Legacy for the financial centre

Reputation

The most obvious legacy of the war years and of their reappraisal in the 1990s is reputational. The phrase “Nazi gold” has attached itself to the Swiss financial centre in international memory in a way that no later scandal has fully displaced. For foreign journalists, politicians and litigants, the history of the gold transactions and of the dormant accounts provided a ready frame for every subsequent controversy, from the treatment of potentates’ assets to the tax disputes of the early twenty-first century. In retrospect, the crisis of the 1990s appears as a turning point for Swiss banking, the moment at which discretion without accountability became a liability.

The reputational damage had a practical dimension. The class actions filed in New York in 1996 and 1997 and the threat of sanctions by American states and municipalities showed that Swiss banks with significant American business were exposed to legal and political pressure in the United States in a way that their wartime predecessors had not been. This lesson, first learned in the dormant accounts affair, would be repeated with greater force in the tax disputes after 2008, which are the subject of Part G. The line from Washington in 1946 to Washington in 2009 runs through the gold and the looted assets of the war.

The duty to keep and produce records

A second legacy concerns records. The federal decree of 1996 prohibited the destruction of files relevant to the Commission’s work and overrode all duties of confidentiality in favour of historical research. The episode that triggered public outrage in January 1997, when a security guard at the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft in Zurich rescued files from the shredder, showed how fragile the historical record of private institutions could be.¹ The Commission itself worked under a time limit. Its right of access to private archives ended with its mandate at the end of 2001. Under a decision of the Federal Council of July 2001, the companies were allowed to take back the copies that the Commission had made in their archives, which led historians to call for continued access to the archives of private companies whose history is of public interest.²

Modern Swiss law has made the preservation of business records a general obligation. Companies must keep their books, accounting vouchers, annual reports and audit reports for ten years under the Code of Obligations, and financial intermediaries must document their transactions and their clarifications so that the authorities can reconstruct them, as the Anti-Money Laundering Act requires.³ These rules have their own origins and serve their own purposes. They nevertheless reflect the same insight that the Commission’s work had made plain: that a financial centre whose records cannot be reconstructed invites suspicion, while one whose records are complete can defend itself.

Provenance and the culture of compliance

The third legacy is the least tangible and perhaps the most important. The gold transactions of the SNB turned on a single question: whether a buyer may rely on the assurances of a seller when the circumstances suggest that the asset may have been stolen. The SNB answered that question in the affirmative and paid for it in 1946 and again, in reputational terms, in the 1990s. Swiss anti-money-laundering law now answers it in the negative. A financial intermediary must clarify the economic background and purpose of a transaction or business relationship if it appears unusual or if there are indications that assets are the proceeds of a crime. It must also report to the Money Laundering Reporting Office if it has reasonable grounds for suspicion.⁴ The development of this law, from the Chiasso affair of 1977 to the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 1997, is the subject of chapter F.V. Its adoption in the same year in which the Bergier Commission began its work was no coincidence of timing alone. It reflected a political climate in which the tolerance for unexplained assets had fallen sharply.

The same principle has shaped the Swiss approach to cultural property. Switzerland endorsed the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art in 1998 and adopted a Cultural Property Transfer Act that entered into force in 2005, which introduced due diligence obligations for the art trade and extended the period during which stolen cultural property can be claimed.⁵ In Zurich, where the art market, the private collections and the Kunsthaus are close neighbours of the banks, the question of provenance has become a permanent part of professional practice. The debate about the Bührle collection shows that it is also a permanent part of public life.

“Never again” and its limits

The debates of the 1990s produced a rhetoric of “never again” in Swiss finance, a commitment that the financial centre should never again serve as a safe haven for the proceeds of crime and oppression. The commitment has been tested repeatedly since then, in the cases of the assets of Sani Abacha, Ferdinand Marcos and other potentates, in the tax disputes with the United States and the European Union and in the collapse of Credit Suisse in 2023. The later chapters of this book examine these episodes. What the history of the war years contributes is a sense of proportion. The failures of 1939 to 1945 were institutional failures. Bodies from the central bank to the Federal Council acted within the law as they understood it and did not ask the questions that the circumstances demanded.

From the perspective of a practitioner who has advised financial institutions in Zurich, Singapore and Hong Kong, the most durable lesson lies there. Compliance rules can be codified, but the habit of asking where assets come from, and of refusing business when the answer is unsatisfactory, has to be cultivated inside institutions. The Bergier Commission did not create that habit. By showing in documented detail what its absence had cost, it made it harder to argue against.

Notes

1. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, entries of 13 December 1996 (unanimous adoption of the federal decree on the historical and legal investigation) and 14 January 1997 (shredding at the Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft made public by Christoph Meili, an employee of a security firm). The case is discussed in chapter F.VI. ↩
2. UEK, Final Report, introduction, p. 38, https://www.uek.ch/en/schlussbericht/synthesis/ueke.pdf: “In July 2001, the Swiss Federal Council decided otherwise and granted companies the option to take back the photocopies made in their archives. This affects some 12,000 records.” ↩
3. Art. 958f para. 1 of the Code of Obligations (“Die Geschäftsbücher und die Buchungsbelege sowie der Geschäftsbericht und der Revisionsbericht sind während zehn Jahren aufzubewahren”), https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-en/2/22/220-958f-1336.html; Art. 7 paras. 1 and 3 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 10 October 1997, requiring records of transactions and clarifications that allow qualified third parties to form a reliable judgement, to be kept for at least ten years after the end of the business relationship or the completion of the transaction, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/de-fr/9/95/955.0-7-11.html. ↩
4. Arts. 6 para. 2 and 9 para. 1 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 10 October 1997 (SR 955.0), English text at https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/9/95/955.0-6-10.html and https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/9/95/955.0-9-15.html: the intermediary must clarify the economic background and purpose where a transaction or business relationship appears unusual or there are indications that assets are the proceeds of a felony, and must report immediately to the Money Laundering Reporting Office if it knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect such a connection. The development of this law from 1977 is treated in chapter F.V and current law in Part I. ↩
5. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, entry on the Washington conference on Nazi-looted assets of 30 November to 3 December 1998, at which more than forty states adopted non-binding principles on looted art. Federal Act of 20 June 2003 on the International Transfer of Cultural Property (SR 444.1), https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/4/44/444.1-34-39.html: commencement date 1 June 2005 (Federal Council decree of 13 April 2005). The duty of diligence for the art trade is in Art. 16, and the thirty-year period for claims results from Art. 9 and the amendment of Art. 934 of the Civil Code (https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/4/44/444.1-index.html). ↩

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.