The U.S. government will pay $25.5 million to settle a suit by Holocaust survivors over goods that were stolen by the Nazis in 1944 and which disappeared after they were recovered by the U.S. Army.
Most of the money will go to social welfare programs for survivors in the United States, Israel and Hungary, according to documents filed in federal court in Miami.
In addition, the government will make an uncommon "statement of acknowledgment" about the U.S. role in the looting of what has been dubbed the Hungarian Gold Train.
The case was the only Holocaust-related litigation in which the U.S. government was a defendant.
"I hope the money will go to those people who need it most," said Irving Rosner of Aventura, Fla., one of those who brought the suit.
Rosner, 82, was forced to work in a labor camp after the Nazis took him into custody in 1943 in Beregujfalu, Hungary. He came to the United States in 1949 after spending four years in a displaced persons camp.
"I'm happy they settled it," he said.
The events in the case came in the closing days of World War II. As Allied armies advanced, the Nazis occupying Hungary loaded a train 24 cars long with goods seized from Jews who had been imprisoned in concentration camps.
The Nazi goal was to ship the looted property -- gold, jewelry, Oriental rugs, clothing and artwork, including paintings by Rembrandt and Durer -- to Germany.
According to U.S. government reports, the train never arrived at its destination. Instead, the Nazis abandoned it in a tunnel about 60 miles from Salzburg, Austria. U.S. soldiers took control of it there. Some of the booty immediately vanished. The rest was sent to U.S. military warehouses in Austria.
What happened to much of the property is a mystery, according to the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets, which studied the case and published reports in October 1999 and December 2000.
The commission said Maj. Gen. Harry J. Collins, the chief U.S. military official in western Austria at the end of the war, had placed orders from the warehouse for enough china and silver for 45 people, as well as a dozen silver candlesticks, glassware, 30 sets of table linens, carpets and furs for his villa and a personal railroad car.
Collins died in 1963, and the fate of the goods he requisitioned was unknown, said Jonathan Cuneo, one of three lead lawyers for the survivors.
