Swiss media on Friday praised a U.S. report on gold looted by Nazi Germany as balanced and fair, but added it contained few new revelations and showed scant understanding for the concept of neutrality.
The report, which was compiled by U.S. Under-secretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat and released on Wednesday, was splashed across the front pages of all major Swiss papers, which did not publish on Thursday due to the Ascencion Day holiday."God bless America," said Journal de Geneve.
"The proof is done," the paper said in its front-page editorial. "Seven months of investigations and dozens of thousands of pages of documents have reached the conclusion that the Swiss were the bankers of Nazis," it added.
"Fair and therefore shocking," said Zurich's Tages-Anzeiger.
"Switzerland was fearing the worst from the Eizenstat report. Past assumptions about the gold clearing house are now proven and it is frightening," the Tages Anzeiger added.
"No understanding of neutrality," said the conservative and influential Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
Even if the Eizenstat report hardly adds anything new to the discussion about Switzerland, Neue Zuercher Zeitung said it would be wrong to conclude that one can give an all-clear signal and go back to business-as-usual.
"There are still some explosives in the report and it is still not clear that Switzerland has learned the right communications strategy," the paper added.
The long-awaited U.S. study criticised Switzerland for banking Nazi gold but also said the U.S. government after the war was not tough enough in pushing the Swiss to account for and return gold they had acquired in dealings with Germany.
The study showed that Nazi Germany's central bank, the Reichs-bank, had sold melted-down gold from the jewelry, even the teeth, of death camp victims along with gold looted from occupied countries to Switzerland and other countries to finance the war machine.
But Neue Zuercher Zeitung bemoaned the lack of details about gold from Holocaust victims, saying it had long been suspected that melted-down loot ended up in the Reichsbank's vaults.
"Unfortunately, the report is a little short on details when it comes to the issue of gold from victims."