What was at stake during those discussions? Israel Singer and his companions from the European Jewish Congress wished for — as did Rolf Bloch in his capacity as president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) — an all-inclusive settlement that would take care of all potential claims. The SBA preferred individual solutions. What weighed more heavily, however, was this: representatives of the SBA did not take seriously Singer’s insinuation that lack of cooperation would force them to use the same methods they applied in the case of Austrian president Kurt Waldheim. Thomas Maissen, the Swiss professor of history at the University of Heidelberg, pointed this out in his book Remembrance Denied.

Singer followed up that first round of talks with a visit on September 14, 1995, when he flew with Edgar Bronfman, the president of the WJC, and a sizable delegation to Berne on Bronfman’s private jet. Before the reception in the Cercle privé de la Grande Société, the SBA’s grail, they had met with Swiss president Kaspar Villiger, a meeting that Michael Kohn, former president of the SIG, had hastily arranged (no easy task, since the president’s aides didn’t know who Bronfman was and demanded a résumé) and arrived quite late. At first the president did not want to receive one of the members of Bronfman’s delegation, the grandiloquent Avraham Burg. Thereupon Burg threatened to raise hell before the assembled media, and Michael Kohn advised Kaspar Villiger not to force the issue.

I would doubt that Georg Krayer, the SBA president, was well advised under the circumstances to hold fast to his dramaturgy, and in the Salon des Jeux he read a ten-minute welcoming address that was studded with technical details and to which we had to listen standing up instead of sitting down at table right away. But most likely it was not a good idea — given the delegation’s delayed arrival and their scheduled 2 p.m. departure — to lay out the SBA position with everybody standing up and hungry instead of having them seated. Under these circumstances, even the kosher meal did not save the meeting.

Looking back, neither the faded charm of the Grand Société nor Bronfman’s misspelled name card (“Bronfmann” with two Ns) provoked the antagonism, nor even the stiff greeting ritual, but it was the fact that the SBA did not understand Bronfman and the WJC. The WJC didn’t want to discuss numbers but instead a process of verification. John Authers and Richard Wolffe summarized the results in their book The Victim’s Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle over the Debts of the Holocaust: “By the time Singer, Bronfman, and their colleagues . . . thought they had agreed on a way forward, the bankers would continue their investigation of dormant accounts under conditions of total secrecy. A joint committee, including Israel Singer, would hire auditors and examine the process. Neither side was to discuss the findings in public until they were complete.”

Here was the crux of the whole story. The representatives of the World Jewish Congress and of the Jewish Agency, puzzled by the unsuccessful efforts of survivors to find their deposits in Switzer­land, no longer trusted the bankers. Through a London-based free­lance journalist, in October 1992 they had ordered an expert opinion from the contemporary historian Jacques Picard that for the first time documented the legal framework and the common bank practices in use since the end of the war.

As Picard remembers it, the issue first went to the ETH’s Swiss archives of contemporary history, which, in turn, recommended him. At some point, the WJC showed up, intending to buy the documentation. It had already paid the remuneration. Picard, however, was busy elsewhere, had no exaggerated sense of the value of his work, which he wished to qualify as a preliminary study, deposited ten copies in ten public archives, and returned the money.

The WJC knew, therefore, that the SBA had vehemently op­posed the notification clause in the 1962 federal law “about assets in Switzerland belonging to racially, religiously, or politically persecuted foreigners or stateless persons” and had prevailed. Read the expert opinion — I had it translated into German in 1996 — and it becomes clear why the SBA had a credibility problem. It simply hid behind the Bank Secrecy Act and had never wanted to permit legally binding notification of assets. Yet it should have been struck by the fact that dormant accounts in 1947, 1949, and 1956 all totaled under a million Swiss francs ($250,000), while the registered assets in 1963 had reached SFr 9.5 million ($2.3 million). Georg Krayer’s words of greeting in the Grande Société — surely prepared by the SBA’s secretary general — did not deviate one inch from the attitude followed since 1949, something the well-briefed representatives of the WLC could hardly have missed.

Since Krayer was fully occupied with managing the Basel-based Sarasin bank, I suggested — supported by former Swiss ambassador to Washington, the late Edouard Brunner — that he find a lead lawyer to carry some of the burden. In the early sixties, the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry — since 1954 confronted with antitrust accusations of involvement with organized crime — named Abe Fortas (who helped Lyndon Johnson legally seal his 1948 Senate election and whom LBJ appointed to the Supreme Court) as its lead lawyer. But Krayer could not warm up to the idea because it would have meant for him — and for his secretariat, which exercised great influence — a loss of power, and certainly a loss of face. With hindsight, this was probably the decisive mistake that blocked resolving the whole affair quickly and with manageable costs. So instead of strong leadership, we experienced an unending chain of errors, publicity disasters, and other PR fiascoes.

Finally, stinginess should not be underestimated as a motive.

The SBA’s legal representative in the United States was an attorney with the distinguished Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering who was, however, not a partner. I still find it incomprehensible that the SBA would allow itself to be represented by a non-partner only to save a few Swiss francs. The suggestion to ap­point a lead lawyer is as well documented as the discussion in the SBA committee about account search fees. I tried to explain that very few Holocaust survivors or heirs of the victims had ever seen a SFr 100 banknote. My colleagues argued against my position with frightening lack of feeling. The Union Bank of Switzerland’s (UBS’s) Robert Studer and other representatives of the large banks vehemently demanded a search fee of at least SFr 1,000 ($760). Their argument: if we didn’t ask for at least SFr 1,000, we would receive too many applications. In some cases, as much as SFr 5,000 ($3,800) was demanded. With the exception of the SBA’s secretary-general, Jean-Paul Chapuis, and his deputy, Heinrich Schneider, who urged that relatives and heirs of Nazi victims needn’t pay for such searches, everybody wanted to adhere to normal business practices. Should someone not know the name of the bank, fees would multiply on a per bank basis — thus UBS charged SFr 250 for a named business address, 900 for all branches in the canton Zurich, and 2,000 ($1,520) for a Swiss-wide search. And the question arose: Where should we begin?

During a TV interview, I had the idea of using the banks’ ombudsman as a central clearinghouse. But unhappily, Hanspeter Haeni, the ombudsman, made the headlines because the search forms he used asked for an applicant’s Christian name (the British version) instead of the American “first name.” In his defense, it should be noted that the form had passed the inspection of Jewish circles without challenge and that the terminology had not provoked a collective uproar among the non-Christian minority in Britain. But in our case, the waves of indignation ran high. Once more, no antenna for the nuance.

During his repeated trips to Switzerland during the second half of 1995, Singer had the impression that the SBA didn’t take him seriously — he wasn’t even allowed to enter their offices — and never considered a joint panel to conduct a comprehensive examination; in other words, they never thought about any concerted action. The WJC secretary-general persuaded Bronfman to arrange a meeting with Senator Alfonso D’Amato, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. D’Amato wasn’t Bronfman’s natural ally, but the senator had a large Jewish constituency in New York and immediately sensed the explosive power of the issue; Singer succeeded in removing Bronfman’s aesthetic objections. In this early phase, both were fair enough to await the outcome of the SBA’s investigation.

