Iskra Research Publishing House Iskra Research Publishing House For months now one of the "Top 40" features aired by the world press has been the story about the money of the victims of Hitler's Genocide hidden in Swiss banks since the end of World War II. The actual story of the persecution and extermination of the European Jewry is tragic and full of contemporary lessons Ñ if we stop and think about the current trends to restrict immigration and spread racism.
However, the basic facts of the Holocaust, including the complicity of the Swiss banks, have been a matter of public record since the 1940's. Even the smaller story of the wealthier Jews, who tried to sell off and hide their property from the clutches of the Gestapo, or to use these possessions to buy their way to freedom, is fairly well known. Writers like Erich Maria Remarque and movies like "Casablanca" have given us tragic pictures of the predicament of these individuals, their desperate attempts to buy visas and passports to flee the European hell, the pitfalls of carrying their money or gold on their person versus the dangers of storing it with trusted persons or neutral banks.
So why is the world media engaged in a feeding frenzy of interviews with Swiss bankers, heads of Jewish and Zionist agencies, religious and lay morality gurus, and the few elderly survivors of Treblinka and Auschwitz?
And one question more: why did the publicity paranoid Swiss bankers decide to open up the 50-year old depositors' records to inspection and why, oh why, did they put aside $185 million to be distributed among the survivors?
Before we provide the reader with some answers we would invite you to ponder the following facts of recent history:
In 1934 the Swiss banks tightened their privacy regulations to attract money of the wealthy Jews fleeing Germany, and of other potential depositors. Among these secret depositors were, for example, the police chiefs in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and other countries, who were fleecing the hapless victims of the Holocaust. Later, when the war erupted, the good bankers helped Germany launder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of looted assets of the conquered countries. According to some calculations, Swiss banks helped Germany launder some 800 million dollars looted in this way.
The press:
In the United States, the New York Times led the despicable conspiracy of silence. During the late 1930's, while the situation of the European Jews was getting more desperate, the American press muffled the reports of street beatings, concentration and labor camps, and the spreading race laws in Germany, Rumania, Hungary, and so on. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, when the Nazis turned to physical extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and Reds as the Final Solution, the New York Times continued to keep quiet about the Einsatzkommando groups in Ukraine and Belorussia, and the building of the giant extermination camps in Poland.
The Western democracies:
Mussolini, Hitler and their thugs were a satisfactory solution to deal with the Red Menace of communism, first, inside their own countries, then on a European scale (see the example of Spain). In a calculated way, the governments of France, Britain and the United States cultivated fascism in Europe and attempted to direct it against the Soviet Union. Antifascist emigres were seen as a hostile and destabilizing element, and the immigration laws were tightened to prevent the entry of masses of Jews persecuted by the fascist regimes. Boat loads of refugees were turned back to Europe in the way reminiscent of the recent happenings in the waters around Haiti. We should keep in mind that the class principle prevailed: the rich Jews stood a much better chance to get around restrictions; it was the poor, huddled masses which were turned away.
During the war, the military and political leaders of Britain and the US prevented the spread of information about the mass killings and the construction of the giant extermination camps in Germany and Poland. They refused to divert any war effort into the destruction of these camps and the networks of roads leading to them.
The Western banks are today involved in a gigantic money laundering business. In February of this year a conference on money laundering in central and eastern Europe established a number of facts about organized crime and capitalism. According to one of the specialists, the take from global organized crime and drug trafficking reached 1000 Billion dollars last year.
About half of this world's total was made in the United States. Mr. Bickford, a former legal advisor to the British intelligence community, talked of the extent of organized crime in America. According to him the "gross criminal product" of the US Mafia went from $100 Billion in 1986 to $500 Billion last year, making the Mafia the 20th richest organization in the world, "richer than 150 sovereign states". 78% of this money was drug related.
The discussion was not limited to the US. The Japanese Yakuza gangs netted $10 Billion in 1995; drugs and prostitution gangs extended their links from Central Asia and Turkey to central and western Europe; the Colombian based Cali drug cartel generated over $320 Billion from cocaine. Dr. Sergei Shibaev, a former partner at the Coopers & Lybrand accountancy firm in Moscow, told the conference that "41,000 companies, half the country's banks, and 80% of joint ventures ... may be connected to criminal groups, of which there are around 5,000". According to him, the black economy amounted to 40% of all economic activity.
This writer has written before that huge amounts of money were leaving the Soviet Union and then Russia over the past ten years. Official figures from the Bank of International Settlements stated that exports from the Soviet Union and its successor states have continued to exceed imports by $10 to $15 Billion per year. A couple of years ago we cited a report of the World Bank which estimated that over 80% of this positive trade balance was being secretly salted away into private bank accounts. The organized crime conference heard a report that these money outflows continue at the rate of $12 Billion per year and an estimated $60 Billion has been moved out of Russia in the past five years. Much of this fleeing capital ends up in the secretive banks of Switzerland, Cyprus, the Cayman islands and other off-shore banking centers around the globe. In fact, one estimate heard at the conference stated that the Russian Mafia "has $10 Billion in Swiss banks".
We should also consider that this capital hemorrhage of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other places results in untold miseries there. Just consider how many hospitals must close, how many kids must be deprived of fresh milk, school books and innoculations in order to feed the insatiable appetites of the New Russians and their bankers in the West. In another article, "The human cost of Russian capitalism", we have pointed to some of the genocidal consequences of the restoration of capitalism in these countries. Suffice it to say that throughout the Eurasian bloc of newly deindustrializing states, from Bulgaria to Siberia, death rates are multiplying, birth rates are plunging, social and cultural decline is evident.
Tens of billions of dollars of dirty money are being laundered by the esteemed Swiss bankers each year. This gives us another angle on the magnanimity of their gesture in setting up a "Truth Commission" to return some of the "Jewish gold" to the victims of the Holocaust. The $185 million, which the Swiss will provide to the victims of the Nazis is a small price to pay for safeguarding the flow of billions of fresh dollars of drug, weapons and prostitution money, as well as the proceeds from the huge Eastern bloc fire sale streaming into their vaults right now.
The New York Times talked to one of the lucky survivors of the Nazi camps. Miss Neumann, of Budapest, Hungary said of this reparations plan: "I think it is just a plan. The people at the top will receive the money, not the poorer people like me. I don't think I will live to see it." (NYT, July 27, 1997).
I agree: the publicity campaign around the Nazi loot is designed to distract the public from seeing the much larger feeding frenzy going on in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The Western press is covering up the present catastrophe engulfing hundreds of millions of victims.