Two people in Poland say they have found a Nazi German train cloaked in mystery since it was rumoured to have gone missing near the end of the second world war while carrying away gems and guns ahead of advancing Soviet Red Army forces. Local authorities in Poland’s south-western district of Wałbrzych said they had been contacted by a law firm representing a Pole and a German who claimed to have located the train and were seeking 10% of the value of the findings.

“Lawyers, the army, the police and the fire brigade are dealing with this,” Marika Tokarska, an official at the Wałbrzych district council, told Reuters. “The area has never been excavated before and we don’t know what we might find.”

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 Wrocław 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 armoured and belonged to the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s military machine.

Radio Wrocław cited local folklore as saying the train entered a tunnel near Książ castle in the mountainous Lower Silesian region and never emerged. According to that theory, the tunnel was later closed and its location long forgotten. According to Radio Wrocław, the 150-metre-(495-foot)-long train was carrying guns, “industrial equipment”, gems and other valuable treasure. Tokarska said she did not have any details on the location or the contents of the missing train. Some sceptics say there is no evidence that the train ever existed.

“A handful of people have already looked for the train, damaging the line in the process, but nothing was ever found,” Radio Wrocław quoted Joanna Lamparska as saying, describing her as a connoisseur of the region’s history. “But the legend has captured imaginations.”

Trains were indeed used to spirit Nazi loot back to Berlin as US-led Allied and Soviet forces surged towards the German capital from the west and the east in the winter and spring of 1945. In the case of the so-called Hungarian Gold Train, Nazi forces sent 42 freight carriages from Budapest towards Germany filled with family treasures including gold, silver and valuable paintings seized from Hungarian Jews and estimated to be worth up to $200m (£127m).

The train was intercepted by US soldiers, who, according to a later investigation, helped themselves to some of the loot.