Until December 11, 1941, the US and Nazi Germany were technically neutral despite World War II having ravaged large portions of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

But following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of hostilities between the US and the Axis Powers on December 7, 1941, Nazi Germany followed Japan's lead and declared war on the US.

According to Rare Historical Photos, the decision to declare war was entirely Adolf Hitler's. Even before Pearl Harbor, Hitler was aware that the US and Nazi Germany would eventually come to blows, since the US was supporting the British war effort.

The decision to enter the war was announced by Hitler at a speech at the Reichstag after the German and Italian embassies burned their cables in Washington, DC.

SEE ALSO: What the Nazis said to Gen. Eisenhower upon surrendering 71 years ago this month

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NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II

The French Foreign Legion is one of France’s elite fighting forces, filled with men who are ready and willing to do extreme violence on France’s behalf. When 1930s Germany started looking at its neighbors with greedy eyes, it knew that it had to do something about the Legion.

Germany saw its opportunity in the large number of Legion noncommissioned officers who were German by birth. The Nazis hatched a plan to send droves of men to the Legion. These men would then convince German noncommissioned officers to betray the Legion. The spies would also collect lists of Jewish legionnaires and other groups targeted by the Third Reich for extermination.

Somewhere around 80 percent of French Foreign Legion NCOs were German, so this was no idle threat. The Legion quickly caught on to the Nazis’ plan and began screening German recruits carefully.

Still, many Nazi agents got in before the heightened scrutiny began. Legion leaders, knowing they were compromised, began sending suspect Legionnaires to low-risk postings like road construction. At the same time, Legionnaires who might be targeted by the Nazis were sent to far-flung outposts in North Africa.

The level of German sympathies in the Legion was bad enough that France debated whether or not to deploy Legion units from their headquarters in Algeria to France ahead of the possible German invasion. They settled on recruiting new Legionnaires from anti-Nazi populations, such as political refugees from Germany and French reservists, and brought loyal Legionnaires from North Africa to train them.

Nine new regiments were raised but most lacked the standards and experience of the true French Foreign Legion. Most of these units were sent to the front before the Germans invaded and they fought bitterly to resist the blitzkrieg when it was launched. When war broke out, the Legion also took the preventative measure of arresting German Legionnaires suspected of being Nazi spies.

The Legion has a long and proud history of fighting well past when other units would have surrendered, and the Legion units fighting in France upheld that tradition. Most continued fighting even after taking losses of 75 percent or more, only ceasing when ordered by their commanders after the Armistice was signed.

The 11th Foreign Infantry Regiment, knowing it would likely be wiped out, even burned its colors to prevent their capture before launching a series of delaying actions to buy other units time to retreat.

After the Armistice was signed, Germany demanded that their spies be allowed to leave the Legion. The true Legionnaires were happy to see them go.

Those spies took lists of people considered “undesirable” with them, and the Legion quickly had to make false papers to protect them from arrest by the Nazis. Many were shipped under new names to remote outposts where the Nazis were unlikely to look for them.

Unfortunately, about 2,000 men were found out by the Nazis. Most were sent to a new German unit, the 361st Motorised Infantry Regiment, and forced to fight for Germany.

At the same time, Legion units split into three groups. Some of the newer units, filled with recruits who had joined “for the duration of the war,” were disbanded. Others joined the Free French Forces under Gen. Charles de Gaulle and continued to resist the Germans. A few units, mostly those in areas already controlled by the Germans, joined the Vichy French forces and fought against the allies.

In one battle in Syria, this actually resulted in men from the Free French Foreign Legion fighting those from the Vichy French Legion. Following the Legion’s mantra, “The Legion is our Fatherland,” the treated prisoners and wounded from the opposing Legion with special care.

Ultimately, the Free French Foreign Legion won and continued supporting the Allies well into the invasion of Germany.

SEE ALSO: The legendary RAF 'Dambusters' of WWII are now flying F-35s with US Marines

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NOW WATCH: We went inside a secret basement under Grand Central that was one of the biggest World War II targets

The bartender at the Communist-themed pub in former East Berlin scrunches up his face and readjusts his glasses. Lenin looms on the wall beside him. “This is from Berlin?” I ask him.

“No, it’s from a little town, you’ve probably never heard of it,” he says of the bottle of doppelkorn liquor he has just poured me.

“What’s it called?” I inquire, taking a tiny sip from the clear liquid.

“Nordhausen,” the barkeep replies.

“Sure, I know it.”

“You do?” he gasps, amazed an American should know of a Podunk village in Lower Thuringia.

“Sure, my great-uncle liberated a concentration camp there,” I tell him.

Silence thicker than Berlin’s humid summer air. After a clumsy moment like so many when the Holocaust is mentioned in modern Germany, he replies: “I did not know there was a concentration camp there.”

* * *

Seventy years earlier, in April of ’45, the German army was in tatters and retreating before the Allies. American troops approached the city of Weimar in central Germany on April 11 and liberated the first Nazi concentration camp: Buchenwald. Among the skeletal prisoners famously photographed in the grim barracks was future Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

But that same day, 40 miles to the north, a US Army detachment entered another, lesser-known camp outside the town of Nordhausen. The Mittelbau-Dora facility used slave labor to build V-2 rockets and worked thousands to death. Among the men of the 104th Infantry Division was a medic from Brooklyn, New York. A 21-year-old American-born son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Jules Helfner was fluent in German, kept a pistol in his boot, and was armed with a camera.

Together with his handwritten notes, Jules’s unique photographs, published here for the first time, bring to life a Jewish foot soldier’s personal experience in the 104th. They document four months of Helfner’s service after landing in France in late 1944, chronicling the march into Germany, liberation of a Nazi labor camp, and his eventual encounter with fellow Jewish soldiers in the Red Army at the climax of World War II.

All too often, this aspect of the Holocaust story — the Jewish liberators — is overlooked in Israel.

“He went through hell and back again,” Shirley Helfner, Jules’s younger sister, now 85, said. She was a kid when Jules enlisted and was shipped off to Europe but remembers his return to Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood after the war ended. Speaking with me at her home in Phoenix, she described Jules as quiet and refined, reserved but “with good humor.”

He was brilliant, she said, a polyglot fluent in English, French, German and Yiddish, the language spoken at home.

