Philip Rubenstein
Switzerland: Handmaiden to Hitler? Part 1: A Case to Answer

Phil Rubenstein - Switzerland - Handmaiden to Hitler, Part 1: A Case to Answer

- Hello everyone. And before we get going, I thought it would just be good just to do a quick plug for the lockdown website, which, just to remind everyone, is lockdownuniversity.org. And the reason I wanted to do this, is because I missed all of the South Africa lectures when they were all delivered live. I couldn’t see any of them. So I have to say, it’s been a total blessing to have the website, ‘cause it just meant I’ve just been able to just go on catch up and just watch some great lectures. So for those of you who are already using it, you don’t need me to tell you about its virtues. For those of you who haven’t used it, you’ve got a thousand or so lectures on there. So fantastic resource. So I would just urge everyone just to go onto the website. Okay, so this is part of the Switzerland series that William kicked off on Monday and it’s a two-parter. So today and tomorrow, we’re going to be looking at the track record of Switzerland during World War II and the aftermath from 1945 to the present. There’s a tourist office version of Switzerland, which you’ll know. It’s all snow-covered mountains, Alpine retreats, clean cities, yodelling, Gluhwein, chocolate and fondue, peace and democracy. And there’s a very different version of Switzerland, which is the one that we’re going to be examining over these two sessions. In today’s talk, we’re going to be looking at Switzerland’s records during World War II and we’ll discover how Switzerland closed its doors to Jewish refugees who were in desperate need of sanctuary, how the Swiss banks enriched themselves throughout the war with Nazi acquired booty, and how the Germans could even turn a well-known Swiss spa town into a Nazi enclave during the war. It would take a full 50 years for the Swiss nation finally to be presented with the truth of those years. And the story of how that finally came to be revealed is the subject of tomorrow’s talk.

Let me just say a word about books and sources for today, just in case you’re interested. So I’ve used a number of sources for these two lectures and there’s three books in particular that I’ve used. If what you are interested in is really good history, I would really recommend the Stuart Eizenstat book in the middle, “Imperfect Justice”, which is a broader story, it’s not just the Swiss story. It’s all of the Holocaust restitution efforts that Stuart Eizenstat, former senior US government official, was involved in and we’ll mention him more tomorrow. And the Adam LeBor book, “Hitler’s Secret Bankers”. And if you’re interested more in the colour and in the kind of cast of characters who are involved in these events, the Tom Bower book, “Blood Money” is good value for that. So Switzerland joined the war. For 50 years after the war’s end, Switzerland told itself and the rest of the world a story. And that story was that it had been honourably and respectably neutral throughout World War II. So let’s take a moment to just consider this concept of neutrality, what it means and how it came about. And William, for those of you who are interested in who are free, William’s going to be talking more about Swiss neutrality in World War I and World War II in his lecture on Monday. For those of us who live in relatively large countries, when I think of our lockdown audience, you know, the USA, Canada, South Africa, the UK, this idea that you can be neutral in a global conflict, it seems rather fanciful.

But if like Switzerland, you’re a small, landlocked country and you’re located in the heart of a continent where the great powers have fought wars against each other for centuries, neutrality starts to make a lot of sense, really as a basic survival for strategy. As a basic strategy for survival. And what neutrality meant for the Swiss in particular is this. It meant you avoid military alliances. You purposefully never enter the conflicts of other nations, and you maintain a well-trained citizens army that can defend your borders and hopefully deter any would-be invaders. By the start of World War II, Switzerland’s policy of neutrality has held successfully for 130 years. The last war in which the Swiss took an active part was actually the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. So when the Swiss find themselves surrounded by Axis countries from 1940, as you can see from this map, they take serious steps to avoid being pulled in. At one time, they mobilise 800,000 soldiers and they station them across the borders. Now 800,000, think about it, this is a country of 4 million, so that’s 20% of your population are in uniform. For 50 years after the war, Swiss school children are taught that Germany never invaded Switzerland because the Swiss had such a strong army and because the Germans were deterred by the topography of Switzerland, those Alps that would’ve been so difficult for the Germans to cross. In this next hour, we’re going to be examining what Swiss neutrality really meant and we’ll consider the real reasons that Nazi Germany never invaded.

