Throughout the decades since the end of World War II, the idea of lost Nazi gold has intrigued numerous researchers, animated many a conspiracy theorist, led to a great deal of lawsuits, and inspired an entire subculture of treasure hunters. The Nazis were known to have drained and hoarded their own gold reserves, looted gold and other valuables from the countries they invaded, and seized the wealth of the Jews they worked to systematically erase from the Earth. While some of this plunder was seized by Allied forces and much of the rest of it disappeared into the Swiss banking system, it seems a reasonable enough notion that somewhere, some deposit remains awaiting discovery. This prospect seems especially plausible to those who live in Poland, or more specifically, Lower Silesia, in southwest Poland, where the idea of buried German treasure has long been an absolute reality. Between 1945 and 1947, after Germany retreated from Poland and Soviet forces entered the region and pushed all remaining Germans out, nearly 2 million Germans were forced to leave their homes, which afterward were tenanted by Polish refugees displaced from Central Poland and areas of the east annexed by the Soviet Union. What they found were empty homes, but soon they discovered that the German residents, forced suddenly from their homes, had often buried their valuables, hoping to return to find them later. So caches of jewelry, furs, silken clothes, and porcelain dishware were frequently found when tilling fields or digging up gardens, buried in chests and jars and sometimes even in coffins. Many of the settlers of the area became speculators in treasure, digging for and selling the goods they found, and since then, treasure hunting has become a central aspect of the Polish culture there. There are numerous rumors of larger treasure deposits, not just the worldly belongings of Germans forced from their homes, but hoards of Nazi gold buried underground or sealed in secret tunnels. The most well-known of these legends is that of the Nazi Gold Train, a train carrying riches untold, looted by the Nazis, shipped by rail to avoid its falling into enemy hands, and then hidden away somewhere there in Poland. This old legend became modern news in 2015 when a group of treasure hunters claimed to have discovered the location in which the elusive gold train had been buried. They had used ground penetrating radar, and they had informed the Polish government of their discovery in accordance with local laws. Thus, before they even attempted to dig up what they’d found, their discovery was trumpeted the world over, and a kind of modern gold rush ensued, with other treasure hunters hopping on planes to poke around in the Polish woods. Quite disappointingly, no gold train had ever been discovered, and historians insist that there is no reason to believe that such a gold train is even in Poland. It is tempting, then, to dismiss the entire notion of a lost Nazi gold train as an urban legend, if it were not for the fact that such a gold train certainly did exist.

Indy atop a Nazi plunder train in The Dial of Destiny.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. As that Adventure theme tells you, this is yet another installment of my longest-running series yet, exploring the truth behind the MacGuffins and legends of the Indiana Jones films. This will actually be my last installment in the series, as I’ve gone through the previous films and am now digging into the new film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Don’t worry, though! Any spoilers here are few and minor. If you saw the film, or even if you didn’t, you know even from the title that the MacGuffin is not a Nazi gold train. Instead, the dial of the title is a fictionalized version of the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious ancient device with gears, which they attribute to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Though the film handles them in an entirely fictional way, the Antikythera Mechanism and the technology attributed to Archimedes are extremely interesting subjects. I anticipate eventually devoting an episode of the podcast to exploring claims about ancient advanced technology, in which I could talk about these topics as well as others, like the claims of advanced technology attributed to Egyptians and other ancient cultures. But for topics wholly associated with Indiana Jones films, the Nazi Gold Train is going to conclude our series. Early on, it seems, the first drafts of the screenplay for this new Indy film were focused almost entirely on the lost Nazi Gold Train legend. In the end, the film we got only featured an opening scene on a “plunder train” that was carrying a lot of looted goods, including valuable art and ancient artifacts. It certainly makes for a rousing first sequence in the film, one that even features another relic that I recently devoted an episode to discussing! But there is no sense in the finished product that this film is exploring the real legend of the Nazi gold train. And perhaps that is a good thing, because the true story of the Nazi gold train—the only one we know really existed—is not one of adventure and mystical artifacts. It’s a story of national chauvinism, slow dehumanization of the other, and genocide, of the destruction and plunder of a helpless minority. And the use of this story in dubious claims of buried gold made by treasure hunters in Poland today is at the very least in bad taste, and at worst, is in a way another kind of plundering, a pillaging of tragedy for a good story.