The army wanted to send him to medical school, but, pressed for time as the Allies mobilized for Operation Overlord, the epic invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, it drafted Jules as a field medic instead, she said.

The 104th began its tour in Europe after D-Day, as the Allies pushed into the Low Countries and moved on Germany. The earliest dated photo in Helfner’s collection — which his children kept safely over the decades, and which I only saw for the first time last year — is from the Belgian city of Verviers, which served as army headquarters during the bitter winter of ’44.

As the Allies advanced into the Reich, the 104th was at the front, capturing Cologne at the beginning of March and moving east toward Berlin.

Jules posed, leaning against a truck, outside the city’s famed cathedral. (As Jules and the 104th fought through Cologne, his younger brother, Benjamin, was on the opposite side of the globe.

Serving as a sailor aboard the USS General Harry Taylor, Ben was halfway between Hawaii and Wake Island, crossing the 180th Meridian, bound for the Pacific theater. Ben was my grandfather.)

Several photos taken by Jules show him and his army friends along the way, occasionally with the rubble of ruined buildings as the backdrop.

One guy, Julian “Broncho” Nagorski from Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, is named. Nagorski received the Bronze Star for valor, moved to Montana and died in 2008.

The dates written on pictures are sometimes incorrect, suggesting he annotated them sometime after the war.

Though Jules rarely spoke of his experience, his annotations offer poignant insights. “German 88 piece,” he wrote on the back of a photo taken near Cologne. “The gun we feared most.”

But the most startlingly personal reflections were written on the photos from Nordhausen.

* * *

In mid-April, about 60 miles west of Leipzig, the unit entered the Mittelbau-Dora camp. The German military had already abandoned the facility, in which prisoners were worked to death building buzz bombs. Thousands of bodies were strewn in the open air. Several hundred starving survivors remained, and despite the medics’ best efforts, some of those liberated died in the days following.

“To see photographs is one thing,” Fred Bohm, an Austrian-born Jewish corporal technician with the 104th, recounted in a 1979 interview, “but to go in and smell and be exposed to this horror you cannot really be ready for that.”

“But what really struck me is the impact it made on the other guys,” Bohm said. “They were staggered, literally. They were sick.”

Jules spoke little about his experience in the war, let alone at Nordhausen. But the one time he related it to his younger sister he said “the guys went wild,” Shirley recalled.

“They went back to the German town [Nordhausen] and they were killing the Germans left and right,” she said he told her. “Such a horrible, horrible experience.”

His dozen or so photos from Mittelbau-Dora show rows of emaciated corpses in brutal clarity (inexplicably, they’re all dated March 27). One caption distills the outrage Jules must have felt. “Nordhausen Concentration Camp,” he wrote, before switching to capital letters: “3500 JEWS WERE SLAUGHTERED HERE.”

American officers ordered German civilians from the nearby town to bury the thousands of bodies.

“I was put in charge of the burials and I insisted that the Germans from Nordhausen come for the occasion in their Sunday best,” W. Gunther Plaut, a Jewish chaplain with the unit, recounted in an interview years later. “Of course, we did not have enough space to do the work. But in my anger, now turning toward revenge, I told the burghers to use the knives, forks and spoons from their homes. I ordered the women to come out and help wash the bodies."

A handful of pictures captured the German townsfolk carrying and burying the dead. A unique image, Judith Cohen, director of the photo archive at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, said, shows several burghers going underground into the subterranean factory.

“Two charred bodies of inmates of the Nordhausen concentration camp being lifted out of their faulty shelter by German civilians for burial,” reads the caption. One shot, taken below ground, shows the German “robot bomb” — the V-2 rockets — assembly line “worked by the inmates of the Nordhausen concentration camp,” he wrote.

* * *

In the weeks following the capture of Mittelbau-Dora, the 104th pressed eastward, eventually encountering the advancing Red Army. The two allied forces met on the Mulde River, just east of Leipzig. German forces were shattered, their vehicles destroyed and burning on the side of a road. Civilians fled and German soldiers surrendered in droves and were pressed into disposing of armaments.

“These Nazis chose to give up to the 104th US Inf. Div. rather than give up to the Russians,” reads a caption of a photo taken on the Mulde. It would be a familiar story, with millions of Germans fleeing the Soviets at the end of the war, desperate not to fall behind what Churchill would later call the Iron Curtain.

“German prisoners of war crossing the Mulde River on an improvised pontoon bridge. These Nazis chose to give up to the 104th US Inf. Div. rather than give up to the Russians.” April 1945, near Bitterfeld, Germany. (Jules Helfner)

Possibly the most improbable images are those in the final days of the war in Europe. The American and Soviet armies stood on opposite banks of the Mulde, and men from either side met in the city of Wurzen. In a brief moment of comradely warmth before the Cold War set in, Russian and American soldiers stood arm in arm in the conquered town square.

“Red Army soldiers names Ivan + Aleksis with a GI from the 104th,” scrawled Jules. “These Red Army soldiers were Jewish.”

On what may have been the same day in Wurzen, the beaming smiles of 16 women, the only ones in any of Jules’s photographs, radiate in the spring sun.

“A group of Jewish girls liberated by the 104th Inf. Div. at Wurzen, Germany. The entire group numbered 1000, most of them were Hungarians, Romanians, Polish, Russian + Austrian.”

Jules and the men of the 104th returned to the US and were decommissioned in the fall of 1945. He returned to New York.

His mother Ruth and and sister Shirley both would tell that Jules returned a changed man, quiet and reserved but retaining the sense of humor he shared with his brother, Ben.

“When he returned,” Shirley said, drawing on 70-year-old snippets of memories, “he gambled away all his back pay of $500.” Jules and his friends got together and got drunk, she recalled; one buddy passed out wasted, so they put him in the bathtub.

His daughter, Lisa Becker, who lives in Western Massachusetts, said he never really mentioned his wartime experience to her.

“The photos were kept in my dad’s desk drawer, not under lock and key, but as kids we never had any occasion to be looking around because we simply thought only office supplies, house bills and other related info must be in there,” she told me.

Despite Jules’s aspirations to go to medical school, the GI bill would only cover four years of it. Instead he worked as an engineer for Grumman. He died in 1978, seven years before I was born, of complications of a heart attack and stroke.

“It was not until his death in 1978 when my mother was clearing out his desk that she came across the envelope that contained the pictures. By that time my siblings and I were adults,” Becker said, “and my mother finally shared them with us.”

