Swiss Hold Holocaust Millions Bankers Belatedly Discover Long-Dormant Accounts Of Holocaust Victims

After denying for years that there was any money left in their coffers belonging to descendants of Nazi Holocaust victims, the Swiss banking community announced Tuesday that its members had discovered at least $34 million in dormant bank accounts opened before the end of World War II that might have belonged to Jews.

The bankers said they would set up an independent office, a banking ombudsman, so that relatives of Holocaust victims could be helped in looking for suspected lost accounts.

The about-face by the Swiss banks came after a summer of intense pressure from Jewish groups, the Israeli government and scores of Jewish survivors of World War II living in Eastern Europe.

For decades Jews in Eastern Europe were unable to contact Swiss banks concerning accounts their relatives may have opened, but since the fall of communism, many are now able to travel freely for the first time and seek to recover wealth they believe to be in Switzerland.

In the years leading up to the war, and during much of the war, Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe often crossed the Swiss border with large sums of money at the risk of being shot, or they sent emissaries to deposit funds in secret numbered accounts to keep them out of the reach of the Nazis.

After the war, many relatives of those who did not survive the concentration camps tried to recover the funds, but found that Swiss bank secrecy laws and the high cost of lawyer’s fees for the search made recovering money almost impossible.

Between 1962 and 1973, the Swiss banking community tried to clear its name by repaying more than a thousand individuals and some Jewish charities $9 million, saying that was all that existed of dormant World War II accounts. But many Jewish groups and lawyers in Switzerland discounted such efforts as inadequate, particularly since the banks did not search for accounts perhaps set up under company names.

Such apparently halfhearted attempts have marred the reputation of the Swiss banking community, and many interpreted Tuesday’s actions as an attempt to regain some of that lost credibility.

Also on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Switzerland has tried to come to grips with its past over how it treated Jews during the war, particularly cooperating with Germany on identifying those Jews trying to flee across the border.