Francois Genoud, Carlos the Jackal, Klaus Barbie,
Hjalmar Schacht, Al Quaida ...
"As far back as 1963, a German language newspaper in Basel reported that "a
Swiss citizen who lives in Lausanne" was managing the remnants of the Nazi
treasury, most of which had been stolen from European Jews. Twenty-four
years later, during the Barbie trial in June 1987, Guy Bermann, a lawyer
representing civil plaintiffs, summarized methods used by the Germans to
accumulate wartime treasure--such as extracting gold fillings of death camp
victims--and identified Genoud as the postwar manager of that fortune.
"In 1992 the Observer called Genoud "one of the world's leading Nazis,"
noting: "Security services claim he transferred the defeated Nazis' gold
into Swiss bank accounts."...
---------------------------
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-and-hitler.html
---------------------------
HITLER'S SWISS CONNECTION by David Lee Preston
Hitler's Swiss Connection, by David Lee Preston
published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 5, 1997
On May 30 1996, a gray haired Swiss widower named Francois Genoud took a few
close friends and relatives to a restaurant in Pully, his home town on Lake
Lausanne.
Then they accompanied him back to his house, where one of his lunch
companions prepared him a lethal cocktail: a bitter white poison dissolved
in water. Genoud took the drink into his hands. He had started planning for
this moment a year earlier when he went with his daughters, Martine and
Francoise, to become a member of the suicide-assistance organization Exit,
complaining that "psychological illness" had made life unbearable since the
death of his second wife, Elisabeth, in 1991.
Genoud put the glass to his lips and drank. "He had decided to leave this
earth," said Martine Genoud, "on a date that he chose himself." He was 81.
An urbane man with an air of influence and respectability, Genoud was no
ordinary Swiss pensioner.
He was an unrepentant Nazi who devoted his life to aiding Adolf Hitler's
surviving henchman and those he saw as Hitler's natural anti-Jewish
successors: Arab terrorists.
He was a financier of fascism, and a manager of the hidden Swiss treasure of
third Reich.
A shadowy figure in six decades of international intrigue, he masterminded
an airplane hijacking, underwrote attacks on Israel and paid for the defense
of Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and "Carlos the Jackal." An anti Jewish
propagandist, he made a fortune publishing Nazi tracts.
In the end he slipped away just as a 50-year old scandal was breaking that
might have implicated him in one history's great cover-ups: The Swiss
collaboration with Nazi Germany in hiding gold looted from Holocaust victims
and subjugated governments.
Genoud's suicide came just four weeks after Jewish leaders and Swiss banking
officials announced an unprecedented agreement setting up a commission to
examine secret bank and government files, searching for funds deposited in
Switzerland by Holocaust victims. Chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman
Paul Volker, the panel is working separately from a Swiss government probe
into Nazi plunder in Switzerland.
In the United States, Sen. D' Amato, the Senate banking Committee chairman,
is investigating Swiss wartime holdings and campaigning for release of
billions of dollars in Holocaust victims' funds from Swissbanks. President
Clinton has pledged "full moral and political support," for the
investigations. And Holocaust survivors and families of victims have filed
class action lawsuits in federal court in New York against a group of Swiss
banks, trying to recover assets taken from Jews during the War.
Responding to a question during the Inquirer's investigation of Genoud,
D'Amato last month called on the Swiss government to fully investigate and
disclose Genoud's role in the Swiss handling of the Nazi gold.
"The accusations made against Mr. Genoud seem to be reprehensible," said
D'Amato. "We would hope that the Swiss would be forthcoming with information
on his activities before, during and after the war."
Did Genoud take his own life to avoid the coming scrutiny?
Daniel Lack, a Geneva attorney and legal adviser to the World Jewish
Congress, said, "It stands to reason he [Genoud] must be implicated in the
illegal transfer of Nazi assets to Switzerland and concealing it. I dare say
that the man realized this. All these inquirers into the opening of the
records of Nazi assets in Swiss banks may have compromised him in more ways
than one. It's not improbable, his connections being what they were and his
sympathies being what they were."
In October the world Jewish Congress released a once-secret U.S. Army
document from 1945 found in the National Archives. It told of Allied
Soldiers finding bags of gold fillings from human teeth hidden by the Nazis
in Germany at the end of the war. The document reported the bags were among
stacks of gold bars, gold coins, silver, Passover candlesticks, paintings
and other assets looted by the Nazis and hidden in a salt mine in Merkers,
in western Germany.
