For decades after the close of the War, the attempts of Jewish people to reclaim what monies they and their families had deposited in Swiss bank accounts before and during the War, were unsuccessful. The efforts of non-Jewish account holders received immediate help and attention, but when it came to the assets of the Jews, the Swiss suddenly couldn't find any records. Ironically, this was all exposed in the past year, and the Swiss President even had to come forward and apologize to all Jews. (It was reminiscent of the U.S. Congress apologizing to the Hawaiians for the theft of their homeland).

It turns out, however, that the Swiss were much more intimate with the Nazis than they had admitted before. They not only engaged in money laundering for the Nazis, they also supplied wartime materiel; yet when the war was over, the Swiss were treated like innocent victims. It turns out that the reason the Nazis did not invade Switzerland was not because the Swiss would fight to the last man, as the conventional wisdom went, but was instead because Hitler needed the Gnomes of Zurich for their talents as moneychangers. Ironically, they even provided the Fuhrer with U.S. dollars, in order to facilitate the fascist leader's military demands.

The Harper Collins book "Nazi Gold" by Tom Bower, subtitled, "The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors" is a powerful indictment. When the War began, Germany had $100 million in gold, at the end of the War, Germany had sold about $900 million in gold. The following excerpt from a review by Ann Louise Bardach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, speaks for itself:

The greatest slaughter in history has, until quite recently, tended to obscure the other horror perpetuated by the Nazis - namely, the greatest robbery in history. The first order of business for the invading Nazi army as it trampled through Europe was a raid on the national treasury and the hauling of millions of dollars in gold and cash back to the Reichsbank in Berlin. Next were art seizures from museums, galleries and the private collections of Jews. In time, all the valuables and property of Jews would be confiscated, and eventually they, too, would be taken away. Even after their deaths, the thieving would continue. Wedding rings snatched from the corpses, gold wrested from their teeth; in fact, an estimated 72 pounds of dental gold was extracted each day from victims at Auschwitz.

Billions of dollars of the looted gold and cash and an estimated $2.5 billion in stolen art were sent to Switzerland, where the Reich's Swiss bankers attended to its purchase, care and investment. Nazi Germany was, after all, the most important client in the history of Swiss banking. Before World War II, Switzerland had been a poor country. Thanks to the Third Reich, Switzerland emerged from the war as the second-richest country in the world.

In news stories over the last two years, the world has learned that the Swiss were hardly the beset-upon neutrals that they have claimed to be but instead were full partners with the Nazis. Moreover, as Tom Bower's masterly chronicle, "Nazi Gold," makes clear, the Nazis could never have prevailed as long as they did without the Swiss. Indeed, as Bower makes clear, the war would most likely have ended a full year earlier had it not been for the financial intervention of Swiss bankers.

Called "a state within a state," Swiss banks have long functioned as Switzerland's shadow government. And while the overriding motives of the Swiss bankers to collaborate with the Nazis were mercenary -- simple greed -- it was anti-Semitism, pervasive among the Swiss elite, that was the amoral glue that held it together.

Even after warnings from the Allies to cease their dealings with the Axis, the Swiss persisted. After the war, the Swiss were equally scornful, determined to hold onto their ill-gotten gains by any means. They swindled the Allies, repaying only $58 million worth of gold when in fact they had bought roughly $400 million (worth $4 billion today) of gold from the Nazis, then refused any assistance to survivors of the Holocaust. Although the banks avidly sought the assets of persecuted Jews before and during the war (lured by the security of anonymous numbered accounts), they steadfastly stymied the attempts of heirs to lay claim to these accounts. Thousands of Jews were denied their family's savings on the grounds that they could not produce death certificates of relatives murdered in concentration camps. Others, who had fled with their lives, leaving behind bank books and personal documentation, also found the banks' doors slammed in their faces. There seemed no end to the ingenious reasons the bankers came up with -- always sanctimoniously cloaked in the convenient secrecy laws -- to keep survivors from their assets. At the same time, the Swiss, who recorded the religious affiliations of their depositors, went out of their way to repatriate assets of non-Jews and provide loans and credit to rebuild Germany.

Bower deftly characterizes the major villains of this travesty -- the demonic Heinrich Rothmund, director of the Swiss Police, who advised the Germans during the war to stamp the passports of fleeing Jews with a red "J" so that the Swiss could easily identify them and turn them over to the Gestapo; the venal Eduard von Steiger, the Swiss justice minister who supervised the deportation of Jews back to the Nazis and the Machiavellian Max Oetterli, president of the Swiss Bankers Assn., who made it his mission to return nothing to the Allies and Jewish depositors. But it was negotiator Walter Stucki, a passionate devotee of Marshal Petain, along with foreign minister Max Petipierre, who reinvented the Swiss' wartime history and finessed its postwar rapprochement with the Allies.

However, the perfidy of the Swiss was well abetted by the Allies, particularly the British, whose devastated postwar economy made them vulnerable to Swiss demands. Anxious to discourage Jewish migration to Palestine, then a British territory, the English offered no support for restitution to Jewish claimants. Deprived of their family funds in Swiss accounts, many Jews were unable to make the move. "Anti-Semitism was terribly fashionable here," a British wartime intelligence officer once remarked, "until Hitler came along and overdid it." Anti-Semitism was also institutional at the State Department until the 1970s. Many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's closest advisors, as well as a small but powerful cadre in the State Department, were willing to let the Swiss slide on restitution. Not only did John McCloy, Roosevelt's closest advisor, veto repeated requests to bomb the concentration camps or the rail lines leading to them, he granted clemency after the war to some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals.

But there were some heroes, notably a group of Treasury Department and State Department officials known as the Crusaders, mostly of Jewish descent, who valiantly fought for just restitution to the Allies and the Jewish victims. Bower wonderfully dramatizes the herculean struggle of this group: Seymour Rubin, James Mann, Max Isenbergh, James Angell, Eli Ginzberg and Sam Klaus, who masterminded Operation Safehaven to track hidden Nazi loot. They fought the good fight and lost but laid the groundwork for the victories 50 years later. The legacy of the Swiss-Nazi relationship is, of course, the bank accounts of drug traffickers, terrorists and tax cheats in Swiss banks today. Protecting villains is a thriving business, one which the Swiss learned well at the knee of the Third Reich.

(SOURCE: This book review was derived from the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, 6 July, 1997. This article is reprinted in the national interest of the American people.)