And we’ll come to appreciate a kind of grim, cynical wartime saying among many ordinary anti-Nazi Swiss. And this is how it goes. For six days a week, Switzerland works for Nazi Germany and on the seventh it prays for an Allied victory. Perhaps the first clear indication of the direction in which the Swiss wind was to blow from 1940 onwards, comes in a speech in May, 1940 by this man here with a rather unfortunate moustache. And his name is Marcel Pilet-Golaz. He’s the country’s foreign minister and he’s a member of the seven person Federal Council. The Federal Council is the Swiss government. It’s the official name for it. And he makes a speech to the nation in the wake of the Nazi invasion in France, which had recently happened. And he starts to talk about, “A new order in Europe.” “Switzerland,” he says, “Will need to adapt to,” what he calls, “The new political realities of Europe.” And he makes clear that this is going to involve a policy of accommodation with Berlin. So that’s in May, 1940, but the reality on the ground is that Switzerland had already been moving in that direction and they’d already started a policy of accommodation towards the Nazis from as early as 1938. The notorious Evian Conference had been held, of course in July, 1938. And infamously, virtually all the 32 nations who were represented, Allied nations, refused to open their doors to persecuted Jews. Tellingly, the conference was held in Evian.

Now, Evian is on the French side of Lake Geneva and it was held there because the Swiss government refused even to host the conference themselves. So scared were they to send out the wrong message to Jews that Switzerland may be a place of sanctuary for them. And so scared were they to send out the wrong message to Berlin. Nevermind that Switzerland was a traditional haven for refugees and political dissidents. As far as the Swiss government was concerned, Jewish refugees were not included in that list or as warden government official at the time mincingly put it when he told the press, “Our little lifeboat is full.” Evian had shown that the Swiss weren’t alone among Allied nations in blocking the entry of Jews attempting to flee Germany occupied Europe. But the Swiss went one stage further. So desperate were they to keep Jews out, that this man, Heinrich Rothmund, who was the head of the Swiss Foreigner Police, went to Berlin with a request from the Swiss government that they, the Germans, should stamp passports of Jews with J And the argument went that this is going to distinguish German and Austrian Jews from German and Austrian gentiles when they turn up at the border and help the Swiss to identify the Jews, deny them entry and send them back to Germany and Austria. As you would expect, the Nazis thought this was an excellent idea. So at the behest of the Swiss federal government, every Jew in the Reich who had a passport had a large J stamped on it, as you can see here in the left-hand corner. And when a German or Austrian Jewish family turned up at the Swiss border, they were identified as Jews and sent back. Historians have estimated that around 30,000 Jewish refugees were turned back at the border and almost all of those who were denied entry would later perish in the camps.

There was maybe one single hope for these refugees back in the summer of 1938. If you could cross the Rhine illegally, there was talk of one Swiss policeman who might be able to help you. This is Paul Gruninger and he was the captain of police for the canton of St. Gallen, one of the many Swiss cantons that makes up the federal state. Gruninger, he’s born in 1923 and he starts out as a semi-professional football player, and there’s not that much money in it, as you would expect. So he joins the police force in 1919. So he’s been an unswerving enforcer of the law for almost 20 years. But when he saw the thousands of Jewish refugees at the border being turned back because of the J stamp, he felt a sense of moral outrage. And Gruninger decides he’s going to flout the law. So he covertly allows Jews through the border gates, then he falsies the official seal in their passports to deceive Swiss officials into believing that the Jews had entered the country lawfully. From August to December, 1938, Paul Gruninger was able to save the lives of an estimated 3,600 Jews in this way. However, by December, German diplomats in Berlin are starting to smell something fishy. So they alert the Swiss that they believe that one of their border officials is letting in Jews. And ever eager to please Berlin, the Swiss fine Gruninger, arrest Gruninger and then suspend him from his position. His superior is the police minister of St. Gallen who had previously tacitly supported Gruninger’s efforts, but now that he’s been caught, the police minister drops him.