I cannot stress enough that the WJC was not out to expose Switzerland on the pillory but was only interested in clearing up the question of the dormant accounts through a provable method. Therefore, Singer must have thought it a gross violation of trust that the SBA unilaterally announced the results of their inquiry at its semiannual press conference at the Savoy in Zurich on February 7, 1996, and that it was done in such desultory fashion. Thus Singer learned from the morning news that 775 accounts worth SFr 38.7 million ($33 million) had been found.

I was surprised and angered by the news. It was an affront even to SBA’s executive committee. Moreover, I felt intuitively that this maneuver would not work out well. The representatives of the SBA could not claim political naiveté or the self-immunizing effect of having “meant well,” since, at the same time, they had published results of a public opinion survey they had commissioned showing they had the support of the Swiss people. And they imagined that was enough to save them.

To believe that a public opinion poll would satisfy a man like Singer, a haughty millionaire like Bronfman, and the SJA was, to cite Talleyrand, “pire qu’un crime, une faute” (worse than a crime, a mistake). “You can’t deal with a billionaire” is an experience I share with James D. Robinson. (He reached this conclusion in dealing with the murdered Lebanese billionaire Edmond Safra, who, for a time, was his vice president at Amexco.) It is difficult to understand how anybody faced with this track record could assume the casual admission that almost SFr 40 million ($34 million), having been found, was enough to protect them, and, for the rest, categorically block any cooperation or permit examination of the relevant documents.

It was as if the discussions in the Grande Société had never taken place. The large banks simply continued the political line they had developed in the fifties in a half conspiracy to downplay the whole thing and dismiss irksome questions with legalistic tricks. These decisions were made by the legal divisions of the large banks and by the SBA secretariat, a much lower level than top management, which had no idea of what game was being played, not then, and not since 1947. The amounts were simply too small. The lawyers, on the other hand, never went beyond a limited legal perspective.

Singer saw his suspicions confirmed, issued a sharply worded statement in Bronfman’s name, and set his machine in motion. Senator D’Amato scheduled hearings for April 23, 1996, and Elan Steinberg, Singer’s colleague in the WJC, supplied the media with material about Switzerland’s financial relations with Germany during the Second World War. For American readers, who generally didn’t know much about this chapter of contemporary history, most of the information was new and the impact was devastating.

Promptly, a dumbfounded Swiss ambassador in Washington, Carlo Jagmetti, asked me what was going on. My counter-question, “Don’t you know Jacques Picard’s expert opinion?” “No,” he answered. “Then I’ll send you a copy,” I said. For the time being, sending the report ended my active role in this drama. The upcoming annual general meeting of the bank in May 1996 would complete my professional responsibilities. I was al­ready focused on my farewell seminar at New York University. In connection with my retirement, the board of Julius Baer was sponsoring a four-day financial seminar at NYU’s Stern School.

But Kurt Hauri, the president of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission, had a different idea about my immediate future. In February 1996, after a meeting of the SBA board, he invited me to come by his office He was worried that it had taken outside pressure to find the 775 dormant accounts and the SFr 38.7 million ($33 million). From the bank commission’s point of view, the suddenly emerged accounts posed a fundamental question of what was “.t and proper” — in other words a guarantee of impeccable management. Obviously, the banks had not operated in a .t and proper manner to date; otherwise, they couldn’t suddenly have found the SFr 38.7 million. More embarrassing was the fact that this sum was a multiple of the 9.47 million established in 1963 and could there­fore only increase the suspicion that even the 38.7 million was not the last word.

For the banking commissioner, the audit of the dormant ac­counts was evidence to be used in judging the satisfactory management according to article 3, paragraph 2, letter (c) of the banking law. In my testimony on April 26, 1996, at the D’Amato hearing, I was able to point to just that. Strangely enough, the question of “.t and proper” would later disappear in the general confusion, even though it was the concept that had persuaded us to take the D’Amato hearings seriously — perhaps because of the cantonal banks, which, thanks to a special law, were until recently exempt from the audit requirement. (But many of the dormant accounts turned up precisely in those banks.)

So much for the general part of the story. Trying to straighten out the details and to represent the Swiss banks at the D’Amato hearings would prove more difficult. In February 1996, I first called Ernest Japhet, the long-time chairman of Bank Leumi le-Israel, and asked him how to stop the anti-Swiss campaign. At the time, Japhet was already living in New York. In Israel, he, like all the heads of major banks, had been condemned for illegal support of share prices. Japhet told me only one man could stop the anti-Swiss campaign: Curtis Hoxter.

Hoxter, who was born in Frankfurt and had emigrated in time, runs a PR agency on Lexington Avenue. I knew his name. He had repeatedly tried to offer his services to our bank. More importantly, he had Israel Singer’s confidence, since during the Waldheim affair he had been the informal contact between Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitzky, Singer, and the WJA.

As I was planning my trip for the seminar at the Stern School in March 1996, I determined that I would have two free days before flying with Delta to Nice/Gassin. So I called Georg Krayer and asked him if I could do something for him, perhaps talk to Singer. The chief of the SBA said spontaneously, “A good idea. Do it. I still haven’t received an answer to my letter.”

The SBA had realized its colossal error. On March 18, 1996, it had faxed Bronfman an explanatory letter apologizing and asking for an early meeting with Krayer in order to reestablish mutual trust for future cooperation. It was not a great success, since the letter was written in German. I had offered to write the note and deliver it personally, but the SBA had insisted on doing it themselves. Bronfman allegedly tossed the fax into a wastepaper basket since he wasn’t able to understand the language of Goethe.

Encouraged by Krayer, I arranged a meeting with Singer through Hoxter. The three of us (Singer, Hoxter, and me) met for afternoon tea at the Omni Berkshire Hotel. The atmosphere was pleasurable, and the only thing Singer said about the letter, which had clearly made the rounds (before being tossed), was, “I wouldn’t have answered it either.” It took me two evenings with Singer, the brainy lawyer-rabbi, to hammer out the fundamentals of how we would proceed, which we laid out in a memorandum. I received strong support from Heinrich Schneider, the SBA deputy secretary-general, who always faxed me back immediately.

What had we put down on paper in New York? We needed an independent commission made up of leading personalities, with the SBA nominating one half and the World Jewish Restitution Organization the other half. This committee would hire auditing firms to carry out the examination and, to the extent necessary, bring in other outside experts. The auditing firms would develop their own methodologies in order to identify the accounts of the Holocaust victims, and the commission would make sure that the auditing firms and the bank auditors would examine the banks in line with the agreed-upon procedures.

In conclusion, the commission would draft a report and publish its findings. These ideas were sketched out in a memorandum dated April 9, 1996, and were the beginnings of the later Volcker Commission, which, some people in Zurich would claim, was the only substantial thing I’d ever done in my life.

