Swiss Bankers Agree to Work with Jews to Probe Accounts

As Nazi Germany rose to power and began assembling its war machine throughout Europe, Greta Beer’s father set aside millions of dollars for her in a Swiss bank.

“We looked to Switzerland as if it was a citadel, a safe haven in this turbulent world around us,” recalled Beer, who left her native Romania in 1956 and now lives in Queens, N.Y.

“There was nothing safer than a small neutral country with its very powerful banks.”

After her father died, she and her mother repeatedly tried to access the money, traveling from city to city and bank to bank. Banking officials in Switzerland, however, told her that there was nothing under her father’s name.

“My father had the greatest trust in the Swiss banks,” Beer said in testimony before Congress this week. “And they broke that trust.”

Now, as a result of mounting pressure from Jewish groups and members of Congress, Beer and others like her have moved a step closer to obtaining assets that have long been held in Swiss bank accounts.

The Swiss Bankers Association has agreed to set up an independent commission with Jewish participation to determine the value of assets held in dormant accounts of Holocaust victims.

“We are committed to resolving all outstanding questions about assets that may have belonged to victims of the Holocaust in a sensitive, equitable, open, accurate and professional manner,” Hans Baer, a member of the executive board of the bankers association, told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), who heads the committee, called the hearing to turn up the heat on the Swiss banks.

“We will not be deterred by any more stonewalling, hiding behind arcane laws and technicalities,” D’Amato said. “After so many years of injustice for survivors and families of the victims alike, we must discover the truth. That is the least we can do.”

In February, the Swiss bankers declared unilaterally that they had found only $32 million in 774 dormant accounts.

The World Jewish Congress, which has been waging a campaign to reclaim the assets along with the Jewish Agency for Israel, charged that the declaration violated an agreement between the WJC and the bankers to cooperate in investigating the assets.

WJC President Edgar Bronfman told the Senate panel that the Swiss banks’ claim “defies credibility.”

Bronfman said he believes that Swiss banks are holding “several billion” in accounts that have laid dormant since the end of the Holocaust.

The Swiss banks’ premium on privacy and the difficulty of producing proof of ownership of an account that once belonged to a Holocaust victim have made it difficult for descendants to identify or claim assets.

Since the United States began to declassify records on “Project Safe Haven,” a secret postwar intelligence operation that kept tabs on Jewish assets as they were transferred out of Switzerland and other countries, the Israeli government and Jewish groups have amplified their calls to recover lost assets.

“I believe that each dollar recovered represents a little piece of dignity, not just for the survivors who will benefit, but for all mankind who will have demonstrated that it remains morally unacceptable for anyone to profit from the ashes of man’s greatest inhumanity to man,” Bronfman said.

Baer said the banks would nominate half of the members of the independent commission and that the WJC would name the other half. Those members will appoint a chairman and have the authority to call in an independent auditor.

At the end of the process, any remaining dormant accounts in Swiss banks that may have belonged to Holocaust victims will be distributed to the rightful heirs or charitable organizations, he said.

“The last thing we would ever want to do is prolong the suffering of those victimized during the Holocaust,” Bear said.

In a related development, WJC officials at the hearing unveiled recently declassified U.S. intelligence reports that show that two Swiss banks had violated banking rules by continuing to work with Nazi customers after September 1944.