61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

e «never to mention the entire affair again», but that it was impossible to
maintain complete silence in the face of the accusations circulating. 66 This
silence was interrupted on the one hand because many survivors of the Nazis’
policy of persecution and extermination wanted to find out what had happened
to their bank accounts. On the other hand, there were many occasions on which
Jewish organisations approached the banks or the Swiss authorities directly to
demand the surrender of unclaimed victims’ assets.
In May 1954, the legal representatives of the big banks co-ordinated their
response to heirs so that the banks would have at their disposal a concerted
mechanism for deflecting any kind of enquiry. They agreed not to provide
further information on transactions dating back more than ten years under any
circumstances, and to refer to the statutory obligation to keep files for only ten
years, even if their records would have allowed them to provide the information.
However, the subject never disappeared entirely from public discussion.
Throughout the post-war period the banks relied on a combination of discreetly
playing down the problem and erecting barriers to investigation: time and again
they would bring banking secrecy into play in order to legitimise their reluctance
to provide information while at the same time charging high search fees
for conducting investigations. Examples show that claimants had to pay
25 francs in the 1950s and as much as 250 francs in the 1960s. Twenty years
later a search could cost as much as 750 francs. 67 Because dormant accounts often
contained small amounts, these fees frequently exceeded the value of the assets
being sought and, together with the routinely charged administrative or other
costs, reduced them substantially so that 50% of balances outstanding up to
1999 amounted to less than 100 francs, and as many as 70% of the accounts
contained less than 1,000 francs. 68
Due to the deduction of such fees, unclaimed accounts, deposits and safe-deposit
boxes could also disappear in the space of a few decades. The assets found by the
ICEP in 1999, whose owners had not come forward by the time the ICE and the
ICEP began their investigations, therefore constitute only part of the total.
When presenting its findings, the ICEP stated that no information was
available on 2,758,000 of the total of 6,858,100 holdings (usually bank
accounts) that existed between 1933 and 1945. 69 This means that no assets were
listed for more than ten years, either because the balances had been paid out (on
the instructions of the customers) or because they had been cancelled by the
bank without any instructions from the customer as a result of the erosion of
their value. It was the small unclaimed balances that most often disappeared.
This usually happened because of a combination of non-payment of interest and
the accumulation of bank charges over a prolonged period. If the account had
shrunk to a minimal amount, it was cashed in. After ten years the records could
446