Self-Financing Genocide : : The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews / / Zoltán Vági, Gábor Kádár.

Discusses the process of the economic annihilation of the Jews in Hungary, who- from the economic point of view - were more influential than any other Jewish community in Europe. Following the German occupation in March 1944 the collaborating Hungarian government attempted to assert its claim concer...

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Bibliographic Details
Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Central European University Press eBook-Package 2013-1998
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Place / Publishing House:Budapest ;, New York : : Central European University Press, , [2022]
©2004
Year of Publication:2022
Language:English
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Physical Description:1 online resource (440 p.)
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Table of Contents:
  • Frontmatter
  • Table of Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • List of Tables
  • Acknowledgments
  • Preface
  • Prologue: The specifics of the genocide against Hungarian Jews
  • Part I. Rationality and Holocaust: Self-financing Genocide
  • 1. Hungarians and Jews
  • 2. The demography and sociology of the Jews before the German occupation of Hungary
  • 3. The economic status of Hungarian Jews
  • 4. The wealth of the Hungarian Jews
  • 5. The wealth of Hungarian Jews in international comparison
  • 6. From crisis to crisis: Anti-Semitic concepts and practice (1919–1936)
  • 7. Race-protectionism, the wealth of Jews, Aryanization (1936–1944)
  • 8. The road to the Holocaust: Hungarian Jews during the Second World War (1939–1944)
  • 9. 1944—The looting of Jewish wealth and its main problems: Speed, legal controversies, institutional rivalry, and the Germans
  • 10. Lofty goals and disillusioning reality
  • 11. Self-financing genocide 1: From death camps to budget, or: The Reich, occupied Europe, and Operation Reinhard
  • 12. Self-financing genocide 2: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the German budget, and the postwar fate of Hungarian Jewish property and the Melmer deposits
  • 13. Self-financing genocide 3: The profit to the Hungarian budget
  • 14. Multiple plunder: The fate of Hungarian Jewish assets at the end of the war and after 1945
  • Part II. Legend and Reality: The Story of Kurt Becher
  • 1. The character and the sources
  • 2. Soldier, businessman, bureaucrat, mass murderer? Becher’s career until 1944
  • 3. Artificial chaos: Becher’s position in Hungary
  • 4. In the gateway to success: The Weiss Manfréd affair
  • 5. The Kasztner affair
  • 6. Stopping deportations and death marches from Budapest
  • 7. Halting the mass extermination of the Jews
  • 8. Becher: Savior of the Pest ghetto and Chief Inspector of the concentration camps?
  • 9. Evacuation: Removal of the Hungarian industry to the Reich
  • 10. Becher’s personal gain
  • 11. Assessment of Becher’s character
  • Part III. The Story of the Hungarian Jewish Gold Train
  • 1. Assembling the contents of the Gold Train
  • 2. The train’s journey
  • 3. The trucks and Toldy’s journey
  • 4. International legal background and problems of definition
  • 5. The fate of those contents of the Gold Train which fell into American hands (1945–1957)
  • 6. Hungarian attempts to recover the contents of the Gold Train
  • 7. Critique of U.S. restitution policy and practice pursued in relation to the Gold Train
  • 8. The fate of the treasure that fell under French control
  • 9. The value of the contents of the Gold Train
  • 10. The historiography of the Gold Train
  • Illustrations
  • Appendix
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Bibliography
  • Index of Personal Names
  • Index of Geographical Names
  • Subject Index