The Hungarian Gold Train – Investigating a 1945 US Military Handling Failure

In November 1947, Evelyn Tucker walked into a warehouse in Salzburg expecting to find about two hundred paintings. She counted 1,181. Her 1949 letter describing how senior American officers had drawn property from the Hungarian Gold Train to furnish their own quarters sat in a State Department file for forty-nine years before anyone reopened it.

Decree 1600 and the Receipts Issued at Source

The story of the Hungarian Gold Train begins with the paperwork. Before any train was loaded, every confiscated item passed through a formal Hungarian state process that issued receipts and tagged owners by name.

Hungarian Jews had been emancipated in law in 1867, and the population built significant wealth over the following seventy years. That stability ended in 1938 with the first anti-Jewish laws, and again on 7 March 1944 when German forces invaded under Operation Margarethe. Following the occupation, the Arrow Cross government enforced Decree 1600, which compelled Jewish citizens to surrender items of high monetary value. Receipts were issued for each surrender. Seized property was placed into individual bags and boxes that named the owners.

This is the baseline fact the rest of the investigation turns on. The property was identifiable at the point of origin.

By late 1944, the Soviet Army was advancing on Budapest. Arpad Toldi, an SS-appointed Hungarian official, loaded the sorted valuables onto a heavily guarded freight train. That train stalled in the mining town of Brennbergbanya from December 1944 until March 1945, then resumed its run westward as the Red Army closed in. On 29 March 1945, before the carriages departed for Austria, Toldi separated the highest-value items into forty-four crates and loaded them onto a convoy of trucks. He drove off to an undisclosed destination with those forty-four crates and ordered the remaining twenty-four boxcars to head west.

Photographs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, catalogue pa1156093, show ‘MAV Hungaria’ (Magyar Allam Vasutak, Hungarian State Railway) painted directly on the side of the boxcars. The cargo was not anonymous bullion. It was loaded onto a national railway whose carriages identified themselves on the outside.
The forty-four crates of higher-value loot never reappeared in any complete intake record located by this investigation.

Four Weeks of Interrogations at Werfen

The train came to a halt in Werfen, a small Austrian town in the shadow of the medieval Hohenwerfen Castle, on 16 May 1945. That was nine days after Germany’s unconditional surrender. Allied troops seized the cargo within hours.

What happened next is documented in the intelligence files, even though the original interrogation transcripts are not in the present evidence. Over the following four weeks, US Army Counterintelligence Corps investigators questioned the train entourage in detail. The interrogations established the exact provenance of the cargo. They placed Arpad Toldi at the top of a most-wanted list for the ‘destruction of Hungarian Jewry’.

The military knew exactly what it had taken custody of.

French forces detained Toldi himself in August 1945. They released him without charge in November 1945. The raw transcripts of those French and American interrogations are absent from the present file. So is something more basic. Standard intake procedure for any captured cargo of that size required formal inventory logs at the moment of seizure, and the May 1945 Werfen and Salzburg intake manifests, which would record what identifying marks and Hungarian receipts the intake officers logged before the cargo was reclassified, have not been located.

No unedited inventory page from those first four weeks has surfaced in any US Army records facility located so far.

General Clark’s Missing Ruling

The reclassification ruling sits at the centre of the failure chain, and the document itself is not in the file.

Every memorandum that justifies the dispersal cites General Mark Clark. As Commanding General of the United States Forces in Austria, Clark issued a determination that the cargo of the Gold Train was ‘unidentifiable as to owners and, in view of the territorial changes in Hungary, as to national origin’. That phrase governs every subsequent ruling on the property. It appears in supply manifests, sale authorisations, restitution denials, and finally in Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s 27 July 1948 cable to the United States Legation in Budapest.

What downstream documents refer to as ‘sometime in 1945’ has no date, no signature page, and no written justification in the material made available. The investigation cannot say with certainty whether Clark personally drafted the wording, or whether a subordinate intelligence or property control officer wrote it for his signature.

