Breakthrough in hunt for Hitler's gold with dig to begin for legendary £250m ‘Amber Room' treasure stolen by Nazis

The Sun

01-08-2025

A BREAKTHROUGH may have been made in the hunt for Hitler's legendary gold train - said to be packed with jewels, gold and the lost £250m Amber Room.
Since 1945, governments, the Polish Army and treasure hunters have scoured the terrain searching for the train - and now they believe its location may be in northern Poland.
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Polish authorities have officially granted permission for a new search, according to Wirtualna Polska.
Gdańsk's Office for the Protection of Monuments has reportedly approved drilling and archaeological surveys in Dziemiany - located in the Kościerzyna district of northern Poland.
The search aim to uncover a suspected WWII-era bunker, which could conceal the fabled train and its valuable artefacts.
Marcin Tymiński, spokesperson for the Pomeranian Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments, said there might be a hidden German deposit in Dziemiany.
'Some speculate it could even be the lost Amber Room,' he added.
The Nazis established a military training ground in Dziemiany for SS units at the end of 1943, according to Jan Delingowski who is leading the treasure hunt.
Delingowski, a former merchant fleet radio officer, has spent the last decade searching for the legendary train in the region of Kashubia.
In an interview on the YouTube channel History Hiking on Sunday, he pointed to historical evidence linking the suspected treasure site to Nazi official Erich Koch, RMF24 reports, RMF24 reports.
Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazis in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945.
After WWII, Koch was tried in Poland and convicted in 1959 for war crimes - including responsibility for the deaths of around 400,000 Poles.
Mystery of Nazi shipwreck that may hold £100million of Hitler's GOLD & the legendary 'Amber Room' treasure
Koch was sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out - officially due to his poor health.
However, according to declassified files from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), cited by Rzeczpospolita, the real reason was that the communist-era Polish Security Service and the Soviet KGB hoped he would reveal the location of the Nazi gold train.
An inmate who met Koch in the 1980s claimed the Nazi official revealed the treasure's hiding place before his death.
Citing the inmate's account, Delingowski says the convoy veered off the road 'somewhere between Czersk and Człuchów, heading toward the Oder'.
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The crates are said to be stashed in a bunker disguised and hidden 'on a hill near a lake, at the site of former SS barracks'.
Previous explorations of the region led to the discovery of a brick tank, Wirtualna Polska reports.
Based on the testimony and Delingowski's decade-long research, authorities have granted permission to investigate the site.
The official decision reads: 'Based on findings from prior heritage surveys, there is reason to believe that a World War II-era slit bunker is located on the plot (...), which may qualify as a historical monument.
"Furthermore, historic material - including archaeological artefacts - may be present inside and around it.'
The legend of the Nazi gold train
THERE is an enduring urban legend that deep beneath the mountains of southwest Poland lies a Nazi gold train - also known as the Wałbrzych gold train.
According to the legend, the train was loaded with precious jewels, gold and amber from the Amber Room of the Czars.
The Amber Room, originally created for Russian Tsar Peter the Great in the 1700s, was looted by the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
It is considered the crown jewel of the missing Nazi treasure haul, often dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World" after being stolen from Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg.
According to the legend, the train was hidden in a sealed tunnel or underground bunker or mine somewhere in the Central Sudetes.
Since 1945, numerous searches - including operations by the Polish Army during the Cold War - have failed to uncover any trace of the train.
Interest in the legend surged again between 2015 and 2018, when two Polish treasure hunters claimed they had discovered the train using ground-penetrating radar.
This claim led to a high-profile excavation effort involving the Polish military, government officials and private backers.
But the dig was eventually abandoned after the so-called anomaly turned out to be a natural geological formation.
And so, the legend lives on - a group of enthusiasts has even built a full-scale replica of a Nazi armoured train, hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction.