The Swedes were initially very nazi friendly, the King had a good relationship with Hitler and they corresponded throughout the war. Sweden would also allow German troops to travel through Sweden on their way to fight in Narvik. The Germans didn’t need to invade Sweden.
The British considered an invasion or at least some form of military action to secure vital ports like Narvik, from where the Swedish iron was shipped. They never got around to doing it though.
It’s a fun fact. It’s also pure fiction. I have no idea where you get this from. The first violent resistance to the invasion was the sinking of the German cruiser Blücher carrying troops to invade Oslo in Drøbaksundet.
There was a lot of resistance to the invasion, but Norwegian military was badly equipped and badly organized so they had no real chance against the Germans. It didn’t help that there were some nazi friendly officers that simply capitulated at once.
On topic - I think it would be enough of a sensation if they found an intact German train from the war hidden away in those mountains regardless of any gold. Personally, I don’t think there will be much treasure to be found but one can always hope.
While I’m inclined to believe the whole thing is hokum for a bunch of other reasons, the answer to this one objection is simple: while every train may have been needed for the war effort, that didn’t stop Hitler from pulling many trains away from the war effort in late 1944 and presumably early 1945 to try to complete the Final Solution before the Reich fell. If you’re a Nazi official in a position to swipe a serious stash of the Reich’s gold, you’re also probably in a position to redirect a train that had been destined for Treblinka.
The story is bogus, because existing bank records would show any significant amount of gold missing from a bank. Plus, it has been 70 years-pretty hard to keep somthing hidden like this.
But as in the case of the “Amber Room” there is just enough to keep the story interesting.
I voted the middle option because I think it’s plausible there’s a train, but the claim it contains gold is wishful thinking. I think it’s something more mundane: an armored military train pulled into a tunnel to evade aerial bombing and got trapped when a bomb collapsed the portal.
What I would expect it to be is a world domination weapon buried until there was enough plutonium to power it. Nothing as mundane as a bomb of course. Probably a scalpel ray beam to surgically cut off undesirable parts of the Earth’s crust.
Weeeelll, there’s a world of difference between “a sin” and “a tacky, but legal act.”
I used to work across the street from Al Capone’s Vaults. :rolleyes: My money is on “publicity stunt for a crappy movie.” And even if it isn’t, The Asylum, who gave us Sharknados 1, 2, and 3, will make sure it is!
I think the idea of a entire trainload of gold worth uncountable billions being buried is… implausible at best. There are lots of reasons why they’d have just moved it elsewhere, why there wouldn’t be that much gold, why records should exist of it, etc.
On the other hand, a buried safe full of gold? A train full of many valuables including a little gold? Those kinds of possibilities I think are quite likely.
Any German with half a brain knew the war was lost by summer of '44, giving them essentially a year to prepare for what would happen afterward. It would have to be done in relative secrecy because you sure as hell don’t admit to the Fuhrer that you’re diverting war resources to pad your post-surrender retirement fund.
Then you let the rumor mill work on that seed. What started as a (potentially) truthful “The German general hid a bar of gold in the luggage compartment” eventually grew into “The Nazis put Fort Knox on a train and buried it in our backyard.”
There is a long and fascinating article about the gold trains, treasure and other oddities of the Silesia area in the current* New Yorker*. According to the author, no one really knows what the massive underground constructions were intended for - a uber-bunker for the Nazi elite, factories for V2s and other super-weapons, aircraft storage. There are dozens of different stories, even from contemporary interrogations of SS personnel who were part of the projects. So there are cases where the famed Nazi bureaucracy didn’t document every move, or held it so closely that it was effectively destroyed before falling into Allied hands.
By the way, about halfway through the article, the real reason for the Riese (“Giant”) excavations comes to light. Buckle your seatbelts, space cadets.
Bah; everyone knows that late in the war the bulk of the Nazi’s hoarded gold disappeared from a bank in the village of Clermont, France. Rumor has it the culprit was a unit of irregular US Army troops led by a non-com named Kelly. There was even a documentary made about it in the late '60s.
