Nazi loot train purportedly found in Poland

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-20/nazi-treasure-train-found-lawyers-claim/6710156

Quote:
Local authorities in Poland's south-western district of Walbrzych said they have been contacted by a law firm representing a Pole and a German who said they had located the missing train.

The pair were seeking to cash in on their find, attempting to claim 10 per cent of the value of the findings.

"Lawyers, the army, the police and the fire brigade are dealing with this," official from the Walbrzych district council Marika Tokarska, said.

"The area has never been excavated before and we don't know what we might find," she said.

Local news reports said the train in question went missing in 1945, packed with loot from the-then eastern German city of Breslau – now called Wroclaw and part of Poland – as the Red Army closed in at the end of WWII.

One local media report said the train was armoured and belonged to the Wehrmacht - Nazi Germany's military.

A Polish radio station cited local folklore as saying the train entered a tunnel near Ksiaz Castle in the mountainous Lower Silesian region and never emerged. According to that theory, the tunnel was later closed and its location long forgotten.

The station said the 150-metre-long train was carrying guns, "industrial equipment", gems and other valuable treasure.

Ms Tokarska did not have any details on the location or the contents of the missing train.

Sceptics said there was no evidence that it ever existed, but a connoisseur of the region's history told the station that a handful of people had already looked for the train, but nothing was ever found.

"But the legend has captured imaginations," said Joanna Lamparska.

Trains were used to spirit Nazi loot back to Berlin as Allied and Soviet forces surged towards the German capital from the west and the east respectively in the winter and spring of 1945.

In the case of the so-called "Gold Train", Nazi forces sent 24 freight carriages from Budapest towards Germany filled with family treasures including gold, silver and valuable paintings seized from Hungarian Jews and estimated to be worth up to $200 million.

The train was intercepted by US soldiers who, according to a later US investigation, helped themselves to some of the loot.

Reuters
 
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Ten percent of $200 mil is $20 mil, a good find !

A missing 150-metre-long train for 70 years is hard to believe.


Not really, the train is supposed to have about 300 tones of gold bars on board, and that at today's gold price means

11,221,253,567.37
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Originally Posted By: Andy636
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Ten percent of $200 mil is $20 mil, a good find !

A missing 150-metre-long train for 70 years is hard to believe.


Not really, the train is supposed to have about 300 tones of gold bars on board, and that at today's gold price means

11,221,253,567.37
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Not when that much gets dumped on the market...

When central banks have discussed selling their gold, the values drop, no reason it would be different here.
 
This is an impressive find, and sadley I am more interested in seeing the train than the gold. There is something so eerie, and interesting about abandoned objects, especially huge machines that seem impossible to loose. We hear over and over again about the previous artifacts that "was" the last great find, but after hearing about amazing things like this, who knows what else may be found in the future. I'm sure hundreds of years from now, a decrepide anti-aircraft weapon may be found from WW1. I just hope there are a few explorers in the new generation of kids.

But finders deserve more, 50% is fair
 
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Originally Posted By: Andy636
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Ten percent of $200 mil is $20 mil, a good find !

A missing 150-metre-long train for 70 years is hard to believe.


Not really, the train is supposed to have about 300 tones of gold bars on board, and that at today's gold price means

11,221,253,567.37
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
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300 TONS!? That's probably more than half of the production of gold that entire year... for all of planet Earth! That would be a tremendous amount of gold to have on one train. That would be impressive to see.
 
Originally Posted By: tinmanSC
That would be impressive to see.


Meh, 1 ton of gold makes a 37 cm^3 cube. I can fit 300 tons of gold in my garage. The floor will crack.
 
Originally Posted By: tinmanSC
Originally Posted By: Andy636
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Ten percent of $200 mil is $20 mil, a good find !

A missing 150-metre-long train for 70 years is hard to believe.


Not really, the train is supposed to have about 300 tones of gold bars on board, and that at today's gold price means

11,221,253,567.37
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif


300 TONS!? That's probably more than half of the production of gold that entire year... for all of planet Earth! That would be a tremendous amount of gold to have on one train. That would be impressive to see.


They didn't produce it...they *ahham "borrowed it" *ahham from vaults all over Europe.
 
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Ah, gold is found and everybody goes a little crazy.

Given the history of that gold, I would like to see it put to use making the world a better place, but that's not likely to happen...
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Originally Posted By: Andy636
Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Ten percent of $200 mil is $20 mil, a good find !

A missing 150-metre-long train for 70 years is hard to believe.


Not really, the train is supposed to have about 300 tones of gold bars on board, and that at today's gold price means

11,221,253,567.37
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif
crazy.gif



Not when that much gets dumped on the market...

When central banks have discussed selling their gold, the values drop, no reason it would be different here.


There are approximately 29,500 metric tons of bank owned gold in all central banks world wide in 2015.

1% will not move the markets by much if you don't dump it all at once

P.S.- All the gold held by the central banks represent about 17% of all the gold available at this time in the world
 
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Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
There are much larger German machines that disappeared during WW2 and have yet to be found. Totally believable.


Why I tend to be a nay sayer is because you can lose a ship or a plane...but let's face it...how far away can a train go from the tracks, 50-100 meters ?
 
Also, rail companies don't forget where their right of ways are.

A tunnel through a mountain has a engineering trail, a financial trail, employee records, maintenance records and don't forget the tracks leading up to it.
 
Originally Posted By: Andy636
Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
There are much larger German machines that disappeared during WW2 and have yet to be found. Totally believable.


Why I tend to be a nay sayer is because you can lose a ship or a plane...but let's face it...how far away can a train go from the tracks, 50-100 meters ?


How far can a rail cannon that travels on 2 sets of tracks go from the tracks? Yep. One of them has never been found.
 
Originally Posted By: Kira
Also, rail companies don't forget where their right of ways are.

A tunnel through a mountain has a engineering trail, a financial trail, employee records, maintenance records and don't forget the tracks leading up to it.


Such things have been lost in New York City, in the middle of a small island. Imagine what can be lost in an area being destroyed by an invading army.
 
Hopefully our GI's got some take home bonus bar off these trains. One bar would make a decent life start for many returning soldiers.

They deserved it.
 
Originally Posted By: madRiver
Hopefully our GI's got some take home bonus bar off these trains. One bar would make a decent life start for many returning soldiers.

They deserved it.


As much as they deserve a decent paycheck, it was "stolen loot" and their duty to return it to whatever victims it was stolen from.

Straight-up question for the history buffs: The early 30's Weimar Republic printed money that wound up being worthless due to hyper-inflation, in fact, it was a textbook study. "Neutral" countries selling Hitler war materiel surely preferred gold in payment vs Reischmarks, so why was this gold still floating around Germany? I could imagine (based on movies) individual unit-commanders hoarding their own little stash if they could get away with it, but not a train-full.

Since selling arms to the Nazis couldn't have been good P.R. for "neutral" countries, they were probably secretive about it, and these fabled caches of "nazi gold" were likely laundered/ remelted/ whatever and traded off. When the books were seized at the end of the war, the gold on hand didn't add up. But some would rather imagine it all in one convenient spot (train tunnel) than dispersed a few hundred pounds at a time.

Am I way off?
 
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