With the release of hundreds of damaging documents, a dark side of Switerland's democracy has been unveiled. Switerland is now seen as a nation of greedy bankers, collaborators with the Nais, and robbers of the wealth of the victims of the Holocaust. Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls is a powerfully enlightening account of how a small and determined group of people from divergent backgrounds humbled the legendary Swiss financial empire to achieve a measure of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, while shattering the myth of Swiss wartime neutrality.
Rickman tells how a small group of people, none of them professional historians, pieced together a pule of unknown proportions and proceeded to dismantle the myth of Swiss innocence and victimiation at the hands of the Nais, and expose a fifty-year cover-up. Untold numbers of European Jews and others placed their funds in Swiss banks because they believed they offered a safe haven for funds which the Nais were trying to control. What better place to put their money than in Switerland? Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls discusses how investigative groups proved that Switerland stole the money of the Jews and helped the Nais to do the same. No one began with evidence and no one had a source of knowledge upon which to fall back. All they shared was a feeling that something was terribly wrong and that a great injustice had occurred. Propelled by this instinct, a U.S. Senator, the World Jewish Congress, a British Parliamentarian, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a handful of Holocaust survivors accomplished what the U.S., British, and French governments and a group of feuding Jewish organiations could not or would not do.
As a result of this effort, how the world views Switerland and how Switerland views itself has been redefined. Most importantly, those who survived the Nai horrors, only to be victimied again by the Swiss bankers, have now achieved some measure of justice, or at least financial compensation after more than fifty years.
