By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
The Internet has come to the aid of World War II-era Holocaust victims from Hungary whose possessions were stolen from them twice: first by the Nazis and then by the liberating American army. Shortly before Thanksgiving, the Seattle law firm of Hagens Berman, which filed a class action suit on behalf of the Hungarian survivors, announced that they had set up a Web site to help survivors and their families identify items that were stolen from them.
At the end of World War II, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art, heirlooms and other property looted from Hungarian Jews by the Nazi occupation forces was confiscated by the U.S. Army and loaded onto a train headed west. But when it arrived in Austria, instead of seeking out the rightful owners among the Holocaust’s survivors to return it, they were confiscated by the liberating army.
The total value of the confiscated treasures is estimated to have been worth as much as $120 million in 1945. If so, in 2003 dollars they would be worth more than $1 billion. More than 6,000 descriptions and photos of gold, artwork, jewelry, and other furnishings that were stolen by the Hungarian Nazi government have been assembled from the original 1948 auction catalogs and are displayed on an Internet database.
Although the army had evidence of personal ownership — including inventories prepared by the Nazis — the property was sold through the Army Exchange Service or donated to international refugee organizations. Some of the possessions were even kept by officers and used as home and office furnishings. All this came to light in 1999, when the Presidential Advisory Commission on the Holocaust Assets released its report on the Gold Train.
In 2001, Hagens Berman filed a class action lawsuit, known in the courts as Irving Rosner, et al v. United States of America, to allow the remaining Holocaust survivors and their families to claim their long-lost treasures. Members of the law firms of Dubbin & Kravetz, L.L.P and Cuneo Waldman & Gilbert, LLP are also working on the legal team representing the Holocaust victims.
The Gold Train class action claims the government made no effort to return the valuable personal assets, did not truthfully respond to the postwar Hungarian government and a delegation of Hungarian Jews who sought information about the property, and suppressed the truth about its actions for more than half a century. Since filing the lawsuit, attorneys and investigators have found information to support their claim in a variety of sources, including formerly classified U.S. government documents from the U.S. archives and the Clinton Presidential Library. They have also uncovered documents from Hungarian and Israeli government archives.
Based on this new evidence, they filed an amended complaint, claiming the U.S. auctioned off the valuables to cover up widespread looting by senior military officers and to fill in budget gaps in international refugee resettlement programs following the Second World War.
“More than 50 years ago, the U.S. either improperly looted or auctioned off these priceless Jewish heirlooms, scattering the truth about the U.S. Army’s looting figuratively and literally around the world,” said Steve Berman, managing partner at Hagens Berman. “We can now start to recover the truth — that the U.S. should have returned this property so the Hungarian Jews could restart their lives with their families’ belongings.”
Berman is a nationally recognized expert in class action litigation. He was one of the attorneys who represented the states in the tobacco industry lawsuits that resulted in the largest monetary settlement in the history of litigation. Dubbin & Kravetz currently represents Holocaust survivors and heirs with claims against major European insurance companies, as well as a national coalition of Holocaust Survivor organizations involved with the recovery and allocation of Holocaust restitution funds.
D.C-based Cuneo Waldman & Gilbert represents consumers, investors, workers and businesses in class action cases including white-collar crime, antitrust, securities, product safety, and privacy rights.
Last year a Miami, Fla. court cleared the way for the survivors to seek an accounting to find out what had become of the property and to seek restitution from the government, dismissing the U.S. government’s claim that the six-year statute of limitations for the suit had long since expired. In part, the court ruled that the government should not be allowed to profit from its own misconduct by counting the six years from the time of the incident, rather than the time that the alleged duplicity was made public.
“The United States should have a willingness to make things right even after years of inaction. We must ensure that our government and its armed forces are held accountable for past misbehavior in order to prevent its recurrence by any military forces in the future,” said Mark Talisman, founding vice chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying the case is “about accountability, memory and the rule of law,” as well as the practical matter of getting back their things after all these years or, at least receiving monetary compensation.
Attorneys representing the victims said that recovery of the actual items is highly unlikely. Still, the identification of the auctioned items’ owners is an important step in reaching a resolution.
The online database, which can be found at www.hagens-berman.com/goldtrain, is divided into 14 separate categories including: gold jewelry and ornaments, silver and silver-plate, rugs and carpets (including both oriental and machine-woven ones) and lace items. Users can view both lists of descriptions and photos, or just look at pictures. They can search for specific items or browse within a each category. If Holocaust survivors or their heirs find an item they believe had been confiscated from their family, the Web site will show them how to submit a claim. The lawyers said survivors and heirs should try to find photographs and other family records to help support their claims.