Data shows Swiss hauled stolen Jewish gold for Nazis
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The gold, worth an estimated $250 million to $500 million, came from the central banks of countries occupied by Germany and taken from dead Holocaust victims.
The gold was carried in trucks bearing the Swiss national emblem and insured by Swiss companies, according to a 1946 U.S. intelligence memo and a transcript of a 1945 military interrogation of the Nazi official who headed Germany's wartime gold department.
"Switzerland emerges as not only a banking center for Hitler's Germany, but a one-stop laundering center," said Elan Steinberg, WJC executive director.
Meanwhile, Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, Switzerland's former president, issued an apology for calling Jewish demands for a Holocaust compensation fund "blackmail." The apology came in a letter to Edgar Bronfman, WJC president. The group said it would now resume working with the Swiss government.
Nonetheless, new revelations fuel the storm over Switzerland's wartime relationship with Nazi Germany, and follow signs that those relations extended beyond the economic to the military sphere.
In another development, Switzerland's largest bank came under fire this week when it admitted to throwing away World War II-era archive material in violation of a government ban on the destruction of records that might reveal details about wartime transactions.
Union Bank of Switzerland said one of its employees threw away documents, thinking they were not important. A security guard reportedly rescued the documents and handed them over to Jewish community officials in Zurich, who then gave them over to police. The guard was then reportedly suspended from his job, pending an investigation.
The new disclosures come amid a dispute between Jewish and Swiss officials surrounding the creation of a preliminary fund to begin compensating Jews possibly entitled to assets deposited in Swiss banks during the World War II era.
After the release of the documents on shipments to Spain and Portugal, a top Swiss National Bank official acknowledged that such shipments were made, but said they amounted to only one-fourth of the total cited by D'Amato and Jewish leaders.
He denied claims that Swiss banks had laundered money for the Nazis and insisted that the shipments to Portugal and Spain were consistent with Switzerland's neutral war posture.
Responded D'Amato, "We are tired of half-truths that only come out when they are faced with overwhelming evidence.
"The Swiss bankers were the profiteers, they were the Nazi bankers. They made blood money and that doesn't seem to me to be neutrality."
Other newly released World War II-era documents, meanwhile, show that Swiss-Nazi collaboration went to the military level.
The United States was so outraged by massive Swiss supplies of munitions to Germany during the war that it considered imposing a total economic blockade of Switzerland, according to an October 1943 letter from Adm. William Leahy, a member of the joint chiefs of staff, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Leahy said an increase in Swiss military aid to Germany was damaging the Allied war effort.
"It is particularly significant that at the very time that the British and American combined bomber offensive is beginning to substantially affect German production of munitions," the letter states, "Swiss exports of munitions to Germany have been considerably increased..."
The joint chiefs suggested a ban on exports to Switzerland, but the WJC said it has been unable to determine if that happened.
The dispute between Switzerland and Jewish groups began earlier this month when Delamuraz accused Jewish groups of trying to "blackmail" Switzerland into paying Holocaust victims $250 million.
Stepping down from Switzerland's rotating presidential post, Delamuraz said: "If we agreed now to a compensation fund, this would be taken as an admission of guilt. This is nothing less than extortion and blackmail."
Jewish officials said the remarks bordered on anti-Semitism and implored the Swiss to distance themselves from Delamuraz and apologize.
Before he issued his apology to Bronfman, Delamuraz, now the economics minister, said his remarks were misrepresented and added he was sorry if he offended families of Holocaust victims.
Jewish and Swiss officials began discussing the creation of a preliminary compensation fund late last year. But it was the Swiss side, WJC officials said, that proposed the $250 million figure.
The World Jewish Restitution Organization, which is coordinating worldwide restitution efforts, had urged economic sanctions if Swiss authorities did not denounce Delamuraz's statements and accelerate their investigation into missing Jewish assets.
Switzerland may be bowing to pressure to open a compensation fund. The Swiss Cabinet said it would support such a fund if it comes from dormant bank accounts, not government money.
Jewish officials have rejected the plan, saying the money is not Switzerland's to offer and should come from the government.
Against this backdrop, Swiss Jewish officials have expressed concern about new Swiss anti-Semitism.
Martin Rosenfeld, general secretary of the Swiss Jewish Federation, said this week that anti-Semitism has been surfacing in letters and phone calls to Jewish groups and in letters to newspapers.
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