The true story of the Nazi Gold Train takes place not in Poland, but in Hungary, and it’s hard to call it a story of lost Nazi gold, as it’s manifestly a story of stolen Jewish wealth. What happened to the Jewish population in Hungary is made even more tragic by the fact that for a long time, Hungary was a very welcoming place for eastern European Jews. After Hungary achieved independence in 1867 under a Dual Monarchy as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a series of laws granted Hungarian Jews equal rights. Jewish immigration was encouraged by the government, and European Jews assimilated by adopting the Magyar language, thereby swelling the Magyar-speaking minority and ensuring the political leadership of the Magyar-speaking peoples. Anti-Semitism lurked in the background but was unpopular as Hungarian Jews prospered and contributed to the wealth of the nation. Things changed after World War I, when Hungarian Communist revolutionary Béla Kun established the radical, violently repressive, and short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. As a result of this brief experiment in Communism, anti-Semitism surged. As has so often been the case throughout history, Jews were blamed for any Bolshevist activity, and from 1920 to 1944, the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the far right gained acceptance even among centrists. As has always been typical of such anti-Semitic rhetoric, it was clearly contradictory in its main arguments. Jews were said to be too prosperous for how small a portion of the population they represented, but also somehow too numerous. They were said to be too influential as capitalists, being too well represented among industrialists and bankers, but were also, simultaneously, Bolsheviks who wanted to overthrow the Capitalist order. They were too foreign, too separate from Hungarian culture, but simultaneously too dominant, and their religion was too exclusive and insular, but somehow also threatening to the supremacy of Christianity. And developing alongside this resentment of the Jews in Hungary was a peculiarly Hungarian brand of racial pride and nationalism, called Hungarism, which was similar to that which was developing among Germans. This movement was inspired by Turanism, a pseudoscientific pan-nationalist ideology that was inspired by the ideologies of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. According to this pan-Turanianism, Hungarians, or more exclusively Magyars, along with other Turkic tribes, were descended from a “Uralo-Altaic race” who were the real Semites of the Bible. Thus Jusus was a Magyar, the Bible was written in a variation of the Magyar language, and Hungarians should be thanked for all of Western Christian civilization. If this sounds familiar, it should. It shares much in common with both Nazi ideology and other harmful pseudo-anthropological claims like those associated with British Israelism, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and the Christian Identity movement, all of which have developed or were founded on the same brand of virulent anti-Semitism.

1920 brought down another domino that would eventually push Hungary in the direction of the Third Reich with the ratification of the Treaty of Trianon, which completely dismembered Hungary as a state and awarded much of her territory and Magyar-speaking populations to Austria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Ever since that time, alongside the rising anti-Semitism rose a political movement to restore the borders and regain these territories, a goal that partnership with the Nazis would eventually help them achieve. But still it was a slow process, a slow descent into Fascism. The far right Hungarist factions calling for extreme anti-Semitic legislation were kept at bay and did not achieve a political majority for some time because mainstream political factions pacified them by passing watered-down anti-Semitic laws in the 1930s. These laws sought to limit Jewish presence in certain professions, causing tens of thousands of Jews to lose their careers. One result of such legislation was that Jews, who had previously been considered Magyars because of their adoption of the language and were at most considered a religious minority, were thereafter defined as a distinct race, as was the case in Nazi Germany. And while centrists thought they were pacifying the far right with such laws, they were really legitimizing them and helping to spread their anti-Semitic views. With the rise of other far right leaders, and the influence of the Nazis who had political agents on their payroll starting explicitly Nazi factions and parties, more anti-Semitic legislation was passed, excluding Jews from any public sector employment, revoking their citizenship, banning intermarriage with them, and generally removing them from the economy and national life altogether. One of the last pieces of legislation enacted by the Hungarian government was the confiscation of Jewish property, framed as a contribution to the war effort. During this time, Hungary had allied itself with Nazi Germany, which made good on its promises to win them back the land they’d lost in the Treaty of Trianon, in the process increasing even further the Hungarian population of Jews. The solution of the far right was deportation: shipping Jewish refugees out of Hungarian territories and into German-controlled regions where they would supposedly be resettled. But many of these refugees were sent to their deaths, as they were sent right into the path of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who were gunning down Jews in those regions and burying them in mass graves. Thus Hungary had begun to play a concrete role in the Holocaust.

