The Claims Resolution Tribunal in Zurich

Organisation and procedure

The distribution of the funds of the Deposited Assets Class was entrusted to the Claims Resolution Tribunal, known after the settlement as CRT-II to distinguish it from the arbitral tribunal of 1997. It operated in Zurich and in New York under the supervision of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.¹ Its work was overseen by special masters appointed by the court, among them Paul Volcker, Michael Bradfield and Helen B. Junz, who had been involved in the work of the Volcker Committee.² The Zurich office gave the tribunal access to the bank records identified by the audit, which remained in Switzerland and were protected by Swiss banking secrecy, and allowed the tribunal to request additional information from the banks.

The procedure was designed to overcome the evidentiary difficulties that had defeated claimants for fifty years. Claimants did not have to prove the existence of an account with documents, which most of them did not possess. They had to show that it was plausible, in the light of all the circumstances, that the account had belonged to their relative and that they were entitled to it as heirs. The tribunal matched claims against the Account History Database and against the names of the published accounts. Where the bank records did not show the value of an account, the tribunal applied presumptive values based on the average values of accounts of the same type determined by the Volcker audit. On 31 May 2002 the court authorised the payment of such presumptive values for accounts of low or unknown value, and on 16 June 2010 it approved an upward adjustment.³ The valuation of awards applied the methodology proposed by the Volcker Committee, including the adjustment for the period since 1945.

Numbers and outcomes

The scale of the tribunal’s work was considerable. It analysed more than 104,000 claims submitted on behalf of some 415,000 relatives seeking information about accounts in Swiss banks. The matching process produced roughly 1.5 million potential matches between claimants and accounts, each of which had to be examined individually.⁴ Nearly USD 720 million of the USD 800 million allocated to the Deposited Assets Class was paid to more than 18,000 victims and heirs. The average value of an awarded account was USD 115,889 and the average award USD 184,130. About USD 86 million was distributed as so-called plausible undocumented awards of between USD 5,000 and USD 7,250 each, for claims that were plausible but could not be matched to a specific account in the surviving records.

On 9 November 2012 Judge Korman directed the tribunal to begin its liquidation and announced the completion of the programme for the Deposited Assets Class. By that date awards of over USD 726 million had been distributed to that class, bringing the total distributed under the settlement to more than USD 1.24 billion. In 2013 residual funds of USD 50 million were allocated to needy survivors. The last distributions were completed in 2020, when the programme was officially closed.⁵ According to a summary published at the close of the programme, a total of about USD 1.29 billion had been paid to approximately 458,400 claimants in more than 80 countries.⁶

Significance for Zurich

The tribunal was an unusual institution for Zurich. An international body supervised by an American federal court operated in the city for almost two decades, with access to Swiss bank records that remained protected by banking secrecy towards everyone else. Its work required cooperation between American lawyers, Swiss bankers, historians and genealogists from many countries. For the Swiss legal profession, it demonstrated how a mass claims process could be organised within the framework of Swiss law, with records remaining in Switzerland and decisions taken according to rules approved by a foreign court. It also produced a body of decisions, published on the tribunal’s website, that documents in great detail the fate of individual families and their accounts. These decisions form one of the richest sources for the history of Swiss private banking in the 1930s and 1940s.

The tribunal’s presumptions and its plausibility standard have influenced later mass claims processes, including those relating to insurance policies and to property in other countries. They also illustrate a point of general relevance for the law of evidence in cross-border private client matters. When a bank has destroyed or failed to keep records, the burden of proof cannot fairly rest on the claimant alone. A tribunal that aims at justice must then develop presumptions that account for the imbalance of information between the institution and the heir.

Notes

1. Claims Resolution Tribunal, website, https://www.crt-ii.org/. The website is now maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ↩
2. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Deposited Assets Claims” (as above). ↩
3. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Chronology” (as above), entries for 31 May 2002 and 16 June 2010. ↩
4. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Deposited Assets Claims” (as above), which also gives the numbers of recipients and the average values cited in the following paragraph. ↩
5. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Chronology” (as above), entries for 9 November 2012, 13 May 2013 and 2020. ↩
6. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Overview” (as above), which records that more than 458,400 claimants in more than 80 countries had received payments by 2020. ↩

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.