Lately there have been a spate of articles in the media about the sensational news that somewhere in Poland, in a sealed railroad tunnel deep inside some remote mountain, about the discovery of a fabled Nazi treasure train, supposedly stuffed with art treasures, gold, gems and secret Nazi archives….It was on a last desperate mission in the dying days of WWII as Hitler’s Third Reich was collapsing….The train was supposedly discovered because of a deathbed confession from someone who knew of it’s existence…..

This person revealed it to treasure hunters who actually located it, and with the technique of advanced ground penetrating radar two men have convinced many people that this is the long lost train…Herman Goering, the Reichsmarshall of the Luftwaffe, or German air force, was a well known and avid collector of fine art and antiquities, and he devoted much of his time in power to stripping and looting Europe of all it’s best art treasures for his and Hitler’s personal enrichment, many of which ended up at his palatial estate, Karin hall…..

According to my Google sources: “A legendary Nazi ‘ghost’ train packed with treasure may have been discovered hidden in a long-forgotten tunnel in the Polish mountains. Two people have claimed they have discovered the train, which is said to have disappeared 70 years ago as the Nazis tried to hide their treasure from the advancing Soviet Red Army. According to local legend, it was packed with gems and guns, and had been sent south-west, through the mountains towards the border.

Local news reports said the train in question went missing in 1945, packed with loot from the-then eastern German city of Breslau, now called Wroclaw and part of Poland, as the Red Army closed in at the end of the Second World War. One local media report said the train was armored and belonged to the Wehrmacht, the Nazi Germany’s military, (their regular Army.)

Radio Wroclaw cited local folklore as saying the train entered a tunnel near Ksiaz Castle, in the mountainous Lower Silesian region, and never emerged. According to the theory, the tunnel was later closed and its location long forgotten. Radio Wroclaw claimed the 495-foot-long train was carrying guns, ‘industrial equipment’, gems and other valuable treasure when it went missing.”

This persistent legend would fit in well with the known proclivities of Reichsmarshall Herman Goering, to whom the chaos of war and his own exalted stature in the Nazi hierarchy, 2nd only to Adolph Hitler for most of the war, provided ample opportunity to justify his insatiable lust for gold, gems, and precious cultural artifacts ….Just like in “Indiana Jones” he had his agents ceaselessly scouring Europe not only for art treasures but for mysterious and unlikely power sources, but Goering was a venal and corrupt man who loved amassing gold and treasures for his own personal enrichment and pleasure……

Again from my Google sources: “There was the systematic way the Nazis had gone about stealing art – how, for example, Hitler’s second in command, Herman Goering, would line up items for his own collection and Hitler’s, making repeated visits to the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. You may have heard about Nazis destroying and looting art all over Europe.

But you may not know that the looting – tons of works taken from both personal and public collections – was perhaps the greatest pillage in history, as much a part of Nazi war planning as was military conquest. The Nazi war on art and the ravages of modern combat caused an unprecedented upheaval of art and cultural property that is still unraveling today.

The recent movie “The Monuments Men” with an all star Hollywood cast, is the true story of how the Allies were able to recover much, but not all of this stolen artwork…’During a war”, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering smugly informed his interrogators at Nuremberg, “everybody loots a little bit.”

It was a statement so preposterously self-serving as to be darkly comic. Goering had profited from perhaps the greatest organized art theft in modern history, one that continued for years and was supervised by an agency of the German state, and removed colossal quantities of paintings, sculptures and other items from occupied Europe (26,000 railway wagons of it from France alone). Yet more was snatched from museums and collections in Germany itself.

A significant quantity of this lost art may just have come back into view. Last week, German investigators revealed that more than 1,400 works had been discovered last year, hidden in a Munich, Germany apartment! Obscurity still clouds this astonishing discovery, which, in total, has been tentatively valued at more than £1 billion! Although some spectacular examples have been listed – by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso, Otto Dix and Max Beckman, among others – it is still unclear just what was squirreled away in that flat, or where it originally came from.

Nazi art thefts were linked to a genuine, though malign, interest in the subject – even, on the part of several prominent party leaders, an obsession. Hitler, himself a failed artist of phenomenally meager talent, was an avid art enthusiasts…Both he and – apparently – Goering intended to found great museums with their ill-gotten masterpieces.”

If this much treasure can be found right there in Germany, it takes but a little stretch of the imagination to think that there may indeed be a Nazi treasure train buried somewhere inside a Polish mountain…In fact there may be similar looted treasure troves scattered all across Europe! Apparently, this looting and pillaging was an ongoing part of the Nazi war effort which has received relatively little publicity until the sensational stories of the treasure train began surfacing a few weeks ago…

I guess it’s true what they say about war: “To the victor belongs the spoils” as well as “History is always written by the victors.” The Nazi’s were a sick, twisted purely evil regime, led by a meglo maniac mass murderer who practiced genocide on the Jews, systematically and ruthlessly killing over 6 million of them, and who sought to enslave the entire world…

Yet their top leaders still fancied themselves as men of culture who were fascinated and entranced by art treasures!They thought that they would not only be able to achieve world domination but also then be able to kick back and enjoy all the spoils of war, all the loot they had pillaged and plundered and killed for!….The amazing insolence of arrogance!

There is another old saying that may apply here as well: “A house built on a rotten foundation cannot stand” and I think this is a truer epitaph for the unbelievably wicked and corrupt Nazi regime….I hope they do find the mysterious, shrouded in secrecy treasure train, but they will never be unable to undo all the malevolence, all the sheer and unadulterated evil the Nazi’s unleashed on the world, all the atrocities they committed, all the violence, bloodshed, murder and mayhem they committed in their insane lust for power and political dominance….

Perhaps though, discovering and returning these art treasures to their rightful owners may be one small step in the right direction……So I, for one hope they DO discover the Nazi Treasure Train, because Art is a fundamental part of any civilization, and the art belongs to the creators….The makers, not the takers….

For more information and links on “The Nazi Treasure Train” visit http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3203511/Poland-looking-report-Nazi-treasure-train-found.html#ixzz3lvxloEn,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rescuing-nazi-looted-art,
Paintings discovered among looted, stolen and hidden art @www.archivefilms.com/…
Cracking the case of the nazi’s stolen art @www.telegraph.co.uk › …

For more articles by John Whye, click on http://www.johnwhye.com@wordpress.com