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VIENNA — A brother of Hitler's who was thought to be older was actually younger and died within days, raising questions about how his death might have affected the future leader of Nazi Germany, a historian said in comments published on Monday.

Hitler is widely thought to have been the fourth of six siblings, but records from Braunau am Inn, the northern Austrian town where he was born, show that he was in fact the third, according to findings by the historian Florian Kotanko, reported by the newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten.

Otto Hitler, a brother of Adolf Hitler's thought to have been the last sibling born before him, was actually born three years after, on June 17, 1892. He died six days later of hydrocephalus, a swelling of the brain, according to the report.

"The conclusions of many Hitler biographers about the mental development of Adolf Hitler, who allegedly received special attention from his mother Klara as the only surviving child after the deaths of three siblings, are no longer tenable," Kotanko was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

"How was the 3-year-old Adolf Hitler confronted with the birth and death of a brother?" Kotanko said. Among other open questions, he said, is whether Hitler had been aware of his brother's condition and how it might have affected him.

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NOW WATCH: A new book claims that the pope tried to kill Hitler

During Hitler's nine-month imprisonment for trying to overthrow the German government in 1923, he wrote the book that would become the basis of his fortune — "Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle."

Initially sales of Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribe didn't capture Germany's attention.

"They sold, so-so,"Dr. Pascal Trees, a research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History, said in the Smithsonian documentary "Hitler's Riches."

"To be perfectly frank, it's not a good read," Trees said.

The führer's notorious memoir was first published in 1924 and cost 12 deutsche marks, according to Trees.

To spur sales, the Nazis decided to produce a newer, more straightforward edition of the manifesto.

The Third Reich, however, was still searching for a way to get Hitler's book into every German home.

The opportunity to further monetize "Mein Kampf" became apparent when Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933.

"Of course there were a lot of marriages, there always are, and then they all had to be paid for by the state,"author of "Hitler's Fortune" Dr. Cris Whetton said in "Hitler's Riches."

"The state bought the books [Mein Kampf] to present to every married couple, and Hitler reaped the profits,"Whetton added.

At the time, Hitler earned a 10% royalty from every sale of the book that became the official state wedding present to newlyweds.

At the peak of "Mein Kampf" sales, Hitler earned $1 million a year in royalties alone, equivalent to $12 million today.

By 1939, Hitler's work had been translated into 11 languages with 5,200,000 copies sold around the world.

What's more, since Hitler was chancellor of Germany, he was exempt from the 400,000 deutsche marks (approximately $120,000 in today's dollars) he owed in taxes, according to "Hitler's Riches."

"The authorities presumably with a little bit of pressure said we think it's reasonable as chancellor Herr Hitler should not paid tax,"Whetton said.

Since the end of World War II, the Führer's manifesto has not been reprinted because the rights have been held for 70 years by the state of Bavaria, which has refused to allow reprints.

Now that the copyright has expired, the first copies of an annotated edition of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' from Munich's Institute of Contemporary History went on sale for $64 on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

The 2,000-page edition will be accompanied with more than 3,500 academic notes.

SEE ALSO: Why Hitler was such a successful orator

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NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II

The success of the Allied D-Day invasion caught the Nazis off guard and threw their war strategy to the dogs. Suddenly, Nazi Germany found itself fighting a two-front war against foes that were making increasingly fast strides toward Berlin. 

Of course, the Nazis could not admit to as strategic a defeat as what had occurred in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Within eight days of the invasion, Germany had put out a new edition of its "Der Deutsche Wochenschau" newsreel propaganda series. These propaganda videos were meant to highlight the bravery of the Nazi forces and illustrate Germany's incessant march towards victory.

This reel of Der Deutsche Wochenschau is strongly ahistorical, showing the Allied D-Day invasions to falsely be a failure. We have highlighted some of the most interesting scenes of the video below:

Below is an edited version of "Der Deutsche Wochenschau."

SEE ALSO: Here's Eisenhower's initial report on the D-Day invasion

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NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II

"I know that men are won over less by the written than by the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers."—Adolf Hitler writing in "Mein Kampf," 1925

In more than 5,000 persuasive speeches, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler bewitched his audiences in an altered and rehearsed voice.

Hitler's voice was described as overwhelmingly powerful and "spellbinding" by French-American novelist George Steiner in Ron Rosenbaum's book "Explaining Hitler."

"I was born in 1929, so from '33 on my earliest memories are sitting in the kitchen hearing the voice [of Hitler] on the radio," Steiner shared with Rosenbaum.

"It's a hard thing to describe, but the voice itself was mesmeric ... The amazing thing is that the body comes through on the radio. I can't put it any other way. You feel you're following the gestures," Steiner said.

Remarkably, the Nazi leader's normal voice was largely unknown outside of Hitler's terrifying inner circle.

But in 1942, a Finnish sound engineer secretly recorded a conversation between Finland's defense leader, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, and Hitler.

Before the engineer was caught by the SS, he managed to record 11 minutes of candid audio.

Here's the audio clip:

And here's the voice Hitler used in his speeches:

Further, American psychologist Henry Murray describes the Nazi dictator's overall presence as "hypnotic" in "The Personality of Adolf Hitler," a 229-page report that was commissioned in 1943 by the US Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA.

According to Murray's report, Hitler received frequent compliments on his grayish-blue eyes, even though they were described as "dead, impersonal, and unseeing."

Hitler was slightly below average in height and had a receding hairline, thin lips, and well-shaped hands.

Murray notes that the merciless Nazi leader was known to offer a weak handshake with "moist and clammy" palms, and was awkward at making small talk.

SEE ALSO: Why Hitler was such a successful orator

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NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II

DETMOLD, Germany (AP) — A 94-year-old former SS sergeant who served as a guard at Auschwitz has been found guilty of more than 170,000 counts of accessory to murder for helping kill 1.1 million Jews and others at the Nazi death camp.

The Detmold state court sentenced Reinhold Hanning to five years in prison, though he will remain free while any appeals are heard.

Hanning showed no reaction as the judge, Anke Grudda, read her justification for the verdict and sentence.

"You were in Auschwitz for two and a half years, performed an important function. ... You were part of a criminal organization and took part in criminal activity in Auschwitz," she said.

