Nazi Gold Page 4
After a short train journey from the border, on August 13 Simon Sonabend had led his family to friends in Biel, the center of Switzerland’s watch manufacturers. Welcomed with evident trepidation by Swiss Jews, the two children were transferred to another house while their hosts explained their predicament to Simon Sonabend. Swiss law required foreigners staying the night to be registered at the local police. A handful of Swiss, realizing the consequences, had illegally hidden their uninvited guests, but Sonabend’s hosts, fearful of breaking the law, insisted on notifying the police about the refugees. Sonabend’s tearful entreaties were resisted. Even Jews born in Switzerland were being threatened by the government with denaturalization. Rothmund’s edict had ruptured the bond among Jews and their friends.
On the morning of Saturday, August 15, 1942, two policemen arrived at the house where the children were staying. Gruffly, they were ordered to pack. “We can’t travel,” replied the bewildered boy. “It’s the Sabbath.” Jeering, the policemen bundled Charles, his sister, and later their distraught, frail mother into a car. Their immediate destination was the Convent des Ursulines, a picturesque sixteenth-century mansion bordered by narrow cobbled streets and overlooked by the Jura Mountains in Porrentruy. Nearby was France. The nuns had agreed to imprison the Belgians until their deportation. The convent, packed with Jews and other refugees, had become a staging post for Auschwitz, a symbol of Switzerland’s pact with the Nazis.
Simon Sonabend had been incarcerated in the town’s jail. Italic script in the prison’s heavy black ledger recorded the fate of prisoner number 1,151. Unlike other illegal French immigrants, who were fined ten francs, Sonabend was described as a “Jew to be deported.” Just before his departure, he revealed that he had entrusted one suitcase filled with currency, jewels and gold to a Swiss associate (another suitcase was held by the police). Meticulously, the police recorded the prisoner’s statement and asked Simon for his signature. Unlike Switzerland’s bank records, the police and prison records would survive the next fifty years in unblemished condition.
That same day in Bern, Rothmund had issued a new instruction concerning the treatment of Jewish refugees. Four weeks earlier, he had discussed with von Steiger their common fear that Switzerland would be overwhelmed by Jews. The frontier, Rothmund had reiterated, was difficult to guard, especially against those prepared to suffer any injury to save their lives. The solution, he recommended, was to issue an uncompromising order that every Jew crossing illegally into Switzerland was to be forcibly returned to occupied Europe. Von Steiger, enjoying a holiday in the mountains and feeling no sympathy toward the “arrogant and disgruntled people … with dollars and jewels,” approved the law on August 13, 1942. Among the first victims of Rothmund’s new decree were the Sonabends.
In the late afternoon on the following day, two French policemen called for Lili Sonabend and her two children. Escorted from the mansion along the cobbled path to a waiting car, the woman suddenly panicked and cried for mercy. In the words of the subsequent police report, “Madame Sonabend pretended they would be shot if deported.” Lili collapsed screaming onto the pavement, attracting over fifty outraged townsfolk who protested against the family’s deportation. The nuns, by contrast, remained immobile. For their own safety, the police allowed the Sonabends to return inside the building.
The following night, August 17, the Sonabends, terrified but resigned to their fate, were driven to the French border. The routine, by then familiar, would be repeated by thousands of other Jews. In darkness on strange roads, children would cry for their mothers; old women would be forced to walk, begging the police to shoot them rather than that they should take another step; fathers would plead and scream for their families to be saved; and wives would sob as their husbands were dragged through the dirt. All uttered the same entreaties: that the police should know that they were leading them to inevitable death, that they should know that the Gestapo, whom they had mercifully evaded just days before, awaited their return. Nearly all were met with the same icy indifference. At best, the police remained silent, convinced that they had to obey orders or lose their jobs—like Paul Grüninger, a police chief in St. Gall who had been dismissed in 1940 for allowing 3,000 Jews to cross the border. At worst, the officers spat out, “You’re Jews and you’re getting what you deserve.”
