The Swiss bankers knew exactly what they were doing. When a nervous client appeared with two stocky men in ill-fitting suits, they understood the situation perfectly. Those men were SS officers, and the hurried withdrawal they demanded was nothing more than sheer extortion. Switzerland, the supposedly neutral heart of Europe, had become the Nazi regime’s favorite bank.
From the moment Hitler was democratically elected in 1933, he and his party turned Germany into an organized crime syndicate. They destroyed their enemies and took their property. Himmler’s SS was designed to be self-financing, and its main source of revenue came from the property of the Third Reich’s enemies, the fruits of their forced labor, and the proceeds of their eventual murder. Profits flowed.
Swiss banks had long been tied to the German economy, granting Germany more loans than any other Western financial institutions. As the Nazis tightened their grip, desperate Germans, many of them Jews, traveled to Switzerland to hide their assets. They were running out of time and out of options. “It really was a gangster logic,” said Swiss parliamentarian Jean Ziegler.
“They were not only murderers. It was a regime of organized crime. ”
They became billionaires through the war. And Switzerland helped them do it.
It wasn’t just stocks, bonds, and jewelry stolen from the victims. Nazi Germany also churned out stolen works of art. Hitler, obsessed with beauty, planned to build a massive museum in Linz, the city where he was raised. He wanted to restructure the entire history of art from a Germanic point of view.
Swiss dealers were hired to sell what the Nazis called “degenerate art. ” They knew its value on the international market, and they sold plenty through Switzerland. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.
Stealing gold was only the first part. Then the Nazis had to launder it, and Switzerland was the perfect place to do it. “What the Swiss did was not only lend money and trade credits to the Nazis and their puppet regimes,” one expert explained, “but actually assisted in the looting of national treasuries. ”
The Reichsbank followed the German army into each capital city, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium, and helped itself to the national gold reserves.
Jewish communities were liquidated. Everything they owned was turned into currency. Gold fillings were pulled from victims’ mouths and melted down. Human hair was used in the manufacture of submarine boots.
Slave labor produced the weapons of war. The Nazis sought profit from every possible source, including the dead. Hermann Göring was a gangster with an army of gangsters under him. He stole gold from the concentration camps, melted it down, re-stamped it, and sent it to Switzerland.
The Germans arrived in Paris in the summer of 1940, and within days they had a list of the most important Jewish art dealers. Paris was the center of the art world then, and the Nazis took over fifteen or sixteen galleries almost immediately. The Jeu de Paume became the depot for all looted art. Trucks carrying priceless works would arrive, and a staff of sixty art historians and photographers would inventory them.
Some went to Germany. Some went to Switzerland, where they were sold. The Vichy regime provided plenty of officials eager to do business with the Third Reich. The art dealers were just as eager.
There was no ideology, no morality, just the realization that if they didn’t sell it, someone else would. There were heroic acts buried beneath all this greed. The valet of one Rothschild mansion stayed behind and worked for a German general who had taken over the house. He wanted to save part of the family’s wealth.
He called his cousin, a firefighter, and they staged a fake fire in one entrance. While the German soldiers rushed to help extinguish it, the valet and his cousin carried priceless silverware out the other door. Despite the heroics, the pillaging continued. Göring was insatiable when it came to art and used the looted works to barter for foreign currency.
To get the art into Switzerland, they even used the diplomatic pouch to avoid customs. Why did Switzerland allow itself to become so deeply involved? The first reason was fear. From the moment Hitler moved into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, the Swiss feared they would be next.
Every night, Swiss citizens went to bed wondering if they would wake up at three in the morning under invasion. In June 1940, orders went out to prepare for a full-scale invasion, a top-secret plan code-named Operation Christmas Tree. It called for the quick defeat of Swiss resistance and the partition of the country with Italy. But Hitler had other priorities.
Switzerland was landlocked, completely dependent on surrounding countries for fuel and essential supplies. In the end, Hitler decided that invading would cost too much. He got most of what he wanted anyway by applying pressure. Still, the threat never went away.
The German press reminded Switzerland she was originally part of the Reich. Hitler called the neutral country “a pimple on the face of Europe. ”
The Swiss prepared to fight. General Henri Guisan called his senior officers together to plan a defensive strategy.
They could blow up the St. Gotthard and Simplon tunnels, cutting off the main transit route for German supplies to Italy. The army could retreat to mountain strongholds that would be nearly impossible to bomb. Switzerland’s landscape was perfect for defense, unlike the flat plains of Holland.
Despite this strategy, a Nazi invasion eventually would have been too much for Guisan’s forces. They knew it. “We are no match for the Nazis,” people said. “We’ll be victims like the rest of Europe.
”
In 1943, with Germany on the defensive, Hitler still fumed over Swiss neutrality. Himmler and the SS wanted to occupy the country. But Hitler’s generals and economic advisers argued against it. Many of them had their own fortunes locked away in Swiss banks, a violation of German law, and they wanted to keep it secret.
The myth of Swiss neutrality persisted, and the Swiss themselves fostered it. But not everyone accepted it. “It is a big, big lie, the lie of neutrality,” Jean Ziegler insisted. “World War II was a crime against humanity.
It was the fight between civilization and barbarism. Hitler was the incarnation of evil. To be neutral when humanity is fighting for its survival, that attitude is criminal. ”
The Swiss banks made immense amounts of money out of their relationship with Berlin.
