by Bower, Tom
Consular officials, realizing that their masters in Bern were unaware of the turmoil, offered their advice. The consulate in New York, reported Hans Lacher, had for some years come under “strong pressure” from “hundreds of people” claiming property that had disappeared. “I am afraid that I have been unable to persuade the overwhelming numbers of these people about the Swiss position,” he pleaded. Switzerland’s image was not improved, he added, by the lack of personnel to cope with the rush, nor by the belated dispatch of just 500 more forms. To emphasize to those isolated in the mountains in Bern the reality of Manhattan, Lacher added that the demands were presented by the Jews in a “tough and aggressive nature” and that “even the slightest appearance of a restrictive attitude must be avoided.” His bid to introduce “calm” and reality was ignored by Weber. Clearly the consul had less understanding of the policy than the U.S. State Department, which had been persuaded not to provide any information for applicants.
Weber had adopted the same tactics in Israel. One hundred forms had been sent to Tel Aviv, arousing the ridicule of Israeli newspapers and a campaign against Switzerland. “That’s all we need,” cried a Bern official. But the Political Department refused all offers of help from other countries. The process, explained officials, was strictly an internal Swiss affair. Their motive was not solely to defend Switzerland’s sovereignty. Few claimants, they believed, were genuine. Officials of the same departments who twenty years earlier had encouraged Gestapo and Nazi Party officials to deposit their loot in Switzerland suspected all Jews of being dishonest. The officials believed that if they delayed the process, those dubious Jews would be discouraged from submitting application forms.
Weber’s attitude was not properly appreciated by the major banks at the outset. Initially, the senior lawyer of the Swiss Bank Corporation asked for 200 forms and then increased his request to 4,650 forms, explaining that “a very high number of assets have been discovered.” The lawyer of the Union Bank of Switzerland, also mentioning the large number of dormant accounts, requested 3,240 forms. In total, Weber’s office dispatched 7,112 forms to banks and other financial institutions. But by the end of the year the institutions had understood his policy. Free of any sanctions, the banks began limiting their search to Jewish-sounding surnames, ignoring the use of pseudonyms or special numbered accounts. The results were spectacular. SBC, which had requested 4,650 forms, registered only seventy-seven accounts, while the Union Bank, having requested 3,240 forms, registered 251 accounts. In early 1964, Weber had been notified of just 1,048 dormant accounts belonging to either foreigners or stateless citizens. The total amount was SF9,469,882, or $2.5 million. Considering that the banks in the late 1940s and thereafter had declared that the heirless assets were either “trivial” or worth “at most SF1 million,” the new disclosure should have aroused Weber’s skepticism. He might also have asked how many of the association’s member banks had responded. He would probably have been surprised to discover that of 400 banks, only twenty-six had replied to the questionnaire.
Above all, Weber might have read the very detailed eleven-page protest to the Ministry of Justice from Eric Mehnert-Frey, a retired deputy director of the Compensation Office. After more than twenty years of experience, Mehnert-Frey was familiar with the banks’ dishonesty. He had seen how the banks had illegally transferred Jewish deposits to foreign countries or camouflaged them within anonymous corporations that were excluded from Weber’s responsibility. Mehnert-Frey had also seen Jewish deposits surreptitiously transferred to Liechtenstein—but that adjunct of Switzerland had been skillfully ignored by the lawmakers. Unless Weber pursued those leads, wrote the expert, the law was pointless. To Mehnert-Frey’s disappointment, Weber and government ministers ignored his letter and instead congratulated themselves. Contrary to the allegations by the Jewish organizations that “hundreds of millions” of dollars lay unclaimed in the country, the banks’ search had revealed just $2.5 million.
The self-congratulation threw the Jewish organizations into disarray. While Switzerland’s Jewish organization believed that all the banks had complied strictly with the law, Jews in New York and Israel doubted that all the trustees and banks had been honest and had obeyed the law.
