Lower Silesia, in southwestern Poland, is a land of treasure hunters. Until the end of the Second World War, the region—covered by mountains and deep pine forests with towering, arrowlike trees—was part of Germany. In the early months of 1945, the German Army retreated, along with much of the civilian population. The advancing Red Army killed many of the Germans who remained. Nearly all those who survived were later evicted and forced to move west. By the end of 1947, almost two million Germans had been cleared out.

In order to fill the emptied landscape, the newly formed Polish government relocated hundreds of thousands of Poles from the east. The settlers arrived in vacant towns, walked into empty houses, and went to sleep in strangers’ beds. There was furniture in the houses, but usually the valuables were missing. The porcelain dishes, the silk dresses, the fur coats, the sewing machines, and the jewelry were gone, often hidden in the ground: buried in jars, chests, and even coffins. It was a hasty solution—a desperate effort to cache valuables as people were running for their lives. The owners of these possessions intended to return, but most didn’t. And so on steamy fall mornings, when the new arrivals dug in their gardens or tilled their fields, they unearthed small fortunes.

The stashes were ubiquitous, and everyone, it seemed, was a treasure hunter. The historian Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, in his book, “Lower Silesia from Nazi Germany to Communist Poland, 1942-49,” writes that many Poles came to the region because they were “attracted by the supposed German treasures to be gleaned at little or no cost.” There were so few consumer goods available that many of the new residents made a living by trading merchandise stolen from German homes. Siebel-Achenbach cites one report suggesting that as many as sixty per cent of those who resettled in the Wrocław district were such speculators.

There were also, perhaps, bigger treasures. During the latter half of the Second World War, after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazis still considered Lower Silesia to be safe ground. Factories were moved there, as were precious works of art. But, as the end approached and German troops departed, the military allegedly buried gold, jewels, art works, and even futuristic weapons. The most famous story involves a German military officer named Herbert Klose, who worked as a high-level police official in the city of Wrocław. After the war, Klose was caught and interrogated by the Polish secret police. The Polish author Joanna Lamparska writes about Klose in her new book, “Gold Train: A Short History of Madness.” The record of his interrogation, which is labelled “Case 1491” in the secret-police files, is kept at the Institute of National Remembrance in Wrocław.

During his interrogation, Klose said that, in mid-November of 1944, the city’s chief of police asked him to help residents secure their valuables; with the Red Army on the move, even the banks might not be safe. Under Klose’s watch, the local police collected gold, jewelry, and other precious items for safekeeping. “The gold was stored at the police headquarters,” Klose said. “The chests were made of iron and hermetically closed with rubber seals. Also the chests were unmarked so nobody would know what’s inside.” (He did note that they were numbered.) Klose made plans to hide the chests outside the city, but when it came time to move them he couldn’t take part, because he’d injured himself falling from a horse. The other officers went without him and, according to Klose, buried the chests in several places and then concealed the entrances.

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There are other stories like Klose’s. At the end of the Second World War, the U.S. military investigated a legend that much of the reserve of the Reichsbank, in Berlin, had been hidden in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany. In 1945, American soldiers discovered a room in the mine whose floor was covered with more than seven thousand marked bags containing gold coins, gold bars, and other valuables. Similar discoveries have fuelled the dreams of treasure hunters across Europe for more than half a century.

In Lower Silesia, treasure hunters are still looking for Klose’s gold and for other riches. They have formed clubs, and one of the most well known is the Lower Silesian Research Group. The members, mostly men, are amateurs who spend their weekends studying old maps, visiting historical archives, interviewing survivors of the war, and spelunking. In a region where treasure hunting is a pastime, they pride themselves on being the best.

For years, members of the Lower Silesian Research Group have been searching for a Nazi train allegedly hidden in a secret tunnel. They believe that the tunnel, now collapsed, is situated on the outskirts of the town of Wałbrzych, between an existing set of railroad tracks and a Toyota dealership. There are kilometre markers on the tracks, and the location is known simply as the 65th Kilometre.

Much of the Research Group’s findings come from Tadeusz Slowikowski, a former miner in his eighties. Coal mining is a tradition in the region and residents have excavated the surrounding hills for centuries. In 1974, Slowikowski retired from mining and turned his attention to researching the 65th Kilometre. Over the years, he has amassed heaps of documents and even built a scale replica of the site, complete with model trains, in his garage. Much of his proof is circumstantial. His most tantalizing evidence comes from interviews he conducted after the war with a former German railroad engineer. The engineer recalled seeing, during the war, a secured, fenced-off area near the 65th Kilometre, where the secret tunnel supposedly exists.

Last August, two members of the Research Group, Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper, scanned the site with ground-penetrating radar and produced a series of images that resembled a train. After seeing them, Poland’s deputy culture minister said that he was “more than ninety-nine per cent sure” that the train was there. Speculation quickly spread that the train contained some portion of Klose’s gold, and the would-be discovery was dubbed the Nazi Gold Train in newspapers around the world. Tourists flocked to the site.

But the ghostly pictures served up by geophysical-imaging technology can be misleading. This past fall, a group of Polish scientists conducted tests of their own at the site and concluded that no train was buried there. One of them, Michał Banaś, a geologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, used a thermal-infrared camera and found anomalies in the ground, leading him to believe that, while there might be a tunnel, there was no evidence of a train. The treasure hunters remain adamant that they are right.

When I visited Wałbrzych, this winter, I spoke with Tomasz Jurek, the president of the Lower Silesian Research Group. Jurek, who is fifty-nine, is slight, with a receding hairline, a broad forehead, and a bushy mustache. When we met in the lobby of my hotel, he glanced around nervously and eyed my tape recorder. He told me that there were shadowy operators who were interested in the same treasures. I asked him for more details. “There is some logical explanation, but it’s for you to figure it out,” he said. “I cannot officially say.” I felt as if I had stepped into a Cold War spy movie. Eventually, I asked about the existence of a secret tunnel at the 65th Kilometre.