Word: switzerland
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...look at records in Switzerland, the joint U.S.-Swiss commission, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is hiring several Swiss accounting firms to go into the banks and check their accounts, while preserving the secrecy the Swiss take such pride in. Though the committee's accountants have been pledged the bank's full access, it is doubtful they will come up with much. The investigators will be permitted to look only at dormant accounts, that is, those in which there has been no activity and no communication with the owners. Earlier this year the Swiss Bankers Association...
...major obstacle to finding satisfactory answers is the fact that many Jews in Germany and occupied areas were risking their life when they illegally sent their money out to Switzerland. To protect themselves they depended not only on the secrecy of numbered accounts but also on intermediaries: Swiss lawyers and accountants who opened the accounts and managed them under power of attorney. If the middlemen were honest brokers, they turned the funds over to their rightful owners after the war. If they were crooked, they embezzled the money long ago or, by making withdrawals or deposits, have fended off investigators...
...potentially an even darker corner of Swiss history. Last month the British Foreign Office released a 23-page report titled Nazi Gold: Information from the British Archives, which reveals that an immense amount of gold the Nazis looted from banks and private holdings in occupied countries ended up in Switzerland. Citing a Swiss banker who "let it slip," the report says some $500 million in Nazi gold was on deposit in Switzerland, a charge Bern vigorously denies. Not all of it was taken from captured central banks. Some was gold from the jewelry and teeth of Jewish victims of death...
...start work next April. It will be authorized to penetrate all levels of secrecy inside the banks, but unfortunately for those who want swift answers, it has been given up to five years to finish its task. The panel will try to trace the "fate of assets which reached Switzerland as a result of National Socialist rule" in Germany. That includes questions of complicity with the Nazis, illicit profits, and illegal gold and currency transactions. Individual claims by the relatives of Jewish victims, however, will be left to the Volcker commission...
Meanwhile, the U.S., British and French governments must decide what they will do with 5.5 tons of gold from the stocks turned over by Switzerland in the 1946 settlement. Jewish organizations in several countries urge that it be given to surviving victims of Nazism, or to charities or Israel. That step is needed to right the wrong the Allies perpetrated when they ignored individual claims on the gold, suggests Greville Janner, a British Member of Parliament and chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust. "Now is the time to do what is worthy and decent and honorable," he says, "which...