[MRM]

I've been fascinated by stories like this since I read a book that claimed that Martin Bormann survived the war and used Nazi treasure to capitalize the post-war German economic miracle from his hiding place in Brazil or Venezuela. The kernel of truth in the book was the premise that former Nazis had access to looted treasure and used it to invest in German industry at a time when their economy was starved for capital and they got rich on their investment as the German economy grew. It is well documented that high ranking Nazis were stashing treasure everywhere they could. Some of it was recovered. Some of it has never surfaced again.

My Nazi treasure book claimed that the biggest lost treasure of WWII was a cargo crate filled with looted diamonds that was the cargo of a sub tasked with spiriting the loot out of Germany and getting it safely on shore somewhere else (I forgot where). Supposedly the area around the landing site and rendezvous point was in danger of being overrun by partisans, so the sub commander followed protocol, marked a spot in relatively shallow water and dropped the cargo box in the Mediterranean where it could be easily recovered when the coast was clear. Something went wrong with marking the spot and they were never able to recover the diamonds. The most titillating claim was that we know that no one ever recovered the diamonds because it would have been such a big discovery that no one could keep that number of diamonds under wraps - it would distort the world market. Therefore the diamonds are still out there, within sight of some beach, and that even to this day divers discretely ply the area until the local mafia, who has laid claim to the lost treasure, explain to them that they should spend their vacations elsewhere. Sometimes I daydream that the captain's log of the sub were captured and are stored somewhere in a former Soviet archive where they'll be discovered and provide the final clue to an intrepid researcher. Sounds like the plot to a book, doesn't it?

Anyway, if the legend of the treasure train is true, it had to have been hidden somewhere that the people in charge thought would be hidden enough to be safe but close enough to be retrieved, but the spot turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. It has to be someplace too remote to have been stumbled onto by accident or by modern treasure hunters.

I think Tabs' hypothesis is correct. Whoever was in charge of the train made sure that almost no one knew what was on that particular train and arranged to have it sent deep into a siding in an unfinished tunnel. They blew the entrance to the siding so that no one knew the siding was there and they assumed the tunnel just ended. The train was far enough back that more modern metal detectors aren't able to sense it.

The trick is finding just such a spot that was convenient enough to hide the train back then but too remote to have gotten back to since then. Sounds easy, doesn't it?