Lower Silesia, in southwestern Poland, is a land of treasure hunters. Until the end of the Second World War, the region—covered by mountains and deep pine forests with towering, arrowlike trees—was part of Germany. In the early months of 1945, the German Army retreated, along with much of the civilian population. The advancing Red Army killed many of the Germans who remained. Nearly all those who survived were later evicted and forced to move west. By the end of 1947, almost two million Germans had been cleared out.
In order to fill the emptied landscape, the newly formed Polish government relocated hundreds of thousands of Poles from the east. The settlers arrived in vacant towns, walked into empty houses, and went to sleep in strangers’ beds. There was furniture in the houses, but usually the valuables were missing. The porcelain dishes, the silk dresses, the fur coats, the sewing machines, and the jewelry were gone, often hidden in the ground: buried in jars, chests, and even coffins. It was a hasty solution—a desperate effort to cache valuables as people were running for their lives. The owners of these possessions intended to return, but most didn’t. And so on steamy fall mornings, when the new arrivals dug in their gardens or tilled their fields, they unearthed small fortunes.
The stashes were ubiquitous, and everyone, it seemed, was a treasure hunter. The historian Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, in his book, “Lower Silesia from Nazi Germany to Communist Poland, 1942-49,” writes that many Poles came to the region because they were “attracted by the supposed German treasures to be gleaned at little or no cost.” There were so few consumer goods available that many of the new residents made a living by trading merchandise stolen from German homes. Siebel-Achenbach cites one report suggesting that as many as sixty per cent of those who resettled in the Wrocław district were such speculators.
There were also, perhaps, bigger treasures. During the latter half of the Second World War, after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazis still considered Lower Silesia to be safe ground. Factories were moved there, as were precious works of art. But, as the end approached and German troops departed, the military allegedly buried gold, jewels, art works, and even futuristic weapons. The most famous story involves a German military officer named Herbert Klose, who worked as a high-level police official in the city of Wrocław. After the war, Klose was caught and interrogated by the Polish secret police. The Polish author Joanna Lamparska writes about Klose in her new book, “Gold Train: A Short History of Madness.” The record of his interrogation, which is labelled “Case 1491” in the secret-police files, is kept at the Institute of National Remembrance in Wrocław.
During his interrogation, Klose said that, in mid-November of 1944, the city’s chief of police asked him to help residents secure their valuables; with the Red Army on the move, even the banks might not be safe. Under Klose’s watch, the local police collected gold, jewelry, and other precious items for safekeeping. “The gold was stored at the police headquarters,” Klose said. “The chests were made of iron and hermetically closed with rubber seals. Also the chests were unmarked so nobody would know what’s inside.” (He did note that they were numbered.) Klose made plans to hide the chests outside the city, but when it came time to move them he couldn’t take part, because he’d injured himself falling from a horse. The other officers went without him and, according to Klose, buried the chests in several places and then concealed the entrances.
There are other stories like Klose’s. At the end of the Second World War, the U.S. military investigated a legend that much of the reserve of the Reichsbank, in Berlin, had been hidden in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany. In 1945, American soldiers discovered a room in the mine whose floor was covered with more than seven thousand marked bags containing gold coins, gold bars, and other valuables. Similar discoveries have fuelled the dreams of treasure hunters across Europe for more than half a century.
In Lower Silesia, treasure hunters are still looking for Klose’s gold and for other riches. They have formed clubs, and one of the most well known is the Lower Silesian Research Group. The members, mostly men, are amateurs who spend their weekends studying old maps, visiting historical archives, interviewing survivors of the war, and spelunking. In a region where treasure hunting is a pastime, they pride themselves on being the best.
For years, members of the Lower Silesian Research Group have been searching for a Nazi train allegedly hidden in a secret tunnel. They believe that the tunnel, now collapsed, is situated on the outskirts of the town of Wałbrzych, between an existing set of railroad tracks and a Toyota dealership. There are kilometre markers on the tracks, and the location is known simply as the 65th Kilometre.
