The Independent Committee of Eminent Persons

Mandate and composition

The memorandum of understanding of 2 May 1996 between the Swiss Bankers Association, the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the World Jewish Congress created a committee of six members and a neutral chairman. Each side appointed three members and two alternates. The chairman was Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.¹ The Jewish organisations appointed Ruben Beraja, Avraham Burg and Ronald S. Lauder, with Zvi Barak and Israel Singer as alternates. The Swiss Bankers Association appointed Curt Gasteyger, Klaus Jacobi and Pieder Mengiardi, with Hans J. Baer and René Rhinow as alternates.² The committee thus combined the moral authority of the Jewish organisations, the institutional knowledge of Swiss banking and diplomacy, and the credibility of a chairman whom both sides respected.

The committee’s mandate was to identify accounts in Swiss banks of victims of Nazi persecution that had been dormant since the Second World War, and to assess the treatment of such accounts by the banks. The committee had no judicial powers. It could neither award assets nor bind anybody by its findings. Its power came from two sources: the agreement of the banks to cooperate and the decision of the Swiss Federal Banking Commission to declare the investigation an official special audit.³ That designation turned a private arrangement into a supervisory procedure and made cooperation mandatory for all banks within its scope.

The audit

The investigation that followed was the largest forensic audit ever undertaken in Switzerland. The auditors examined all available records for the period from 1933 to 1945 of some 254 banks that had existed in 1945, representing 82 per cent of the Swiss banking system at that time. Five international accounting firms carried out the work: Arthur Andersen, Coopers & Lybrand, Deloitte & Touche, KPMG and Price Waterhouse. At the peak of the investigation some 650 forensic accountants were at work. The external costs, which the banks bore, were in the range of CHF 300 million.⁴ The figure is sometimes given as considerably higher when the internal costs of the banks are included.

The audit faced a fundamental obstacle. Of an estimated 6.8 million accounts that had existed during the relevant period, records survived for about 4.1 million, or approximately 60 per cent, while records of some 2.8 million accounts could not be traced.⁵ Since Swiss law had never required banks to keep records beyond ten years, the banks had routinely destroyed files once that period had expired. The auditors therefore worked with the surviving data, which they compared with lists of victims of the Holocaust compiled from sources such as Yad Vashem and other archives, and with information on the banks’ internal treatment of accounts. The result was a system of categories that expressed the probability that an account had belonged to a victim of Nazi persecution.

Findings

The committee published its report on 6 December 1999. It identified 53,886 accounts with a probable or possible relationship to victims of Nazi persecution.⁶ Among these, the committee regarded 25,187 accounts in categories 1 and 2 and part of category 3 as sufficiently likely to belong to victims that it unanimously recommended the publication of their names. Its conclusions on the banks’ conduct were balanced and pointed. The auditors reported no evidence of systematic destruction of records of victim accounts. They did, however, confirm evidence of questionable and deceitful actions by some individual banks, including the withholding of information from victims and heirs and the inappropriate closing of accounts.⁷ The Swiss Bankers Association described the report as fair and expressed regret for improper behaviour. The committee summed up that the handling of these funds had too often been “grossly insensitive to the special conditions of the Holocaust and sometimes misleading in intent and unfair in result”.⁸

The report also addressed the question of value. A deposit of 1939 could not simply be repaid at its nominal amount in 2000. The committee recommended that the 1945 values of accounts be multiplied by a factor of ten to reflect interest and the change in value up to the present, with deductions for fees and charges to be reversed.⁹ Its other principal recommendations were that the databases created by the audit be consolidated under the control of the Federal Banking Commission, that the names of the accounts in the relevant categories be published, and that claims be decided by the Claims Resolution Tribunal under the settlement then pending in New York.¹⁰

The publication of names followed after a delay that reflected Swiss concerns about banking secrecy and data protection. On 5 February 2001 a list of about 21,000 Holocaust-era accounts was published, together with the rules of the new Claims Resolution Tribunal.¹¹ The number published was thus somewhat smaller than the 25,187 accounts that the committee had recommended. The consolidated Account History Database eventually contained about 36,000 accounts regarded as likely to have belonged to victims, which the tribunal could use when examining claims.¹²

Assessment

The Volcker Committee achieved something that neither the banks nor their critics could have achieved alone. It established, on the basis of an audit conducted by independent professionals with access to the banks’ records, a factual picture that both sides accepted as broadly reliable. That picture refuted two opposite myths. It showed that the Swiss Bankers Association’s figure of 1995 had grossly understated the number of relevant accounts. It also showed that the claims of billions of dollars in Jewish assets hidden in Swiss banks, circulated in 1995 and 1996, could not be substantiated. The combined value of the accounts identified, even after the application of the factor of ten, lay well below the amount of the settlement that had already been agreed.¹³

The report’s criticism of the banks’ post-war conduct was all the more telling because it came from an investigation that the banks had themselves financed. It confirmed in essence what the Bergier Commission would later document from the historical side. For the financial centre, the Volcker Committee created a precedent that has been invoked many times since: a crisis of trust can be resolved only by an investigation whose independence is beyond doubt, whose access to records is secured by law or supervision, and whose findings are published.

Notes

1. ICEP, Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks (as above), paras. 3 and 13. ↩
2. Wikipedia, “Volcker Commission”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcker_Commission. ↩
3. ICEP, Report (as above), para. 16. The designation as an “official special audit” by the Federal Banking Commission gave the auditors access to bank records and overrode objections based on banking secrecy. ↩
4. ICEP, Report (as above), paras. 16 and 17 and footnote 11. ↩
5. ICEP, Report (as above), para. 23. ↩
6. ICEP, Report (as above), para. 30. ↩
7. ICEP, Report (as above), paras. 41(a)–(b) and 74. ↩
8. swissinfo.ch, “Volcker report presents Swiss bank probe result”, 6 December 1999, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/archive-banking-fintech/volcker-report-presents-swiss-bank-probe-result/1385624. ↩
9. ICEP, Report (as above), para. 82. ↩
10. ICEP, Report (as above), para. 67 (consolidation of the scattered databases into a central archive under the Federal Banking Commission), para. 74 (publication of the names of the holders of 25,187 accounts in Categories 1, 2 and part of 3) and para. 80 (claims to be channelled through the Claims Resolution Tribunal), https://www.crt-ii.org/ICEP/ICEP_Report_english.pdf. ↩
11. Swiss Banks Settlement: In re Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation, “Chronology”, https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Chronology.aspx.html, entry for 5 February 2001. ↩
12. Swiss Banks Settlement, “Deposited Assets Claims” (as above), which also records the publication of a further list of about 2,700 account owners and 400 holders of powers of attorney on 13 January 2005. ↩
13. Wikipedia, “Volcker Commission” (as above), which gives an estimated value of CHF 31.5 million for the 10,471 accounts in categories 1 and 2 and of CHF 4.2 million for the 43,415 accounts in categories 3 and 4. The article does not state the basis of valuation, and the figures are given here only as an indication of the order of magnitude. ↩

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.