Posted by Allen on 7/23/2003, 9:18 pm It's mostly about the Swiss banking community's relationship with Nazi Germany, which amounted to laundering the booty. But it contains other information about intelligence operations, refugees, smuggling. The SS had a branch called the DSK - Devisenschutzkommando. It's ostensible purpose was to control the flow of currencies between the occupied territories. In reality it operated as a shakedown. For instance, the DSK would place an ad in the newspaper in France or Belgium for a house or parcel of land for sale. When someone responded, they'd arrest him on a trumped up charge and confiscate all his money, gold, stock, anything of value. After WWI, the Allies set up the BIS in Bern - the Bank of International Settlements - with representatives of the central banks of both Germany and the Allied countries sitting on the board of directors and serving as officers. The Allies funded the bank to make loans to Germany to pay reparations. All through WWII, the Germans paid their interest on the loans so as to avoid default to the bank, which they wanted to stay on good terms with. Morgenthau was incensed, but there was nothing he could do about it. Then there was the Hungarian Gold Train. Forty-six carloads of wealth plundered from the Jews of Hungary were discovered on a siding near Salzburg in May of '45. Thirty million dollars worth of watches, jewelry, gems, antiques, cameras, china, typewriters, adding machines, 2700 carpets, clocks, and the entire collection of the museum at Gyor. Both German and Allied soldiers had swiped stuff off this train before what was left over was split between Hungary and the Inter-Governmental Committee for Refugees. This was a cause for some chagrin on the part of the 200,000 Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. After the fall of Rome in June of '44 a Major Dunlop of the SOE interviewed a Jewish-Hungarian doctor living there, Ladislao Kovacs. This report has been declassified and apparently is referenced HO 4/101 SOE Hungary no.17, PRO. Dr Kovacs had been the personal doctor to Albert Goering, brother of Herman, since 1939. As a Jew, he had been reluctant to take on Goering as a patient(actually, the initial consultation was for Mrs. Goering) until Albert explained his feeling about the political situation in Germany, "I spit on Hitler. I also spit on my brother, and the whole Nazi regime." He began giving Kovacs money and set up a joint bank account at the Bank Orelli in Bern which he instructed Kovacs to use to help Jewish refugees to get to Lisbon. After the German occupation of Italy in 9/43, Goering wrote out a laissez passer for Kovacs as his personal doctor(about 8,000 Jews were transported from Italy to the death camps after 9/43). Does anyone know what ever happened to Albert Goering?
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I've just finished Adam LeBor's book, "Hitler's Secret Bankers"(1997). LeBor is a newspaper writer, so it's a quick and easy read.
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