The HISTORY CRIER
A Publication by the Indiana Military Org,
a privately owned and funded organization dedicated
to the preservation of Indiana Military History.
James D. West, Editor
January 2003 Volume 9 Number 1

Continuing a Proud Tradition in Reporting Since 1941
Atterbury Crier-Camp Crier-Cardinal-Wakeman Probe-Caduceus-Twingine Times-Big Times-Splint & Litter- Wardier

Atterbury AAF - Bakalar AFB - Camp Atterbury - Freeman AAF - Freeman Field - 28th Division - 30th Division - 31st Division
83rd Division - 92nd Division - 106th Division - Wakeman General Hospital

The Gold Train - A WW2 Embarrassment for the United States
and a link to Camp Atterbury, Indiana

Major General Harry J. Collins, pictured as
Commander of the 31st 'DIXIE' Division,
Camp Atterbury, Indiana, 1953.

"Reports that wedding rings and other valuables of Nazi victims were stolen are shocking and disheartening. The U.S. Army valiantly fought to the death against Adolph Hitler to destroy evil, not to permit some of those who fought to enrich themselves at the expense of Hitler's victims." -- Phil Baum, American Jewish Congress Executive Director. Furthermore, the report said more than 1,100 paintings were given to the Austrian government, in breach of U.S. policy, and many of the cultural valuables aboard the train, from silver platters to loose diamonds, were sold at auction in New York to benefit non-repatriable refugees. The decision to decree the assets "unidentifiable" was the key reason cited by the United States for not returning the assets to Hungarian Jews..

The Austrian government told U.S. investigators “a portion of this property has been restituted,” but gave no accounting of the disposition of individual paintings, the report said. Checks with Hungarian authorities also found no record of the paintings or other items, it said.

Appropriation of Nazi loot by U.S. forces took place “at the highest levels,” said the report, listing five U.S. generals who “took valuables from the gold train to furnish their residences and offices. 

”The report cites government documents alleging that Maj. Gen. Harry J. Collins, commander of a division in Austria, took from the confiscated goods five rugs, eight paintings, chinaware for 45 people, silverware, linens and bedding for his home, villa, office and private railroad car.

The report showed the general requisitioned items of "the very best quality and workmanship available in the land."

APPROPRIATIONS OF THE GOLD TRAIN TREASURES
BY THE U.S. FORCES IN AUSTRIA
Requisitions of the Gold Train Property

U.S. military personnel recognized from the beginning that the art and cultural property assets of the Gold Train were valuable and impressive and could be used in their offices and homes. On July 13, 1945, Major General Harry J. Collins, Commander of the 42nd ("Rainbow") Division in western Austria received objects of "furniture and furnishing…supplied by Office of Property Control, Land Salzburg."

Collins was given property for his headquarters identified as "U.S. Government Property (from Hungarian Train, Military Government Warehouse)" including "different objects made of onyx, 5 rugs and 8 paintings."33General Collins also requisitioned valuables from the Gold Train for his home.

An August 28, 1945 memo from one of Collins’ aides to the Property Control Officer in Salzburg made the following demand:

1. The Commanding General directs that you give first priority to obtaining without delay the following listed household furnishing:

a) Chinaware (all types for formal banquet and other meals.) Sufficient for 45 people.

b) Silverware (Same qualifications as above and to include serving forks and spoons).

c) Glassware (To include water glasses, highball glasses, cocktail glasses, wine and champagne glasses, and liqueur glasses. Sufficient for formal banquet involving several kinds of wine for 90 people.)

d) Thirty (30) sets of table linens, each set to consist of one table cloth and 12 napkins.)

e) Sixty (60) sheets, sixty (60) pillow cases, and sixty (60) large bath towels.

The General desires that all of the above listed items be of the very best quality and workmanship available in the land of Salzburg. He specifically told me to say that he intended to hold you responsible for securing these items.

The Property Control Officer responded to this request by taking these items from the MG warehouse in which the Gold Train properties had been stored. Subsequent requisitions by Collins for Gold Train property included 12 silver candlesticks and 11 carpets; two rugs to decorate his railroad car; and 13 rugs for decoration of his villa, Maria Theresien Schloss.

