Spoils Of War Essay, Research Paper

Spoils of warThe Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Second World War’s Most Terrible Robberyby Ronald Zweig>336pp, Allen LaneIn mid-December 1944, as the Soviet army began to encircle Budapest, a train of 42 wagons left the Hungarian capital. They were bound, it was said, for a supposed Nazi “Alpine redoubt”. The wagons contained valued possessions – ranging from Persian carpets to gold wedding rings and silver religious artefacts – that had been systematically plundered from Hungarian Jewry following the Nazi occupation of the country nine months previously.As the Gold Train trundled its way westwards, its contents and those in charge of them underwent a series of adventures that, but for the deep tragedy which surrounded the entire enterprise, might otherwise be characterised as almost comic. One virtue of Ronald Zweig’s definitive account of the train – its origins, its journey and its fate – is the measured pace at which he is able to tell a most complicated story in a most uncomplicated way. The book makes compelling reading.Some of the loot was pilfered during the 14-week journey, which ended prematurely in Salzburg. Some was hidden in hamlets and forests along the route. Some was sold, or given away as bribes to ensure the train’s safe passage. In the village of Schann, in the Austrian Tyrol, local farmers and their wives could hardly believe their good fortune when they came upon crates of the buried treasure. They claimed them as their own, even though their origin must have been obvious from the nature of the contents.As Zweig rightly reminds us, the story of the Gold Train is important on several interconnecting levels. The plan to systematically rob Hungarian Jews of their possessions did not originate with the Nazis. The commander of the train, Arpád Toldi, a Hungarian police officer of no importance until the Nazi takeover, was not a member of the Hungarian Nazi movement. But he was a virulent anti-semite, a devout believer in the myth of a conspiracy by Jewish plutocrats and Jewish Bolsheviks to plunder the wealth of Hungary for their own cosmopolitan ends.Anti-semitism in Hungary had a long history. Emancipated in 1867, the Jews of Hungary occupied a precarious position in the Hungarian state, between the Magyars (who constituted just over half the population) and a miscellany of Slavic peoples and ethnic Germans. The Catholic Church never accepted the emancipation, and used its considerable influence to undermine it.In 1938 the so-called liberal-conservative government of Kálmán Darányi enacted the First Jewish Law, designed to squeeze Jews out of Hungary’s professional and economic life. Darányi’s successor, Béla Imrédy, promised to exclude Jews from the national and cultural life of the state. The Second Jewish Law (1939) banned all Jews from employment in the public sector and imposed severe restrictions on Jews in the private sector.These enactments pleased Magyar nationalists, but did not please them enough. In one sense, the wartime Nazi takeover was not an invasion at all. Rather, the radical right invited the Nazis in, and used the military hardware their guests had kindly brought with them to realise one of their most cherished ambitions: the liquidation of all Jewish property in Hungary. In a few short and terrifying months, in the spring and summer of 1944, they did exactly that.It was the Magyars who systematically persecuted, plundered and tortured the Jews, forcing them to yield up their possessions. It was the German Nazis who conveniently disposed of the human remnants of this spoliation. We might observe in passing that the Jews of France were “collected” by French policemen, and that the Jews of the Baltic states were rounded up by local militias, eager to please the Nazis and to benefit from the confiscation of Jewish property.All the while, the Catholic Church looked on. When midwives were brought in to conduct intimate examinations of Hungarian Jewish women, looking for concealed valuables, the Bishop of Csanád did complain to his superior – but only to protest that these examinations “per inspectionem vaginae” were conducted in the presence of men.And to whom or to what did all these looted possessions belong, if not to those from whom they had been plundered? To the Third Reich, which had, after all, facilitated their confiscation in the first place? To the Hungarian state? To the remnants of the Jewish people? As the Reich crumbled before the advancing Allied armies, the scattered contents of the Gold Train became pawns in the reshaping of post-war Europe.The puppet government installed by Stalin in Budapest demanded that the contents be repatriated. Jewish Holocaust survivors at first supported this argument, but later recanted when it became clear that the Communists had no intention of applying loot recovered from the French to the task of rebuilding Hungarian Jewish life.The French had done their own deal with the Communists partly in order to recover French property in Hungary, but mainly to snub the British and the Americans. In Washington the Truman administration pressed for the remaining contents of the Gold Train to be handed over to Jewish organisations – a plan Clement Attlee’s government did its best to sabotage, fearing that the proceeds of any disposal would be used to fund “illegal” Jewish immigration to Palestine.Eventually it was agreed that the contents would be auctioned off in New York City. The gross income from these and other sales totalled just over $2m – a far cry from the estimates of up to $350m that were made in 1938.In a poignant conclusion to a story brilliantly told, Zweig points out a simple lesson. Assets have value only insofar as people want to possess them. A Jewish religious artefact generally has value only if a thriving Jewish community wishes to purchase it. But if you destroy the community, the value will fall, and all you are likely to be left with is the price of the raw materials. The true value of the Gold Train was lost forever in the crematoria of Auschwitz.· Professor Geoffrey Alderman is the author of Modern British Jewry (Oxford)