Report Identities Hidden Bank Accounts

The report of the independent Swiss Banking Commission, set up in 1996 under the chairmanship of Paul Volker, former head of the US Federal Reserve Bank, has revealed the existence of some 54,000 dormant accounts. At least 10,000 of them almost certainly belonged to Jewish victims of the Holocaust or their heirs. Back in 1997 the Swiss banks claimed to have knowledge of fewer than 5,200 accounts of foreign clients of the period. The names of 25,000 account holders, who at the time believed that they were fully protecting their finances in a neutral country, are being published on the internet to enable heirs to claim their rightful inheritances. It is probable that compensation payments will be made at a sum ten times the nominal 1945 value of the original holding or asset and drawn from the $1.2 billion award made by the Swiss banks in last year’s settlement with the World Jewish Congress, still to be apportioned among possible claimants. The Swiss banks long denied the existence of any such outstanding accounts and, in the main, refused to respond to requests from the children of Holocaust victims, either protesting ignorance of account records or by making impossible demands for the non-existent death certificates of those lost in the camps. The Commission confirmed the banks’ duplicitous behaviour, commenting that there was evidence of “questionable and deceitful actions by some individual banks in the handling of accounts of victims, including withholding of information from Holocaust victims or their heirs about their accounts”. However, the report neither supported the allegation that the Swiss banks sought to profit from the genocidal activities of the Nazi regime, nor that they had set out systematically to destroy account records.