Unlike the ombudsman of the banks or the two representatives of the SBA, I always got along well with Singer. Not a trace of arrogance; on the contrary, a very winning and understanding personality. He would just as soon have reached an agreement based on that memorandum but had to consider the interests of the freshly mobilized Senator D’Amato and that militant blusterer in his own ranks, Avraham Burg. He handled the details very cleverly, insisting that the memorandum be kept secret. “Otherwise Senator D’Amato will cancel the hearings,” he said. I had nothing against the D’Amato hearings. Internationally it was the best platform for the banks to reestablish the issue’s correct proportions — that is if one had agreed to appear before a foreign panel at all.

Israel Singer is a short man with gray hair who holds a political science degree and is an ordained rabbi. He was born of Austrian parents, grew up in Brooklyn, and is married to a Bernese woman named Evelyne. At the time, he was about fifty years old and had made his money in the construction business, a rough trade. Before his election as secretary-general of the WJC, he had been a professor. He had made his reputation through the campaign he waged against Austrian President and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Verbal, worldly, always ready to exchange jokes, even if I called him at midnight, he wears well-tailored suits and combines Jewish observance with professional savoir faire and savoir vivre — except for the kosher Pepsi-Cola he drinks with all his meals. In New York we often ate in a kosher Chinese restaurant. Once, I ar­rived early and would have liked to order, but the cook didn’t dare go near the stove until Singer had koshered the kitchen.

The project of an independent commission gave me some protection against Senator D’Amato’s bank hearings scheduled for April 26, 1996. Daniel K. Mayer, the son-in-law of my late friend Herb Silverman and a senior partner in the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, which represented the SBA before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, handled the preparations. I had to tell the SBA in no uncertain terms that if need be, I would pay for the lawyer myself but would refuse to ap­pear with the SBA’s lawyer. That could be seen as snobbism on my part, but there are limits to saving money. In such situations, it is re­assuring to have a heavyweight on your side — one who is also good-looking and in full control of the situation.

On the evening before the hearings, we submitted in writing a hundred-page-long answer to the questions we were given in mid-March. In my testimony, I condensed the answer to a single reply to this question: What did the SBA intend to do to clarify the dormant ac­counts? On the evening before the hearings, we all stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. I would have liked to talk to Bronfman, but he had scheduled a meeting at the White House to make sure of the president’s support. Instead, I discovered Curtis Hoxter in the bar and asked him about Singer’s whereabouts. Hoxter went to look for him and came back with the news that Singer couldn’t afford to be seen with me; otherwise Senator D’Amato would become suspicious and cancel the hearings. Singer’s goal was clear: he wanted to persuade the public that agreement was the result of the hearing and not of any Swiss initiative. However, once the hearing was behind us, we all ate lunch together at the Four Seasons.

I didn’t feel too comfortable at the hearings. The gallery was full, but the rostrum on which the committee sat was pretty empty with only D’Amato and California Senator Barbara Boxer and their assistants and lawyers present. Of course I missed what the TV cam­eras captured. For the most part, I talked to Senator D’Amato, who clearly was not anxious to grill me and regularly pushed aside the notes his assistants put before him. Occasionally, Barbara Boxer intervened, but since her questions concerned Sweden and I didn’t realize at first that she had confused Sweden with Switzerland, I lost my train of thought.

Stuart Eizenstat spoke before I did, and so did the now famous Greta Beer, whose mother had tried without success to discover the accounts of her late husband in Switzerland. At the end of my testimony, I invited Greta Beer to come to Switzerland as my personal guest in order to help her put things in order. I got the idea while greeting her. We shook hands and, out of pure friendship, I added my left hand to cover her right. The spontaneous invitation shook the otherwise very loquacious senator, who called me “a very incisive person.” He summed up the gesture the way it had been meant, “as an important gesture of goodwill.”

Jean-Paul Chapuis and Heinrich Schneider, the two executive heads of the SBA, had accompanied me to Washington as chaperons. But during the two-day preparatory drill for the hearing con­ducted by the attorneys of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, it turned out that both of them had only a very rudimentary knowledge of Shakespeare’s language. That didn’t make our labors any easier.

On the other hand, and much more important, the large banks signaled their support. I did not want to testify only on behalf of the SBA, but wished to have the major banks behind me. At six in the morning (Washington time), before the hearing, I held a conference call with Robert Studer (Union Bank of Switzerland), Georges Streichenberg (Swiss Bank Corporation), and Robert Jeker (Credit Suisse). The atmosphere was pleasant. The tenor of the conversation ran to “plein pouvoir” (full powers for me): “We agree with everything. Whatever you decide to do is okay with us.” After the hearings, they all thanked me very charmingly. The first to do so was Streichenberg, who called me at once after the hearings were over.

Looking back, I doubt that before I left for Washington the SBA had informed me fully about the substance of the issue. Only much later did I learn about the circular letter of the SBA and about the decision the banks’ lawyers had reached in 1954, which was to not make public any information about cases that went back more than ten years. Nor did I know that the major banks had transferred some of the dormant accounts to subsidiaries, which were not required by law to register them. My lawyers too believed that I had not been fully informed. They advised strongly against having Paul Chapuis and Heinrich Schneider march into the hall with me, lest they too would be forced to testify if D’Amato saw them. Schneider could not be convinced. He came anyway and afterwards held a press conference in Swiss-German, even though we had all urged him not to do so, lest he provoke the U.S. press.

Senator D’Amato did not want to let Greta Beer travel to Switzerland without his lawyer. That wasn’t exactly according to my taste. “Usually my guests don’t come with their lawyer,” I told him. We finally agreed on a neutral attorney, Willy Korte, an expert on stolen art and a very amusing gentleman who had found the cathedral treasure of Quedlinburg, which had been carried to Texas via army mail. Korte told great stories. Greta flew to Zurich in May 1996. I accompanied her to see Ombudsman Hanspeter Haeni and gave a lunch for her at my home. Her offensive remarks about “the colored who are ruining New York,” however, spoiled my appetite.

Dr. Benno Degrandi, our bank’s lawyer, talked to her at some length in the library before lunch, found out that her father had held a diplomatic passport, and, as an experienced military judge, Degrandi became suspicious. The father, Siegfried Deligdisch, had died a natural death during the war in a Budapest hospital, and his brother had taken over the family’s knitted goods factory. Greta and her brother had emigrated to Italy after the war via Vienna. Finally, it turned out that her father’s brother appeared to have control of the account that had never been found and that she had long feuded with her uncle. Later, Singer told Degrandi — more or less to underline his concern — that they could have come up with much better cases.

But again the major gaffe came from the Swiss side, which demonstrated no perception of the situation and committed one faux pas after another. The ombudsman, for example, sent the finding directly to Greta, although I had urgently asked that Trudi Zuercher inform her personally. Trudi was an employee of our New York branch who had already met Greta, had prepared her visit to Zurich, and accompanied her to Switzerland. The ombudsman did his best, at least from his point of view, and sent her a handwritten letter. But he did not pay attention to the included printed form with the name under investigation on it. Somebody from the secretariat had confused the names, so Greta Beer had received a search form in the name of “Eugen Stern.” One more avoidable error.

