High life
Swiss
defence
Taki
t is not the smartest thing to do right now, but somebody has got to defend good old Helvetia. My mentor, Professor Van Den Haag, is utterly opposed — 'Anyone who calls New York the Big Bagel and defends the Swiss has it coming to him.'
Oh well, Abie Rosenthal of the Big Bagel Times has already called me an anti-Semite and tried to have me fired. Ditto Professor Daniel Bell. The comment I liked the most was when the ex-sainted editor took over the Speccie and almost immediately got a call from the Israeli embassy. 'The first thing you must do as a Jew is to get rid of Taki,' he was told. But Dominic Lawson did not, knowing me better than that.
And speaking of Rosenthal, it is in keep- ing with the unshakable dogma of our age — 'I have an absolute right to help myself to somebody else's bank account' — that he (Abie) and Thomas Friedman of the Washington Post, not to mention Al D'Amato and Edgar Bronfman, are demanding that the Swiss had better cough up untold billions as restitution for all their terrible deeds in the second world war.
The trouble is that they never quite explain what the basis of their claim is. What they would like people to think is that this is the money which the Swiss sup- posedly never returned to the relatives of those who perished in the Holocaust. No death certificate? Well, then we get to keep the lolly. And so Switzerland grew fat and rich, according to the legend. Alas, so far the Swiss banks have discovered only around $29 million in unclaimed funds. That is not to say that there is not more. Nor is it to deny that the Swiss make Fagin look like Mother Teresa. (Sir James Gold- smith once told me, 'It is not that the Swiss are anti-Semitic. They would do that to anyone.') But tracing Holocaust victims' families' moneys deposited over 60 years ago, some in currencies which no longer exist, and then to decide who has the right- ful claim to them is far from easy. D'Amato and his like know this. They Persuaded the public that the Swiss made billions out of the Holocaust by skilfully confusing a number of issues: a) the unclaimed accounts at the end of the war; b) the money the Swiss made by buying gold bullion, much of which was looted from the vaults of conquered Europe, from the Germans for US dollars and Swiss francs, the only wartime convertible cur- rencies; and c) the German assets deposit- ed in the Swiss banks.
Reading American newspaper accounts one would think that the Swiss were as responsible for the Holocaust as Hitler's murderers. Churchill did not think so and often praised the Swiss as 'standing for freedom and largely on our side'. That the Swiss did business with Nazi Germany is not news. Both the Allies and the Axis powers benefited from trade with Switzer- land. Though Switzerland was surrounded by Germany and her allies, it still managed to export strategic material to America's factories; indeed, Hitler seemed amazingly untroubled by this trade with his enemies which was being conducted across German- occupied territory. During 1939-45 the Swiss National Bank purchased almost twice as much gold from America as from Germany. The world trade in gold in those years took place in Switzerland. The Swiss almost certainly knew that the gold had been stolen and turned a blind eye. It is immoral as hell, but this is what some neutral countries have been known to do. From 1939-41, the United States was non-belligerent and continued to do busi- ness with a Third Reich that was looting and pillaging Europe. The Swiss have been tried and convicted. They have been found guilty of embezzling the savings of Holocaust victims and lying about both. It is not that simple. However neutral a country is, it cannot buy stolen gold. The Swiss did. However hard it was to trace unclaimed accounts, the Swiss hardly bent over backwards in trying. They did not try at all, in fact the reverse. But they did take in 200,000 refugees, 20,000 of them Jews, and remained strictly neutral until the end. Windbags like D'Amato have turned a narrow-minded, legalistic, tight- fisted and at times heartless people into Nazi murderers. Threatening to freeze $84 billion of Swiss assets unless Helvetia coughs up is something a certain Mr Capone would do. America is a better country than to act like Al Capone.
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