How UBS Stole Billions from Those Gassed At Auschwitz
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
The massacre in Sydney on the first night of Hanukkah was a gut punch, not just because of the brutality but because of what it exposed: how fragile the illusion of safety really is. I am the father of nine Australian citizens the husband of one. Debbie’s family escaped the Holocaust in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and came to a safe haven down under. Or so they thought.
This tragedy hit me personally as a Rabbi and not just as a family man because of my deep ties to the Australian Jewish community, and Sydney in particular. The Rebbe sent me to Sydney with nine colleagues when I was eighteen years old to open the city’s first ever Rabbinical College. The day we arrived we are on the front page of Australia’s leading publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, which took pride in a University for Rabbis on its shores.
For two years I was in charge of all adult education for Chabad in Sydney. They were the two most formative and important years of my life. I have since returned to Australia hundreds of times, appeared on all the leading national TV programs for decades, spoken to audiences of thousands, and brought many people to Jewish observance in a city I truly love.
And now, I am sickened and depressed to my core. Debbie just returned from Sydney last week, visiting her parents, while I stayed home for our ninth child who is a High School senior. When I was last in Sydney in about June, I spoke to thousands of people in the Shuls, warning them that a mass casualty event in Australia was God forbid likely, given the tsunami of Jew-hatred that had engulfed the country, especially with Australia having taken in hundreds of thousands of Islamists. Not peaceful Muslims, who are equal under God in every way, but Islamists, a political ideology of the Muslim brotherhood that seeks a Second Holocaust.
Genocides don’t just happen immediately but gradually and incrementally. And even the aftermath of a genocide usually represents a gradual and then suddenly catastrophic set of injustices that, if not corrected, sets the stage for the next cataclysm.
The Holocaust did not begin with murder.
It began with accountants.
Before Jews were deported to ghettos and camps, they were stripped-systematically and legally-of their economic existence. Their bank accounts were frozen, their businesses seized, their insurance policies voided, their assets transferred, catalogued, and redistributed. The genocide of European Jewry was preceded by one of the most comprehensive financial expropriations in modern history.
That theft was not an afterthought. It was a prerequisite.
And it could not have occurred without banks.
Two institutions stand at the center of this history: Deutsche Bank, the financial backbone of Nazi Germany, and the Swiss banking system that later consolidated into UBS, which became the world’s most sophisticated custodian of stolen Jewish wealth.
What followed the war-decades of denial, obstruction, and only grudging restitution under overwhelming pressure-reveals a deeper truth: while laws changed, institutional culture did not fully transform. The reflexes that once treated Jews as financially suspect never entirely vanished.
The Financial Blueprint of Jewish Destruction
The Nazi regime understood that a people deprived of resources is a people that can be destroyed with little resistance. Long before the Wannsee Conference formalized the “Final Solution,” Jews were subjected to a relentless campaign of economic annihilation.
The process was called Aryanization. It was theft masquerading as law.
Jewish-owned businesses were forced into sales at a fraction of their value. Shares were transferred under coercion. Bank accounts were frozen “for protection.” Insurance policies were canceled on technicalities. Even household items were inventoried and confiscated.
This required infrastructure: legal expertise, financial intermediaries, credit mechanisms, and institutional legitimacy. That infrastructure was supplied by Germany’s banking system.
Deutsche Bank: Not a Bystander, but a Pillar
Deutsche Bank was not merely Germany’s largest bank during the Nazi era; it was a central pillar of the regime’s economic machinery.
Historical research-including investigations commissioned by Deutsche Bank itself-has established that the bank played a role in financing Nazi industrial expansion, facilitating the forced transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises, and absorbing assets stripped from Jews who were expelled, deported, or murdered.
The bank operated branches throughout Germany and occupied territories, integrating itself seamlessly into the Nazi economy. It provided credit to companies that benefited directly from forced labor and expropriation.
Deutsche Bank’s own historical inquiry later uncovered documents showing that loans issued through its Katowice branch helped finance construction work connected to Auschwitz. This was not abstract complicity. It was a financial link to the most infamous killing center in human history.
Auschwitz was built not only with ideology and hatred, but with credit.
After the war, Deutsche Bank, now ironically owned in great part by UBS, did not face a moral reckoning commensurate with its role. Like many German institutions, it reintegrated quickly into postwar economic life. Executives were recycled. Assets remained largely intact. The victims were gone.
Switzerland’s Role:
If German banks were the engine of Jewish expropriation, Swiss banks were its vault. Tens of billions of dollars that belonged to Jews gassed by the Nazis was largely held by Swiss banks like UBS.
Switzerland maintained official neutrality during World War II. Its banks, however, were anything but neutral in outcome. Swiss institutions became repositories for Jewish assets deposited by desperate refugees and for Nazi-looted wealth transferred across borders.
Banking secrecy-enshrined in Swiss law-became a near-perfect shield.
After the war, Holocaust survivors and heirs approached Swiss banks seeking access to accounts opened by parents and grandparents who had fled or been murdered. They encountered an institutional wall.
Banks demanded death certificates for people murdered in gas chambers. They required documentation destroyed during the war. They labeled accounts “dormant” and quietly absorbed them. Survivors were treated not as victims, but as nuisances.
This behavior persisted not for years, but for decades.
The most morally grotesque chapter came after 1945.