On the day before the hearing, I sat in the garden of the Swiss Embassy in Washington with Federal Councilor Kaspar Villiger, the Swiss finance minister at the time. He had arrived for the spring meeting of the World Bank, and we talked about the fact that Americans didn’t really grasp the concept of dormant accounts because they had adopted a medieval precept from their British colonial masters, the so-called Escheatment Law — that is, property reverts to the state if there are no legal heirs or the heirs don’t claim in time. (To be more specific, unclaimed property reverts to the state after a specified period of time, for example, three years in California.) My suggestion to the finance minister who was in constant need of cash: “Adopt such a law and all your budget worries are over.”

But clearly the memorandum of understanding on which I worked with Israel Singer had priority. It was essential that a representative of a major bank was a cosigner. I made that point of view my own and sold it to the banks by pointing to their large stake in American investment banking and the large percentage of Jewish personnel in New York. They had to be interested in a quick settlement if they didn’t want to jeopardize the business they had only just built up. So literally at the last minute Joseph Ackermann flew to New York. The current head of Deutsche Bank was, in 1996, a managing director of Credit Suisse. I got to know my colleague — a casual acquaintance even though our offices in Zurich were only a hundred meters apart — as a very pleasant personality.

The memorandum of understanding was signed on May 2, 1996, in Bronfman’s New York office in the Seagram Building (which he had to give up after Jean-Marie Messier’s Vivendi resignation, just as he had to abandon the castle in France and his art collection, auctioned off in the spring of 2003) by Georg Krayer, Joseph Ackermann, and myself for the SBA. In addition to Bronfman and Singer, Avraham Burg and Zvi Barak signed for the World Jewish Organization and the WJC. Barak was a member of the Bank Leumi le-Israel board, an economist by training, and a fighter pilot. But he completely lacked the aura and the charm of a classic ace fighter in the style of a Captain Peter Townsend.

I had hoped to avoid flying to the United States twice in two weeks, but circumstances didn’t leave me much choice. So one morning, Ackermann, Krayer, and I climbed aboard the Concorde in Paris for the signing in New York. On top of everything else, the plane landed three hours late, so that for the first and only time in my life, I rattled into town aboard a helicopter. Afterward, all the cosigners except for Bronfman, who pretended to have another engagement, ate lunch at the Four Seasons. Then I went to sleep for two hours at the St. Regis — Georg Krayer took the other bed — and at night we climbed back on the Swissair evening plane to Zurich.

In signing the memorandum, we had already begun to think about what the audits could cost. Afterward, it turned out that not one of us had any idea of the amount of work the project would re­quire. Ackermann, as an executive of a large bank and the most cognizant with such questions, thought in terms of $150,000. At the end, the cost was more than a billion Swiss francs ($800 mil­lion), a sum the Julius Baer research department correctly predicted a short time later. In addition to the SFr 300 million ($240 million) for the auditors, we had to add the internal bank costs — between SFr 500 mil­lion and SFr 800 million ($400 million and $640 million) — and other expenses. That was a terrible shock and stood in modest relation to the sums we found, which were disproportionately smaller. Krayer and I knew what audits cost in our own houses. But that an experienced CEO of a major bank had no idea of the audit costs for a large bank meant that we really didn’t know what we had signed.

Then again, it remains doubtful if this knowledge would have helped us much in this highly politicized matter. At the time, we thought that total costs, including the accounts to be delivered to the heirs, would be in the neighborhood of SFr 10 million to SFr 15 million. Not the most favorable starting point from which to steer toward a compensation agreement that would have made the audit unnecessary. Personally, I compared the audit costs to a Wassermann test, which in my day was still mandatory in Switzerland if one wished to get married. Nobody, after all, leaves his bride alone at the altar only because he doesn’t want to pay for the test.

Unlike the Wassermann test, however, Barak insisted pretty neurotically that we dispense with Swiss auditors. Instead, the auditing firms would have to resort to forensically qualified Anglo-Saxon accounting experts who as a rule didn’t speak German or French, and certainly couldn’t read the German script, still widely used in the German-speaking part of Switzerland by the end of the war, and who had to familiarize themselves with the material — with the banks paying the bills. The demand that only forensically qualified auditors be used provoked some bankers’ anger, and they threatened not to allow the auditors on their premises. There was one advantage: their evidence would weigh more heavily. On the other hand, we would not be able to benefit from the “super tariff” of 30 percent to 40 percent, which our own auditors charged, but instead had to use outside firms, whose personnel demanded the highest fees while their bosses happily flew from Australia or New Zealand to meetings in New York. However, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung’s report that an Australian accountant had taken a taxi from Geneva, where he had landed in late evening, to Zurich was a nonstory. The Hotel des Bergues would have charged more for a night’s stay.

It was the largest auditing project the world had ever seen. Some 650 certified accountants (out of the 250,000 who work in houses with global operations) were mobilized from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand to wade their way through bank archives under the co-coordinating aegis of Peter Weibel, the Swiss head of Price Waterhouse. If we had given the commission a managing director, which we had not done for cost reasons, we would in the end have saved a lot of money.

To give some sense of proportion, here are the results for the Bank Julius Baer. After the audit, twelve accounts were finally reported — two of them still current. (They had not been paid out after 1962 because they didn’t correspond to the criteria laid out in the federal law.) The auditing costs for those twelve accounts with a total value of SFr 12,000 ($9,600) amounted to SFr 3 million ($2.4 million). In addition to the so-called team leader, a Briton, and his deputy, also a Briton, two Swiss helpers busied themselves with the dossiers of a bank, which in the time under question had twenty-five employees. They marched through our house for four months, making slow progress. But most of the expenses came from the endless conferences and meetings the leadership of Deloitte & Touche, the contracted firm, held with Michael Bradfield (Paul Volcker’s deputy) in London and New York. That the auditors were paid at an hourly rate to learn how a Swiss bank operates outraged many of our own employees.

Nor do I want to hide one almost anecdotal experience. When we filtered out dormant accounts at our Geneva sister bank, the Société Bancaire Julius Baer, we found one that had been heavily padded. Through a Geneva law firm, which used a Parisian advocate, our legal department established contact with the rightful heir. The lady was not pleased. Yes, yes, she knew all about that, but at the moment she was not interested and to please leave things as they were. Obviously, tax reasons inspired the lady to prefer this inherited account “dormant.”

Back to forming the commission. Who should be chairman? Both sides had compiled long lists of candidates. Together we thought seriously about former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. We were a little afraid of naming an American, since experience had taught us that an expensive bureaucratic substructure would inevitably be involved.

