U.S. to Launch Inquiry Into Nazi Loot

The Clinton administration on Friday ordered an urgent search of half-century-old documents to try to determine what happened to Nazi gold and other wealth--much of it stolen from victims of the Holocaust--in the hectic days following World War II.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the review is intended to “provide a greater understanding of the role played by the United States and other countries” in handling Nazi loot, much of it believed to be held in numbered Swiss bank accounts.

“The State Department’s review will focus on United States’ diplomatic efforts in the postwar period in the latter part of the 1940s, which includes our interaction at that time with the Swiss government,” Burns said.

The U.S. review comes amid a revived international quest to recover gold the Nazis stole from conquered nations, Jewish businesses and individual Jews during the war. A recent British government report, published on the heels of new American research, asserted that billions of dollars’ worth remain in the secure and quiet vaults of Swiss banks.

Burns said the State Department decided to conduct the U.S. study at the urging of Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.).

The U.S. review could aid Jewish organizations in their efforts to trace the jewelry, melted-down gold teeth and other assets that the Nazis stole from Holocaust victims.

The British report noted that Allied negotiators in 1945 excluded the possibility of private claims to the assets because they “would be small in comparison with governmental claims . . . and extremely difficult to prosecute.”

The Swiss government recently agreed to relax its bank-secrecy laws to identify accounts that may have been deposited by Jews in the early days of the war and to trace Nazi government accounts. But the government said it may take five years before any money is disbursed. The task is complicated by the Swiss banking practice of identifying accounts by number, not by name.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the study should help organizations like his and the World Jewish Congress in that endeavor.

“If the State Department shows everything they have, it will help organizations like ours to obtain material from other national archives,” Cooper said in a telephone interview. “They are late in the day, but the announcement . . . will make it easier to research the issue.”

Cooper said assets worth between $30 billion and $90 billion in current dollars ended up in Switzerland, some in deposits and some in gold that was sold by the Nazi government to help pay the cost of the war.

“Gold teeth, wedding bands, other jewelry, etc., was sold to Switzerland to finance the war effort,” Cooper said. “Maybe it is not all identifiable, but . . . it should be clear that the gold was sold by other than its lawful owner.”

In the closing days of the war, the U.S. Army sought to trace Nazi assets. Some documents from that era have already been made public.

For instance, the Wiesenthal Center obtained a memo from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters dated May 8, 1945, the day of the Nazi surrender. The memo noted that Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s SS, the organization that organized and carried out the extermination of 6 million European Jews, as well as about 5 million others, used the German national bank to “convert SS loot into orthodox financial assets.” Other documents showed a concerted effort to trace those and other Nazi assets.

In an affidavit dated a month after the German surrender, a German employee of the central bank told U.S. Army interrogators that during his service in Berlin, he saw 75 deliveries of valuables from the SS. He said they included jewelry, gold and other precious metals.

After the war, Cooper said, some seized Nazi assets were diverted to uses such as relief for displaced people. That was a laudable aim, he said, but, considering the origin of much of the Nazi money, the support “was actually paid for by the victims.”

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A $20-billion class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in Brooklyn federal court on behalf of Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks for allegedly refusing to return victims’ money, jewelry and other assets.

Defendants include Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corp., also known as Swiss National Bank, and more than 100 unnamed banking institutions and individuals.

The exact number in the potential class is unknown, the lawsuit stated.