Holocaust Wealth Conferees Demand Action

Those who pillaged World War II-era Jewish property and profited from it run the gamut from Hermann Goering, the former Luftwaffe chief who spirited paintings out of France in diplomatic pouches, to Eva Peron, who reportedly used Nazi money to open secret Swiss bank accounts, according to experts invited here by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

And time is running out to do justice to remaining Holocaust survivors, many of whom are aged and some of whom are living in poverty, said conference organizers, who demanded urgent action on what they described as a deeply moral issue. They called on a dozen countries, from Spain to Uruguay, to investigate quickly whether they are home to assets hidden by 334 former leaders and officials of the Third Reich.

More than 50 years after the fact, say the specialists, the loot still missing is worth billions of dollars--”the greatest robbery in the history of mankind,” charged Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights agency active on behalf of Holocaust victims.

The center brought experts from 17 countries here this week to report on international efforts to find the wealth stolen by Adolf Hitler’s Germany and return the booty to its rightful owners.

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The property that remains to be given back, the experts said, ranges from a painting attributed to Rembrandt, known as “Jew With a Fur Cap,” which now hangs in a Pittsburgh gallery but belonged to a European Jewish family, to assets in Swiss banks that today may be worth billions of dollars.

Officials of the Wiesenthal Center also insisted that the last stocks of gold confiscated from the Nazis--5 1/2 tons held in Britain and the United States--be used to benefit victims of the Nazi genocide.

It is only now, more than half a century after the end of World War II, participants in the two-day conference said, that the complete, colossal scale of the Nazis’ plunder of Jewish property and of Europe’s art treasures is really becoming known, in part because of the opening of some archives with the end of the Cold War.

“Six million Jews and a lot of other people died,” said Michael D. Hausfeld, a Washington lawyer who has filed a class-action suit in U.S. courts against Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust victims. “What happened to everything they owned?”

The moral imperative, said Msgr. Amadee Grab, the Roman Catholic bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg, is nothing less than the commandment given in the Book of Leviticus: “You will restore to everyone his property.”

The conference, held under heavy security at a downtown Geneva hotel, once again trained the international spotlight on Switzerland, which is struggling to come to grips with its role during the war, when it proclaimed a status of neutrality but engaged in active trade with Nazi Germany.

“Not a single franc which doesn’t belong to Switzerland will remain in our country,” senior Swiss diplomat Thomas G. Borer pledged as the meeting opened Tuesday. “It’s not a question of money but of respect to the memory of the victims.”

But Borer complained of baseless charges against his country that he said had been published by the “Anglo-Saxon” media.

“Is it really fair to say that because of the wars, crimes and horrors committed by others, the Swiss people--which stayed on the margins of history--is now one of the most guilty parties?” he asked.

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Some participants, however, charged that the Swiss, who downplay the suggestions that fabulous Nazi wealth is still in their country, are refusing to accept responsibility for their country’s past.

“The Swiss were willing bankers for Hitler’s executionists and thieves,” Hausfeld said.

In an interview, the American lawyer charged that “85% of the assets stolen by the Nazis were laundered through Switzerland,” resulting in “billions” in today’s dollars for the Swiss.

To quell the mounting criticism about the wartime actions of bankers, industrialists and government officials, Swiss banks this year set up a $120-million fund for Holocaust victims, and the government announced plans for a $5-billion fund for victims of poverty, war and hate crimes.

“Undeniably, the Swiss government is now acting very responsibly and is doing the right thing, but they must know their plan, however bold, is no Marshall Plan, and the world is not going to bestow upon them a Nobel Prize for philanthropy,” Hier commented. “For the world knows they are simply paying back the money their predecessors gladly accepted and illegally profited from.”

Conference organizers insisted that their aim was not to single out Switzerland but to seek restitution in every country where it is still needed.

Hier objected in particular to the decision by the Tripartite Gold Commission--created by the United States, Britain and France in 1946 to parcel out recovered gold seized by the Nazis from the captive nations--to award more than 45 tons of the precious metal to Austria, which in 1938 voted in a plebiscite to join the Third Reich. The bullion, now worth $540 million, should instead go to victims of Nazi genocide, Hier said.

“If the Swiss are being forced by world opinion to reconsider, then why should the Austrians” not do the same? Hier asked. “In addition, the world deserves to know who in the United States made such a decision--to reward those who flew the swastika with gold stolen from the victims of the Final Solution.”

Conference participants said Spain and Portugal still have large stocks of gold in their reserves that they bought during the war from the German Reichsbank and Swiss National Bank, some of which may have come from melted-down wedding bands and dental fillings of Jews killed by the Nazis and from looted banks in the German-occupied nations of Europe.

Plundered treasures went as far afield as the Americas, and the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

Author and journalist Jorge Camarasa of Argentina, who is researching the issue, said Eva Peron reportedly opened Swiss bank accounts during a visit to Zurich in August 1947 with some of the protection money that thousands of former Nazis paid to her government so they could settle in Argentina.

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In France alone, where an estimated 100,000 works of art were looted from public and private collections, about a fifth are still missing, including paintings by such masters as Manet, Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec, said Hector Feliciano, a Paris-based Puerto Rican author whose well-respected book on the subject, “The Lost Museum,” has just been published in the United States.

“The question of the artworks stolen by the Nazis is still an open one 50 years after the end of the war. They are still in collections, still sold by international auction houses,” Feliciano said, accusing the art establishment of general indifference to the problem.

Yehuda Blum, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, specifically demanded the restitution of thousands of Jewish cultural treasures, including Torah scrolls, Passover bowls and wedding contracts and records from East European Jewish communities that the Nazis shipped to Prague and that now have been put on exhibit by Czech authorities.

“Those artifacts don’t belong there. They are not Czech cultural property. They are the cultural property of the Jewish people,” Blum said.