But finally we asked the man I had thought about on May 2 during the taxi ride to JFK with Krayer and Ackermann: Paul Volcker. As Alan Greenspan’s predecessor as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he was doubtless the “eminent person” we needed. In order to get him, we were willing to tolerate his cheap cigars. The foul-smelling stogies are not a matter of personal spitefulness but an expression of a frugal lifestyle. Paul Volcker was hardly interested in money, but he had a sick wife to attend to. Professionally, he had first made a career in the bond department of the Chase Manhattan Bank, was therefore an interest rate expert, and as such papabile for the presidency of the New York Federal Reserve. I had met him in that capacity at a World Bank meeting.

At first, Volcker had little interest in our offer. He found the differences between the two positions too great. The banks were thinking of a total compensation sum in the $5 million range, the Jewish side demanded $50 billion. Moreover, he thought it unlikely that the banks would allow themselves to be fully examined. That was one concern we could remove. The Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC) could order an extraordinary audit at any time under the motto of “assuring impeccable business practices.”

We have to thank Fritz Leutwiler for Volcker’s final agreement to serve. During our first phone conversation, Volcker had made it clear that “in Switzerland I don’t do anything without first asking my friend Fritz Leutwiler.” The long-time president of the National Bank, already failing in his health, persuaded him that it was his duty. The integrity of the Swiss banking system was at stake.

The Swiss members of the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons (ICEP), as it was called, were nominated quickly: the political science professor Curt Gasteyger, the certified public accountant Dr. Peter Mengiardi, former CEO of Atag Ernst & Young (who also had no clear idea of the costs facing the banks), and Klaus Jacobi, the late former state secretary in the Swiss foreign office, and as such its top diplomat. He grew up in the town of Bienne as the child of a manufacturer of upright pianos, was married to a friend of my wife, and, as it turned out, proved to be a tough defender of bank interests. (Jacobi died quite suddenly in September 2004.)

We had also nominated Professor Alain Hirsch, a legal scholar, who threw in the towel after the second session, appalled both at the rude style of the Israelis on the committee, and by their extreme demands. We replaced him with the Basel professor of constitutional law, Rene Rhinow. An excellent man. As an experienced parliamentarian, he almost never showed up for meetings.

Bronfman, Burg, Barak, and Singer needed a lot longer for their nominations, a result of elections in Israel where Benjamin Netanyahu unexpectedly defeated Shimon Peres. Suddenly, Ronald Lauder was enthroned; he had financed Netanyahu’s election campaign. (Today Ronald Lauder, the former ambassador to Vienna and patron of the arts, is the president of the WJC as the successor to Edgar Bronfman.) In addition, Reuben Beraja, the former president of the Banco Mayo Coop Buenos Aires (which went bankrupt in 1999), and Avraham Burg were to represent the WJC, the Jewish Agency, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization.

I was not foreseen as a member of the committee and had no ambition to become one. But shortly before presenting the ICEP, with Paul Volcker as chairman and Reuben Beraja, Avraham Burg, Curt Gasteyger, Alain Hirsch, Klaus Jacobi, and Ronald S. Lauder (who flew to meetings as rarely as possible, even though he had his own private jet and usually arrived toward the end of the meeting, explaining that his plane had been out of order) as members, we determined that the work could not be completed as speedily without alternate members. So Singer and Barak (whom Singer once called a bull in a china shop, with good reason) were named as alternates on one side and Peider Mengiardi and myself on the other. Mengiardi, a pleasant man whose contributions were very helpful, moved up to permanent membership after Professor Alain Hirsch retired. Professor Rene Rhinow now became an alternate. The idea was to make Singer and me responsible for managing the group’s daily affairs.

Back in 1988, Bronfman had received the German Democratic Republic’s highest civilian decoration from Erich Honecker him­self, the “Great Star of People’s Friendship.” Did he value counter­point by wanting to hold the first meeting of the Independent Committee at his Chateau de Mery-sur-Oise in the Ile de France? I wondered. I felt like Georges Pompidou. “On n’a pas de château quand on fait de la politique” (You don’t have a castle if you’re in politics). A castle was not the right framework for me. If this were the case, I would have to decline. Instead, we met on August 15, 1996, in New York.

The meeting drove us to the brink of exhaustion. Bronfman on one side and Krayer on the other repeatedly had to intervene in order to prevent escalation of the discussion. Bronfman’s historic achievement is his disciplining influence. Barak, round as a barrel, highly impulsive and extremely rude, his unpressed shirt often hanging out of his trousers, allowed no one to finish talking but at the same time pretended most credibly to be in danger of suffering from apoplexy. Burg’s rudeness did not lag far behind him. Once he demanded that Peider Mengiardi come up with six gold teeth pulled from a woman’s mouth in Auschwitz after Mengiardi had dared to criticize his attack on Switzerland’s federal president, Pascal Delamuraz. Both in dress and manner, the two differed markedly from the quiet Reuben Beraja in his graceful pinstriped suits and elegant shirts. A stylish personality. It is really a great pity that he later had to defend himself against embezzlement charges in Argentina.

When Barak (“I was elected by the Israeli people”) and Burg raved about nothing in particular in order to grind us down — at times the pattern of a tie could be an affront — I seriously feared, intermittently, that I was not up to the situation. During these moments, Klaus Jacobi, steeled in countless negotiations, helped to stabilize me: “Just wait, sooner or later they’ll calm down.” And that was exactly what happened. After the second meeting, things slowly became more civilized. I learned quite a bit from this experienced diplomat.

The only one who matched Bronfman’s self-confidence was Paul Volcker. Neither of them was used to accepting anyone else’s authority. Volcker would fly in at seven in the morning, open the session at eight, and in the afternoon get back on the plane for New York. Nobody could match his composure. When he didn’t sleep, he doodled in his notebook. He could afford to do that because he had silently brought his secretary-general, the attorney Michael Bradfield, with him.

With Bradfield we felt like the bridegroom whose bride has neglected to tell him that she is bringing a child into the marriage. We had worked out an excellent and very detailed employment contract with Volcker, and in his “terms of reference” he didn’t mention Bradfield at all. (The contract is still in my files.) Later he would comment that having smuggled Bradfield in was “the one smart thing I did.”

It turned out that Bradfield, a partner in the Washington law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, had been Volcker’s top aide for the last twenty years. He had accompanied him all the way from the treasury department to the top of the Fed. The more than SFr 5 mil­lion ($3.1 million) that showed up in the ICEP’s account examination report under the item “other professional services” might have been used to cover his own substantial “expenses.”

Still trapped by the notion that we had no money and couldn’t afford to run up expenses, Volcker irritated us at the beginning with his estimate that “operating costs” would probably amount to $20 million. He was so amused by our irritated reaction that he told Ambassador Jagmetti about it. We really had no idea about the charges we were facing. Volcker proceeded with god-like authority, acting according to the motto that “if you want the truth, you have to pay for it.” The individual banks paid for the audits. The SBA assumed general costs, including digitalization of the Yad Vashem list of Holocaust victims, which exhausted the association’s reserves that had been built up over a hundred years.

Bradfield, a very energetic and endlessly hard-working man, equipped with a good knowledge of the banking system’s possible weaknesses, became the driving force behind the investigation. That in the midst of his labors doctors found an advanced case of glandular cancer, which they treated with heavy doses of chemotherapy, did not break his working zeal to any notable extent.

