Nazi Gold Page 2

  “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 Leagu
ers. 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 th
eir 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.”