Nazi gold train 'found in Poland' by treasure hunters

Pair said to want 10 per cent of haul's value

A Nazi train thought to be full of gold and gems which vanished during the Second World War has been found by two men in Poland, the pair have reportedly claimed.

The armoured train is said to have gone missing near the then East German city of Breslau, now a Polish city named Wroclaw, as the Soviet army approached towards the end of the war in 1945.

And a law firm in south-west Poland says it has been contacted by two men who say have discovered the train, with Polish media reporting that the men want 10% of the value of the train's contents.

Radio Wroclaw said the discovery matches reports in local folklore of a train carrying gold and gems which went missing at the end of the war near Ksiaz Castle. It supposedly entered a tunnel near the castle and never emerged. The tunnel was later closed and its location forgotten.

A US soldier inspects thousands of gold wedding rings taken from Jews by the Nazis and stashed in the Heilbron Salt Mines, in 1945 in Germany

The claim was made to a law office in Walbrzych, two miles from Ksiaz Castle.

One website, walbrzych24.com, said one of the men was Polish and the other German.

Another site, Wiadomosci Walbrzyskie, said the train was 150m long and may have up to 300 tonnes of gold on board.

Trains were used to move Nazi loot back to Berlin as Allied and Soviet forces drew nearer to the German capital from the East and West in the winter and spring of 1945.

"Lawyers, the army, the police and the fire brigade are dealing with this," Marika Tokarska, an official at the Walbrzych district council, told Reuters.

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

In the “Gold Train” case, Nazi forces sent 24 freight carriages from Budapest towards Germany, filled with family treasures including gold, silver and valuable paintings seized from Hungarian Jews, estimated to be worth as much as £125 million.

The train was intercepted to U.S. soldiers, who then kept much of the loot for themselves.