Nazi Gold

The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe’s Jews and Holocaust Survivors

Tom Bower

To Veronica

CONTENTS

Preface

List of Abbreviations

1 Confrontation and Tears

2 The Seeds of Crime

3 The Crusade

4 Looted Gold

5 “An Impenetrable Racket”

6 Cracks

7 The Nazis’ Friends

8 The Pawns

9 Washington Showdown

10 The Hidden Millions

11 Perfidious Swiss

12 The Polish Conspiracy

13 New Hope

14 Keepers of the Flame

15 Complicating the Riddle

16 The Deal

Final Words

Postscript

Sources

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impetus for this book was a telephone call in May 1996 from two friends, Mike Kinsella and Bob Royer. Kinsella, the chief of staff of Senator Alfonse D’Amato, and Royer, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, were searching in the National Archives for information about Swiss banks to use in the early stages of the senator’s campaign. Their support and generosity thereafter were unlimited. Martin Mendelsohn arranged through the Simon Wiesenthal Center for funding for my initial visit and research. Gregg Rickman, Senator D’Amato’s legislative director, has undoubtedly served as the tower of strength for the senator’s campaign and was an enormous and indispensable help to me.

Robert Fink, my indefatigable and resourceful associate in New York, was, as always, invaluable, not least in several archives in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, and for tracking down important eyewitnesses.

In Switzerland, Mario Koenig spent ten weeks in the national archives and not only produced astonishing new material but provided incisive interpretation. I am very grateful to him and to others who unfortunately must remain nameless. Thanks to the original journalism of Irene Loebell of Swiss Television, I was better able to understand this story and Switzerland.

In Paris, Jane Lizop overcame the chaos of the French national archives—which are magnificently designed but are managed in such a way as to prevent proper research—and produced some absolute gems.

Among the many others who gave me valuable help are Moses Abramovitz, Edwin Adams, Morton Bach, Rolf Bloch, Herbert Cummings, Martin Doude van Trostwick, Eli Ginzberg, Max Isenbergh, Paul Jolles, Nat King, Ida Klaus, Paul Rechsteiner, Seymour Rubin, Hans Schaffner, Elan Steinberg and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, Jacob Tanner, Gian Trepp and Herbert Winter. I received considerable but unattributable help from many Swiss bankers and government officials.

Peter James performed his unique magic in editing the manuscript; David Hooper of Biddle & Co. declared the book to be legally watertight; Anne-Marie Ehrlich found the photographs; and Diana Mackay, who sold the foreign rights, and Michael Shaw of Curtis Brown were, as always, great friends and supporters. To all, I am very grateful.

Most of all, I am grateful to my family, who never complain, always laugh and never cease to offer encouragement.

PREFACE

The contrast is stark and pertinent. The date was November 1940. Thousands of young Allied soldiers and airmen had just been buried in German-occupied France; Britain’s cities were burning, thanks to the Luftwaffe’s blitz; and sailors of the Royal Navy were drowning in freezing water as casualties of the Battle of the Atlantic. From occupied Europe and Germany, correspondents employed by the New York Times, still unencumbered eyewitnesses, dispatched reports about oppression, arrests, executions and tyranny, characterized as “Our Darkest Hour.”

In that same month, two hundred of Switzerland’s financial and political leaders—the pillars of that nation—petitioned their government to show greater sympathy toward the Nazis. The plutocrats were pushing at an open door. While Europe shuddered before the apocalypse, Switzerland was aligning itself with evil.

Both in the midst of the war and in the aftermath, as the horrors were gradually revealed, the Swiss never questioned the morality of that choice. Their justification was their country’s isolation and traditional neutrality.

Switzerland’s ethics did not go unnoticed or uncriticized in London, Washington, D.C., or Paris, but compared with the other revelations after the Nazis’ defeat, this small country’s misconduct was relegated as of minor importance.

Yet in 1997, fifty-five years after a group of Nazis finalized their plan at Wannsee, in a pleasant lakeside villa outside Berlin, to destroy the entire Jewish nation, Switzerland has finally been brought before the bar of history and asked to account for its Faustian pact. Switzerland is asked not only to explain its conduct toward the Jews and its relationship with those who plotted their destruction, but to justify something far worse.

Why, it is asked, did a group of self-professedly respectable Swiss citizens willfully profit from the crime that threatened the foundations of western civilization?

Crime often produces a windfall for the perpetrators, but greed, intrigue, and deception have not until now been associated with the affluent, faceless men who own and manage Switzerland’s discreet financial institutions. “Switzerland,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” The hopes of many refugees ended in Switzerland, and they were murdered soon afterward. But their money remained secure, too secure, in Switzerland’s banks.

The fate of those Jews—some perhaps featuring as the naked innocents in the smudged photographs and jerky newsreels filmed by their enthusiatic murderers—has been chronicled as a result of an astonishing legacy. Carefully, even lovingly, the Nazis recorded the minute details of their crimes in correspondence, memoranda, and the minutes of their conferences. The surviving archives indisputably proved individuals’ guilt.