In the face of that criticism, Weber remained entirely passive. He neither challenged the bank’s responses nor sought to investigate whether there were any undeclared deposits. No banks were requested to produce any records, and none was even threatened with prosecution for failing to comply with the law. Despite Weber’s inertia, over 7,000 claims had arrived at his office. All were indexed and compared with the banks’ disclosures. If the two matched, Weber considered whether under the law he was obliged to inform the claimant. For the official, that task implied seeking an excuse not to reveal the existence of the account. No lists of rightful owners were to be published, and no inquiries were answered beyond acknowledging receipt of the claim. The casualties of Weber’s edict were usually powerless.
Mrs. Ortar-Zabludowsky, writing from Jerusalem on April 7, 1964, was one of many applicants who became victims of Weber’s ploy of avoiding giving help. Seven months after receiving her letter asking for information about the property of L. Kronstein, a relative, Weber replied that his office was too busy to discover whether the property was registered. In 1966, Weber dispatched a short duplicated letter that no registration had been found. Ortar-Zabludowsky’s inquiries were stopped dead.
Anna Hoerhager, living in Vienna, complained that Crédit Suisse had knowingly handed over her mother’s account, opened in 1914, to the Gestapo. “It was not a fortune,” wrote Hoerhager, “but the bank handed over the money to Nazi Germany without any legal authority … and without her signature.” Her problem was that pursuing the bank would be too expensive. But her appeal to the government to investigate how a bank could break the law was waved aside. Her only recourse, replied the Political Department, was the Swiss courts. Weber’s office offered no help.
The heirs of Friede Lindemann, a German Jew, applied to Weber for her estate in Switzerland, unaware that the Schaffhausen branch of the Union Bank had already identified her account and had disclosed to Weber’s office that it contained SF14,000. The death certificate submitted to Weber by the heirs stated that Lindemann had died near Danzig, Germany, in January 1941 from natural causes. Weber denied their right to use his office to seek their inheritance. According to his interpretation, the 1962 law applied only to “victims” of the Nazis who died “violently.” In fact the law did not mention “violent death,” but Weber refused to take into account the conditions under which Lindemann had lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany or to consider that the cause of death on the certificate might have been false. Weber’s readiness to trust the Germans contrasted with his disparagement of those Jews who died in ghettos or from bombing, hunger, sickness or lack of medical attention. Those Jews, he agreed with his fellow officials, were not “victims” because there was no obvious Nazi violence. Lindemann’s heirs, according to Weber’s edict, and at least 223 other claimants, were precluded from using his office to search for their money. The Union Bank was allowed to keep Lindemann’s estate, and the family, kept completely in the dark, were told that Weber could not help; they were then charged for the costs of the investigation.
Weber’s treatment of the Israeli heirs of Chaim Dunajewski, a Russian Jew who had lived in Hamburg, was similarly restrictive. During the 1930s, Dunajewski had deposited SF1.2 million in three Swiss banks—the Union Bank, the Swiss Volksbank and the Zurich Kantonal Bank. Knowing that Dunajewski was dead, his relations had sought the money in the 1950s, but in 1955 Markus Feldmann had ordered that the money should remain in the banks’ custody and no attempt should be undertaken to trace the heirs. The survivors’ claim to Weber revealed that Dunajewski had died in Moscow in 1948. Clearly fearing the Stalinist authorities, the Russian had not dared to contact the banks or his family. Weber’s office had received information about Dunajewski’s accounts from three Swiss banks and was in n
o doubt that the Russian was dead and that the heirs were genuine. Yet Weber refused to give the family any information. Under the 1962 law, he recorded, he was empowered only to help the heirs of persecutees whose death was caused by Nazi violence; he could not help the victims of Soviet persecution or the families of people who had died from natural causes. Acting on Weber’s criteria, the banks refused to transfer Dunajewski’s fortune to his heirs and kept the money.
Weber’s propensity to help the banks and deny the transfer of any money that could be deemed heirless assets—and should therefore have been transferred to refugee organizations—embraced the savings of Betha Jacobsohn, a German Jew who had probably been murdered in a concentration camp. She had no heirs. A bank had declared the dormant account to Weber’s office and, under Swiss law, Jacobsohn’s money should have been returned to the German state, a solution supported by Stucki. Weber disagreed. Since they were heirless assets, he decided, he was not competent to determine the fate of the money. Always inclined to favor the banks, he decided that the money should remain in the institution.
