Ziegler-Swiss,Gold&Dead(Swiss bankers&holocaust)(1998)

This is Jean Ziegler's shocking book The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead - How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine (1998) which probably provides the fullest picture to date of Swiss complicity in Nazi German war crimes of World War II. At what price neutrality? For the 50 years following World War II, Switzerland has maintained that whatever collaboration it may have engaged in with Nazi Germany was undertaken in hopes of avoiding invasion. Recently, however, foreign governments and the families of Holocaust victims have begun to take an interest in the fate of the many millions of dollars' worth of Jewish gold, works of art, and money that disappeared into numbered Swiss bank accounts during the war, never to be seen again. According to Ziegler, professor of sociology at Geneva University, Swiss bankers fenced and laundered the gold stocks stolen from central banks in Nazi-occupied countries. It was they who financed Hitler's wars of conquest. Had the Swiss ruling class evinced any remorse at the close of the war - had its members apologized for their transgressions and quietly left the stage - he should never have written this book. The author details how top Swiss bankers fenced and laundered the gold that the Germans stole from conquered nations' central banks, from Jewish businesses and homes, even from Holocaust victims' teeth. By exchanging this loot for foreign currency and giving Hitler huge loans and arms deliveries in 1943, Switzerland's ruling elite helped to prolong the war, causing countless needless deaths. He documents the role of Swiss banks in capital transfers to South America to abet fleeing Nazis after 1945, and he reconstructs the Allied wartime campaign of espionage and commercial retaliation against Hitler's Swiss accomplices. He names the Swiss bankers, government officials, arms manufacturers and companies that benefited from collaboration with the Third Reich. His soul-searching indictment burns into the reader Switzerland's war guilt, as he discusses the turning away at the Swiss frontier of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the unconstitutional taxes imposed on Swiss Jews by their own government; the German slave trains that passed through Switzerland carrying Italian labor conscripts and, according to various accounts, Jews being shipped to extermination camps; and Swiss banks' ongoing misappropriation of personal savings from Jewish heirs unable to produce the camp death certificates of murdered family members. Ziegler's well-documented report demolishes the myth of Swiss neutrality. The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead provides a provocative, damning portrait of the Swiss banking community and his fellow countrymen as the global financial power that Switzerland now wields is the direct result of the Nazi plunder laundered in Swiss banks, a result that the Swiss people have accepted without guilt or question. It's not surprising that this book is controversial in his own country as the Swiss people are understandably reluctant to accept the complicity of their government in funding Hitler's war effort. What is disturbing is the Swiss government's continued attempts to obstruct open discussion of the past. 305 pages. A must read for everyone.

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