Drops him completely, and places the full blame squarely on Paul Gruninger. Gruninger is dismissed, prosecuted, convicted and heavily fined, and all his pension rights are removed. For the next 35 years, Paul Gruninger was treated in Switzerland as a pariah, ostracised, forgotten, living in poverty and barely able to keep his family afloat with the odd jobs that he was able to get. Paul Gruninger dies in 1970, sorry, 1972 at the age of 80, but it would take another two decades after his death before he was finally rehabilitated in Switzerland and his name was honoured. And we’ll come back to Gruninger tomorrow to hear what happened with that rehabilitation. Paul Gruninger’s example reminds us, I think that it’s important to make a distinction between the Swiss state and the Swiss people, because they’re not the same. And it’s a complicated picture. I mean, generally it seems that the Swiss population was a lot less happy to appease the Nazis than their elected representatives. So when Marcel Pilet-Golaz made that speech in 1940, it was met with widespread public protest and quite a lot of hostility from some quarters of the press. Now, of course, there were plenty of Nazi sympathisers in Switzerland at the time and there were also a few pro-Nazi Swiss organisations, but they weren’t that heavily supported.

And there was also, as you would expect, roughly, very, very roughly a split by region. So I’m massively generalising here, but broadly, the French speaking part of the country tended to be more anti-German and the German speaking part tended to have a stronger attachment to the Germans. What about the Swiss Jewish community? Well, the Jewish community had around 18,000 members and they did experience a current of antisemitism, but I mean, this is going to sound rather depressing. It was no worse than in many other European countries in those dark years. Antisemitism however, was more prevalent at institutional level in Swiss society. So for example, Jews were forced out of the boardrooms of many well-known Swiss companies. The Swiss Stock Exchange forced out its Jewish chairman and the pharmaceutical companies that later combined to become Novartis, which is now a pharmaceutical giant, they replaced their Jewish directors with proper Aryan German directors. But it is worth making the point that in all those six years of World War II, there were no anti-Jewish laws that were ever passed by Switzerland. Talking of the Swiss people, the Swiss residents of a little Alpine town called Davos were particularly an unhappy with what happened to their town over the course of World War II. This is a postcard from Davos. It’s the Deutsches Krieger-Kurhaus, which is the German sanitarium, one of the German sanitariums, that operated in Davos during the war. Davos, now, when we hear the name Davos, most of us associate that place with a town that politicians, business leaders and celebrities gather every year for a kind of glitzy shindig where they opine on the state of the world. But Davos became popular in the 18th century for a different reason, and it was for the supposed healing powers of its mountain air. And this drew scores of wealthy patients to its sanitarians for treatments and to enjoy the Alpine climate.

And it particularly drew Germans, because it’s not that far from the border with Germany. But Davos takes a particularly dark turn from 1933 onwards. In the top left corner, you can see there’s a photo of a man called Wilhelm Gustloff and Gustloff was a fanatical follower of Hitler and he’s made leader of the Swiss branch of the Nazi party. He moves to Davos because of its popularity among Germans and he makes it his business to recruit as many Germans in Davos as he possibly can to the Nazi party. Gustloff is assassinated in Davos three years later, so that’s in 1936, by the man at the bottom, that’s a Jewish student by the name of David Frankfurter. And what we’re looking at here is a Nazi propaganda poster of Gustloff and dermorder, his murderer, David Frankfurter. By the time of his assassination, Gustloff’s work is well-advanced, because by '36, Davos was well on its way to becoming Nazi Germany’s stronghold in Switzerland. And the town was almost thoroughly Nazified. There were 12 sanatorium, all run by Nazis, including the Deutsches Krieger-Kurhaus that we saw before. And it wasn’t unusual when you walk through those sanitariums, that staff would greet you with, “Heil Hitler.” The bank accounts of these sanitariums are used to channel Swiss francs back and forwards to Germany. The Nazis take over the medical establishment of the town to the point where almost every member of the key medical committee, which is the Tuberculosis Committee, was a member of the Nazi party.

