Going for the Gold

...It is certainly not a reason to accuse Swiss banks of an improper and uncaring attitude...

...Because, like the system itself, it's available directly from Bose...

...Even when the facts were clearer, the Allies adjusted neither their military strategies nor immigration policies to address this reality...

...Jewish organizations, looking to create a trust fund for survivors, have staked a claim on as much as $7.4 billion that they maintain the Swiss either laundered for the Nazis or stole from Holocaust victims...

...The cost was a policy of self-defense that allowed it to abet the war effort of the Nazis...

...Call today...

...We know that's hard to believe...

...Both the Swiss and German national banks, which handled the large gold transactions, accounted for their purchases and sales in the way that so much suffering in World War II was recorded—with an accountant's pencil...

...Unlike the Swiss army, the French army fell to the Germans in a number of weeks, and the Vichy government, as shown by its treatment of the Jews, was as cruel as that of its masters in Germany...

...and Britain suppressed clear evidence that Germany had declared a war of annihilation against the Jews...

...But during the war Switzerland absorbed more than io percent of its population as refugees...

...And the records of settlements with Holocaust survivors after the war are as impossible to trace as are the exchange rates of European currencies that no longer exist...

...George Patton found loo tons of gold in a German salt mine, but these spoils of war were distributed to Allied central banks, not individual victims...

...And it produces a rich, natural sound quality comparable to audio systems costing thousands of dollars...

...Franco's Spain maintained membership in the Axis club throughout the war...

...After the war, Switzerland paid war reparations to the Allies, as compensation for its fortunes of neutrality...

...Never mentioned in a Time cover story, illustrated with a swastika of gold bars, is that in the years 1939-45 the Swiss National Bank purchased almost twice as much gold from the United States as it did from the Germans...

...In 1946, to settle the claims of war-profiteering and to rejoin the bloc of Western trading nations, the Swiss agreed to pay the Allies reparations of 25o million Swiss francs ($6o million, or 6 percent of that year's federal budget...

...The methods varied, and there was a decided difference between the style of the bland representatives of the Deutsche Bank who cheated French and Belgian industrialists out of their holdings by quasi-legal methods and that of Herman Goering greedily egging his associates on "to plunder and plunder copiously...

...Both the U.S...

...Unlike the rest of Europe, Switzerland survived the war intact, with neither its population nor its cities in ruins...

...in short, they helped finance the German war effort—and this while their government was avowing a wartime "neutrality" whose full price has yet to be revealed...

...In the cover story of its European edition, "Called to Account," Time extrapolates from one woman's disappointment with Swiss banking to allege systematic fraud: What happened, Sapir and other Jewish survivors of the Holocaust charge, is that Swiss banks implacably refused to hand over to the survivors of death camps or their heirs the money deposited in secret, numbered accounts before World War II engulfed Europe...

...Most press accounts assume that without Swiss trade the Nazi war machine might have ground to a halt...

...Voegeli, who after World War II worked as a lawyer in London and Zurich trying to trace the Swiss accounts of Holocaust survivors: After 1952, I was once again involved in this depressing—because of the sad circumstances —area, this time in the legal department of a big bank in Zurich...

...The Swiss no more comprehended the sweeping tragedy of the Holocaust than did the Allies...

...To substantiate the claim that Swiss banks collaborated with the German war effort, the suit quotes at length, not from Swiss sources or one of the many books published on this question, but from a U.S...

...And several lawsuits have been filed, one claiming as much as $20 billion from Swiss banks, which in their searches since 1985 have found only $29 million in unclaimed funds...

...Subscribe to The American Spectator ...call 1-80o-524-3469 30 May 1997 • The American Spectator...

...That most countries in Europe during World II committed atrocities does not mean that Switzerland's conduct should go unexamined...

...Central Europe lay in ruins, and the Swiss were shunned in the West for their dealings with Germany...

...A deposit made in 1938 in Reichsmarks would have been worthless at the war's end, as would have bonds issued by a Romanian industrial company or the obligations of the Czech government...

...In my experience, banks and insurance companies paid claims without making a lot of fuss when the claimant could provide reasonably sufficient proof...

...As the suit inveighs: From 1933 through at least 1946, the Swiss collaborated and acted in complicity with and aided and abetted the activities of the Nazi Regime in furtherance of the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, slavery and slave labor, and genocide...

