{"id":51096,"date":"2026-04-18T12:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T12:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/51096\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T12:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T12:25:09","slug":"the-auschwitz-stamp-in-a-swiss-vault","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/51096\/","title":{"rendered":"The Auschwitz stamp in a Swiss vault"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first week of February 2026, something that Swiss banks had kept under the seal of \u201ctop secret\u201d for eighty years surfaced in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Former federal prosecutor Neil Barofsky, who once oversaw the Wall Street bailout program during the 2008 crisis and took part in exposing Bernard Madoff\u2019s fraud, disclosed a figure that could not help but raise concern in Bern.<\/p>\n

He referred to at least 890 previously undisclosed accounts at Credit Suisse linked <\/a>to Nazi officials, SS officers, and their assets. Some of these accounts remained active until 2020. Seventy-five years after the fall of the Reich, they were still listed among operational accounts.<\/p>\n

At Credit Suisse\u2019s research department, investigators also discovered a folder bearing the title \u201cSale of Looted Jewish Assets,\u201d without the slightest trace of shame. A separate batch of materials concerned the so-called \u201cratlines\u201d \u2014 the system through which SS officers escaped to Argentina via Rome, Genoa, and the Vatican; parts of this route, as emerging documents now suggest, passed through the Swiss banking infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Lawyers for UBS \u2014 the bank that absorbed the bankrupt Credit Suisse in 2023 \u2014 directly asked a federal judge during Senate hearings to shield the investigative materials from \u201cexcessive public attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

The myth of Switzerland is built on watches, chocolate, banking secrecy, and that much-vaunted \u201cneutrality.\u201d The reality of this \u201cneutrality\u201d does not begin with the Geneva Conventions, but with very specific decisions taken in Bern in the summer of 1938. But let us proceed step by step.<\/p>\n

In August of that year, five months after the Anschluss of Austria, the Swiss Federal Council closed the border to refugees persecuted on racial grounds. On September 29, a protocol was signed in Berlin that European history knows by the short name of the \u201cJ-stamp\u201d agreement. The letter \u201cJ\u201d in the passports of German Jews was not demanded by Berlin, but by Bern: German passports in 1938 still did not distinguish race, and the Swiss border authorities needed a way to separate \u201cAryans\u201d from \u201cnon-Aryans\u201d in advance.<\/p>\n

The initiative belonged to Heinrich Rothmund, head of the Swiss Federal Police, and through Hans Fr\u00f6licher, the Swiss ambassador in Berlin, it was implemented by the Reich with satisfaction.<\/p>\n

In November 1938, Kristallnacht took place. The Swiss stamp already existed by then. And in Switzerland, it was perfectly understood what was happening across the border.<\/p>\n

Heinrich Rothmund himself stated <\/a>in 1942: \u201cA Jew in our country has always been regarded as a foreigner, and he is only admitted if he is prepared to adapt to our traditions and customs.\u201d In 1943, he added: \u201cRefugees who have become so on racial grounds, for example, Jews, are not considered political refugees in our eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1942, the borders were closed completely. Jews fleeing occupied France, the Netherlands, and Belgium reached Alpine checkpoints only to receive a response formulated as follows: racial persecution did not constitute grounds for asylum. According to the Bergier Commission \u2014 an international group of historians established by the Swiss Parliament in 1996 under pressure from the World Jewish Congress \u2014 between 1940 and 1945, Switzerland refused entry to between twenty and twenty-four thousand people. Some were handed over to German and French border authorities.<\/p>\n