This is the Frederick Middle School and you can see that there’s a swastika flag flying on the roof. This school was founded and run by Germans to ensure that their children were going to get a proper Nazi education. And many of the students went on to join Nazi youth organisations. The local Swiss residents were not happy about developments in Davos, unsurprisingly. Some of them were sympathetic, but most of them couldn’t bear the Nazis, couldn’t bear the way they strutted around town as if they owned the place. And the Swiss press in Davos and outside of Davos was also pretty angry at what one newspaper described as, “The Nazi citadel at Davos.” As for David Frankfurter, the assassin of Gustloff, he was used by Goebbels in Nazi propaganda. Gustloff was declared a bloodzuiger, a blood martyr of the Nazi cause. And he gave himself up. After the shooting, he went straight over to a Swiss police station. He gave himself up. He was arrested. The Germans demanded that he’d be extradited. The Swiss, bless them, refused to extradite him, but they tried him and they sentenced him to 18 years in prison. He was released in 1945 when the war ended. But then the Swiss, having done a good thing by not extraditing him, having done a not very good thing by imprisoning him, having done a better thing by releasing him, then they expel him from Germany, sorry, from Switzerland. And they make him pay all the court costs of his case. So he lives the rest of his life in Israel.

And it’s only a quarter of a century later in 1969 that Switzerland actually revokes the expulsion. So now we come to the nub of this lecture. That’s the role played by the Swiss banks during the war and enabled and encouraged by their government. I’m going to go through the charge sheet one by one. And in the first place, the Swiss banks, as we’ll discover more tomorrow, refuse to return funds that are deposited by Jews to their rightful heirs. As the rule of the swastika advanced from Germany and across the continent from 1933 onwards, European Jews began to smuggle their savings into Switzerland to safeguard family money from Hitler’s reach, because who knew when Hitler and his henchmen were going to seize their worldly assets and who knew when they might suddenly have to flee with no time to deal with local banking bureaucracy. And of all the places where you might seek a safe haven for your assets, well, you’re going to choose Switzerland. Why? Because the Swiss banking system was a byword for financial rectitude. And indeed, in 1934, to assist the Jews in their urgency to hide assets, Switzerland actually passes its historic banking secrecy law. This is the one that assures the anonymity of account holders. Thousands of Jews before the war take advantage of these secretly laws to get their money over to Switzerland and to safeguard it for their families. They find their way to Bern or Geneva or Zurich any way they can, by train or by other means, often arriving with a big bag of cash that they deposit in a branch and where they’re given the account numbers and then they return to their families.

As it turns out, these dues are all wrong, because after the war, the bankers refuse to hand their accounts back to their heirs. And for 50 years, and as I say, we’ll look at this more tomorrow, the banks stonewall and they obstruct the heirs at every turn, leaving many Shoa survivors in the state of penury for the rest of their lives. Second. Swiss banks held deposits for top Nazis, both individually and collectively. Now, one of the things to remember about wars, is there’s a military side to a war, but there’s also a financial side to a war, because every war needs financing and in every war, one or other side may profiteer from their activities. So let’s take the SS, right? At the same time as the SS are running the camps and directing mass slaughter, they’re also in the business of profiteering. They have their own economic organisation and they have their own parallel economic empire. And as they plunder and loot their way through Europe, it’s Swiss bank accounts that hold all of their funds. And same with the Nazi high command, okay? So Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, they all steal their way to amassing huge private fortunes. And they all use Swiss bank accounts to stash away their ill-gotten gains. United Bank of Switzerland, or as most of us know it, UBS, held an account in the name of Max Amann. This is him on the left. Amann had a really unusual dual role in the Reich, because on the one hand, he was the Nazi party’s business manager, but he was also independently a commercial publisher. And at one time, he owned 80% of Germany’s newspaper industry, which was effectively gifted to him. So it meant that the Nazis had control over the industry. Now, he’s personally promoted by Hitler to the rank of SS obergruppenfuhrer. Why?

