Switzerland during World War II
Looted Assets,
Gold Transactions and
Dormant Accounts
Switzerland has been critized for the financial services provided
by Swiss banks and insurance companies to Nazi Germany before and
during World War II in three major points:
looted assets, transactions with stolen gold and
lack of cooperation with the legal heirs of dormant accounts.
Did Switzerland collaborate with Nazi Germany in Holocaust?
Looted assets
The Nazi regime in Germany forced many of their victims to sign orders
for the transfer of their accounts with Swiss banks to German banks.
Swiss banks did not doubt these orders. This way they made it
unnecessarily easy for the Nazis to loote their victims' assets.
Gold Transactions
During World War II the Swiss National Bank (SNB) bought gold worth
1,212,600 million Swiss Francs from the German Reichsbank, which was
far more than the gold reserves of the Reichsbank had amounted to
before the war.
Buying and selling gold was a quite normal thing for a national bank
at this time because gold was the very base of the international
currency system. In the same period, SNB also bought much more gold
(worth 2,243,900 Swiss Francs) from the USA.
The problem was, that much of the gold sold by the German Reichbank
was either stolen from national banks in occupied countries, especially
Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and other gold was stolen
from people the Nazis had murdered.
Dormant Accounts
During the Second World War, millions of Jewish and Gipsy people were
deported by the Nazis from Germany and from the occupied territories
in Europe to concentration camps in eastern Europe and murdered there
("Holocaust").
Some of the victims had accounts in Switzerland, but under these
tragic circumstances surviving heirs were not easily able to know
whether there was any account at all and exactly with which bank
institute in Switzerland. After the war, Swiss bankers generally
declared accounts of people that did not reply to letters or send
letters to the bank with exact reference to the account number as
"dormant accounts". This fact alone is a standard
procedure not worth commenting. The problem is, that bankers were not
very cooperative with surviving heirs who tried to find the accounts
of their relatives.
Only as a result of the debate on Switzerland and World War II
after 1995, Swiss banks were willing to publish a list of
dormant accounts and to cooperate. It seems, however, that
the number of relevant accounts on the sums involved have been
massively overestimated by Jewish associations.
The Washington Agreement betwenn the Allies and Switzerland (1946)
Already during the Second World War British and American officials had
warned Switzerland that the Allies would not acknowledge the gold
transactions between the German Reichsbank and the Swiss National Bank
because most of the gold sold by Germany to Switzerland was in fact
stolen. Swiss assets in the U.S.A were frozen in November 1942 and
Swiss companies that had cooperated with Germany were put on black
lists.
After the war the Allies and Switzerland negociated about the
normalization of relations. On May, 21st 1946, an
agreement was reached in Washington:
- German assets in Switzerland were confiscated, one half fell to
the Allies, one half to Switzerland (as a compensation for
outstanding debts).
- Switzerland paid 250 million Swiss Francs to settle the diffences
about the transactions of stolen gold.
Literature and links on Switzerland's History / World War II:
Early Swiss History
Old Swiss History
A Modern Constitution
Industrialisation
World War II
Country & People
Links
