TREASURE hunters who unleashed a storm of speculation last year after claiming they had found a lost Nazi armoured train buried in the mountains of Poland will begin their dig tonight.

Amateur enthusiasts Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter lodged a claim with the Wroclaw district government in August last year, seeking to guarantee a 10 per cent cut of any find.

After initially attempting to remain anonymous, the pair went public amid a storm of international speculation that they may have located a Nazi loot train laden with treasures as diverse as Jewish gold and Russia’s lost, dismantled ‘Amber Room’.

BACKGROUNDER: Inside the myth of the Nazi’s loot trains

But months of investigations attempting to verify their discovery has so far come up trumps.

There are even allegations that the subsurface radar scans the pair produced as evidence of their find are forgeries.

Despite this, Koper and Richter have obtained government permission to excavate a railway siding that was filled-in during the closing days of World War II.

LIVE STREAM

Rumours have circulated for decades that the Nazis, facing collapse in Poland ahead of an onrushing Russian army, had filled up to three trains with documents, experimental equipment, rare ores and treasure.

Some argue they were destined for a mysterious network of tunnels carved out of the mountains near Walbrzych by thousands of Soviet slave labourers working for the Nazis.

Dubbed Projekt Riese (Project Giant), it has since been associated with everything from a secret attempt to build a nuclear bomb to housing alien spacecraft. What little evidence there is suggests it may have been intended to be a secret hideaway for Adolf Hitler himself.

The dig, scheduled to begin August 16, is set to put the mystery for rest once and for all.

A team of some 35 diggers will converge on the embankment between Wroclaw and Walbrzych in Poland’s southwest.

“There will be a live stream,” a spokeswoman for the two men told the German news agency DPA.

He added that updates would also be posted on the project’s website and Facebook page.