Much of the Research Group’s findings come from Tadeusz Slowikowski, a former miner in his eighties. Coal mining is a tradition in the region and residents have excavated the surrounding hills for centuries. In 1974, Slowikowski retired from mining and turned his attention to researching the 65th Kilometre. Over the years, he has amassed heaps of documents and even built a scale replica of the site, complete with model trains, in his garage. Much of his proof is circumstantial. His most tantalizing evidence comes from interviews he conducted after the war with a former German railroad engineer. The engineer recalled seeing, during the war, a secured, fenced-off area near the 65th Kilometre, where the secret tunnel supposedly exists.
Last August, two members of the Research Group, Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper, scanned the site with ground-penetrating radar and produced a series of images that resembled a train. After seeing them, Poland’s deputy culture minister said that he was “more than ninety-nine per cent sure” that the train was there. Speculation quickly spread that the train contained some portion of Klose’s gold, and the would-be discovery was dubbed the Nazi Gold Train in newspapers around the world. Tourists flocked to the site.
But the ghostly pictures served up by geophysical-imaging technology can be misleading. This past fall, a group of Polish scientists conducted tests of their own at the site and concluded that no train was buried there. One of them, Michał Banaś, a geologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, used a thermal-infrared camera and found anomalies in the ground, leading him to believe that, while there might be a tunnel, there was no evidence of a train. The treasure hunters remain adamant that they are right.
When I visited Wałbrzych, this winter, I spoke with Tomasz Jurek, the president of the Lower Silesian Research Group. Jurek, who is fifty-nine, is slight, with a receding hairline, a broad forehead, and a bushy mustache. When we met in the lobby of my hotel, he glanced around nervously and eyed my tape recorder. He told me that there were shadowy operators who were interested in the same treasures. I asked him for more details. “There is some logical explanation, but it’s for you to figure it out,” he said. “I cannot officially say.” I felt as if I had stepped into a Cold War spy movie. Eventually, I asked about the existence of a secret tunnel at the 65th Kilometre.
“It’s one of the special places,” Jurek said, guardedly. “Because there are so many tunnels, who knows what else is there.” Jurek insisted that the tunnel at the 65th Kilometre was just a point of entry into a labyrinthine complex that may hold many Nazi treasures. He paused for a moment to let this possibility sink in, and then added, “It’s the tip of an underground city.”
According to Jurek, one of the key components of the city sits beneath nearby Książ Castle—a storybook palace built on a rocky promontory overlooking a ravine and a twisting river at its bottom. I was skeptical, but Jurek urged me to go and see the castle for myself.
I arrived at the castle early one morning and seemed to be the only person there. The castle’s architecture—a mixture of Gothic, Baroque, and rococo styles—is a testament to its long history, which dates back to the late thirteenth century. Perched on its ledge, with its spindly turrets scraping a gray sky, it presented a haunting image. During the war, the Nazis commandeered it and began a vast renovation project, which included a suite designed especially for Hitler. There are only a few people alive who remember what the castle was like at the time; one of them is an eighty-one-year-old woman named Dorota Stempowska. Beginning in the eighteen-thirties, her family lived on the castle grounds and served the noble family that owned it, working as blacksmiths and horse handlers. She and her son, Leopold, still live on the grounds, in a stone house near the main entrance.
Stempowska is a small, soft-spoken woman, with a round face and thinning white hair. When we met, during my visit, she spoke at length about her memories of growing up there. She was a young girl during the war but vividly recalls the day in 1943 when a large German military contingent arrived. They quickly sealed off many of the buildings. The tight security around the castle is well documented. After the war, a former S.S. officer who was charged with guarding the castle recalled, “We S.S. men had to sign a statement of confidentiality and were not allowed to host family members within a radius of forty kilometres.”
Not long after the Germans’ arrival, the explosions started, Stempowska said. The tremors seemed to come from deep inside the earth. They were so loud, and so powerful, that they woke Stempowska in the middle of the night, and they continued every two hours, like clockwork, for more than a year. No one knew what the Nazis were up to, but rumors circulated among the servant families. “It was widely known that they were constructing some kind of residence for Hitler,” Stempowska recalled.
When the war ended, the former servants cautiously explored the castle. Much of the inside was gutted, and there were some additions, including two new elevator shafts, one finished and the other half completed. I asked Stempowska where the elevators led. She began to explain but eventually told me that her son, Leopold, would show me. A middle-aged man, dressed in a blue blazer and a checked shirt, emerged from the adjacent room. Leopold, a geophysicist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, had a serious, no-nonsense demeanor. He glanced at his watch and motioned for me to follow him.
