{"id":25829,"date":"2010-12-06T08:22:09","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T13:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=25829"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:38:30","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:38:30","slug":"holocaust-survivors-and-swiss-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/12\/holocaust-survivors-and-swiss-banks\/","title":{"rendered":"Holocaust Survivors and Swiss Banks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Professor<\/a>
Professor Leonard Orland has published a book that explores how the Swiss government and banking industry helped finance the Nazis. Photo provided by the School of Law<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The extermination of millions of innocent civilians \u2013 not to mention slave labor, looting, medical experimentation, sterilization, and other war crimes \u2013 marked the gruesome reign of Nazi Germany during World War II. But in his latest book, Leonard Orland<\/a>, Oliver Ellsworth Research Professor of Law, also calls attention to another, \u201clittle-known\u201d culprit involved in the Holocaust: Switzerland.<\/p>\n

In his book A Final Accounting: Holocaust Survivors and Swiss Banks<\/em><\/a> (Carolina Academic Press, 2010), Orland explores the role of Switzerland\u2019s government and banking industry in helping to finance the Nazis as they came to power and, for decades following the war\u2019s end, denying Holocaust survivors access to funds they had placed in Swiss bank accounts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been dozens \u2013 probably hundreds \u2013 of books written about the Holocaust, but material in English on the role of Switzerland is almost non-existent,\u201d says Orland, who took notice when a historic settlement of $1.2 billion resulted in 2000, after four class action lawsuits were filed by Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks.<\/p>\n

The U.S. federal judge who oversaw the case captured Orland\u2019s interest in launching a worldwide campaign to locate Holocaust survivors and their heirs, and equitably allocate the settlement funds among them. For Orland, one of his main goals in writing A Final Accounting<\/em> was \u201cto memorialize and present to a wider audience this Herculean and Solomonic undertaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Myth of Neutrality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Orland spent three years sifting through the entire court record \u2013 tens of thousands of pages, including transcripts of interviews with Holocaust survivors \u2013 to understand how Swiss law was misused to permit and justify unlawful actions committed by Swiss banks. His research also drew from the Bergier report<\/a>, a 22-volume record generated following an independent investigation into the assets that were moved to Switzerland during the World War II era.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough this litigation, I got access to a lot of historical material telling the story of a Switzerland which did things besides make chocolate bars and cuckoo clocks,\u201d Orland says. \u201cIt made munitions; it financed the construction of Auschwitz; it took from the Nazi banks looted Holocaust gold, including gold fillings from people who were murdered; and facilitated, financially, Nazi Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Orland, the offenses committed by Swiss financial institutions were numerous. They allowed Nazis to coerce Jews in their custody to sign their accounts over to the regime\u2019s control, systematically destroyed records of Holocaust survivors\u2019 accounts, and denied funds to survivors and their families for years following the war under a \u201cveil of Swiss banking secrecy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMoreover, they instituted a policy of charges to bank accounts \u2013 that is, each year, they would charge multiple fees, eventually depleting the smaller accounts to zero,\u201d Orland says. Swiss law also permitted the banks to destroy all records of accounts dormant after 10 years, and then effectively seize the funds. \u201cThe banks had to know that these dormant accounts were the result of a unique historical event \u2013 genocide,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Yet neither the Swiss government nor its banks have since admitted to any wrongdoing, according to A Final Accounting<\/em>. \u201cOne thing is clear \u2013 there\u2019s been no outpouring of contrition at any level of the Swiss banking industry or government,\u201d Orland says.<\/p>\n

The Role of American Courts<\/strong><\/p>\n

In addition <\/em>to examining this litigation and the court\u2019s daunting task of distributing the settlement funds, A Final Accounting<\/em> also discusses other famous class action lawsuits filed in American federal courts \u201cto rectify historic wrongs\u201d \u2013 in cases ranging from the victims of South African apartheid to descendants of American slavery.<\/p>\n

As Orland points out, the U.S. offers something unique to victims of the Holocaust and other human rights offenses. \u201cIn America, and no place else in the Western world, is there such a thing as class action \u2013 let alone a human rights class action,\u201d he says. \u201cAmerican courts, for more than a century, have entertained the possibility of a legal action for violating the law of nations.\u201d<\/p>\n

With 11 other books published during his career, Orland says he is most proud of A Final Accounting<\/em>, a work that has provided him with a chance \u201cto give Holocaust victims a way of having their words reach a wider audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The law school is having a banner year for books, with the publication of 10 new faculty works \u2013 including Orland\u2019s book \u2013 by major academic presses. In honor of these and other faculty publications in respected law journals, the school has dubbed the 2010-2011 academic year \u2018The Year of the Book.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A law professor explores how the Swiss government and banking industry helped finance the Nazis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[49],"class_list":["post-25829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 05:26:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25829"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36723,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25829\/revisions\/36723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25829"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=25829"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}