Dormant assets in the post-war decades

The nature of the problem

The German term nachrichtenlose Vermögen, literally assets “without news”, describes values held by a bank or another custodian whose owner can no longer be found. In the Swiss debate the term came to refer above all to deposits, securities accounts and safe deposit boxes of victims of National Socialist persecution who had placed part of their wealth in Switzerland before or during the Second World War and who, together with their heirs, never reclaimed it.¹ The reasons for depositing money in Switzerland were well understood at the time. The Swiss franc remained convertible, the country was politically stable, and Swiss banks offered a degree of discretion that became statutory with the Banking Act of 1934 discussed in chapter F.II. For Jewish families in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands or France, an account in Zurich, Basel or Geneva could represent a last reserve that lay beyond the reach of confiscatory decrees, foreign exchange controls and, eventually, deportation.

The legal position of such accounts after 1945 was determined by ordinary Swiss private law. A bank deposit is a contract between the bank and its client, whose claim does not lapse simply because the client disappears. As long as no heir came forward, the bank continued to hold the account, to charge fees and, in many cases, to reduce the balance until nothing remained. The Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, known after its chairman Jean-François Bergier as the Bergier Commission, later observed that before 1962 dormant assets were governed by the general rules of contract law and of banking practice, including the rules on limitation, and that the ordinary provisions of the Civil Code and the Code of Obligations applied again once the special reporting decree of 1962 had expired.² Swiss law contained no general rule that would have obliged a bank to search actively for the owner of a dormant account or to transfer unclaimed assets to the state after a certain period. That gap lay at the heart of what followed.

The banks’ post-war conduct

The Bergier Commission devoted a separate volume to the fate of dormant assets in Swiss banks, written by Barbara Bonhage, Hanspeter Lussy and Marc Perrenoud. Its findings are sober and, for the banks, uncomfortable. Heirs who approached banks after the war were frequently told that the bank was not obliged to keep documents for more than ten years, and banks invoked banking secrecy to decline information to anyone who could not prove an entitlement to inherit with certainty. Since many victims had died in camps whose records did not produce death certificates in the ordinary form, that standard of proof was often impossible to meet. The commission also found that many dormant accounts were depleted by fees, that accounts without value were closed, and that small balances sometimes found their way into the banks’ profit and loss accounts, while the underlying documents were destroyed once the retention period had expired.³

The Washington Agreement of May 1946 had already addressed the question in principle. Alongside the payment of CHF 250 million in settlement of the Allied claims concerning gold, Switzerland undertook to examine sympathetically the question of assets in Switzerland belonging to victims of persecution who had died without heirs.⁴ The Swiss Bankers Association carried out surveys of its members in 1947 and 1956, when federal legislation was under discussion. The Bergier Commission found that the banks reported dormant assets to the association sehr zurückhaltend, very cautiously, in the expectation that small totals would make legislation unnecessary, and that the association actively opposed a statutory solution until 1962.⁵ The Cold War added a further layer of difficulty. Many heirs lived in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, and Swiss banks and authorities were reluctant to release assets to persons in countries whose governments might confiscate them or whose documents were regarded with suspicion.

Switzerland concluded compensation agreements with Poland and Hungary around 1950 in connection with the nationalisation of Swiss property in those countries. These agreements later acquired a disturbing significance because part of the heirless assets of citizens of those states was eventually used to settle Swiss claims against their governments.⁶ The history of those agreements shows that the question of dormant assets was never only a matter between banks and their clients. It was also a question of foreign policy, of the protection of Swiss investors abroad and of the relationship between Switzerland and the states of Eastern Europe.

Notes

1. Stiftung gegen Rassismus und Antisemitismus (GRA), Glossar, “Nachrichtenlose Vermögen”, https://www.gra.ch/bildung/glossar/nachrichtenlose-vermoegen/. The glossary defines dormant assets as values whose owner can no longer be located and relates the term particularly to the holdings of victims of National Socialism in Swiss banks. ↩
2. Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz – Zweiter Weltkrieg (UEK), Die Schweiz, der Nationalsozialismus und das Recht. II. Privatrecht, Veröffentlichungen der UEK, Band 19, Chronos, 2001, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/19d.pdf. ↩
3. UEK, Nachrichtenlose Vermögen bei Schweizer Banken. Depots, Konten und Safes von Opfern des nationalsozialistischen Regimes und Restitutionsprobleme in der Nachkriegszeit, by Barbara Bonhage, Hanspeter Lussy and Marc Perrenoud, Veröffentlichungen der UEK, Band 15, Chronos, summary, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungen/15narilo.htm. ↩
4. Dodis, “The 80 years of the Washington Agreement”, on the agreement of 25 May 1946, the payment of CHF 250 million “without recognition of a legal obligation” and the confidential letter in which the Federal Council undertook to examine sympathetically the question of assets in Switzerland of victims of the former German government who had died without heirs, https://www.dodis.ch/en/80-years-washington-agreement; UEK, summary of vol. 15, on the exchange of letters within the Washington Agreement, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungen/15narilo.htm. See chapter F.III for the agreement as a whole. ↩
5. UEK, Band 15, summary (as above), https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungen/15narilo.htm; see also the short text on the same volume, https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Kurztexte/k15nachrichtenlose.htm, which stresses the difficulties created by the Cold War. ↩
6. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, which records the compensation agreements with Poland (1949) and Hungary (1950) and the publication on 19 December 1996 of the study by Peter Hug and Marc Perrenoud, “In der Schweiz liegende Vermögenswerte von Nazi-Opfern und Entschädigungsabkommen mit Oststaaten”. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.