Majority Rule Guarantee of Democracy2
Swiss Bank Controversy: Who's Money Is It? It is hard to imagine having everything you ever owned taken away in a split second. Many Jews experienced this after the years of oppression by the Nazi regime. The Jews had everything stripped away: their families, their possessions, their futures, and their dignity. "I would give that money away for anybody. I should have had some relatives survive. I mean most of my friends, they had sisters, or cousins, or aunts or somebody to belong to. I had nobody," said Gizella Weisshaus (Jones 1996). It has been about fifty years now since the end of the Holocaust. Up until recent times, the survivors of the Holocaust have decided that they deserve their money that they put into the neutral Swiss bank accounts before the war. They did this to protect their assets from the Nazis. This then provides the controversy, fifty years later, do the Holocaust survivors and their families deserve the money back from the Swiss banks, or are the Swiss banks even responsible for paying back the money? The controversy first arose with Gizella Weisshaus, when she could not receive her father's money after the war ended because she did not know her father's bank account number. When she was a
Another position of the Jews is that they reject firmly to the Swiss proposal of giving only the survivors one lump sum divided up in equal parts, if proper documentation is presented. young girl, her father had been taken away to the concentration camps. It was only until a great outcry from the Holocaust victims that the Swiss agreed to form a committee to investigate the missing bank accounts. "Switzerland does not provide for the government to receive the unclaimed property of those who have died with out leaving a will or heirs. "The Swiss have pledged that at the end of this process [searching for documents], not one penny will remain in Switzerland that may have belonged to a victim of the Holocaust," said Jeffery Taufield, a spokesman for the Swiss bankers Association (Jones, 1996). Yet, even more proof for the Holocaust victims. They are also disappointed in the Swiss because they are giving the Holocaust victims a hassle when they try to recover their money. They dislike this idea because the family of the victims would not be able to claim money from their family and because not everyone had the same amount of money, everyone deserves the money that they put in, not more or less the amount of the original account (Levin, 1998). They are working with the Jewish, British, German, and United States officials in recovering information and documents that would exonerate or prove corruption of the Swiss accounts. Years after the war she went back to claim the money, and the teller told her that with out an account number she could not do this. They said that they found evidence that supports the claims that the Swiss withheld many deposits (Jones, 1996). The Holocaust victims' position is that they are owed this money back because it was theirs in the first place before the war, no questions asked. The Swiss even have laws protecting them and their reasons for not returning the money back to the survivors. The US then appointed officials to look into the findings of the documents. The Jews themselves find the whole process of recovering the money back very painful.
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