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“THE CASE OF THE HUNGARIAN GOLD TRAIN” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1510-E1512 on July 22, 2004.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE CASE OF THE HUNGARIAN GOLD TRAIN
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HON. JOSE E. SERRANO
of new york
in the house of representatives
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an important issue of justice for Holocaust survivors: the saga of the Hungarian Gold Train, and the role played by the United States government.
As the Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust Assets, PCHA, first revealed in full in 1999, this was a dark mark on the otherwise heroic and exemplary role played by the United States in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. In 1944, the Nazis systematically confiscated the property of Hungary's Jews. A train loaded with stolen property was turned over to U.S. Army after World War II ended. Our policy and law required us to return that property to its rightful owners. Instead, the United States refused to return the property to Hungary--despite the pleas of Holocaust survivors. Worse, our government covered up the matter for half a century. As the PCHA concluded, the Gold Train is
``an example of an egregious failure of the United States to follow its own policy regarding restitution of Holocaust victims' property after World War II.''
As members of this House are well aware, the United States has been at the forefront of recent worldwide efforts to assure restitution and historic justice for Holocaust survivors. When other nations or their corporations have tried to use legalistic defenses, such as sovereign immunity or statutes of limitations, we have said forthrightly that there is a moral as well as a legal obligation to make historic amends. Sadly, in dealing with the claims of the Hungarian Holocaust survivors, our own government has taken the very approach we have decried elsewhere.
The survivors filed suit in federal court in Miami in 2001 seeking an accounting and restitution. The Justice Department has litigated this case in a manner that appears to ignore its moral dimensions, and that appears to contradict our bipartisan national policy on Holocaust restitution. It has sought to have the case thrown out of court--an effort rejected by Judge Patricia Seitz. It has insisted on taking grueling in-person depositions from dozens of elderly survivors. It only filed a substantive response to the lawsuit three years later. In that response, it chided the survivors themselves for lacking the ``due diligence'' to learn about the Gold Train, despite the fact that the government itself covered up the story and kept documents classified for decades! This sort of foot-dragging only adds insult to injury. The Department of Justice has a duty, in my view, not only to vigorously uphold the law, but also to pursue justice and seek fair restitution for those victims who lost property on the Gold Train.
The report accompanying the Commerce, Justice and State Appropriations bill makes clear the Appropriations Committee's concern over this issue. Report language indicates that the Committee is watching this case carefully. As I told Deputy Attorney General Comey when he testified before the Subcommittee in March, I have heard a great deal about this from Holocaust survivors. I feel very strongly that these individuals should not be dragged through further time-
consuming litigation and court proceedings.
Mr. Speaker, I believe the judge's order that the Justice Department mediate the case with the survivors is a very positive development. The parties have agreed that Fred Fielding, the former White House counsel to President Reagan and currently a member of the Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, the 9/11 Commission, will conduct the mediation. I will monitor this process, and work with Mr. Fielding as necessary to see that justice is done. As the report indicates, it is important that the Justice Department treat this mediation seriously and at last resolve this matter in a way that is fair, compassionate, and prompt.
I believe that the most authoritative account of this case--and of the United States government's moral duty to compensate these survivors--was recently written by the Hon. Stuart E. Eizenstat. Ambassador Eizenstat was the Special Representative on Holocaust Restitution Issues during his time as Under Secretary of State and Deputy Treasury Secretary during the 1990s. He sat on the PCHA and is respected worldwide for his balanced leadership on this issue. He recently wrote an article in the Forward, the respected Jewish newspaper. I strongly agree with the thrust of this article, and I would like to enter it into the record at the end of this statement.
Mr. Speaker, simply put, justice delayed is justice denied. These Holocaust survivors came to the United States to build new lives, and our government has wrongly withheld the compensation which could have helped in that process. They have been waiting for almost sixty years for justice. They should not have to wait any longer.
Integrity of the Restitution Process Rests on Single Standard of
Justice
(By Stuart Eizenstat)
During the last decade, Swiss, German, Austrian and French companies and their governments paid some $8 billion to Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Third Reich, disgorged thousands of dormant bank accounts, finally honored prewar insurance policies and returned confiscated property and artwork.
The Europeans paid reparations for their conduct during World War II, and restituted property even though their legal liability more than half a century later stood on shaky grounds. They did so in significant part because the American government insisted that they had a moral and historical responsibility to those they wronged.
Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot in the
``Hungarian Gold Train'' case. The American government is being sued by Jewish survivors for alleged improper handling of assets stolen from them by the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary. Faced with righting what may be America's historical wrong, the Justice Department has forgotten our own message to the world, and is relying on strict legal arguments to escape responsibility.
This is the wrong approach and should be corrected immediately, lest we lose the moral high ground that was indispensable to achieving our agreements--and that remains essential today to ensure our agreements are honored and that other human rights violations are taken seriously.
The U.S. Army was not only heroic in winning World War II, but also had an enviable postwar record in recovering Nazi-looted property. Unlike the Soviet Union, which took away valuable paintings and cultural property as war booty, the American government never tried to enrich itself as the victorious power. In accordance with international legal principles and American policy, art and cultural property was returned to the countries from which it had been taken. In turn, those countries were expected to return the property to the citizens from whom it had been confiscated.
