Between the Alps and a Hard Place (22 page)

Worse than nonsense. The equation of Jews with wealth and mobile capitalism holds only at the margin (and a low margin it is) for the relatively small number of Jews in Western Europe—not at all for the numerous, poor denizens of Eastern
shtetels
. The notion that the wealth of Europe was in Jewish hands—and that the Jews saw the Nazis' danger soon enough to safeguard their wealth but too late to protect themselves—is an implausible falsehood made to justify anti-Semitism.

Moreover, even if the second myth were true, it does not follow that the clever, capitalist Jews would have safeguarded their assets in Switzerland. New York was protected by the Atlantic, London by the English Channel, Paris by the Maginot Line and the world's most prestigious army. Switzerland was protected by what? Neutrality? The Alps? Let us be serious. Remember, Switzerland has only its back to the Alps. Germany essentially had an unfettered path if it chose to invade. And it is difficult to imagine that the Nazis would have respected Swiss neutrality out of respect for international law. That is why the Belgians put their gold in Paris, and the Swiss themselves put their gold in New York and London. Anyone who thought Zurich safer than these was not so smart.

And yet uncritical acceptance of these myths is the basis of the most official position of the U.S. government, the so-called Eizenstat report of 1997. The opening paragraph of the relevant section reads: “There were ample reasons to believe that Swiss banks and insurance companies held the assets of many Jewish and non-Jewish victims.” The impression the text means to
convey by the word “many” is that there were more such assets in Switzerland than anywhere else. But the authors do not cite these “ample reasons” and dare not make the claim explicitly, because it is insupportable. “Moreover, it was believed by many Jewish organizations and the Allies that the other neutrals would not have significant amounts of heirless assets.” But why delimit the field to the neutrals? Why not make comparisons with France, Britain, and the United States, which is where smart money was likeliest to flee? “Switzerland introduced bank secrecy in part to counter Nazi efforts to block or trace capital outflows from Germany into Swiss banks.” But there was no capital outflow from Germany at the time Switzerland introduced bank secrecy, much less were there Nazi efforts to counter it. Why would historians write things so patently untrue? “In the 1930s it made sense for any European who feared political unrest, confiscation, or war to protect family assets by placing them in Switzerland.” It may have made sense according to the flawed facts and logic of the Eizenstat report, but it certainly did not make sense to the Belgians, Dutch, and Swiss governments, all Europeans, who in fact put their money elsewhere.

One would have expected the Eizenstat report, whose purpose was to explore the issue of heirless accounts, to provide some facts about the number and value of such accounts, as well as facts about how access to those accounts had been managed and perhaps how it should have been managed. But no. A document of 49 preface pages and 208 main text pages contains only 16 on its ostensible subject—heirless assets in Switzerland. And those pages contain
not one solitary fact
about how many victims of Nazism put how much money where or what happened to it. Rather, those 16 pages chronicle communications
between Switzerland and the United States about their respective laws on the subject.

Nonetheless, the tone of the report strongly suggests that Switzerland, a Nazi sympathizer and collaborator, took the Jews' money just as it took Nazi gold, and got away with it for a long time—but that the day of reckoning was at last at hand.

The point, in short, was to extort money from the Swiss. As in the days of Brennus, and World War II, and as ever it shall be, when the sword is heavy, the arguments don't have to be good, or the scales honest.

B
ETWEEN 1995 AND 1999 SWITZERLAND was again beset by a great power's claim on its economy. The challenge posed by the Clinton administration and the World Jewish Congress had one element in common with that of World War II: Power alone determined how much the weak had to pay to the strong. The power was wielded by American public figures acting officiously rather than officially on behalf of private parties, while the ransom was paid by Swiss private parties to satisfy a claim that had been made on the whole country. Why? Because the American private parties had access to just a bit of the power of the U.S. government.

It hardly matters how Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), rented the governmental power he wielded against Switzerland. The point is that the money he invested in political contributions within the U.S. political system ended up delivering to him control over a disproportionately larger amount of money. It was domestic interest-group politics projected internationally. Power makes money.