Nor was General Collins the only military official who used the Gold Train property for personal use. A "List of Material Loaned from Property Control Warehouse" prepared by the Property Control Office indicates that numerous high-ranking officers of the American Forces in Austria appropriated Hungarian Jewish treasures found on the Gold Train for the decoration of their residences. For example, General Laude received china, silverware and linen for his Salzburg home; General Hume received 18 rugs, table and silverware, table linen and glassware; General Howard received nine rugs, one silver set and 12 silver plates to decorate his Vienna apartment; and Brigadier General Linden received 10 rugs for his quarters on the von Trapp Estate.

As more American military families settled in Austria, the Property Control Officer expressed his concerns to the Repatriation, Deliveries and Restitution Division (RD & R Division). On March 8, 1946 he reported:

"The problem arrival of families of military personnel in Austria in the near future, it is believed, will place heavy demands on certain of the property in the warehouse,"39 because he believed that "General Collins was interested in providing proper quarters and house furnishing for families of the military;" and to that end, the procurement of "proper" materials, meant that, "quite probably demands might be made upon property in the warehouse."

Go here for more information:  http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/goldtrain.html#AppropriationsoftheGoldTrainTreasures

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 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."

Go here for more information: http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/99/10/USLootTrain.html

Contents of the Gold Train

There is a report available on the jewels and golden valuables ordered by Commander Arpad Toldy to be laden on two lorries and carried to the French zone, where they were seized by the French troops.

According to the Central Board, the following assets were transported into the French Zone where they were seized by French troops in St. Anton:

Nazis and the mysterious 'Gold Train'
New book tracks tale of lost treasure from the Holocaust

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 Posted: 2:28 PM EST (1928 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- In a cramped, unventilated New York University office, an intense man tells a story about some looted Nazi gold.

The man is Ronald Zweig, and his scholarly visage and soft accent belie a tenacity for wading through the archives of the Holocaust. A senior scholar of modern Judaic studies and member of the National Archives' Historical Advisory Panel on Holocaust Era Records, he's also the author of a new book, "The Gold Train" (William Morrow), on the infamous Hungarian treasure haul.

The Gold Train included everything from silverware and watches to "wedding rings and gold teeth with human blood on them," Zweig writes. The material was from hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews rounded up by the SS and Hungarian fascists in the spring of 1944.

The contents of the train were never recovered in toto. Much of it was dispersed throughout Europe; some disappeared. Over the years, Holocaust survivors have sought to get back the belongings that were placed on the train, to little avail. The train has become a brutal symbol of all that was lost.

It all came about, says Zweig, because of a horrific confluence of interests. Jews -- one-fifth of the Hungary's population in 1910 -- had been accepted as part of the country's fabric until the 1930s. But a government increasingly sympathetic to the Nazis gradually tightened laws against them, and when World War II turned against Germany, things got worse.

"What you have here," he says, "are two processes at work. The German army and foreign office had their own strategic interests in Hungary. Their concern is that the internal domestic situation be as quiet as possible.

"The SS has another agenda. On the one hand the ideological mass murderers who want to finish the Jewish problem say, 'This is our opportunity.' The 800,000 Jews of Hungary ... had survived until 1944. The Hungarian government had not cooperated with the Germans to ship them off to Auschwitz, too."

But a new government dominated by Hungarian fascists was "eager, willing and efficient collaborators in the system," Zweig says. In 12 weeks, 437,000 people were shipped off to Auschwitz, at the rate sometimes of 12,000 a day.

Precise inventories taken, then Hungarian Jews killed

The Nazis, as usual, were remarkably efficient. The Jews' belongings were minutely chronicled, Zweig says.

"The crucial period, April 1944, the Jews are handing over their property; it's put into individual bags and closed in front of them," he says. "The address is recorded, and they're given receipts, but within weeks that all becomes meaningless because these people are shipped off to Auschwitz and they don't survive."

Afterward, the Hungarians opened the envelopes, put everything into piles and re-sorted the material into categories. "You couldn't identify ownership anymore, but the inventory was fairly exact," Zweig says.

What Zweig tried to find out with "The Gold Train" was both why and what: Why Hungary, why so late in the war, and what happened to the plunder?

