Switzerland found itself in the dock yesterday on the eve of the first international conference on so-called Nazi gold. The conference will try to shed light on the movement of looted assets during the second World War.
An independent Swiss commission said yesterday that Switzerland had handled 76 per cent of gold transactions for the Nazi regime from 1939 to '45, and that commercial banks acquired 14 per cent of all gold bought from the Nazis by Switzerland during the war. Until now, it was believed that nearly all the gold was bought by the Swiss National Bank.
Bern, which after the war kept a large proportion of the gold looted by the Nazis, much of it from Jews, will come under strong pressure to give money to a new compensation fund for Holocaust victims at the 41-nation conference in London.
The Swiss must accept a deal that "reflects the cardinal principle that stolen gold should be returned to its rightful owners", the executive director of the World Jewish Council (WJC), Mr Elan Steinberg, said.
The WJC's president, Mr Edgar Bronfman, who indicated he would be pressing the Swiss to pay billions of dollars, said he did not expect an agreement to be reached at the conference. Of the $850 million of gold looted by the Nazis during the war ($8.5 billion in today's figures), $290 million ($2.9 billion today) came from the assets of individuals, the WJC has calculated.
Fifty years on, diplomats, central bankers, historians and representatives of Jewish and gypsy groups will gather for three days in London to pool international knowledge about the looted gold and its final destinations.
The so-called US "Eizenstat" report branded Switzerland the bankers and brokers of the Nazis and said Swiss financial contacts with Hitler's henchmen helped prolong the war.
The conference is expected to announce the creation of a fund to compensate Nazi-era survivors with the remainder of looted gold recovered by the Allies at the end of the war.