Controlling his emotions, Simon Sonabend also uttered a plea. His family, he begged, should be deported to Free France in the Vichy zone, where there would be a chance of survival. Nonchalantly, the Swiss police rejected his request. “The Jews,” decided the police, “are to be handed over to the Germans.” Charles Sonabend recalled, “The Swiss were cynical and treated us as criminals.” That cynicism, ordained by Rothmund’s office and by his political master, manifested itself in the police requirement that Simon Sonabend pay SF6.80 for the taxi that took his family and their police escort to the border.
Clutching their luggage and denied any map to establish their whereabouts, the Sonabends walked hesitantly into the darkness. “My parents were too traumatized to carry on fighting,” Charles realized in later years. “My father didn’t think of waiting and then going back into Switzerland. Blindly we walked toward the SS.” Once inside France, forlornly hiding under bushes, their hope that they would not be found by German patrols proved futile as sniffer dogs approached. Handing over their only suitcase, they were escorted to the local frontier post. “The SS,” Charles Sonabend later reflected, “questioned us more politely than the Swiss police.”
By then, the Swiss policemen had returned to their base. In their report, they recorded that the routine deportation had passed uneventfully. Attached to their report was the receipt issued by the taxi driver. The file was placed in an archive and the family was forgotten.
The following day, in Belfort prison, Charles met his father for the last time. Together they prayed. Just before the eleven-year-old bid farewell, he was told of the valuables hidden in Belgium and of the bank accounts in Switzerland and New York. The cell door closed. While the two children were taken to a local orphanage, the parents traveled to Paris and then on cattle trucks toward Poland. Charles and his sister soon arrived in Paris themselves. But the recent mass roundup of Jews had exhausted the local police. As a temporary measure, the two orphans were given shelter with Jewish families.
In Switzerland, the police handed Sonabend’s suitcase to a friend. Prying it open, he found more valuables. Having taken what he deemed was owed to him, the friend (according to the police report) deposited the remaining $200 in Sonabend’s account at a local branch of the Kantonalbank. At that moment, two weeks after their deportation, the Sonabends arrived at Auschwitz. They died shortly afterward.
The Sonabends’ murder coincided with an outpouring of grief, anger and shame in Switzerland. Churchmen who had witnessed the suffering of the refugees protested to von Steiger that Switzerland’s reputation for asylum had been contaminated by allowing just 9,600 refugees to remain in the country. The ban, complained the protesters, was harming rather than protecting the nation. In reply, the minister spoke of his fears that the refugees might import health risks and of his passionate desire to obey the law. Switzerland, he exclaimed, was “an overcrowded little lifeboat.” Addressing the Federal Council on September 22, von Steiger praised his own policies, predicting that history would one day record, “We have fulfilled the duty of humanity with independence and honor as in the past, and with reason guiding our emotions.” As a gesture, the minister announced a slight relaxation of his policy. Exceptions would be tolerated to the expulsions, but there was no question of Switzerland’s making a sacrifice on behalf of the persecuted.
In Washington and London, there was no reaction to von Steiger’s announcements. Neither Allied government offered assistance to the Jews. While Foreign Office officials had categorized as a “wild story” Riegner’s information about German policy “to eliminate ‘useless mouths,’” senior officials in the State Department, still denying the existence of the Holocaust
, withheld the telegram from World Jewish Congress officials in Washington as “unsubstantiated” and continued to block attempts to allow entry into the United States by those Jewish refugees still able to escape from Europe. A revolt against that prejudice was germinating among the new recruits in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which was located in an imposing building opposite the White House. Within the department, a band of American crusaders were scrutinizing the role of Switzerland and the other neutrals toward the Nazis, a scrutiny that would eventually engender the campaign to restore the Jewish assets to their owners.
3
THE CRUSADE
Sam Klaus, a passionate gumshoe, an outstanding lawyer and a fervent Nazi hunter, shone among the American crusaders. An intelligent man, dynamic and resourceful, Klaus boiled with anger as he learned of Germany’s treatment of the Jews, and he was determined to do all he could to prevent, for all time, any renewal of Germany’s threat to world peace. He was no less driven by an invincible urge to find the Nazis’ loot. To Klaus, Switzerland epitomized the enemy. For their part, the Swiss regarded Klaus—principled, powerful and Jewish—as their preeminent foe.