...In 1962, the Swiss banks formally investigated the dormant accounts of persons who may have died in the war, but all that surfaced was io million Swiss francs (then $2.5 million), which was paid to survivors and Jewish causes...

...Better sound through research 27 over funds that were first deposited, prior to World War II, by persons who later died in the Holocaust...

...The New York Times published the indictments in the guise of an editorial: A lingering mystery of the Nazi era is what happened to the gold, money and other valuables deposited in Swiss banks by Jews throughout Europe who were fearful their assets would be seized by Germany...

...Deserving further research, perhaps by the editors of the Washington Post, is the statistic that the Swiss National Bank sold to the Americans the same amount of gold that it purchased from the Reichsbank, raising the strong possibility that the U.S...

...Toward the end of the war, the Allies blacklisted Swiss companies that traded with the enemy...

...To wit: "Defendant Swiss Bank Corporation is a banking institution organized under the laws of Switzerland...

...Its client, Croatia, enthusiastically carried out policies of extermination...

...These amounts relate—give or take a few billion—to the current market value of the gold that the Swiss National Bank purchased from the German Reichsbank...

...In fact, Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) has its headquarters in Basel...

...And money found its way to Switzerland in the bags of traveling salesmen who may have lost track of their friends as the populations of Eastern Europe started to drift like ocean sands...

...it was never launched as more important projects came to the fore in German planning...

...There is a section boldly entitled "Factual Allegations: the Nazi Regime and Swiss It may be small...

...But at that point the Swiss were branded collaborators, and at least in the press the right to appeal was denied...

...Despite being surrounded on all sides by fascism, it preserved a nation that could easily have disintegrated along the lines of its French, German, and Italian speaking communities...

...Apparently the best legal team money could rent does not include anyone who can read German, French, or Italian, the three major languages in Switzerland, as all the sources cited in the lawsuit are in English, and most come from Washington archives, which, as in the Senate hearings or the forthcoming report of Stuart Eisenstadt, are assumed to be the Rosetta Stone of Swiss history...

...The Swiss responded to the charges by agreeing with the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency to convene what is called an Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, with Paul Volcker as chairman, to audit the records of Swiss banks for the money of Holocaust victims...

...Treasury Department internal memorandum, drafted during the war in Washington: In general the Swiss Bank Corporation officials have served the German [sic] and Italians in the field of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, electricity, and metal products...

...CDD-A575, The Mountain, Framingham, MA 01701-9168...

...Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania lacked the military preparedness to oppose the German onslaught, and many of their soldiers were impressed into German divisions or the mechanics of the Holocaust...

...Further charges have been brought by New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who convened the Senate banking committee to document the misconduct of the Swiss in World War II and to chronicle the more recent Swiss refusal to return the savings of Holocaust victims to rightful heirs or worthy causes...

...The class action suit, filed in New York, describes one claim as follows: To Lewis Salton's best recollection, he knew his parents had traveled to Switzerland, he knew his father conducted stamp transactions with Edelman in Zurich, and he overheard his father's telephone calls discussing stamp-related banking transactions occurring in Switzerland...

...Tracing the source of looted gold is, unfortunately, impossible from the records of the Swiss banks alone...

...During the war, the U.S...

...Russia's nonaggression pact with Germany allowed for the partition of Poland and its attendant final solutions...

...The Germans supplemented their reserves either with gold taken from the banks of occupied countries—the gold of the Belgium central bank was dragged through Africa to Berlin, and finally sold in Switzerland—or from the private holdings of vanquished populations...

...Senate panel probes Holocaust survivors' missing money," is a headline typical of many that condemn Swiss bankers of embezzlement...

...Nevertheless, alone among the countries of central Europe, Switzerland protected its citizens from the ravages of war, much as it had armed itself across the centuries to protect its democracy from the encroachments of the Habsburgs, the lances of Napoleon, or Europe's periodic ritual suicides, like those practiced before the trenches of Verdun...

...A s tried and convicted in the American press, the Swiss are guilty of collaboration with Nazi Germany, embezzling the savings of Holocaust victims, and lying about both...

...It awaits the release of central bank records throughout Europe and in the United States, which until recently has refused to release documents pertinent to these questions under the Freedom of Information Act Ironically, only the Swiss government has appointed historians to reconstruct its wartime dealings even though much of the flight capital that Switzerland attracted in the late 1930's was sent on to the United States or South America when it appeared Switzerland would fall to Nazi expansion...

