For more than 70 years , treasure Orion have flocked to a muted corner of southwestern Poland in search of a fabled hoard ofNazi lettuce . deeply inside the Owl Mountains , the Third Reich dug a huge meshing of mineshaft and tunnels between 1943 and 1945 ( called the Riese Project ) , perhaps to hide a surreptitious weapons program , or to carve out an heavy subterraneous trap for Hitler ’s last stall .
Whatever the Nazis had plan for their extensive underground complex – toil by forced labor movement from nearby concentration camps – the Soviets spoiled it . In 1945 , with the Red Army at the doorsill , the Nazis fled their Owl Mountains resort , blasting most of their tunnel to rubble behind them .
But according to fable , a Nazi freightage train loaded with despoiled artwork , jewels and untold streak of gold bullion still rests somewhere beneath that dust . Stories tell of a German miner who saw the Nazis pack up their " gold power train " and park it inside the Owl Mountains , from which it never emerge .
" There is emphatically a Nazi train swallow up somewhere in those burrow complexes , " says ecologist Rob Nelson , co - host of the Science Channel serial publication " secret of the Underground , " which set up its second time of year Saturday Oct. 28 with an episode devoted to the Nazi Gold Train .
" Having talked to the people [ in Poland ] , and having drop time there , there ’s still so much that ’s unexplored , " say Nelson , an venturer with Indiana Jones proceeds . " The data suppose that there ’s only 5 percent we know about . The rest of it has been shell away and blocked off . There ’s tons of stuff and nonsense back there for sure . "
The Nazi Gold Train report may have the whiff of myth , but it ’s rooted in diachronic precedent . A like Nazi geartrain carrying more than 5 tons ( 4.5 metrical long ton ) of gold , 700 pounds ( 317 kilograms ) of diamonds and bead , 1,250 painting and thou of Oriental carpeting – steal from grand acres as well as everyday victims of the Nazi racial extermination – was stop by Allied force-out in 1945 and dubbed theHungarian Gold Train .
And the region surrounding the Owl Mountains , which was part of Nazi Germany in the 1940s , is home plate to several large residence – and oneexceptional castle– where Nazis were lie with to have stashed artwork and jewels . Much of it wasnever recovered .
The Hunt for Nazi Gold
To facilitate their hunting , Nelson and his co - host Stefan Burns , a geophysicist , employed primer - penetrating radiolocation ( GPR ) , which uses electromagnetic heartbeat to exhibit a rough image of what lies at a lower place to a depth of about 10 feet ( 3 meter ) . They also brought along a magnetometer to measure fluctuations in the Earth ’s magnetized athletic field , and a twist that use a surveying technique called electric impedance imaging ( ERT ) , which can reveal secret water system deposits , or more critical to tunnel - hunters , tooth decay and air gaps .
This is n’t the first clip that such technology has been deployed in hunting of the gold train . In 2015 , teams of university researchers and recreational gem hunters converged on the Owl Mountains area when hearsay rise up of an ex - Nazi who left deathbed instruction on how to recover the railroad train . Poland ’s deputy culture minister threw accelerator pedal on the fire by annunciate that he was " 99 pct convinced " that the caravan had been ascertain .
But calendar month of scan with ground - penetrating microwave radar , and caloric and magnetic sensing element , come up with nothingbut a few subsurface anomalies .
" There may be a tunnel , " Janusz Madej , school principal of the scientific team who searched for it in 2015,told the New York Times , " but there is no train . "
Nevertheless , gem hunters started digging in the aver surface area in the summertime of 2016 , but after a calendar week , they had to conclude there was neither tunnel nor string . ( What seem to be a radio detection and ranging image of a carriage turned out to be a natural rock formation . ) But the efforts were n’t a complete bust – the town of Walbrzych didscore a fiscal windfallcourtesy of the holidaymaker who clump this part of southwest Poland .
Centennial State - hosts Nelson and Burns have discipline their scanners on a dissimilar location , where local anaesthetic conceive there ’s a side train track that may have connect to the main pipeline .
" It ’s in a brand - young expanse where no one has search before , " says Nelson , who does n’t require to itch the big reveal , but will say that they found hint to some new cloak-and-dagger passageways , " which is huge . "
One gadget the " Secrets of the Underground " crew brought with them to Poland was ahandheld LIDAR digital scanner , which can make a veridical - clock time 3D single-valued function of any place using millions of laser points . The team used the scanner to create the first digital maps of miles of tunnel complexes that had antecedently only been sketch out by hand . In one burrow , the LIDAR scanner revealed that a crack in the roof was much deep than it look in the sparsely lit mineshaft . In fact , it lead to a second level . No geartrain , though .
" We dwell in a macrocosm where you feel like everybody make love everything , " says Nelson , " but we still cognise very little about what the Nazis were doing with these tunnels . The Germans blasted them as a way to keep their closed book , and all of the plans were destroyed . That ’s part of the mystery . "