By September 1995, when Edgar Bronfman met with the president of Switzerland and had lunch with the Swiss Bankers' Association, his hosts knew that his WJC was demanding money. The WJC had already shown that it could embarrass the president of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, by generating media attention about his wartime collaboration with Nazi abuses. In Eastern Europe the WJC had taken the lead in a drive to return former Jewish property—mostly old synagogue buildings—to Jewish use. And it had already fired a shot across Switzerland's bow by generating articles that publicized a long-standing fact: Swiss banks still carried many accounts that had not been claimed since the war, and Jews claiming to be heirs of depositors had received little help and much insensitivity from the banks. Therefore, the articles generated by the WJC suggested, the banks were perpetuating at least part of one of the century's most disgraceful episodes—and hinted at a broader critique of Switzerland's role in the war.
¹

Swiss authorities, and the bankers themselves, were eager enough to pay in order to avoid having to defend themselves against these charges. In 1962, and again in 1995, the government had ordered the banks to search for accounts
that might be construed as having belonged to foreign Jews
. Since there is no way of knowing for sure the relationship of any given account holder to the Nazi regime or to its victims, never mind the holder's race or religion, the number and amount they came up with each time necessarily depended on arbitrary criteria for designating an account holder as “Jewish” in his or her absence. The 1962 survey picked out as Jews some 750 persons who had Jewish-sounding names. The 1995 survey started from the opposite premise: unless there was reason to think otherwise, the account was dubbed “Jewish.” The 1995 surveys had indicated
that eight hundred accounts still unclaimed after previous reviews contained approximately $32 million. The Swiss bankers were eager to give this sum to Mr. Bronfman (sixty-four times what the Kennedy administration had given to Jewish organizations in 1962), and to be left alone. So, at the lunch, they formally offered it to the WJC. Bronfman did not even consider the offer; his interest, he claimed, lay in setting up a process to determine just how much was owed.

The Swiss authorities and bankers had no idea of the power that Bronfman represented, or of what he would put them through. They also held on to the silly notion that Bronfman was interested only in the money in unclaimed accounts. In fact, since Bronfman never advanced objective criteria for his demands, he wanted such money as his power could reap. The fuss over the unclaimed accounts and the banks' well-known insensitive insistence that claimants provide full documentation for their claim was only a kind of propellant for a much bolder claim on the whole of Switzerland for alleged past sins. Just as his claims went beyond what might be called justice for individual Jews, Bronfman's power was rooted not so much in the Jewish community as in the American political process itself.

Edgar Bronfman describes his life as a love-hate relationship with his father's legacy.
²
In his book,
The Making of a Jew
, he recounts that as a college student his first act of rebellion was to abandon Judaism
de facto
. But because of family and business connections, he still moved in Jewish circles and fulfilled his father's role in Jewish charities. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, recognized Bronfman's business
talents; in 1979 he drew Bronfman into succeeding him as president of the WJC, then at a low point of influence.

The WJC had been founded in Geneva in 1936 to marshal the efforts of Jewish organizations around the world to induce their respective governments to accept Jews fleeing Nazism. It failed. After the war, it succeeded in becoming the broker of a settlement between Ben Gurion's Israel and Adenauer's Germany that eventually yielded Israel $73 billion. This success came because the state of Israel chose the WJC as an intermediary, and Adenauer's Germany was eager to pay. Success did not come from any strength inherent in the congress. In short, the WJC is an organization of organizations that has tried to cast itself as the representative of all the world's Jews. In this it has not been terribly successful; the state of Israel, home to about one-third of the world's Jewish population, does not delegate the right to represent world Jewry, more than a third of all Jews live in the United States and think of themselves as part of other organizations or none at all, while the rest are scattered over the rest of the world and wield little influence. The power of the WJC, therefore, has waxed and waned with the willingness of governments to give it a role.