Several elderly Auschwitz survivors testified at the trial about their own experiences, and were among 58 survivors or their families who joined the process as co-plaintiffs as allowed under German law.

"It is a just verdict, but he should say more, tell the truth for the young people," said Leon Schwarzbaum, a 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin.

"He is an old man and probably won't have to go to jail, but he should say what happened at Auschwitz. Auschwitz was like something the world has never seen. "

Schwarzbaum said he does not want Hanning to go to prison and is happy that he apologized, but had hoped that he would provide more details about his time in Auschwitz for the sake of educating younger generations.

During his four-month trial, Hanning admitted serving as an Auschwitz guard. He said he was ashamed that he was aware Jews were being killed but did nothing to try to stop it.

He had faced a maximum of 15 years. Hanning's defense had called for an acquittal, saying there is no evidence he killed or beat anyone, while prosecutors sought a six-year sentence.

Hanning said during his trial that he volunteered for the SS at age 18 and served in Auschwitz from January 1942 to June 1944 but said he was not involved in the killings in the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

"It disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization," he told the court in April. "I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it and I apologize for my actions."

Despite his age, Hanning has seemed alert during the four-month trial, paying attention to testimony and occasionally walking into the courtroom on his own, though usually using a wheelchair.

Hanning joined the Hitler Youth with his class in 1935 at age 13, then volunteered at 18 for the Waffen SS in 1940 at the urging of his stepmother. He fought in several battles in World War II before being hit by grenade splinters in his head and leg during close combat in Kiev in 1941.

He told the court that as he was recovering from his wounds he asked to be sent back but his commander decided he was no longer fit for front-line duty, and so sent him to Auschwitz, without his knowing what it was.

Though there is no evidence Hanning was responsible for a specific crime, he was tried under new legal reasoning that as a guard he helped the death camp operate, and thus could be tried for accessory to murder. The indictment against Hanning is focused on a period between January 1943 and June 1944 for legal reasons, but the court has said it would consider the full time he served there.

The same argumentation being used in Hanning's case was used successfully last year against SS sergeant Oskar Groening, to convict him of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving in Auschwitz. Germany's highest appeals court is expected to rule on the validity of the Groening verdict sometime this summer.

Groening, 95, was sentenced to four years in prison but will remain free while his case goes through the lengthy appeals process, and he is unlikely to spend any time behind bars, given his age.

The precedent for both the Groening and Hanning cases was set in 2011, with the conviction in Munich of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on allegations he served as a Sobibor death camp guard. Although Demjanjuk always denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, it opened a wave of new investigations by the special prosecutor's office in Ludwigsburg responsible for Nazi war crime probes.

The head of the office, Jens Rommel, said two other Auschwitz cases from that renewed effort are still pending trial — another guard and also the commandant's radio operator, contingent on the defendants' health, which is currently being assessed — and a third is still being investigated by Frankfurt prosecutors.

Rommel's office, which has no power to bring charges itself, has also recommended charges in three Majdanek death camp cases, and has sent them on to prosecutors who are now investigating.

Meantime, the office is still poring through documents for both death camps, and is also looking into former members of the so-called Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads, and guards at several concentration camps.

Rommel said even though every trial is widely dubbed "the last" by the media, his office still plans on giving more cases to prosecutors, and politicians have pledged to keep his office open until 2025.

"That seems to me to be the outside boundary," said Rommel, who's not related to the famous German general of the same surname. "If the cases will make it to trial, that's hard to say. You can't really look into the future — but we have the mandate to keep investigating as long as there's still the possibility of finding someone."

SEE ALSO: PHOTO: The moment Hitler declared war on the US

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NOW WATCH: Trump's latest rally featured fights, Nazi salutes, and a call to light protesters on fire

"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life," one of the world's most brutal tyrants reportedly said after touring the newly Nazi-occupied French capital.

The day after Germany signed an armistice with France, Hitler and his cronies toured Napoleon's tomb, the Paris opera house, Champs-Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur, and the Eiffel Tower on June 23, 1940.

Hitler's friend and architect Albert Speer was instructed to take note of the city's design to recreate similar yet superior German buildings.

"Wasn't Paris beautiful?" Hitler reportedly asked Speer.

"But Berlin must be far more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow."

While sightseeing, Hitler also ordered the destruction of two French World War I monuments that reminded him of Germany's bitter defeat.

The Führer's first official visit to the "City of Light" was also his last.

In all, Hitler spent three hours in Paris but spent four years occupying northern France.

SEE ALSO: This is the last known photo of Hitler

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At least 10 people were injured at a rally outside the California state Capitol in Sacramento on Sunday as members of a white-supremacist group clashed with counterprotesters, authorities said.

The melee erupted during a rally staged by the Traditionalist Worker Party, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist extremist group.

One of its leaders, Matt Parrott, said the party had called the demonstration in part to protest against violence that has broken out outside recent rallies by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The incident may fuel concerns about the potential for violent protests outside the major party conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia this summer and in the run-up to the November 8 presidential election.

When the white supremacists arrived at the Capitol at about noon on Sunday, "counterprotesters immediately ran in — hundreds of people — and they engaged in a fight," said George Granada, a spokesman for the Capitol Protection Service division of the California Highway Patrol.

In announcing the counterprotest, a group called Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento said on its website that it had a "moral duty" to deny a platform for "Nazis from all over the West Coast" to voice their views.

"We have a right to self-defense,"Yvette Felarca, a counterprotester wearing a white bandage on her head, told reporters after the clash."That is why we have to shut them down."

At least some of the injuries at the rally involved stab wounds, according to local media. None of them were life-threatening, and there were no immediate reports of arrests, Granada said. The building was placed on lockdown.

Matthew Heimbach, chairman of Traditionalist Worker Party, said his group had expected violence even though it planned a peaceful rally and had a permit.

"We were there to support nationalism. We are white nationalists," Heimbach told Reuters. "We were there to take a stand."

The Sacramento Fire Department said 10 patients were treated at area hospitals for multiple stabbing and laceration wounds.

None of the injuries were life-threatening, and there were no immediate reports of arrests, Granada said. The building was placed on lockdown.

Video footage on social media showed dozens of people, some of them wearing masks and wielding what appeared to be wooden bats, racing across the Capitol grounds and attacking others.

Photos on social media showed emergency officials treating a victim on the grass in the area as police officers stood guard.

