Date of Issue: February 24, 1997

KEY DATES 1933 Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany 1941 "Night and Fog" policy is issued authorizing disappearance of "persons endangering German security 1942 First mass gassing of Jews at Auschwitz 1945 Germany surrenders 1996 Article appears in Jewish newspaper listing Jewish bank accounts in Switzerland 1997 Swiss banks announce creation of a fund for Holocaust survivors and families

Recovering Jewish assets grows into a bitter crusade.
What a thoughtless Swiss diplomat came to call nothing less than a "war" against his country started with little things. A gold ring. A novel. A chair. Before long, a chain reaction of seemingly disconnected events, an assortment of powerful personalities and a series of Swiss blunders culminated in a moral crusade to track down stolen wealth hidden away inside the vaults of Zurich and restore it to the victims of the Holocaust. The immediate cause was money, but the soul-searing intent of the men and women who set the hunt in motion was to peel back the veil time has cast over the evils of Nazism and expose the truth.

	Memos among almost two tons of documents provide evidence of how long, how closely and how lucratively Swiss banks collaborated with the Nazis.

For Bert Linder, now 85, it began the day in 1942 when the Nazis took his gold wedding ring. It was such a mean little gesture as they separated him from his loved ones. The Auschwitz ovens later claimed his wife and 10-month-old son and four other family members. Linder was one of the only 2,000 to leave that charnel house alive, and so, he says, "my life was meant for something."

The idea to get money back from Switzerland’s bankers, who bragged about their neutrality even while taking gold stolen, like Linder’s ring, from the Jews, came to the California resident last July as he visited Austria on a lecture tour. In Vienna he read about how much looted Nazi wealth remained in Swiss banks and how others were trying to retrieve funds deposited for safekeeping there.

Linder, now rich enough not to worry, wondered instead about the poorest survivors struggling to get along, the ones without big Swiss bank accounts from the old days. "I thought, why shouldn’t this money be got for all Holocaust victims?" he says, and so he hired a lawyer to investigate, then threatened to sue the banks if they did not create a reparations fund. The banks were "negative, negative, negative."

But Linder is nothing if not tenacious — how else would he have come out of Auschwitz alive — and he made himself the bane of the banks. The Swiss press dubbed him David against Goliath. His lawyer bombarded the banks with letters and warned of lawsuits, but action was held up when one bank after another came forward with a promise to contribute to a fund. "My friends tell me enough is enough. But enough is not enough. The Swiss have the audacity to keep this money that does not belong to them and to make money with it. It should go back to the Jewish people."

Two weeks ago, the Swiss capitulated. A little. First the major banks announced they would create a $70 million humanitarian fund for the reaming survivors of the Holocaust and families of victims. The Swiss government said it would oversee the fund, but would not commit any public money until its investigation, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, had been completed.

This is not the first time the U.S. has sought to account for all the gold bars the Nazis looted from occupied countries, the Jewish assets seized, the jewelry, gold dental fillings, and wedding rings wrenched from concentration-camp victims. As early as 1943, when Washington launched Project Safehaven to locate the Nazi plunder and find out where it was going, the U.S. knew most of it was entering Switzerland. That year, spymaster Dulles warned the Swiss government that much of the 100 tons of gold bullion the Reichsbank was selling for Swiss francs was stolen. Eventually, Safehaven agents concluded that some $6 billion in Nazi assets had been transferred into Switzerland from 1938 to 1945 under cover of bank-secrecy laws.

Now that the paperwork from Project Safehaven has finally been unsealed, memos among the nearly two tons of documents provide damning evidence of how long, how closely and how lucratively Swiss banks collaborated with the Nazis.

--Dec. 10, 1941. The British embassy in Washington warns the U.S. Treasury Department that "every leading member of the governing groups in all the Axis countries have funds in Switzerland. Some have fortunes."

--An undated document identifies an account held for Hitler in Switzerland for royalties from Mein Kampf.

--An undated paper cites the 300,000-franc Swiss account of Hitler’s tailor.

--July 10, 1944. President Franklin Roosevelt gets a classified report from William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services, calling his attention to the personal friendship between senior Swiss and Nazi central-bank officials and a deal they had arranged. Each month, Switzerland promised to purchase 6,000 kg of German gold, which the Reich was using to buy Swiss ball bearings. Roosevelt’s reply: "We ought to block the Swiss participation in saving the skins of rich or prominent Germans." But Roosevelt took no action.

--An undated paper records the debriefing of a certain Dr. Landwehr, who had directed the Nazi foreign-exchange department. "Dr. Landwehr estimates that all in all, the sum of German assets which passed into Switzerland amounted to at least 15 billion reichsmarks," said the report. "Landwehr dismissed with an ironic smile the Swiss estimate of 1 billion reichsmarks."