Title
Diana Jean Schemo, 'A Nazi's Trail
leads to gold - Looted from Jews?- in Brazil',
New York Times , 24 April 2002
Description
The article provides
information on the investigations of the Brazilian Comissão Especial de
Apuraçao de Patrimônios Nazistas (Commission for the Investigation of Nazi
Assets.) Among the areas of investigation were: Odessa (a post-war Nazi organization
set up to aid and finance former Nazis), stolen masterpieces such as
a $1 million Madonna by Raphael exported to Brazil, and dormant accounts opened
by Nazis who sought refuge in Brazil. Of these, fourteen accounts were identified,
totalling $15 million. The Brazilian Commission received assistance from The
World Jewish Congress.
Albert Blume, German born member of the Nazi Party in
Brazil since 1938, died in 1983 leaving in a Brazilian bank vault an estate
worth $4 million of watches, rings, gold bars and gold teeth. Blume's documents,
including a diary in two volumes, found in the vault by Ricardo Penteado,
assigned by the Brazilian court as the legal executor, showed that he joined the
Nazi Party in 1933 but was expelled in 1936. In 1938 he emigrated to Brazil to
work for E. Schlemm & Co., a company acting as an agent for German
businesses trading in Brazil.
His aunt, Margarida
Blume has claimed her right to his legacy from Brazilian courts of law. The case
came to the attention of the Brazilian Commission to investigate Nazi war
criminals. This was 'the first discovery of a perpetrator's [bank] account',
according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wisenthal Centre in Los
Angeles.
A member of the Brazilian Commission, Rabbi
Henry Sobel, contends that the fortune did not belong to Blume who was, in his
opinion, a spy later used as a conduit for stolen gold. A Colonel Walter Blume
was condemned to death at Nuremberg, but later the sentence was commuted in 1951
to 25 years and reduced further in 1955. According to Ottavio Costa, editor of
Manchete, (whose source is the Holocaust survivor Ben Abraham) this was the same
man as the Albert Blume who died in Brazil in 1983, who had been a key figure in
Odessa and a Gestapo Colonel: Walter Blume sentenced at Nuremberg for his role
in the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe. It would be useful if the Nazi's
diary, which Sobel was translating into Portuguese, as he states in his article
Rabbi Henry I. Sobel, 'Looted Nazi Gold: The Brazilian Connection' Cardozo Law
Review (November 1998), were published, or at least to know where it is to be
stored in the future.
Source
New
York Times
, 24 April 2002