ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 19, 1997 TAG: 9702190072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
SOURCE: Associated Press
Sweden's eminent Wallenberg family funneled millions of dollars in gold into Swiss banks, even though it may have come from Nazi plundering, according to a newspaper report Tuesday citing newly opened U.S. documents.
The Wallenbergs - bankers and industrialists often referred to as ``Sweden's Rockefellers'' - are at the center of Sweden's re-examination of its actions during World War II, when it was officially neutral.
The family's most famous member, Raoul, is lionized for saving Hungarian Jews from Nazi terror, but his cousins Jacob and Marcus have been criticized for doing business with Nazi Germany.
The report, in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, cites a U.S. Justice Department document that it says was written in 1949.
The Commerce Department is reviewing U.S. documents in its investigation of questions surrounding Holocaust victims' assets, but spokesman Jim Desler in Washington refused to comment on individual papers under review.
Dagens Nyheter said the U.S. documents show the Wallenbergs acted as business fronts for the German electronics company Bosch in the United States by purchasing the company's American subsidiary. The purchase was deceptive because the Wallenbergs gave Bosch the absolute right to buy back the subsidiary, the newspaper said.
In 1943, the German government turned over a substantial amount of gold to the German parent company. Bosch used some of the gold to repurchase shares in the U.S. subsidiary, according to the report.
The Wallenbergs then used the gold, worth about $13 million at today's rates, to buy securities from two Swiss banks, the newspaper said.
Jacob Wallenberg inquired where the gold had come from, the U.S. report said.
``If it was of an offensive origin, Wallenberg recommended that the gold be sold and that someone in exchange would buy Swiss or Swedish securities,'' the newspaper quoted the documents as saying. That transaction was carried out, the Dagens Nyheter said.
A spokesman for the Wallenberg family, Nils Ingvar Lundin, said he could not comment on the report, but noted that a government commission is investigating whether Nazi loot remains in Sweden. The family has said it would provide access to archives of the bank it owned during the war years.
Along with the commission, which is focusing on Jewish property and unclaimed bank accounts, the central bank is investigating whether gold stolen by the Nazis remains in its reserves. Sweden returned about 14 tons to the Netherlands and Belgium after the war.
Hoping to establish the extent of missing assets held by Holocaust victims, Israel announced plans Tuesday to search Switzerland's government archive for duplicates of bank records that may have been destroyed.
Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency, said he has information the archive contains duplicate records, but he cannot be sure until investigators examine them.
It could be ``the one place where no one shredded a thing,'' said Burg, whose quasi-governmental agency oversees global Jewish affairs.
A director of the Swiss Federal Archive said that although the government archive contains some bank records, including reports on dormant accounts, they are incomplete.
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