So some folks are claiming that they found a train in Poland, with WW2 era looted treasure’s. Speculation seems to be focusing on Gold and Art, the folks that came forward, are requesting a 10 percent finders fee, which the authorities seem to be balking at.
My plan is a little more different and off the wall. Instead of giving them the 10 percent, the authorities actually give them the train itself, both the engine and the rolling stock. Minus the flak panzer cannons that seem to be in every movie and the rights to the enevitable movie.
There is enough rail nerds, that flipping the train should bring in a pretty penny in its own right, and clean money to boot.
*Even if this turns out to be a Geraldo class story, I can see a movie being made.
Oh, dear god, TRAIN PEOPLE! They seem to be everywhere (my own daughter has been doing a little trainspotting recently), and they all seem to have a lot more money than you’d expect looking at them. With a locomotive they might make more than what the booty’s worth.
I’ve known a couple people with small mine train pikes; privately operated just for the fun of it. I could see someone getting real serious about wanting something like that for themselves. And like dropzone said, some of them have the money to get real serious in a bidding war. Add the amusement parks and tourist haunts and the train itself could be the real treasure.
Could somebody provide a link to this story? I’m very dubious that a train full of gold has been sitting around Poland for seventy years without somebody noticing it and deciding to check it out.
So we have a second or third hand report that two men claim they found a train full of gold. We don’t have the name of the men or the location of the train, much less any corroboration.
Having read post 5’s link, I suspect that Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance has been translated into Polish; and that somebody, on reading it, has entered too fully into the spirit of the thing.
I don’t find it impossible to believe that such troves might still exist and be found some day - the Nazis did spend a lot of the last days squirreling away caches of various size and running trains into tunnels and dynamiting the entrance was done.
But this story has all the hallmarks of, well, a UFO story.
A book a few years back made a convincing case that the panels and fittings burned up (a known incident, but believers minimized the reporting and evidence, just as many maintained the *Titanic *had gone down in one piece, despite many reports of it breaking up).
It could be a scam but – to pay a lawyer or a couple lawyers and push it to this level makes me think it could be true. They way I read it they aren’t looking for an advance on the value, just trying to firm up what they get if they reveal the location. If its a scam, where is the payoff for it other than some fiction book deal?
I have only hazy recollection of the details, but the Germans (or perhaps Nazi-Polish troops) stored all the panels in a warehouse, which burned. Despite finding some remains such as brass wire and clips, the story divides at that point between it being unrelated material, bits from only a few of the panels or all that was left of the whole collection.
The book (The Amber Room) makes a strong case that it was the whole thing, as all stories about the material after that point are questionable, and there are contemporary reports that say the whole lot was stored there. Believers dismiss those reports for no good reason.
(Just like the many reports of the *Titanic *breaking up that were essentially dismissed from romanticism or whatever, right up until Ballard found it. Try and find any pre-1986 writings that don’t claim or lean heavily to the ship going down intact… despite eyewitness testimony it broke.)
I found a link and if there is any truth to this story this belong holocaust survivors or their families . This is NOT Nazi treasure it’s was stolen from victims
of the Holocaust .
The Germans built some very impressive underground works in the region. They were also good at clearing “unpleasant” sites. Several of the death camps were almost completely erased. (And the workers who did the clearing would also be “erased”.)
Tearing up some railroad tracks wouldn’t have been impossible.
OTOH, this was very late in the war. The ability to hide their tracks (;)) would have been somewhat hard at the time.
Question about the claimants: have they actually located the train or have they “figured out where it must be.” The latter means they are probably wrong.
There is also the question about the condition of the train and contents. Stuff underground tends to get very, very wet without active drainage. Things easily flood. And the water in mines can be very nasty. Outside of stuff like gold bars, a lot it (if it exists) might be hopelessly ruined.
Also, the claimants are asking for 10%. But, if the material is stolen, then it belongs to the proper owners. You can’t expect a finders fee unless you know what you have, who owns it, and can negotiate with the owners.
It’s one thing to return a painting like Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to her righful heirs, but gold is basically fungible. How can any particular owner be identified? I could be wrong but I don’t think gold bars have serial numbers.