Nazi Gold Page 3

  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 BB
C radio from London and were heard in Switzerland, where local newspapers reported a speech by Winston Churchill denouncing the Nazi murder of one million Jews. Swiss citizens were even themselves eyewitnesses of the mass murder. Across occupied Europe, Swiss diplomats, doctors and travelers, protected as neutrals, observed and reported to Switzerland the horrors inflicted upon the innocent. Some eyewitnesses, such as Dr. Rudolf Bucher, a Zurich physician, gave dozens of speeches in Switzerland during that summer of 1942 about their experiences—of seeing deportations and mass shootings, of hearing rumors of the gas chambers. Considering that information, the Sonabends had good reason to believe that they were safe. But they had been unaware of Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, the director of the police section of the Ministry of Justice and the Police.

  Tall, broad-shouldered, athletic and a respectable Christian, Rothmund nursed a hatred of Jews noteworthy in Switzerland only because of the power he wielded. Indoctrinated for centuries by its dogmatic priests, Switzerland’s God-fearing community was steeped in a primitive hatred of the Jews as the killers of Jesus Christ. Long after Jews had been granted civil rights in neighboring countries, Switzerland continued to discriminate and persecute Jews until, the last country in Europe to do so, it granted them political rights in 1866. Ever since, Switzerland’s small Jewish community had meekly acquiesced in their countrymen’s anti-Semitism. Trepidation rather than pride had spread among the small community on February 4, 1936, when David Frankfurter, a twenty-five-year-old Jewish medical student and the son of a rabbi in a small Yugoslav community, assassinated Wilhelm Gustloff, Hitler’s personal representative in Switzerland. Frankfurter had immediately surrendered to the police, explaining the murder as a gesture to draw attention to the plight of the Jews in Germany. His eighteen-year prison sentence was a warning to all Swiss Jews to remain inconspicuous and unprotesting. Accordingly, none had dared to protest when, to conform with Nazi Germany’s laws, Jewish bankers, members of long-established Swiss families, had been requested by their countrymen to resign their directorships and memberships in the council of the Zurich stock exchange.

  Dr. Heinrich Rothmund’s unpredictable moods swung between meekness and hysteria, reflecting a driven, authoritarian, conceited official who alternately displayed despotism and charm, gentle wit and harsh cynicism. By 1942, acting at the behest of Switzerland’s establishment and the majority of the people, its authoritarian police apparatus was dedicated to keeping the country “pure” and to saving it from being “overrun with Jews.” Rothmund was tied to that ideology, and the reports from Germany and Eastern Europe could not sway his feelings toward those whom he considered a sinister threat.

  Switzerland’s attitude toward Jews applying for asylum was sealed by a new law passed on April 7, 1933. Those fleeing from the Nazis as religious rather than “political fugitives” were denied the status that automatically granted asylum under the Swiss constitution. By 1942, just 9,150 foreign Jews were legally resident in Switzerland, only 980 more than in 1931. The fortunate few were the rich who had cooperated in allowing the Swiss to profit from their misery. Unscrupulous Swiss businessmen like Richard Holtklott had been tipped off by Swiss diplomats about Jewish property and factories in Germany and occupied Europe that could be purchased cheaply. Among the victims of that trade was Frederick Weissmann, the owner of Emil Jacoby, a shoe factory in Berlin. After running the business for thirty years, Weissmann was compelled by Germany’s Aryanization laws to sell the factory. The purchaser, for one mark, was Bally Shoes, the Swiss giant, which had acquired for similar amounts a succession of other Jewish assets in Germany. Weissmann’s only comfort was that Bally arranged an entry visa to Switzerland, which saved his life. The less prosperous Jews were the subject of Rothmund’s influence, first manifested on March 26, 1938, just two weeks after Hitler triumphantly arrived in Vienna and annexed his homeland to the Reich.

  Desperate Austrian Jews were entering Switzerland in growing numbers, and Rothmund proposed to the Federal Council—the government, or Bundesrat, consisting of seven ministers—that the refugees should be denied visas and expelled. “We must protect ourselves with all our strength,” he told the nation’s rulers, “and, when necessary, without mercy, against the immigration of foreign Jews, most especially those from the east.” As the Jews’ predicament worsened and distraught Jews were forcibly repelled at the Swiss border, Rothmund was dispatched on July 6, 1938, as the Swiss delegate to a conference to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees. At President Roosevelt’s initiative, thirty-two nations had agreed to meet in Switzerland, but when the Swiss government refused to host the meeting they convened instead at nearby Évian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva.

