Treasure Hunters in Poland begin to dig for Nazi "ghost" train.

Searchers in Poland begin to dig for Nazi "ghost" train believed to be full of treasures. (LiveScience).

Treasure hunters broke ground today in Poland, hoping to find a legendary train said to be filled with gold and hidden by Nazis near the end of World War II.

But some scientists doubt that such a train ever existed and said it's unlikely the team will find the gold they're looking for.


"We're entering the sphere of almost urban myth," Tony Pollard, a battlefield archaeologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Live Science. "From my own experience as an archaeologist, I'm highly dubious about it, and I think most of the archaeological community shares that opinion."

According to local lore, the Germans hid a train loaded with gold and other loot in a secret tunnel as the Soviet army advanced in 1945. Government-sponsored and private efforts alike had attempted to locate this fabled treasure trove over the past several decades.

Last summer, a pair of amateur explorers, Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, claimed that they had identified the spot where the train was buried, in the town of Walbrzych in Poland. [Images: Missing Nazi Diary Resurfaces]

The announcement touched off a frenzy. Treasure hunters and tourists reportedly flocked to the region. Some Polish officials even backed the claims; Poland's deputy minister of culture said he was "99 percent" certain the train existed after seeing Koper and Richter's ground-penetrating radar images, which supposedly showed an armored train buried underground.

Excitement over the discovery dampened just a few months later, after a scientific commission from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, attempted to verify the findings and found no evidence for the train. "There may be a tunnel, but there is no train," Janusz Madej, a geology professor who led thecommission, reportedly told a press conference in December 2015.


Koper and Richter, however, pressed on. This week they began digging in the spot where they say they found a train-shaped anomaly in their radar scans. Photos from the site showed that the team has already started clearing large amounts of dirt with an excavator. The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that the team plans to initially dig 20 feet (6 meters) deep.

  Pollard noted that he was especially skeptical about Koper and Richter's radar images, which purported to show the underground train in great detail. "I've worked with ground-penetrating radar experts, and these are like no results that I've ever seen," he said, adding that radar images of buried archaeological features typically look more abstract

He added that he was also disappointed that much of the discussion surrounding this treasure hunt was about the possibility of striking gold and its value. "I certainly don't want people to think this is archaeological research," Pollard said. "Archaeology's raison d'être is to answer questions about the past. If there is indeed a train laced with Nazi gold, it could raise a lot of questions."

Even the discovery of an empty tunnel could be an interesting turn of events. In this part of southern Poland, the Nazis used forced labor to build a vast network of tunnels called the Riese complex ("riese" is the German word for "giant").  Read the full story here, More here.

2 thousand fishermen freed from slavery in Southeast Asia in 2015.

2 thousand fishermen freed from slavery in Southeast Asia in 2015. (AN).

More than 2 thousand workers enslaved in the fishing industry were released in the first six months of this year in the countries of Southeast Asia.

This is the result of an investigation that began more than a year ago by some reporters of the Associated Press, which led to the discovery of a thriving market in human exploitation which has its hub in the eastern islands of Indonesia and involvies workers from Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

A report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) shows that workers are trapped on islands (such as Benjina, in Indonesia's Maluku), exploited, tortured and locked up in cages.

A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropicl Meicine, based on interviews with more than a thousand survivors, reveals that half of the fishermen who manage to return home suffer  from depression and approximately 40% from acute post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety. Many of them bear the marks of scarring or mutilation.

25 years old Tin Lin Tun, has not seen his family for five years, since a Thai agent took him away, promising him a job in construction: "I'm sure my parents think I'm dead." Rather than becoming a builder, the boy was sold to a fishing boat and taken to Indonesia.

The investigation revealed that the marine products from slave labor are purchased by some US food giants. The importing agencies have condemned all forms of exploitation, but lawsuits were opened against companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Nestle USA Inc. and Nestle Purina Petcare Co.

Labor exploitation in the fisheries sector is one of the most dangerous social ills in Thailand, involving hundreds of thousands of children.

According to government data, the injury rate of children under 15 who work illegally on barges and fishing boats is much higher for those who are exploited in the oil or gas industries. According to the International Labor Organization and the Asia Foundation, 20% of young fishermen are victims of accidents, compared to 8.4% of their "colleagues" in other sectors.


Thailand is the third largest exporter of fish in the world, for a market that, according to the Thai Frozen Foods Association, last year reached $ 3 billion. The turnover with Europe totaled between 575 and 730 million euro per year. The sector employs about 300 thousand people, mostly illegal immigrants from neighboring countries.

The children exploited in the Thai fishing industry - many of whom come from Cambodia and Myanmar - also work 50 hours a week. Only 30% of the workers are legal (at least 15 years old) and enjoys the protection of a contract.

Polish Jews Split Over Exhuming Jewish Victims of Nazi era Polish Pogrom.

Source picture here.

Polish Jews Split Over Exhuming  Jewish Victims of Nazi era Polish Pogrom. HT: Forward.

In September 1941, a group of villagers wielding axes and other tools descended upon the homes of their Jewish neighbors and murdered every last one, according to testimonies gathered by Holocaust scholars.

Not much else is known about the massacre in Wasosz, a village 100 miles east of Warsaw, including basics like the number of victims. Current estimates range widely, from 180 to 1,200.

