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“THE STAIN OF NAZI GOLD” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E886-E887 on May 8, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE STAIN OF NAZI GOLD
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HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, May 8, 1997
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, as the only survivor of the Holocaust ever elected to the Congress of the United States, I want to share with my colleagues a thoughtful editorial from the New York Times, entitled
``The Stain of Nazi Gold.''
Under Secretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat, one of our Nation's most respected and serious public servants, deserves enormous credit for having pursued this entire matter with extraordinary diligence, intelligence, and integrity. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.
The Stain of Nazi Gold
The honest excavation of history can bring sobering discoveries, as the American Government has now found in an examination of Nazi Germany's stolen gold and its redistribution after the war. No nation emerges unscathed from this investigation, including the United States, and many are disgraced. It is saddening but not altogether surprising to learn that morality and justice, especially the international obligation to look after the survivors of the Holocaust, were swiftly sacrificed to expediency when the gold was divvied up after the war. Remedying this failure, as the report rightly notes, is the unfinished business of World War II.
The extraordinary inquiry, which involved the declassification of nearly one million pages of documents, was initiated by President Clinton after Switzerland coldly rebuffed Jews seeking to recover gold and other assets their families had deposited in Swiss banks before the war. Under the determined direction of Stuart Eizenstat, the Under Secretary of Commerce, and William Slany, a State Department historian, it touches on wartime economic collaboration with Germany but deals mainly with the anemic postwar effort to restore gold and other valuables to the nations and peoples from which they had been stolen.
Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Argentina will want to take notice. The extent of their economic cooperation with the Nazis has been slowly unfolding in recent years, but Mr. Eizenstat makes clear they profited from their neutrality. Even as the threat of German invasion waned in the last years of the war, Sweden sold Germany iron ore and ball bearings, Portugal provided tungsten for steelmaking, Spain traded goods and raw materials and Turkey shipped chrome. Argentina defied efforts to prevent the transfer of German funds there from Europe.
Switzerland is properly singled out. Though helpful to the Allies as a base for spying, it served as Nazi banker, gold keeper and financial broker. Switzerland provided Germany with arms, ammunition, aluminum and agricultural products.
These countries made only a fitful effort after the war to return the looted gold and other assets they received in payments from Germany during the war. Here America bears considerable responsibility. It led the postwar effort to recover and distribute the gold. Yet only a small portion of the $580 million in gold stolen from conquered governments, worth some $5.6 billion today, was ever recovered. Even less of the millions of dollars in gold and other assets taken from individuals was returned.
Switzerland was aggressively unhelpful, resisting accounting and recovery efforts for years and not honoring agreements to liquidate German assets held in Switzerland. The American report estimates that as much as $400 million in German-looted gold remained in the Swiss National Bank at the end of the war, but no more than $98 million was returned.
The task of tracing and apportioning the gold and other assets was daunting, but American officials tolerated intransigence by other nations and accepted pitiful restitution agreements in the name of cold-war solidarity. Eager to obtain access to an Azores air base in the 1950's, Washington let Portugal surrender only about one-tenth of the German gold it held at the end of the war.
Spain eventually returned just $114,000 in looted gold from a stockpile of $30 million. Turkey, which held $44 million in Nazi assets and $5 million in looted gold, made no restitution. Only Sweden paid up.
The victims of this dismal record were the survivors of the Holocaust and others left homeless and stateless by the war. Assets that could have been used to help them were never returned to the countries plundered by Germany. Worse still, gold and other valuables found in Germany that had been seized from millions of individuals and households across Europe were knowingly mingled with assets stolen from European governments by the Nazis. As a result, gold that should have gone to help individuals through relief and compensation programs ended up in European and American government vaults, where some remains today.
These matters remained too long obscured from public view, shielded by excessive secrecy and national pride. It is late to redress the wrongs, but every effort should now be made to return gold and other assets to those with a legitimate claim. Switzerland, after long delay, is finally making an effort to trace and return assets deposited before the war. Mr. Eizenstat and Mr. Slany have performed a high public service by digging for the truth.
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