WHAT’S THE STORY?

THERE had been rumours for many years after the Second World War that a train filled with gold, works of art, and other treasures looted by the Nazis had been hidden somewhere in Poland. Last year two men, Piotr Koper of Poland and Andreas Richter of Germany, claimed to have solid clues that the train was in a ‘lost’ tunnel at a site between Wroclaw and Walbrzych in south-west Poland, possibly leading into the rocky hill on which Ksiaz Castle is built.

They persuaded the Polish authorities to let them look for the train, despite the historical evidence being that it never existed and despite surveys by scientists of the site in a wood near Walbrzych which concluded there was not even a tunnel, never mind a train of any kind.

Still, Koper and Richter went ahead and started digging. It has just been announced that, funnily enough, there is no train or tunnel at the location they selected.

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

THE local legend is what really kicked it off. During the war, Wroclaw was then Breslau and incorporated into Hitler’s Greater Germany. There’s no question that the Germans built a series of underground tunnels in the area around Wroclaw, because they employed slave labour to dig them and many thousands of Jews and other people died while digging them.

Hitler, even while telling the world that the Nazis were invincible, conceived a plan to create the tunnel network so that German industries and the Nazi High Command could be relocated should Germany itself be invaded. One tunnel just 12 miles from the dig site has been perfectly preserved, and it sinks some 200 feet underground, showing how much Hitler feared Allied bombing.

As they had done elsewhere, the Nazis had systematically stolen just about anything of worth in Poland, and as many as 80,000 objects including artworks, gold items and precious jewellery were allegedly stored in heavily guarded premises in Wroclaw.

When the Soviet Union’s Red Army began to kick the Germans out of Poland in early 1945, the story goes that the top Nazi officers loaded all their looted treasures onto a train and hid them in a tunnel that was sealed off and made invisible, presumably so they could come back later and get the funds to finance a Fourth Reich – or even just to line their own pockets. It was even rumoured that the fabled gold and amber treasures of the Russian royal family were on board the train. It is only in recent years that countries like Switzerland have admitted that the Nazis did hide stolen materials and money in their banks, so the story wasn’t entirely implausible – it’s just that there was no hard evidence of this particular train ever having existed.

SO WHY WAS IT TAKEN SERIOUSLY?

HERE’S the bit that really takes the biscuit. Apparently, a "deathbed confession" was made by a very elderly man who claimed to have survived the building of the secret tunnel near Walbrzych.

Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter got to hear of it and as owners of a mining company, they felt they had a real chance of discovering it.

Impressed by the anonymous deathbed confession – and, by their very nature, such confessions cannot be repeated by the person making it – the Polish government got taken along for the ride.

“This is a find of world significance, on a par with discovering the Titanic,” said lawyer Jaros?aw Chmielewski, who acted for Koper and Richter.

The two men did a deal with the Polish Government to take a 10 per cent finder’s fee and then surveyed the area where the tunnel was said to be. With ground penetrating radar they found an "image" of a train some 300 feet long buried in what looked like a tunnel. Poland’s deputy culture minister Piotr Zuchowski was ecstatic - “I am more than 99 per cent certain that this train exists,” he told a press conference in August last year.

Oops! Along came a team of highly trained surveyors from Poland’s top mining academy and found… nothing.

THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END OF THAT, THEN

INDEED, but the willingness of usually sensible people to believe in the Nazi gold legend saw thousands of treasure hunters descend on the area. Poland’s mining communities have been devastated by unemployment in recent years, and many of those who went to Walbrzych were jobless people looking to try to win the Lottery of Nazi gold.

The local authorities quickly had to seal off the area and eventually agreed to Koper and Richter carrying out an excavation which employed at least 60-odd people for a week or so.

Koper and Richter manfully came clean on Wednesday and admitted they had found… lots of dirt – but no tunnel and definitely no train full of Nazi gold. Their image turned out to be an ice formation.

SO IT’S ALL A BIT OF A DAMP SQUIB THEN?

YES and no. Obviously the two would-be Indiana Joneses are a trifle disappointed, not least because the week-long dig cost them a five figure sum, at least, but tourism to Walbrzych is up by 44 per cent and the local authority reckons it has had £150 million worth of free publicity around the world – including this article

Nor is it quite over yet. Koper and Richter have revealed there is another potential site for the tunnel and train not far from the empty site and so they will start digging there next month.

“Hope dies last,” said their spokesman.