In Hungary’s defense, when the nature of the Nazi’s Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem” became more apparent, government ministers ceased their deportation of Jewish refugees, and the country moved toward neutrality and even began making diplomatic overtures with the Allied powers. By that time, though, it was too late. Since the Annexation of Austria, Hungary was right on the southern border of Nazi territory, and Hitler was not about to let his enemies flank him and seize Hungary’s resources. Additionally, the destruction of the large Jewish community in Hungary would be a major step toward the completion of his Final Solution. So in 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and propped up a collaborationist regime there. They then set about deporting the largest remaining population of European Jews, seizing their material wealth and placing them on trains bound for Auschwitz and death. So we see, the real story of the Nazi Gold Train starts with other trains, laden not with valuables but with human beings who were shunted away to their destruction. Much of the wealth of Hungarian Jews had already been surrendered and redistributed prior to the German invasion, and a great deal more was looted by their German occupiers before it could be loaded onto a train and sent out of Hungary. In December of 1944, the transportable items that had been protected from looting were loaded onto a train. Twenty-four cars were laden with the valuables of Hungarian Jews, but lest we think of this as gold bullion and chests overflowing with gems like some pirate booty, it should be noted that most of it was mundane, the earthly belongings of 800,000 people that had been deemed to be of some monetary worth: furniture, sewing machines, cameras, binoculars, carpets, dishes, and stamp collections. Yes, some gold and paper money and some pearl and diamond jewelry were among the items, but most of that sort of thing had already been looted in Budapest. Still, the train that escaped Hungary before the advance of the Red Army is estimated to have contained valuables worth billions of dollars today. The fate of some of its looted goods is largely unknown. We know that after passing into German territory, some of it was transferred onto trucks, never to be seen again, and we further know that the commander of the train took trunks of gold and disappeared into Switzerland. As for the rest of it, in May of 1945, the train was seized by Allied troops, and despite pressure from a Hungarian Jewish organization seeking the return of whatever valuables remained on the train, the U.S. Government kept it and auctioned off most of it. Even to this day, the fate of some 200 works of art taken from the train remains unknown. The details of what was done with these seized goods by the U.S. was not made public until 1999, after which a lawsuit was filed by Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The U.S. government settled for $25 million and apologized, while insisting these were just “shortcomings in the restitution efforts,” due to the “application of several policies,” and that “the conduct of its personnel was appropriate in most respects.” One might imagine what went unsaid, that the Soviet Army was at the time occupying Hungary, and the U.S. did not want to surrender the Gold Train’s wealth to their rivals, even if refusing to do so ran counter to U.S. policy. So we see that this true story of the Nazi Gold Train is far less sexy and mysterious than that told by Polish treasure hunters. It is not a story of buried gold, but rather of genocide, first and most importantly, and thereafter of plundering on all sides.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Image courtesy the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Apparently, though, there was more than one lost Nazi Gold Train legend circulating around Europe. According to local lore in Poland, there was another such train laden with gold and other valuables being sent through Poland in 1945 in hopes of keeping the resources out of Soviet hands. According to this legend, this gold train vanished near Walbrzych. Or at least, this is the story told by some treasure hunters, such as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, who claimed to have found the hiding place of this train in 2015. By their telling, there was a long history to this legend, and the Communist Polish Army long searched for this train. Curiously, though, the existence of this local legend is just as difficult to confirm as the location of any buried treasure. Certainly there is a culture of treasure hunting in Poland, as I spoke about at the top of this episode, and there are numerous legends and facts that contribute to rumors of hidden Nazi Gold, one being that the Nazis did indeed use the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners to excavate a complex of secret underground tunnels beneath a castle in Walbrzych in Lower Silesia. The castle was to be a new headquarters for Hitler, and the tunnels would form a kind of bunker city underground. The tunnel complex was never completed, though, and was abandoned, its entrances long ago collapsed, but unsurprisingly, legend claims that the Nazis, unable to take up residence in the tunnels, still used them to secret away their deposits of ill-gotten gold. And there are even very specific legends about the Nazi gold that may be hidden in that region. The central claim of lost Nazi gold in Poland revolves around a German police chief at Breslau named Herbert Klose, who under interrogation in 1944 said that he had helped hoard and secure the gold and valuables of that city’s residents. According to Klose, these chests of gold and valuables were buried somewhere. Searches for Klose’s gold trove and other buried Nazi treasure in Poland became so widespread during the second half of the 20th century that a sort of guild for treasure hunters was organized, the Lower Silesian Research Group, and the prospect of the discovery of such a treasure even prompted the Polish government to pass specific laws requiring treasure hunters to declare their finds and surrender 90% of their value to the state. The idea that Klose’s treasure is out there somewhere, perhaps buried in a disused Nazi tunnel in Lower Silesia, drives an entire subculture and cottage industry. And it was among these treasure hunters that the legend of another gold train, this one leaving Breslau with Klose’s treasure and perhaps with secret German weapons inside, was conceived. But is there any historical basis for this legend?

