He Survived to Fight a Whole New War

Bert Linder is an old man, his eyes are going and his right knee is already gone, but news of Nazi gold and Swiss banks makes him recall, with a clarity that only pain allows, a scene from his younger days.

In 1943, Linder stepped off a cattle car, descended into Auschwitz, stripped off his clothes and tossed his gold wedding band to the ground .

Later, two dentists walked through the barracks, pushing pliers into open mouths and wrenching free teeth with fillings of gold. The dentists dropped them into little sacks that two SS men held agape.

These were the lesser horrors of Linder’s captivity. The worst ones--the beatings, the gassing of his wife, son and sister--survive only as nightmares, savaging him while he sleeps.

The gold, though, lives.

“The Nazis took those things from us, and the Swiss have no right to them,” said Linder, an 85-year-old death camp survivor and retired real estate agent. “We, the survivors, only want back what is rightfully ours.”

Linder says he doesn’t need the money or even much want it--just justice.

From his home in a desert subdivision, Linder is waging a campaign to force the storied banks of Switzerland to give up the riches they secured from victims of the Holocaust, wealth acquired through connivings with the Nazis and held secretly all these years.

In so doing, Linder, who has lectured and written about his experience in the camps, wants to make the Swiss confront the truth about their wartime association with the Nazis, a truth cloaked for 50 years behind myths of neutrality and heroism.

“The Nazis could never have functioned without the Swiss banks,” Linder said, “and the banks have kept silent about it all these years.”

When news broke last year that the Swiss had discovered in their vaults what may be long dormant accounts of Jews held in the Holocaust, Linder, who was traveling in his native Austria, became one of the first survivors to step forward. In September, he filed claims against eight Swiss banks believed to hold such accounts and demanded that any money discovered be distributed among the survivors.

Like many of the Holocaust survivors now besieging the banks, Linder does not claim that he or his deceased parents held an account in a Swiss bank when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938--though, he says, that was certainly possible. His father, a Vienna brush factory owner, tried to spirit sizable amounts of money out of the country as the situation for Jews worsened in the late 1930s.

The claim Linder has put to the Swiss banks is more compelling, if less quantifiable: the teeth. The rings. All the millions--the factories, the cash, the cars and the homes plundered by the Nazis--socked away in the safe havens of the Swiss banks.

“It is a moral claim,” said Josef Wegrostek, Linder’s lawyer and longtime friend in Vienna.

The initial responses from the banks ranged from tepid to icily bureaucratic. Three didn’t answer at all.

“You will surely understand,” wrote the directors of Credit Suisse in Zurich in September, “that there is nothing there to be distributed; therefore, we cannot comply with your request.”

But the battle, far from over, had barely begun. Almost overnight, Linder became a darling of the European news media. His face, adorned by large owlish glasses, appeared in newspapers, magazines and on TV shows across the continent.

Family Affairs, a popular Swiss newsweekly, carried a splashy color photo and the headline: “David Gegen Goliath.”

David versus Goliath.

“I’ve known Bert for 30 years, and he is a very persistent man,” Wegrostek said.

Before long, the revelations began to pour forth from the recesses of the Swiss vaults, suggesting a larger wartime role for the banks--and, potentially, billions more in Jewish assets. Hundreds--then thousands--of Holocaust victims and their descendants joined Linder to demand that the banks drop their vaunted veils of secrecy and come clean. Lawsuits were filed, blue-ribbon panels convened, investigations launched.

One such lawsuit, brought against three Swiss banks in the U.S., now includes some 12,000 survivors and their families, including nearly 1,000 from California.

“We get 300 to 400 phone calls every day,” said Edward R. Fagan, the lawyer handling the case.

Linder is pleased with what he helped start, and he is enjoying the revelations that daily seem to push the Swiss bankers further and further out on a limb. He hopes that those who emerged alive from Dachau and Buchenwald and Treblinka and Sobibor will finally get what is rightfully theirs.

And with each day, fewer survivors remain; more memories die away. Linder said he won’t rest until the survivors get their due.

“I still cannot believe the things human beings did to each other in the concentration camps,” Linder said. “If anyone had walked up to me on the street and told me what happened, I would have told them they were lying.”

