World Jewish Congress says: Chase Manhattan may have helped Nazis loot art

By Joan Gralla

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The World Jewish Congress charged Wednesday that Chase Manhattan Bank helped the German ambassador to France loot Jewish-owned artwork during the Second World War.

The WJC's executive director, Elan Steinberg, said that according to a U.S. Treasury Department report, Chase's French branch was actively aiding Nazi Germany in securing assets. "There is evidence that German assets were placed at Chase, which were used in transactions involving Jewish looted art," Steinberg said. The 1945 Treasury report, declassified two years ago and provided to Reuters by the WJC, said that on May 30, 1944, the German embassy deposited 6 million francs -- about $150,000 -- as a security bond for an embassy credit with another bank, called Banque Transatlantique. "The funds were to be released to Jansen (a firm that banked at Banque Transatlantique) upon settlement of an unspecified matter, which apparently involved certain tapestries temporarily in possession of the German embassy," the Treasury document said.

The Treasury report also said the German ambassador to France Otto Abetz kept embassy funds at Chase Manhattan's Paris branch. Asked about the charge about Abetz, Chase Manhattan spokesman Jim Finn declined comment, saying: "There are all kinds of allegations and who can tell what's true today." Finn said Chase Manhattan has done some 13,000 hours of research in U.S. and European archives on its wartime role. A separate post-war report by the U.S. War Department has said that Abetz played an important role in seizing art.

On July 17, 1940, he formed the Service Kunsberg, led by Freiherr Johann von Kunsberg, the commandant of the German secret police, to confiscate works of art in France, the document said. Finn also declined comment on a charge the WJC made on Tuesday that the bank's Chateauneuf branch, near the Riviera in unoccupied France, sent German assets back to Germany and German-held areas. Finn repeated the bank's previous response to charges the Paris branch helped the Nazis steal a handful of Jewish accounts and assisted Germany in getting U.S. dollars for marks that might have come from forced sales of Jewish assets. This was against U.S. policy; Washington was trying to keep assets out of Germany's hands. "We're not going to defend the indefensible. It was wrong, we've made public what was wrong, and that's it for us," he said.

Irving trial witness to sit on 'looted art' panel

Our opinion

 

WELL if it is Otto Abetz, the Chase Manhattan's billions are safe: because ... the Jewish wise men have appointed arch-ignoramus Prof. Richard Evans (right, Deborah Lipstadt's $200,000 Third Reich "expert") to their Art Loot commission, and Evans admitted under cross-examination by David Irving (on Trial Day 21, Feb.16, 2000, page 176) that he has not the faintest idea who Abetz (Hitler's ambassador to France throughout W.W.II) was. The Sonderkommando Künsberg was one of the most interesting bodies in the war; historians' fingers always itch when they come up across its files -- its main task was securing the secret files of defeated foreign powers as soon as the Nazi tanks rolled in. You may find papers in the Künsberg files that you no longer find in the Public Records Office. . .