...As Germany began the war with an estimated $2oo million in gold reserves (which includes those of Austria and Czechoslovakia), what is clear from the ledgers is that the Germans used looted gold to balance their trade accounts...

...ACCEPTING THE REFUGEES With words like "Holocaust victims," "Nazis," "looted gold," and "justice" in the refrain of each article about Swiss banking during World War II, it is an easy leap of faith to assume that Switzerland played an active part in the extermination of the Jews...

...To put such numbers in perspective, David S. Wyman writes in The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 that during the war the United States admitted only 21,000 Jewish refugees, and describes how Britain did all it could to prevent Jews fleeing the Holocaust from settling in Palestine...

...Under the leadership of Senator D'Amato, who recognized in the Swiss banks what President Theodore Roosevelt called "a good, safe menace," the hearings provided the press the irresistible combination of personal narratives of the Holocaust along with the dark shadows of financial scandal —Whitewater on the Rhine...

...But counter-measures were always tempered because the Swiss were useful to the Allied cause...

...Auditors addressing the matter of dormant accounts again today will confront numerous bank mergers that have reduced the number of Swiss banks from 1,o51 in the early 1940's to 413 at the end of 1995, plus the obligation only to maintain banking records for ten years...

...The American Spectator May 1997 away at the Swiss border...

...The American Spectator • May 1997 Neutrality: 1933-1946," that incorrectly dates the fall of Hitler's government and states that Switzerland supplied Germany with "raw materials," when, in fact, the country has no mineral deposits...

...Few believe the Swiss when banks are questioned for dormant accounts from that era and only small amounts—in one recent search it was eleven accounts worth $21,000 —are found...

...More than 14,00o Jews escaped Germany to Switzerland during the same period that 55,000 left for the United States and 15,000 went to France...

...In 1934 it passed its laws on banking secrecy to prevent the German government from investigating the foreign accounts of Jewish citizens...

...D'Amato: "Thank you for writing and sending me your claim for possible accounts in Swiss banks...

...The profit on this trade has been estimated at $20 million, in the dollars of that period...

...Militarily, Nazi Germany never conquered Switzerland...

...But as Thomas Maissen of the University of Potsdam concludes: "The gold delivered to Switzerland—it should be remembered in the current debate—was not hidden at the behest of a criminal state and war criminals...

...The United States remained neutral for the war's critical first two years, during which time its merchants traded with the Nazis...

...also funded the German war effort...

...After the war Switzerland found itself economically isolated...

...As for its politics, it reduces history to the level of "Hard Copy" or "Geraldo," 'When I wrote to the Senate Banking Committee requesting a copy of the hearing transcript, the response was a constituent form letter from Sen...

...Could American banks find an account that became dormant in 1945 and make a judgment as to who today might be entitled to such funds...

...26 May 1997 • The American Spectator SECONDARY EVIDENCE Because few American reporters speak French or German, much of the case against the Swiss and the Swiss banks has been assembled from secondary sources, beginning with the hearings of the Senate Banking Committee...

...Gold in the war years was pegged to a value of $35 an ounce, which means the Swiss National Bank purchased 255 tons from the German Reichsbank...

...In a Time essay, Lance Morrow writes: "The case of the Swiss and the Holocaust plays interesting variations on the theme of remembering and forgetting...

...and quotes the author of a 1989 book, Hitler's Gold: "The basic outline of all this has been known for many years...

...A father's occasional trip to Switzerland could certainly arouse the hope that there are assets to be found in banks there...

...Italy surrendered itself to the public pleasures of fascism...

...If it is easy to criticize the apparent collaboration of the Swiss, how does the rest of Europe fare...

...Historian Gordon A. Craig describes Nazi economics: The conquerors regarded these lands, without exception, as legitimate objects of economic exploitation...

...After that, it continued to admit other refugees, including 50,000 French and Polish soldiers...

...In the 1944...

...As Gerhard Weinberg writes in his history of the Second World War: At 1:35 a.m...

...it was payment for Swiss currency and military goods, which were also sold to other countries during the war...

...The Swiss National Bank has denied knowing the source of the gold that it accepted from the Reichsbank in exchange for Swiss currency...

...That Hitler wanted Switzerland as he wanted the rest of Europe for his thousand-year Reich is well documented...

...Specifically, the actions and conduct of the Swiss Banks exceeded the obligation of a neutral country and actively assisted the war objectives of the Nazi Regime...

