61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

German business collapsed and whose most important records had been taken
into the possession of the Union Bank of Switzerland. The fact that the
documents intended for destruction included records relating to house renovations
in Berlin between 1930 and 1940 and after 1945 gave rise to the suspicion
that these may have been cases of «Aryanisation», or at very least touched upon
sensitive issues. A criminal investigation was therefore launched on the grounds
of possible violation of the Federal Decree. At the same time, the Bank initiated
proceedings against the night-watchman, who was accused of having breached
bank secrecy by passing on classified documents to the Jewish community in
Zurich (Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich), which publicised the incident. Both
proceedings have since been dropped without result.
Current archive situation and oral history
A further set of problems relates directly to the difficulties encountered by the
ICE in the course of its researches. First there was the problem of quantity: the
archive of the Swiss Clearing Office (Schweizerische Verrechnungsstelle, SVSt) alone,
which recorded, supervised and audited most of the relevant financial transactions
between Switzerland and Germany, still comprises well over 1000 boxes,
and this after being reduced by an eighth in the 1950s and then again by almost
three-quarters between 1959 and 1961. They were transferred from ten
locations in Zurich to the Swiss Federal Archives in Berne, where they can – up
to now with the exception of the so-called «Rees Report» – be inspected today. 38
As early as September 1996, an internal study showed that a full evaluation of
the source material relevant to the ICE’s mandate to assess the role played by
the Swiss financial centre during the years 1933–1945 in the Federal Archives
alone, would require around 45 man-years to complete. 39 Besides that, the
archives of the Swiss National Bank have voluminous holdings which have
hardly been evaluated to date, not to mention the enormous quantities of
material which were available in US, British, German, Russian, Polish, Italian,
French, Dutch and Austrian archives for the investigation of a wide variety of
issues.
Work on source material in the ICE’s key area, the archives of private companies
and trade associations, turned out to be particularly complex. A questionnaire
was sent out to the major Swiss companies at the beginning of the project and
this was completed by all of them, with one exception (Burrus SA in Lausanne).
It soon became apparent that despite some lacunae in the archives, a plethora of
material is still available. How could we ensure a targeted and problem-oriented
coverage of highly heterogeneous, often fragmentary source material, frequently
stored pell-mell in different locations, without any standardised finding aid?
This was the key question around which many of the ICE’s efforts were to centre
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