A meeting last week between world Jewish leaders and Swiss bankers has been called the “first step” toward returning Swiss accounts of Holocaust victims to their rightful heirs.
The recent effort to reclaim the accounts, however, is not the first.
Switzerland, known for its banks’ premium on privacy, issued a decree in 1962 making it possible to relax that privacy temporarily in order to find the accounts of Nazi victims and distribute the assets to the proper heirs.
Despite the decree, Swiss banks refused to release the deposits to relatives without proper documentation and accurate account numbers, much of which vanished during and after the war years.
“I want my country to show civil courage,” Verena Grandelmeier, who brought the issue before Parliament earlier this year, said in an interview. “I regret that Switzerland did not do all it could in the ’60s, when the actual victims were yet alive.”
“We have to safeguard the ethic and moral of Switzerland’s reputation as a banking country,” added Grandelmeier, who was born in 1939.
Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress office here said the Jewish community and Israel did not apply enough pressure on Swiss banks in 1962.
He recalled the case of a Jewish man from Frankfurt who set up an account. The man died in the Holocaust. When family members eventually went to claim the man’s funds, the Swiss wanted them to produce a death certificate and show that they were the rightful heirs to the money, not other relatives who might still be alive.
It was an impossible task in the wake of the war, Riegner said.
An Israeli lawyer who came here after the war said he represented Nazi victims who wanted their money and assets returned.
“It was and is extremely difficult to prove the family had accounts and assets,” he said.
The lawyer spoke of an industrialist from Warsaw who had a secret bank account during World War II. When the man and his family made their way to a safe haven in Switzerland, he died of a heart attack.
The family die not have the account number and did not know which bank the account was in. Consequently, the lawyer said, the family never saw any of that money.
According to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency article from 1963, the Swiss Consulate in New York was flooded at the time with inquiries from people who often did not have many details about the accounts they sought.
Between 1962 and 1973, only $9 million from Jewish accounts in Switzerland was reportedly given to individuals who could prove that the funds were deposited by family members and to Swiss charities that aided Jews and refugees, saying that was all that existed of dormant World War II accounts.
The documentation problem still exists, but Jewish officials are working with the Swiss bankers to address some of those issues.
The Swiss Bankers Association announced Sept. 12 that $34.1 million has been found in what may be secret accounts of Holocaust victims and that more funds could be uncovered. Some of the funds could belong to non-Jews.
The Swiss attorney general, Carla del Ponte, said in an interview she believed that more money in Jewish accounts was in Swiss banks.
In the recent announcement, the bankers, who have responded to intense pressure from Israel, Jewish groups and survivors 50 years after World War II, said an independent office would be set up to help relatives of Holocaust victims search for accounts.
The association also said Switzerland would refrain from invoking its 10-year statute of limitations on dormant accounts.
Representatives of the bankers association met with a Jewish delegation last week that included WJC President Edgar Bronfman, Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and members of the Swiss Jewish community.
After the meeting, Bronfman and Burg expressed satisfaction with the talks.
“Potential for a breakthrough in the relations between us and the Swiss banks has been created on a historic scale,” Burg said in a statement released after the Sept. 14 meeting.
A follow-up meeting between the bankers and the Jewish officials is scheduled for next month, Bronfman said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
