Adam LeBor - Hitlers Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide

Non-Fiction

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Surviving Hitler: Choices, Corruption and Compromise in the Third Reich

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Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide

The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoffs $65 Billion Investment Scam

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World

City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs & Jews in Jaffa

Fiction

The Budapest Protocol

The Yael Azoulay Trilogy

The Geneva Option

The Washington Stratagem

The Reykjavik Assignment

Danube Blues

District VIII

Kossusth Square

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First published in Great Britain by Pocket Books, 1997

This revised and updated edition first published by Head of Zeus in 2020

Copyright Adam LeBor, 1997, 1999, 2020

The moral right of Adam LeBor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

ISBN: 9781789543230

Author Photo: Zoltan Tuba

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In memory of my beloved grandparents:
Ben and Luba LeBor, who left in time

The first and second editions of Hitlers Secret Bankers were published in 1997 and 1999 when the furore over Swiss banks and Nazi gold was at its height. The book was short-listed for the Orwell Prize in Britain, published in the United States and six foreign languages including Japanese and Hebrew. Hitlers Secret Bankers garnered substantial publicity, especially in the United States. I like to think that my work both increased our knowledge of this period and added to the pressure on Swiss banks and the successors to other Nazi-era financial institutions to admit their role in funding and enabling Nazi genocide - and to eventually make some recompense.

Writing the book demanded a very fast learning curve. Why did Swiss banks and Switzerland so willingly accept looted Nazi gold? How exactly did Swiss bankers deliberately empty the accounts of Holocaust victims, send the funds to Nazi Germany, then block and stonewall survivors and their heirs for decades? To find out I travelled to Switzerland, the United States, London and Israel. I interviewed survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims who had placed their money in Switzerland. I immersed myself in archives, researching the finances of the Third Reich, the mechanics of looting a countrys national gold reserves, the destruction of European Jewry and the fate of its wealth, Switzerlands wartime record, the concept of neutrality, the role of the Bank for International Settlements in keeping trans-national finance channels open during the war, and more. All of these fascinated me. The second question that lodged in my mind then, and which is still there now, is also a How?. How did one of Europes most sophisticated and civilised countries descend into a barbarism for which no words can ever really do justice?

Hitlers Secret Bankers shaped my writing career. I tried to answer that question in my subsequent book. Surviving Hitler: Choice, Corruption and Compromise in the Third Reich , co-written with my friend and colleague Roger Boyes, examined everyday life in the Third Reich. Every dictatorship depends to some extent on the consent and cooperation of those governed. Nazi Germany and its empire was no exception. In Surviving Hitler I did in-depth research into several people about whom I had written in Hitlers Secret Bankers. Their ambiguous, complex stories had fascinated me. Albert Goering, brother of Hermann, had saved the lives of dozens of Jews and anti-Nazis. When the Gestapo were on his trail, Albert asked his brother to intervene. He did. The brothers were utterly different yet still they kept their bond. Even in war, blood was thicker than politics. In a modest flat in Tel-Aviv I interviewed Hansi Brand, whose husband Joel had been sent by Adolf Eichmann on an abortive mission to negotiate a deal between the Allies and the Nazis. Hansi had worked with Rezso Kasztner, the wartime Hungarian Zionist leader who did strike a successful deal with the Nazis: 1684 Jews were allowed to leave after paying $1000 each. Hansi had sat in on the negotiations with Eichmann. It was hard to imagine this elderly Hungarian Jewish lady dealing with the devil himself. I asked her what Eichmann had been like. He wasnt too loud, He said something to me and I said something to him and I received an answer for that. But he was very nervous. His weapon was always there on his desk, and his helmet.

Hitlers Secret Bankers also inspired my first novel, The Budapest Protocol , a thriller. The protagonist is a foreign correspondent based in Budapest who discovers that the European Union is a front for a Fourth Reich in which Germany dominates Europe by economic rather than military means. That idea was directly inspired by the Red House Report, a wartime American intelligence document, detailing Nazi plans for a Fourth Reich, which is quoted in Hitlers Secret Bankers. I moved the Red House hotel to the Astoria in wartime Budapest, which was taken over by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation. Hitlers Secret Bankers also taught me that money, looting and profit drives wars as much as ideology. After Surviving Hitler I wrote a biography of Slobodan Milosevic, drawing in part on my experiences as a reporter covering the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Behind the nationalist ideologies that were supposedly driving the conflict, plunder was also an engine of war. Criminal gangs fought for control of tobacco and smuggling networks that crossed the front-lines. When towns and villages fell to one side or another, they too were looted.

This new edition of Hitlers Secret Bankers includes an extensive afterword. It examines how the compensation fund of $1.2 billion was eventually distributed, and how even after it was signed, the Swiss banks continued objecting and filibustering over its terms. It also draws on the reports by the Volcker Commission, which investigated the extent of lost and dormant accounts and the record of the Swiss banking industry during the war, and the Independent Commission of Experts, known as the Bergier Commission, which was formed by the Swiss government. This examined the role of Swiss banks and broader historical areas of Swiss policy and relations with Nazi Germany.

One of the most eye-opening discoveries I made while writing the first edition of this book was the central role played by the Bank for International Settlements, the bank for central banks, then and now based in Basel. I became fascinated by the BIS, where Allied and Axis officials worked together, while not far away their compatriots were killing each other. Some years later I went on to write Tower of Basel , the first investigative history of the BIS, which was published in 2013. Even now the worlds most powerful bankers regularly meet in secret at the BIS, to discuss the state of the worlds economy and monetary policy. Much of Tower of Basel deals with the pre-war, wartime and immediate post-war history of the BIS, which is intricately bound up with the Third Reich and its finances. What I learnt confirmed that the title of Chapter Four of Hitlers Secret Bankers, about the BIS, was absolutely correct: Kapital Uber Alles, Capital Over All. I have included extensive new material on the BIS and its role as a secret wartime channel between the Axis and the Allies, which draws on Tower of Basel .