IT WASN'T ONLY THE SWISS
Christian Caryl points out that the most unlikely countries looted Jewish gold and wealth during, and after, the second world war
THE JOURNALIST who uncovered the scandal didn't pull any punches. At the very moment our Jews were being arrested and sent to German death camps,' he wrote, 'they were also being systematically and efficiently robbed of all their posses- sions by our police and our government officials ... not all of them Nazis.' The special office created for the operation bore the chillingly poetic name of Liquida- tion Board for Confiscated Jewish Proper- ty. It was part of the Ministry of Justice. Gold and silver taken from the Jews was handed over to the German SS, while the rest of the wealth — real estate, insurance, cash — was divided up among the locals. Personal possessions, from pianos to paint- ings; were sold at auction. The few Jews who escaped Auschwitz returned to find their homes and apartments occupied by strangers. Survivors were 'fobbed off with mere crumbs of their former property'.
The culprits described in this unpalat- able scenario were not the greedy, despica- ble Swiss. Nor were they bestial Eastern Europeans or snivelling, collaborating Vichy Frenchmen. They were not among the usual second world war villains we so love to hate. They were Norwegians — emancipated, politically correct, Third- World-loving Norwegians. Bjorn Westlie, the journalist who uncovered the case dur- ing research for a story on the anniversary of VE Day, found the orderly lists of stolen Jewish property in the National Archive in Oslo. The documents were nei- ther classified nor inaccessible. It was just that no one had ever troubled to look presumably on the assumption that good Norwegians would never do a thing like that.
But it's the Swiss we love to hate, and recently we have been able to indulge this to the full. New revelations about Swiss behaviour during the war have triggered hefty bouts of good old-fashioned Swiss- bashing. 'Switzerland', wrote the Economist, 'is by no means nowadays a model international citizen.' Even at the best of times, Swiss bankers are unloved,' growled the Times. 'When they are seen to deny justice to victims of the Nazi Holo- caust and their descendants, they are hated.'
Surely it comes as no surprise to hear that the Swiss didn't behave well during the war. For decades we have heard how they turned Jewish refugees back at the border, how it was the Swiss who made the helpful suggestion that the Germans mark the passports of Jewish citizens with a to ease identification. Nor should we be caught off guard by 'revelations' that Swiss bankers may still be hoarding money from depositors who died in the Holocaust. Now intelligence records uncovered in the Unit- ed States and a memorandum published by the British Foreign Office say that the Swiss accepted huge quantities of German gold during the war — some of which, says the World Jewish Congress (WJC), 'may have even included melted dental fillings from Jews killed in German death camps'. Greville Janner, a Labour deputy in Parlia- ment who has been pushing for investiga- tions of the issue, came up with a memorable picture: 'Rivers of gold flowed out of Nazi Germany, and the banks of that river are in Switzerland.'
But is his picture correct? The history of the second world war suggests that the flow of stolen Jewish property was more like a delta than a smoothly flowing stream. The British press, obsessed with the gnomes of Zurich, have managed to overlook that the WJC and the World Jewish Restitution Organisation have been quietly putting the screws on other so-called neutral powers lately. The Swedes, like the Swiss, found themselves encircled by Axis powers at the beginning of the war, and despite their pro- fessed neutrality they were only too happy to sell the Germans urgently needed iron ore in exchange for looted gold and to allow safe passage to German troops on their way to invade the Soviet Union. Last year Edgar Bronfman, president of the WJC, accused Swedish banks of hoarding 'vast sums' during the war, including money and gold robbed from Jews or deposited by them in Sweden for safe-keeping and then never recovered. The Swedes accepted fewer refugees during the war than the Swiss did, but today, unlike the Swiss, the Swedes are so far refusing to allow an inde- pendent assessment of the allegations against them. Portugal, Spain and Turkey have also been receiving fresh attention from Jewish organisations for their role as repositories of German loot during the war.
Nor, it should be mentioned, were the victorious powers averse to looting proper- ty that once belonged to Jews. On 15 May 1945, in what the British historians Antho- ny Read and David Fisher describe as 'Berlin's biggest ever armed robbery', an officer of Soviet military intelligence showed up at the Reichsbank, the official recipient of all wealth taken from concen- tration camp victims, and snatched $50 mil- lion-worth of gold and $400 million of negotiable bonds for the Soviet govern- ment. Communist governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe expropriated factories and stores Aryanised by the Nazis. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jewish organisations have started a vast restitution campaign in Eastern Europe to recover such property, which is quite credibly pre- sumed to run into billions of dollars. One will search the big British papers in vain for any stories about this. The Russian government, by the way, still holds Old Master paintings looted from Hungarian Jews by Adolf Eichmann. No one in Britain ever seems to have noticed.
