Truth Floats

Part Three: Memories Are Eclipsed, But Never Erased

This article is the third in a trilogy of autobiographical anecdotes. Part One is about my earliest work in journalism on the October Surprise investigation. Part Two describes when I came closest to the story of the JFK assassination. These background tales convey previous experiences that continue to influence my current analysis and writing about the challenges we face today.

One of the films I originated and produced reversed a mainstream historical assertion that had been unquestioned for half a century.

Nazi Gold, a milestone documentary, described the role of Switzerland in World War II. Along with other details revealing actions that were far from neutral, we disclosed how Swiss Banks provided critical services for the Nazi war machine. 

This was a compelling story with interviews and information showing a consistent lack of ethical behavior by the Swiss government and banks. Their enforcement of policy was driven by reprehensible greed.

Swiss banks profited from a huge amount of money that European Jews deposited as the Nazis applied their power. They thought their money was safe in Switzerland, but many were killed in concentration camps. Stories of Swiss banks refusing to hand over accounts and assets to survivors after the war were the foundation of our film. We went deeper and investigated Swiss policies and activities during the War.

Some survivors, who never had told their tragedies before, were given a platform to relate their experiences. It was difficult for these people to recount the most painful part of their lives, and only possible because they felt violated by the attitude and actions of Swiss banks.

Some were able to go to Switzerland after the war to retrieve the accounts of parents who died in the gas chambers; most were refused access to the funds because they didn’t have death certificates.

The Nazis were prolific record keepers, but the Swiss knew they didn’t keep records of those that were murdered in the camps.

One woman who was denied any help in securing her father’s account described how her parents had smuggled her away for adoption before they were arrested and killed. As a young girl, her new family enjoyed outings to a place where they could see the smoke from a concentration camp; they went to watch the Jews burn. After the war, when she went to Switzerland, she was turned away by a bank that refused to assist her in any way.

A man who had been denied access to his father’s money in Switzerland, even though he had account numbers, also described his experience in a concentration camp as a child. Because he was small, he was given the job of cleaning chimneys in the crematorium. He survived, but with horrific memories that never faded; only multiplied by the theft of his father’s assets.

We interviewed some individuals — and confirmed with numerous reports — about how Jews attempting to escape Germany were turned away at the Swiss border. Most were captured by the Germans and sent to the camps. This and much of what we uncovered, showed how Switzerland was in the business of appeasing Germany; at the core of policy was cold-hearted greed.

A critical omission from the history books was that The Bank of International Settlements, met yearly throughout the war, discussing the common interests of the wealthiest people in the world. This elite group allowed Nazi bankers to continue supporting the war effort. Incredibly, this included financiers from the United States, Japan, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland; for them, the war was business as usual. 

Our investigation also confirmed that the Swiss Government allowed trains full of captured Italians to transit through Switzerland to camps in Germany. This new revelation was detailed in an interview I did with a woman who was a teenager in Switzerland during the war. She was very reluctant to speak openly, fearing castigation, and only agreed after assurances that her identity would be obscured.

She described in detail how in the middle of the night, along with her mother and a group of women, she went to the central train station in Zurich and brought blankets and food to prisoners locked in cattle cars. Although her husband confirmed she had shared the story decades ago, she had kept this secret for nearly fifty years.

Her account was corroborated by transportation records and additional witnesses. The Swiss government had previously claimed that these transports were never permitted, although they had gone through Austria. We were able to verify that Italian partisans and Jews were taken on trains north through Switzerland when the Austrian mountain passes were closed by winter snow.

We also added the perspective of Nazi Germany to the film. I was able to locate the last surviving officer who served Hitler directly, Lieutenant Reinhart Spitzy. Although primarily an aide to foreign minister Ribbentrop, he also assisted Hitler with his schedule and paperwork.

Spitzy, who agreed to be interviewed, was an Austrian living close to Hitler’s former mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden. On my first visit to his home in a remote Alpine valley, he shared some fascinating anecdotes, including how Hitler detested cigarette smoking and didn’t allow it in his headquarters. Spitzy described how he would often enter the men’s room to find German generals, waving towels by the window like schoolboys, hiding evidence of their verboten smoking from the Führer. 

Although there is some strange levity in this account, it is also a reminder that Hitler and his officers were human, rather than abstract demonic figures. I recognized that depravity is not very distant from the mundane facades of normality.

In his interview, Spitzy said that Hitler often declared that the Swiss only cared about three things; money, money, and money. For a country that prided itself on high-minded neutrality, this perhaps pained them more than any interview in the documentary.

The revelations were so disturbing to contemporary authorities, that they quickly assembled a Swiss TV panel to recite all of the good things Switzerland did during the war. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t refute anything in our film, including the confirmed shooting down of dozens of Allied bombers by Swiss forces during the war; with only two German fighters hit by ground fire — perhaps mistakenly.

By the time we completed Nazi Gold, there was nothing that surprised me in the realm of how badly governments and their lackeys could behave. For fifty years, textbooks and historians had claimed Switzerland was neutral in WWII, demonstrating once again that devious forces control a distorted, polarized historical view of events, only serving to distract from their duplicity. 

With a deepening understanding of how history unfolds, I also recognized that for a story to have an impact, the classic roles of protagonist and antagonist must be clearly defined. And because the agenda of the powerful has little to do with ethics or integrity, at the right moment, people with nobility and determination, can reveal the truth.

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