The planetary power of Swiss banking today comes from the days of the Second World War. When the Reich asked something of their business friends, they were very inclined to give it. The Allies colluded as well, pretending Switzerland was truly neutral because it was useful to them. The Swiss office of the OSS, led by Allen Dulles, was the main source of allied intelligence in Europe.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, run by the Swiss, helped protect Allied airmen shot down over Europe. The Julius Bär Bank, owned by a Jewish family, arranged foreign exchange for the OSS. Through Swiss banks, the Allies financed the French resistance. “I think that 99% of the Swiss were against Hitler,” one observer noted.
The grassroots resistance in Switzerland was stronger than in any other country in Europe because Switzerland itself was created against the German Empire. But Switzerland was not alone in doing business with the Germans. Vichy France cooperated. Turkey bought Nazi gold, as did Sweden.
Franco’s Spain bought stolen gold from Europe’s national treasuries through Switzerland. Salazar’s Portugal also profited. Argentina buzzed with rumors of U-boats delivering gold to its shores. “We don’t want to deal directly with the Reichsbank,” these central banks would say.
So the Swiss National Bank became the clearing house, selling gold to third parties. As the tide of the war turned against Germany, the plunder continued. Hitler, even in the middle of defeat and psychological devastation, wrote his will and still talked about his art collection. His obsession never faded.
Pressure from the United States mounted. In 1941, the Treasury Department blacklisted Swiss firms suspected of doing business with the Nazis and froze their assets in the US. Unlike other neutrals who began pulling away from Germany after Stalingrad, the Swiss continued their profitable relationship well into 1943, despite spectacular Allied victories and the collapse of Mussolini. On and on they continued.
They were doing very well. Operation Safe Haven, a worldwide hunt by US Treasury agents, was launched to uncover and prevent the disappearance of German assets. A dark suspicion remained that the Nazi leadership would use secret funds in neutral countries to establish a Fourth Reich. In August 1944, the SS convened a mysterious conference in Strasbourg to prepare for just that possibility.
When the war finally ended, the loot was spread across Europe. Allied troops discovered gold reserves in the salt mines of Merkers and in Buchenwald, valued at $200 million. The US, Britain, and France formed a commission to redistribute the gold. But where was the rest, the estimated $621 million stolen from Europe’s central banks?
The focus turned to Switzerland. The Allies couldn’t agree on a strategy. Britain and France needed Swiss banks to restart their shattered economies. The US worried that a ruined Europe would fall to communism.
In March 1946, Switzerland was forcefully invited to Washington to account for its behavior. “They negotiated for 68 days,” Ziegler recalled. “And they lied like hell. They said, ‘What?
Reparations? We are neutral. We never allied with anyone. Why should we give reparations?
’”
The Washington Agreement was signed in May 1946. Switzerland agreed to return 250 million Swiss francs, about $52 million worth of gold, which would be distributed to the central banks the Nazis had looted. In exchange, all national claims against Switzerland were dropped. Nowhere did the agreement attribute guilt or liability.
It stated Switzerland was merely making a financial contribution to European reconstruction. “Essentially, it allowed the Swiss to get away with murder,” one expert said. The secret records of the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of International Settlements were never opened to the Allies. To this day, only a few Swiss bankers know how much stolen gold was laundered through Switzerland.
A side letter to the Washington Accord said Switzerland would do its utmost to return money deposited by individuals to those who had made the deposits before and during the war. Nothing happened for years. Holocaust survivors went back to Switzerland with little documentation, knowing their families had Swiss bank accounts. Banking officials treated them with incredible nastiness.
They demanded death certificates. “Auschwitz didn’t issue death certificates,” the survivors said. If a descendant could produce a declaration of disappearance, the clerk would ask, “Prove to me that you are the only heir. ” But the SS had killed whole families, whole villages.
That second proof could never be produced. Banking secrecy was turned against the very people who had sought its protection. The return of stolen artworks was equally difficult. Post-war Europe was on the verge of mass starvation, and the Allies had other priorities.
In France, there was a denial phase. For decades, many survivors didn’t dare ask for material things. They were just happy to be alive. Only later did they realize that art is not just a material thing.
It goes beyond that. It took the end of the Cold War to bring the issue back to light. In 1995, the Austrian government returned artworks stolen by the Nazis for which no heirs could be found. The Swiss banks, however, were slower to deal with their wartime activities.
When the US declassified documents about Switzerland’s role, the American press and the World Jewish Congress took notice. Edgar Bronfman, Sr. , and Senator Alfonse D’Amato accused the Swiss of profiting from the Holocaust and withholding bank accounts worth an estimated $7 billion. “I would be extremely suspicious of anyone who assumes we can have an accurate accounting now,” one skeptic said.
“The sums involved are not very important, I suppose. ”
The Swiss Parliament launched its own inquiry in December 1996. A commission of experts was appointed to review the archives. This time, individuals and corporations cooperated.
Still, questions remain. About twenty percent of the art looted in France is still missing. Some of it must be somewhere in Switzerland, waiting to surface. Much of it found its way to places like the United States, where the market was.
What exactly constitutes legitimate spoils of war? Perhaps the question itself is an oxymoron. War is an immoral enterprise whose objective is to kill as many people as possible. The Nazis observed nothing.
More than half a century later, the chilling methods of the Nazi regime have become clearer. But the precise amount of Nazi gold and their assorted spoils of war may remain a mystery forever.
