Nazi Gold - Hardcover

Carpozi Jr., George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0882821679 ISBN 13: 9780882821672

Publisher: New Horizon Press, 1999

Synopsis

Recent news about Switzerland's part in helping finance the Nazi war machine has sent shock waves through Europe. Now, prizewinning investigative journalist George Carpozi, Jr. unveils a mammoth work--part detective thriller, part authoritative analysis which exposes the rest of the story.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Thanks to recent public pressure on Swiss banks and the declassification of intelligence documents, researchers now have more information than ever on how the Nazis stole and hid Jewish wealth. Carpozi, a former New York Post reporter, presents his book as the definitive account of the Nazis' looting of Europe, but disorganization and bad writing ruin his attempt at an all-encompassing indictment. Carpozi's research is thorough: he not only shows how neutral countries such as Switzerland hoarded wealth stolen from Holocaust victims but also demonstrates that even the Allies stashed away Jewish money and refused to return it to survivors after the war. Yet he makes little attempt to integrate the pieces of the puzzle and offers almost no analysis of historical context. The choppy text (many paragraphs consist of only a sentence or two) shifts between countries and back and forth in time in an endeavor to establish narrative pace. While Carpozi lists 11 pages of references, many of those sources are newspaper articles he simply quotes verbatim. Anecdotes about Holocaust survivors are thrown into the preface and the second chapter, then forgotten, when they could have added a human element to the political developments discussed later in the book. Exclamations such as "It is impossible to put the clock back!" and references to the "thieving Nazis" give the whole work a sensational tone. A subject this complicated deserves better treatment. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Carpozi here attempts to tie together threads of the financial victimization of the Jews around the world during and after the Holocaust. His book is not to be confused with Tom Bower's superior Nazi Gold (LJ 5/15/97), which helped blow the lid off the Swiss bankers' swindle of Holocaust survivors. The first part of Carpozi's book reconstructs the Swiss banking scandal that Jean Ziegler told more compellingly in The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead (LJ 3/1/98). Worse, in a chapter entitled "Well-Known Facts," Carpozi has the United States declaring war on Germany in 1941 instead of the other way around. He also writes that Hitler committed suicide in 1944 instead of 1945. Factual mistakes make it hard to take seriously Carpozi's more original material in the second half. In one of the shortest chapters ever written, he introduces the interesting allegation that Ford's European operation used slave labor but devotes less than a page to it. In addition, Carpozi's tortured writing ("...Ribbentrop, who was glomming loot...in case he'd have to go on the lam") is more at home at the New York Post and Star magazine, to which he contributes, than in a serious book. Not recommended.?Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, IA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Horizon Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0882821679
• ISBN 13: 9780882821672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200