Because he was Hitler’s publisher for “Mein Kampf”. Once Hitler becomes Reichsfuhrer, “Mein Kampf” is made a mandatory school textbook. So it’s required reading for a whole generation of German school children. The sales of “Mein Kampf” were of course in the millions. So this UBS account, it’s believed, and I say it’s believed because UBS have never admitted to it, this UBS account was opened by Max Amann for Adolf Hitler to bank his royalties. Back in 1996, when the details of this account were first revealed to the world, Jenny Fraser, who some of you in the UK may know. Jenny Fraser’s, a journalist with “The Jewish Chronicle” here in London. Jenny Fraser contacted UBS for a comment and this is what she was told. “We can neither confirm nor deny, because such information is protected by,” wait for it, “Client confidentiality and Swiss banking laws.” So Swiss banks opened deposits and kept deposits for the Nazi high command and we’ll find out what happened to those monies, it won’t surprise anyone tomorrow, after the war. Third. Swiss banks willingly accepted gold that was stolen, looted by the Nazis from the National Vaults of every country they invaded and annexed. Swiss banks, especially the Swiss National Bank, accepted gold looted from the National Treasuries of countries occupied by the Nazis. Let’s go from the start here. So at the beginning of the war, every international banker knew that Germany had maximum $100 million worth of gold left in its gold reserves, okay? Maximum $100 million. It may have been 70, so somewhere between there. But over the next five years, Germany would accumulate and sell eight times that amount.

So Germany is selling around $800 million of gold. And just to give you a sense of what that is in today’s prices, that’s around $15 billion in today’s prices. So $100 million in 1939 and by 1944, that suddenly jumped to 800 million. Where does all this gold come from? Well, it’s gold that the Nazis simply loot. They turn up at the official gold reserves of every country they conquer, then they ship the contents back to the Reichsbank in Berlin. The gold is then valued and it’s re-smelted and stamped with the Reichsbank insignia and it gets a new serial number and then it’s sold on by the Reichsbank to the bank of a neutral country. Now, some of this gold is bought by neutral countries other than Switzerland. So Spain and Portugal, for example. But half of the token, that’s $400 million worth, is banked by the Swiss. And the biggest single purchaser of looted Nazi gold is the Swiss National Bank. Although large amounts are also sent to the commercial Swiss banks, like Credit Suisse, like UBS, and that was the fact that they denied for 50 years after the war, but we know that to be true now. Not only did Swiss bankers accept looted gold, but they knew it was stolen. Every banker knew that at the start of the war, the Germans only had 100 million.

So it was a question of simple arithmetic. And guess what? They also would’ve noticed that every time the Nazis annexed another country, Belgium, Holland, France, a few months later, suddenly Berlin’s gold reserves start to rocket and massive shipments would arrive in Switzerland. Swiss bankers were warned by the Allies that all Germany’s pre-war gold stocks had been used up at the very latest, the very latest by 1943. So they knew at the very least that anything they received from Germany after that date could only be looted gold. Operation Safe Haven is a secret intelligence operation that we’re going to be coming back to a few times over these two talks, and it was set up by the US to investigate, it was set up in 1944, set up to investigate the extent of economic collaboration between the Swiss and Nazi Germany. And a Safe Haven report, which is dated January, 1945, says as follows, “Swiss aid to the enemy in the banking field was clearly beyond the obligations under which a neutral must continue to trade with a belligerent and was clearly dictated solely by the profit motive of the Swiss banks.” Solely by the profit motive of the Swiss banks. Fourth. Number four. Swiss banks accepted gold that was stolen from murdered Jews. From 1942 onwards, the SS were sending regular shipments by train from concentration camps and death camps to the Reichsbank in Berlin.

I mean, what was in these shipments? Well, the horrific contents of these crates included gold rings pulled off the fingers of dead Jews and gold fillings extracted from their mouths, known as dental gold. The Nazis gave the code name of Melmer, M-E-L-M-E-R, to this activity. So when the gold fillings and the rings arrive at the bank, officials assessed their value and sent them off to be melted down and recast into gold bars. Dental gold is worth less than high grade gold that’s normally used in international finance, but whether the stolen Reichsbank gold was of the highest quality or merely of dental grade, it would always find a welcome home in a Swiss bank. Fifth and finally, the Swiss banks supplied the vital foreign currency that funded the Third Reich’s war machine and extermination programme. If you think about the first two years of World War II. You know, it must have felt that there was nothing that was going to stop the Nazi onslaught across Europe. But by mid 1942, it’s a very different story. Now Germany’s fighting on not one front, but on two fronts. And after Stalingrad, it’s really bogged down in the east. And of course now the USA has entered the war. So by this time, by the middle of 1942, Hitler’s war costs were enormous and somehow they have to be paid for. The problem is that many countries won’t accept stolen gold, and everyone knew it was stolen gold. So it had to be laundered. And in order to pay their bills, the Nazis needed to convert the gold into a currency that the world was happy to accept. The solution was neutral Switzerland.

