Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice

J.L. Granatstein, distinguished research professor emeritus of history
at York University, is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and
co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Influential Canadians of the
20th Century and the Dictionary of Canadi

The Nazi Holocaust was a profit-making enterprise. The clothes, shoes,
and even hair of the victims was processed, recycled, and re-used for
the greater good of Hitler’s Reich and its loyal servants—the SS,
the military, and industrialists, who all got their cut. But this was
peanuts compared with the wealth amassed by rich Jews, all of which was
confiscated and apportioned to the state and its friends. Some Jews,
however, seeing what was coming, moved their assets to Switzerland
before they were swept up in the Holocaust, and much of that money, it
appears, still sits in vaults in Basel, Zurich, and Berne in numbered
accounts. The basis of huge Swiss banking fortunes, we now know, has
come from money that belonged to Hitler’s victims. So give the money
to the surviving heirs, you say? Not so simple; you see, there are laws
and rules and unless someone knows the number of the secret account,
well, then there is nothing we can do.

That was the situation, as Isabel Vincent recounts in this
straightforward, well-researched story, until Edgar Bronfman, the head
of the World Jewish Congress, began rattling the Swiss bank cages. A
very wealthy man with the best of political and business connections,
Bronfman simply shook the Swiss by the throat until they began to act.
The process is far from over, but the Swiss government and the banks
have put up money for restitution, and accounts that have lain
undisturbed for more than a half-century are beginning to go to their
rightful owners. This is an extraordinary story, very clearly told, that
may help keep the pressure on the Swiss to make their long overdue
amends.