One case documented by the commission concerns a fifteen-year-old girl, detained in Geneva in the autumn of 1943, who was reportedly assaulted by Swiss soldiers and later returned to France as \u201cnot eligible for asylum.\u201d She ultimately ended up in Auschwitz. The case is recorded in the commission\u2019s materials with dates, signatures, and border statistics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf one proceeds from the assumption that the number of Jewish refugees denied the right to cross the Swiss border did not exceed a few thousand people, even such figures would only further confirm the conclusions once reached by the International Commission of Historians led by Fran\u00e7ois Bergier. Those conclusions are clear: Switzerland should have accepted and accommodated these people as refugees, especially since doing so would have entailed no real risk whatsoever \u2014 neither in terms of food supply for the population, nor in terms of exposure to military or political sanctions,\u201d wrote <\/a>historian Marc Perrenoud.<\/p>\n

In other words, regardless of the numerical estimates, they do not alter the assessment of the position of Switzerland\u2019s political leadership at the time, which remained strictly negative toward accepting Jewish refugees on its territory.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In parallel, trade was taking place. Between 1939 and 1945, the Swiss National Bank purchased gold from the Reichsbank worth approximately 1.2 billion Swiss francs at the time \u2014 roughly eight billion dollars in today\u2019s terms. More than half of this gold had been looted.<\/p>\n

In Nazi storage facilities, it was kept alongside gold taken from victims of the camps, and in seventy-six shipments sent to Zurich and Bern, according to archival data, there were ingots bearing the \u201cAuschwitz\u201d marking \u2014 not metaphorically, but literally, stamped by Reichsbank assayers.<\/p>\n

The Bergier Commission report records this on pages 133 and 191, citing internal memoranda from the bank\u2019s management in 1943, which explicitly discussed that deliveries from Berlin contained \u201cgold confiscated from deported Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bankers, in the commission\u2019s wording, chose an \u201cethic of minimal effort.\u201d The practice continued until May 1945. But even after the end of the war, the money \u2014 both that of the Nazis and that of their victims \u2014 remained in Switzerland.<\/p>\n

After the war, everything appeared orderly and civilised. In March 1946, an agreement was signed in Washington under which the Confederation returned 250 million francs to the Allies \u2014 a symbolic repayment compared to a wartime flow measured in billions. The remainder was written off as the cost of neutrality.<\/p>\n

Bank deposits belonging to murdered Jews \u2014 accounts opened in Swiss banks in the 1930s \u2014 were classified as \u201cdormant,\u201d and for decades Zurich responded to heirs with a standard reply: provide death certificates issued by the administrations of Buchenwald or Treblinka; without them, nothing can be done.<\/p>\n

By 1996, the patience of the World Jewish Congress had run out. A lawsuit was filed in the federal court in Brooklyn, and in 1998, Swiss banks agreed to a settlement of 1.25 billion dollars. In the same year, an interim Bergier report on Nazi gold was published, followed in 2002 by the final 800-page report.<\/p>\n

The conclusion of both was unequivocal and harsh: Switzerland did not help people in mortal danger and accepted as payment gold whose origins it knew.<\/p>\n

According to Russian historian Leonid Mlechin<\/a>, the Swiss themselves genuinely did not understand why they were being criticised: \u201cWe invested money in Adolf Hitler back in 1923, when he came to Zurich. And we have the right to receive interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In March 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal Center passed information to Credit Suisse regarding Nazi-era accounts that had been concealed from the investigations of the 1990s. The bank agreed to an internal review and invited the same Barofsky \u2014 a figure known in New York and Zurich financial circles as a byword for rigorous auditing. He began uncovering documents.<\/p>\n

In December 2022, he was dismissed \u2014 formally for \u201cexpanding the scope of the investigation,\u201d and in practice because that scope had begun to produce too clear a result.<\/p>\n

In February 2023, the Senate Budget Committee received a signal about pressure on the investigator, and Senators Grassley and Whitehouse \u2014 representing the Republican and Democratic sides respectively \u2014 launched a rare bipartisan inquiry.<\/p>\n

Following the 2023 takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, Barofsky returned to work. And then \u2014 February 2026: 890 accounts, a folder titled \u201cSale of Looted Jewish Assets,\u201d \u201cratlines,\u201d and UBS lawyers asking a judge to shield the materials from public scrutiny.<\/p>\n