A Property Control Officer is the military officer responsible for managing captured goods in occupation warehouses, including the issue of supply forms and disposal authorisations. In Salzburg, that officer reported up the United States Forces in Austria command chain.

The ruling ran directly counter to the Allied policy in force at the time. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force directives, revised in June 1944, required military officers to actively protect cultural property from misappropriation and to return identifiable looted assets to their countries of origin. The policy was known as External Restitution, meaning property was returned to allied governments, who then handled internal redistribution.

Hungarians were trying to identify their property. On 24 July 1945, a Hungarian representative named Mr Von Csillaghy met Lieutenant Colonel Heller in Salzburg and presented luggage inventories for the train cargo. On 20 December 1945, the Central Bureau of Hungarian Jews wrote to the United States Legation in Budapest formally requesting a negotiation delegation. The Budapest legation did not reply.

The December 1945 letter is cited in the evidence. The receiving stamp, the legation case officer, and the routing slip that should accompany a formal external diplomatic communication of that kind are not present in the file.

Authorship of the wording, whether Clark drafted it himself or signed a subordinate’s draft, cannot be established from the available material.

Banquet Chinaware for Forty-Five People

Once the cargo was on the books as ownerless military salvage, the standard supply forms did the rest. The Salzburg warehouse stopped functioning as a custody facility and started functioning as a depot.

A supply manifest dated 13 July 1945 logged eight paintings, five rugs, and a quantity of onyx objects moving from the ‘Hungarian Train, Military Government Warehouse‘ to Major General Harry J. Collins, Commander of the 42nd Infantry Division. The form was an ordinary military supply manifest of the kind used to move bedframes and typewriters.

On 28 August 1945, an aide to General Collins followed up with a written memorandum to the Property Control Officer in Salzburg. That memorandum directed the officer to give ‘first priority’ to obtaining formal banquet chinaware, silverware, and glassware sufficient for forty-five people, together with thirty sets of table linens. The items were destined for Collins’s private villa and his personal railcar.

Other senior officers followed the same procedure. Brigadier General Henning Linden and General Edgar E. Hume drew table linens, glassware, and artwork from the warehouse for their own quarters.

No record in the file shows any Property Control Officer refusing a senior officer’s draw on the warehouse.

The requisition forms used the same paperwork as any other supply depot request. Clerks processing the forms saw a commanding officer’s dining room order. They did not see, on the paperwork in front of them, the receipts that had been issued to Hungarian Jews in 1944.

The most contested historical reading of the file also sits in this section. The 1999 federal audit and the plaintiffs in the Rosner v. United States lawsuit characterised the requisitioning as systemic looting on a large scale. The Holocaust historian Ronald W. Zweig disputed that reading in his 2002 book, arguing that the requisitions accounted only for a small fraction of the cargo and that no evidence supported the wider larceny claim. The supply manifests themselves are not in dispute. The scale and the moral framing of the requisitions are.

An internal Property Control review of the senior-officer draws between July and August 1945 does not appear in the available file.

The Sale Concurrence of 29 November 1946

The senior officers’ requisitions were not the only outflow from the warehouse. A parallel commercial sale process began in 1946.

A United States Forces in Austria headquarters memorandum dated 6 March 1946 set out a sorting protocol. Ordinary, low-quality clothing was earmarked for local relief distribution. The high-quality items were withheld from relief and saved for commercial sale.

On 18 November 1946, the Salzburg Property Control Officer formally recommended selling the ‘Werfen Train rugs and furs’ to prevent them losing their commercial value. Eleven days later, on 29 November 1946, the Chief of the Restitution, Deliveries, and Restoration Division signed a concurrence memorandum. That memorandum authorised disposal of the assets ‘either on the Austrian open market, or by sale through the Army Exchange Service for dollar credits’. The Army Exchange Service is the United States military’s internal retail network for serving soldiers and their families.

