Hitler's Silent Partners

Vincent, a Canadian journalist, wrote about Swiss banks' handling of assets belonging to Holocaust victims and about the international campaign in the 1990s to recover them.

The historical material covers what happened. Jews across Europe deposited assets in Swiss banks before and during the war, relying on Swiss neutrality and on banking secrecy. Most of the depositors were killed. After the war, heirs attempting to recover the accounts were required to produce documentation including death certificates, which the camps did not issue, and account numbers or passbooks that had been lost or confiscated. Banks declined claims on these grounds and the assets remained. Vincent also covers the Swiss purchase of gold from the German Reichsbank, including gold looted from occupied central banks and from individuals, and the wartime economic relationship more broadly.

The contemporary narrative covers the 1990s campaign: the pressure from Jewish organisations and from Senator Alfonse D'Amato's Senate Banking Committee, the class action litigation in American courts, the threat of sanctions from state and municipal pension funds and financial regulators, the whistleblower Christoph Meili who found records being destroyed at a Swiss bank, and the eventual settlement of one and a quarter billion dollars in 1998.

Vincent's argument is that the banks obstructed claims deliberately for decades and that the settlement came only when commercial pressure in the American market made resistance more expensive than payment.

The book was published in 1997, before the settlement concluded and before the Volcker Committee and Bergier Commission published their findings, which are the authoritative sources. It is advocacy journalism written during an active campaign. The core factual claims were subsequently confirmed by those independent inquiries.