  Few knew more than Rothmund and the Swiss government about the persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria. During an enjoyable tour around Oranienburg, the concentration camp near Berlin, Rothmund had lectured his hosts over lunch in the camp about Switzerland’s successful control of the Jewish threat and had later congratulated himself on the respect shown to him. His report on his return praised the German method of teaching citizenship. By then, the fate of the Jews—harassed, stigmatized, robbed, jailed and murdered by their kinsmen—was openly boasted about by Germany’s leaders in their much applauded public speeches. Over 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria—52,000 to Britain, 30,000 to France, 33,000 to Palestine, 100,000 to the United States and 3,000 to Sweden. Switzerland had allowed 14,000 to enter but had compelled more than half to leave. As the persecution worsened, Switzerland’s restrictions increased. For Rothmund and his sponsors, the Jews were unwanted mouths, millstones, even vermin among the horde of foreigners seeking protection under Switzerland’s Red Cross. The conference at Évian aggravated the Jews’ tribulations. Instead of helping the Jews, the delegates, most notably the Australian, voiced fears of a stampede and of importing “a Jewish problem.”

  Heartened by international solidarity, Rothmund returned home to consider the crisis. Enforcing Switzerland’s exclusion of Jews had become difficult, not least because identifying the Jews among the Germans arriving at Switzerland’s borders was not always easy. Aryan Germans were upset by the questions and—more irritating—the Swiss were embarrassed when Jews were inadvertently admitted. A cumbersome way of identifying the Jews would be to require visas for all Germans traveling to Switzerland. To avoid that unfortunate measure, on August 13, 1938, Swiss diplomats approached the government in Berlin with an unusual request. By then, desperate Jews were crossing the Swiss border illegally. Exhausted, hungry and often destitute, they were usually arrested and driven back toward their tormentors. From Bern, Rothmund pushed hard for special discrimination. Dr. Hans Frölicher, the pro-Nazi Swiss ambassador, asked the Nazi government whether Germany would be prepared to mark the passports of Jews with a distinctive sign. Previous requests had been unavailing because the German policy had been to encourage Jewish emigration, but eventually, on September 7, after persistent Swiss pressure, the Germans yielded. All Jewish passports were to be prominently stamped with the letter J.

  Rothmund remained dissatisfied. Although Switzerland was at this time housing no more than 12,000 political and religious refugees, the police chief traveled to Berlin to demand further concessions. After successive bouts of negotiation, the Nazis finally agreed that German border guards would prevent Jews from crossing the frontier. The Swiss demand for cruelty had been accepted.

  Over the following weeks, the pressure to escape into Switzerland intensified. Kristallnacht, a two-day orgy of mayhem and murder directed against Germany’s Jews on November 9–10, 1938, was launched by Hitler in a speech promising “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” More German Jews unsuccessfully attempted to cross the Swiss border. The following year, on the outbreak of war, France’s Jews also sought sanctuary in Switzerland, risking their lives as they passed through thick forests and across ravines and mountain ranges. The French were followed by Belgian and Dutch Jews. Nearly all of those who overcame the obstacles and cros
sed the frontier were forcibly ejected. To all appeals for humanity Rothmund stayed impervious, despite knowing the fate of those returned to German-occupied Europe. Even the knowledge that warehouses across Switzerland were full of unclaimed luggage dispatched by hopeful Jews who had failed to complete their journey did not dent the police chief’s resolution. Voicing the sentiment of his masters, he told inquirers that tiny Switzerland should not underestimate the threat posed to law and order or “overstrain” its limited food supplies.

  The irony was lost on most people. Until 1942, the Swiss government would compel the 5,000 members of Switzerland’s Jewish working community to finance entirely the care of the Jewish refugees. Wealthier refugees were forced to pay additional taxes to support poorer refugees, and no refugee was allowed to work, pending compulsory internment. American Jews had contributed toward the cost until a director of the National Bank threatened to cease converting “Jewish dollars.” Rothmund and Eduard von Steiger, the new minister of justice and the police and a Nazi sympathizer, had cowed Switzerland’s Jewish community into petrified subservience. Long before the Sonabends crossed the frontier, Switzerland had without a qualm adopted Germany’s racial policies. Uncertainty permeated the lives of those Swiss Jews to whom the Sonabends innocently appealed for help.