Similarly, the Swiss collaborators and profiteers also recorded their thoughts and decisions on paper. Although the most pertinent of those files still remain hidden from public inspection in the banks—and might well be shredded—sufficient government records had been innocently deposited in Bern’s national archives to substantiate a compelling case against previous generations.

Until recently, the incidents and conversations described in this book would have been dismissed as irrelevant or inconceivable. In my book The Paperclip Conspiracy, published in 1987, one chapter was devoted to Switzerland’s conduct during and after World War II. However, compared with the revelation that the Allies had protected and employed incriminated German scientists, Switzerland’s protection of the Nazis’ loot and their expropriation of Jewish deposits aroused no interest. One decade later, it is Switzerland’s misfortune that its image as a land of awesome Alpine scenery, clockwork efficiency, and immaculate cleanliness is tarnished by those same sordid but irrefutable revelations.

As the story unfolds, it becomes painfully clear that facts about Switzerland ten years ago were only hints of a far graver iniquity than could be imagined. After studying archives in Paris, London, New York, Washington and especially Bern and speaking with those who shaped events after 1945, I found a new truth gradually emerging. This is not just a story about a handful of pitiless bankers hoarding the wealth of a ravaged continent while spurning the pleas of defenseless survivors of the Holocaust; it is a sensational accusation that a country whose citizens, over the past half century, boasted to their neighbors about their enviable wealth, was quite knowingly profiting from blood money.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1

CONFRONTATION AND TEARS

BERN–NOVEMBER 17, 1952

Hatred shone in their faces. Distrust echoed in their voices. The chill inside the conference room struck deeper than the winter air in the ancient square outside.

Tragedy had compelled the nine men to sit around the long wooden table, but their common sentiment was anger. None had suffered, but all were suspicious. Humanity was confronting greed and, after seven years of strife, the innocent had finally won one victory: the agreement to gather on the afternoon of November 17, 1952, in the parliament building.

All nine men were Swiss, but the majority regarded two of their number as foreigners, not properly acceptable as ancient Helvetii. These two were both Jews, representatives of an intimidated minority who could not boast of courage or prowess. The majority were lawyers and bankers, protectors of their nation’s wealth, proudly successful in excluding their country from the moral conflicts that for centuries had plagued their neighbors. At the head of the table sat Markus Feldmann, the new minister of justice and the police, renowned as an ambitious workaholic but carelessly short-sighted about the conflict he was seeking to broker.

“We’re here,” announced Feldmann, “to discuss the fate of money deposited by foreigners in Switzerland who were killed because of Nazi violence and wartime events.” The sanitization of the vocabulary used to refer to the Holocaust had been perfected in Switzerland ever since Adolf Hitler became chancellor in neighboring Germany. For the twelve years of the Third Reich, none of the non-Jews in that room had protested about the criminality occurring beyond their frontiers and, in the aftermath, none been troubled to consider the truth. Comfortable survival and self-enrichment remained their entrenched gospel, and any challenge to that credo prompted instant suppression. Such a challenge had now arisen. “Parliament has decided,” continued Feldman, “that we need a decree or regulations to deal with the money in question.”

The “money in question” was the unaccounted-for millions of Swiss francs—some insiders would eventually confess to “hundreds of millions”—which had been deposited in the Swiss safe haven by Europe’s Jews as much as thirty years earlier. Those Jews had been murdered, their records had disappeared and their secrets were known only to their trustees, represented by the Swiss around Feldmann’s conference table—secrets that they were unwilling to divulge.

Naturally, the minister looked to Emil Alexander, the reticent but experienced director of the ministry’s Justice Division, to provide an unobjectionable summary of the reasons for their meeting: “At first, when the question of the so-called heirless assets became a reality,” began Alexander, “we tried to deal with it practically. People applied at banks claiming that their missing relations had left behind a fortune deposited in a Swiss bank, and the Bankers Association made inquiries among its members.” To Alexander’s right sat Max Oetterli, the Swiss Bankers Association’s pugnacious forty-six-year-old secretary. Oetterli had fought hard to prevent this meeting and had no intention of leaving without expressing his hostility. “The results,” summarized Alexander, referring to Oetterli’s work, “were usually very thin, which is not very surprising, because the people who came to the banks based their applications on a hunch.” Oetterli agreed with that and with what followed.

“Those inquiring at the banks,” continued Alexander, “were usually unable to prove that the person was dead or even missing. A further complication is that making inquiries in some countries, especially Eastern Europe, is dangerous. Another great difficulty is that some deposits were registered under false names which the inheritors don’t know. And some people did not deposit their money in banks but entrusted it to private people like lawyers, notaries and business associates. Those identities are of course unknown to the people hunting for their inheritance. Finally, after all this time, there is a chance that money could be lost because of the statute of limitations.”

