Sunday, July 6, 1997
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Book Review

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NAZI GOLD: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors By Tom Bower; TREASURE HUNT A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard By William H. Honan (HarperCollins: 382 pp., $25)

The greatest slaughter in history has, until quite recently, tended to obscure the other horror perpetuated by the Nazis--namely, the greatest robbery in history. The first order of business for the invading Nazi army as it trampled through Europe was a raid on the national treasury and the hauling of millions of dollars in gold and cash back to the Reichsbank in Berlin. Next were art seizures from museums, galleries and the private collections of Jews. In time, all the valuables and property of Jews would be confiscated, and eventually they, too, would be taken away. Even after their deaths, the thieving would continue. Wedding rings snatched from the corpses, gold wrested from their teeth; in fact, an estimated 72 pounds of dental gold was extracted each day from victims at Auschwitz. 

Billions of dollars of the looted gold and cash and an estimated $2.5 billion in stolen art were sent to Switzerland, where the Reich's Swiss bankers attended to its purchase, care and investment. Nazi Germany was, after all, the most important client in the history of Swiss banking. Before World War II, Switzerland had been a poor country. Thanks to the Third Reich, Switzerland emerged from the war as the second-richest country in the world. 

In news stories over the last two years, the world has learned that the Swiss were hardly the beset-upon neutrals that they have claimed to be but instead were full partners with the Nazis. Moreover, as Tom Bower's masterly chronicle, "Nazi Gold," makes clear, the Nazis could never have prevailed as long as they did without the Swiss. Indeed, as Bower makes clear, the war would most likely have ended a full year earlier had it not been for the financial intervention of Swiss bankers. 

Called "a state within a state," Swiss banks have long functioned as Switzerland's shadow government. And while the overriding motives of the Swiss bankers to collaborate with the Nazis were mercenary--simple greed--it was anti-Semitism, pervasive among the Swiss elite, that was the amoral glue that held it together. 

Even after warnings from the Allies to cease their dealings with the Axis, the Swiss persisted. After the war, the Swiss were equally scornful, determined to hold onto their ill-gotten gains by any means. They swindled the Allies, repaying only $58 million worth of gold when in fact they had bought roughly $400 million (worth $4 billion today) of gold from the Nazis, then refused any assistance to survivors of the Holocaust. Although the banks avidly sought the assets of persecuted Jews before and during the war (lured by the security of anonymous numbered accounts), they steadfastly stymied the attempts of heirs to lay claim to these accounts. Thousands of Jews were denied their family's savings on the grounds that they could not produce death certificates of relatives murdered in concentration camps. Others, who had fled with their lives, leaving behind bank books and personal documentation, also found the banks' doors slammed in their faces. There seemed no end to the ingenious reasons the bankers came up with--always sanctimoniously cloaked in the convenient secrecy laws--to keep survivors from their assets. At the same time, the Swiss, who recorded the religious affiliations of their depositors, went out of their way to repatriate assets of non-Jews and provide loans and credit to rebuild Germany. 

Bower deftly characterizes the major villains of this travesty--the demonic Heinrich Rothmund, director of the Swiss Police, who advised the Germans during the war to stamp the passports of fleeing Jews with a red "J" so that the Swiss could easily identify then and turn them over to the Gestapo; the venal Eduard von Steiger, the Swiss justice minister who supervised the deportation of Jews back to the Nazis and the Machiavellian Max Oetterli, president of the Swiss Bankers Assn., who made it his mission to return nothing to the Allies and Jewish depositors. But it was negotiator Walter Stucki, a passionate devotee of Marshall Petain, along with foreign minister Max Petipierre, who reinvented the Swiss' wartime history and finessed its postwar rapprochement with the Allies. 

However, the perfidy of the Swiss was well abetted by the Allies, particularly the British, whose devastated postwar economy made them vulnerable to Swiss demands. Anxious to discourage Jewish migration to Palestine, then a British territory, the English offered no support for restitution to Jewish claimants. Deprived of their family funds in Swiss accounts, many Jews were unable to make the move. "Anti-Semitism was terribly fashionable here," a British wartime intelligence officer once remarked, "until Hitler came along and overdid it." Anti-Semitism was also institutional at the State Department until the 1970s. Many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's closest advisors, as well as a small but powerful cadre in the State Department, were willing to let the Swiss slide on restitution. Not only did John McCloy, Roosevelt's close advisor, veto repeated requests to bomb the concentration camps or the rail lines leading to them, he granted clemency after the war to some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals.