Klaus was born in Brooklyn in 1904. His father, a successful and cultivated tailor working on lower Madison Avenue, died shortly afterward of cancer. Klaus’s mother remarried a grocer, and the family moved into a poor neighborhood, “redolent,” according to Klaus’s sister, “of Dickensian habits.” A victim of diabetes and of misery at home, Klaus could in later years recall from his childhood only one benediction: his stepfather’s insistence on a Hebraic education and a commitment to Jewish causes, especially the development of Palestine. Hard work eased his exit from that ghetto. Graduating at the top of his class from Columbia Law School and rising to become one of New York’s best lawyers, Klaus enjoyed a well-established reputation by the outbreak of war. Automatically disqualified from military service in 1942 for health reasons, he joined others with a similar background in the Treasury who, in later years, affectionately recalled “Sammy” Klaus as a small, dark, intense bachelor with a passion for collecting rugs, always straining after perfection, who marched in the vanguard of an unusual crusade.
The mastermind of the crusade was Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury since 1934, an affable, ardent New Dealer, a friend and neighbor of the president, who was driven by a credo that Europe’s peace could be secured only by permanently destroying Germany’s industrial might, reducing the warmongering nation to manufacturers of cuckoo clocks. Armed with ideas, guile and tenacity, Morgenthau’s crusaders were a group of outstanding economists and lawyers, graduates of Harvard and Columbia, many of whom had risen from poor Jewish communities through their ambition, intelligence and industry. United by their desire to cripple Nazi Germany and by their concern for Europe’s abandoned and destitute Jews, they were influenced by a variety of sources, prominent among them Israel Sieff, a British Zionist, who hosted weekly dinners in Washington to discuss the fate of Europe’s Jews.
The most senior of Morgenthau’s crusaders was Harry Dexter White, a New Dealer empowered as an assistant Treasury secretary to direct American policy across Europe. Inside the White House, Morgenthau’s standard-bearer was Isador Lubin, a member of the president’s “brain trust.” Officially ranking as a government statistician, Lubin was one of those confidants of President Roosevelt who, like Colonel Bernard Bernstein (a Treasury representative assigned to General Eisenhower’s headquarters to plan the occupation of Germany), had become uneasy about the collaboration by Europe’s neutral countries with Nazi Germany.
Klaus was assigned within the Treasury to the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA) division, tracking and controlling Germany’s foreign trade. Just as in the bygone era when the imperial navies and armies of warring nations laid siege to castles and blockaded ports, the Treasury in Washington, which relied heavily on the Ministry of Economic Warfare in London, had plotted an economic offensive against Germany and occupied Europe to prevent crucial supplies from reaching the Nazis. During that first year, 1942, immersed in constant discussion with other innovative lawyers and economists, Klaus toyed with the problem of how eventually to seize the increasing flow of Nazi loot deposited in the neutral countries.
Since 1940, a trickle of intelligence reports from London had suggested that German bankers, industrialists, politicians and Nazi functionaries were accumulating technology and money, particularly in Switzerland, estimated to be worth $1 billion (over $10 billion in today’s values). Reading those reports, Morgenthau’s men suspected that after Germany’s defeat the remnants of the Nazi leadership would use the secret funds deposited in the neutral countries as the seed money to establish the Fourth Reich. To forestall that resurgence of Nazism, Sam Klaus’s own plan, set out on May 11, 1944, less than a month before the Normandy landings, was to launch a worldwide hunt to uncover and prevent the sale and disappearance of German property and loot after the war. Code-naming it the Safehaven program, Klaus recommended that Allied governments persuade the neutrals to seize all the German property deposited in their countries.