But in regard to the Hungarian Gold Train, the American government followed a starkly different policy. The train, totaling 24 rail cars and holding countless Hungarian Jews' valuables that had been confiscated by the pro-Nazi Hungarian government, was seized by the U.S. Army in Austria in mid-May 1945, just after the war had ended. Despite constant appeals for years by the post-war Hungarian government and the official Hungarian Jewish organizations to return the property--even to simply permit an examination of the valuables--the American government refused. Even the American Legation to Hungary questioned Washington's refusal.
Instead, the U.S. Army declared the Gold Train assets
``enemy property'' unidentifiable as to individual ownership and national origin, making restitution infeasible. Instead of returning the property to the Hungarian government, as the French army did with other Jewish assets it seized after the war, some senior American military officers requisitioned the property to furnish their apartments in Austria. Other items, such as watches, alarm clocks and cameras, were sold through Army Exchange stores in Austria. More than 1,100 paintings, some with impressive credentials, were transferred by the U.S. Army to the Austrian government. A substantial amount of property was sold for auction in New York, with proceeds transferred to the International Refugee Organization to benefit Holocaust survivors. A small number of items simply were stolen.
None of the property, however, was returned to the large surviving Hungarian Jewish community from whom the Gold Train assets had been confiscated.
After successfully urging more than 20 countries to establish historical commissions to examine their role in dealing with looted Nazi assets, President Clinton followed my recommendation to create our own Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. The commission, headed by Edgar Bronfman--who played a critical role in exposing the misuse of Jewish bank accounts by Swiss banks--first publicly disclosed the disturbing facts about the Hungarian Gold Train in an interim report in 1999 and in a later report in December 2000. The Bronfman-led commission, in which I served as a commissioner, did not flinch from exposing misjudgments by the American government--just as the Clinton administration did not hesitate to do for so many years with other countries.
Our disclosures led to a private class-action lawsuit, Irvin Rosner et al v. United States, by more than 3,000 Hungarian Holocaust survivors against the American government, seeking an accounting of the contents of the Gold Train; a search of U.S. Army posts for the valuables and the return of any Gold Train property still in government hands; and up to $10,000 in damages from each member of the class of Hungarian Jewish survivors.
Instead of acting as we had urged foreign government and their companies to act, instead of even calling for an investigation of the facts to establish whether there truly was the kind of culpability our presidential commission found, the American government moved to dismiss the case on the basis of the statute of limitations, the sovereign immunity of the United States and the inappropriateness of the federal court system as a proper forum for these claims. The government has subjected elderly survivors to rigorous depositions, and has used an expert witness, the chair of Tel Aviv University's Jewish history department, to contest some of our commission's findings and the plaintiffs' more sensational allegations.
Even if the Hungarian Gold Train case is questionable on legal grounds, and even though some of the facts remain contested, the moral claim by the survivors that their assets were not returned is solid. What, then, should be done now?
For starters, the mindset of the Bush administration's Justice Department must change. We must hold ourselves to the same rigorous moral and historical accountability to which we have held foreign governments and their corporations. This was the basic argument made by a bipartisan group of 17 senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Trent Lott of Mississippi, in a recent letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As reported in these pages two weeks ago, U.S. Federal Judge Patricia Seitz granted part of the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the Hungarian Gold Train case, but denied other parts and has ordered the United States to submit to mediation. The Justice Department should now take the opportunity to allow the mediator to review all the records and documents and to weigh the contested facts, including the amount of Hungarian Jewish assets that was actually on the Gold Train.
Of course, it will be almost impossible for survivors to identify individual items that were confiscated from them and to determine which items made their way onto the Gold Train. That is why the Bush administration should apply the same
``rough justice'' concepts we used in negotiating with the Germans, Austrians, Swiss and French--this time, for the benefit of Hungarian Jewish survivors in the United States, Israel and Hungary.
After all, it was no easier for slave and forced laborers of German and Austrian companies to identify their employers. Yet German and Austrian corporations and their respective governments met their responsibility and paid billions of dollars to survivors, Jews and non-Jews alike. The French government likewise faced its moral responsibility to those victimized by Vichy France.
Justice would be served if the mediator appointed by Seitz was permitted to make a recommendation to the parties, Congress held a hearing on the mediator's findings and on competing allegations, and President Bush asked Congress for a reasonable lump sum payment to be allocated on a per capita basis to living Hungarian Holocaust survivors who file an affidavit identifying their moveable property that was taken in April 1944 by the pro-Nazi regime.
Obviously, the American government is only responsible for what it seized on the Gold Train and failed to return. And the amount should reflect that some of the assets were sold for the benefit of Holocaust survivors in the United States, a small number of whom were Hungarian Jews. The amount, however, is less important than establishing the principle that the United States will hold itself to the same standard to which we have held others.
And importantly, a simple, straightforward apology should accompany the payments for what was likely a singular deviation from the otherwise sterling conduct of the American military after World War II. The United States will then be in a stronger position to continue to urge other countries to meet their responsibilities--and we will have proved that when the shoe is on our foot, we can wear it.
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