an island of democracy and prosperity in the heart of Hitler's Europe,
which all of us had been taught to believe, but also a vital financial support
for the Third Reich.

The purpose of this book is to reveal as many details as possible about
the affair of the Holocaust deposits. It will deal with Swiss wartime policies,
only insofar as they touch on the fate of the money Holocaust victims held
in Switzerland. In recent years Bern has proposed a series of explanations
for its wartime behavior, some of which, in retrospect, may even be con-
sidered acceptable. But surely there is no excuse for the condescending,
arrogant, insulting attitude the Swiss banks exhibited to the Holocaust sur-
vivors or the victims' heirs when they attempted to get their money from
the banks after the war. From this perspective, the accounts and moneys
may aptly be seen as a symbol of liberal, democratic Europe's treatment of
the living skeletons that came out of Auschwitz, Treblinka, the Warsaw
Ghetto, and hundreds of other places that decimated the continent's Jewish
population.

The book has two distinct sources: archival and contemporary materials.
This stems from the fact that the book deals with documented past events,
most of whose participants have already passed away, and current events,
the documentation of which is still classified, but whose heroes are still
with us. In any case, an attempt was made to verify the credibility of the
sources as much as possible, either by comparing testimony through anal-
ysis or because I witnessed some of the described events. My work as a
journalist, however, prevents me from revealing a few of my sources. The
chapter notes cover as much information as possible without revealing their
names.

On two key issues I made use of excellent prior publications. The first
is the report by Swiss historians Peter Hug and Marc Perrenoud on the
deposits problem, as handled by Switzerland until the mid-1970s, a work
based on thousands of Swiss documents and deserving of becoming a cor-
nerstone of future research. The second is the Eizenstat report on gold trade
between Switzerland and Germany and the negotiations for the return of
the gold after World War II. This American report is based on about 15
million documents and is the most up-to-date summary of the subject.
Nonetheless, concerning both reports, I did not hesitate to add details,
analysis, and even criticism in places where I felt there was a need.

A long list of people helped me in the past four years in the ongoing
research necessary for this book. Among them were Avraham Burg, Israel
Singer, Greg Rickman, Yoram Majorek, Batia Lashem, Gilad Livnah,
Thomas Borer, Zvi Barak, Rolf Bloch, Avi Becker, Akiva Lewinsky, Elan
Steinberg, Pierre Monod, Hanan Ben-Yehuda, Avraham Hirschson, Silvia
Matile-Steiner, Eldad Adar, Naftali Lavi, Moshe Zanbar, Shraga Ilam, Ron

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