We left the castle and walked briskly down a dirt road that dropped steeply into the ravine. The branches of skeletal trees swayed overhead and the waters of the Pełcznica River churned far below. Eventually, we came to a small red door built into the mossy wall of the ravine. Leopold struggled to find the right key and, after some fumbling, managed to open the door. He led me down a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway, which soon opened into an enormous tunnel—sixteen feet high and eighteen feet wide, big enough for a Greyhound bus to drive down and still have four feet of clearance overhead. The tunnel continued into the murky distance, almost as far as I could see. It was an unexpected and breathtaking sight—and, as it turns out, just a small portion of the “underground city” that Tomasz Jurek had described.
Leopold began walking quickly down the tunnel, his footsteps echoing. I followed. What, exactly, I asked, were the Nazis building here? Leopold nodded thoughtfully. “That is the mystery,” he said.
Starting in 1943, the Nazis began building a series of underground bunkers beneath the Góry Sowie, or Owl Mountains, in Lower Silesia. All told, there were seven facilities, including the one beneath Książ Castle. Historians believe that the Nazis intended to connect these facilities with tunnels; and some treasure hunters, such as Tomasz Jurek, insist that the tunnels were completed and then sealed off by the German military in the last days of the war. These underground lairs, known collectively by the code name Riese—“giant,” in German—constitute one of the Third Reich’s most ambitious undertakings.
The German historian Franz W. Seidler, in his book “Hitler’s Secret Headquarters,” writes, “The enormous scale of this project defies the imagination.” The total floor space of the facilities exceeded a hundred and ninety thousand square metres, which is almost forty times as large as the White House. The project’s engineers estimated that it would take 6.3 million workdays to complete. Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s Minister of Armaments and Munitions, wrote, in his memoirs, that Hitler and other Nazi leaders were worried about their survival “to an insane degree.” Reflecting on the Riese project, he complained that Hitler used far too many resources to build “that huge bunker,” noting that it “consumed more concrete than the entire population” of the country “had at its disposal for air-raid shelters in 1944.”
No one knows exactly what the Nazis were planning. The few surviving documents indicate that Riese was intended to be a bombproof refuge for the Nazi élite. Seidler estimates that it would have been capable of accommodating twenty-seven thousand people. Bella Gutterman, an Israeli historian and the former director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, has studied the Riese project and believes that it also was designed as a place to manufacture and store aircraft. Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was keenly interested in protecting his planes, as was Hitler. In 1943, at Hitler’s behest, Göring told subordinates, “Go underground at once, along with my whole warehouse of junk.”
That is the extent of what’s known; all other records and blueprints appear to have been destroyed. “Who knows what kind of weapons they intended to build there,” Gutterman told me. She noted that, while Riese was being built, some four thousand S.S. men guarded its perimeter and were told to shoot any strangers who approached. As the end of the war drew near, the Nazis were determined to keep information about the project from falling into the hands of the Russians and likely destroyed their records. Seidler, in his book, notes that for decades suspicions have lingered about “the real reason behind the existence of Riese.”
When the war ended, hardly anyone seemed to know about Riese, but clues were everywhere—collapsed cave entrances, railroad tracks leading to abandoned worksites in the mountains, and ventilation shafts built into the forest floor. Tomasz Jurek recalls hearing, as a boy, about a network of train tunnels that existed belowground. It stood to reason that, if Herbert Klose was looking for somewhere to hide his treasure chests, or perhaps even an entire train, the tunnels of Riese would be a natural place to stash them. But, without a master plan to consult, no one knew where all the tunnels began and ended, or how far and how deep they went. To complicate matters, the landscape was filled with mining tunnels, shafts, adits, and crosscuts, any of which, in theory, could provide entry into Riese. The only solution was trial and error. For the region’s treasure hunters, the first challenge was always finding a way in.
After visiting the castle, I drove an hour southeast, to the small town of Piława Górna. I had plans to meet a treasure hunter named Andrzej Boczek, who had promised to show me how he searched for loot. Boczek greeted me in his driveway, waving enthusiastically. Dressed in camouflage pants and a black sweater, he was a hulking figure—more oversized Teddy bear than lumberjack, with a shock of reddish-blond hair, a ruddy face, and an infectious grin.
