Hitler's Secret Bankers Hardcover -

From the publisher

No death certificates were issued at Auschwitz. But today, decades later, Swiss bankers still demand them before they will release to relatives the assets of account holders killed in the Holocaust. In the face of the Nazi threat, many European Jews entrusted their wealth to the banks of Switzerland, believing that even if they died, the money would eventually be recovered from this safe haven by their surviving relatives. They were wrong. Millions of dollars, deposited in good faith by Jews who were victims of the Nazi genocide, are still in vaults, earning interest and providing working capital for Swiss banks.

Based on newly declassified documents and archival research, Hitler's Secret Bankers reveals the full, hitherto unknown extent of Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis. In addition to the dispute over dormant accounts, Swiss banks provided to the Nazi war machine the foreign currency that paid for vital war materiel such as chrome and aluminum.

Swiss banks also profited from gold looted by the Nazis from the national banks of occupied countries such as Belgium and Holland and deposited in Switzerland. Documents now available from American archives show that Swiss banks, for all their declarations of neutrality, knowingly accepted stolen gold -- estimated to be worth between $200 million and $400 million.

Hitler's Secret Bankers also reveals the details of the secret Nazi plan to launch an underground economic Fourth Reich at war's end and exposes the links between Nazi intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg and his Swiss counterpart, Roger Masson. It outlines Switzerland's role in the secret meetings between President Roosevelt's personal envoy and the SS, meetingswhich aimed to ransom Jews, in total contravention of Allied policy.e