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The waterlogged tunnel threading its way beneath the hills of Lower Silesia amounts to a relic of one of Hitler’s most grandiose and futile projects.

This subterranean passage, reached through a pair of black gates, was hacked out of the ground by prisoners and slave labourers.

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Their task was to build bunkers and factories under the pine forests of what is today southern Poland, constructing a hiding place where a collapsing Third Reich might secrete its war industries – and its treasures.

A tunnel similar to this one may conceal a train laden with looted gold. Last week, the Polish government said that a man who helped bury the train had disclosed its location shortly before his death. The authorities took a ground-penetrating radar to this spot and, sure enough, a train was detected deep beneath the soil.

Yesterday, The Sunday Telegraph was given a tour of a nearby tunnel, complete with railway tracks leading into the depths of the earth.