Last week, meanwhile, we suddenly heard of two tons of looted gold discov- ered in a basement vault of the Federal Reserve in New York. It's entirely possible that this booty came from the Merkers salt mine in Thuringia, captured by the Ameri- cans in 1945. The mine was filled with hun- dreds of tons of gold, much of it clearly identified as the dental fillings or wedding rings of Jews murdered in the camps. That booty ended up in the Tripartite gold pool after the war, and most of it was ultimately paid out to other Allies as reparations. What's clear, though, is that none of it was returned to the former owners. In 1962, in what amounted to an admission of guilt in the matter, the US Congress approved a token payment of $500,000 to the Jewish Restitution successor organisation.
That sum is definitely not much when one considers that, in 1946, America suc- cessfully pressured the Swiss into giving up a chunk of the looted gold they had received from the Germans during the war. The Swiss, forced to buckle under when the Americans froze their assets in the United States, ended up handing over $60 million-worth, which was then divided up among the Allies and some of the coun- tries that had been stripped of their wealth under German occupation. If the Swiss were indeed fences of stolen goods, then a court of law would evidently have to indict the Allies as accomplices. Lately some Jewish leaders have been saying as much. Stuart Eizenstat, a Commerce Department official appointed by President Clinton to examine new allegations against the Swiss, noted recently: 'We know that in 1946 the Swiss government turned a significant amount of funds over to the US govern- ment, possibly looted money. We believe that the amount was distributed . . . What we do know is that none of that money went into the hands of those from whom it was looted. Just as Switzerland may have to undergo some painful examination about its role, so too will the US govern- ment.' Let's not forget, though, that the British and French also got their share.
None of this, of course, exculpates the Swiss — and the Swiss, judging by reports in the country, will probably be the first to agree. After much agonised soul-searching provoked last year by the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, many Swiss are now prepared to recognise that their dealings with the Germans during the war were unsavoury. Even the Swiss National Bank, audibly gnashing its teeth, has admitted that it acted 'with incomprehensible gulli- bility' in its wartime business with the Reichsbank. Now the Swiss have finally agreed to open up banking records and suspend the fabled Secrecy Law so that independent investigators can get at infor- mation.
One wonders what they will find, for none of the recent 'revelations' about Nazi gold in Swiss banks are actually that new. The Swiss National Bank opened its archives in 1985, and Swiss historians such as Jacques Picard and Werner Rings have published detailed studies of Swiss finan- cial transactions performed with the Ger- mans. The myths are simply more durable. The popular mind clings persistently to Frederick Forsyth imagery of cunning SS officers spiriting gold teeth into anony- mous numbered bank accounts. Forget that Swiss banks don't have anonymous numbered bank accounts and that the Secrecy Law is today no tougher than else- Where. Forget that the Germans looted most of their gold from the central banks of occupied countries, not from individu- als. Forget that they sold it to the Swiss in return for cash to buy natural resources and arms elsewhere in the world, not as pension funds for SS officers entering pre- mature retirement.
It's worth noting that neither the For- eign Office report nor the intelligence documents unearthed in America appear to have brought us much closer to deter- mining how much of the gold that ended up in Switzerland actually came from Jew- ish sources. The one concrete case that appears in all the reports (and it, too, is nothing new) is the so-called Ribbentrop gold. Most of it fell into American and British hands at the end of the war, but at least three tons of the gold ended up on the German side of Lake Constance. Part of that amount ended up in Switzerland and the rest in'Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Portugal. It is in the nature of gold, of course, that it can be easily disguised.
Just to add to the muddle, the hunt for Nazi gold is often conflated in the popular mind with the separate but equally deli- cate issue of nachrichtenlose Vermdgen, the assets left behind in Swiss banks by Jewish depositors who died in the camps. Last year some of the banks admitted to finding accounts that could contain money from Holocaust victims, and an independent commission headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has now set out to throw addition- al light on the problem. The journalists, meanwhile, spurred on by clammy-handed editors determined to eke the most out of headlines sexily proclaiming 'Nazi gold in secret Swiss accounts', spew out the num- bers like shrapnel. Among the allegeds and the possiblys we hear figures, usually attributed to unnamed experts, that run cheerfully from millions to billions: The Foreign Office report, for example, says that a member of the Swiss delegation in 1946 'let slip' a figure of $500 million of looted gold bought from the Nazis, while the Swiss say that the minutes of the con- ference actually speak of 500 million francs ($120 million). At the moment, of course, either side can say whatever it wants which makes an excellent argument for opening up the relevant files.
The Swiss, meanwhile, observe the whole mess with weary bemusement. They are used to being hated, so none of this comes as much of a surprise. They stayed out of the war and they have remained ostenta- tiously rich — both of which make them ideal scapegoats. Some particularly bad sports among the Swiss are muttering that they have been singled out for bad publicity because Swiss merchant banks are now much-feared players in London and New York. The Swedes, they say, aren't compet- itive enough to generate such My own theory is more psychological. In a per- verse way it's much easier to imagine that the gold stolen from the dead of the camps is stored away in some tightly sealed vault, waiting for just redistribution when the time is right. It's much harder to bear the thought, which is probably closer to the reality, that those melted teeth and wed- ding rings have long since begun to circu- late in the world's economy. Do you know where the gold in your family came from?
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