The document was a stark reminder, WJB president Edgar Bronfman said, the
looted Nazi gold sought by investigators was not just gold bullion taken
from the treasuries of Europe, but items seized from human beings. According
to testimony at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945-46, the Nazis
extracted gold from the teeth of people they executed in death camps and
melted it down to sell for the war effort. Captured SS records on microfilm
at the National Archives show that Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic and
Administrative Main Office, had distributed a chart that said: "Efficient
utilization of the prisoner's body at the end of nine months increases this
profit by the return of dental gold. It is possible at times to obtain
additional revenue from the utilization of bones and ashes."
As a teenager in the fall of 1932, Francois Genoud briefly met the man who
was to shape the rest of his life. In a hotel in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn,
the young Genoud encountered Adolf Hitler. He told Hitler of his great
interest in National Socialism, and Hitler shook his hand. Genoud's
parents--his father was a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer--had sent him from
Lausanne to study in Germany at 16 to learn discipline. He found Hitler's
writings "very relevant," he said years later. Sixty years after that single
meeting, Genoud told a London newspaper, "My views have not changed since I
was a young man. Hitler was a great leader, and if he had won the War the
world would be a better place today."
In 1934, back in Switzerland, the 19 year old Genoud joined the pro-Nazi
National Front, and two years later he began to forge the other political
links that would prove so valuable. He traveled to Palestine. There he met
the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the pro-Nazi religious and political leader of
Palestinian Muslims, Amin el-Husseini, who was to spend most of World War II
in Germany, and who, according to British author Gitta Sereny, "would
consider [Genoud] a confidant until his death in 1974."
Genoud traveled to Berlin frequently during the war "to see his friend the
grand mufti," and visited him afterward many times in Beirut, according to
Le Monde correspondent Jean-Claude Buhrer. The grand mufti "entrusted Genoud
with the management of his enormous financial affairs," according to Sereny.
Working for both Swiss and German intelligence agencies, Genoud traveled
extensively in the Middle East.
In Lausanne in 1940, along with a Lebanese national, he set up the Oasis
nightclub to serve as a covert operation for the Abwehr, the German
counterintelligence service. In 1941, Abwehr agent Paul Dickopf sent Genoud
into Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Belgium. Genoud befriended several
top Nazis, including SS Gen. Karl Wolff, who had been Heinrich Himmler's
personal adjutant and who by 1943 would be "supreme SS and police leader" in
Italy.
"It was a tit for tat between me and my Abwehr contact [Dickopf]," Genoud
reminisced shortly before his death. "I was dealing in all kinds of things
including currency, diamonds and gold, and Dickopf liked dealing, too. So I
pushed things his way, and he pushed things my way . . . . It was all very
satisfactory; everybody was happy. We were all friends." Dickopf, meanwhile,
went underground in the fall of 1942 with Genoud's help, emerging in
Switzerland. Ironically, from 1968 to 1972, Dickopf was president of
Interpol, the widely respected international police agency. At the end of
the war, Genoud represented the Swiss Red Cross in Brussels, according to
Buhrer.
Genoud, according to documents from Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld of Paris,
soon used his banking contacts to set in motion networks that later became
known as ODESSA, which functioned principally for the transfer of millions
of marks from Germany into Swiss banks and the evacuation of key Nazi
leaders into Morocco, Spain and Latin America.
"The money," wrote Toronto author Erna Paris in a book about Klaus Barbie,
"most of which was stolen from European Jews, was deposited in numbered bank
accounts through a clandestine club of former SS officers called Die Spinne
(The Spider), the successor to the ODESSA organization."
Meanwhile, Genoud acquired from the families of Hitler, Bormann and Goebells
all posthumous rights to the writings of the three men-- agreements that
made him a fortune when he published the volumes. (Sereny said the sheer
force of Genoud's personality enabled him to obtain those rights: "To the
surprise of many people," she wrote in the London Observer a month before
his death, "he invariably comes across as a sympathetic and honest man.")
It was at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 that Genoud befriended Maj. Gen.
Herman Bernhard Ramcke and obtained Bormann's account of Hitler's
conversations from Ramcke's subordinate, former SS Capt. Hans Reichenberg.