*

Even now, 52 years after British soldiers rescued Linder from Bergen-Belsen, the nightmares often soak him in a cold sweat: the thrill in the eyes of the Nazi guard who clubbed him with the butt of his rifle. The prisoner, unable to go on, throwing himself onto an electrified fence. The smell of burning flesh.

“Sometimes he wakes up and I have to hold his hand,” said Linder’s wife of 51 years, Joan. “Sometimes I have to give him a Valium.”

Linder’s daughter, Viviane, remembers how the house had to be very quiet when Dad got home from work.

“I would have to send all my friends home,” said Viviane Linder-Petz, who lives in Westlake Village.

It’s why Linder retired to the desert 21 years ago.

“It’s very calm and quiet here,” he said.

Linder, born in 1911, grew up on a peaceful street in Vienna, where his father owned the Jacob Linder Brush Manufacturer.

By the time the Nazis came to power in Germany, Linder worked as a traveling salesman and was married to Millie Meier, a Catholic who didn’t seem to mind that he was Jewish.

On March 13, 1938, the Nazis marched into Austria, and Linder was fired from his job the same day. When he decided to leave Austria, Millie decided to stay behind.

“I learned later that she had become a Nazi,” Linder said.

Linder lived on the run for the next five years. In Belgium and France, he helped the Resistance and once escaped from a makeshift prison run by the French. In a corner of Southern France still unoccupied by the Germans, Linder fell in love and married Gisella Spira a Jewish woman from Berlin.

“Gisella was very beautiful, nice, very intelligent, she was my wife,” Linder said.

In January 1942, still on the run, the couple had a son, Roland. The family lived a tenuous existence for the next year and a half, before the Germans swept in. Linder and his family were arrested in an Italian border town called Borgo San Dalmazzo.

At Auschwitz, after Linder had stripped and dropped his belongings, a guard shaved him of his body hair and engraved a tattoo that still survives in a faded blue-green scrawl atop his left hand: 167595.

“Arbeit Macht Frei,” said the sign on the wrought-iron gates. “Work Will Set You Free.”

His wife and son, however, had been taken in another direction.

“They went right to the gas chambers,” Linder said.

For the next 20 months, Linder survived as a slave: He built roads near Auschwitz and, later, shaped pipes in the underground complex of the German V-2 missile factory at Nordhausen until it was bombed by the Allies.

He was always cold, always hungry. Two memories: the “selections” at the end of every workday, to determine who would go on and who would die. And the Russian prisoners stalking a dying comrade, waiting for him to fall.

“Yes, I witnessed acts of cannibalism,” he says.

Linder does not recall the moment of his deliverance. He lay unconscious in the barracks when British soldiers entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. He weighed 96 pounds.

The British fed him rice and cream, and, when he was strong enough, made him a cook. His white cotton smock, ironed and starched, still hangs in his bedroom closet.

Embroidered on the sleeve: “Kitchen Chief.”

In Brussels, several weeks after his rescue, Linder wandered into a free dental clinic. The line was long, and Linder, still wearing his striped camp uniform, turned to leave.

A young woman grabbed him by his collar, and, noticing his uniform, offered to slip him in the back door. It was Joan Winkler, the woman he would marry.

The couple had two children and, in 1951, immigrated to America. After a few fits and starts, Linder moved his family to Los Angeles, set up a business and gave it a name. Its ordinary title stood in banal contrast to the horrors he had endured: Bert Linder Real Estate.

Thirty-six members of Linder’s family never left the camps.

*

How much Jewish gold is there in the Swiss banks?

No one really knows, but a lot of people are trying to find out: the banks themselves, a U.S. Senate Committee, and a panel chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, which has been given extraordinary access to pierce Switzerland’s secrecy laws and scour the vaults.

The banks say the amount is probably small. Last year, they announced that they had discovered 774 accounts inactive from the war totaling about $32 million.

“This does not mean that these accounts belonged to Holocaust victims exclusively,” the directors of the Union Bank of Switzerland wrote to Linder.

Recent revelations have sent the Swiss reeling. Documents suggested that Swiss banks handled gold stolen by the Nazis, and that the banks helped the Nazis spend it to fuel their war machine.

“There is no denying that the Swiss were the bankers and launderers for Hitler’s Germany,” said Elan Steinberg, spokesman for the World Jewish Congress, one of the groups that has led the campaign against the Swiss banks.