Boczek escorted me into an elegant Teutonic-style cottage, which he had built himself. It was a clubhouse for his fellow treasure hunters and he hoped that someday it would also serve as a museum for all of his discoveries. Most of what Boczek had found was Nazi paraphernalia—helmets, knives, compasses, gas masks, cannisters, maps, a rifle, and a standard in the form of an eagle perched on a swastika. Boczek motioned for me to sit down and then used one of his relics, a rusting Wehrmacht knife, to open a bottle of lager. “Share a beer with me so that you do not miss any information,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I am talking about such stuff that one can never find in any book. It is not imagined, the things we are talking about. Cheers!”
Boczek went on to tell me that his uncle was one of many Gentiles in Poland who died at Auschwitz, but he added that he couldn’t let this knowledge, or old hatreds, prevent him from appreciating the history and the meaning of his relics. “Everything, no matter where it was found and what it is, has its own history,” he said, nodding toward his stuff. “Every single thing is valuable to me—for example, this.” He picked up the Nazi standard. “Someone has made it. Someone carried it. Someone died because of it. This is a story! This helmet”—he paused and gestured toward the artifact—“someone wore it. That man was alive: he had a wife, children, a family, and he could love like everyone else.” At times, Boczek’s interest in Nazi paraphernalia seemed to border on a fetish. He had a black cross, similar to the kind used by the Nazis, affixed to the front of his car for a while, but he removed it because it was too “controversial.”
But there were sacred codes of the trade that Boczek always honored. And there were superstitions. He never took anything from a graveyard or tampered with tombstones. An acquaintance, a businessman and a fellow treasure hunter, once made the mistake of bringing home a discarded Jewish gravestone. “He had two good companies, and both companies went down,” Boczek told me. “He also developed cancer.”
Boczek grabbed a scroll of paper, got down on his hands and knees, and unfurled it on the floor. “I want to show you something,” he said. It was a black-and-white aerial photograph of a mountain range in Lower Silesia, taken by the Allies in February of 1945. Old photos were essential in finding tunnels, he said, because they showed where the barracks of old labor camps once stood. The Nazis relied on thousands of slave laborers to dig their tunnels; the barracks were typically nearby.
Boczek pointed at a cluster of small specks on the map. “Can you see this camp right here?” he said excitedly. It had been big, he added, and the size of the camp often correlated to the size of the tunnels being dug. By counting the barracks, Boczek gauged the number of Kommandos—units of slave laborers—staying at the camp. These workers fell into two basic categories, based on their quality and their strength. “The first kind were people taken from the streets, like Jews, Poles, Dutchmen, French, and Belgians,” he said. “They lived just a short time here in these mountains, approximately four weeks. The most hardworking people were Russian prisoners of war; they lived longer than the other guys, about six to seven weeks.” On average, Boczek estimated, one forty-person Kommando unit was able to dig thirteen linear feet of tunnel—eleven feet high and ten feet wide—every twelve hours. Such calculations helped him to determine the size of the tunnels that he hoped to locate and explore.
Once Boczek had identified the site of a good-sized camp, he began analyzing old maps. Typically, he compared maps from before and after the war, looking for places where new streams appeared. “So where did they come from?” Boczek said, with a professorial air. “Every stream comes from a drift.” A drift is a horizontal passageway in the earth from which water can emerge. If the entrance of a tunnel was sealed off with boulders, water might emerge from it, forming a stream. These were Boczek’s markers, and he used them each spring when he set out to find new tunnels.
Digging for treasure legally can be cumbersome. First, you need the landowner’s permission. Then you must report everything you find to the authorities—and, under Polish property law, you may keep only ten per cent of that. Digging is also costly, sometimes involving earthmoving equipment and crews of men with shovels. What’s more, many of the treasure hunters I met didn’t seem to trust anyone, even one another. Tomasz Jurek complained that a member of his own club had surreptitiously tried to chisel a narrow passageway, from his own basement, into a secret facility ostensibly built by the Nazis. “He was working on this project without notifying the group,” Jurek said. He then assured me that the transgressor was no longer part of the club.