Weber’s cozy alliance with the banks was finally challenged in late 1964 by Hanusch Weigl, a lawyer in Tel Aviv specializing in claims. Irritated by Weber’s behavior in successive cases, Weigl appealed to Golda Meir, then the country’s foreign minister, for help in the case of Ernestine Steinhardt, who had, in unknown circumstances, disappeared during the Holocaust.
In the years before the 1962 law, Weigl had written on behalf of Steinhardt’s relatives to all the major Swiss banks, including the Swiss Bank Corporation seeking information about the existence of an account. SBC’s formal reply gave no hint that the lawyer’s request had been successful. Relying on a client’s right to secrecy, the bank justified its refusal to help by pointing to Weigl’s failure to provide valid documents proving that his clients were entitled to inherit the deposit. Unaware of the truth, Weigl had in 1963 submitted a routine application to Weber’s office. Weber’s reply was unsatisfactory and, certain that the persistent silence was suspicious, Weigl recruited Golda Meir to protest and ask the Political Department to intervene.
The government officials soon established the facts and, without telling Weigl, asked for an explanation. The problem, the bank replied, was uncomplicated: Steinhardt had an account, but there were no proven heirs. Weber endorsed the bank’s defense. Weigl’s clients had not proved that they were genuine heirs. On the other hand, Weigl’s application did not fall within the terms of the 1962 law, because the account was no longer dormant. The “activity,” explained Weber, consisted of the original letter sent by Weigl before the 1962 Act! Even officials in the Political Department were stunned by that tortured logic. The new law, protested the Political Department, was intended to facilitate applications for these sorts of accounts. But the bankers were adamant. Without proof of Steinhardt’s death and proof of the claimants’ right to inherit her money, Weigl should not be even told that an account existed. Weber even criticized Weigl’s behavior and insisted that “unfounded emotional and self-opinionated arguments; even unobjective and uncalled-for threats by claimants or their legal representatives” would not prevent the Claims Office from faithfully adhering to the law. Despite protests that it was wrong that Weigl should be required to prove the claimants’ authenticity to the bank’s satisfaction rather than to Weber’s, the bankers’ position prevailed. The money was not released.
After the first year of Weber’s activities, Israeli diplomats had become concerned. Many banks, they told officials in the Political Department, might not have declared dormant accounts. Their fear was dismissed by Edgar Mottier, the director of the Justice Division. “I can’t believe that, given the horrors,” he replied, “anyone could live with his conscience by not declaring any assets.” Mottier’s remark reached Weber, who disagreed. Many assets, Weber volunteered, had not been declared, but the blame lay elsewhere: not among the banks but among those “many private and small banks” who had failed to declare any deposited assets or whose declaration was untrue. On the basis of “innumerable letters and conversations,” Weber would later tell George Brunschvig, the leader of Switzerland’s Jewish community, “it has been established that there are people without conscience, frequently Jews, who withhold property from their coreligionists.” Accusing Jews of stealing from Jews was unlikely to endear Weber to those seeking their money or to win the trust of those looking for an unspecified inheritance. But Weber didn’t care. He had no intention of substantiating his assertion, least of all by ordering an audit of the banks and the other institutions.
In 1966, three years after the Office opened, 824 unclaimed dormant accounts remained registered in Weber’s files. Neither the depositors nor their heirs had been found. Among the new casualties were the German heirless assets valued at SF16.5 million that Stucki had reported eight years earlier. In 1963, Stucki had suggested that those heirless assets should be the subject of the new law. Weber had reacted coolly and begun searching for an excuse to forestall any accusation of misappropriation. His salvation was a small announcement published in 1958 by the Compensation Office in the Bundesblatt, the Swiss government’s official gazette, listing all previously frozen accounts that could be claimed. Included in that advertisement was the SF16.5 million that, to the banks’ satisfaction, had remained unnoticed by everyone. Legally, nothing more was required to find the heirs. The banks rather than the charities would inherit the money. Weber’s only remaining chore was to rid himself of the 824 unclaimed accounts. That drudgery he gratefully delegated to Heinz Häberlin, a retired lawyer appointed as a public trustee to search for the inheritors.