Here you have a neighbouring country where German is widely spoken, where there’s an efficient, super efficient system of transportation, where you have a world-class banking system and a currency, the Swiss franc, that’s widely welcomed worldwide. There is a highly credible argument, and I’m not going to put it stronger than that, there’s a highly credible argument that without the willingness of the Swiss banks to buy Nazi gold in return for Swiss francs, the Nazis certainly after '42, could never have afforded the material to continue to prosecute the war, nor could they have afforded to build and maintain the trains and the camps and the whole infrastructure that kept genocide going. The banks formed the inner core of Switzerland’s economic collaboration with the Third Reich, but there’s a whole outer core of business and industry that also profit from their trade with the Nazis. This is a wartime poster for Bally, the shoe wear, the shoe manufacturing company. Bally grew massively in this period, because they were acquiring left, right and centre, shops in Germany at knockdown prices that the Nazis had confiscated from Jews. And they also bought up mountains of leather stolen by the Nazis from occupied countries. And then there’s the diamond industry. In 1940, the Germans overrun Belgium and they take control of the mostly Jewish owned diamond industry in Antwerp. And they seize nearly $11 million worth of gems. And to cover their tracks, they dump most of the stones in Switzerland. I mean, some of them go to Spain, but the vast majority of them go to Switzerland. And as a result, the Swiss become one of the leading exporters, one of the world’s leading exporters of cut diamonds over the course of the war.

Now, it may seem that some of these examples I’ve given are isolated examples, but they’re not. They are the natural products of a trading partnership between the two countries, because Switzerland and Germany weren’t just close, they were economically codependent. They were locked into each other financially. Germany depended on the Swiss for its banks and the Swiss depended on Germany for its coal. From 1939 to 1945, Switzerland imported 10 million tonnes of coal from Germany. Now, if someone said that to me, I wouldn’t know if that was a little or a lot quite frankly. So I think it might make more sense to say that this was 40% of Switzerland’s entire energy needs over the course of the war. In other words, without German coal, the lights would’ve gone off on Swiss industry. So you have to ask the question, could Switzerland have replaced German coal from other sources or was there no other option? Well, it certainly would’ve been very costly to find alternatives and it would’ve been difficult to figure out the transport logistics, because it was very convenient to take German coal given that Germany was just next door. So Germany could have made that. So Switzerland could have made that choice and they could have made that choice very early in the war. But the fact is, they didn’t. And in choosing to stick with German coal, Switzerland bound itself to Nazi Germany. By binding itself to Nazi Germany, other things follow. The Reich had masterminded a whole camouflage operation to use Swiss corporations to disguise the true ownership of many German businesses that needed to trade with the Allies. And they also do this to prevent the assets of German companies being frozen in the US. So this is how it works. A German business takes over a Swiss company or sets up a dummy company in Switzerland using a Swiss name, and they put Swiss nationals up as front then.

