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today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: November 1999 October 1999 September 1999 August 1999 July 1999 June 1999 May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 August 1998 July 1998 Alphabetical index (text) October 15, 1999 U.S.
Forces Captured a Nazi ‘Gold Train’ and Later Looted Valuables By TIM GOLDEN WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of World War II, as Soviet troops advanced from the east, Nazi officials in Hungary ordered that a train be sent west toward Germany with the collected wealth of Hungary’s decimated Jews. Their wedding bands alone filled crate after crate.
American troops intercepted the train in Austria, in May 1945, and moved its contents — gold, silver, paintings, furs — to a warehouse near Salzburg. But according to a preliminary report Thursday by United States investigators, the Americans were neither careful nor selfless custodians. Rebuffing pleas from the Hungarian Government and surviving Hungarian Jews, United States officials at that time declared the valuables “unidentifiable” and refused to let the Hungarians inspect them.
Then, while the fate of the loot was being resolved, the report said, the Americans apparently helped themselves. According to documents cited by the investigators, the flamboyant commander of United States forces in the area, Gen. Harry J. Collins , requisitioned silver and china from the warehouse, ordering that it be “of the very best quality and workmanship available in the land.”
He furnished his Austrian villa with some of the Hungarians’ carpets and silver candlesticks, and his senior officers followed suit. Clocks, jewelry and furs that had belonged to Hungarian Jews were appropriated by the Army and sold to soldiers. Two suitcases filled with gold dust disappeared, the investigators found, and other property was stolen from the warehouse by soldiers, apparently with the collusion of the guards.
Eventually, many of the remaining valuables were auctioned in New York and the proceeds given to a United Nations refugee agency. But the report today, by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, suggests that American forces ignored regulations calling for the preservation of victims’ assets and their