Published on January 9, 2025 at 8:05 p.m. / Modified on January 9, 2025 at 8:06 p.m.
Between 1940 and 1945, in the midst of World War II, Swiss banks and the SNB, the Swiss National Bank, bought gold from the German Reichsbank. The total amount amounts, according to a first report, between 1.3 and 1.45 billion Swiss francs. It should be noted that, at the same time, more or less 2.5 billion francs were sold or advanced to the Allies. Switzerland being neutral, the Swiss franc became the only means of international payment during the war.
The problem with German gold is that it was taken illicitly. It was discovered after the war that it came from the reserves of the central banks of Holland and Belgium, but also, in part, from the victims of the concentration camps.
A strategy to avoid invasion
The BNS, according to its own archives, doubted the origin of this gold from the summer of 1941. But continued its purchases, with the approval of the Federal Council. Their calculation at the time was that such a strategy would protect Switzerland from a German invasion. After the war, Switzerland signed the Washington Agreement in 1946. For its ambiguous behavior with Nazi Germany, it agreed to pay a fine of 250 million francs and to shed light on the unclaimed accounts of victims. Jews from Nazi persecution. But Swiss bankers oppose it, citing banking secrecy. The Cold War begins and distracts the Allies.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the World Jewish Congress took advantage of the opening of ex-Soviet countries to try to find property stolen from Jews by the Nazis and Communists. It was during this research, focused mainly on escheated accounts, that the organization discovered the existence in Swiss banks of accounts having belonged to Jewish victims of Nazism and left escheated, i.e. say without known heirs. Descendants of these people tried, in vain, to obtain information from banks. These hide behind banking secrecy.
-Two commissions of inquiry
The World Jewish Congress, headquartered in the United States, then began a pressure campaign against Switzerland. An investigative committee was formed in 1996 to shed light on the dormant accounts. It is chaired by Paul Volcker, former president of the American Fed. At the same time, an independent commission of experts, better known as the “Bergier Commission”, is responsible for shedding light on Switzerland’s attitude during the Second World War. The two commissions deliver their report after years of investigation. No less than 200 to 400 million Swiss francs in assets belong to these dormant accounts. The Bergier report reveals, among other things, how Switzerland turned away Jews in full knowledge of the danger of death.
In 2021, Credit Suisse reopened its archives and hired an American lawyer specializing in financial fraud, Neil Barofsky, following suspicions raised by an NGO, the Simon Wiesentahl Center. But the bank, which in the process fired Barofsky, made it difficult to access certain documents, according to an interim report from the US Senate investigation. The latter was finally reinstated after the report was released.
Today, several hundred accounts have been identified as having a potential link with Nazis. And several hundred intermediaries, such as lawyers, who would have allowed the Nazis to hide their assets in Switzerland.