Jurek’s biggest concern, and Boczek’s, was being followed. Both worried that they were being watched by a gang of clandestine agents known as “the guards.” Other treasure hunters voiced similar concerns. Piotr Koper, the man who claimed to have found the train at the 65th Kilometre, said that he feared for the safety of his family.
There is an extensive mythology around the guards. By most accounts, they are a global network of former Nazis, similar to the legendary ODESSA unit. ODESSA was allegedly founded at the end of the war in order to help former S.S. members avoid capture and escape to countries like Argentina and Brazil. Historians doubt whether ODESSA units ever existed. Boczek conceded that most of the original guards were likely dead, but he suspects that their secrets have been passed along to subsequent generations, who have been charged with watching over the old homeland and its buried treasures.
Boczek and Jurek told me that they had been spying on a particular man, a suspected guard, who walked the same route through the woods every day at the same time. “I find it very interesting, especially because this guy is not a Slav,” Boczek said. “He looks more like a typical German or Austrian. I have pictures of him on my computer at home. We have checked his background and this guy is . . .” Boczek stopped and shook his head. “I cannot tell you more.”
Joanna Lamparska, who has written several books about the treasure hunters of Lower Silesia, told me that the legend of the guards came from an enduring Zeitgeist: a sense, among older Poles, that the region is not really theirs. For decades after the war, many Poles lived out of suitcases, half expecting that the Germans whose homes they occupied would return and demand what was theirs. During the nineteen-seventies, as relations between Poland and West Germany warmed, many former German residents returned to visit their old homes. Lamparska said that there are countless stories of German tourists arriving with bags and retrieving possessions buried in the ground or hidden in walls. She recalls driving through Lower Silesia in the nineteen-nineties with a companion, a blond-haired photographer. She was asked repeatedly if her friend was a German, there to reclaim a house.
The legend of the guards centers in particular on the handful of ethnic Germans who were allowed to remain in Lower Silesia after the war. Allegedly, they were left to look after abandoned caches both small and large. At one point during my visit with Boczek, he made a phone call and placed the phone on speaker mode. There was a strange clicking on the line. Boczek said nothing but gave me a knowing smile, as if to say, You see? Later, when I pressed him for more information on the guards, he demurred. “You know too much already,” he said.
A day or so later, I travelled into the Owl Mountains and hiked to a spring where a small stream began. Water flowed out of the mountain from a dip in the slope, which was filled with rocks. It looked like the sort of geologic feature that Boczek had described—a spot where a tunnel might once have existed. On this particular day, I was not with Boczek but with Krzysztof Szpakowski, one of the region’s most flamboyant treasure hunters.
Szpakowski is a middle-aged, barrel-chested man, with a glistening bald head. He was dressed in military garb, including black leather boots and green fatigues that looked freshly ironed. On his shirt was a custom-designed patch with the image of a wolf and the words “Code Name Riese—Third Reich Deposits.”
The spring was a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Włodarz Complex, one of the seven underground facilities in the Riese system. Szpakowski operates Włodarz as a museum, and offers tours to tens of thousands of visitors each year. Roughly two miles of tunnels have been discovered, cleared of debris, and opened to viewing. Szpakowski periodically looks for, and finds, new passageways, but the full scale of the complex remains a mystery.
Szpakowski pointed to where water was bubbling from the mountain. “Without any research, we can claim that there must be a facility there,” he said. The question was what this unexplored area might contain. Szpakowski believed that Riese was never properly finished and therefore never operated as a refuge for the Nazi élite. “They couldn’t use it as a shelter, so they used it as a depository,” he said.
He claimed to have interviewed a number of former German residents of the nearby town of Walim, who recounted a similar story: In early 1945, German soldiers arrived, emptied the streets, and threatened to shoot any residents who peered out of their windows. Moments later, a convoy of trucks rumbled through town and headed up toward the Włodarz Complex.
Jerzy Cera, a Polish author, documents a similar story in his 1974 book, “The Mysteries of the Walim Undergrounds.” He quotes a letter, written toward the end of the war, from a Polish partisan who was living near Walim. In the letter, the partisan recounts meeting a local forest warden who described a convoy of trucks that drove into a tunnel near Walim and never came out. Afterward, German soldiers blew up the entranceway and camouflaged it with soil and vegetation. The partisan made plans to visit the site with the warden, but before this could happen the warden was murdered.
