9780151003341

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Startling revelations that Switzerland helped to bankroll Nazi Germany's war effort, as well as Swiss intransigence in the face of redress claims by Holocaust survivors, have shaken Switzerland's international reputation. In this uncompromising account, leading Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler closely examines the shady relationship between Swiss bankers and Nazi Germany. What emerges is a scathing indictment that shatters the myth of Swiss neutrality during World War II. Based on records of the German Armaments Ministry and other official documents, The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead shows how Swiss financial institutions provided Hitler with the foreign exchange essential to his war effort - laundering gold looted from the banks of occupied Europe and from the bodies of concentration camp victims; granting sizable loans; and supplying Germany's war economy with weapons, ammunition, and precision instruments. In return, Switzerland was spared the depredations that befell the rest of Europe. Ziegler argues forcefully and authoritatively that without Swiss complicity the war in Europe would have ended earlier, sparing hundreds of thousands of lives.

"Ziegler's fundamental aim is one that no board of auditors would presume to undertake: "to analyze sociological factors and human behavior, complicities and constraints." His is a book about the Swiss people, his own country-men, a "nation of guilty innocents and innocent guilt," consumed in a "mania for self-righteousness, guiltlessness and perpetual purity."

Peter Grose, New York Times Book Review, 04/05/1998

A bestseller in Europe, this eloquent exposı by a Swiss sociologist who is a member of the Swiss parliament probably provides the fullest picture to date of Swiss complicity in Nazi German war crimes of WWII. Ziegler details how top Swiss bankers fenced and laundered the gold that the Germans stole from conquered nations' central banks, from Jewish businesses and homes, even from Holocaust victims' teeth. By exchanging this loot for foreign currency and giving Hitler huge loans and arms deliveries in 1943, Switzerland's ruling elite helped to prolong the war, causing countless needless deaths, Ziegler compellingly argues. A Geneva University sociology professor and associate professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, he documents the role of Swiss banks in capital transfers to South America to abet fleeing Nazis after 1945, and he reconstructs the Allied wartime campaign of espionage and commercial retaliation against Hitler's Swiss accomplices. He names the Swiss bankers, government officials, arms manufacturers and companies that benefited from collaboration with the Third Reich. His soul-searching indictment burns into the reader Switzerland's war guilt, as he discusses the turning away at the Swiss frontier of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the unconstitutional taxes imposed on Swiss Jews by their own government; the German slave trains that passed through Switzerland carrying Italian labor conscripts and, according to various accounts, Jews being shipped to extermination camps; and Swiss banks' ongoing misappropriation of personal savings from Jewish heirs unable to produce the camp death certificates of murdered family members. Ziegler's well-documented report demolishes the myth of Swiss neutrality. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly, 02/02/1998

The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead: Search Results