...Not only is it not known how much money was deposited in Swiss banks in the 1930's, or by whom, it is not known in which currency or what instruments these deposits may have been made...

...Austria, like Switzerland, a predominantly German-speaking country, warmly embraced the Anschluss and its integration into the Third Reich...

...therefore, he believes his father had a Swiss bank account...

...An eyewitness to this disgrace is quoted in Martin Gilbert's history of the Holocaust: Two of these poor wretched creatures slit their wrists on the bridge on the same day, while a woman (whom we had seen being hunted down in L'Haut de Morge) threw herself from the fourth story of the hotel in Saint-Gingolph where she was staying...

...On July 12, 1996, it also published a letter from Dr...

...After the outbreak of war on the western front, in the spring of 1940, Switzerland accepted 6,000 Jews who fled before the Blitzkrieg launched against Belgium and France...

...attack up the Rhone valley, it was a neutral wedge into the Axis powers that protected the Allies' flank...

...Would they even begin to look...

...federal court on behalf of all victims of what is called the "Nazi Regime...

...The importance of Switzerland to the Allied war effort can be measured in a 1943 memorandum sent by the British high command to the American Joint Chiefs of Staff: The British Chiefs of Staff attach considerable importance to the military advantages they now derive from Swiss neutrality and are anxious that our policy towards Switzerland should aim at ensuring that these advantages are neither discontinued nor curtailed...

...But after the war even the British repatriated thousands of Russian prisoners to Stalin's death camps...

...According to the records of the Swiss National Bank—not to be confused, as it is in another lawsuit, with SBC—it purchased from the German Reichsbank the equivalent of 1.2 billion Swiss francs worth of gold during the years 1939-45...

...Were the suit only about recovering money lost in the Swiss banking system, presumably it would have been lodged in Switzerland, in the canton where the bank in question was hiding the funds...

...Nor does the lawsuit display even rudimentary knowledge of Swiss banking...

...a few hours later orders went out of the high command of the German army to prepare an invasion of Switzerland...

...The ledgers, long in the public domain, are now being recycled in the guise of sensational revelations...

...The unit features a compact disc player, an AM/FM radio, a handy remote control, and our patented acoustic waveguide speaker technology...

...This time I had to advise the claimants of "unclaimed assets" on how to obtain access to their "heritage" and what sort of proof was necessary...

...One Associated Press report states: "During World War II, the Nazis looted at least $55o million in gold—now worth more than $6 billion—from German-occupied countries and stashed most of it in Swiss banks," the implication being that some of it might turn up in dusty vaults...

...It also appears that the Swiss laundered substantial assets looted by the Nazis...

...Ireland was neutral as well, if not openly sympathetic with the Germans...

...After Germany invaded Poland, in September 1939, the Swiss army mobilized up to ten percent of the population and throughout the war went through long periods when it expected imminent attack from the Germans...

...Only by selling gold could the Germans acquire either U.S...

...There remains the question of the savings of Holocaust victims locked away in Swiss banks — a separate issue from the gold traded by the Swiss and German national banks...

...The editorial musters the requisite indignation in concluding that "for decades the Swiss banking industry arrogantly thwarted inquiries about its role in the Nazi period...

...Nevertheless, during the 1930's and throughout the war, the Swiss adopted policies that reacted to the German threat against the Jews in contradictory ways...

...But unlike the three countries on its borders—France, Germany, and Italy—Switzerland protected its citizens, including 18,000 Jews, from deportation and, before and during the war, accepted refugees fleeing Europe's cauldrons...

...But it was the Swiss, not wanting to be flooded with more refugees, who concurred when the Germans marked passports with the odious "J" to prevent more Jews from slipping into Switzerland undetected...

...But Adolf Eichmann only allowed 1,600 to leave for Switzerland, and those denied safe passage as "Swiss-protected persons" were deported not to Palestine but to the gas chambers...

...For both Allied and Axis powers Switzerland was a clearing house for gold trades, in lieu of a functioning foreign exchange market...

...In 1944, the Swiss National Assembly voted to admit up to 14,000 Jews who were trapped in Hungary and who were the charge of the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg...

...But the Bose® Acoustic Wave® music system is definitely an overachiever...

...Nor are those claiming funds always specific in their allegations...

...The estimate among Hitler's generals was that at least eighteen divisions were needed to dislodge the Swiss from their redoubts, and after the failures to defeat Britain and the Soviet Union, the cost of a Swiss invasion became a mountain too far...