Around the table, even men who were foes agreed with the lawyer’s summary. Alexander had arrived at the purpose of their meeting. Protests during recent months had persuaded the government to consider a law compelling Switzerland’s banks, insurance companies and others to declare any assets in their custody owned by murdered Jews. “The banks,” confirmed Alexander, “insist that they do not want to enrich themselves with this money; that they would not apply any time limit to reclaiming the deposits and that we can discuss later what to do with any unclaimed money.” Oetterli again nodded, but his face hardened as Feldmann signaled to George Brunschvig, the president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG). Brunschvig’s lobbying for a new law had incensed the bankers.

“Experience shows,” began Brunschvig, bruised by his past encounters with Oetterli, “that those bankers involved seldom give satisfactory information. The only guaranteed way of discovering these deposits, we believe, is by introducing a new law.” Brunschvig glanced for support at his colleague Paul Guggenheim, a respected professor and lawyer.

“We’ve really got two problems,” said Guggenheim. “First, how to find the heirless assets; and then to decide who will receive the money.” Glancing at Oetterli, the professor continued, “I don’t like the bankers’ proposals because they don’t guarantee that all the financial institutions will be honest. That’s why a law is vital.” The Jewish lawyer, outraged by the perfidies practiced by Oetterli and his ilk since 1945, dropped any pretense of courtesy. “I’m not very impressed by the bankers’ plea that a law would damage their absolute requirement of secrecy. On the contrary, it seems to me that they are more damaged if they keep on with their denials of having any money.” At the last moment, Guggenheim tempered his bluntness with an olive branch: “With goodwill, we can surely find a solution to this problem.”

Goodwill was far from Oetterli’s thoughts as Alfred Wegelin, the managing director of the Schweizer Volksbank, launched the counterattack: “We strongly disagree about this problem. We’re wide apart.” Sympathy and understanding about recent history were not emotions extended to the two Jews. “We bankers want to find a solution to the deposits of those who are dead. That’s why we support the efforts to help the inheritors. But they must abide by the law. Today a deposit could be described as an heirless asset and sometime in the future the owner will turn up—especially if they live in Eastern Europe.” For the banker, the only solution was to do nothing: “The money is very safe in the banks. It’s always available for the inheritors.”

Albert Matter, the director of the Basler Kantonalbank, sitting beside Wegelin, would over the next years prove to be as insensitive as Oetterli, yet on this occasion he began with an apparent reassurance. “Banks certainly do not want to enrich themselves with the so-called heirless assets. There’s no danger that claimants will lose their money because they don’t appear for a long time. We’re always ready to help people who come to us looking for money, so long as it’s within a certain framework.” Sneers came as easily to Matter as palliatives: “But don’t forget. It’s not only people who have deposited money with us who have disappeared. People who owe us money have also gone.” Matter’s bank had evidently endured some uncomfortable moments. “We’ve had to put that fact down to experience,” he concluded. Some in Europe had experienced the Holocaust while Matter and his colleagues had experienced bad loans. Some Jews, Matter’s colleagues griped, had even allowed themselves to be murdered in order to escape repayment of their loans.

The gulf appeared unbridgeable. For the minister, directing a small army of secret-police officers spying on their fellow countrymen, the thought of prying into banking secrets was nearly intolerable. In the tradition of Swiss ministers, Feldmann’s role was not to govern but to serve the different interests of the community. Switzerland’s bankers, he accepted, did not require the government’s protection, only the assurance of noninterference. Together, the bankers were stronger than the state, and they applied pressure when their interests required it. “Clearly,” said the minister passively, “the Jewish group want a law and the bankers don’t. The representative of the Bankers Association should tell us how he imagines future cooperation.”

Oetterli took the stage, narrowing his eyes and hunching his shoulders. His mood was far from benign. “All our experience convinces us that the problem is vastly exaggerated.” He emphasized each word, at once aggressive and derisive. “Many claimants seem to have convinced themselves that—because a missing relation once passed through Switzerland—he must have deposited a fortune here.” Mocking the Jews came naturally to Oetterli, especially in the battle to protect his members. “The proposed law will be a serious breach of banking secrecy and will damage Swiss banking. If there are any heirless assets, the safest place for them is in the bank. Their future, if they are really shown to be heirless, can be discussed later.” Oetterli had often mentioned talking about the heirless assets “in twenty or thirty years’ time,” ignoring the urgent needs of the survivors.

“Have all your inquiries worked smoothly up to now?” asked Feldmann.

“Our members have tirelessly sought to help inquirers,” replied Oetterli. “We do everything we can. Unfortunately, the documents provided are often inadequate.”

The implication that Oetterli and his members were assisting claimants infuriated Guggenheim. Inquiries to the Bankers Association about accounts—which were considered only if accompanied by a hefty fee—had aroused what the headquarters in Basel had called “a number of legal and practical problems.” To Guggenheim, they were “the completely impossible requirements” of proving the death of a depositor, the proof of heirship and the precise identification of the bank account.

