How UBS Stole Billions from Those Gassed at Auschwitz

The massacre in Sydney on the first night of Chanukah 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 and the husband of one. Debbie’s family escaped the Holocaust in Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and came to what they believed was a safe haven down under.

This tragedy hit me personally not only as a family man but as a rabbi with deep ties to the Australian Jewish community, and Sydney in particular. The Lubavitcher 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 were on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald, which took pride in a university for rabbis on its shores. For two years I ran adult education for Chabad in Sydney—two of the most formative years of my life.

I have since returned to Australia hundreds of times, appeared on every major national television program, spoken to audiences of thousands, and helped bring many people to Jewish observance in a city I deeply love.

And now I am sickened to my core.

Debbie was in Sydney just last week visiting her parents, while I stayed home with our youngest, a high school senior. When I was last in Sydney, around June, I warned Jewish audiences that a mass-casualty event was tragically likely given the tsunami of Jew-hatred engulfing the country—especially after Australia admitted hundreds of thousands of Islamists. Not Muslims, who are our brothers and equal under God, but Islamists: a political ideology that seeks a second Holocaust.

Genocides do not begin with murder. They begin gradually. Incrementally. And often with something far less visible than violence.

They begin with finance.

The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers. It started with accountants.

Before Jews were deported, they were stripped—systematically and legally—of their economic existence. Bank accounts frozen. Businesses seized. Insurance policies voided. Assets transferred and redistributed. The genocide of European Jewry was preceded by one of the most comprehensive financial expropriations in modern history.

That theft was not incidental. It was essential.

And it could not have happened without banks.

Two financial systems were central: Deutsche Bank, the financial backbone of Nazi Germany, and Swiss banks—later consolidated into UBS—which became the custodians of stolen Jewish wealth.

Deutsche Bank was not a bystander. It financed Nazi industrial expansion, facilitated the forced transfer of Jewish-owned enterprises, and absorbed assets stripped from Jews who were expelled, deported, or murdered. Its own postwar historical investigation revealed that loans issued through its Katowice branch helped finance construction tied to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was built not only with hatred—but with credit.

After the war, there was no reckoning proportionate to the crime. Executives were recycled. Assets remained intact. The victims were gone.

If German banks were the engine of Jewish expropriation, Swiss banks were its vault.

Under the cover of “neutrality” and fortified by banking secrecy laws, Swiss banks like UBS held tens of billions of dollars belonging to Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Refugees deposited assets in desperation. Nazi-looted wealth crossed borders. After the war, survivors and heirs came seeking what little remained.

They were stonewalled.

Banks demanded death certificates from people murdered in gas chambers. They required documents destroyed in the war. Accounts were declared “dormant” and quietly absorbed. Survivors were treated not as victims, but as inconveniences.

This was not confusion. It was policy.

For decades, Jews who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen were forced to beg Swiss banks for their own money. Many were humiliated. Many were rejected. Many died before claims were resolved—if they were acknowledged at all.

The money stayed with the banks.

Only in the 1990s did the wall finally crack, when the World Jewish Congress—led by Edgar Bronfman—launched a relentless global campaign. Lawsuits. Congressional hearings. Threats of divestment by U.S. pension funds. Public exposure.

Swiss banks denied. Deflected. Obstructed.

Then came the Volcker Commission. Its findings destroyed their credibility.

In 1998, UBS and Credit Suisse agreed to a $1.25 billion settlement—the largest Holocaust-era restitution agreement in history. This was not charity. It was restitution for documented wrongdoing. Independent investigations confirmed that the banks had systematically failed to return Jewish assets and had acted in bad faith for decades.

They paid only when silence became more expensive than truth.

Even then, justice was diminished. Many survivors were already dead. Others received pennies on the dollar. The banks closed the books and declared the matter “resolved.”

But culture was never addressed.

The suspicion of Jewish claimants. The bureaucratic cruelty. The reflexive hostility toward Jews who demanded accountability—none of that was uprooted.

Compliance is not conscience.

No one is accusing UBS today of running gas chambers. The charge is more precise: that the institutional instincts that enabled financial antisemitism were never fully eradicated.

UBS will say it has Jewish employees. That defense has been used before.

In the 1930s, Jews were portrayed as financial schemers.

In the 1990s, survivors were treated as opportunists.

The uniforms changed. The reflex endured.

As Jews are attacked, libeled, and murdered across the world, we must remember how this always begins. Before Pittsburgh. Before San Diego. Before Boulder. Before Sydney. There was economic warfare—boycotts, divestment, financial isolation.

And we let it happen.

That is why the story of UBS must be told—not as history, but as warning.

Banks that profited from the destruction of Jewish life carry a permanent moral obligation. That obligation does not expire with settlements or press releases.

Holocaust memory is not branding. It is a test.

UBS passed audits.

It passed settlements.

It passed public relations reviews.

It failed that test.

And when financial institutions forget that Jews were robbed on their way to the gas chambers, they risk repeating the logic that made that robbery possible—only now with better stationery.