When I learned about his illness, I felt, in the tradition of an Alfred Schaefer, that we would have to dispense with his services. If someone is not in command of their full intellectual and physical capabilities, they cannot perform in a demanding office. I was sorry, but from where I sat, there was no other choice but to replace him.

To my mild surprise, the SBA wanted no part of that decision. The Swiss side of the committee also found that this was simply not done. Obviously, the gentlemen already knew each other too well to make uncomfortable decisions in the service of the cause.

This is what happened. Bradfield, encouraged during evening-long telephone conversations and examined by leading Swiss doctors, became, during the course of his illness, extremely anti-Swiss. Talking to me, he hit a false note at times. On one occasion he blurted out with a rebuking, “Oh, you Swiss.” To which I had to re­ply, “Out of mere intonation, I can’t accept that.” Even worse, the sick attorney dug more deeply into the dossiers, constantly increased the search criteria for the auditors, and expanded the framework of the investigation. The differences in the instructions given auditors — and published in the appendix to the Volcker report — on November 19, 1996, and on January 30, 1998, provide a striking example. The 1998 instructions under which the auditors finally went to work had expanded the mandate to the “closed accounts.”

In the weeks that followed, Bradfield made these “closed ac­counts” his pet project, and the auditors became very nervous about his constantly changing framework. The investigation of the dormant accounts had brought to light all kinds of improprieties, including single cases of crass embezzlement. But no specific discriminatory intent lay behind those improprieties. As Volcker noted maliciously, Swiss banks treated all foreign account holders badly.

The sums these large audits found were by no means insignificant: SFr 72.3 million ($52.5 million), among them 543 accounts totaling SFr 65.2 million ($47.25 million). Ranked according to nationality, some SFr 23.02 million ($16.7 million) belonged to 875 French addresses.

After “only” SFr 72.3 million ($52.5 million) had been found, Bradfield changed direction and put the auditors to work on the closed accounts, as the January 1998 instructions required. The auditors found that until 1945, Swiss banks held a total of about 6.85 million accounts; some 4.1 million were verifiable, leaving a gap of 2.75 million accounts where no verifiable link to victims of Nazi persecution can ever be established. Of the 4.1 million accounts, 1.065 million had Swiss owners, while another 787,000 were savings accounts, leaving 2.25 million potential foreign ac­counts. The definition was deliberately construed to put as many accounts as possible under the category of potential foreign accounts. It was enough for even a well-known Swiss name to appear without a complete address to keep it out of the domestic accounts category.

A methodical blur was added by the fact that an account was not necessarily hidden behind the 2.25 million name-linked bank movements. It could simply have been clearing a check or some other activity with the bank. Among the 54,000 “victim accounts” that were found, a total of 26,000 fell into the category of “un­known account types,” meaning they could neither be assigned to demand deposits nor savings passbooks, bank safes, security ac­counts, or “other accounts.”

The auditors compared the names of the 2.25 million account holders with the names of the murdered, which had been collected from Yad Vashem, Poland, and other East European countries. Bradfield attached great importance to making sure that the digitized search did not fail because of variants in the names or spelling inconsistencies. His efforts required higher expenditures and were ridiculed in some places but in the end were justified All it took was for a typist to put one wrong letter in a name and it would have disappeared in any match based on letter identity.

Any such automatic collation only provided a first indication, as the match with the names of prominent Nazis, which was also carried out, demonstrated. This match signaled 1,934 hits, but as the Independent Commission of Experts (Bergier Commission) determined, “Nearly all of the discovered ‘matches’ were based on randomly identical names,” and therefore did not point to any “culprit accounts.” In matching the 2.25 million “foreign account holders” with the 5.5 million names of victims as well as the claimants the ombudsman had recorded, the auditors registered 280,000 hits in the sense of random-name identity. From this quota, in turn, they filtered out all those who could not be identical (significant differences in age, different middle names, deportation or death before an account was opened, the academic title of children). They came up with a total of 3,252 names. But 76,000 account holders had to be added although their names were not on any victims’ list. Why? Their circumstances allowed a clear-cut assignment, for example, the way an account had been opened or the address (concentration camp) or an internal bank memorandum that the holder had died in a concentration camp.

The auditors then examined these 353,000 accounts to see if the owners were Swiss or foreigners, if after 1945 the account was active or not, what the account was worth, and the “final disposition,” that is, if it was still open, had been paid out, or closed for a variety of reasons — fees charged, payment to Nazi authorities or for unknown causes.

Finally, the auditors isolated 36,000 accounts “closed, un­known by whom,” and which possibly had borne the name of a victim of Nazi violence. (Out of this amount, as indicated above, 26,000 were part of the “unknown account type” category, meaning that they may not have been accounts at all.) Some 23,000 ac­counts were published on the Internet, after clearing them with the Swiss Federal Banking Commission.

The value of these accounts totaled SFr 35.7 million ($25.9 million). According to a wealth formula especially developed for the Volcker Commission by the interest rate guru Henry Kaufman, that sum would be worth SFr 411 million ($310 million) today. And that makes the proportions look quite different.

If you add the 36,000 accounts “closed, unknown by whom” and use an average base deposit of SFr 10,000, the billion-franc mark is crossed quickly, at least to the extent that the 23,000 accounts are considered, which were burdened for so long with closing and administrative charges that in the end nothing was left. The auditors dug up several very embarrassing cases, including more than 400 accounts that were illegally delivered to the Nazi authorities because of mismanagement or otherwise.

Paul Volcker traveled around the world telling one particular story. An au pair worked in Switzerland for a summer and received a few hundred francs in wages. She left the money in her account, believing she would come again next year. The bank liquidated the account after nine months, charging closing costs.

In another case, a dormant account in a private bank that had SFr 65,850 ($4,950) in 1990 was reduced to SFr 557 ($417) at the end of 1994. In 1997 it was promptly reported with this meager balance. Without the audit, the correct value would never have been determined any more than the unprofessional practice of burdening accounts with fees and other expenses (including the search fees that ranged from SFr 50 to SFr 3,000 and were debited to the ac­count) until nothing was left.

But the auditors were denied the opportunity to examine closed accounts because the banks had plundered them. They, and all of us, came too late to the conclusion that the real scandal was not the dormant assets but the closed accounts. The cantonal banks, whose great political weight an outsider like Volcker could not assess, had pressured the Swiss Federal Banking Commission to set a last deadline for the auditors to complete their work and in doing so had bought the idea that in the end, the whole truth would not come out. As a result, the cantonal banks — unlike all the other banks — were not required to publish accounts that “probably” should have been assigned to a Holocaust victim. Bradfield had differentiated the results of the matches into two categories: “probable” and “possible.”

Over time an unpleasant quarrel erupted between Volcker, needled by Bradfield, and Kurt Hauri, the president of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. In April 2000, after publication of his commission report, Volcker wrote a letter to a New York judge, Edward Korman, in which he recommended delaying payment of moneys from the $1.25 billion settlement in order to pressure the banks.