“Proof of death in a gas chamber is extremely difficult,” Guggenheim had long complained. “All we know is that the deceased was last seen entering a concentration camp and is not known to have ever emerged.” Moreover, the requirement that the accounts be identified was impossible. The Jews had chosen to deposit their money in Switzerland because it guaranteed anonymity. They were not always likely to reveal their ruse to their families.

“The Bankers Association isn’t proposing anything new,” snapped Guggenheim. “We’re not going to get any further because hardly any of the banks are prepared to give information voluntarily.” But Oetterli was manifestly unimpressed. Charge and countercharge had become routine, even though the representatives of the Jews were mild men who feared exciting enmity. Oetterli was beyond persuasion, but Feldmann’s sympathy was vital, and Guggenheim addressed his comments to the politician.

“Six million people have disappeared and that exceptional fact requires special remedy. Because of those terrible events not only whole families but whole communities have disappeared. In many cases there aren’t going to be any inquiries at the banks. Only if a law orders a census of deposits can we find the lost deposits. Other countries have adopted similar measures for this special problem. And the same should happen here—even if it’s not easy. There are definitely deposits at the banks whose owners have not contacted their bank since 1942. A law ordering that those deposits be declared cannot undermine banking secrecy.”

“It’s absolutely clear that we have to consider a major moral problem,” agreed Feldmann, only to be interrupted by the clamor of bankers insisting on their reverence for the sanctity of the law. “A new law is inevitable,” insisted the politician. “No one can deny that this issue is political, psychological and moral. The cause was something monstrous. The bankers don’t want a law. I propose to order the drafting of a law, and we can discuss it later.”

Most mortals, faced with such determination, might have held back to await the minister’s proposals. Oetterli was different. Loathing his adversaries and outraged that a politician should dare to contemplate interfering with the sovereignty of Switzerland’s banks, he threatened to withdraw all cooperation: “Any law would be monstrous and will cause a great row.” Oetterli’s choice of the word monstrous, the very word Feldmann had used to refer to the Holocaust, was deliberate and provocative. Switzerland’s bankers, accustomed to having their warnings respected, understood how to exploit the weaknesses of the nation’s stagnant and secret political system. For Oetterli, the bankers were the keepers of the flame and the protectors of the nation’s future. Certainly they were unaccustomed to contradiction from Jews. But Brunschvig felt that he had been unusually provoked. “What amazes me is Herr Oetterli’s threats to withdraw his cooperation if there’s a law. We can’t overcome that. Yet your investigations have revealed practically nothing.” Everyone understood Brunschvig’s unspoken accusation. Hiding behind the secrecy laws, the bankers were conspiring to delay, or to deny that the assets existed, or to demand that they should not be returned to their owners. Frustrating all inquirers, the bankers’ tactics persuaded even the most determined claimant to abandon the quest. It amounted to a fraud on the victims and the survivors. “Only a law,” concluded Brunschvig, “can solve the problem.”

“I’m very skeptical about the Bankers Association’s position,” agreed Guggenheim. “They seem to have little understanding about the heirless assets.”

Now the tension in the room burst out into open warfare. “I am absolutely amazed,” shouted Oetterli, “that you’re actually considering confiscating money entrusted to us.”

“There’s no question of expropriation if there’s an owner,” snapped Guggenheim, irritated by Oetterli’s familiar distortion. “We’re talking about using property which is no longer owned by anyone for social purposes.”

There was nothing more to say. The disagreement was fundamental. Two entrenched interests were unwilling to yield. “My timetable,” announced Feldmann, “is to hold a conference in February to discuss the draft law.”

It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Bern, Switzerland’s federal capital, was dark. Gravely, Markus Feldmann said good-bye to his visitors. As the eight walked out of the parliament building into a dimly lit square, the floodlights illuminating the solidly built structures nearby confirmed the realities of power in Switzerland. On the left was the Berner Kantonalbank, the headquarters of a regional center of finance. On the right was the headquarters of Switzerland’s National Bank. For twelve years, the representatives of Nazi Germany’s central bank had walked through its stone doorway to be welcomed by their Swiss friends. Even after Hitler’s defeat, the bank’s directors—ignoring the Allies’ outrage—had continued to look after the interests of Germany. Their motives were not humane. Self-interest was the supreme guide for all of Switzerland’s banks, which was the precise reason why, soon after Markus Feldmann bid farewell, he bowed to Oetterli’s demands and abandoned the notion of serving morality. Any thought of a new law was jettisoned.