Szpakowski speculated that the trucks contained Klose’s gold or some equally valuable treasure. His logic involved a significant leap of faith, but to him it made sense: why else would the Germans go to such lengths to protect and hide whatever the trucks delivered? The challenge was deciding where to dig. Numerous places looked promising, including this mountain spring. But was there really a tunnel? And, if there was, where did it lead—and what, exactly, was in it? Szpakowski told me that, to answer such questions, he relied on certain devices. I asked if I could see them, and he agreed. He left me at the edge of the woods and returned several minutes later with a small wooden suitcase. Before opening it, he took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Then he carefully removed two long brass rods from the suitcase. Each rod had a handle. Szpakowski took one in each hand and the rods began pointing this way and that.
They were divining rods, he said, the kind used by mystics to find water in the desert. Szpakowski used them to find tunnels. He closed his eyes briefly, as if in meditation, then began slowly walking forward. The rods pointed directly ahead and then suddenly swivelled, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, so that they pointed at each other. This meant that there was a tunnel directly beneath us, Szpakowski said. He retraced his steps and the rods swivelled at the same spot. Szpakowski’s cigarette had burned down to a nub and smoke was streaming into his eyes. “It is difficult to do while smoking,” he said. Then he urged me to try.
Before handing me the rods, he placed their tips in the dirt, to “neutralize” them. First, he said, I had to gather my thoughts: “Whatever you think, whether there is a God or whatever you believe in, think of it. Then ask a question in your mind. Ask them”—the rods—“to show you the way. Where does the tunnel begin?” I tried to follow his directions and began to walk forward. I felt like a teen-ager playing with a Ouija board and trying not to move the planchette deliberately. And then the rods crossed at the exact spot where Szpakowski had stopped.
He smiled. He said that he always double-checked his results with his German-made KS-750 ground-penetrating radar, but he liked to start with the rods. I said it was a shame that he couldn’t simply ask the rods where the gold was. Not to worry, he replied, there was another device for that. He walked back to his suitcase and gingerly removed a fantastical divining rod—gold in color, with a small, rocket-shaped glass capsule attached to its tip. He picked it up, held it by its handle, and allowed the rod to swivel. “So I stand in a particular spot,” he said, “and I say, ‘Show me where the nearest gold deposit is.’ ” For a moment, the rod remained still, then it trembled, and finally it swivelled and pointed toward the heart of the Włodarz Complex.
The problem with the tunnels, from the treasure hunters’ point of view, is that they present a seemingly endless number of possibilities. Each new passageway, even if it is empty or a dead end, leads to a spot where another passageway may start. Like a lottery ticket, each tunnel sparks a new dream, and every treasure hunter seems to have his own wish list: gold, jewels, art works, an underground train terminal, a supercomputer prototype, a cyclotron. For most, the legend of Klose’s gold seemed to represent a kind of Holy Grail.
But during my visit with Andrzej Boczek, at his cottage clubhouse, he scoffed at the notion that there was a treasure-laden train buried at the 65th Kilometre. “It was made up to get attention from world media,” he said. This “train tale” was simply a ruse devised by treasure hunters to distract from “what is really hidden underneath.” I asked him to elaborate. What was the real treasure, if not Klose’s gold? Boczek reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a creased piece of paper. He unfolded it and waved it in the air briefly, allowing me a fleeting glimpse. The image on the paper was unmistakable: it was a flying saucer.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to see it. Tomasz Jurek had also mentioned to me that he was looking for a spaceship that the Nazis had allegedly built and hidden underground in Lower Silesia. Igor Witkowski, a Polish journalist and author, has written a book about Nazi “wonder weapons” and notes that “rounded, experimental flying vehicles” were seen at Książ Castle during the war. Witkowski’s writings have captured the imagination of fringe historians in the U.S., among them Joseph P. Farrell, the author of “Nazi International: The Nazis’ Postwar Plan to Control the Worlds of Science, Finance, Space, and Conflict.”
