Hitler's silent partners : Swiss banks, Nazi gold, and the pursuit of justice /

Among the late-blooming legacies of World War II is the discovery that supposedly neutral nations such as Sweden and Switzerland actually reaped immense financial benefits from their less than benign cooperation with the Nazis. Vincent is an award-winning investigative journalist for the Toronto Globe and Mail; her research efforts over three continents have produced a fascinating and deeply disturbing narrative that reveals the corruption and moral indifference that allowed Swiss bankers and politicians to reap the windfall of Hitler's destruction of European Jewry. The mazelike movements of stolen wealth and Vincent's efforts to track it down provide surprisingly dramatic tension. However, what breathes vibrancy and nobility into this saga is the parallel story of the Hammersfeld family. A prosperous Viennese Jewish family, the Hammersfelds were scattered across Europe as they fled Nazi terror after the 1938 Anschluss. The efforts of the Hammersfeld survivors and heirs to seek a just restoration of their assets add saving grace to what otherwise would be a depressing tale of greed and indifference to human suffering. --Jay Freeman

Secret Swiss bank accounts have long been used to hide funds that depositors wish to protect from detection. European Jews threatened by Nazi Germany used such accounts to avoid confiscation of their assets. Vincent (See No Evil), an investigative journalist for Toronto's Globe and Mail, tells the story of one Viennese Jewish family, the Hammersfelds, who are now seeking to recapture such an account that they believe was opened by their grandfather after the Germans annexed Austria in 1938. One of the weaknesses of using the Hammersfeld family as an example of Swiss bankers' recalcitrance is that they admittedly possess no concrete evidence other than a recollection that their grandfather had set up a Swiss account before he eventually perished. From the book's title, one might expect exclusive insights into the role of supposedly neutral Swiss bankers during WWII in helping the Germans launder confiscated gold and finance the country's war machine, yet Vincent adds little to what is already known. Still, this compendium of information reads like a stirring saga of one family's struggle to survive. Author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Like Tom Bower's Nazi Gold (LJ 5/15/97), this account uncovers the ties between Swiss bankers and the Nazis. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A journalist for Toronto's Globe and Mail details the continuing, wretched story of Swiss collusion, as financiers and dealers in stolen goods, with Nazi Germany. The story isn't simple, and the culpability extends far beyond Swiss bankers. For instance, Vincent notes that a US intelligence report from 1945 suggested that even the International Committee of the Red Cross, with headquarters in Switzerland, smuggled ``Nazi assets and valuables across Europe in diplomatic pouches.'' A number of Swiss firms may also have worked closely (and profitably) with the Nazis. While it was known in official circles that Switzerland flagrantly abused its neutrality, its complicity was only lightly considered by the Allied victors, largely because of pragmatic realpolitik. Although Swiss banks, throughout the war, paid Germany needed foreign currency for gold bullion usurped from the central banks of conquered countries and for bars refined from the gold gathered from the ring fingers and teeth of millions of slaughtered Jews, they were not pursued by any international courts. Secret accounts established by beleaguered Jews before they disappeared were ignored, too. An amount approaching $6 billion (in current dollars) may have been involved. Only under intense international pressure, generated at first by the World Jewish Congress, have the Swiss begun, reluctantly, truculently, to open their bank records for review. Vincent provides a thorough summary of what is known about Swiss actions during and since the war, and to humanize the issue, draws on a number of interviews with individuals attempting to find out about family accounts, and especially on the efforts of the surviving descendants of Abraham Hammersmith, a Viennese textile exporter, to reclaim their past. The history of the Hammersmith family, many of whom died in the Holocaust, is a kind of record in miniature of Jewish suffering and Swiss mendacity. A clear, angry, important (though interim) work that treats significant matters with clarity and intelligence. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)