The first two answers are political, he observes, the first having to do with shifting government loyalties toward support for the Nazis after the country's loss in World War I, the second having to do with maintaining German survival.

"By 1944, we know that the Germans fully realize they're losing the war, and everybody is trying to elbow for a better position and accumulate the assets necessary to negotiate with the Allies, to help Germany survive until the grand alliance of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt breaks down, or just to flee to Latin America. In Hungary it becomes very obvious and very ugly," he says.

Scattered and vanished

But as for what happened to the riches of the Gold Train, Zweig surmises that a clever Hungarian named Árpád Toldi, appointed by the SS as "commissioner of Jewish affairs," managed to disperse them through a bait-and-switch.

By December 1944, the Red Army was driving hard on Budapest, and the decision was made to evacuate the Jewish loot. Toldi supervised the sorting, packing and departure of a 42-car freight train loaded with the valuables of 800,000 civilians.

This train meandered its way westward through Hungary into Austria, with Toldi buying off marauding squads of drunken fascist troops of various stripes with lesser pieces of loot. The core cache of gold and diamonds was diverted to a small flotilla of trucks.

"Toldi knows very well what's going to happen at the end, and he avoids any detailed inventories being made," Zweig recounts with a smile. "So when the people on the train realize they've been [had], that Toldi has the real gold and diamonds, they ask themselves, 'Well, who has the inventory?' And they discover that no one has."

The Gold Train wound up in Austria, but its booty was scattered through various points along its route and probably beyond. With the train itself passing through first French and then American hands, and stories of hoards of Nazi loot springing up all over Allied occupation areas, the Gold Train became lost in the innumerable myths of Nazi war treasures.

Claims were laid to the surviving assets on the train by the Soviets, Hungarians and (not incidentally) the two major Jewish organizations overseeing the welfare of Holocaust survivors in Europe.

Nobody knows how much the train was worth. The Hungarian government and Hungarian Jewish organizations estimated $350 million in 1945 dollars, or between $3 billion and $4 billion today.

The bulk of the Gold Train assets in Allied hands was eventually allocated to the Jewish relief organizations to finance the evacuation of Hungarian Holocaust survivors to what was then Palestine. Hungarian Jewish survivors did not receive the money directly. "In this case, justice has been done but not seen to be done," Zweig says.

But then there's the money that didn't make it to Allied hands -- the assets in Russian hands or successfully spirited away by Toldi's accomplices in 1945. That trail has vanished, leaving innumerable unanswered questions.

Most important, where is the money now?

Zweig answers in one word that describes so much of the tragedy of the Holocaust: "Gone."

U.S. admits looting Jewish property

MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

WASHINGTON — A new account of how U.S. soldiers at the end of World War II looted a train filled with Hungarian Jews’ property may prompt other countries to search dark chapters of their own histories in an attempt to make restitution.

That is the assessment of several members of the presidential commission that researched the fate of the "Hungarian Gold Train," which was filled with Jewish property stolen by the Nazis that later ended up in the hands of U.S. servicemen.

"I think we knew when this commission was set up there would be some dark spots on our own record," said U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who also serves as the Clinton administration’s point man on Holocaust restitution issues. However, Eizenstat, who sits on the commission, stressed that the panel’s openness in detailing those spots will "send a strong signal" to similar commissions in other countries.

"The worst thing we can do is suppress things because it’s a U.S. issue," said Miles Lerman, the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and a member of the commission. "The more windows you open, the more air you let in, the healthier the process."

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States said last week it uncovered documents detailing how U.S. infantry forces on May 16, 1945, seized a train in Werfen, Austria, that was filled with paintings, rugs, china, gold, watches and other valuables looted from Hungarian Jews by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators. This account of the American looting comes several years after the United States and Jewish groups began pressing Swiss banks and other European banks and companies to make restitution for the valuables and labor that was stolen from European Jewry.

The report, which is preliminary, buttresses those efforts because it "indicates that we are not afraid to look at our own government," said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, which has been pressing foreign countries to return Nazi-looted property to their rightful owners.

