61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

icance of these transactions on the basis of newly accessible sources, two major
studies were published during the second half of the 1980s: one by Werner
Rings, the other by Arthur L. Smith 6. Yet there was very little public response
to either study, even though both raised a number of key issues: the extent to
which Swiss intermediaries gave a stamp of legality to otherwise unmarketable
stolen assets; whether Switzerland consistently acted as «Hitler’s banker»; and
whether Swiss financial services prolonged the war (and thus led to higher death
tolls, both of combatants and civilian victims of Nazi terror).
From the mid-1990s onwards, the debate about the SNB’s gold transactions was
revived, attracting far more attention since it now took place in parallel with the
burgeoning debate about the Swiss banks’ treatment of Holocaust victims’ assets.
This time, governments and official commissions produced the most important
documents. The first report came from the British Foreign Office in 1996 and
contained sensational – but incorrect – claims about the extent of the gold trade:
the authors had confused dollars with Swiss francs, and thus obtained a figure
almost five times as large as the true figure. 7 The US Department of State coordinated
a far more extensive study which again placed Switzerland and other neutral
countries at the centre of the history of the economic war 8. In the preface, Under
Secretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat explicitly raised the issue of the prolongation
of the war due to strategic imports paid from revenue from sales of gold to the
SNB. 9 In 1997, the ICE produced a short introductory report for the London
Conference organised by the British Foreign Office and the US Department of
State; this was then expanded into a comprehensive study published in May 1998.
Other national commissions published reports which in some cases aroused
substantial controversy (notably the Portuguese report, whose polemic appeared
to be exculpatory); on the other hand, the reports from Argentina, the Czech
Republic, France, the Netherlands and Sweden played an important role in
shedding light on the financial history of the Second World War. The major
private German banks involved in the trade in Nazi gold, Deutsche Bank and
Dresdner Bank also commissioned two reports 10, while other enterprises (such as
Degussa) also supported historical research into these complex events. 11 These
reports focussed the debate on issues which were largely ignored by the Allies
during and immediately after the war, and which had not been dealt with in the
studies published in the 1980s. They included investigations into the origin of
the gold and the related question of the extent to which the gold stolen by the
Germans was the property of private individuals who fell victim to the Nazi
regime. How much of this victim gold was sold in or via Switzerland? How much
did the persons responsible for these gold purchases and transit transactions know
about the policies of persecution and genocide being pursued by the Third Reich
– and how did they justify their conduct in light of this knowledge?
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