In retrospect, the committee had to concede one major weak­ness. The work lasted much too long. It did not publish a 217-page report until December 1999, which included an investigation into the stream of refugee capital. At that time, the agreement reached with the collective plaintiffs on August 12, 1998, was almost a year­and-a-half old, and only a very few were still interested in the results. After the agreement, Volcker, rather insulted, had wanted to leave the commission but, thanks to our ardent pleas, remained on board. But he took vengeance of sorts by not even considering simplifying the investigation. On the contrary, he made sure it was made more severe.

We have only ourselves to blame that it took so long. We started at too leisurely a pace, took too long to constitute the committee, and wasted too much time with matters of little import and petty quarrels such as the qualification of the auditors. Then we lost another year before the auditors went to work. The auditing firms feared lawsuits and wanted to insure themselves against such a risk. At some point, the problem landed on my desk, and I found a solution with Nikolaj Beck, a versatile man who worked at Swiss Re and is today is one of its senior managers. The lawyers also demanded that the International Committee of Eminent Persons, for reasons of limited liability, be constituted as an association. Other­wise, Ronald Lauder, for example, risked becoming a victim of class action specialists.

Belatedly, I think it was a disadvantage that we knew each other too well. The committee worked hard; it met every quarter, fifteen times in all. In Zurich, we met in one of the airport’s conference rooms; in New York, we saw each other in Volcker’s office at the Banker’s Trust on Park Avenue. These meetings, often attended by the CEOs of the auditing firms, usually lasted until 3 p.m. Then each one of us jumped on a plane home. I remember the food with some horror. Kosher sandwiches. They didn’t improve by being served in heaping amounts. The Swiss delegates made sure they at least had the opportunity the night before to have a decent dinner and feel human. We all mingled very informally. Nobody wanted to expose himself. Finally, I was very disillusioned by a telephone conversation that lasted for several hours during which we negotiated to the point of exhaustion about the final version of the report. Michael Bradfield worked the same tricks as Ernst Bieri once did in our own house. He submitted the report so late that major changes were no longer possible. I had suspected something like that and had wanted to see something beforehand, but Bradfield did what Volcker wanted and never thought about allowing any large-scale discussion.

Volcker was not interested in any censure or general reckoning with the banks. Zvi Barak was not far from the truth with his suspicion that an American chairman believed he was the committee. And that’s how it was. With Bradfield as his instrument, Volcker had made sure he would get what he wanted. In the end, the committee was only an empty show. Since in my whole life my authority had never been challenged, I wasn’t used to being treated so nonchalantly. I had prepared a few things I wished to have included and to set a few decisive accents in the report about the practiced improprieties. But telephone conferences are terribly strenuous. You never know exactly who is talking and when you can speak up to say something. Finally, I was simply too tired to continue resisting.

In the course of the investigation, my target acquisition had shifted. Our charge had been to settle the affair, but my attitude changed in the face of what I discovered. But Volcker never thought there could be any other assignment than to take the matter off the table. Accordingly, Bradfield’s report was a whitewash for the banks: no deliberate misdeeds had been committed. And the committee agreed. An unacceptable procedure.

It is true that nobody had organized any great plunder. It was a Swiss variation — unorganized theft. Many examples can be cited regarding the misuse of accounts. We Swiss were only saved by the fact that no methodology was recognizable, as was the case with a German insurance company that had reserved blocks of numbers for their Jewish customers who were to be robbed.

Nevertheless, we could all be satisfied with the results. For a long time I worried that no report at all would be issued. In that case, we would have spent a billion without producing any result. Another possibility frightened me: a minority report that would have devalued the majority opinion.

I give high marks to the Jewish side that things went as well as they did. One reason — in addition to the friendly climate within the committee — may be that Singer was busily trying to commit German companies to compensation payments of 10 billion D-marks ($2.5 billion), while the Swiss framework had already been set by the $1.25 billion agreement. In any event, the politics of the WJC hadn’t changed since the meeting in the Grande Société. Singer wasn’t interested in putting the banks in the pillory, and there was never a “Jewish conspiracy to take over the world’s leading financial centers,” as Robert Holzach told The New Yorker’s European correspondent, Jane Kramer.

As far as I know, Holzach never denied the summary of that conversation published in The New Yorker of April 28, 1997:

One old banker here told me to think of Swiss anti-Semitism this way: “It’s not a dormant account,” he said. “It’s a dormant feeling.” He thought that maybe it had to do with “the old times, when the cattle dealers were mainly Jews.” He told me, “No one likes cattle dealers,” and with that he pretty much summed up the rest of his conversation. Robert Holzach, at UBS, wanted to reassure me that with one possible exception there were no Jews “at the top” in any of the three great public banks. He said that the banking scandal was really a war. It had to do with a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world’s “prestige financial markets,” something he told me is already happening in New York, London, and “even Frankfurt.”

Immediately after the conversation with the long-time chief executive of the UBS, Jane Kramer sat crying in my office: “I have never experienced anything like it in my entire life,” she wept, and asked what she should do. “Nothing,” I advised her. Nevertheless, I was aghast that a talented banker would resort to such a diatribe, especially with a Jewish journalist. But friends that Holzach and I had in common from the Thurgau (themselves from a Jewish house) told me, “Calm down. This was nothing more than good old Swiss-Prussian military anti-Semitism.”

Holzach’s gaffe did not make waves, given the endless blunders and thoughtlessness the Swiss committed and which aroused the sympathy of the Germans who were much more experienced in those things. I can only repeat: there was never a Jewish conspiracy. We simply became victims of our own smugness. We had not done our homework. Too many of us, it turned out, were unable to meet the demands that the situation imposed. In their entire professional life, the Swiss bankers had only known normal business practices. They failed to meet their first test and fled into fantasies of war and conspiracy, which, on top of everything else, reached a broader public. Rainer Gut’s popularity did not increase when, given the class action suit, he took charge — he and Georges Blum of the Swiss Bank Corporation had the best overview of the situation — and settled the dormant account issue with enough money. I wasn’t too happy about it either, although back in 1996 an informant had told me that we wouldn’t get away with less than $1 billion.

The uncertainties of the American judicial system are foreign to us. Experienced attorneys almost always tell their clients to settle. In Switzerland, though, where only a handful of attorneys have any understanding of the American legal system, the whole thing smelled of blackmail. To some extent, the American lawyers and their class action suits rained on Volcker’s parade. Given the huge exposure of the major Swiss banks in the United States, they had no other choice but to reach a quick settlement. Credit Suisse’s Jewish managers under the spiritual leadership of Louise Firestone, the head of the legal department, pleaded vehemently for an agreement. If she had left during those boom years, Credit Suisse New York could have buried its investment banking ambitions. Significantly, the CEOs of the major banks didn’t worry about shareholder comments but only about public opinion and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, which smelled a confession of guilt. Under the slogan “rough justice,” the only thing that mattered was the return to a normal agenda as quickly as possible. Credit Suisse CEO Rainer Gut admitted as much publicly.

