Nazi Gold : The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions From Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors

A “compelling [and] carefully researched” account of greed, duplicity, and an unholy partnership between Switzerland and the Third Reich (The Washington Times). In the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, the European continent fell, nation by nation, to Nazi Germany’s invincible war machine. But Switzerland remained neutral during World War II, taking no side and bowing to no master. For a long time after, that was the accepted history—but it was a lie. Respected British investigative journalist Tom Bower reveals the shocking truth about how the government of Switzerland and the Swiss banking industry knowingly collaborated with the Reich during the darkest era in modern history. With the knowledge and acquiescence of the Swiss government, hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from Jewish Holocaust victims—including gold teeth extracted from the mouths of those murdered—were systematically hidden away in Swiss bank accounts. But these crimes did not end with the defeat of Hitler. For the next half century, Swiss authorities engaged in a covert campaign of lies, subterfuge, and corruption to hide the wealth from its rightful owners—concentration camp survivors and the families of the slain—while freely dispensing the illegally obtained funds to fugitive Nazis. Written by “one of the finest investigative journalists in the English-speaking world,” Nazi Gold is an explosive true account of state-endorsed crimes and atrocities; of former victims fighting courageously for their due in the face of prejudice, hatred, and indifference; and of the dedicated US Treasury agents who worked tirelessly for decades to right an unconscionable wrong (The Washington Times). A “compelling [and] carefully researched” account of greed, duplicity, and an unholy partnership between Switzerland and the Third Reich ( The Washington Times ). In the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, the European continent fell, nation by nation, to Nazi Germany’s invincible war machine. But Switzerland remained neutral during World War II, taking no side and bowing to no master. For a long time after, that was the accepted history—but it was a lie. Respected British investigative journalist Tom Bower reveals the shocking truth about how the government of Switzerland and the Swiss banking industry knowingly collaborated with the Reich during the darkest era in modern history. With the knowledge and acquiescence of the Swiss government, hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from Jewish Holocaust victims—including gold teeth extracted from the mouths of those murdered—were systematically hidden away in Swiss bank accounts. But these crimes did not end with the defeat of Hitler. For the next half century, Swiss authorities engaged in a covert campaign of lies, subterfuge, and corruption to hide the wealth from its rightful owners—concentration camp survivors and the families of the slain—while freely dispensing the illegally obtained funds to fugitive Nazis. Written by “one of the finest investigative journalists in the English-speaking world,” Nazi Gold is an explosive true account of state-endorsed crimes and atrocities; of former victims fighting courageously for their due in the face of prejudice, hatred, and indifference; and of the dedicated US Treasury agents who worked tirelessly for decades to right an unconscionable wrong ( The Washington Times ). Nazi Gold is the expose of the fifty-year conspiracy by Swiss bankers to steal deposits by European Jews and help German Nazis hide the money they looted from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It is also about a group of dedicated Americans with the U.S. Treasury Department - Sam Klaus, Orvis Schmidt, James Mann, and Seymour Rubin, to name a few - who struggled tirelessly for many years following World War II, with little support from the British and French, to get the Swiss to release the deposits to the rightful owners or their heirs. Finally, Nazi Gold is about the victims themselves - constantly rebuffed, denied, and humiliated in their efforts to recover their money and survive in a postwar world that showed them nothing but indifference, prejudice, and hate Based on intensive research and incontrovertible evidence, Nazi Gold is the last dramatic chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Tom Bower, a distinguished British investigative historian, reveals for the first time in full the despicable role played by Swiss banks and the Swiss government in exploiting World War II and the persecution of the Jews to their financial advantage. He describes how Swiss industries manufactured and sold military equipment to the Germans during the war at a substantial profit, then after the war cynically turned away survivors and heirs of victims of the Holocaust with lies, obfuscation, and impossible-to-satisfy demands for proof of relationship to deceased depositors Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished and sensational source material, as well as interviews with many individuals on all sides of the controversy, Bower is also able to re-create important and secret meetings and telephone conversations that are often astounding in the bluntness of their revelations