Television footage on the Sacramento Bee website appeared to show a confrontation between a crowd dressed in black and a camera man and a television reporter, though it was not clear whether this was the same incident that produced the stabbings.

The Bee said "antifascist protesters" had confronted a TV crew from the local broadcaster KCRA at the California Capitol.

Fraces Wang, a reporter for ABC10, captured some of the more disturbing moments in videos shared on her Twitter account.

The melee comes about four months after four people were stabbed during a scuffle between members of the Ku Klux Klan and counterprotesters near a KKK rally in Anaheim, California.

In recent months Trump has blamed "professional agitators" and "thugs" for violence that has broken out at many of the Republican candidate's rallies.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, last month, anti-Trump protesters threw rocks and bottles at police officers who responded with pepper spray. A month earlier, some 20 demonstrators were arrested outside a Trump rally in Costa Mesa, California.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Fiona Ortiz and Justin Madden in Chicago; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Chris Reese)

Maxwell Tani contributed reporting.

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On June 30, 1934, the Nazi Party was swelling in numbers.

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was well on his way to absolute power, but there was just one more roadblock in his path.

His party became so huge that a splintering effect was deemed inevitable.

Believing that these elements within his own party would rise up against him, Hitler initiated a swift and deadly purge of his supposed rivals in an event called "The Night of the Long Knives."

One of these groups was the undefined "Sturmabteilung" (SA), or the "Brown Shirts." Over 4 million strong, this paramilitary group initially brought Hitler to power by means of protests and street violence.

It became apparent, though, that the group was evolving to become extremely revolutionary. The German army and those with deep pockets, two groups that Hitler was trying to curry favor with, became concerned with the SA’s overly violent rhetoric.

After defying Hitler's orders to cease and desist their activities, Hitler gave the code word "Hummingbird."

Immediately across Germany, Hitler's paramilitary group — the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Gestapo, the Secret State Police — began rounding up members of these supposed rivals. Under the pretext of a coup d'état, Hitler had over 85 German officials, including some of their wives, executed.

Of note is the events that surrounded the SA's leader, Ernst Röhm.

Having been arrested by Hitler himself, Röhm was eventually taken to a prison and provided with a pistol to commit suicide.

But in his last act of defiance, he demanded that Hitler kill him personally.

SS troops then shot him at point-blank range.

SEE ALSO: How The Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis

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NOW WATCH: Researchers say the Nazi gold train — supposedly discovered by amateur treasure hunters — doesn’t exist

"Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe continues his diverse departure from the world of wizardry in "Imperium," a story inspired by true events wherein a young FBI agent infiltrates a group of white supremacists bent on committing acts of terrorism.

Radcliffe recently played the role of a farting corpse in the critically-acclaimed fantasy "Swiss Army Man." 

"Imperium" is scheduled to be released on August 19.

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Helmut Oberlander, a translator for one of Hitler's most infamous mobile death squads, will likely live the rest of his dwindling days in Canada, thanks to a new decision from Canada's top court.

The Canadian government has worked to deport Oberlander, who has admitted to being a member of the reviled Einsatzkommando 10a unit, for much of the last twenty years. It appears, on Thursday, they will lose that fight.

In February, a court set aside a government order to revoke Oberlander's citizenship and ordered his case to be reviewed. This had been the third time that Oberlander's citizenship had been revoked, then reinstated by the courts.

"It's been tiring and difficult and unnecessary and now the Supreme Court — the highest court — has told the government that's enough." Ronald Poulton, a lawyer for Oberlander, told Reuters.

The judge in the case said that there needed to be study of whether or not Oberlander was only cooperating with Nazis under duress, or out of fear of his life.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a government appeal of that decision, meaning that Oberlander will — unless the government revokes it again — retain his Canadian passport.

The decision was immediately blasted by Jewish groups.

"Oberlander was a member of a Nazi mobile killing unit that murdered more than 90,000 Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust. He lied about his complicity in these atrocities and gained Canadian citizenship fraudulently. Based on these facts, he should be deported without further delay," reads a statement sent out by the The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and Canadian Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants (CJHSD).

Oberlander's unit — also know as the Ek 10a — was also responsible for the extermination of intellectuals, Communists, Roma, and a host of other groups deemed undesirable by the fascist regime.

The 92-year-old has always contended that he was conscripted into the unit — although one Canadian court found there was no conscription for non-Germans, like Ukrainian-born Oberlander — and that he only did minor jobs.

Translators, like Oberlander, were nevertheless instrumental in helping the Ek 10a root out Jews and other targeted groups who tried to go underground in Eastern Europe as Hitler's armies marched westward.

Given Oberlander's advanced age, there's little optimism that Ottawa will be able to ever remove him from the country. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try, said Shimon Fogel, CEO for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, in a statement.

"We are disappointed in the SCC's decision, and we encourage the Government of Canada to continue engaging fully in bringing Helmut Oberlander to justice. Though justice has been delayed, it need not be denied."

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VIENNA (AP) — Austria's Interior Ministry says the government has drawn up a draft law that would allow it to take ownership of the house where Adolf Hitler was born.

Tuesday's move follows steadfast refusal by owner Gerlinde Pommer to sell the empty building in the town of Braunau am Inn on the German border.

The government has sought possession so it can take measures to lessen its draw as a shrine for admirers of the Nazi dictator.

The draft still must be approved by parliament, where the government is in the majority and can rely on the support of most opposition parties.

Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck says he expects a parliamentary vote sometime this year. Government considerations range from tearing down the house to making it into a museum documenting Nazi horrors.

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It was at the age of seven, when asked at school to write down her name and place of birth, that Angela Orosz was first made aware she had been born in Auschwitz.

“I really had a hard time with that word,” she said. “I was begging my mother, ‘can we change it?’ She said ‘no, I’m not going to change it, this is what you have to know’.”

Orosz said she had no idea then what Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp, actually meant. “It wasn’t that I struggled with having been born there. That only struck me later,” she explained. “It was just because it was so awfully difficult to spell.”

It would take her more than a further half century before she felt able to recount the story of her and her mother, who died in 1992. At the age of 60 she finally broke her silence to tell a local journalist at her home in Montreal how her mother, Vera Bein, had given birth on the top bunk in the barracks of camp C at Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1944.