NEW YORK–OCTOBER 16, 1996

The aged, tearful faces revealed a lifetime’s suffering. Under jarring neon lights in an eighth-floor conference room within sight of the Statue of Liberty, the witnesses could hardly disguise their unique odyssey. Surrounded by murmuring journalists, lawyers and officials, the five women and one man, cast as victims and survivors, were united by a recurring nightmare and a searing loss. They had been nurtured amid wealth and love in Jewish communities scattered across Europe, but their childhood security had been shattered and their loving parents murdered by unforgiving persecution. By twist of fate and good fortune, unlike six million others, they had survived Auschwitz and other infamous slaughterhouses to enjoy the affluence of New York. Even that salvation, over the years, had not dented the sorrow or the anger aroused by their bitter inheritance. Too late to exact retribution against the murderers of their parents, they had eagerly accepted an invitation to travel on that bright October morning in 1996 to a drab federal courthouse to testify on behalf of an unusual indictment.

Over the decades, respected judges within that concrete building had heard innumerable accounts of New York’s sordid crimes and bewildering inhumanity, but no witness had been summoned to relate a similar chronicle of profiting from mass murder—an unprecedented theft committed by the apparently respectable citizens of the world’s most peaceful nation. Renowned as diligent bookkeepers, those burghers had insulted, ignored and ultimately forgotten the six witnesses and many more who had pleaded for understanding. Now the witnesses gloried in an unexpected opportunity to revive some unfinished business and compel the bookkeepers to submit a final account.

Compared with the countless horrors committed during the Holocaust, the witnesses’ complaint had in the past understandably been judged of lesser importance. After the initial flurry in the months after the war, when some of the murderers were caught and executed, deliberate blindness and a biological amnesty had saved the majority of murderers from the hunt and retribution. Only the sudden discovery, over the following decades, of Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Dr. Josef Mengele had reminded the world of the crime and the failure of justice. Even so, many of those murderers caught in recent years had been spared thanks to the myth that the survivors, old and obsessed, had become unreliable eyewitnesses to the worst crime in European history. Nevertheless, as the manhunt faded, one final reckoning was revived: to settle the account with the Holocaust’s profiteers.

The witnesses were indelibly scarred by Nazi persecution and their grievance was against a breed of men, brazenly immune to their suffering, who pontificated about their service to mankind yet had stolen their family’s money. Some names had become notorious for earning fortunes from the suffering of the Jews. Recrimination had been directed at the roll call of Germany’s biggest corporations and banks, which had employed slave labor and banked profits earned in the concentration camps. But few had thought to regard the silent, starch-shirted bankers and lawyers in beautiful, clean, neutral Switzerland as unconscionable profiteers.

Charges of hypocrisy were too mild for those witnesses waiting to tell the world about their fractured lives. The calculated theft was merely the final degradation that they had suffered. For fifty years the injustice had been neglected and condoned as one of history’s footnotes. Now, at the end of their lives, they finally commandeered the spotlight.

Their attention was focused on the slight, dark-suited, dapper man who, just after 10:30 A.M., entered the room surrounded by young aides. The witnesses’ presence in the court building was at his invitation, and their evident gratitude was uninfluenced by the controversy surrounding their hero. In his native New York, which he represented, Senator Alfonse D’Amato is revered and reviled. Accused of many sins, he positions himself as a home-loving Italian-American maverick traduced by smug Ivy Leaguers. The senior Republican senator, first elected in 1980, was an unlikely champion of Jewish causes, but his critics had been silenced by the effectiveness of his latest campaign. Seated behind a small table, D’Amato, in his jagged Brooklyn accent, opened the hearings of the Senate banking committee: “We’re very concerned that Swiss citizens and corporations blatantly benefited from the Holocaust while the interests of the survivors were totally ignored.” His voice rising slightly, the senator issued his challenge: “We want to know where all the hundreds of millions of dollars of assets that the Nazis deposited in the banks went.” And then the threat: “It’s time for justice. Time to get the truth. We want to know where it is. Who has it?”

The witnesses beamed. The politician was addressing their concern. Along one side of the room, Swiss journalists were scribbling intently. Their readers, especially the bankers and politicians in Zurich and Basel and Bern, would the following day study their reports with concern and even fear.

To shame those Swiss stalwarts, D’Amato summoned his first witness, Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and a spokesman for the Holocaust’s victims. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel dignified the political theater set so near to Wall Street. Surviving hell has its downside, and his breaking voice recalled the horrific and irremovable scars of an experience he shared with the witnesses. Wiesel is tormented by the Germans’ destruction of his close family in Hungary and by the loss of his beloved father, whom he barely knew before he died in Buchenwald. Ever since emerging from a life lived among the dead, he has been dedicated to explaining the mad savagery—the “balance sheet” of life—he and his fellow victims endured. “They didn’t simply want to kill Jews, as horrible as this may sound,” he told D’Amato. “They wanted Jewish money.” Then he made a memorable accusation: “Is there no limit to pain? Is there no limit to outrage?” His words cautioned those critics and lobbyists seated behind him—hired to deride the hearing as cheap politicking.