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But there were some heroes, notably a group of Treasury Department and State Department officials known as the Crusaders, mostly of Jewish descent, who valiantly fought for just restitution to the Allies and the Jewish victims. Bower wonderfully dramatizes the herculean struggle of this group: Seymour Rubin, James Mann, Max Isenbergh, James Angell, Eli Ginzberg and Sam Klaus, who masterminded Operation Safehaven to track hidden Nazi loot. They fought the good fight and lost but laid the groundwork for the victories 50 years later. The legacy of the Swiss-Nazi relationship is, of course, the bank accounts of drug traffickers, terrorists and tax cheats in Swiss banks today. Protecting villains is a thriving business, one which the Swiss learned well at the knee of the Third Reich. 

"Treasure Hunt," by William H. Honan, also recounts a compelling wartime looting story. Basing his book on a series of articles he wrote in the New York Times, which were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Honan pieces together the mysterious theft of the priceless thousand-year-old manuscripts and artwork known as the Quedlinburg Treasure, stolen from a German mine shaft by an American soldier. It is a delicious, quirky tale that should unravel with the rhythm and suspense of a detective whodunit, but it doesn't. Mistakenly, Honan tells his story in the first person--recounting more than we want to know about his own travails--namely his transition from editor to writer--his need for "a hot story," etc. "Then I saw newspaper headlines. . . . I closed my eyes and enjoyed the fantasy." Honan's choice to put himself at the center of his tale is a regrettable one. The awesome story in front of him towers over his personal story. 

Nevertheless, the mystery of the Quedlinburg Treasure is still a great yarn. Five centuries older than the Gutenberg Bibles, the Quedlinburg manuscripts, along with bejeweled reliquaries, were presented by King Heinrich I to the cathedral in Quedlinburg in the ninth century. Jewels, gold and ivory studded their covers; the text of one manuscript was written in gold ink. In the mid-1930s, Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief administrator of the death camps, who fancied himself a modern-day Heinrich I, installed himself as the custodian of the treasures. In 1939, as the Nazis began their siege of Europe, Himmler stashed the treasure in a nearby bank vault for safekeeping but, in the final days of the war, had it transferred to an abandoned mine shaft on the outskirts of Quedlinburg. 

As American soldiers arrived in Quedlinburg with the fall of the Third Reich, villagers alerted and escorted them to the buried treasure. For almost 10 centuries, the manuscripts had survived countless invaders, natural disasters, the Napoleonic Wars, ordinary thieves and even the Nazis, but they would disappear while in the care of their Allied guardians. Joe Tom Meador, an Army lieutenant from the backwater Bible Belt town of Whitewright, Texas, seemed an unlikely candidate to pull off one of the great art heists in history. 

An aesthete who maintained a double life for most of his years, Meador was also an inveterate kleptomaniac. A lover of "higher things," as he was wont to say, he found that looting came naturally. The liberation of Europe, following V-E Day, was a carte blanche shopping spree for Meador. "The only time Meador drew his knife was to slice a painting out of its frame," quipped one Army buddy. Struck by the splendor of the Quedlinburg Treasure, Meador simply snatched pieces from the mine, wrapped them in brown paper and sent them home to Whitewright via the Army post office. For much of the next 50 years, the patrimony of Quedlinburg, the object of a fevered international search, sat wrapped in an old blanket in the hayseed town. 

More sure-footed with character than with the mechanics of storytelling, Honan presents intriguing portraits of the central players--the decadent Meador; his greedy brother and sister who, after Meador's death in 1980, ceaselessly sought to sell the manuscripts; and the resourceful German savvy art sleuth, Willi Korte, who spearheaded the search for the treasure. Honan is at his best when documenting the disturbingly avaricious art world: preeminent auction houses, galleries, prestigious dealers, none of whom had any reservations about trafficking in stolen art.