The US government has agreed to pay Hungarian Jews for the looting of their valuables by American soldiers during the Holocaust.

Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, told the New York Times, that the sum, $25.5 million, is ‘a symbolic acknowledgement of an isolated and unfortunate chapter of the Americans’ role in the Holocaust.” Nevertheless, ‘the acknowledgement matters,” he said, “history matters.”

The stolen property included gold, silver, paintings and furs that were loaded on a train to Austria that was intercepted by the American army in 1945. The items were sent to a warehouse and much of it was sold to soldiers, according to a report by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. A large portion of the property, including two suitcases filled with gold dust, was stolen by US soldiers as well.

The lawsuit, which has been going on for three years, originally sought $10,000 for about 30,000 Jews from Hungary. As part of the settlement deal $21 million will be given to social welfare groups assisting Jews in need who lived in Hungary’s 1944 borders from 1939 until 1945. The settlement, which still needs to be ratified by the presiding judge, would also require the government to declassify all of the documents involved in the case for archiving.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 and is filed under hotnews.