Gold train

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The term gold train refers to an event from the time of the end of National Socialism . The affair about a missing train with valuables expropriated by Hungarian Jews is considered to be one of the greatest raids in history. It is about the looting of the alleged “gold train” with a total of 24 wagons by Hungarian, Austrian, German and American soldiers and citizens.

history

From March 19, 1944, the Hungarian Jews were expropriated by decree of the Hungarian state and, from May 15, deported to Auschwitz by the Eichmann Special Task Force under Adolf Eichmann . 437,000 of around 800,000 Jews were deported by July 9, 1944 and almost all of them were murdered. The Jews remaining in Budapest were also expropriated, but from October 1944 only some of them were deported. When the Red Army approached in 1944 , the Nazi regime of the Arrow Cross decided to transport the stolen valuables to Germany.

In March 1945, for example, a freight train with 46 wagons "allegedly" started at the Austro-Hungarian border, 24 of which were filled with looted Jewish property. The train was loaded with boxes full of gold, silver, jewels, jewelry, coins, cash, dishes, paintings, carpets, china, furs, sacred objects, clocks, stamp collections and so on. In Hopfgarten in Tyrol, some of the boxes were diverted by truck from a member of the Arrow Cross regime. The “gold train” continued and was initially hidden in Bad Gastein in the Tauern tunnel . In Böckstein on May 11, the remaining train reached the American zone . The train conductor László Avar finally handed the wagons over to the US Army on May 16 in Werfen . The contents of the train were initially stored in a barracks in Salzburg , the value was estimated by US authorities at around 150 million dollars. Members of the US armed forces are said to have "made use" of these Hungarian assets without authorization. In Salzburg, American officers equipped their offices and houses with items from the “gold train”. At the end of 1945 Gideon Rafael from the Jewish Agency wanted to visit the camp, but was initially refused entry. When the Agency visited the camp in 1946, only 16 of the 24 cars were left. Finally, some of the items were sold at auctions in New York under the direction of the UN Refugee Commission.

For decades, the US government and the Hungarian government had been negotiating the refund. During one of these negotiations, US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance brought the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen back to Budapest in January 1978 . In 1998 Bill Clinton set up the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, which u. a. should clarify the whereabouts of the treasures of the "gold train". Their report did not provide much illuminating information on four pages. Meanwhile 33 Hungarian Holocaust survivors had filed lawsuits. They reached a settlement in 2005: The US government paid $ 25.5 million for social welfare projects for the benefit of Hungarian-Jewish victims of National Socialism.

See also

An alleged gold train is said to be hidden near Waldenburg (pl .: Wałbrzych) in Poland .

literature

Non-fiction
  • Sabine Stehrer: The gold train. Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-7076-0064-5 , ( Die Bibliothek des Raubes 10).
  • Ronald W. Zweig: The Gold Train. The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary . Morrow & Co, New York NY 2002, ISBN 0-06-620956-0 .
    • Ronald W. Zweig: The Hungarian gold train or the myth of Jewish wealth , in: Constantin Goschler , Philipp Ther (ed.): Robbery and restitution: "Aryanization" and restitution of Jewish property in Europe . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl., 2003, pp. 168–183.
novel
  • James Twining : The Black Sun. Thriller ("The black sun"). Bastei Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2008, 416 pages. ISBN 3-404-15832-6 (The author James Twining uses the story of the gold train as a background for his novel).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ ORF: Living in Salzburg
  2. Archive link ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) dispute over the gold train in World War II settled