Word: switzerland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...York City resident Rudolphine Schlinger says she too has proof her husband William had Swiss bank accounts. The wealthy furrier had made deposits before and during the war from his home in Versoix, Switzerland. But he died in 1985 without having retrieved the funds. Then a December 1996 article in the newspaper Jewish Week listed his account at Swiss Bank Corp. At a hearing last week in New York City attended by a representative from the bank, the 89-year-old widow appealed directly for restitution. "To you, sir, I ask, rather I demand, that you tell me what happened...
...Israel Singer it started with a book. In 1994 he chanced to read a Paul Erdman novel, The Swiss Account, that alluded to Allen Dulles' wartime role as America's top spy in neutral Switzerland. The hints of unsavory Swiss behavior enticed the ordained rabbi and former political science professor from New York City into reading a biography of Dulles, which made reference to a U.S. intelligence operation code-named Project Safehaven. Its mission: to track down Nazi gold and loot being smuggled out of the Third Reich...
What turned this courtly, resolute advocate into the point man for reclaiming Jewish assets from Switzerland was a chair--or, more precisely, the lack of a chair. On Sept. 12, 1995, Bronfman went with Singer to a meeting in Bern. They wanted to ask the Swiss Bankers Association to investigate the dormant accounts of Holocaust victims. Without offering their visitors a seat, the bankers began to dictate their terms. They proposed turning over $32 million discovered in 774 Jewish accounts since the war and suggested that that would close the matter for good. "I don't think it occurred...
...from occupied countries, the Jewish assets seized, the jewelry, gold dental fillings and wedding rings wrenched from concentration-camp victims. As early as 1943, when Washington launched Project Safehaven to locate the Nazi plunder and find out where it was going, the U.S. knew most of it was entering Switzerland. That year, spymaster Dulles warned the Swiss government that much of the 100 tons of gold bullion the Reichsbank was selling for Swiss francs was stolen. Eventually, Safehaven agents concluded that some $6 billion in Nazi assets had been transferred into Switzerland from 1938 to 1945 under cover of bank...
...British embassy in Washington warns the U.S. Treasury Department that "every leading member of the governing groups in all the Axis countries have funds in Switzerland. Some have fortunes...