While international law and U.S. policy required the return of looted arts and cultural items to the governments of the countries from which they were taken, U.S. officials decided that the origin and ownership of the valuables on the train were "not identifiable," according to the report released last week by the commission. Hungarian Jewish leaders at the time criticized the decision, arguing that if they had access to the contents of the train they could help restitute the property. On Oct. 15, one day after the report was issued, Hungary’s Jewish leaders said they will seek to have the looted treasures returned to their rightful owners.

While much of the assets were auctioned in New York with proceeds going to refugee organizations, many other items such as rugs, china and crystal were simply taken by top American generals to display in their homes and offices, according to the report. The whereabouts of those objects are unknown. Other less valuable objects such as watches, jewelry and cameras were sold in U.S. Army Exchange stores. Other property was stolen from military warehouses.

Researchers for the commission also concluded that 1,181 paintings on the train were returned to Austria rather than to Hungary, their country of origin, in part because the United States was leery of Hungary’s move toward Communist rule and because U.S. officials may have wanted Austria, which they considered Nazi-occupied territory, to have valuables to use in war claim negotiations. The artworks’ whereabouts are currently unknown.

Ernst Bacher, an Austrian cultural official, has told the commission that "a portion of this property had been restituted," but he did not provide researchers with any specifics, according to Jonathan Petropoulos, head of the commission’s research team investigating art and cultural property.

Asked about possible restitution by the United States in light of the report’s findings, Steinberg said the return of the paintings to Austria rather than to Hungary raises some questions. There is "no indication that they have been restituted," Steinberg said of the artworks.

The commission, which was created last year, was charged with investigating the fate of Holocaust-era assets that came under the control of the United States and providing the president with recommendations for further action. It does not have the authority to make restitution itself.

"We do believe when we find the truth we have to do something about it," said Stu Loeser, the commission’s spokesman.

Loeser said the commission has opened a research office at the Center for Military History at Fort McNair in Washington and will try to locate former American servicemen who may know what happened to the property that was stolen from the train. The commission also said it will "search for individual claims made by Hungarian victims and try to determine if survivors or their heirs have also made efforts to regain their property."

Go here for more information:
http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/991022/looting.shtml

Maj. Gen. Collins takes command of 31st Division. 
The command of the Division was signed over to General Collins by Brigadier General Eugene W. Riddings in a brief ceremony at Dixie Division headquarters.  Gen. Riddings has been heading the division during the few days lapse since the departure of Maj. Gen. A. G. Paxton, past division commander.

the Cardinal - 05/01/1953

WELCOME TO CAMP ATTERBURY
The slogan for Armed Forces Day this year is...POWER FOR PEACE.  Camp Atterbury and the 31st Infantry "Dixie" Division are holding Open House so that you may get a closer look at the power.  We feel there is, and should be, more than casual interest in an exhibition of this sort.  Therefore, we have opened wide the gates of Camp Atterbury and planned what we hope will be an interesting, stimulating and educational day.  THIS IS YOUR ARMY.  We in uniform are working for you.  But, we are ALL working together for the protection of our fundamental rights as Americans.  Please feel free to ask questions at any of the displays or demonstrations.  We want you to understand your Army.  We hope that you will leave Camp Atterbury with a better understanding of weapons....training....and the American soldier.
Harry J, Collins
Major General, U. S. Army, Commanding

A Statement by the Commanding General
On 31 March I assembled all civilian employees at Camp Atterbury ad talked to them about their rights and privileges, and my policies.  At that time I told them that they would be notified as quickly as possible of any changes affecting their status of employment.  Recently a cut was made in the civilian personnel in the U. S. Army Hospital, Camp Atterbury.  This reduction in civilian personnel was based on a reduction of the bed capacity of the Camp Atterbury Hospital; therefore, it follows that a ratio reduction of civilian personnel needed for care of patients was necessary.  The reduction in bed capacity of a hospital, or increase in bed capacity, is not al all unusual, but rather, in times of emergency, quite normal.  Consistent with my policy, I was the first to notify them by my News-letter, which is published weekly.  Consequently, if in the future I am informed of any changes which will affect the civilian personnel of Camp Atterbury, or the Army, I likewise will notify them at the earliest possible time.  Maj. Gen. Harry J. Collins, Commanding

courtesy Ed Zerkle

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