An investigation that, under the official Swiss narrative, was long closed is now ongoing in real time \u2014 and it is no longer being concluded in Bern.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And this country \u2014 whose Nazi-era files are now being opened by U.S. senators \u2014 in December 2024 adopted, by a majority of 96 votes to 80, a resolution in the National Council on Karabakh, drafted as if the four UN Security Council resolutions of 1993 and the 44-day war of 2020 had never taken place.<\/p>\n

The same country where, in January 2025, the upper chamber of the Federal Assembly (the Council of States) adopted draft law No. 24.4259 titled \u201cPeace Forum for Nagorno-Karabakh: Enabling the Return of Armenians,\u201d and where, in spring, both chambers of parliament approved the \u201cSwiss Peace Initiative on Nagorno-Karabakh\u201d \u2014 a name that, in diplomatic translation, signifies yet another attempt by Swiss lawmakers to \u201cre-educate Azerbaijan.\u201d<\/p>\n

A country in whose Geneva cantonal parliament initiatives were born with titles such as \u201cAnnexation of Nagorno-Karabakh\u201d and \u201cPreservation of Armenian Cultural Heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n

A country where, as of January 1, 2025, a law came into force banning Muslim women from appearing in public places with their faces covered \u2014 while, at the same time, the Geneva canton submitted to Bern an initiative on the \u201cprotection of the rights of believers in Azerbaijan.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same country whose resolutions on Karabakh clearly reflect the wording of the Aurora Foundation \u2014 an organisation whose board of trustees at various times included the signature of Ruben Vardanyan, and whose financial and reputational networks between 2019 and 2022 intersected with names that surfaced in the released Epstein case materials.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Swiss are not peacekeepers. They are specialists. Their expertise lies in turning into an asset everything that is poorly accounted for \u2014 and, first and foremost, the reputation of an arbiter for which they have no inherent claim.<\/p>\n

When a Geneva deputy in the Federal Assembly in Bern speaks from the Bundestag podium about \u201chuman rights,\u201d \u201caggression,\u201d and \u201ccultural heritage\u201d in relation to Azerbaijan, anyone who has read the February transcripts of the U.S. Senate hears a double echo in those words: the same Confederation that, for eighty years, has still not returned everything extracted from the graves of other people, and is now, through UBS lawyers, defending itself against its own archive.<\/p>\n

Azerbaijan will not accept lessons in international law from the cashiers of Zurich and the preachers of Geneva. Not because Baku rejects criticism \u2014 it is prepared to listen to any country that is not afraid to face its own reflection.<\/p>\n

It is because the patience of a sovereign state has its limits, and that limit ceases to be a matter of diplomacy the moment the preacher himself requires a prosecutor.<\/p>\n

Before lecturing Azerbaijan on morality, the Confederation might first complete the inventory of its own bank vaults. Judging by the latest Senate data, even the top shelf has not yet been dusted off.<\/p>\n

The article can be concluded with the concise definition of Swiss policy given by Russian historian Leonid Mlechin:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not only a historical question, and not only a matter of money. This story shows that political views and sympathies play an enormous role. Once Adolf Hitler appealed to the political and financial elite of Switzerland, that sympathy never disappeared. It continued to shape the country\u2019s policy. It is a lack of moral and ethical principles. This is what the entire Swiss history demonstrates \u2014 the history of Nazi money in Swiss banks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the first week of February 2026, something that Swiss banks had kept under the seal of \u201ctop…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1031,1037,1036,1032,1035,1030,1034,1033,1029,41,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-51096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-analysis-of-azerbaijan","9":"tag-azerbaijan","10":"tag-baku","11":"tag-important-news-of-azerbaijan","12":"tag-international-experts","13":"tag-interviews","14":"tag-interviews-with-azerbaijani-analysts","15":"tag-news-from-baku","16":"tag-news-of-azerbaijan","17":"tag-swiss","18":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116425701804250128","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}