She had weighed just 1kg and was too weak to cry. “That’s what saved me,” she said.

But it was in a German courtroom just over a week ago that the now 71-year-old made one of her most courageous decisions yet, to take to the witness stand in the case of Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former SS guard, in what will be one of the last from the Nazi concentration camps. She wanted to give testimony, she said, “on behalf of the six million Jews who cannot be here because they were murdered”.

“In fact, it was far more than six million that were murdered,” she told the Guardian in Dresden this week. “Just think of all those children that didn’t grow up and have children, not to mention the many women who survived Auschwitz but were never able to have children.

“And, as we know now, their children who in turn suffer from hormonal imbalances as a result of the chemicals their mothers were given. I’m not a mathematician but you don’t need to be to know that six million is actually a very misleading number.”

Orosz clamped a concentrated gaze on Hanning as she recounted her life story in the Detmold courtroom on 26 February, telling him how her parents had arrived in Auschwitz on 25 May 1944, when her mother was three months pregnant. 

“My mother had already been separated from my father and would never see him again,” she told the court. “When it was her turn in front of Mengele [the murderous Auschwitz doctor who notoriously experimented on inmates], my mother told him that she was pregnant, hoping he would be compassionate ... Mengele snapped “Du dumme gans” [you stupid goose] and ordered her to the right.”

That meant she had been chosen for forced labour, rather than the gas chamber.

Orosz’s voice is a vital one in the case, in which prosecutors have gathered a handful of survivors of the mass deportation of 425,000 members of Hungary’s Jewish community to Auschwitz between May and July 1944, 90% of whom were exterminated.

The trial is based on the fact that Hanning worked as a guard there during that period. By his very presence there, according to prosecutors, he was a cog in the killing machine and is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people, the number killed between 17 May and 12 June, the period it is known he was there.

Orosz said her hopes rest on Hanning finally deciding to speak out. So far he has pledged to stay silent. “As I said to him in court: ‘You know what happened to all the people. You enabled their murder. Tell us! Tell us!’”

To the many critics who have said it is inhumane to put a frail 94-year-old in the dock, Orosz has strong words: “So what if it’s a death sentence for him?

“With 94, you have no life expectancy anyway. If he can sit, hear and see, if he can eat, he can also appear in a court. He was part of the killing machine. And what about my father who was murdered at the age of 32, while someone like him was able to live happily ever after. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many years in prison he might get. He’s not going to be going to jail anyway.

“What matters is whatever he might say about what happened in Auschwitz, what he did in Auschwitz, what he saw in Auschwitz, will enter the history books, so that even if some people might say ‘the Jews are lying’, they will hear from the mouth of the Nazi what happened.”

Orosz’s true understanding of her origins crept up on her slowly throughout her childhood in Hungary. “I remember Saturday nights at home and all the Holocaust survivors came. I would sit under the table listening to what they were talking about and it was always ‘the lager [camp] this’, ‘the lager that’ and people brought artefacts with them from Auschwitz, a cooking pot, a blanket. Slowly, slowly I built the story up.”

At the age of 11 she was told the full story, of how her mother had been forced into hard labour. When she was seven months pregnant, Bein was selected for experimentation by Mengele’s team, who injected a burning substance into her cervix. “Right behind in her uterus was the foetus, me,” said Orosz. “These injections were terrible, painful. Injection one, the foetus moved to the left side ... the next day, another injection, and the foetus moved in the other direction.”

But then, somehow, the doctors forgot about her mother. Her pregnancy did not show because Orosz was so tiny. “If not for this we would both have been killed before I had taken my first breath,” she said.

Later, her mother told her of another woman who had given birth. Mengele had bound her breasts, waiting to see how long the baby would live without being fed. “Shortly after, both of them were murdered.”

A sympathetic Hungarian doctor offered to perform an abortion on Bein, insisting it could save her life. She declined.

When she went into labour, she was helped by the barrack orderly who managed to get a sheet, hot water and scissors. “She told my mother to go to the top bunk. In the barrack, the bunks were three on top of each other. She went up after my mother and helped her give birth.

“I was born three days before the SS celebrated Christmas, so probably on 21 December 1944. I was so malnourished, I was unable to cry which helped ensure no one discovered me.”

Three hours after the birth, Bein had to leave her baby on the bunk and go out into the freezing cold for roll call, wearing just rags and wooden clogs, “the whole time praying I would still be alive when she returned,” Orosz said.

Five weeks after her birth, Auschwitz was liberated. On that day, 27 January, another child was born, Gyorgy Faludi. “His mother was so weak she didn’t have enough milk, so my mother fed us both.” Sandor Polgar, a fellow survivor from Bein’s hometown, discovered her and the baby and insisted on going to the town of Auschwitz – the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim – to get a birth certificate.

“I suspect having lost his own wife and daughter in Auschwitz he was desperate to ensure I was acknowledged.”

Polgar became Orosz’s stepfather when he and her mother subsequently married.

When she was one year old Orosz weighed just 3kg (6.6lb), “the weight most babies have at birth,” she said. “Most doctors refused to treat me, believing I would die. Even my grandmother said to her daughter: ‘Let her die, Verushka (her nickname for her), she will never be a proper child.’ But one doctor held me upside down like a chicken and when I raised my head, he said: ‘This child will live’.”

Her bones were so weak she could not walk until she was seven. “All my socks were thick knitted things to cover up my stick legs. All my dresses were full of lace and gathered together to make me look fatter.”

In Dresden this week to attend a psychiatrists’ conference, she will talk from her own experience about how mothers pass trauma on to their children.

“I got the invitation to speak in August and I thought this isn’t really relevant to me. I’m normal. But then I called my kids and my 47-year-old daughter gave me a list from here to China about why I was a typical Holocaust survivor. She said how I sent her shopping on her own at the age of three, because I wanted her to be independent, in case the Holocaust happened again. And she said I constantly told her and her brother: ‘Your generation would never survive the Holocaust because you’re spoilt rotten.’ Then when she told me how afraid she was of giving birth, I hit the roof and told her: ‘You’re afraid? You have a home and husband and nurses, you are out of your mind to be afraid!’”

“Mother, your whole life is the Holocaust!” her daughter told her. “I hadn’t realised until then,” she admitted.

Her children have been supportive of her trip to Germany. “They teased me and said: ‘Your whole life you’ve never seen a psychiatrist, now you’re talking to 225 at once!’”

