The Federal Decree of 1962 and its limited results

The *Meldebeschluss*

The first statutory attempt to deal with dormant assets of victims of persecution came seventeen years after the end of the war. On 20 December 1962 the Federal Assembly adopted, with the unanimous support of both chambers, a federal decree on assets in Switzerland of foreigners or stateless persons persecuted for racial, religious or political reasons, which became known as the Meldebeschluss, the reporting decree.¹ It required every person or institution in Switzerland that administered assets to report those for which no reliable information had been received since 9 May 1945 and whose owners were known or presumed to have been victims of racial, religious or political persecution.² The decree was limited to ten years. It set up a reporting office within the federal administration and allowed heirless assets to be transferred to a fund.

The decree had been prepared under pressure. Jewish organisations had raised the question in the preceding years. The banks, as the Bergier Commission noted, had resisted any legislation until the decree was adopted. The model finally chosen reflected that history. It relied on self-identification by the banks, left it to each institution to decide which of its dormant clients might have been victims of persecution, and contained no mechanism to verify whether the reports were complete.

What the decree produced

The results were modest by any standard. According to the Bergier Commission, 46 banks reported 739 assets with a total value of CHF 6.2 million by February 1964, and most of the declared value eventually returned to the banks after heirs had been identified or the assets had been otherwise dealt with.³ Taking account of reports by other custodians such as lawyers, fiduciaries and insurance companies, the total reported under the decree amounted to about CHF 9.4 million, of which only about CHF 3.1 million ultimately passed into the special fund for heirless property.⁴ A text on the Swiss handling of the National Socialist legacy, published on the website of Thomas Maissen’s chair at the University of Heidelberg, gives a slightly different count: the 26 institutions willing to provide information reported just under CHF 10 million by 1974, of which about CHF 1.5 million was paid to heirs through the reporting office.⁵ The discrepancies between the figures reflect different dates and different definitions of the reporting institutions. They do not alter the conclusion that the decree uncovered only a small fraction of what later investigations found.

The method of identification explains much of that shortfall. Banks searched their records for names that sounded Jewish, which excluded many victims who did not bear such names and left out entire groups of the persecuted, including Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and disabled persons.⁶ The decree also depended on the banks’ judgement of what counted as “reliable information” since 1945. An account in respect of which a letter had been received in 1946 from a relative, or on which fees had been debited with the client’s formal consent, might fall outside the reporting duty altogether. Many relevant files had moreover been destroyed under the ten-year retention rule before the decree came into force.

The reinterpretation of 1972

The most troubling chapter of the decree’s history came at its end. Shortly after taking office as head of the Federal Department of Justice and Police, Kurt Furgler submitted a proposal to reinterpret the decree. On 28 February 1972, by a presidential decision of Federal Councillor Nello Celio, the federal government allowed accounts of owners in Eastern European countries to be confiscated directly, without proceedings to determine heirs and without declarations of presumed death. About CHF 4 million was eventually distributed in 1975, primarily to the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and to Swiss Refugee Aid, while one fifth went to Poland and Hungary under the compensation agreements.⁷ Other sources describe a distribution of CHF 3.18 million of heirless assets, one third to Swiss refugee aid and two thirds to the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities.⁸

For the banks and the authorities, the expiry of the decree closed the matter. The Bergier Commission’s verdict, reached a generation later, was that the conduct of the banks, the lobbying of the Swiss Bankers Association and the inaction of the federal authorities together allowed the assets of victims of National Socialism to remain in Swiss banks throughout the post-war period.⁹ When the question returned in the 1990s, the banks therefore faced it with an institutional memory that regarded it as settled, with records that had in many cases been destroyed, and with a public that knew almost nothing about the decree of 1962.

Notes

1. NZZ, “Ohne Rechtsgrundlage enteignet: Wie der Bundesrat 1972 einen fatalen Entscheid bezüglich nachrichtenloser Vermögen fällte”, https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/ohne-rechtsgrundlage-enteignet-wie-der-bundesrat-1972-einen-fatalen-entscheid-bezueglich-nachrichtenloser-vermoegen-faellte-ld.1531716. The article draws on the study by Peter Hug and Marc Perrenoud commissioned by the federal government in 1996. ↩
2. UEK, Band 19, summary (as above), https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungenpdf/19d.pdf. ↩
3. UEK, Band 15, summary (as above), https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungen/15narilo.htm. ↩
4. Eidgenössisches Finanzdepartement, Bericht der Expertenkommission “Bundesgesetz über nachrichtenlose Vermögenswerte”, June 2004, historical introduction, https://www.bj.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/zwkZoj0V9qbd/ber-expertenkommission.pdf. ↩
5. “Die Schweiz und die nationalsozialistische Hinterlassenschaft”, text on the website of the chair of Thomas Maissen, University of Heidelberg, https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/imperia/md/content/fakultaeten/phil/zegk/histsem/mitglieder/ls_maissen/dateienhomepage/die_schweiz_und_die_nationalsozialistische_hinterlassenschaft.pdf. The text records that “die 26 auskunftswilligen Institute meldeten bis 1974 knapp 10 Millionen Franken”. ↩
6. UEK, Band 15, summary (as above), https://www.uek.ch/de/schlussbericht/Publikationen/Zusammenfassungen/15narilo.htm. The summary uses the phrase “jüdisch klingende Namen”. ↩
7. NZZ, “Ohne Rechtsgrundlage enteignet” (as above). The article characterises the 1972 decision as an expropriation without a legal basis. ↩
8. “Die Schweiz und die nationalsozialistische Hinterlassenschaft” (as above), https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/imperia/md/content/fakultaeten/phil/zegk/histsem/mitglieder/ls_maissen/dateienhomepage/die_schweiz_und_die_nationalsozialistische_hinterlassenschaft.pdf. ↩
9. UEK, Band 15, summary (as above); similarly GRA, Glossar, “Nachrichtenlose Vermögen” (as above), which summarises the Bergier findings in the same sense. ↩

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.