Hitler's Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide （Adam LeBor

The Jews of Europe entrusted their families' wealth to what they hoped would be a safe haven, the banks of Switzerland. Even if they died, their money would eventually be recovered, they believed. They were wrong. Millions of dollars, deposited decades ago in good faith by Jews who were to die in the Nazi genocide, still lie in the vaults, earning interest and providing working capital for Swiss banks.
 
But the Swiss Bankers' role as financiers to the Third Reich goes far beyond the dispute over dormant accounts. Based on newly declassified documents and archival research in Washington, London, and Jerusalem, Hitler's Secret Bankers reveals the full, hitherto unknown extent of Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis. Swiss Banks were the key foreign-currency providers of the Nazi war machine, and the Spanish pesetas and Portuguese escudos they provided paid for vital war materiel such as chrome and aluminum.
 
Hitler's Secret Bankers also reveals how Swiss bankers' trade with the Nazis was but one part of a wider government policy of accommodation with the Third Reich that returned to the Gestapo and the SS tens of thousands of fleeing Jews who had made it across the Swiss border, how the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements and its American president, Thomas McKittrick, continued trading on behalf of the Reich throughout the Second World War and accepted Nazi gold, and how American intelligence believed that the Swiss-based International Red Cross had been infiltrated by Nazi agents, along with the details of a secret Nazi plan to launch an underground economic Fourth Reich at the war's end.
 
Adam LeBor  (1961-)  was born in London and read Arabic, international history and politics at Leeds University, graduating in 1983, and also studied Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked for several British newspapers before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1991. He has reported from thirty countries, including Israel and Palestine, and covered the Yugoslav wars for The Times of London and The Independent.
 
Hitler's Secret Bankers was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.  His books have been published in fourteen languages including Chinese, Hebrew and Japanese.