61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Conscious of the importance of personal rights and their restrictive effect on the
general accessibility of source material, the Commission members were of the
opinion that their research archive should be preserved in its entirety. However,
in July 2001, the Swiss Federal Council decided otherwise and granted
companies the option to take back the photocopies made in their archives. This
affects some 12,000 records.
Important as privileged access to archive material was for the ICE, there was no
guarantee that it could make events dating back over half a century fully transparent.
This is because even corporate archives tell only part of the story, and
only one of many possible stories. First of all, no archival sources exist that
would be able to provide us with information on everything that was put down
in written form and is still available as a document today. In many cases,
meetings that lasted for days get only a few terse sentences informing us of
decisions. Differences of opinion and controversies seldom leave any trace on
paper; nor do conversations in the lobby, telephone calls or an exchange of views
during a chance encounter. The more confidential matters were, the less likely
they were to be recorded on paper. Second, there are intuitive relevance criteria
within companies that decide what is worth keeping and what is not. Third, the
documents that we use as historical sources served specific interests and
purposes. Far from giving a «neutral» depiction of events, they view facts from
a specific perspective and therefore charge them with meanings which in turn
– implicitly or explicitly – suggest a specific interpretation. Nevertheless, it
cannot be concluded from these qualifications that access to company archives
was of little value. On the contrary, only by using this source material will we
be able to understand management decision-making processes and arrive at a
more complex and at the same time differentiated interpretation of historical
development. The interconnection of different perspectives is always important
in this regard, as instanced by the affair surrounding the financial holding
company Interhandel. 35 This shows how much Swiss, German and US source
material was coloured by a specific interpretation of events, resulting in a large
number of divergences and various alliances of interests. An attempt to research
the circumstances on the basis of corporate sources led to the sobering realisation
that the Union Bank of Switzerland, into whose possession Interhandel’s
records had passed when it acquired the company in the mid-1960s, had in
1994 destroyed around 90% of all the material transferred. However, what
remained in the Bank’s archives was sufficient, together with other sources from
private and public archives at home and abroad, to provide a plausible reconstruction
of events.
At the same time, this experience also encourages scepticism. It is a well-known
and undeniable fact that both private and public archives routinely – and now
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