Elegantly dressed in a black lace dress and a twisted string of pearls, she speaks in a heavy singsong Hungarian accent, despite more than 40 years spent in Canada.

For years Orosz had refused to give evidence in a courtroom, fearful of the nervous stomach pains it brought on when she talked about her and her mother’s experiences.

Related: Auschwitz survivor angers co-plaintiffs in SS officer trial by saying prosecutions should stop

But then she saw media coverage of the trial of Oskar Gröning last year, and heard how a fellow survivor, Eva Kor, had stood up and hugged the 94-year-old former Auschwitz bookkeeper in an act of forgiveness. “I just couldn’t take it. I sent an email to my lawyer, Heinrich-Peter Rothmann, to tell him ‘I’m coming to Germany immediately’. I mean, how can you forgive these people? It’s certainly not in me.”

She and Kor, once friends, are no longer talking.

When she visited Auschwitz for the first time last January for the 70th anniversary of its liberation, Orosz tried to trace the barracks where she was born. But it was pitch black and the area was sealed off because of the commemoration ceremony.

“I will return because I have a passionate wish to see where my mother was, to touch where I was born, to try to feel what she might have felt. I am still haunted by that idea that while normally when you give birth you go home to a warm place with your partner by your side, petrified because of the responsibility, my mother had no future, no food, nothing.

“But still she believed I would live. She said to me I looked like a little bird without feathers and that I was really ugly – though not to her.”

This article was written by Kate Connolly in Dresden from The Guardian and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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NOW WATCH: Researchers say the Nazi gold train — supposedly discovered by amateur treasure hunters — doesn’t exist

One of history's most brutal tyrants was a diagnosed schizophrenic on a mission to avenge his childhood years of repressed rage, according to Henry Murray, an American psychologist and a Harvard professor.

In 1943, the US Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, commissioned Murray to study Adolf Hitler's personality to try to predict his behavior. In his 229-page report, "Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler," Murray described Hitler as a paranoid "utter wreck" who was "incapable of normal human relationships."

"It is forever impossible to hope for any mercy or humane treatment from him," Murray wrote.

SEE ALSO: 22 brutal dictators you've never heard of

After a frustrating childhood, Hitler felt obligated to exert dominance in all things.

Hitler suffered from intolerable feelings of inferiority, largely stemming from his small, frail, and sickly physical appearance during his childhood.

He refused to go to school because he was ashamed that he was a poor student compared to his classmates. 

His mother appeased him by allowing him to drop out.

"He never did any manual work, never engaged in athletics, and was turned down as forever unfit for conscription in the Austrian Army," Murray writes.

Hitler managed his insecurities by worshiping "brute strength, physical force, ruthless domination, and military conquest."

Even sexually, Hitler was described as a "full-fledged masochist," who humiliated and abused his partners.

Much of his wrath originated from a severe Oedipus complex.

As a child, Hitler experienced the Oedipus complex — love of mother and hate of father — which he developed after accidentally seeing his parents having sex, Murray's report says.

Hitler was subservient and respectful to his father but viewed him as an enemy who ruled the family "with tyrannical severity and injustice." According to the report, Hitler was envious of his father's masculine power and dreamed of humiliating him to re-establish "the lost glory of his mother."

For 16 years, Hitler did not exhibit any form of ambition or competition because his father had died and he had not yet discovered a new enemy.

Hitler frequently felt emasculated.

Another blow to Hitler's masculinity: He was "incapable of consummating in a normal fashion," old sexual partners shared with Murray.

"This infirmity we must recognize as an instigation to exorbitant cravings for superiority. Unable to demonstrate male power before a woman, he is impelled to compensate by exhibiting unsurpassed power before men in the world at large," he writes.

As mentioned, when Hitler did have sexual relations with a woman, he exhibited masochistic behaviors. Hitler was said to have multiple partners, but eventually married his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, hours before the two committed suicide together in his Berlin bunker.

On August 1, 1936, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler opened the 11th Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany.

In doing so, he inaugurated what is now a famed ritual of a lone runner bearing a torch carried from the site of the ancient games in Olympia, Greece into the stadium.

"The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die," he reportedly said.

If that sounds like PR for the Nazi Party, that's because it was.

The relay "was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence,"according to the BBC.

Or, in other words, Hitler wanted the games to impress foreigners visiting Germany.

The organizer of the 1936 Games, Carl Diem, even based the relay off the one Ancient Greeks did in 80 BC in an attempt to connect the ancient Olympics to the present Nazi party. 

"The idea chimed perfectly with the Nazi belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich,"according to the BBC. "And the event blended perfectly the perversion of history with publicity for contemporary German power."

And according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hitler's torch run, "perfectly suited Nazi propagandists, who used torch-lit parades and rallies to attract Germans, especially youth, to the Nazi movement."

The torch itself was made by Krupp Industries, which was a major supplier of Nazi arms.

Here's a view of one of the Olympic torch bearers:

And here's a view of the last bearer ahead of lighting the Olympic flame:

Unsurprisingly, the 1936 Olympic Games were not without controversy.

Despite Hitler's aforementioned pitch that "the sportive, knightly battle ... unites the combatants in understanding and respect," the Nazis tried to keep Jews and blacks from competing in the games.

As Andrew Nagorski detailed in his book "Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power," the official Nazi Party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, even put out a statement saying that it was "a disgrace and degradation of the Olympic idea" that blacks and whites could compete together. "Blacks must be excluded. ... We demand it," it said.

Various groups and activists in the US and other countries pushed to boycott the games in response.

The Nazis eventually capitulated, saying that they would welcome "competitors of all races," but added that the make-up of the German team was up to the host country. (They added Helene Mayer, whose father was Jewish, as their "token Jew" participant. She won the silver medal.)

During the games, Hitler reportedly cheered loudly for German winners, but showed poor sportsmanship when others won, including track and field star Jesse Owens (who won 4 gold medals) and other black American athletes. According to Nagorski, he also said: "It was unfair of the United States to send these flatfooted specimens to compete with the noble products of Germany. ... I am going to vote against Negro participation in the future."

Ultimately, the most disconcerting thing about the 1936 Olympics is that the Nazis' propaganda push was actually effective on visitors and athletes — despite all the racism and anti-Semitism.

