61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

of Swiss ownership, others without (and at lower prices). Trade in Royal Dutch
shares was taken up again towards the end of 1942, after having been suspended
for some months. This sort of trading was the subject of the first warning issued
by the Allies in January 1943, when they stated that the acquisition of assets
looted by the Germans was inadmissible. In 1943, the major Swiss banks
stopped trading in Royal Dutch shares and left it to smaller firms which were
less in the public eye. In 1946, the value of securities of dubious provenance to
find their way to Switzerland during the war was estimated by the Federal
Department of Finance (Eidgenössisches Finanzdepartement, EFD) to be between
50 and 100 million francs. 23
After the end of the war such trading in securities was included in the restitution
lawsuits; however, it was never possible to discover the full extent of the
channels and networks through which looted securities reached the Swiss
market. Such transactions were able to flourish in the 1930s because a grey
market for dubious but legal securities trading came into being in Switzerland,
favoured by the foreign exchange control measures adopted by Germany and
other Central European states. As a result of the international financial crisis,
Germany became interested in covert transactions for redeeming German
securities. Once the Swiss institutions had become involved in the grey market,
they did not stop there: also during the Second World War securities markets
were used for illegal transactions.
Banking operations and financial relations with the USA, 1939–1945
While the level of investment by Swiss banks in Germany fell during the war
and their efforts were very much concentrated on repatriating funds, the volume
of business with the United States continued to increase. As already mentioned,
this trend had started in the 1930s. When after the occupation of Prague in
March 1939 war in Europe seemed increasingly likely, the Swiss Bank Corporation
decided to set up an agency in New York; it opened six weeks after the
outbreak of the war. At the end of the 1930s, other Swiss banks also considered
establishing a foothold in safer territory. After the panic on the British and
Canadian markets following the political crisis in September 1938, the USA
seemed the obvious choice. In December 1938, Credit Suisse examined the
possibility of buying an overseas branch: the renowned Bank Speyer & Co. was
up for sale. Credit Suisse saw a major obstacle, however, in that it was a «Jewish»
bank with a «an odour not easily effaced [...] even if the non-Aryan partners
could be eliminated». 24 In the same Nazi vein, a senior member of the
management stated that «Today the firm is still considered to be Jewish,
although the possibility exists of Aryanising it in a friendly way.» At the
beginning of 1940, Credit Suisse opened its own New York agency on the basis
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