In the preface to the Bormann document, Hitler's Table talk, Genoud wrote
that Hitler wanted the people of the Third World to carry on the work of the
Thousand Year Reich.
A December 1952 State Department telegram from Bonn leaves no doubt about
Genoud's circle of friends. The formerly classified document, obtained by
The Inquirer under the Freedom of Information Act, names "Swiss citizen
Francois Genoud" as the "middleman" in a meeting in Cologne in which former
paratrooper Ramcke and Gen. Heinz Guderian told a French government adviser
and a Swiss colonel of their opposition to the European Defense Community, a
Cold War alliance in Western Europe. Ramcke and Guderian were well-known to
Western officials.
Ramcke had been charged by the Greece with murder and pillage as the leader
of the German troops who captured Crete in 1941; he also was charged by
France with murder and wanton destruction of property as commander of the
Second Parachute Division at Brest in July and August 1994. And Guderian had
been chief of staff for the high command of the German army.
By 1955, Genoud had used his wartime contacts to become an adviser,
researcher and banker to the cause of Arab nationalism. Along with
Reichenberg in Tangiers and Cairo, Genoud set up AraboAfrika, an
import-export company that served as a cover for the dissemination of
anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli propaganda and the delivery of weapons to the
Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Genoud made investments for
Hjalmar Schacht, the former Nazi Reichsminister of Finance, president of the
Reichsbank and a key postwar intermediary between Germans and Arabs.
Numerous former Third Reich officials gained refuge in the Arab world,
including Eichmann's deputy, Alois Brunner, who for years was protected by
Hafez el-Assad in Damascus.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, seeking to offset Soviet influence in
the Middle East, helped bankroll the activities of Brunner and other former
Nazis working in Egypt after the war, according to documentation by American
journalist Christopher Simpson.
Also, in November 1956, William J. Porter of the U.S. Embassy in Rabat
notified the State Department that "Mr. Francois Genoud, a Swiss national
residing at Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and purporting to represent the Hjalmar
Schacht interests, called at the Embassy this week to discuss . . . massive
investments" in Morocco.
"The crux of the proposition made to the Moroccan Government by Mr. Genoud
and his associates," says the once-classified document obtained by the
Inquirer under the Freedom of Information Act, "involves the sale by the
United States--through a long-term, low-interest loan--of 55 million
dollars' worth of agricultural surpluses to the Schacht group, which would
dispose of them in Western Europe and utilize the counterpart for investment
in Morocco in the form of equipment and technicians." Genoud said the
Moroccans were keenly interested in securing Schacht's collaboration,
according to the document, "partly because of the esteem in which he is held
in the Arab world generally, but also because the Moroccans tend 'to admire
the philosophies for which he stands.'" Porter reported that the embassy did
not encourage Genoud, and did not think the Schacht plan would benefit the
United States.
More is to be learned about Genoud's contacts with the Americans. The State
Department has yet to declassify 16 documents relating to Genoud; 29 other
documents relating to his application for a visa or permit to enter the U.S.
remain classified.
The Lufthansa Boeing 747 bound for Frankfurt was ready for takeoff in Bombay
when the control tower received a bizarre message: "Call us the Victorious
Jihad. If you call us Lufthansa, we won't answer you." It was the evening of
Feb. 21, 1972, and Palestinian hijackers had taken the plane hostage. Among
the 188 passengers was Joseph Kennedy, 19-year-old son of assassinated Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy.
The next day, a letter from Cologne demanded $5 million for the
"Organization for the Victims of the Zionist Occupation." In perfect
English, the letter gave Lufthansa explicit instructions: A man carrying a
suitcase with the money should wear a black jacket and gray pants, disembark
at the Beirut airport holding Newsweek magazine in his left hand and the
suitcase in his right hand, and go to the parking lot. With the key sent in
the envelope from Cologne, he was to open an old Volkswagen parked under a
sycamore tree and read the instructions on the rear seat.
The jet flew to Yemen, where the crew and passengers were freed, including
the young Kennedy. And $5 million in used bills went to the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, which has committed numerous international
terrorist attacks since.
