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Date: December 19, 1996
Swiss Government Names Princeton Professor to
Commission That Will Study World War II Banking Practices
Princeton, N.J. -- Harold James, Professor of History at Princeton University, was today named to a nine-member independent commission that will study practices by Swiss banks that provided banking services to the Nazis during World War II.
The commission was named amid growing speculation that Swiss banks laundered gold looted by the Nazis from occupied states of central Europe and served as repositories for assets that the Nazis confiscated from Jews. Swiss bankers are also suspected of assisting some Nazis, such as propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who funneled moneys to South America. The commission will begin its work in January, although no date has been set for its first meeting.
James, a member of the Princeton faculty since 1986, specializes in modern economic and political history. His is the co-author of a history of the Deutsche Bank, published in Germany in 1995. This year, he published International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods , which was commissioned by the International Monetary Fund. James, a British citizen, received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1982.
Five members of the commission are Swiss; James is one of four from other countries. Eight members of the panel are historians, and the ninth is a prosecutor with experience in money-laundering cases. "We have selected the best in the world," said Swiss President Jean-Pascal Delamuraz of the foreign members of the panel, according to the Associated Press.
Commission members were named less than a week after the Swiss Parliament passed a law that established the panel and ordered commercial banks to open their records to historians for the first time.
James explained that while the Swiss government had opened its archives to historians seeking to trace financial policies and patterns with the Nazis, Switzerland's banking secrecy laws prevented commercial institutions from doing the same.
James took leave last year at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, and he is working on a history of the Reichsbank, which was commissioned by Bundesbank. His article in a Swiss newspaper, Tages-Anzeiger, gained widespread attention, as did his earlier work on the Deutsche Bank. "It was the first time a German commercial bank had opened its archives to outside historians," James explained. "It is actually a good model of how companies should approach their own histories."
That work uncovered some of the clues that the new commission will now pursue. James said it will be important to examine records from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. He also hopes for more progress in the effort to open Nazi banking records that have been held in Moscow for decades. "There is a colossal amount of captured government documents that have still not been properly evaluated," James said.
According to James, the new commission has been charged with "investigating every aspect of Swiss dealings with the Germans in World War II and the period immediately afterward." The inquiry will cover the movement of both gold and money and the actions of both public officials and individuals. The transfers of works of art will be covered as well, James said.
Scholars will also examine economic policy. "We will look at the way in which the Swiss economy worked in the context of being a little island in German-occupied Europe," James said.
Asked whether the panel will also be charged with making recommendations on how to redress wrongs, James said, "The recommendations should be self-evident once we are finished."
On Friday, the Swiss National Bank acknowledged that it had profited from its dealings with the Nazi Reichsbank. However, bank officials noted there was no evidence that gold stolen from individual Jews had passed through the central bank during World War II.
According to The Jerusalem Post, a 1985 account by Swiss National Bank historian Robert Vogler found the SNB management during World War II was "politically insensitive" in performing its duties and "displayed a naive gullibility" in dealings with the Reichsbank.
James attributes the recent actions by the Swiss government to the end of the Cold War, when the preoccupation with secrecy -- by both Eastern Bloc nations and the United States -- finally began to ease. Still, James said, "It's interesting that all this has only been done so recently. It has taken so long."