The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine

A bestseller in Europe, this eloquent expose by a Swiss sociologist who is a member of the Swiss parliament probably provides the fullest picture to date of Swiss complicity in Nazi German war crimes of WWII. Ziegler 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, Ziegler compellingly argues. A Geneva University sociology professor and associate professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, 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. (Mar.)