61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Safehaven Programme, whose aim was to prevent the Nazi elite from moving
major assets abroad and reviving the National Socialist Party. Switzerland
played a key role here since it was suspected that the Swiss financial centre could
be used as a refuge or a «hub» for such transactions. This point was addressed
by Commission III (Sub-Committee on Enemy Assets, Looted Assets and
Related Matters) at the UN Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton
Woods in July 1944. The resulting Resolution VI was intended to clarify that
accepting looted gold and concealing enemy assets would not go unpunished. 7
Although the British were not as preoccupied by this issue as the US, the
Resolution received broad support. It obliged the United Nations «to do their
utmost to defeat the methods of dispossession» 8, and it concentrated increasingly
on Switzerland – also in connection with the debate surrounding the
Basel-based Bank for International Settlements – BIS (Bank für Internationalen
Zahlungsausgleich, BIZ) whose dissolution was demanded by Norway – as the
most important neutral country from a financial point of view. It was decided
to send an Allied delegation to Switzerland to conduct direct negotiations on
freezing German assets and on the issue of looted gold. The «Currie Mission»,
named after its head, Laughlin Currie, arrived in Bern in early 1945. 9 Following
intense negotiations, the agreement that emerged on 8 March provided for the
restitution of all assets looted under the Nazi regime and moved to neutral
territory. Nevertheless, relations between Switzerland and the Western powers
remained tense. The counter-demand to abolish the black lists of Swiss
companies which had closely co-operated with the Third Reich failed to materialise,
as did the unblocking of assets frozen in the US since June 1941.
At the end of 1945, the Paris Conference on Reparations, at the urging of the
United States, took up the issue of the extent and way in which victims of the
Nazis who had become stateless were to receive reparations. Article 8 of the
Paris Reparations Agreement of 21 December 1945 then stated that all nonmonetary
gold found by the Allied armies in Germany «shall be placed at the
disposal of the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) […] for the
rehabilitation and settling of victims of German actions who could not be
repatriated», and that this should be done as quickly as possible. 10 German
assets in neutral countries, i.e., in Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal, were also
to be tapped for the same purpose to provide a source of funding for reparation
payments. A part of these funds, 25 million dollars, was to be made available to
the IGCR. In dealing with these questions, the issue of dormant accounts was
also addressed; the concluding passage of the Conference stated:
«Governments of neutral countries shall be requested to make available for
[the rehabilitation and resettlement of non-repatriable victims of German
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