What the property had been was now formally separated, on paper, from how it would be sold.

On 17 October 1947, Hungary filed an official restitution claim with the United States military authorities. The claim went unacted upon. Between June and December 1948, the Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization auctioned the property in New York and generated about 3.5 million United States dollars for general refugee resettlement.

The 6 March 1946 sorting memorandum reads as a routine inventory procedure for surplus depot stock. Receipts that had attached owners to the goods in 1944 are not referenced anywhere in the disposal chain.

Nothing in the file shows whether the cultural-property officers attached to the Allied military’s preservation unit were copied on the November 1946 sale memoranda before the concurrence was signed.

Evelyn Tucker Counts 1,181 Paintings

The art historian Evelyn Tucker was finally informed of the warehouse cache in 1947. She worked for the Allied military unit responsible for locating, documenting, and protecting cultural property displaced during the war.

On 5 November 1947, the Restitution, Deliveries, and Restoration Division authorised the release of ‘approximately two hundred paintings’ to her custody. Between 6 and 11 November 1947, Tucker walked through the upstairs room of the Salzburg Military Government Warehouse, which the staff referred to as the ‘gold room’, and counted the paintings physically. She counted 1,181. The paintings were clearly of Hungarian origin.

The number on the authorising paper was off by close to a thousand.

A note on the figure: Tucker’s count is 1,181. A separate 1952 document by Ardelia Hall at the State Department gives the number as 1,176. The 1999 federal audit confirms both numbers refer to the same body of paintings.

Eight months after Tucker’s inspection, the official line tightened. On 27 July 1948, Secretary of State Marshall sent his cable to Budapest formally denying Hungarian restitution claims. Marshall relied on Clark’s ‘unidentifiable’ ruling and on the argument that Hungary’s borders had shifted during the war.

Tucker wrote her own assessment six months after Marshall’s cable. On 6 January 1949, in a letter to Ardelia Hall, the State Department’s Advisor for Restitution issues, she described how senior American officers had drawn cultural property from the warehouse to furnish their clubs and private offices. Tucker characterised the conduct as ‘hardly short of criminal’. That phrase is her stated opinion, in her own words. Whether the requisitions amounted to criminal conduct as a matter of law is the same question that Zweig contested half a century later.

Tucker’s letter was filed into the Ardelia Hall document collection at the National Archives, where it remained unread by the public for forty-nine years. Researchers for the Presidential Advisory Commission located it in 1998.

Any earlier written objection Tucker may have raised through an internal channel, before she sat down to draft the January 1949 letter, has not been traced.

Fifty-Six Years to a Federal Settlement

The federal audit closed the public silence in 1999. On 14 October 1999, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets published a progress report titled ‘The Mystery of the Hungarian Gold Train’. The report labelled the military’s handling ‘an egregious failure’ to follow the country’s own restitution policy. Tucker’s letter, located in the archive the previous year, was the document the audit pivoted on.

Legal action followed within two years. In 2001, Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their heirs filed a class-action lawsuit, Rosner v. United States, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The government sought to dismiss the suit on statute-of-limitations and discretionary-act grounds. On 26 November 2002, the court denied the motion to dismiss and allowed the case to proceed. The case settled in 2005 for 25.5 million United States dollars. The settlement closed the federal litigation but did not produce any of the missing documents this investigation has been unable to locate.

The 2005 settlement came fifty-six years after Tucker put her letter into the diplomatic pouch, and seven years after researchers reopened the file in 1998.

Subsequent declassification has not, on the present file, returned the Werfen intake manifests or the signed copy of General Clark’s reclassification order.

Source

Sources include: the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the US Staff Report (Chapters II, IV, and V, 1999); the ‘Gold Train Report’ from UNT Libraries; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection catalogues (pa1156092 and pa1156093); and records from the United States District Court Southern District of Florida case ‘Rosner v. United States’ (2002).