Steinberg and others, including representatives of the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles, say the amount of stolen gold handled by the Swiss totals at least $4 billion at today’s value.

Documents dug out of once-secret archives have buttressed the survivors’ case.

One memo, written by American intelligence officers in 1946, detailed the shipment of some 280 truckloads of Nazi gold--worth $500 million today--by the Swiss National Bank to Spain and Portugal as part of a wartime money-laundering operation.

Another document, prepared by the U.S. State Department in 1946, determined that the Germans had transferred some $398 million worth of gold to Switzerland during the war. In today’s prices, that would be worth about $4 billion.

“These documents are the Bruno Magli shoes,” Steinberg said.

And last month, the Weisenthal Center sent to Swiss President Arnold Koller the names of 334 high Nazi officials who they believe may have transferred looted wealth into Swiss banks.

On the list: Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun.

“We don’t care how much the Swiss say is in their banks in 1997,” said Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and director of the Weisenthal Center. “How much did they have in 1945?”

The evidence may take years to sort out, but the matter seems to be needling the Swiss conscience.

In December, the Swiss National Bank acknowledged publicly it had profited from gold plundered by the Nazis. The bank added that none of the gold came from concentration camp victims, however.

The Swiss banks now say they will do everything they can to identify gold and money owned by Holocaust victims.

“At the end of this process, not one Swiss franc that may have belonged to a Holocaust victim will remain in the Swiss banks,” said Jeffrey Taufield, spokesman for the Swiss Bankers Assn.

Last month, three of the largest Swiss banks established an $80-million “humanitarian fund” to aid victims of the Holocaust.

One of those was the Union Bank of Switzerland, which rebuffed Linder months before.

Said the banks: “The time has come for action, not words.”

*

These days, Bert Linder is a busy man. He has completed a book about his experiences, “Condemned Without Judgment” (SPI Books, 1995). He is lecturing high school students on his experiences in the death camps.

And he is preparing to return to Austria to press his case. He’ll lecture at several universities as well, a duty that has already earned him plaudits from the Austrian government.

Though hobbled and old, Linder’s tone and his step have taken on a new urgency. With each day, there are fewer survivors, fewer memories. In the past year, the Holocaust Survivors of the Desert, of which Linder is president, lost two of its more than 130 members.

And that’s why, Linder said, the case against the Swiss banks is important. Not for the money. But for the memories. So the Holocaust doesn’t slide into the pit of the forgotten past, so some group can claim the gassings and the beatings and the yanking of the teeth never happened.

“Of course it happened,” he said. “I saw these things with my own eyes.”

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Bert Linder

Background: Born 85 years ago in Vienna. Fled to Belgium and France in 1938. Wife Gisella and son were killed at Auschwitz but he survived. After the war, he remarried and came to United States with wife Joan and two children in 1951. Settled in Los Angeles and started a real estate business. Retired to Rancho Mirage 21 years ago.

Passions: Writing and speaking about the Holocaust. Lectures high school students in the desert area. His speeches in Austria earned him the Cross of Honor for service to the Austrian government. Author of “Condemned Without Judgment” (SPI Books, 1995), a memoir.

On the death camps: “When we arrived at Auschwitz, a guard told us to get undressed and drop everything to the ground. He told us we would be working for the Third Reich.”

On his Nazi jailers: “The guard who beat me enjoyed what he was doing. And he did a good job.”

On his rescue from Bergen-Belsen: “In the end, I gave up. I did not think I would survive. I was unconscious in the barracks when we were liberated. When I awoke, I was lying on an army cot. Standing over me was a British soldier, trying to get me to swallow some liquid.”

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Questions on the Lawsuit?

More than 4,000 Holocaust survivors and their descendants have filed lawsuits against Swiss banks, saying the banks may be holding Jewish assets seized or forgotten during World War II.

To get more information on the lawsuits, call:

* The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is also backing a lawsuit against several banks, (310) 553-9036.

* Edward R. Fagan, a New York attorney who represents several thousand survivors and their families, (212) 293-1900.

* In addition, the Wiesenthal Center has a Web site listing some 1,600 accounts held in Swiss banks during the war, some of which may belong to Holocaust victims: https://www.wiesenthal.com.