...When the retiring president of the Swiss federal council described these demands as "ransom" and "blackmail," a spokesman for various Jewish groups threatened to organize a boycott against Swiss financial institutions...

...The most accurate reporting on the problems of matching Holocaust victims with accounts dormant in Swiss banks and on the separate issue of Nazi gold has been published in the German language Neue Ziircher Zeitung, which has reconstructed the accounts of the Swiss National Bank during the war and explained the problems of trying to locate "a Swiss account" sixty years after it might have been opened...

...however, it is not a plausible reason for a bank to acknowledge such vague claims...

...285 million...

...Only on October 1, 1944, did the Swiss end their arms trade with Germany...

...In the narrow confines of the claim, the plaintiffs allege that they are heirs to bank accounts lodged with the defendant Swiss banks which have refused to turnand tries to redress the sufferings of World War II as if they were caused by a negligent airline or the Tobacco Institute...

...Even the paper's "News of the Week in Review" asked: "Why has the known suddenly become news...

...dollar exchange rate was $1= 4.2o Swiss francs, which values all Swiss gold purchases at U.S...

...1-800-898-BOSE, ext...

...In exchange for food and basic raw materials, the Swiss traded with the Axis powers...

...Nor was there regulation of lawyers, accountants, and fiduciaries who held funds on behalf of clients, often in escrow accounts with fictitious names...

...Mr./Mrs./Ms ( ) Name (Please Print) Daytime Telephone Evening Telephone Address City State Zip Or mail to: Bose Corporation, Dept...

...But in 1942 the Swiss government issued a decree stating that "refugees on the grounds of race alone are not political refugees...

...The plan was to crush Swiss resistance quickly...

...And few Swiss bankers vote in New York senatorial elections.' Another source in the case against the Swiss banks, and one that so far seeks only an "accounting" of dormant accounts for ten years after the war, is a lawsuit filed in U.S...

...on June 25,1940, the armistice between Germany and France went into effect...

...After the war, undoubtedly the accounts of Holocaust victims were swept up in such a system, just as the U.S...

...But this suit was filed in New York, and as such is a political document, not unlike an editorial in the Washington Post or a press release issued by a re-election campaign, perhaps that of Senator D'Amato...

...Stories have circulated of heirs being turned away from Swiss banks for lack of The American Spectator • May 1997 a death certificate of parents or relatives lost in the Holocaust...

...As a friend of mine who lived through the war says bluntly: "They had us by the throat...

...As the Nazi pressures increased, Switzerland accepted more Jewish refugees than any other country, when measured as a percentage of population...

...WHOSE MONEY...

...Its main office is in Zurich, Switzerland...

...Even in Switzerland banks are ineffective probate judges, and aside from the intervening tragedy of World War II, the distribution of family assets would be problematic enough...

...No one who fell victim to or opposed Nazi fascism in the years 1933-45 can easily accept the trade that existed between the Swiss and the Germans...

...The principal firms served are: Pirelli, Farbe, Shering, Ciba, Lonza, Franck, La Roche, Brown-Boveri, Atlantic, Alliance Aluminum, and Mannesmann...

...The effect of the ruling was to deny perhaps as many as 30,000 refugees entry to Switzerland...

...Operation Tannenbaum was the code name for the invasion of Switzerland...

...But what sustained the German war effort was not gold sales to the Swiss, or receipt of their ball bearings, so much as having its armies on the ground in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, large tracts of Russia, Norway, 28 May 1997 • The American Spectator Bulgaria, Finland, parts of the Caucasus and North Africa—places in which the Germans did not need to exchange gold for war supplies...

...Unfortunately, no reliable study exists, nor can one be undertaken sixty years later, even by eminent persons, that can verify from where and how money came into Switzerland during the 1930's...

...At the same time, however, that the Swiss army was protecting the high ground, the Swiss economy was quietly surrendering to the Germans...

...In Switzerland, legitimate claims to assets in a bank never expire, but problems arise when accounts are opened without proper instructions on the management or disposition of assets in the event the money goes unclaimed...

...In response, after a series of public blunders, the Swiss banks created a $70 million fund to assist victims of the Holocaust, and the Swiss government proposed revaluing its gold reserves and dedicating at least 3 billion Swiss francs to endow a trust fund to aid those who suffered under Nazi aggression...