This $1.25 billion should be seen against the background of the $1.4 billion settlement that Wall Street investment banks (including a Swiss house) paid in 2003 for the rosy stock analyst comments, which took in so many investors. The banks pay, no­body speaks badly about anybody else, and life goes on. Americans will never understand the bitterness left behind in Switzerland. And we will only be the victims of our own attitude.

On the other hand, the Swiss never understood the Anglo-Saxon formalism during the audit when tiny sums like SFr 5.25 were written down, while the Swiss had long since answered the question about such disproportionate relations between effort and result. Loyalty to regulations is not a militia’s strength. It works out often enough, but this time it went awry.

I can only repeat that the banks did well with the Volcker report. The SBA, for example, was not audited, and certainly not forensically, and that remains an omission. Furthermore, the fact that in the cauldron of the cold war, dormant accounts belonging to Poles were paid out to repatriated Swiss crassly contradicts legal doctrine designed to protect individual property. Nor did the report mention the agreement the legal staffs of the major banks had reached in 1954 to refuse information about matters that went back more than ten years. Members of the Bergier Commission for the study of Swiss activities during the Second World War found the relevant documents. When Bradfield learned about them, he interpreted this agreement as proof of a “criminal conspiracy.”

For me, there’s no doubt that a good part of Switzerland fell apart. I could not have imagined discovering such improprieties. But not even in my own family did I find only approval. One of them, a fervent patriot, who had served in the armed forces during the Second World War, ignored the results of the Bergier Commission, consistent with the motto: “We have not done anything wrong, and everything else is just slander.” Writing thick books about the connections of American companies to Nazi Germany doesn’t help either. Switzerland surely will not get a franc in restitution. But this reaction from the historian Walther Hofer, a retired professor at the University of Berne, whom I respect very much — he came from Bienne and was a friend of my wife — again demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding. The aim was never to discredit Switzerland. The presentation of warmed-over stories was a means of cracking open the hedgehog position of bank secrecy and finally moving beyond a long drawn-out tale. Countering that others had also sinned is negative benchmarking and leads nowhere.

Back to the work of the committee. Already in 1997, when the large daily papers in Switzerland began to publish long lists with the names of dormant account owners (among them, embarrassingly, names of French aristocracy, whose addresses could have been found by looking in the Paris telephone directory, in case no one had a Bottin on hand), the committee had founded a Claims Resolution Tribunal (CRT). Its task: examine all claims raised. The tribunal approved 1,281 applications and rejected 5,415.

In the spring of 2001, Volcker and Bradfield, named as “special masters” by Judge Korman, published a list of names compiled on the basis of the audit that contained more than 20,000 probable and possible account owners. Among the names were Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. In December 2005, Sigmund Freud’s grandson, Anton Walter Freud, was awarded $168,000. The award was posthumous. Anton Walter Freud had died in 2004 at age 83. A limit of six months was set for disposition of claims. Claims were made on only every fourth account, but then, on average, four claims per account. Altogether, 32,000 laid claim to the “deposited assets” and only 5,000 of them focused on the 21,000 published accounts. The whole claims process based on individual restitution proved extremely difficult.

Judge Edward Korman set aside $800 million out of the $1.25 billion to settle individual claims. By and large those millions were not redeemed. In November of 2001, the judge authorized the first twenty-four payments to survivors. Another thirty-five received their money in January 2002. All told, $10 million were paid out, some $3 million to a survivor in Australia. Greta Beer received $100,000 “for her efforts.” Surely years will pass before all the claims are settled, provided the current pace is continued. In the spring of 2002, some 11,000 applications had not been settled, and in the spring of 2004 some $600 million were waiting to be paid out. More up-to-date figures are not available. CRT, the Claims Resolution Tribunal, refuses to issue any further information, perhaps at Michael Bradfield’s behest.

The generous criteria used in accepting claims angered the Swiss press. It criticized the failure of experienced jurists in Zurich to examine the claims. Instead, horror of horrors, Americans had done so. The media’s criticism showed how little the public under­stood Volcker’s approach and how little the Swiss themselves had learned. They still split every penny and would in case of doubt prefer excluding a claimant, while Volcker would include doubtful cases. Everybody would be served best by taking the issue off the table as soon as possible. (The Federal Court of Appeals should have removed the last obstacles when in September 2005 it upheld Judge Korman’s decision to allow a substantial part of the money — $67.5 million — to go to Nazi victims in the lands of the former So­viet Union.)

Instead, when Volcker visited Zurich in the spring of 2002, a reporter for the daily Tages-Anzeiger rushed up to me with the argument that much too much had been paid. I told her to stop insulting poor Rainer Gut. His success in negotiating this settlement will doubtless remain his historic achievement.

Gut may console himself for not having been the only victim of petty attacks. Jean François Bergier earned little public respect for his great achievement. Today, no one is surprised that the Swiss government thanked the scholar in sparse terms — a lukewarm letter drafted by a low-level chancellery official — especially those who remember how the government wanted to honor Paul Volcker’s commitment (only “without the Jews”).

Federal Councilor Joseph Deiss, the Swiss foreign minister, missed the boat in two ways: the dinner we thought to give in Lohn, the government’s country guesthouse, in Volcker’s honor was due just as much to Singer, who over and over again moderated the discussion and blunted the sharpest invectives against Switzerland.

In the end, Israel Singer seems to be the last victim of his un­deniable successes. Edgar Bronfman decided to dismiss his general secretary in 2007, only a few weeks before he retired as president of the World Jewish Congress. It can be handled differently, as I saw in Vienna on July 27, 2002, when the German ambassador gave a dinner for Curtis Hoxter’s eightieth birthday and celebrated the jubilee with a charming speech titled “International Understanding.” In the year 2003, the German president awarded Curtis Hoxter the “Great Federal Ser­vice Cross.” A great gesture. But how did he accept it? “I must confess that my first wife would not have allowed me to accept it,” he admitted. My American friends honored me as much as they could in order to set a public counterpoint to the WJC campaign. Lehigh, my alma mater, founded the Global Council, elected me as chairman of the board, a year later awarded me an honorary doctorate, and published a flattering portrait in the campus journal. In the United States, the press generally took more note of my mediating activities than in Switzerland — down to the cover story in the 1998 New Year’s Day business section of the New York Times headlined: “A human face for Swiss banks.” I was pictured with my brother, the president of the board, and my son.

What concerns me the most is that Switzerland has learned nothing from the whole affair. For me, that was decisive in having the subject of the dormant accounts worked up by the contemporary historian Thomas Maissen. I can only hope that the study, published in the spring of 2005 by the Neue Zuercher Zeitung’s publishing house under the title Verweigerte Erinnerung (Reminiscences Denied), will be taken seriously so that we will not have any repetition of a visit an anti-American student paid me. He wanted to write his thesis about the dormant accounts without having read the Bergier report, because it was too long, but he claimed that the banks had been taken for a ride.

Perhaps that student was simply not “fit and proper.”