I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere here, but there’s been a lot of talk about 2 guys claiming to have discovered a “Nazi Gold Train”, i.e. a train where Nazis are rumored to have buried a train full of gold treasure at the end of the war. There have apparently long been rumors about something like this, but this time it got some additional credence based on their claim to have some sort of photographic evidence, to the point where Poland’s Culture Minister (not necessarily an expert on such matters, but still …) said he was 99% sure it was legit.
Gold seekers have flocked to the area from all over, but the army - which itself is allegedly involved in the search - is said to be blocking it off for fear that it’s mined.
There is a thread in GD I think but yours puts a new spin on the question. I dont know why people think there is a Nazi gold hoard. The government spent every cent on the war effort. Also, Hitler ordered no one to leave Berlin without specific orders. Is there a record of such an order in the captured files? Lots of nazi gold ended up in Sweden in trade for iron ore that enabled Germany to wage war. (Hijack: Why didnt any nation try to recover monetary damage from the Swedes for profiting of the war?)
The most recent news reports (one typical cite) claim that ground-penetrating radar shows an underground train “with something in it”.
Obviously that doesn’t prove that the ‘something’ is treasure, but it does raise the question of how and why there is a train underground, and why it’s in the approximate location rumoured for years to be the site of the “Nazi Gold Train”.
But the train is located in Upper Silesia…in the far southeast of what used to be Germany. The geography should be a hint. The Polish government was in Warsaw,to the north and fell to the Russians in late 1944 iirc. There would have been no trouble putting any loot on a train straight to Berlin. If the nazis wanted to hide the loot because they knew the war was lost why would they hide it closer to the oncoming Soviets? Wouldnt the Alps or Switzerland make more sense?
Towards the end of the war, a lot of Nazis at all levels of government started thinking of their own post-war interests. IOW, it’s possible that whoever had control over it at that time wasn’t particularly interested in sending it to Berlin, and preferred hiding it in a place where they and their accomplices could retrieve it from after the war.
Assuming that these claims are themselves for real.
The would have been smart enough to send it away from the Soviets. There was no going back to territory lost to them. Also, the native German population was ethnically cleansed from the area immediately after the war.
You have to know how many options they had for hiding something of that sort.
The Nazi regime wasn’t going to be returning to that area, but that didn’t mean individual Germans couldn’t attempt to return and dig it up. Worth a shot anyway if no better ideas available.
(I’m not sure what your point was about subsequent ethnic cleansing.)
Again, if such a train existed for the purpose of hiding gold there would likely be a record of the train and a record of the cargo…German bureaucracy and such. There were factories in the area built into the hills; the train is likely related to them. The Germans wanted to hide these as they were operated by slave labor and thousands died there.
But they didn’t know ahead of time that this would happen.
If it was in the interests of whoever hid it to keep records. The premise here is that it was deliberately hidden by the looters for their own purposes, and it wouldn’t have been in their interest to keep records.
The premise would make a great movie but its almost impossible the way the German government worked and how would the conspirators have gotten access to rolling stock in the last few months of the war when every train was needed for the war effort?
Everyone would want to believe this it’s a great story, maybe even a tourism angle in the years ahead. I like that they had geo-phys images an the Culture Minister talked about the train and the platforms you could see in the images …
Many people ( particularly Americans [ Shrub: Those Who Are Not With Us Are Against Us ] but also commies and their fellow-travellers ) really don’t understand the philosophical, let alone the Law of Nations, concepts of Neutrality.
It doesn’t mean paying compensation for having traded with, or even for having been in agreement with, whichever side lost.
American corporations and administrations have sold a lot of weapons around the world, even to people they had nothing in common with ( and occasionally which weapons would end up being pointed at Americans ); didn’t mean their profiting was a sin.
However, the Swedes weren’t particularly frightened of, nor fond of, the nazis — despite their own repellent eugenics copied from the masters of eugenic madness ( the Americans ) — Germany couldn’t have held Sweden, who had and still have, a redoubtable army, not to mention arms industry.
They were, like most of Europe east of the Elbe, scared of the bolsheviks though, and they placed their bets accordingly.
Norway did not volunteer to be invaded, and Hitler only did so because the British were doing so first.
Fun Fact: the only initial violent resistance to the German invasion came from Vidkun Quisling and his NS mob.