Häberlin’s task was eased by the unilateral decision taken by Ludwig von Moos, the minister of justice, to abandon any search if the deposit was less than SF500. Four years later, von Moos raised the limit to SF1,000. Those 325 excluded deposits, worth about SF111,000, were to be transferred to a fund labeled “unclaimed assets.” The lawyer’s task was further eased by Weber’s decision to exclude Eastern Europe from his search.
Despite the thawing of the cold war, the risk of endangering Eastern Europeans persuaded Weber and Häberlin to search only for owners and heirs in the West. Proudly, Weber confirmed that he had refused even to send letters to Eastern Europe. At least a hundred application forms asking for information had arrived from Eastern Europe, but Weber kept those requests secret, even from officials in the Political Department. The profits of that self-denial accrued to the banks. Despite that restriction, fifteen account holders, whose money had been written off on the ground that they lived in communist countries, were matched with reported dormant accounts. In Hungary, one family told Häberlin’s discreet emissary they preferred their money to remain in the West. Häberlin passed their new addresses to the banks, but the banks, invoking the secrecy laws, resisted contacting the clients and their heirs and used the case to reinforce their contention that the amount of “so-called heirless assets” was much less than alleged.
By 1969, Häberlin had successfully traced 132 heirs (19 percent of the accounts), entitled to SF1.6 million, in the United States and Israel. But SF4.8 million, nearly half the money declared under the 1962 law, identified as “Eastern European” in origin, remained undispersed. Since its owners had not been contacted, and since there was turmoil in the communist countries in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Weber wanted the money to be declared heirless and placed in a fund for charities. Without any legal authority, the money would be effectively confiscated. Von Moos was uncomfortable about this and suggested that the money remain with a custodian. Weber became agitated. There would be protests, he warned, from “the bankers in particular.” His solution, pursued successfully and with uncharacteristic fervor, was to divert all the money into the “unclaimed fund,” avoiding an official declaration that the Jews were missing. Soon after completing that ruse, Weber suddenly—and still inexplicably—died.
Weber’s successor, Edgar Mottier, the retired d
irector of the Justice Division, did not approve of Weber’s ruse. But in 1972 Kurt Furgler, the newly appointed minister of justice, overruled his officials and his predecessor. Having negotiated a change in implementing the law, he ordered that, without any further checks, all the Eastern European money should be transferred to the “unclaimed fund.” That solution was welcomed by Häberlin, the public trustee, who after six years was eager to return to retirement and be rid of the thankless task. The money to be transferred to the “unclaimed fund” involved 200 accounts. One blip threatened Furgler’s policy. A trustee company in Basel undertaking similar tracing work for the local canton reported that his officials had discovered the heirs of accounts, previously declared by Häberlin to be untraceable in Eastern Europe, to be living in the West, and had also traced other living heirs in Eastern Europe. Furgler, the minister, was unconcerned. The search, he decided, ignoring the law and the morality of the cause, should be abandoned. The final decision was greeted with “great relief and gratitude” by Häberlin. Wanting to share Häberlin’s relief, Furgler ordered his officials to rid him of the problem as fast as possible.
By 1972, the original SF9.4 million declared by banks had increased to SF10.8 million. Exactly half, SF5.4 million, was declared to be “unclaimed” and returned to the banks and other institutions to be kept for their own benefit. The files of those 1,048 accounts opened by Eastern European Jews were neatly stored in the archives. Each file revealed that inadequate research had been undertaken to discover whether the owners or their inheritors were alive and denied future claimants any method to discover the money. Of the remaining half of the money, heirs and claimants received SF1.4 million. The rest of the “unclaimed” money came, after expenses, to SF2.4 million, and was declared to be genuinely heirless and available to charities. In 1946, Stucki had pledged to transfer all the heirless assets to Jewish relief organizations. Twenty years later, the Swiss government intended to renege on that promise and transfer the whole amount to a Swiss charity. After protests, two charities were chosen. One-third was given to a Swiss charity (not the Red Cross, because of its failure to help the Jews), and the remainder, SF1.5 million, to the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. All that remained of the declared dormant accounts was SF789,000. That money was subject to special treatment to finalize the secret agreements with Poland and Hungary.