61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

the Clearing Office, which was to limit its investigations to the conditions at
the time that German assets in Switzerland were blocked in February 1945, in
this case the auditors went right back to the pre-war period. Their efforts illustrated
the closeness of ties until the first part of the war. For the time following
their formal dissolution in the spring of 1940, however, only weak evidence of
an on-going dependence on IG Farben was found. The case was extraordinary
for a number of reasons. Firstly, IG Farben no longer formally owned the shares
of the Swiss holding company since the early 1930s, but had merely controlled
them by means of a pooling agreement with repurchase options vis-à-vis the
share packages placed with IG Chemie. This agreement was terminated in May
1940. Furthermore, there was no sign of any of the papers that were usually an
indication of camouflage – repurchase options, concealed agreements of
different kinds, etc. The Germans had counted on the force of the facts, trusting
in their own ability to shape future conditions to a considerable extent. The
Swiss financial holding company had to be transferred unreservedly to Swiss
ownership, so as to be able to credibly state that the major interests of IG Farben
in the USA were now «Swiss». The outcome of the war, the confiscation of the
company, and the arrest of its top managers dashed hopes of any such
arrangement which had, since the outset, been burdened by uncertainty. A
group of Swiss (preferential) shareholders, built up with the support of IG
Farben in the late 1930s, now controlled the company and wanted to hear no
more of ambivalent aspects of its previous history.
In 1948 a legal conflict erupted between the representatives of the US
Department of Justice and the holding company, and was stubbornly pushed
through all levels of the judicial system. It concerned the interpretation of the
relationship of IG Chemie/Interhandel to IG Farben and was only settled out of
court in the early 1960s without the key legal questions ever being decided: was
this company a case of German interests being camouflaged, had the senior
executives been «middlemen» acting on behalf of the Germans, and had they
continued to be so even after the end of the war? Swiss diplomats intervened in
the case on several occasions once the attitude had become prevalent in
Switzerland in 1946–47 that it was difficult to prove the American reproaches
so that the possibility now arose of securing assets of considerable value for those
parties interested in Switzerland. However, the Union Bank of Switzerland was
only able to negotiate a compromise with the US Department of Justice in
1963. The American factories which had formerly belonged to IG Farben were
auctioned. Of the proceeds, some 40% went to the Union Bank of Switzerland,
which had taken over the majority of shares in Interhandel as of 1958, and
around 60% went to the USA.
As already mentioned, the Interhandel affair had unusual aspects. Even if this
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