Letter to a German Friend in Korea VII

Of Swiss Banks, CBDCs and the Joys of Slavery

Michael Buergermeister

Apr 07, 2023

Letters from Vienna #146

Letter to a German Friend in Korea VII

Of Swiss Banks, CBDCs and the Joys of Slavery

Dear I.,

Do you remember how I told you about my unhappy experience with Swiss banks? Do you recall how I told you about finding my father’s half-dozen Swiss bank accounts and how delighted I was? To my surprise, chagrin and horror, the Swiss bank in question simply stated that they couldn’t find any cash. To all intents and purposes the money of my recently deceased father had simply vanished into thin air. Furthermore, a friend told me that this was standard operating procedure with Swiss banks and that this was the main way they made their money. I have hated Swiss banks ever since and felt not a little Schadenfreude when I heard that Credit Suisse had gone belly-up. Thus, if you think this letter tinged with a degree of personal malice or spite you might well be right.

In 1946 the Swiss-Allied reparations talks began in Washington. Of them Jean Ziegler reports:

“(Paul) Rossy the cunning cynic, backed by (Ernst) Weber the melancholy bureaucrat, dispatched (Alfred) Hirs to Washington to conduct these difficult negotiations with the victorious Allies. Hirs did his utmost: he lied and cheated and sabotaged the reparations agreement to the best of his ability.”

“Marco Durrer gives the following account of Hirs’s preliminary appearances at Washington in his standard work on Swiss-American financial relations during World War II:”

“Hirs addressed the first session of the Gold Subcommittee on March 26, 1946. The general manager of the SNB [Swiss National Bank] began by stating that he had come to Washington merely as a “technical member” of the Swiss delegation… It was not for him to defend the SNB’s policy. He repeatedly stressed, in the course of his remarks on the development of Swiss-German gold transactions, that Switzerland had never had anything to do with looted gold; that was why he would not go into the question. Hirs did, however, mention that, according to the SNB’s information, two thirds of the Belgian gold were in the United States and one third in France. He presumed that, like Switzerland, other countries had shipped the bulk of their gold reserves overseas prior to the German offensive in the west.”

“At the second session on March 29, Hirs went more closely into the principles governing Switzerland’s monetary policy. The SNB had been unable, from considerations of neutrality, to decline German gold… Besides, various Reichsbank representatives had affirmed that the gold dispatched to Switzerland came from the Reichsbank’s prewar holdings…”

“…On September 18, 1944, the vice president of the Reichsbank and his staff conferred with the board of the Swiss National Bank. (Emil) Puhl stated for the record what the Swiss wanted to hear: he assured them that the Reichsbank had never dealt in stolen gold. If gold (and foreign exchange) from foreign central banks had turned up in Berlin, this was only because it had been legitimately and voluntarily transferred there by the relevant central bank. This gold from the occupied territories had been carefully weighed, paid for, and purchased by the Reichsbank in the ordinary course of business.”

“As for the gold garnered by the SS, the so-called Totengold, Puhl advised his Swiss friends to consult the relevant authorities at the SS Economic Administration Department. The Reichsbank was merely a depositary; it had never, at any stage, sent them gold of an illegal nature.”

“The eternal implication was that all the gold sent to Switzerland by the Reichsbank came either from Germany’s prewar holdings or from gold reserves that had been voluntarily relinquished – and to believe that assertion bordered on the irrational.”

“Swiss archives contain another interesting document. Drafted by the National Bank’s legal department and dated April 5, 1944, it presented an overall legal evaluation of the gold transactions conducted between Switzerland and Nazi Germany.”

“The National Bank’s lawyers urged that, where every future purchase of gold was concerned, the Reichsbank must be requested at once to confirm that it was legal German property. Henceforward, only gold bearing German stamps and accompanied by German documentation should be accepted. The National Bank should not, from now on, touch any gold bars that bore the national emblems of occupied countries. The board did not comply with this recommendation.”

“Embodied in the same legal opinion was a political analysis. The Swiss bank lawyers presented a thoroughly realistic account of Greater German occupation methods, notably the deportation of conquered peoples and, in particular, the persecution of the Jews.”

“The Swiss government and its three front men – Weber, Rossy, and Hirs – clung desperately to Emil Puhl’s web of lies and entertained him royally whenever he visited Switzerland…”

“…The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal heard much about German thefts of gold reserves held by the central banks of occupied countries and of gold privately owned by their inhabitants, likewise about the Reichsbank deposit accounts opened by the SS with gold garnered from the concentration camps. This applied particularly to the hearings that concerned the machinations of Walther Funk, the former Reichsbank president and Reich minister of economics.”

“Invited to give evidence, Puhl told of the Reichsbank’s gold transactions. Yes indeed, he testified, the SS had deposited gold and other precious metals in the form of dental crowns, pieces of jewelry, wedding rings, spectacles, et cetera, at the Reichsbank’s headquarters in Berlin. Yes indeed, thefts of gold reserves had occurred far and wide – in Norway, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, and elsewhere. The Reichsbank had had the bars melted down and adorned with prewar stamps. Most of the looted gold had reached the world market by way of Swiss banks.”

“The witness was asked a direct question: Could the Swiss have known that the gold was stolen? Yes indeed, they were fully aware of the gold’s provenance.”[1]

It is not merely Swiss banks however, which must be treated with a degree of skepticism if not suspicion but above all else: The Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of all central banks, itself. As I have written in previous letters (see letters #42[2] & #140[3]) and as I have alluded to on numerous occasions: The Bank for International Settlements is hardly to be trusted; on the contrary.

And it would be foolish to ignore an increasingly worrying reality: “According to a survey from late 2020, 86% of global central banks are conducting research on CBDCs, and as of July 2021, 56 central banks have publicly communicated their research or development efforts (see Boar and Wehrli (2021) and Auer et al (2020)). At the time of writing, two central banks have launched CBDCs and several are conducting pilots.”[4]

“As currently discussed, CBDCs can be defined as a form of digital money, denominated in the national unit of account, which is a direct liability of the central bank (Group of central banks (2020)). These can be either for wholesale use (i.e. by financial institutions) or retail use (i.e. by households and businesses – the general public). CBDCs can be either account-based, meaning that they rely on some form of identification, or token-based, meaning that they allow for anonymity in payments. CBDCs can be based on either distributed ledger technology (DLT) or conventional technological infrastructures. In most cases, CBDCs are being designed such that they preserve the two-tier structure of the monetary system, with a division of labour between the public and private sector.”[5]

Yet, it is the central banks, which seem hell bent on abolishing cash and replacing it with Central Bank Digital Currency. Is this necessarily a good thing, a form of “progress”? Not really, especially given the fact that thanks to bail-ins, by which “any debt that is owed to depositors and creditors is canceled”, having any money in any bank amounts to pure insanity. Given that the bulk of cash in banks is owned not by individuals but rather firms it’s highly likely that a carefully orchestrated financial crisis will destroy those small and medium sized companies, which survived the Scamdemic and the criminal lockdowns. As you will doubtlessly remember: Kai von Moltke pointed out that Fascism is simply the political extension of monopolistic capitalism; this is what we are facing.

All the talk of “efficiencies” and “saving money” is pure bunkum. The CBDC is, as Catherine Austin Fitts points out[6]: our surest path to Auschwitz-style slavery. I’d, in your shoes, vote against it.