There is no art gallery on the Herengracht called De Vries Fine Arts, though many dealers in Amsterdam and The Hague were all too happy to do a brisk trade with their German occupiers during the Second World War. The story of Lena Herzfeld and her family is fictitious, but, sadly, the details of the Holocaust in Holland cited during her “testimony” are not. Of the 140,000 Jews who resided in the Netherlands at the time the roundups began, only 25,000 managed to find a place to hide. Of those, one-third were either betrayed or arrested, oftentimes by their own countrymen. The famous Hollandsche Schouwburg theater did in fact serve as a detention center, and there was indeed a crèche across the street for young children. Several hundred young lives were saved due to the courage of the staff and the Dutch Resistance, one of the few bright spots on the otherwise bleak landscape of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.

The assistance given to fugitive Nazi war criminals by the Roman Catholic Church has been well documented. So, too, has the shameful wartime behavior of Switzerland’s banks. Less well known, however, is the role played by Swiss high-technology firms in secretly supplying aspiring nuclear powers with the sophisticated equipment required to produce highly enriched uranium. In his authoritative book, Peddling Peril, proliferation expert David Albright describes how, in the 1990s, CIA operatives “witnessed Swiss government officials helping suppliers send sensitive goods to Pakistan, making a mockery of the official Swiss policy to maintain strict export control laws.” Furthermore, Albright writes, “the Swiss government demonstrated an unwillingness to take action to disrupt these activities or to work with the CIA.” Quite the opposite, in the summer of 2006, Swiss prosecutors threatened to bring criminal charges against several CIA officers involved in bringing down the global nuclear-smuggling network of A. Q. Khan. Only the intervention by officials at the highest levels of the American government convinced Bern to rethink its position.

While many Swiss firms have been willing proliferators—and no doubt remain so today—there is little disagreement among intelligence officials as to which Western European country has the most firms involved in the lucrative clandestine trade in nuclear materials. That dubious distinction belongs to Germany. Indeed, according to a very senior American intelligence official I spoke with while researching The Rembrandt Affair, much of the material required for Iran’s secret nuclear program has been happily supplied by German high-tech firms. When I asked this official why German industrialists would be willing to sell such dangerous material to so unstable a regime, he gave me a somewhat puzzled look and responded with a single word: “Greed.”