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

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.