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

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A bestseller in Europe, this eloquent expos 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.)

Library Journal

The Swiss have dismissed earlier examinations of the Nazi gold scandals as the work of foreign agitators. That will be more difficult with Ziegler, a native Swiss and Socialist member of the National Council who is no less critical of Swiss activities during World War II than Tom Bower (Nazi Gold, LJ 5/15/97) or Adam LeBor (Hitler's Secret Bankers, LJ 7/97). Ziegler gives a more lucid and inside history of the Swiss war activities and the aftermath, and though he relies too heavily on secondary sources, he cites information that is being seen in English for the first time. His framing of the problem as part of the class struggle is awkward, but his conclusion that the Swiss helped prolong the war is compelling. Masterfully translated, this is the most readable book available about the Swiss scandals. Highly recommended.Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, IA

Bill Grose

The day of reckoning for mighty Switzerland has been long in coming. In the manner of a post-modern Zola, an angry man of letters, Jean Ziegler, has thrown down his "J'accuse" with "The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead," and brigades of auditors, financiers, factors, historians, lawyers and publicists are trying to cope with it....The country has been set aflame by this modest volume....Readers of English can now savor his polemic for themselves (in a fine translation from the German by John Brownjohn). -- Peter Grose

Kirkus Reviews

Swiss sociologist Ziegler (Geneva Univ.) excoriates the gnomes of Zurich, the bankers of Basle and all the rest of his countrymen who, he reveals, gave steady and material aid to the Third Reich. Now we have an important addition to the burgeoning body of material detailing the hypocritical "neutrality" of Swiss financier-politicians during and since WW II. Ziegler offers official documents, graphic Holocaust materials, personal recollections, and vivid character sketches that demonstrate the conflict in Europe was prolonged and hundreds of thousands of lives were lost because of Swiss cupidity. When hostilities started, Ziegler demonstrates, the Germans could not have sustained the costs of a long war with Reichmarks alone. Gold taken from central banks of conquered nations and from the teeth and fingers of Nazi victims was transported to Swiss banks in exchange for currency used to buy material essential to the German war effort. Ziegler shows that the Swiss knowingly laundered the stolen goods. They were delighted to take in Hitler's loot, but not his victims. Desperate Jews were stopped at the border and returned to their captors for prompt incineration. After the war, at a Washington conference to sort out the mathematics, Hitler's fences were models of affronted innocence. They still are. After half a century, while proofs of their old intransigence mount, they remain intransigent, yielding only what they must. As Ziegler says, "gnomes always confine themselves to admitting what cannot be deniedþin other words, what the `damned' foreigners can prove beyond doubt." Of course, there were and are many whose principles extended beyond the veil of holy bank secrecy. But on thewhole it's a tale of bad faith and prejudice on a national scale, one not easy to discount given the significant evidence presented here. A solid and sober contribution to a growing subspecialty of wartime and Holocaust history, rightfully sardonic.