William L. Shirer, an American journalist living in Berlin at the time, and later known for his book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," noted his disappointment with the fact that tourists responded positively to the whole affair. And according to Nagorski, an older American woman even managed to kiss Hitler on the cheek when he visited the swimming stadium.

But perhaps the most chilling line cited by Nagorski came from Rudi Josten, a German staffer in the AP bureau who wrote: "Everything was free and all dance halls were reopened. ... They played American music and whatnot. Anyway, everybody thought: 'Well, so Hitler can't be so bad.'"

World War II officially started a little over three years later in 1939.

Check out "Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power" by Andrew Nagorski here.

SEE ALSO: These gorgeous colorized photos of the front lines of WW2 bring the conflict to life

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Thought to have been missing for 71 years, around 1,000 pages of Heinrich Himmler's office diary have been recently discovered in a Russian military archive.

The entries, which are being published by a German newspaper and in turn translated by the British press, contain personal insights into the life of the head of the SS in Nazi Germany.

In the excerpts, Himmler can be found to have started his days with two-hour massages with a doctor, followed by his murderous duties that shocked the world.

"The most interesting thing for me is this combination of doting father and cold-blooded killer,"said Damian Imoehl, a journalist who assisted in finding the diary pages.

"One day he starts with breakfast and a massage from his personal doctor, then he rings up his wife and daughter ... and after that he decides to have 10 men killed," Imoehl told The Times of London.

Intricate details into the daily horrors of the Holocaust remain scant or casual, either intentionally or because of the fact that he may have had a void in his emotions.

For instance, on October 4, 1943, he recorded"17.30: speech to SS officers." The speech he gave, however, ended up being an explicit proclamation of what he called "the extermination of the Jewish race."

To illustrate this point further, on the day of the failed assassination plot of Hitler, otherwise known as Operation Valkyrie, all that was written about the incident was "13.45: Wolf's Lair — talk with the Fuhrer," followed by "15.00: Lunch with General Field Marshal Keitel."

Also included in these meticulous pages were vague entries that merely stated "in transit." Analysts point to the fact that he may have been meeting with his mistress, whom he affectionately nicknamed "Bunny."

Himmler, who was eventually captured by British forces at the end of World War II, killed himself by biting on a cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth.

SEE ALSO: How The Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis

SEE ALSO: These stunning colorized photos of the front lines of WW2 bring the conflict to life

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NOW WATCH: Researchers say the Nazi gold train — supposedly discovered by amateur treasure hunters — doesn’t exist

The search for a lost Nazi gold train is back on.

Last August, two amateur treasure hunters said they had "irrefutable proof" of the existence of a World War II-era Nazi train, rumored to be filled with stolen gold.

Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper claimed they used ground-penetrating radar to locate the train, which is somewhere alongside a railway between the towns of Wroclaw and Walbrzych in southwestern Poland.

"The train isn't a needle in a haystack," Andrzej Gaik, a retired teacher and spokesman for the renewed effort to search for the train, told Agence France-Presse.

"If it's there, we'll find it," Gaik said.

'There may be a tunnel. There is no train.'

In December, after analyzing mining data, Polish experts said there was no evidence of the buried train.

Janusz Madej, from Krakow's Academy of Mining, said the geological survey of the site showed that there was no evidence of a train after using magnetic and gravitation methods.

"There may be a tunnel. There is no train," Madej said at a news conference in Walbrzych, according to the BBC.

Koper insists that "there is a tunnel and there is a train," and that the results are skewed because of different technology used, The Telegraph reports.

Local folklore

According to a local myth, the train is believed to have vanished in 1945 with stolen gold, gems, and weapons when the Nazis retreated from the Russia.

During the war, the Germans were building headquarters for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Walbrzych's medieval Ksiaz Castle, then called the Furstenstein Castle.

Below the castle, the Germans built a system of secret tunnels and bunkers, called "Project Riese."

The train is in one of these hidden passages, says Tadeusz Slowikowski, the main living source of the train legend. Slowikowski, a retired miner who searched for the train in 2001, believes the Nazis blew up the entrance to the train's tunnel.

"I have lived with this mystery for 40 years, but each time I went to the authorities they always silenced it," Slowikowski told The Associated Press. "For so many years. Unbelievable!"

Slowikowski believes it is near the 65th kilometer of railway tracks from Wroclaw to Walbrzych.

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NOW WATCH: A mysterious lost Nazi train — supposedly filled with gold — may have been found

On Tuesday a team in Poland began digging for a World War II-era Nazi train, rumored to be filled with stolen gold, The AP reports.

Last August, two amateur treasure hunters said they had "irrefutable proof" of the train.

Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper claimed they used ground-penetrating radar to locate the train, which is somewhere alongside a railway between the towns of Wroclaw and Walbrzych in southwestern Poland.

"The train isn't a needle in a haystack," Andrzej Gaik, a retired teacher and spokesman for the renewed effort to search for the train, told Agence France-Presse.

"If it's there, we'll find it," Gaik said.

'There may be a tunnel. There is no train.'

In December, after analyzing mining data, Polish experts said there was no evidence of the buried train.

Janusz Madej, from Krakow's Academy of Mining, said the geological survey of the site showed that there was no evidence of a train after using magnetic and gravitation methods.

"There may be a tunnel. There is no train," Madej said at a news conference in Walbrzych, according to the BBC.

Koper insists that "there is a tunnel and there is a train," and that the results are skewed because of different technology used, The Telegraph reports.

Local folklore

According to a local myth, the train is believed to have vanished in 1945 with stolen gold, gems, and weapons when the Nazis retreated from the Russia.

During the war, the Germans were building headquarters for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Walbrzych's medieval Ksiaz Castle, then called the Furstenstein Castle.

Below the castle, the Germans built a system of secret tunnels and bunkers, called "Project Riese."

The train is in one of these hidden passages, says Tadeusz Slowikowski, the main living source of the train legend. Slowikowski, a retired miner who searched for the train in 2001, believes the Nazis blew up the entrance to the train's tunnel.

"I have lived with this mystery for 40 years, but each time I went to the authorities they always silenced it," Slowikowski told The Associated Press. "For so many years. Unbelievable!"

Slowikowski believes it is near the 65th kilometer of railway tracks from Wroclaw to Walbrzych.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A mysterious lost Nazi train — supposedly filled with gold — may have been found