The gold train - Ronald W Zweig

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.