61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

used by Swiss banks, as many customers sent their money to Switzerland to keep
it anonymous. Therefore they did not want any contact that was not initiated
by themselves. In the Nazi era, however, dormancy took on a totally different
dimension. The assets of customers who belonged to the groups persecuted in
territories controlled by the Third Reich became dormant because their owners
were deported and murdered. The post-war phenomenon of unclaimed money
was a result of genocide. The persecution and despoliation of, for the most part,
Jewish people by the Nazis in Germany, and also in the annexed and occupied
territories after 1938, involved the forcible closure of foreign bank accounts held
by the victims. For this purpose the laws limiting foreign exchange were
applied particularly rigorously. The Nazi authorities forced account holders to
sign forms requesting the transfer of assets deposited abroad to the foreign
exchange banks controlled by them. Often customers were not informed for
what purpose and by whom their assets were being used nor did they usually
know where they were transferred to. For example, it took the investigations
undertaken by survivors or victims’ heirs in Switzerland immediately after the
war to reveal that the assets they were looking for were no longer available in
the banks. However, the rightful claimants would have had to rely on the banks
to track down their property and estimate its value.
Although assets transferred to the Third Reich were left out of the inventory of
unclaimed assets of Nazi victims in Swiss banks, they were nevertheless part of
the restitution claims. Investigators filed some of these claims against Swiss
banks while others were supposed to be filed in Germany under reparations
legislation (Wiedergutmachungsgesetzgebung). However, they were always
dependent on receiving information from the banks about the way accounts
were surrendered. Some banks gave a factually correct but misleading answer,
namely that there was no longer any contact between the bank and the person
in question. Others in addition referred to the statutory duty to keep files for
ten years and stated that they were unable to provide information on the assets
being sought – although relevant documents are still available in the archives
today. Although in some cases the banks did inform claimants that the assets
had been paid out, they neglected to provide key details, i.e., who gave the
instruction and who received the payment. 59 At the end of the 1960s, the Zurich
Head Office of Swiss Bank Corporation portrayed the attitude that prevailed
among Swiss banks in a «highly confidential» letter, as follows:
«In our experience, there was a very great risk that the requests for information
at that time only seemed to be made in connection with German
reparations procedures, but were actually to be used to hold us liable for
any transfer performed back then. It was asserted time and again that
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