Now that I have your attention…
Why does it seem that all of a sudden so many lawyers, countries and whatnot are coming forward now on behalf of the jewish people who suffered and survived the Holocaust. Why now? Why not years ago?
I saw a special on PBS on how Swizterland deliberately hid/ kept jewish funds/money/ accounts knowing that most jews could not provide the proper documentation because of losing everything during the war/holocaust years. Why or how is this coming to light NOW and not years ago?
The sheltered girl trapped inside me has a hard time beleiving in such a huge conspiracy against people who suffered so much. The cynical woman that inhabits my brain says everything was quagmired down in politcal red tape, finger pointing and hoo-ha crapola, but for fifty years? I know that after WW2 ended the entire world was busy trying to get on with life, but you cannot tell me that some lawyer didn’t think of suing some one/government on behalf of the jewish people years before NOW.
I believe compensation is definately in order, but truthfully some of these survivors are so old that what can they do with the money ( if they receive it) before they die? It would be like a bandaid on a sucking chest wound.
People change not because they see the light but because they feel the heat.
Simple answer: there have long been suspicions about the hidden Nazi wealth in Switzerland, but it was not until recently that a “smoking gun” was discovered, forcing the Swiss to own up to the facts. Once this came to light, many other financial details were able to be tracked down.
What will the survivors get out of it?
Not as much as they’d like…but anything sure is an improvement over nothing.
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Quote : Swizterland deliberately hid/ kept jewish funds/money/ accounts knowing that most jews could not provide the proper documentation because of losing everything during the war/holocaust years.
That’s the main reason they’ve never joined the EU - if they had they are bound by European law to make all the records of their accounts available.
What was the ‘smoking gun’ - I remember reading something along those lines a couple of years back but can’t remember any details.
The “smoking gun” was a big pile of documentation that was about to be shredded. A whole roomful of boxes was shredded, but a guard at a Swiss Bank caught on and walked out with as much as he could carry–of course, he was fired. Can’t remember what happened to him, but I recall that he was still jobless when he testified in the U.S. a couple of years ago.
Shirley, I agree. Maybe some of our Jewish friends can tell us if the Jewish community was as organized then as it is now. Perhaps it because of the continual pressure from these organized groups that have helped spill the beans, so to speak.
Of course, my opinion is that most lawyers (sorry, manhattan!) are bloody sucking pigs and ambulance chasers, my sister having worked for a few of them.
Switzerland, sheesh. Talk about making poor moral judgement. Someone should wack you up long 'side yo head!
Flora McFlimsey: IIRC the guy turned out not to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, despite his good deed. I know he makes some dough from grateful Jewish and Banking Transparency groups who hire him to speak. (Yes, there is such a thing as a Banking Transparency group.) And some congressman was trying to get him U.S. citizenship.
And BunnyGirl, despite the apparent pomposity of my posts, I’m not a lawyer. But I am putting the children of several lawyers through Grad School.
Shirley, now that I got your attention, how about making the subject of the thread actually match the content of the thread instead of your lame attention-grabber.
Former New York Senator Al D’Amato may have been a scumbag in general but one good thing he did was to push for a Swiss accounting of wartime accounts. Presumedly the support of New York’s Jewish voters was not far from his mind.
Since I can’t ask Warriner, you’ll have to be content with my answers.
I don’t have to speculate about why the Swiss voted not join the EU. I happened to be living in Switzerland when the referendum was held in 1993 and I am familiar with the tenor of the political debate.
The end of result of the referendum was that the popular vote was extremely close, just a couple of tenths of a percent separating the yeas and nays. I recall that the popular vote approved of joining the EU, but the margin was razor thin. However, national Swiss referendums must pass in a majority of the Swiss cantons, something like the US electoral college system. About two thirds of the cantons rejected EU membership and only a third approved. Thus the referendum was defeated.
In general, the referendum vote fell out along prevailing Swiss political lines. The big urban cantons (Geneva, Zurich, Berne) were heavily in favor of EU membership. The French and Italian speaking cantons (Geneva, Jura, Ticino) also voted strongly EU. The German speaking rural cantons were just as heavily opposed. As there are more German cantons, the nays won.
As far as issues with EU membership go, the dominant debate seemed to be between plain old traditional Swiss neutrality and the fear that not joining the EU would cause Switzerland to stagnate economically. There was a considerable faction of environmentalist opinion that was opposed to EU membership over what they felt was a threat to the alpine environment by truck traffic passing through Switzerland between northern Europe and Italy. Switzerland and the EU have been tussling over this for years and it has feared that joining the EU would force Switzerland to relax environmental restrictions on trucks passing through Switzerland. Farmers were opposed because they feared that certain subsidies and trade barriers would have been reduced or eliminated on EU membership.
I don’t recall modification of banking laws figuring prominently in the debates. This was 1993, well before the misappropriated Jewish accounts was front page news and any overt international pressure was being applied. In any event, the Swiss are not unique in their banking privacy laws as compared to the EU, having weakened them in wake of many recent scandals involving dictators, Ferdinand Marcos in particular.
In short, the Swiss just ain’t the joining kind. This has nothing to do with embarrassment over the Jewish bank accounts scandal and everything to do with a policy of neutrality pursued over hundreds of years.
Sorry to drone on about Swiss politics, but you did know all this about Switzerland before you made your sweeping generalization about the Swiss body politic, didn’t you, Bobalogna?
<blushing> Well, BunnyGirl, I certainly can’t fault someone for paying me a compliment. Perhaps I will take the bar, just for laughs.
Oh, and Warinner, awesome color on the Swiss EU debate! Thanx. Do you have any additional info on the topic at hand? Why the move to compensation now, and not in, say, the 50’s or 60’s?
I seem to remember that the whole document destruction/discovery scandal happened after the current movement was already underway, albeit in its early stages.