As regards the anti-Swiss campaign, and contrary to its claims, the WJC emphatically did not act as an agent of the state of Israel. Interviewed by this author, responsible officials in Jerusalem's Foreign Ministry, who requested anonymity, stated that it was not Israel's position that Switzerland had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, that the state of Israel was not a party to the WJC's campaign, and that it wanted to stay as far away from that campaign as possible. Israel, they said, had better relations with Switzerland than with any other European country. Relations were particularly close between the
two countries' armed forces since they were the only ones in the world based to the maximum extent on reserves. Israel would do nothing to jeopardize these relations. When asked whether Israel would agree to distribute any of the money from the settlement between the WJC and Switzerland, one official recoiled in horror, while the other said that regardless of how much trouble such a task would make for Israel, the government could not refuse it if the WJC offered. But both agreed that Bronfman would never make such an offer. In short, Israel's position is that the World Jewish Congress in no way represents Israel.

Bronfman increased the WJC's power by raising money, and his own by buying access to government with his own and his company's political contributions. He also had a flair for picking causes and for making bold assertions of authority. In the 1980s the congress rose to prominence by championing the cause of Jews in the old Soviet Union. Bronfman's small measure of success in this came because he pressed the idea onto Soviet leaders that earning a clean bill of health from Jewish businessmen was the road to getting what they wanted from the West. Under Bronfman, the WJC has also worked to build up Jewish education in order to strengthen Jewish identity and discourage assimilation.

Bronfman makes clear that his effort in such causes was not because he had become either a believer or a practitioner of Judaism. Rather, mild curiosity about the religion resulted from his success in building the WJC's organization. He wrote that he began to read a little of the Bible for the first time in 1994. He got the identity he had sought from childhood from his secular, organizational involvement in Jewish causes.

The depth of Bronfman's identity as a Jew may be seen by his non-liquor business, namely entertainment. Seagram Company bought Interscope Records, which produced CDs of “gangsta rappers” and such disciples of pornography, violence against women, and death as Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Until August 1997 Bronfman also owned Death Row Records, which produced the equally deadly works of rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Doggy Dogg. He sold the latter only under pressure from shareholder lawsuits. Since no moral code, certainly not Judaism, sanctions such things, it is safe to conclude that morality did not drive Edgar Bronfman. His anti-Swiss campaign had nothing to do with religion, and little to do with race. It was personal fulfillment through the exercise of power.

Bronfman's power consisted of high-level connections within the Democratic Party, of which he was a principal financier in New York and California, as well as at the national level.

A measure of that power is the Bronfman family's (and company's) 1995–1996 soft money donation of $1,261,700 to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Throughout the country, countless local Democratic officials know that pleasing Bronfman means money, as well as favor in Washington. As the Eizenstat report's reference to President Clinton suggests, the president himself ordered Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat to put the State Department's resources behind Bronfman's effort to get money from the Swiss. Such Democratic officeholders as New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi and then California Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis did not need much prompting to follow Bronfman's lead.

Occasionally Bronfman's money lures Republicans. For the anti-Swiss campaign Bronfman was able to recruit Alfonse D'Amato, then Republican senator from New York and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. D'Amato had already earned a reputation for wholehearted devotion to his constituents' claims, becoming known as “Senator Pothole,” and sending out his staff on what he called “pork patrols” to discover any and all benefits for his constituents. From his beginnings as a politician on Long Island, D'Amato had developed sincere affection for the two dominant ethnic groups of his area, the Italians and the Jews. One photo in his office showed him bowing under the pope's extended hand, and another next to former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (and indistinguishable from him). He never looked too closely at the merits of the claims of his favorite groups but took on their causes with gusto. Of all the politicians involved in Bronfman's effort against Switzerland, D'Amato may have been the only one who actually believed the whole set of accusations. None of this kept Bronfman from helping Charles Schumer, a wheelhorse of New York's Democratic Party machine, in his successful 1998 campaign to unseat Senator D'Amato.