Majority Rule Guarantee of Democracy2 essays

Majority Rule Guarantee of Democracy2 essays Swiss Bank Controversy: Whos Money Is It? It is hard to imagine having everything you ever owned taken away in a split second. Many Jews experienced this after the years of oppression by the Nazi regime. The Jews had everything stripped away: their families, their possessions, their futures, and their dignity. I would give that money away for anybody. I should have had some relatives survive. I mean most of my friends, they had sisters, or cousins, or aunts or somebody to belong to. I had nobody, said Gizella Weisshaus (Jones 1996). It has been about fifty years now since the end of the Holocaust. Up until recent times, the survivors of the Holocaust have decided that they deserve their money that they put into the neutral Swiss bank accounts before the war. They did this to protect their assets from the Nazis. This then provides the controversy, fifty years later, do the Holocaust survivors and their families deserve the money back from the Swiss banks, or are the Swiss banks even responsible for paying back the money? The controversy first arose with Gizella Weisshaus, when she could not receive her fathers money after the war ended because she did not know her fathers bank account number. When she was a young girl, her father had been taken away to the concentration camps. As he was being taken away, he mentioned to her that he had put money away in a Swiss Bank account and that she should go and claim it when the war ended. Years after the war she went back to claim the money, and the teller told her that with out an account number she could not do this. They then told her it would take five years to research the dormant account; therefore she would have to wait. Her response was, It made me angry that even now they claim they need five years to find these dormant accounts, as if fifty years wasnt enough (Jones, 1996). Weisshaus was the first one to raise the re...