Swiss Fortunes Rose From Holocaust
Switzerland has decided, after months of wrangling, to create a $5 billion Holocaust survivors’ fund for Jews and other victims of the Nazis during World War II. It’s a good deal for the Swiss.
Five billion is at the lower end of the scale of what was deposited in Swiss banks between 1933 and 1945, money either put there by many who later perished in the extermination camps or stolen by the Nazis and sent to Switzerland to help pay for Germany’s war effort.
Even victims’ gold teeth allegedly were shipped to Switzerland to be processed into bullion.
The $5 billion is part of a package that also includes some $65 million that Swiss banks have said they would pay to families of Jews that had deposits.
For decades after the war, Swiss authorities and bank officials stonewalled most of the attempts by heirs of the victims to retrieve the money, and no wonder.
According to some Swiss historians, the amount involved at today’s prices would be at least $60 billion.
But Swiss parliament member Jean Zeigler said his compatriots never give away even small amounts of money “except in extreme circumstances.” A government spokesman conceded that in deciding to cough up the $5 billion, “external pressure was a factor” - an apparent reference to a threat by New York and New Jersey to cancel the licenses of Swiss banks to operate in their states.
There is little doubt that Switzerland’s banks hung onto the war victims’ funds to pay for Switzerland’s rapid postwar expansion. They did so on the grounds that Swiss law made it difficult, if not impossible, to hand the money over to heirs who hadn’t been designated by the original depositors.
Swiss historian Gian Trepp, who has examined some of his government’s hitherto secret wartime archives, told the London Financial Times that the gold held in the bank vaults of Zurich and Geneva was “decisive” in turning Switzerland into the world’s postwar financial center and converting what had been a predominantly agricultural country into a highly industrialized one.
Other analysts, who also have delved into Switzerland’s rapid postwar development, have concluded that the banks, supported by the Bern government, had a deliberate policy of making the disputed money work for the Swiss economy, rather than handing it over to its rightful owners.
But Swiss officials may yet regret that they fought so long and erected so many obstacles to the restitution of wealth that fell into their grasp under such appalling circumstances.
The controversy has led some historians to examine more closely not only the behavior of Swiss bankers but also the ways in which neutral Switzerland may have willingly let itself be used by Germany to prolong the war, possibly by as much as two years.
According to historian Francoise Guillemaud of the University of Paris, Switzerland was virtually the exclusive source of the hard currency needed by the German war effort to purchase such vital material as Swedish iron ore.
“The Swiss were, for all intents and purposes, the Nazis’ wartime bankers,” Guillemaud alleged. “Swiss officials knew what was going on but shut their eyes, either because there was a lot of profit in the business or because they were afraid of what the Germans would do if they stopped it.”
Some critics have called the sums involved blood money. If the allegation that Switzerland helped the Nazis go on fighting longer than they might have otherwise is correct, the term “blood money” takes on another meaning. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives may have been lost because of what the Swiss did.