...THE OLD GOLD STORY Although the editorial board at the New York Times considers the economic relations between Switzerland and Germany—specifically the trade in gold bars — during World War II a "lingering mystery," the record has been available to anyone in Switzerland with a library card and the ability to read either French or German...

...The Washington Agreement settled all outstanding claims that the Allies had against the Swiss government...

...Like a Reuters piece that ran with the headline, "Swiss Reject Calls for Nazi 'Truth Commission,"' they depict Switzerland as indistinguishable from the French government in Vichy, and those unfamiliar with Swiss history might assume that the Germans occupied Switzerland during the war, as they did Austria and most other European countries...

...A575...

...Only Britain can say it opposed fascism unequivocally from the war's beginning...

...Such a claim may fool a jury in Brooklyn, and produce a judgment like those against asbestos manufacturers, but any Swiss would recognize that half of the listed companies are Swiss, not German or Italian, and thus traditional clients of SBC...

...Current claims of $7 billion and the like, however, do not represent amounts of lost 29 savings that Holocaust survivors are hoping to uncover in Swiss banks...

...That it was never implemented is to the credit—aside from the sacrifices of the Red Army—of Swiss generals, who conceded the lowlands between Zurich and Geneva for a fortress strategy that entrenched the Swiss army in the high mountain passes...

...Dormant accounts in New York, after five years, are turned over to the state, after an obligatory ad in the newspaper...

...Whatever the lawsuit lacks in specifics about which bank may have taken what money, it does speak volumes for the quality of the work that is now produced at the country's leading law firms...

...The individuals testify that they approached the Swiss banks to recover the missing funds of their forebears, only to have doors slammed in their faces...

...WHAT ABOUT THE NEIGHBORS...

...All of the allegations against the Swiss banks assume that a lot of money was deposited in Swiss banks in the 1930's and that after these accounts became dormant the banks quietly conspired to defraud the rightful heirs of their funds...

...most were Jews, some of whom committed suicide on the Swiss border rather than return to Hitler's inferno...

...The end of Switzerland, that pimple on the face of Europe as Hitler described it in August 1942, would have to wait until Germany had defeated her European enemies...

...SWITZERLAND RESISTS Most press accounts about the markets in Nazi gold conclude that Switzerland's neutrality during World War II 25 was nothing more than a guise to cloak war profiteering and collaboration with the Germans...

...Switzerland was also a listening post for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and during the war provided a safe haven for 1,600 American pilots shot down in raids against Germany...

...Before the Senate Banking Committee and in numerous press articles, survivors of the Holocaust or their heirs have made claims to funds presumably deposited in Switzerland...

...The forces of Gen...

...So we're ready to prove it...

...At the start of World War II, no central authority collected information on accounts any more than the banks themselves asked those depositing money to supply addresses or any personal information...

...Although the defendants in the lawsuit are the three large Swiss banks — Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse—the conspiratorial language of the allegations is such as to incorporate the government of Switzerland, all Swiss banks, and the conduct of the Swiss during World War II, and, as such, reads like the transcript of a Berkeley teach-in...

...Like individuals and other nations that faced the war, it was capable of simultaneous acts of cowardice and courage...

...U.S...

...government foreclosed on Sioo million in frozen Swiss assets that were thought to belong to the Nazis or their collaborators...

...The Swiss assistance to Jews trapped in the Holocaust may appear both insignificant and hypocritical when compared to the total numbers who vanished...

...I must point out that a not inconsiderable number of claimants hadn't the least bit of evidence or proof to substantiate their claim...

...but the result was much the same...

...Call or write now for our complimentary guide to this award-winning system...

...Published accounts routinely imply that the Germans hid looted gold in secret Swiss accounts...

...If the measure of a nation is its defense of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," Switzerland deserves a hearing based on the facts —not just petitions of lawyers —when it confronted what Thomas Jefferson called, in that same declaration, "absolute Despotism...

...dollars or Swiss francs, which were the only wartime convertible currencies and thus necessary if Germany were to trade outside the Reich, for example, with Spain, Portugal, or Argentina...

...More likely it suspected the origins of this bullion—if not from death camps, then vandalized bank vaults—and subscribed to the adage, if not the international convention, that to the victor belongs the spoils...

...The Washington Post editorial hinted of damages yet to be awarded: The surge of declassified documents after the end of the Cold War shows that in World War II some Swiss banks swallowed depositors' funds, at the moment when tens of thousands of Germans seeking refuge were being turned MATTHEW STEVENSON manages a Swiss bank and lives in Geneva...