Jews who survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen-often penniless and traumatized-were forced to beg Swiss banks for what little remained of their families’ savings. Many were rebuffed. Some were humiliated. Others were told no records existed.
The effect was predictable: survivors died, claims expired, and the money stayed with the banks.
This was not a misunderstanding. It was a business model.
Swiss banks insisted that they were bound by secrecy laws and procedural requirements. But those requirements were selectively enforced in ways that overwhelmingly disadvantaged Jews.
By the late twentieth century, the accumulated evidence was damning.
The World Jewish Congress Takes Them On
It took an extraordinary confrontation to break the silence.
In the 1990s, the World Jewish Congress (WJC)-under the leadership of Edgar Bronfman-launched a sustained, multi-year global campaign against Swiss banks. Bronfman understood that polite diplomacy would fail. Only pressure-legal, political, and economic-would work.
The WJC documented survivor testimony, commissioned research, and mobilized public opinion. Class-action lawsuits were filed in U.S. courts. American state treasurers threatened to divest public pension funds from Swiss banks. Congressional hearings were convened.
The pressure was relentless.
Swiss banks initially responded with denial and indignation. They claimed records were lost. They questioned the motives of claimants. They insisted the issue had been exaggerated.
Then came the Volcker Commission, an independent audit established to investigate dormant accounts. Its findings shattered the banks’ credibility and forced transparency.
Only under this pressure did Swiss banks-including UBS-capitulate.
The 1998 Settlement: Justice Delayed, Justice Diminished
In 1998, UBS and Credit Suisse, which is now owned by UBS, agreed to a $1.25 billion settlement, the largest Holocaust-era restitution agreement in history. The funds were designated for Holocaust survivors, forced laborers, and heirs of dormant account holders.
The settlement closed legal claims. It did not admit guilt.
To be clear and to summarize, overwhelming evidence showed that Swiss banks like UBS had dormant accounts belonging to Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, refugees who fled Nazi Europe, and survivors who were later stonewalled when they tried to recover their money. Banks demanded death certificates from people who had been gassed in Auschwitz, imposed impossible documentation standards, lost records, and in some cases may have knowingly concealed assets. UBS and Credit Suisse were the two principal banks implicated.
As a result, in 1998, UBS and Credit Suisse agreed to the $1.25 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their families. The settlement was approved by a U.S. federal court and administered under judicial supervision. This was not charity and not goodwill-it was restitution for documented wrongdoing. Independent investigations, including the Volcker Commission, confirmed that the banks had systematically failed to return Jewish assets and had not acted in good faith for decades after the war.
The banks eventually paid-but only after intense pressure from survivors, Jewish organizations, U.S. lawmakers, and public outrage. Anyone who tells you this is a “myth” or “exaggeration” is wrong.
It also came far too late. Many survivors had already died. Others received only a fraction of what had been stolen. And the settlement, while historic, allowed banks to declare the matter “resolved.”
[Incidentally, I so respected and loved everything that Edgar Bronfman, with whom I was friendly, achieved for the Jewish people, that after his sad passing in December, 2013, I joined with his son, my friend Matthew, and dedicated a Torah to him at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square in front of 1000 people including luminaries like the great Elie Weisel and Sheldon Adelson. That Torah is with us till today.]
Swiss banks, like UBS, did not repent. They calculated-and paid only when silence became more expensive than truth.
What the settlement never addressed was the ingrained suspicion of Jewish claimants, the bureaucratic cruelty, and the reflexive hostility toward Jews who demanded accountability.
Compliance Is Not Conscience
Restitution did not transform institutional DNA.
Banks complied with legal demands. They learned how to issue apologies. They began to fund Holocaust memorials and diversity panels.
They did not necessarily learn humility.
The stereotypes that fueled financial antisemitism-the Jew as manipulative, dishonest, overly aggressive-were never fully dismantled. They were sanitized. Modernized. Repackaged in corporate language.
The Unbroken Line
No one is accusing UBS today of Nazi crimes.
The accusation is more precise.
It is that the cultural instincts that enabled financial antisemitism were never fully uprooted: suspicion of Jewish assertiveness, discomfort with Jewish visibility, readiness to shame rather than serve.
UBS would probably respond that they have Jewish employees, but a thin veneer of Jew-cover does not constitute reparation for billions of dollars in stolen assets that allegedly remain outstanding.
In the 1930s, Jews were portrayed as financial schemers.
In the 1990s, survivors were treated as opportunists.
The uniforms changed. The reflex endured.
Why This Story Must Be Told
As Jews are assailed, libeled, attacked and murdered throughout the world, it behooves us all to remember that it begins with finance. Notice that before 11 Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh, before a Jewish woman was shot and killed at Chabad of San Diego, before a Jewish woman was burned alive in Boulder, Colorado, and before 16 Jews were massacred on Hanukkah in Australia, the BDS movement had been moving in full gear to destroy Israel economically. And the world let it happen.
And that’s why th Swiss banks have to be held to account, today. We need a new Edgar Bronfman who completes the job that this great man began.
Banks that profited-directly or indirectly-from the destruction of Jewish life carry a permanent obligation to behave differently. That obligation does not expire with settlements or press releases.
Holocaust memory is not a branding exercise. It is a moral test.
And when financial institutions forget that Jews were once robbed on their way to the gas chambers, they risk repeating the logic that made that robbery possible-just with better stationery.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is widely known as “America’s Rabbi”, and is one of the world’s most recognized and influential Jewish voices. Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley