Title
Rabbi Henry I. Sobel, Looted Nazi
Gold: The Brazilian Connection
Description
In the
closing years of the war thousands of Nazis, protected by pro-Axis governments,
escaped to Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Because Getulio Vargas, Brazilian
President during World War II, was a fascist sympathiser, his country
represented a safe refuge for fleeing Nazis.
Sobel explains how the Brazilian Commission for
identifying Holocaust-era Nazi assets in Brazil was set up on his own
initiative. Once the President of Brazil, Dr. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, had
agreed to his suggestion, with the help of the Brazilian Minister of Justice and
the President, a Commission of seven members was established to search for Nazi
assets taken to Brazil before and during the war.
The Commission was funded by the government and met once a
month in Brasília. The Minister of Justice and the National Secretary for Human
Rights also attended these meetings ,in addition to three lawyers, a historian,
Sobel himself, the Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Finance, and an official at
the Foreign Ministry.
The Chief of Staff was to
provide information about active and dormant accounts at the Bank of Brazil,
formerly the Central Bank of the Government, and the Foreign Ministry official
was to provide the Commission with a list of all the Nazis who entered Brazil in
the 1940s and 1950s.
The Ministry of Justice and the University of Sao Paulo
(USP) were due to sign an agreement to establish a Documentation Center of Nazi
Wartime Activities in Brazil in March 1998 at the campus of the São Paulo
University.
The Commission had reason to believe that there were about
fifteen dormant Nazi accounts in the Bank of Brasil. Sobel thought that former
Nazi Party member Albert Blume in Brasil since 1938, whose bank vault legacy was
opened after his death in the 1980s totalling some $4.5 million (comprising gold
bars, jewellery, gold watches, rings, American dollars, Argentine pesos, Brazilian
cruzeiros, official passports of the Third Reich, and other Nazi documents,
thirty dental gold crowns and a set of gold dental bridges) had been used by the
Nazis as the keeper of Nazi assets in Latin America. His diary, also in the bank
vault and which Sobel was in the process of translating into Portuguese at the
time the article was written, included many references to Kamaradenwerk, the
Nazi network active after the war in Brazil.
Source
Rabbi Henry I.
Sobel, 'Looted Nazi Gold: The Brazilian Connection', in Cardozo Law
Review, November 1998, pp. 507-512