for
Justice Gold Train Victims
August 9, 2004
Over the past decade, this nation played a laudable role in
helping to persuade European governments and companies,
including recalcitrant Swiss banks, to live up to their
moral duty to settle restitution claims by Holocaust
survivors even when their legal liability was murky.
Regrettably, the Justice Department has taken a much less
high-minded approach to a three-year-old lawsuit by elderly
survivors over America's mishandling of valuables the Nazis
collected from Hungarian Jews and then loaded onto a train
heading for Austria.
Instead of facing up to responsibility for the contents of
the "Hungarian Gold Train," which the American Army took
for safekeeping in 1945, the government has raised a host
of technical legal defenses seeking to void the claims, or
at least delay the moment of reckoning. This is
particularly dismaying since essential facts aren't really
in dispute.
They were documented five years ago in a report by a
special presidential advisory commission that detailed departure" "an
unexplained from America's otherwise stellar
record of adhering to laws and regulations calling for the
preservation of victims' assets and their return to the
country from which they were seized. Some of the choicest
Gold Train loot was either commandeered by high-ranking
officers or sold for personal use by Army personnel. Other
valuables were auctioned in New York and the proceeds given
to a United Nations refugee agency. Still other property
was stolen from the warehouse. Two suitcases of gold dust
simply vanished. Meanwhile, emphatic calls by the Hungarian
government and Hungarian Jewish groups f...