While there is certainly truth behind the stories of hidden underground Nazi tunnels in Poland, which were excavated with slave labor and explosives under a top-secret project called Riese, or “giant,” all the rest of these treasure tales are likely urban legends. While there appears to be some corroboration for the story about Herbert Klose’s buried Nazi gold from his interrogation, there is no sense whatsoever of where that looted gold may have ended up. Klose himself said that he had been unable to take part in the hiding of those chests of gold because he had been injured in a fall from a horse. Thus there is no reason to believe those chests were ever put onto a train or taken very far away from Breslau, or modern day Wrocław, at all. Likely, those chests were simply looted by the Germans tasked with hiding them, or by others who encountered them, as was the case with the gold plundered from Hungarian Jews. As for the story of a Gold train loaded up in Breslau and vanishing near Walbrzych, where the Riese tunnels had been dug, that appears to have no historical basis whatsoever. It is claimed that this was a long well-known rumor in Poland, but in fact, it appears to have originated from one man, Tadeusz Słowikowski. Like many of the treasure hunters of Poland, he is a former miner who turned to treasure hunting when there was no longer any mining work to employ him. Słowikowski claims that he was told about the vanishing gold train back in the 1950s by a German. The entire story of this gold train’s existence, of its being loaded with plunder in Breslau and disappearing somewhere near Wałbrzych, appears to have been started by his account of having been told such a tale. That’s it. The claim that this was a longstanding belief in Poland and that the Polish government had long been in search of this train appears to be entirely false, as far as I can determine. Instead, it is just a story told by one treasure hunter and believed by other treasure hunters, and it should be noted that many other treasure hunters in Poland don’t believe in this Gold Train’s existence, preferring instead to focus on the promise of Klose’s buried chests and other caches of German valuables.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Photo credit: Chmee2, (CC BY-SA 3.0)

On August 28th, 2015, the head of conservation at Poland’s culture ministry held a press conference at which he announced an astonishing find. Two treasure hunters had learned of the location of the fabled lost Nazi gold train from an anonymous source: a man who had been involved in burying the train had made a deathbed confession to them. These men then claimed to have confirmed with 99% certainty using ground-penetrating radar, that an armored train had been buried at around the 65th kilometer of the Polish State Railway’s Wałbrzych line. These treasure hunters, who at first kept their anonymity, were following local law by disclosing their discovery before the find’s excavation in order to claim their 10% finder’s fee. The national heritage minister’s press conference set off a sensation, and Polish military had to be dispatched to the area to keep away other treasure hunters, who arrived in droves armed with metal detectors and other gear, hoping to find a piece of the treasure for themselves. Acting out of an abundance of caution, the military searched the area for landmines or other booby traps, after which a non-invasive exploration of the site commenced. The location and the ground-penetrating radar findings were examined by mining specialists and geologists, and these experts protested that the findings in no way represented proof positive of the presence of a buried train at the site, suggesting that perhaps the treasure hunters had detected one of the subterranean tunnels of Project Riese, but not an actual train. Nevertheless, the treasure hunters, who eventually revealed their identities as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, stuck tenaciously to their claim. With further pressure, a complete excavation of the site was eventually arranged, with engineers and demolitionists, and with the involvement of archaeologists and chemical experts on the chance they encountered hazardous buried war materials. In a stunning letdown akin to Geraldo Rivera’s opening of an empty vault on live television, the dig was shut down after nothing was discovered and further radar indicated that what had previously been detected at the site was nothing more than underground ice formations. The dig cost upwards of $130,000, but that was okay with the government, because all the excitement had actually driven tourism to the area, boosting the economy by around $200 million. One town official was quoted as saying, “Whether the explorers find anything or not, …the gold train has already arrived."

