The Gold Train, by Ronald Zweig

A horrifying tale of genocide, greed and gold

In the late 1990s it looked as if the "last chapter of the Holocaust" would be about Nazi gold, stolen art and claims for compensation by victims and their heirs. This frenzy provoked cynicism and spawned the myth of a "Holocaust industry": the claim that a worldwide conspiracy existed to extort cash for the benefit of Israel and the Jews.

Ronald Zweig's account of the Nazi despoliation in Hungary and its aftermath could not be more different from most other books on the subject. Zweig explains why it remains crucial to understand the pillaging by Nazis and their allies, and why it left issues still unresolved.

Despoliation and genocide were interconnected. Jews were hugely important in the development of the Hungarian economy, but nationalists envied their success and fostered a myth that Jews hoarded wealth. Between 1938 and 1942, governments passed laws to exclude Jews from the economy. When the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, anti-Semites put into operation an "orchestrated campaign of ethnic asset-stripping".

Hungarians abetted the deportation of 437,000 Jews, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The victims were robbed at each stage of the genocidal process. It did not matter that the "value" of Hungarian Jews lay less in their property than in their professional contribution to the country they loved. In an orgy of avarice, Hungarians descended on Jewish compatriots and stripped them bare.

So much loot was collected that, when it was evacuated from the path of the invading Red Army in December 1944, a freight train with 40 wagons was needed. There was about two tons of gold, including 40,000 wedding rings and 100,000 watches, and tons of silver, comprising jewellery, household items, and ornaments robbed from synagogues.

While this "gold train" was parked in a mining town, the presiding official, Arpad Toldi, began siphoning off gold, diamonds and cash. He ordered the train into Austria and drove off with the gold in a fleet of trucks, promising to meet the train later. Toldi made a deal with Wilhelm Höttl, a devious SS intelligence officer; in return for 10 per cent of the gold, Höttl agreed to help Toldi reach Switzerland.

Both men were ludicrously careless. Toldi buried his stash so badly that Austrian farmers discovered the hoard and squabbled over the gold as hard as they squandered it. Their sudden prosperity came to the attention of the French occupiers. Höttl entrusted his pile to a drunken colleague, killed in a pub brawl before he confided where it was hidden. When the war ended the train was discovered by the US Army, only to be caught in negotiations over reparations for the survivors of Nazi persecution. But the French, who had the gold, used it to recover rolling stock from the Hungarians, who then paid it to the Russians as war "reparations". Only 20 out of 800,000 Hungarian Jews got anything back.

Zweig recounts these dealings with commendable lucidity and restraint. He reconstructs the amazing saga from fragmentary documentation, and tells it with the minimum of embellishment. The Gold Train is a fine example of how a horrifying episode from the Nazi era can be told without histrionics. Genocide does not usually serve as holiday reading, but this page-turner will leave you sorrier and wiser.