Bella Gutterman, the Israeli historian, told me that she had found no evidence that the Nazis were building a mysterious flying machine, although she thinks that they may have intended to build V1 and V2 rockets in the Riese tunnels. At the end of the war, when Riese was abandoned, many of the prisoners there were taken to Dora-Mittelbau, a concentration camp in Germany, where such rockets were being made. But, in combing through the testimony of survivors from the Riese camps, she found no mention of weapons or engines being built in the tunnels.
Boczek told me that his drawing of the flying saucer had been made by a laborer who lived in the Nazi camps and had worked in the tunnels. “It was not the Americans who invented flying saucers,” he said. “It is based on a flying machine, which uses antigravity technology, and it was produced here in the mountains. This is the real secret of the Gold Train.”
Some people feel that certain treasure hunters in this region pay short shrift to the darker aspects of the history they obsess over. “They are fascinated by German history, but for a few of them it goes too far, in my opinion,” a Polish journalist who has written about them told me. “They live in a world of fantasies of treasure, and sometimes they forget that the Nazis were not only hiding treasures but killing people and starting a war that covered the whole continent.”
The Riese tunnels are undeniably macabre. I sensed this most acutely when I visited the Osówka Complex, another of the facilities in the Riese system. My guide was an amateur historian named Zdzisław Łazanowski, who was trying to turn Osówka into a major tourist attraction. I followed him deep underground, through a labyrinth of tunnels. Some were quite small and narrow; others were cavernous, more than twenty-six feet high, and were finished with smooth concrete walls.
As we walked on, the tunnels became increasingly wet, and then flooded, until we could proceed only in a small rowboat, which Łazanowski kept there. Eventually, we reached a spot where milky white stalactites were hanging from the ceiling. “This is probably a type of calcium that was used to cover the walls of another corridor, which is over us,” Łazanowski told me.
I had visited mines before, but these passageways were different, and not just because of their size. Slave laborers had toiled here—men and women who had been worked to death—and the passageways retained a ghostly gloom. At one point, Łazanowski showed me a spot where the footprint of a German guard remained preserved in the concrete floor. The workers came here each day from a nearby concentration camp, he said. He added that, when talking to the “American media,” it was crucial to underscore that these were “Nazi camps,” not “Polish camps,” even though they now stood on Polish soil. This is a sensitive topic in Poland. In February, the deputy justice minister of Poland’s rightward-leaning government proposed that the phrase “Polish death camps” be outlawed and that offenders pay a fine or face three years in prison.
A few days later, I visited the nearby Gross-Rosen concentration camp, which was the administrative hub for about a hundred subcamps, including a dozen devoted to Riese. I met with a guide who often hosted groups of Polish high-school students on field trips. The students sometimes asked why the camp’s prisoners didn’t try to escape and get help from the Poles who lived nearby. The guide then had to explain that there were no Poles nearby, because the entire region was Germany, not Poland. Afterward, on a few occasions, teachers have told the guide, apologetically, that the history curricula at their high schools allot just two classes, totalling ninety minutes, to all of the Second World War. The guide said that for many of the students the Holocaust seems “so distant” that it’s hard to make it feel real: “Maybe there will be at least one or two in the group who will find it interesting and will look for more.”
There is a very good chance that the tunnels contain no treasures at all. When the Germans fled the region, they forced their thousands of slave laborers westward, starving them and shooting those too weak to continue. During the preparations for their flight, one such laborer, Avram Kajzer, recounted in his diary, “They’re taking apart tunnel buildings, ripping out large pipes, taking them out, and putting them in order in front of the tunnel. A truck comes by every hour and hauls away a load of metal. The tunnel is huge and cold.” Then the Red Army arrived. Soldiers looted what they could, but Stalin dispatched numerous trophy brigades to search for and retrieve valuables as a form of compensation for the Soviet Union’s losses during the war. Some two and a half million items—paintings, sculptures, and other valuables, even the contents of entire museums—were taken and sent to the U.S.S.R.
Joanna Lamparska believes that the Soviets, who controlled Poland for the next five decades, could not have overlooked a major buried treasure. As a historian, she is reconciled to this likelihood, but part of her clings to the hope that she is wrong, she said; the citizens of Lower Silesia have an affection for the treasure hunters, even if they come up empty-handed. “People will forgive them, because they gave us excitement, good moments, hope,” she told me.