The senator smiled. The survivor had justified the campaign and provided the explanation for the embarrassment it was causing. After a judicious cough, the politician disclosed an offer. In 1995, the Bankers Association had suggested to the World Jewish Congress, “Drop all your claims,” and in return the Jews would receive $36 million. That had been rejected. “We want an accounting,” demanded D’Amato, justifying the WJC’s refusal. Rebuffed, the Swiss had proposed a commission to report in five years. “It’s the old game,” ribbed the politician. “Delay, delay, time, time. We’re not satisfied with that.”

He had reached the heart of his indictment, what he dubbed “one of the most incredible things.” The witnesses had all lost fathers who, attracted by the guarantee of anonymity and protection from prying governments, had deposited money in Swiss banks. But the same system had denied their children that inheritance at their most vulnerable moments. The banks, spat D’Amato, demanded “a death certificate.” As he leaned toward the microphone, his anger sounded only too genuine. “I mean, can you believe this?” He looked along the line of witnesses: “Somebody is a victim in a concentration camp and an heir comes forward and the banks say, ‘Well, give us the death certificate to prove that your loved one, one of your parents, was killed.’” Eyes darting, D’Amato leaned farther forward: “I mean, preposterous! Turning you down on the basis that you could not provide a death certificate!”

The indictment was a dreadful one. Evil bureaucrats had murdered their parents and malicious bureaucrats had denied them their inheritance. Bursting with indignation, Estelle Sapir, called as the first witness, depicted the frustration.

Sapir, small, withered and speaking broken English, had last seen her father through barbed wire in a French prison camp. “Try to survive,” he urged her. Their prewar lifestyle of governesses and maids, all the tokens of great wealth, had been long forgotten in their daily struggle. The only legacy was a bank account in Switzerland. In 1947, Sapir arrived at Crédit Suisse in Basel, Switzerland’s second-largest city, clutching a document miraculously preserved during the war in their family home in Poland. Dated 1938, the flimsy deposit slip of the Crédit Suisse bank found among her father’s papers showed that he had deposited money at the Basel branch. “I saw a young man come out from behind,” spluttered Sapir, “and the first thing he asked me, ‘Show me the death certificate for your father.’ And I answer him, ‘How can I have a death certificate? I have to go find Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Mengele.’ And I start to cry. I run out from the bank, into the street. The same day, I went back to the bank, but could not compose myself. Never went back to Switzerland. Never went back to Switzerland. Never.” Without proof of death, exclaimed Sapir, reliving the humiliation, the banker refused to look at the proffered deposit slip. Ever since, scarred by inhumanity, the “child of privilege” had been struggling to survive in New York’s downtrodden districts.

“This is just unconscionable!” exclaimed D’Amato. “How many others fall into this shameful category?” Sapir had not finished. Oblivious to D’Amato’s words, she was still recalling her treatment by the bankers: “The Swiss were so arrogant to me. They have been so arrogant. They knew, I’m just coming from the war, from the Holocaust. They were absolutely not human to me.”

And there was a sting to her tale, one that gave credibility to her testimony. Money deposited by her father in British and French banks had been paid within days of her application in the postwar years. Without a death certificate and ignorant of any details, the British and French banks had traced her father’s account and handed over thousands of dollars to Sapir and her mother. Banking secrecy had not denied Sapir her inheritance. “It’s funny,” she would reflect later. “My father was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss.”

Eleven TV news cameras had recorded Sapir’s anguish, good reason for D’Amato to be pleased. His final witness was Lewis Salton, born in Cracow, Poland, eighty-five years earlier. Salton’s father, a lawyer, collected and traded valuable stamps. Among his principal contacts was Luder Edelmann, a dealer in Switzerland. Purchases and sales of stamps with Edelmann were transacted by Salton through a Swiss bank account. In September 1942, Salton’s father was murdered by a Nazi firing squad, and his mother was gassed. Miraculously, in one of those feats that reveal the ingenuity of the survivors, Salton escaped death and, after traveling for one and a half years across Siberia to Korea and across the Pacific to Panama, arrived in New York.

When travel to Europe was permitted, Salton journeyed to Switzerland to track down his father’s account. As was the case with so many other claimants bereft of documents and precise knowledge, Salton’s inquiries proved abortive. Unlike the banks in Britain, France and New York, the Swiss uttered their refusals without any sense of regret. Fifty years later, Salton, the wealthy inventor of hot plates for the catering industry, was candid to D’Amato about his “sad story”: “Frankly, I don’t need the Swiss money, but I would love to get it for sentimental reasons.”

D’Amato nodded. In language not normally associated with banking, the senator vented his spleen. “Trust was totally broken and smashed. And used in the most vile of ways where you do not have a number. A fraud was committed on all of the people, and it continues today.” The investigation, the senator declared, would benefit from “my dogged determination,” not only to embarrass the Swiss but also to uncover a “conspiracy of silence which unfortunately this country [the United States] and its officials aided back in 1946 when we signed the Washington Accord.”

