The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews And the Second World War's Most Terrible Robbery - Hardcover

Zweig, Ronald

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9780713995466: The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews And the Second World War's Most Terrible Robbery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713995467 ISBN 13: 9780713995466

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2002

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With the Soviet army closing in on Budapest in 1944 a single train moved out of the station, crammed with valuable booty from the genocide (gold, jewels, silverware, furs and furniture) and a desperate group of collaborators, racist ideologues, civil-servants and bodyguards. The journey of the train is the story of this book - both the literal journey from Central Europe towards the chimerical Nazi 'Alpine Redoubt' and the symbolic journey whereby the Gold Train became the focus for the hopes,greed and fear of all those who came in contact with it. This is an exceptional account of the closing months of Fascist Europe and of how the post-war world tried to come to terms with the spiritual and physical inheritance of 400,000 murders.

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Synopsis:

In 1944 with the Red Army rapidly closing in, an extraordinary ragbag of fascist ideologues, thieves, civil servants and soldiers jumped on to the "Gold Train" in Budapest and headed west. On that train were carriage after carriage of loot gleaned from one of the century's most terrible crimes. The destruction of the Hungarian Jews happened late in the war and with a unique bureaucratic efficiency. The officials who meticulously stripped them of their jewellery, gold, silver, furnishings and other possessions before their murder carefully labelled each piece with its owner's name. This same sense of order led to the crazily perverse but logical idea that the stolen belongings of exterminated citizens were a major Hungarian state asset and that at all costs they had to be protected from the advancing Allies. Ronald Zweig's compelling book is the story of the great "Gold Train" and its journey. Even as it steamed out of the station, the value of its cargo took on a legendary quality - hundreds of millions of dollars on the move with its cunning, desperate or gullible passengers trying to reach an illusory Nazi stronghold in the Alps.

The fate of this property has been the subject of fantastic rumours ever since the end of the war and was the basis of a Cold War dispute between east and west. "The Gold Train" is about what happened to the train, but also about how even today its journey hasn't ended as the legal battles continue over its contents. This is a mesmerizing account both of events in a Europe gone mad and of the spiritual and physical inheritance of 400,000 murders.

About the Author:

Ronald Zweig is Lecturer in the history department at Tel Aviv University.

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