In January 1997, a 28-year-old night watchman named Christoph Meili was making his routine rounds at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich when he walked into the shredding room and found two industrial bins overflowing with old ledgers and documents. They were decades old, handwritten records from the 1930s and 1940s, the very years of Nazi rule. There were real estate documents for Berlin properties seized from Jewish owners, records from the German Reichsbank listing stock accounts for companies that supplied the chemicals used in the Holocaust, and lists of mortgaged buildings in German cities. The bank was destroying evidence of its wartime dealings in the middle of the biggest investigation into Swiss banking conduct in history, in direct violation of Swiss law.
Meili took some of the documents home and called a local Jewish organization. Within days, the story was on front pages around the world. The scandal that erupted exposed a system of financial complicity that had operated for more than fifty years. During the war, neutral Switzerland had served as the indispensable financial hub of the Nazi war machine.
The Reichsbank, Germany’s central bank, systematically looted the gold reserves of occupied nations, seizing roughly $550 million worth from countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. It also established a system of industrial-scale theft from individuals. SS leader Heinrich Himmler arranged with Reichsbank president Walter Funk to deposit the stolen personal wealth of Holocaust victims, jewelry, wedding rings, gold dental fillings pulled from corpses, eyeglass frames, under the fictitious name Max Heiliger. An SS officer named Bruno Melmer made at least 76 documented shipments of these valuables from the death camps to the Reichsbank in Berlin.
Some packages still bore the stamp of Auschwitz. The bank melted the gold down into anonymous bars and shipped it to Switzerland, where the Swiss National Bank converted it into Swiss francs without asking questions. The Bergier Commission, a Swiss historical investigation, later estimated that the Swiss National Bank received approximately $440 million in Nazi gold, more than half of it demonstrably looted, and concluded that the bank’s governing board knew the gold was stolen. The commission also found that Swiss authorities had suggested in 1938 that Jewish passports be stamped with a red letter J, and that Switzerland turned away more than 24,000 Jewish refugees at its borders even after learning of the systematic murder of Jews.
The private Swiss banks had their own record of betrayal. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families across Europe had deposited their life savings in Swiss accounts, trusting the legendary secrecy laws codified in 1934 that made it a criminal offense for any bank employee to reveal information about a client. When the war ended and the few surviving relatives emerged to claim their money, the banks demanded death certificates. They knew full well that the murdered had been gassed and incinerated, that no such documentation existed.
The unclaimed deposits, one historian later noted, were treated by the banks as spoils of war. In 1949, Switzerland signed a treaty with communist Poland, trading away the accounts of Polish Jews presumed dead in the Holocaust in exchange for compensation for Swiss assets that Poland had nationalized. The Swiss government bartered away the assets of murdered people to cover its own commercial losses. The Bank for International Settlements in Basel, created in 1930 to manage German reparations, played an even more clandestine role.
Its board included representatives from countries actively at war with each other, British bankers sitting at the same table as Nazi financial officials. Its wartime president was an American, Thomas McKittrick, a Harvard-educated Wall Street banker who took the position in 1940. Under his leadership, the BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, carried out foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and recognized the legitimacy of Nazi puppet regimes. The vice president of the Reichsbank, Emil Puhl, who was later tried for war crimes, called the BIS the Reichsbank’s only foreign branch.
McKittrick socialized openly with senior Nazi officials, while simultaneously passing information to American intelligence. After the war, he was not investigated. He was appointed vice president of Chase National Bank in New York and awarded the Royal Order of the Crown of Belgium. When he died in 1970, his New York Times obituary described him simply as a world financier.
American banks were deeply implicated as well. Chase National Bank, controlled by the Rockefeller interests, kept its branch in Nazi-occupied Paris open for the entire war. A declassified Treasury Department report found that the branch worked in close collaboration with the German occupation authorities in freezing Jewish assets, seizing bank accounts and safe deposit boxes belonging to Jewish customers and failing to return them after the war. The head of the Paris branch wrote to his supervisors in Manhattan in May 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor, boasting that the bank enjoyed very special esteem with top German officials.
Between 1936 and 1941, Chase also helped the German government build dollar reserves through the sale of special blocked marks, raking in over a million dollars in commissions. These marks were primarily funded by the plundered savings of Jewish families desperately fleeing Germany. The FBI investigated the scheme beginning in October 1940. The German banks themselves were at the center of the machinery.
The Reichsbank, before the death camps even existed, had engineered the financing of German rearmament through a phantom corporation called MEFO. Created by Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht in 1934, MEFO had no factories or products. The government paid arms manufacturers with secret promissory notes drawn on this fake company, bypassing the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles and avoiding inflation. By 1938, twelve billion Reichsmarks in MEFO bills were circulating.
Deutsche Bank actively engineered the forced sales of Jewish-owned businesses, absorbed Jewish-owned private banks, and extended loans to IG Farben for the construction of its factory complex at Auschwitz. It maintained anonymous accounts for the Gestapo used to manage the proceeds of auctions of seized Jewish property. Dresdner Bank, founded by a Jewish banker, purged all 600 of its Jewish employees after Hitler came to power, and became the preferred financial institution of the SS. In Prague, the two largest depositors in its subsidiary were the Theresienstadt ghetto and the SS office tasked with managing confiscated Czech Jewish assets.
The bank used the stolen capital of Holocaust victims as its own operating funds, paying for the deportation trains that carried their former owners to the death camps. As historian Peter Hayes put it, the banks were using the money stolen from Jews to pay for the machine that was killing the Jews. After the war, there was no meaningful reckoning. The Allies needed a strong rebuilt West Germany as a bulwark against Soviet communism, and the pursuit of financial collaborators was quietly shelved.
A thorough investigation into Deutsche Bank conducted by the Office of Military Government was buried. The Washington Agreement of 1946 had Switzerland pay 250 million Swiss francs as a final settlement of all claims related to Nazi gold, a payment the Swiss negotiator artfully labeled a voluntary contribution to European reconstruction. The Tripartite Gold Commission returned roughly 377 tons of captured Nazi gold to the central banks of the countries from which it had been stolen, but not a single ounce went to individual Holocaust survivors. The banks grew more powerful than ever.
The discovery by Meili in 1997 changed everything. It sparked congressional hearings led by Senator Alfonse D’Amato, threats of boycotts from American state officials, and massive investigations. The Volcker Commission identified 95 million Swiss francs in dormant accounts belonging to victims of Nazi persecution. The Bergier Commission published its devastating findings.
Under relentless pressure, UBS and Credit Suisse agreed in August 1998 to pay $1. 25 billion to settle claims by Holocaust victims and their heirs, in exchange for a permanent release from all future claims. The payments to survivors were not fully distributed until 2013, by which time many of the oldest victims had already died. No senior executive of any Swiss bank was ever criminally prosecuted.
The pattern did not end with the Holocaust. UBS was fined heavily for the Libor scandal and money laundering. Credit Suisse was convicted of failing to prevent money laundering for a Bulgarian criminal organization, suffered catastrophic losses from the collapse of Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital Management, and in March 2023, after a crisis of confidence, was forced into an emergency takeover by UBS. The Swiss government used emergency powers to bypass shareholder votes, and the financial regulator ordered the complete write-down of roughly 16 to 17 billion in Credit Suisse bonds, wiping out bondholders while shareholders retained a fraction of their equity.
The resulting lawsuits were dismissed in American courts on the grounds of sovereign immunity. The fate of Credit Suisse, a 167-year-old institution erased into its rival, stands as a final cold clearing of the slate. The names change, but the fundamental nature of the capital these institutions guard remains unchanged.