The operation was orchestrated by the Palestinian terrorist Wadi Haddad with
the assistance of Francois Genoud, who drove overnight to Cologne with his
wife carrying the letter with the ransom demand. After sending the letter to
Lufthansa and to news agencies, Genoud and Elisabeth took off for vacation
in the Belgian Ardennes. "The amount of money demanded of Lufthansa was very
high," Genoud told French journalist Pierre Pean, revealing his role in the
hijacking in a biography published this year in Paris. "Too low a number
would have made us lose credibility. Too high a number might have made the
operation fall through, especially considering how quickly the money had to
be collected."
Probably the leading Genoud-watcher in the last three decades has been Le
Monde's Buhrer, who lives in Lausanne. He believes Genoud told Pean about
his role in the Lufthansa hijacking because a 20-year statute of limitations
gave him immunity from prosecution. But in February, the Swiss attorney
general summoned Genoud to Bern to explain his role in the hijacking and his
revelation in Pean's book that he had been in contact with terrorist Carlos
the Jackal since the early 1970s. "I think he killed himself partly because
he saw he could have difficulties with Swiss justice for the first time in
his life," says Buhrer.
As the hijacking dramatically demonstrated, Genoud's postwar intrigues
increasingly were on behalf of anti-Israel forces in the Arab world.
Before the end of the 1950s, Genoud had set up Swiss bank accounts on behalf
of the North African liberation armies of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. In
1958, in partnership with a Syrian--and with Hjalmar Schacht as an
adviser--Genoud set up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva, to manage the war
chest for the Algerian separatists. Schacht was quoted as saying National
Socialism would conquer the world without having to wage another war. When
Algerian independence was proclaimed in 1962, Genoud became director of the
Arab Peoples' Bank in Algiers. He brought his highly placed friend Schacht
with him. But two years later, Genoud was arrested in Algeria and charged
with violating exchange control regulations in the transfer of $15 million
of FLN money to a Swiss bank. The intercession of Egyptian President Gamal
Abdel Nasser got Genoud out of Algeria without a trial, and he never went
back. After a 15 year battle in Swiss courts, the money was returned to
Algeria.
Beginning in the 1960s, Genoud helped finance numerous Arab terrorist
causes, selling weapons and paying legal fees. In November 1969, he sat
alongside the radical lawyer Jacques Verges as an adviser at the trial in
Switzerland of three terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) who had blown up an El Al plane in Zurich that February.
Genoud's Arab Commerical Bank paid for the defense.
Two decades later, Genoud would team up with Verges again, this time as
financier for the left-wing lawyer's defense of Barbie, the Gestapo chief
known as the "Butcher of Lyon." In June 1987, Genoud ignored a summons to
appear as a witness in the Lyon court trying Barbie for crimes against
humanity. Barbie killed 4,000 non-Jewish French citizens and deported 7,000
Jews to death camps. He was convicted in 1987 and died in prison.
Genoud meanwhile, set up a fund to help Nazis in prison. "He even had
baskets of chocolate sent in to people in jail," says American journalist
Kevin Coogan, who met Genoud in 1986.
The French press increasingly was reporting links between Islamic
fundamentalist groups and classic, far-right European anti-Jewish
organizations. In August 1987, the International Herald Tribune reported
from Paris that "Francois Genoud, pro-Nazi Swiss banker living in Lausanne,
. . . who has been named several times in the French press as the trustee of
the 'Nazi war chest,'" had been a contact of Wahid Gordji, an official in
the Iranian embassy in Paris, who was implicated by a French court in
bombing attacks that killed 13 persons in Paris in 1986. Those attacks
allegedly were carried out by a pro-Iranian Islamic fundamentalist terrorist
network. Gordji also had paid for the publication of a mail order catalog
advertising neo-Nazi books, the newspaper reported.
In 1982, Genoud acknowledged to a Lausanne newspaper that he had writer
David Irving, who has no formal academic training in history, but claimed
that there were no gas chambers, the Hitler knew nothing about death camps,
and that fewer than one million Jews died in the war. He once claimed that
Anne Frank's diary was a fake. "David Irving was asked about Genoud," says
Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight, an international anti-fascist magazine
based in London. "And Irving said, 'Oh, I've known Genoud for many years,
we're very good friends. Ah, there's an interesting man--a banker for the
movement.'" Irving and Genoud later had falling out, over translation rights
to the Goebbels diaries. But Genoud's propaganda campaign survived him, and
his pro-Nazi successors have gone high-tech, making Holocaust-denial and
neo-Nazi literature widely available on the Internet.