I mentioned Operation Safe Haven earlier. This was the covert US intelligence operation into Swiss Nazi economic ties. Operation Safe Haven reported that the Nazi’s economic industry started this camouflage operation as early as 1939. And five years later, there were at least 350 of these German businesses hiding under a Swiss identity. 350. The most notorious of these cloak and dagger operations was the network of Swiss front companies that were used by IG Farben, manufacturer among other things, as we all know, of the Zyklon B agent that was used in the gas chambers. What else followed? Well, the Swiss weren’t shy in supplying military equipment to the Germans. Swiss-made machine guns fitted into Luftwaffe planes. Swiss-made timing devices used to explode Luftwaffe bombs. Swiss cannons and Swiss ammunition sold to the Wehrmacht for use against the Allies. In June of 1941, a US diplomatic cable from Zurich, which has been since declassified, made the following observations. “Swiss industry makes a greater contribution to the German war effort than Switzerland would probably make were she an occupied country. Most of the products Germany bought from Switzerland were machinery and equipment requiring highly skilled technical expertise, including for use in tanks and aircraft. These activities were of substantial assistance to the Germans in waging war.” So a damning case I think. But the question is, are we being entirely fair to the Swiss? I mean, there was after all a question mark, which you may have noticed in the title of this talk, “Handmade into Hitler?” And for many years, certainly Switzerland vigorously would’ve contested that assertion. So I just want to end this talk before we go to questions, by taking three of the key justifications that Switzerland has used.

The first one is this. Well, we had to cooperate, because otherwise the Nazis would’ve invaded. This supposed threat of Nazi invasion has been challenged by historians, including by serious Swiss historians. The fact is that the Nazis needed a country that would launder their gold and provide them with the hard cash that allowed them to continue to prosecute the war. Neutral Switzerland, in other words, was a currency warehouse for the Nazis. It was essential for them. And if they’d invaded Switzerland, well, it would’ve triggered the collapse of the Swiss franc. It would’ve ruined Swiss banks and it would’ve closed down for the Nazis, their chief source of foreign currency. So it was never going to happen. You may say that hindsight is easy and you can certainly say, I think it’s fair to say that at the start of the war, the prospect of invasion may have felt like it was real. But by 1943, early '44, when the Nazi project was clearly faltering, the Swiss still vigorously traded, vigorously collaborated and handsomely profited from their relationship with the Nazis. So the second justification that the Swiss have made, is it wasn’t just us. All the neutral countries of Europe did business with the Nazis. So why pick on us?

Well, there is some truth in this. Sweden, Portugal, Spain, I mean, they all traded profitably with the Third Reich and they all accepted some elements of looted Nazi gold, and they were all morally compromised and they’ve all had to face up, some better than others, with these uncomfortable truths. But the fact remains, no other neutral country played so crucial a role in keeping the Nazi war machine rolling as did the Swiss. Switzerland was the only neutral country whose banks would accept Reichsmarks. And the Swiss, as I said earlier, took in four times the amount of stolen Nazi gold that all the other neutral countries collectively took in. Thirdly and finally, the justification says, well, we were even-handed. Yes, we worked with the Axis powers, but we also worked with the Allies. That’s what you do when you’re neutral. And it’s true again, it’s true that Switzerland did cooperate with the Allies. They bought substantial amounts of gold and hard currency from the Allies. They served as a protecting power for Allied POWs, Allied prisoners of war. They tolerated the presence of the OSS, that’s the foreigner to the CIA, which operated from Swiss territory. And they allowed various refugee organisations to operate freely, allowing them to rescue and aid refugees escaping from the Nazis, including Jewish refugees. So all these things are true, but there’s no escaping the fact that Switzerland massively pivoted to Germany during the war and then spent six lucrative years enjoying a financial partnership with Adolf Hitler. For six days a week, Switzerland works for Nazi Germany and on the seventh it prays for an Allied victory. Thank you. And for those of you who are interested in the conclusion to this story and you’re able to join at the same time tomorrow or you can watch on the website on catch-up, we’re going to be revisiting this subject tomorrow at the same time. And we’ll examine what happened after the war from 1945 onwards up to the present day. So thank you very much and now let’s have a look at some of the comments and questions.

Q&A and Comments:

First is from Beverly Price. Thank you, Beverly.

Philip, so poignant to be hearing this tonight at this existential moment in our state’s existence. Imagining Jews not having a homeland at all and being at the deteriorating mercy of the Allies. I think that’s very well said, Beverly. I think you speak for a lot of us there.

Vicky Spolter. After my mother’s death, I was told that I was conceived so that my parents could cross the Swiss border as the Swiss allowed pregnant Jewish women. My parents were separated in two different refugee camps. I was born in Zurich in 1943. My parents never went back to Switzerland. Gosh, Vicky, thank you very much for sharing that with us.

