The entrance to a maze of underground tunnels where a World War II train full of gold and jewels has been located after being hidden for 70 years.
The popularity of the History TV channel can attest to the huge interest there is in World War II and the Nazis in particular.
The episode that the late Cathal O’Shannon made about Pieter Menten, the Nazi war criminal who once lived in the foothills of the Comeraghs and who was reputed to have a hoard of stolen art treasures, is still being aired regularly around the world.
The reason I mention this is because there were reports from Associated Press last week that a long missing ‘Nazi Gold Train’ has been found in underground tunnels close to the city of Walbrzych in Poland.
The train, loaded with gold and jewels, went missing in 1945 in a maze of underground tunnels of which there is no known map.
Treasure hunters have been searching for the train for decades and last week the Polish Minister for Culture, Piotr Zuchowski, said they were 99 per cent certain it had finally been located.
The Russian authorities have declared an interest in the train because it is thought to contain the famous ‘Amber Room’, an ornate chamber made of amber pearls thought to be worth over £250m in today’s prices. It was stolen by German troops from a palace near St Petersburg during the war.
However, great care will have to be exercised with the train as one of the German soldiers who claimed to have helped load the treasure revealed on his deathbed that the vehicle was laced with explosives as a security measure.