"He was not a person who was hung up on whether one was left-wing or
right-wing, just anyone who was against Israel," says American journalist
Martin Lee, who accompanied Coogan in the 1986 interview of Genoud and
vividly recalls the meeting in Lausanne.
"The guy was a fanatic," says Lee. "From the first moment that he appeared
and extended his hand for a handshake, he reeked of fanaticism. He came
forward and clicked his heels in a sort of a Nazi heel-clicking mode,
extended his hand and announced very proudly, 'I am Francois Genoud.'"
Genoud had agreed to meet with Lee and Coogan on the condition that they
neither tape him nor quote him in an article. The well-dressed Genoud drove
Lee and Coogan to the Beau Rivage, a luxury hotel in Lausanne overlooking
Lake Geneva, where they sat down for a drink and conversation. "Clearly
Genoud commanded the respect of the people in the hotel," says Lee. "He
snapped his fingers, and people came running. Clearly he was perceived by
others as a man of influence." Genoud refused to discuss his work, but spoke
excitedly for 90 minutes about his politics.
"Literally, his eyes moistened when he spoke of how great Hitler was . . . .
Genoud insisted that Hitler was not an invader of Czechoslovakia, that he
was welcomed in, cheered en masse. He was practically crying when he said
that."
Lee maintains that Genoud "is a much more significant figure in the postwar
neo-Nazi scene than Barbie. Genoud is more the behind-the-scenes
wire-puller. He was not someone who lined people up and shot them to death,
but he had dealings with those who did. Genoud was a living embodiment of
the continued political maneuvering and influence by Third Reich activists
and hard-core Nazis after World War II--activities that had measurable
influence in world affairs, as evidenced by Arab terrorism and other
political violence."
In their article, which appeared in the May 1987 issue of Mother Jones
magazine, Lee and Coognar refrained from quoting Genoud directly. Still, it
was the only examination of Genoud by an American publication during his
lifetime. "If a Swiss banking investigation doesn't turn up an involvement
on the part of Genoud, I would suspect that it is not a full-fledged,
serious investigation," says Lee. "A no-holds-barred probe has to turn up
Genoud."
As far back as 1963, a German language newspaper in Basel reported that "a
Swiss citizen who lives in Lausanne" was managing the remnants of the Nazi
treasury, most of which had been stolen from European Jews. Twenty-four
years later, during the Barbie trial in June 1987, Guy Bermann, a lawyer
representing civil plaintiffs, summarized methods used by the Germans to
accumulate wartime treasure--such as extracting gold fillings of death camp
victims--and identified Genoud as the postwar manager of that fortune.
In 1992 the Observer called Genoud "one of the world's leading Nazis,"
noting: "Security services claim he transferred the defeated Nazis' gold
into Swiss bank accounts."
The first English language portrait of Genoud appeared in 1985 in Unhealed
Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, by Erna Paris, who drew upon the
work of Buhrer.
"It's impossible to say whether he committed suicide because there was going
to be an investigation," says Paris. "But I think the timing suggests that
given his age and physical decline, and given his daughter's comment, he
might have decided this might be a propitious moment for departing."
Gitta Sereny, who knew Genoud for 25 years and called him "the most
mysterious man in Europe," believes his deteriorating health led him to
commit suicide. "He was really not at all well," she says. "He certainly was
not going to last very long, and it really was as simple as that. He did not
choose to be ill for a long time. It's a human thing, it's nothing
political."
But Genoud--who narrowly escaped injury in October 1993 when a bomb exploded
in front of the door to his home--was aware that circles of inquiry were
closing in on him. In addition to the banking probes, a Lausanne judge was
reviewing a Swiss television documentary about him co-produced by the
International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, for possible
violation of a new Swiss law on racial incitement.
"I don't absolutely believe that there was a planned attempt for a 'Final
Solution,'" Genoud said the Pean book. "In my opinion, this is completely
false. They [the Jews] were mobilized to work, but they were not
systematically exterminated." Under the new law, the Swiss Federation of
Jewish Communities retained a Lausanne lawyer to sue Genoud for that
statement and others. On May 28, the Lawyer began legal action, seeking a
search warrant of Genoud's residence.
The warrant was not be carried out. Two days later, the Swiss boy who had
shaken Hitler's hand--exited the same way as his beloved Fuehrer--on his own
terms, never having strayed from the cause.
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