World War II -- Brought to You by Nestlé's Candy
The Swiss didn't just
hang on to Holocaust victims' bank accounts. They used them to bankroll Hitler's
war machine.
BY JONATHAN BRODER
www.salon.com
The
next time you're hungry for a Nestlé's Crunch or a box of Quik, consider this:
In 1933, the same year that Adolph Hitler rose to power in Germany, the food
giant was helping to finance the creation of a Nazi Party in its native
Switzerland. It was a political investment that paid off handsomely. During
World War II, Nestlé won the contract to supply the entire Germany army with
chocolate -- a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
While much of the media's attention continues to be focused on what Swiss banks
did with Holocaust victims' money, the supposedly neutral country's complicity
with the Nazi war effort ran much deeper. In effect, the land of the cuckoo
clock essentially acted as Hitler's banker, taking in all the gold that the
Nazis looted from the treasuries of Europe and exchanging it for the hard
currency that kept Germany's war machine running.
As we now know, some of that gold was taken from the homes and teeth of Jewish
victims whose relatives are still alive today. Jewish groups, backed by the
United States, are demanding an accounting of the gold so that these relatives
and a diminishing number of survivors can be compensated.
Also at issue is how Swiss banks handled the accounts of Jews who hid their
money in Switzerland -- they thought for safekeeping -- as storm clouds gathered
over Europe in the 1930s. For the past 50 years, relatives and a few survivors
have tried to reclaim their assets, but their efforts have been stymied by Swiss
banks. Some bank officials demanded official death certificates, as if Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen maintained such documents. In one instance, a bank was
discovered shredding wartime records that likely contained the details of
unclaimed Jewish accounts.
Until recently, Swiss banks claimed to have located dormant accounts worth only
some $27 million. Now, after more than two years of entreaties by Jewish groups
and the U.S. Congress, Swiss banks earlier this week finally published a list of
more than 2,000 dormant accounts worth $42 million. But in many respects, the
list raises even more questions than it answers. Why would it have taken so long
for the banks to track down account holders, many of whose names can be found in
Swiss and German phone books? And how, for example, did the name of the former
head of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia wind up on the list? Or a former aide
to Adolf Eichmann or a deputy commandant of a Nazi concentration camp?
It is also worth asking why the Swiss are now seeming as if they are trying to
come clean on the issue of the dormant accounts. One answer is that a team of
independent auditors, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, is
about to pore over Swiss Bank records. The audit is part of a larger
international effort to resolve not only the outstanding claims of Holocaust
survivors against Switzerland but also to probe and publish the truth about
Switzerland's wartime role. An international team of historians and scholars is
set to begin its investigation before the end of the year.
If the documents that I encountered as co-author of a documentary ("Blood Money:
Switzerland's Nazi Gold," to be broadcast on A&E this Saturday at 9 p.m. EDT, 10
p.m. PDT) are any indication, these historians will find a wealth of materials
that will shatter Switzerland's wartime image as an oasis of neutrality and
humanitarianism amid a sea of war and savagery.
Our researchers uncovered Allied intelligence documents that describe how, in
addition to chocolate, Swiss factories also sold Nazi Germany weapons and
weapons parts, munitions, optical equipment, timers, machinery and electrical
power, all of which kept the German army on the march -- and Switzerland's
wartime economy thriving. President Franklin Roosevelt was so angry about
Switzerland's complicity with the Nazis that in 1942 U.S. warplanes bombed a
Swiss ball bearing factory at Schaffhausen on the Swiss-German border.
Officially, the bombing was described as a mistake. But the documents show the
allies were trying to send the Swiss a message.
Such messages did little to dissuade the Swiss. To this day, Berne still argues
that it was surrounded by Germany and Nazi-occupied countries and therefore had
little choice but to deal with Hitler during the war. Really? Then why, as our
research revealed, did the Swiss continue to do business with Berlin even as the
Nazi regime was in retreat? In addition to its factories continuing to produce
war materiel for the Germans, the Swiss allowed German troop trains to traverse
the country en route to Italy. Most important, it continued to buy looted gold
long after the other neutrals -- Sweden, Spain and Portugal -- acceded to Allied
demands to halt their purchases in 1943.
Switzerland served as the clearinghouse for stolen Nazi art. Swiss art dealers
made a fortune selling the impressionist and abstract painting that the Nazis
considered "degenerate." Switzerland also benefited handsomely from the Nazi
conquest and looting of Belgium, a major diamond industry center. By the middle
of the war, Switzerland had replaced Antwerp as one of the diamond capitals of
the world.
Another little-know fact that we discovered was how Switzerland allowed the
International Committee for the Red Cross -- the best-known symbol of Swiss
neutrality and good deeds -- to be infiltrated and corrupted by Nazi agents.
U.S. intelligence documents describe how the Nazis used the Red Cross to smuggle
money into Turkey and the Balkans and to plant Nazi agents among Free French
refugees in North Africa.
Even the end of the war in 1945 didn't stop the Swiss from cashing in on their
Nazi connections. As the Allies scrambled to recapture millions of dollars worth
of stolen Nazi treasure, the Swiss continued to fill their pockets by helping
fugitive Nazis flee to South America, along with untold fortunes in loot, in
what U.S. intelligence described as "the largest transfer of wealth in history."
For a brief time after the war, the Allies tried to force Switzerland to return
the Nazi gold to its rightful owners. At first the Swiss denied it dealt with
any stolen gold -- a claim the Allies quickly disproved by producing records of
Belgian gold found in Portugal and shipped through Switzerland. Then the Swiss,
playing for time and falling back on their neutrality, refused to recognize the
Allies' authority over this matter. Their ploy worked. The Allies, now more
concerned about rebuilding war-ravaged Europe and blunting the threat of
communism, agreed to let the Swiss pay back only $58 million out of an estimated
$250 million in the looted gold it had taken in. Officially, the payment was
described as a humanitarian contribution to the reconstruction of Europe. Even
then, the Swiss didn't come through, eventually paying out only half the agreed
amount.
With the commission of scholars about to begin its probe, the Swiss appear
headed for a painful confrontation with themselves. But an anti-American and
anti-Semitic backlash is gathering steam in Switzerland, with right-wing
politicians campaigning against more payments to Holocaust victims. If the right
wingers win, what could have been a welcome reckoning with history will be one
more exercise in Swiss denial.
July 25, 1997
Jonathan Broder, Salon's Washington
correspondent, co-wrote "Blood Money: Switzerland's Nazi Gold," an investigative
report to be broadcast on A&E this Saturday at 9 p.m. EDT, 10 p.m. PDT.
http://www.salon.com/july97/news/news970725.html