October 15, 1999

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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 return to the country from which they were seized.

"Here you have a massive exception to those rules," said Stuart E. Eizenstat, the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and an Administration representative on the commission.

"We suspected when we set this commission up that there might be some dark chapters in our immediate postwar history," Eizenstat said in an interview. But, he added, "we want to establish the principle that the United States is willing to hold itself to the same high standard to which it has held others."

The commission cast its findings as preliminary, and cautioned that important parts of the story remained unclear. Chief among the unanswered questions is why the commander of United States forces in Austria, Gen. Mark Clark, decided that the property could not be identified, when it appears that the train carried at least some information about the original owners.

The Pentagon's representative to the commission, P. T. Henry, said the Army Center for Military History was examining military records to try to determine the context of General Clark's decision. "The Army is committed to telling the story on this," said Henry, an Assistant Army Secretary. "We are not going to half-step."

Still, the study largely confirms and expands upon the findings of an amateur American historian, Kenneth D. Alford, who first reported the pilfering of assets from the so-called Hungarian Gold Train in 1994 in his book "The Spoils of World War II" (Birchlane Press).

Working mainly from Government files at the National Archives and elsewhere, the commission also discovered that the train contained more than 1,100 paintings taken from Hungarian Jews and apparently turned over by the United States to the Government of Austria.

The fate of the paintings is unknown. But the investigators said a recovered inventory of the paintings included considerable identifying information, raising the possibility that a cache of less famous art works looted in the Holocaust might someday be returned to their owners.

"Not all the Jews were Rothschilds, and most of their paintings were not masterpieces," said Konstantin Akinsha, the researcher who found the inventory. "This is the first time we have found a large group of that type of paintings."

A spokesman for the Austrian Embassy in Washington, Ulf Pacher, said the matter would be investigated. The commission's research director for art and cultural property, Jonathan Petropoulos, said a senior Austrian cultural official had reported back that some of the paintings had apparently been returned, but without specifying when or to whom.

Hungarian officials told the commission that they had never received any such paintings.

The train was one of several sent from Hungary by the Nazis as Soviet troops fought their way across German lines. One train carried gold from the Hungarian Central Bank; another was loaded with paintings from the Hungarian National Gallery. The valuables from both trains were eventually returned.

According to documents cited by Alford, the "gold train" set out from Budapest on Dec. 15, 1944, on orders from Karl Adolf Eichmann.

Over the preceding months, Eichmann had supervised the extermination of most of the 750,000 Jews who lived in Hungary before the war, after they had been forced to turn over their gold, jewels and other valuables to officials of the puppet government installed by the Nazis.

The gold train also carried the valuables of some pro-Nazi Hungarians and was guarded by Hungarian troops. But by the end of March, according to Alford's account, it had advanced only about 100 miles and the guards had already repelled 10 robbery attempts, nine of them by rogue members of the German SS.

Soldiers of the United States Third Infantry Division finally found the train on May 16, 1945, hidden in the Tauern Tunnel, 60 miles south of Salzburg. Two truckloads of gold, gems and watches had been seized by French troops after the Hungarian official commanding the train abandoned it and tried to escape, but most of the remaining 24 railroad cars were apparently intact when they began to be unloaded in July.

According to Alford's account, the property's estimated value was $206 million, in 1945 dollars.

The commission report notes that General Collins, the commander of the 42d Infantry Division, the Rainbow Division, began making demands soon afterward on the warehouse where the property was stored. The general had a reputation as an officer who was rarely challenged. He married an Austrian woman, died in Austria in 1963 and is buried in Salzburg.

Some military documents, copies of which were made available to a reporter by Alford, leave contradictory impressions about what the American officers in Salzburg knew about the property's origins.

At least one document refers to the train's contents as "property of the Hungarian state." But others make it clear that Hungarian officials and guards interrogated after the train's capture told the Americans that most of the property had been taken from Jews.

One report on the train's contents, dated September 1945, also refers to "a lot of papers in Hungarian" that listed "the names of people from whom some of the items on the train were taken." The report notes that the papers were put aside for "their possible future use in determining ownership of some of the items."

Petropoulos, a historian at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles, said there was still very little indication why General Clark decided not to try to trace the owners of the valuables.

In addition to the volume of the property and the likelihood that many of its former owners had been killed, he said, some documents offer the rather feeble justification that because Hungary's borders had been temporarily redrawn by Hitler, the national origin of the train's contents might be vague.

At the same time, the commission report makes it clear that Hungarian Government officials and representatives of Hungarian Jewish groups began as early as December 1945 to petition emphatically for the return of the train's contents, prompting considerable discussion within the United States Government.

But even as that discussion continued, commission researchers noted, property from the warehouse was apparently borrowed, sold off and looted on a much greater scale than in occupied Germany.

"The way it is generally described is that the American soldiers took 'souvenirs' and those in the Red Army took 'loot,' " said Günter Bischoff, a historian at the University of New Orleans who has studied the occupation of Austria. "But the American soldiers who fought through Germany and got to Austria considered Austria conquered territory as well. It would make sense that they took loot, too."