WASHINGTON–OCTOBER 16, 1996

Two hundred and thirty miles south, on the same day, the staff of the Swiss embassy hosted a party in Washington for a departing colleague. Surrounded by immaculate lawns, the sprawling embassy compound exuded wealth, security and certainty—the very qualities of Switzerland itself. The hosts, modestly dressed, quietly spoken and impeccably polite, were aggrieved by that morning’s events in New York. Over a warm buffet, they voiced their suspicions about D’Amato and his motives. In their lifetime, their nation has been associated only with spectacular Alpine landscapes, international charities, enviable prosperity, quirky traditions and a respected banking and business community. An occasional news flash had mentioned Switzerland, but the sustained attention now engineered by D’Amato and the World Jewish Congress had been unsettling for those unassertive, gray-suited bureaucrats. They characterized D’Amato as hysterical, abrasive, dishonest and uncomprehending of Switzerland—in short, as a duplicitous ogre. The contempt was mutual. Despite repeated requests, the senator had refused to meet the Swiss ambassador. This unusual insult reinforced the diplomats’ disdain.

Among those career diplomats was Christoph Bubb, the embassy’s young legal counselor. Worship of laws, regard for the inviolability of formal agreements, have always been paraded as the cornerstones, even the gospel, of Switzerland’s existence. “Legality is a small country’s only defense” is its ritual chant. Sipping fizzy water, Bubb admitted that Switzerland’s wartime conduct could be criticized. The nation’s treatment of Jewish refugees was regrettable, but its vaunted neutrality between the Allies and the Nazis had been sadly misunderstood. Talk of skeletons and dirty laundry was probably accurate, but the idea that Swiss bankers had profited from the war, or had collaborated with the Nazis, or had kept looted gold, or had actually stolen money belonging to the Jews was inconceivable. Inconceivable. Nurtured on facts sanitized by his compromised predecessors, the diplomat spoke of “honesty in the genes” and dismissed accusations of his nation’s collaboration with the Nazis. “Inconceivable.”

Over the years, Bubb’s predecessors had rebuffed claims for the Jewish assets by reference to laws, contracts, formal undertakings and international agreements sanctified after negotiation by a solemn signature. In his world, emotions and references to morality only clouded the issue. Responding to the allegations that Switzerland had knowingly accepted looted gold from the Nazis, he expressed an infallible conviction that his countrymen never broke laws. “Perhaps the gold was booty,” he suggested. “Swiss bankers would then be entitled to accept that gold.” Similarly, Bubb smiled at the suggestion that Swiss bankers would have deliberately kept the deposits of murdered Jews. “Our bankers,” he said with a smirk, “obey the law.”

LONDON–1996

Charles Sonabend possessed proof of the Swiss bankers’ deceit. Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1931, Sonabend, with his family, had become the victim of both the Nazis and the Swiss. In July 1996, the businessman, living in comfort in London, had revisited Switzerland to read Swiss police reports dated 1942 and 1963, detailing his family’s arrest and deportation and a subsequent investigation into the fate of their two suitcases, one entrusted to police custody and another to a family friend in August 1942. Inside one suitcase, according to the 1963 police report, was at least $1,400 in banknotes. According to Charles Sonabend, there was much more. But one sentence in the police report aroused his excitement: “The remaining $200 was deposited in Herr Sonabend’s bank account at the Berner Kantonalbank.”

For the past fifty years, Charles Sonabend had been searching for his father’s Swiss bank account. In 1942, he had later been told by his father’s Swiss business associate, the account contained “at least SF200,000”—over $1.7 million in current values. But every bank to which Sonabend and his sister applied after 1946 denied all knowledge of a family account. Without any details, Sonabend had been helpless. That impotence disappeared after the discovery of the 1963 police report. Quite irrefutably, in 1942 there had been a Sonabend bank account.

Apprehensively, on an overcast July morning in 1996, Sonabend visited the headquarters of the Berner Kantonalbank overlooking the parliament building, where forty-four years earlier Max Oetterli had aggressively denied that Swiss bankers were withholding money deposited by Jews. Greeted in the small reception area by Peter Lienhard, a stout, bearded bank employee, Sonabend was ushered into a first-floor windowless room. The message he received was brief and unapologetic: “There is no trace of any bank account.” If an account had remained dormant for ten years, the bank would have automatically initiated a process to destroy the records. No paper trail remained proving that an account ever existed.

“Nothing more can be done,” Lienhard told the visitor.

“It could have been stolen,” said Sonabend.

“That’s possible,” replied the banker. “We have terrible difficulties tracing old records.” Collective amnesia infected all the bankers.

“This is immoral and wrong,” insisted Sonabend.

Bid swiftly farewell, Sonabend stood forlornly on the street outside the bank. As with thousands of other claimants, a sense of futility began to sap his energy. Peter Lienhard had been so “correct”—so similar to the attitude of the Swiss police and SS officers who had determined the family’s fate fifty-four years earlier.

