Hitler'S Accounts Stir Debate

Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), the country's biggest bank, had no immediate comment on the story by Britain's Jewish Chronicle newspaper, which cited declassified US intelligence reports showing Hitler held numbered accounts at UBS in Berne.

We were surprised by the report and we have to make some checks, a bank spokesman said. But Swiss media seized on the story as fodder for a running debate on just how big a role neutral Switzerland played in propping up .

The Chronicle said on Thursday that Hitler held numbered accounts at UBS in the Swiss capital and that they were handled by one of his collaborators, Max Ammann, a German publisher.

 

The authors of the 1944 intelligence report cited also believe that the foreign exchange income of Hitler's Nazi party was banked at UBS in Switzerland, the Chronicle said.

The report follows the recent declassification of other US documents.

that showed several tonnes of gold seized from Holocaust victims by the Nazis was placed in Swiss bank accounts and divided up among the Allies after World War Two.

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he set out his Nazi political philosophy, while he was in prison for his part in the abortive Munich beer hall putsch of 1923.

Published in 1925, it was made a school textbook after Hitler came to power in 1933 and sold millions of copies in Germany and abroad.

The World Jewish Congress believes that billions of dollars belonging to Holocaust victims are still hidden away in Switzerland and it wants the banks to release the money.

Swiss banks themselves have found only around $32 million in accounts that may have been held by Holocaust victims who tried to hide their assets from a brutal Nazi regime bent on exterminating European Jewry along with other minorities.

An independent panel is trying to clear up the matter.

A generation of Swiss historians too young to remember the war have argued Swiss economic collaboration with Hitler, not Switzerland's outgunned army, was the primary reason Nazi Germany never invaded its southern neighbour.

Switzerland bought huge supplies of gold from Germany, for example, even when the sales volume flowing to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) far outstripped Germany's pre-war holdings.

This prompted the Allies to caution Switzerland that Germany was looting gold from the countries and peoples it had conquered, according to an SNB historian.

Under pressure from Allies to cut off the deals, the SNB drew up guidelines in April 1944 that barred the purchase of gold stamped with the seals of occupied countries.

It seems the possiblility that Germany's government could melt down foreign gold bars and supply them with its own stamps and papers was never considered, SNB historian Robert Vogler has written. And this although the same report pointed to the persecution of Jews.

Many consider Switzerland's darkest hour came when it turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis.

]It was also Swiss authorities who gave Germany the impetus in 1938 to stamp a J in German passports of Jews to help cut the flow of refugees, notes a Swiss government pamphlet commemorating the anniversary of the 1939 army mobilisation.

But many private individuals and organisations did all they could to save the lives of Jews.