Adrian Banks says, “"Gold run”, which was recently on BBC TV, was a very interesting and gripping film about how the Norwegians managed to ship their gold reserves to the UK. Well worth watching.“ I hadn’t come across that. So Adrian, you said that was called "Gold Run” and it was on BBC TV. So I’m sure we’ll all want to catch that. Philip Spain.

Q: How do you see the role of the Bank of International Settlements and of Montague Norman?

A: Well, Montague Norman of course was the governor of the Bank of England at one time. Well, I haven’t mentioned the Bank of International Settlements, 'cause that’s a whole other subject. The Bank of International Settlements is kind of, it’s the banker’s bank. It’s where bankers do all of the inter-bank loans and debts and it operated freely during World War II. Its president was this kind of Midwesterner from the US, a guy called Thomas McKittrick. And you know, extraordinarily all of the directors who were American, Swiss, German, they’d all meet in Switzerland or in Berlin as if there was no war, right the way throughout the war. Some of the American intelligence authorities were furious that these meetings continued, because they felt it undermined their efforts. And at one meeting in 1944, they were actually planning what the world was going to look like after the war and how they were going to settle accounts after the war. So this was an organisation that was highly, highly compromised. And Adam LeBor, who I mentioned earlier, has written a whole book about the Bank of International Settlements and their wartime record, which I think is called, “Tower of Basel”. I think that’s what it’s called. So it’s worth checking that out.

Q: Jeremy Fraser says, “It’s estimated that the Nazis looted 20% of Europe’s art. Is the gold you mentioned in addition or part of this?”

A: Oh, the gold is in addition. I haven’t even started on the art. And again, that’s a subject for a whole different lecture and there are many experts in that field. But no, I wasn’t talking about the art at all.

Q: Marilyn, Marilyn Denal. “How much of looted gold and money in the Swiss banks supported the Nazis who had fled to South America?”

A: Well, we’re going to be mentioning this tomorrow. The answer is, we don’t know and we don’t know, because the Swiss banks have never told us and they’ve never revealed those numbers. But we do know that the Swiss banks were helping effectively to fund the route line to South America by ensuring that their accounts were emptied by Nazis once they’d reached their destination.

Q: Sheila Chiat. “Are you going to explore the role of the Swedish banks, including the Wallenberg Bank in this lecture or the next? And are you going to explore how the prosperity of Switzerland today is built on their role in being the Nazi’s bankers? Thank you for the session.”

A: Well, Sheila, I’m not going to talk about the Swedish banks. Again, it’s a very big subject, but in answer to your second question, the extent to which the prosperity of Switzerland is built in their role in being the Nazi’s bankers. The fact is when you look at how the Swiss economy grew, first of all, in the First World War on the back of their neutrality and in slowly starting to build the banking industry, and then in the Second World War on the bank of stolen gold from the capitals of Europe and from dead Jews, they built that banking industry on the back of their World War II profits. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. Switzerland in the 19th century was a poor country and so their growth has been phenomenal and it’s been powered by the banking industry.

Q: Michael Bloggas, “Knowing so much of what happened, how come as you told us, you buy virtually all electrical items, German and German cars, are you a ghetto Jew? No self-respected Jew.”

A: Well, Michael, thank you for your question. I did mention that in a previous lecture and I’m not really sure what else to say in answer to your question. Beverly.

Beverly Price asks, “Degussa, the German precious metal refiner who refined the dental gold removed by the sonderkommando from gas use, had a share in IG Farben who produced Zyklon B. Peter Hayes’ book from 2004, "From Cooperation to Complicity”, deals with Degussa’s role.“ Degussa is spelled D-E-G-U-S-S-A. Oops, sorry, I’ve just lost that. Oops, sorry. Something just happened to the chat function. Okay.

Q: "Can Swiss Banks be sued in the USA?” Michael Blogg asks.

A: And we’ll come onto that tomorrow, because they were sued and a number of Shoa survivors got together and launched a class action, and we’ll look at that tomorrow. So thank you everyone. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining for this difficult subject and for those of you who are able to, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thank you very much.