In the coming months, Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper, of the Lower Silesian Research Group, hope to go ahead with their exploration at the 65th Kilometre. Meanwhile, fifteen miles to the west, authorities in the town of Kamienna Góra are investigating the possibility that the Nazis buried five trucks there. So far, the treasure hunter who alerted the town has chosen to remain anonymous.
The people of Lower Silesia have long believed that great wealth lies in the ground. But the earth’s natural riches are mostly gone. In the nineteen-nineties, all the big industrial coal mines closed; the reserves were tapped out, and what remained was deemed too dangerous and too costly to remove. The local economy imploded. Wałbrzych, the biggest city in the area, is now home to many retired and unemployed miners.
One evening, in Wałbrzych, I visited the Old Mine Science and Art Center, which occupies a converted mining facility. My visit coincided with Barbórka, or Miners’ Day, which is named for St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners. I entered a great hall lined with banquet tables and thronged with gray-haired old men, wearing feathered caps, crisp blue dress coats, and gleaming medals on their lapels. They had gathered to drink mugs of beer and sing ballads such as the “Miners’ Waltz”: “Mining treasures under the ground / Deeply hidden slumbering. / On the walls and pillars the miners’ faith / Has forged the way to the treasures.”
Toward the end of the evening, I met a group of men who were debating whether there really was a train of riches buried at the 65th Kilometre. “There isn’t, because there is no evidence,” one declared. Another said heatedly that he was ninety per cent sure that something valuable was buried there. “The most important thing,” another said, “is that you can always make T-shirts and do some business!” One miner lamented that none of it really mattered. “There are no mining jobs left,” he told me.
But that wasn’t entirely true. I met one miner, in his sixties, who confided that a wealthy patron, who happened to be a treasure hunter, had recently hired him to excavate an old tunnel, which, he was told, was likely part of Riese. The miner, whose name was Janek, was reluctant to say anything further or even to give his last name. He suspected that his patron was operating illegally, because he didn’t intend to report what he found to the authorities, as Polish law requires. I pressed for details, but he wouldn’t say much more. Then he changed his mind and offered to take me to the place where he’d done his work.
The following day, I drove with him into the Owl Mountains. We travelled along a series of winding mountain roads, into the heart of the area where most of the Riese tunnels are situated. Along the way, we passed the town of Głuszyca and its cemetery, where some two thousand laborers from Riese, mainly Jews, were buried in a mass grave. There are few tombstones. One read simply, “This Was Done to People by People.”
Eventually, at a seemingly random spot on the side of the road, Janek instructed me to pull over. We left the car, and he led me up the side of a steep mountain, into a pine forest. The day was cold and drizzly, and tendrils of mist floated through the treetops. Janek mostly ignored my questions. He pointed out several moss-covered stone structures jutting up out of the earth, which looked like buried chimneys—air vents, he said. I got the sense that there was a sizable world beneath our feet.
As we walked, Janek spoke in a mumbling soliloquy. He no longer worked for the wealthy treasure hunter, but the job had paid very well. His patron had told him little beyond where to dig: a shallow depression where a stream began. Janek led a crew of four miners. As they dug into the depression, they uncovered the entrance to a tunnel that bored directly into the side of the mountain. Janek and his men repeatedly encountered great piles of crumbling rocks, which they had to remove. They also found scraps of paper that Janek believed had been used to wrap dynamite. Some of the wrappers had writing in German, others in Russian. It was puzzling, but one obvious explanation was that the Germans had buried something here and the Russians had excavated it. Eventually, Janek told me, the crew discovered a chamber off the main tunnel. Inside were three green wooden chests, two emblazoned with swastikas. It was exactly what anyone chasing Klose’s gold would hope to find. But when the lids were opened the chests were empty.
Janek still seemed upset about this. When we finally reached the mouth of the tunnel that he had excavated, he pointed to the entrance and shook his head. “Those fucking Russians,” he said bitterly. “They took everything out.”
Then, with a shrug, he turned around and started back through the woods, toward the car. I hustled to catch up with him, slipping on the wet leaves that carpeted the forest floor. As Janek walked, his temper seemed to cool and he muttered, “There are still many holes here waiting to be dug.” ♦