In retrospect, it’s surprising that Poland’s head of National Heritage took the treasure hunters seriously at all. Perhaps their presentation of the ground-penetrating radar findings was very persuasive, but the mere fact that their entire theory was based on an unverifiable deathbed confession, the details of which have never been released as far as I can find, made their entire claim unreliable from the outset. In fact, this subculture of Nazi gold hunters active in Poland is simply not known for credible research. Instead, many rely on mystical divining practices, as was revealed in a 2016 New Yorker piece by Jake Halpern, in which he traveled to Poland and interviewed numerous such individuals. One treasure hunter showed him how he uses divining rods to find secret underground tunnels. Some may swear by the practice of dowsing for such tasks, but this treasure hunter also showed the journalist a bizarre looking dowsing rod with a glass device attached to it that he claimed pointed the way toward gold. I think even farmers who dowse for water would admit that this sounds like a load of hogwash. Added to their mystical superstitions, these treasure hunters harbor a lot of paranoia and indulge in conspiracy speculation. Many believe they are followed by secret agents of some surviving Nazi organization, which they call “guards.” They partake of the conspiracy theories I refuted in my episode on the death of Hitler, that far more Nazi leaders escaped Germany than is known, and that they maintain an international spy network, looking after their hidden treasures and likely planning some future Fourth Reich. And as for the contents of the Nazi train they search for, they let their speculation run wild. In it, they expect not only to find gold and other such treasures, but perhaps also the long lost amber panels and gilded mirrors of Russia’s famous Amber Room, disassembled by Nazis in 1944. Or perhaps, as some of these Polish treasure hunters claim, the train will hold secret German war technology, their Wunderwaffe, or “wonder-weapons,” like the fabled Nazi Bell claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be a genuine time travel device, or maybe even good old-fashioned flying saucers!

The location where Polish treasure hunters believed they had found their gold train. Photo credit: RafalSs (CC BY-SA 4.0)

But there is a pretty basic problem with all of these notions. First, if the Nazis remained active and posted agents in Poland to safeguard their treasure caches, then wouldn’t they just have retrieved the treasure for themselves long before now? And even if we dismiss that paranoid idea, there is the fact that the Soviet forces took control of this region shortly after the Germans abandoned it, and trophy brigades scoured the area for any valuables, including the castle beneath which the tunnels had been built. They would likely have seized any remaining treasure. And finally, there is witness testimony describing how the Germans took everything with them before the Red Army arrived, even ripping the piping out of the tunnels they had built in order to deny such raw materials to their enemies. It seems unlikely they would have left behind great riches and wonder weapons for the Soviets to find. But such arguments won’t dissuade dyed-in-wool treasure hunters like Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter. The two continued to insisted that they need only dig deeper to find their gold train. They led another dig in 2017 that also failed to turn up their treasure, and Koper continues his search for gold, in the form of a hunt for more funding to continue his digs. In 2019, he got lucky and stumbled upon some half-a-century-old renaissance wall portraits beneath the plaster of an old palace he was renovating nowhere near the site he still believes to be the resting place of his Nazi gold train. I guess it goes to show that if you just keep searching, you may find some treasure, even if you’re hunting for something that doesn’t actually exist.

Until next time, remember, historical myths and urban legends make great fodder for sensational news stories. Back in 2015-2016, you may have heard about the supposed gold train in Poland, but then did not hear how it turned out to not be true. So…I’m not saying to distrust all news media, but I am saying to take seemingly extraordinary stories like these with a big pinch of salt.

The Hunt for Lost Nazi Gold Trains

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