GIS PLUNDERED WWII SPOILS, REPORT SUGGESTS.

Byline: Tim Golden The New York Times

In the last weeks of World War II, as Soviet troops advanced from the east, Nazi officials in Hungary ordered a train be sent west toward Germany with the collected wealth of Hungary's decimated Jews. Their wedding bands alone filled crate after crate.

American troops intercepted the train in Austria, in May 1945, and moved its contents - gold, silver, paintings, furs - to a warehouse near Salzburg. But according to a preliminary report released Thursday by U.S. investigators, the Americans were neither careful nor selfless custodians.

Rebuffing pleas from the Hungarian government and surviving Hungarian Jews, U.S. officials declared the valuables ``unidentifiable'' and refused to let the Hungarians inspect them. Then, while the fate of the loot was being resolved, the report said, the Americans apparently helped themselves.

According to documents cited by the investigators, Gen. Harry J. Collins, the commander of U.S. forces in the area, requisitioned silver and china from the warehouse, ordering that it be ``of the very best quality and workmanship available in the land.'' He furnished his Austrian villa with some of the Hungarians' carpets and silver candlesticks, and his senior officers followed suit.

Clocks, jewelry and furs that had belonged to Hungarian Jews were appropriated by the Army and sold to soldiers. A pair of suitcases filled with gold dust disappeared, the researchers found, and other property was stolen from the warehouse by soldiers, apparently with the collusion of the guards.

Eventually, many of the remaining valuables were auctioned in New York and the proceeds given to a U.N. refugee agency. But the report by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States suggests that at least in the case of Austria, American forces ignored regulations calling for the preservation of victims' assets and their return to the country from which they were seized.

``Here you have a massive exception to those rules,'' said Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, one of the Clinton administration's representatives on the commission.

``We suspected when we set up this commission that there might be some dark chapters in our immediate post-war history,'' Eizenstat said in an interview. But, he added, ``we want to establish the principle that the United States is willing to hold itself to the same high standard to which it has held others.''

Researchers for the commission cast their findings as preliminary, and they cautioned some important parts of the story remain unclear. Chief among the unanswered questions is why Gen. Mark Clark, the commander of U.S. forces in Austria, decided the property could not be identified, when it appears the train carried at least some information about the original owners.

The Pentagon's representative to the commission, P.T. Henry, said the Army Center for Military History was examining military records to try to determine the context of Clark's decision. ``The Army is committed to telling the story on this,'' said Henry, an assistant Army secretary. ``We are not going to half-step.''

Still, the study largely confirms and expands upon the findings of an amateur American historian, Kenneth D. Alford, who first reported the pilfering of assets from the ``Hungarian gold train'' in 1994 in his book ``The Spoils of World War II''.

Working mainly from government files at the National Archives and elsewhere, the commission's researchers also discovered the train contained more than 1,100 paintings taken from Hungarian Jews and apparently turned over by the United States to the government of Austria.

The fate of the paintings is unknown. But the researchers said a recovered inventory of the paintings included considerable identifying information, raising the possibility a cache of less-famous art works looted in the Holocaust might someday be returned to their owners.

``Not all the Jews were Rothschilds, and most of their paintings were not masterpieces,'' said Konstantin Akinsha, the researcher who found the inventory. ``This is the first time we have found a large group of that type of paintings.''

Ulf Pacher, a spokesman for the Austrian Embassy in Washington, said the matter would be investigated. The commission's research director for art and cultural property, Jonathan Petropoulos, said a senior Austrian cultural official had reported back that some of the paintings apparently had been returned, but without specifying when or to whom.