2

THE SEEDS OF CRIME

During the night of August 12, 1942, Charles Sonabend, then age eleven, had anxiously followed his father, Simon; his thirty-eight-year-old mother, Lili; and his sister, Sabine, fifteen, up an Alpine mountain path in eastern France toward the Swiss border. Led by a French guide, they stumbled, frightened, over unseen rocks, alarmed by unfamiliar sounds, racked by the terror of discovery. At daybreak, the fugitives’ fear dissolved. Looking down into a rich green valley, their guide triumphantly announced: “You’re in Switzerland.”

“We’re free,” sighed Charles Sonabend. “Saved.” Neutral Switzerland, the home of the Red Cross, would provide sanctuary from their persecutors. The sunlight glancing off the tall Alpine trees and the effect of the fresh mountain air encouraged the family to cast off the hatred and dread instinctive to refugees. Fear of Gestapo officers, of inhumanity and of imminent deportation to a death camp was extinguished by this tranquil vista. It was a return to normality. Their trembling, so long a permanent affliction, ceased.

The Sonabends’ journey from Brussels had started two weeks earlier when Simon, a forty-three-year-old importer of Swiss watches, received a summons from the SS ordering that the family report for “resettlement in the East.” Sonabend was not fooled, and he understood the fate that awaited his family. Ever since the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he had received letters from his brothers in Warsaw describing the Nazi treatment of Jews and the mass shootings and even mentioning rumors about gas chambers.

Simon Sonabend, with his family, had tried to escape the Nazis in May 1940. Fleeing toward Dunkirk after the German blitzkrieg invasion of France, Belgium and Holland, the Sonabends had been marooned twelve miles from the coast in an abandoned British army base and missed the last boat across the channel. Anxiously, they returned to occupied Brussels. Over the following two years, Simon continued to import Swiss watches, secretly arranging for at least SF200,000 to be deposited by the manufacturers in a secret bank account in Switzerland.

For years, Jews, like people of every nationality, had used Swiss banks to deposit money to escape paying local taxes and as insurance should they need to flee their own countries. Some opened accounts in their own names, others anonymously. Some simply pushed banknotes, gold coins and jewelry into safe-deposit boxes, reassuringly protected by thick stone walls. Others bought property or insurance policies. For those fearful that banks, despite their formalities, might nevertheless reveal their secrets to the police or to their own governments, the alternative was to entrust their savings to Switzerland’s lawyers, notaries, trustees, and insurance companies, or to their business associates to be registered in other names. That protection became critical in the months after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. Swiss bankers began receiving requests from German-Jewish clients that their deposits should be either transferred to Germany or handed over to a representative who would personally call at the banks. German Jews, the Swiss realized, had become the victims of Gestapo blackmail. Many of those requests were refused until the bankers were satisfied that the Jews genuinely wanted their money handed over to their jailers. To reinforce their clients’ protection, the bankers had successfully lobbied for a federal law, passed in 1934, punishing those responsible for unauthorized revelations of banking secrets. Although there was no evidence that the 1934 law was conceived to benefit the Jews—the bill was introduced only eighteen days after Hitler became chancellor—the law had, by 1942, convinced most Gestapo officers that importuning Jewish depositors was an unprofitable activity. Countless Jews had already been gassed or shot without revealing the secrets of their finances, while others, on the eve of their death or separation from their children, had passed on the secret: “There’s money for you in Switzerland.” Occasionally—in the desolate prison, in the crammed railway wagon or surrounded by the dying in concentration camps—these people whispered the secret numbers. But, in the turmoil of suffering, the heirs barely noted what seemed an irrelevance. For those still free but persecuted, the existence of a secret fund in Switzerland was akin to divine reassurance.

In July 1942, to avoid “resettlement in the East,” Simon Sonabend found a Frenchman who agreed to smuggle his family into Switzerland. The cost, for providing false French passports and guiding the family from Brussels across France and through the mountains into Switzerland, was SF125,000 (about $800,000 in today’s values)—a fortune, but affordable for Sonabend.

In the days before their departure, Simon deposited diamonds and gold bars with four friends, secretly recording the details inside a chest of drawers. Other gold bars were hidden in a chimney. More gold bars, diamonds stuffed into lipstick canisters and currency then worth about $20,000 were concealed in the two bags that the Sonabends carried to Besançon, near the Swiss border.

Two days earlier, a telegram had arrived at the Foreign Office in London from its embassy in Bern. In stark terms, a British diplomat quoted a “reliable” intelligence source—Gerhard Riegner, the secretary of the World Jewish Congress—reporting Hitler’s secret orders to exterminate four million Jews “at one blow.” That report only confirmed all the eyewitness reports received by officials in the Foreign Office, the State Department and Switzerland’s Political Department about the deportation of French, Dutch and Belgian Jews eastward and their mass execution. Descriptions of those murders had been broadcast on BBC radio from London and were heard in Switzerland, where local newspapers reported a speech by