The Swiss, The Gold And The Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine [Hardcover]

Jean Ziegler (Author), John Brownjohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 1998

Recent startling revelations that Switzerland helped to bankroll Nazi Germany's war effort, and Swiss intransigence in the face of redress claims by Holocaust survivors, have shaken Switerland's international reputation. In this uncompromising account, leading Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler closely examines the shady relationship between Swiss bankers and Nazi Germany. Based on the records of the German Armaments Ministry and other official documents, The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead shows how Switzerland's leading financial institutions provided Hittler with the foreign exchange essential to his war effort-laundering gold looted from the banks of occupied Europe and from the bodies of concentration camp victims; granting sizable loans; and supplying Germany's war economy with weapons, ammunition, and precision instruments. In returen, Switzerland was spared the devastation that befell the rest of Europe. Ziegler argues forcefully and authoritatively that without Swiss complicity the war in Europe would have ended earlier, sparing hundreds of thousands of lives. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in Switzerland's domestic politic and international diplomacy, Professor Ziegler has made an important contribution to this highly controversial and emotional subject.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At what price neutrality? For the 50 years following World War II, Switzerland has maintained that whatever collaboration it may have engaged in with Nazi Germany was undertaken in hopes of avoiding invasion. Recently, however, foreign governments and the families of Holocaust victims have begun to take an interest in the fate of the many millions of dollars' worth of Jewish gold, works of art, and money that disappeared into numbered Swiss bank accounts during the war, never to be seen again. In The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead, Swiss professor and parliamentarian Jean Ziegler provides a provocative, damning portrait of the Swiss banking community and his fellow countrymen. According to Ziegler, the global financial power that Switzerland now wields is the direct result of the Nazi plunder laundered in Swiss banks, a result that the Swiss people have accepted without guilt or question. It's not surprising that Ziegler's book is controversial in his own country; the Swiss people are understandably reluctant to accept the complicity of their government in funding Hitler's war effort. What is disturbing is the Swiss government's continued attempts to obstruct open discussion of the past. The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead will certainly make official denials a little bit harder to swallow.

From Publishers Weekly

A bestseller in Europe, this eloquent expose by a Swiss sociologist who is a member of the Swiss parliament probably provides the fullest picture to date of Swiss complicity in Nazi German war crimes of WWII. Ziegler details how top Swiss bankers fenced and laundered the gold that the Germans stole from conquered nations' central banks, from Jewish businesses and homes, even from Holocaust victims' teeth. By exchanging this loot for foreign currency and giving Hitler huge loans and arms deliveries in 1943, Switzerland's ruling elite helped to prolong the war, causing countless needless deaths, Ziegler compellingly argues. A Geneva University sociology professor and associate professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, he documents the role of Swiss banks in capital transfers to South America to abet fleeing Nazis after 1945, and he reconstructs the Allied wartime campaign of espionage and commercial retaliation against Hitler's Swiss accomplices. He names the Swiss bankers, government officials, arms manufacturers and companies that benefited from collaboration with the Third Reich. His soul-searching indictment burns into the reader Switzerland's war guilt, as he discusses the turning away at the Swiss frontier of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the unconstitutional taxes imposed on Swiss Jews by their own government; the German slave trains that passed through Switzerland carrying Italian labor conscripts and, according to various accounts, Jews being shipped to extermination camps; and Swiss banks' ongoing misappropriation of personal savings from Jewish heirs unable to produce the camp death certificates of murdered family members. Ziegler's well-documented report demolishes the myth of Swiss neutrality.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (March 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151003343
• ISBN-13: 978-0151003341
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Role of Bank for International Settlements in World War II, May 17, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Hempstead, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Swiss, The Gold And The Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine (Hardcover)

According Jean Ziegler, Professor of Sociology at Geneva University, Swiss bankers fenced and laundered the gold stocks stolen from central banks in Nazi-occupied countries. It was they who financed Hitler's wars of conquest. Had the Swiss ruling class evinced any remorse at the close of the war - had its members apologized for their transgressions and quietly left the stage - he should never have written this book. I was interested in how he would handle the wartime activities of the BIS located in Basel. He recognized "the thoroughly dubious role of the BIS, in which Nazi and Allied bankers worked together throughout the war. Deputy Managing Director Paul Hechler's letters from Basel to Emil Puhl,vice president of the Reichsbank, always concluded with the words, 'Heil Hitler.' " An American, Thomas H. McKittrick, served as President of the BIS from 1940-1946. Morgenthau tried to have him removed without success. Resolution 5 of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 called for the elimination of the BIS because of their financing of the Nazis' wars of aggression. When I attended the 50th anniversary of the agreement I asked Edward Bernstein why resolution 5 was never carried out. It seems that the BIS came to the aid of Britain after the war and the British representative to the IMF approached Bernstein and asked whether they might forget resolution 5, to which Bernstein agreed.

8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The level of some peoples denial is amazing, May 9, 2004

By 

RooT (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Swiss, The Gold And The Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine (Hardcover)

This is a good book on this subject it covers many areas of the Swiss partnership with the Nazis. I would highly recomend this book to anybody that is realativly new to the subject matter.

Now for my small rant.

It seams that every book on this subject has some reviewers that are in complete denial of what has been proven time and time again as fact. Why some people cannot accept that the Swiss sold their souls to the Nazis to avoid being invaded is beyond me. This book even thow it goes into many areas of the Nazi / Swiss connection, the sad unfourtunate truth is that there is even more ties that this book does not cover. A example being the fact that Swizerland was producing arms for Germany during WWII. The factorys were untouchable to the Allied bombers due to the so called neuteral status of the Swiss. If allied aircraft ventured into Swiss territory the Swiss would shoot them down, in the meantime Germany enjoyed free crossing across Switzerland by any mode of transportaion throughout WWII.

I did not write this to bash the swiss. I have no anomositys towards them. My only agenda for these statements is to maybe shake people out of the denial they so blindly post in book reviews on the subject of Switzerlands connection and profiterring off the Nazis rise to power. Every country in the world has somthing dark in its past. Denial of mistakes your culture has made really just contributes right back into the evil that was done so long ago. I have to accept my ancetors wrong doing every bit as much as anybody, I am german, and proud to be German. Quit contributing to the lies told for so many years, accept that your ancestors were not perfect. only when you accept your herritage for better or worse can you truley move on and hold your head high again.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Short on expectations, July 24, 2007

By 

P. GUPTA (Anchorage, KY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine (Paperback)

The book is somewhat informative in documenting the differnce forms of war-time gold and cash "management" by the Swiss government and banks. But the narrative is quite dry and often repetitive. Read it if you don't know much about the subject or can't find a more highly recommended book.