In July 1944, Sam Klaus was jubilant, convinced that he had won a major battle. Forty-four nations had met at Bretton Woods, a resort in New Hampshire, under the banner of the United Nations’ Monetary and Financial Conference, to plan the world’s postwar economy. On Klaus’s initiative, the FEA representative persuaded the conference to adopt Safehaven as Allied policy. To the crusaders, Resolution VI, which demanded that the neutrals prevent the Nazis from hiding funds and loot in their countries, was a weapon that would shackle the enemy and their collaborators.
The preamble of the resolution stated: “Anticipating defeat, enemy leaders and their nationals are transferring assets to and through neutral countries in order to conceal them and to perpetuate their influence and power.…” The resolution called upon the neutrals to “take immediate measures to prevent any disposition or transfer … of looted gold, currency, art objects, securities and financial or business enterprises [and] to take immediate measures to prevent the concealment by fraudulent means or otherwise” of stolen assets or assets belonging to enemy leaders and their associates. The loot, the resolution demanded, should be returned by the neutrals to the Allies.
Back in Washington, on August 5, FEA representatives met officials from the State Department and Treasury to agree on their strategy to prevent the neutrals from frustrating the resolution. Using the threat of economic sanctions to compel the neutrals’ compliance was, Klaus argued, vital. But by the end of the meeting the lawyer recognized that his passion for an aggressive policy was not shared by the State Department. Tellingly, the diplomats were even unwilling to relinquish to the FEA their control of communications to the neutral governments. Safehaven’s success depended, Klaus knew, upon the attitude of the neutrals’ governments, and if the U.S. Treasury Department was denied direct access to Swiss government officials, the program would be handicapped. “Where voluntary cooperation proves insufficient,” urged Klaus, “we must be prepared to use direct pressure upon the neutral governments.” The diplomats disagreed. Continuing a blockade after the war, asserted the State Department officials, “would not be warranted.” The department’s cooperation would be restricted to approving a request to American diplomats in the neutral countries to “investigate and report any evidence that enemy capital has been or is being invested in those countries.”
Aggrieved by that disunity, Klaus flew to Europe on August 23 accompanied by Herbert Cummings, an equally zealous anti-Nazi employed in the State Department. Soon after their arrival in London, the secrecy of the mission evaporated. Seeking out journalists, Klaus spoke aggressively about Safehaven’s threat to the German conspiracy. The imminent arrival of American troops on the Swiss border—they had fought their way across southern France—galvanized the crusader into predicting dire consequences if Switzerland and the other neutrals did not cease their close collaboration with Germany. Flying from London to the neutral capitals—
Stockholm, Madrid, Lisbon, Ankara—the two officials called at American embassies to brief and exhort their colleagues to investigate German activities, to identify the deposits of looted assets and to find out how the Germans had camouflaged or cloaked their property within local corporations. Their reception seemed friendly and the assurances of cooperation unconditional, yet by the time the two officials arrived by airplane in Switzerland, their confidence had dimmed.
Like all new visitors to Switzerland, Klaus was beguiled by the country’s civility and its sheer beauty: the snowcapped mountains, the rich green meadows and Bern’s stone buildings erected along cobbled roads centuries earlier—roads down which Napoleon Bonaparte had ridden his horse to visit his banker and possibly a mistress. To discount that facade required exceptional knowledge and experience that even the Allied diplomats, stationed in Bern, hardly possessed. Few outsiders had penetrated the minds of the rulers of the four-million-strong bourgeois-peasant community who had lived since 1848 in a confederation of three cultures and three languages—German, French and Italian.
Klaus was soon versed in the mythology and the boasts, which declared Switzerland to be Europe’s oldest democracy, long ruled by elected representatives rather than royalty. Switzerland, he was told by his hosts, could trace its roots back to 1291 and had survived as a nation since 1848 only because pervading tensions from neighboring countries could be defused by the nation’s resolute neutrality, which had been recognized by the Declaration of Paris in 1815 and reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Neutrality, the chorus endlessly repeated, was essential to Switzerland’s survival, because involvement in a European war would inevitably fracture the country’s delicate balance and precipitate its disintegration.