In an effort to provide conclusive forensic evidence about the massacre, in July a Polish prosecutor asked Jewish community leaders for permission to exhume the bodies. The plan has split the community, with some passionately supporting what they see as a last chance for justice and others claiming it would violate the dignity of the dead and Jewish religious law, or halachah.

“Once the bodies are in the ground, halachah teaches us they are not to be disturbed except when it is done to protect the dignity of the dead or to save lives,” Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told JTA. “I and other rabbis and the leadership of the Jewish community in Warsaw, among others, feel neither stipulation applies to Wasosz. A desire to clarify history is not enough.”

Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, the country’s main Jewish umbrella group, called Schudrich’s position “a serious mistake, with detrimental implications.”

“We have tools to determine details about both victims and perpetrators in a matter which is still a criminal matter,” said Kadlcik, who is seeking an exhumation followed by Jewish burial of the human remains. “If we let this chance go, the case of Wasosz will become history – an unclear one and subject to falsification.”

In a move to undermine opponents to exhumation, Kadlcik has requested an opinion from Rabbi Yakov Ruza, a prominent authority in Israel on forensic medicine. Polish prosecutors have also reviewed the Israeli law that permits exhumation in cases involving a murder investigation, Kadlcik said.

Meanwhile, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance – the government body whose prosecutor, Radoslaw Ignatiew, initiated the investigation of Wasosz – is holding off on any exhumation until at least 2015 while the issue is discussed within the Jewish community.

The debate has ramifications well beyond an internal Jewish dispute over halachah and forensics. In the background are echoes of Jedwabne, an earlier investigation of another wartime mass murder of Jews by Poles.

The opening of that probe in 2001 was a watershed moment for Poland, according to Joanna Michlic, a historian at Bristol University, who wrote a 43-page paper chronicling how the debate split the Catholic Church, generated ultranationalist protests featuring anti-Semitic hate speech, led to the replacement of a memorial plaque that blamed the Germans for the murders and, finally, yielded the first admission by a Polish president of Polish guilt.

Before Jedwabne, Holocaust-era crimes by Poles were taboo because they undermined the communist narrative that all Poles were equal victims of Nazism. The subject remains divisive today because it undermines the current government’s focus on Polish wartime heroism and resistance to totalitarianism.

From a forensic perspective, the dig in Jedwabne was inconclusive. Though an excavation of the site revealed some human remains, it never progressed to include exhumation – as per understandings reached between Polish authorities and rabbis, including Schudrich.

Without exhumation, it was impossible to answer such basic questions as how many people died, which in turn left the door open to revisionism in far-right circles. Several nationalist lawmakers, clergymen and journalists continue to dispute Polish complicity.

“Jedwabne was ultimately a missed opportunity,” Jan Gross, the Princeton historian whose research triggered the 2001 debate, told JTA. “Some important findings were recovered, but questions persisted because the probe was interrupted before basic facts could be recovered.”

For Kadlcik, Wasosz is a chance to correct the opportunity missed at Jedwabne.

“For the ultranationalists, the bottom line from Jedwabne is as follows: The Jews made accusations but hid behind their religious laws at the first attempt to corroborate,” Kadlcik said. “Well, this time we need to settle this and serve justice.”

But Schudrich also drew painful lessons from the Jedwabne probe.

“The entire place was littered with human remains – not just the area where we thought the bodies lay,” he said. “So as soon as the digging began, we saw bones fused together in fire, earrings of little girls. We found children’s bones. To any reasonable person, that settled any doubts there may have been about a massacre. There is no justification to violate the dignity of the dead.”

As for serving justice, Schudrich said, “The perpetrators will get justice from God. The small minority that refuses to face reality and historical evidence, no exhumation is going to change their minds.” Hmmm....The truth must be known, so we learn from our past , NEVER AGAIN.

Archeologists Find Gas Chamber at Sobibor Nazi Death Camp

Archeologists Find Gas Chamber at Sobibor Nazi Death Camp. Dig Uncovers Well-Preserved Nazi Horror. HT: Forward.

An archaeological dig at Sobibor has uncovered the Nazi death camp’s gas chambers.

The excavations in Poland have been going on since 2007, and thousands of inmates’ personal items have been found at the site. They include rings, pendants, earrings, jewelry, perfume bottles, medicine cases and food utensils, Yad Vashem said Wednesday.

The water well used at Sobibor’s Camp 1, in which an uprising by inmates took place, also was discovered. The well also contained the personal items of Jewish inmates.

David Silberklang, senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research and editor in chief of Yad Vashem Studies, called the discovery of the gas chambers “a very important finding in Holocaust research.”

“There were no survivors from among the Jews who worked in the area of the gas chambers. Therefore, these findings are all that is left of those murdered there, and they open a window onto the day-to-day suffering of these people,” he said in a statement.

“We will now be able to know more precisely what the process of murder was in the camp, and what the Jews went through until they were murdered. Additionally, finding the gas chambers and their capacity will enable us to estimate more precisely the number of people murdered in Sobibor.”

Archaeologist Yoram Haimi said the staff was “amazed at the size of the building and the well-preserved condition of the chamber walls.”

The Sobibor camp operated between April 1942 and October 1943, during which time some 250,000 Jews were murdered there. In the wake of the camp uprising on Oct. 14, 1943, the Germans decided to dismantle the camp, bulldozing it and leaving no signs that it was a former death camp.
Until now, researchers used survivor testimony for details about the camp.