The return of the past: the Independent Commission of Experts

The crisis of the mid-1990s

The questions that the governments of 1946 and 1952 had considered settled came back in the mid-1990s with a speed and intensity that no one had foreseen. The end of the Cold War had opened the archives of Eastern Europe and changed the priorities of American foreign policy. The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war led to a wave of commemorations and historical reappraisals across Europe. In Switzerland, the President of the Confederation, Kaspar Villiger, used a special session of the Federal Assembly on 7 May 1995 to apologise for the introduction of the “J” stamp. He acknowledged that fear of Germany and concern about foreign infiltration had sometimes outweighed the country’s tradition of asylum and that difficult trade-offs had been resolved in too risk-averse a manner. The fact that Switzerland had been spared from the war, he said, imposed a special moral obligation on it.¹

The apology on the refugee question did not end the debate. In 1995 and 1996, the question of the dormant accounts of Holocaust victims was raised by the World Jewish Congress and taken up by the United States Senate Banking Committee under Senator Alfonse D’Amato.² On 2 May 1996 the Swiss Bankers Association and Jewish organisations set up an Independent Committee of Eminent Persons under the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, to examine the dormant accounts.³ The work of that committee and the class actions in New York that led to the settlement of 1998 are the subject of chapter F.VI. For the present chapter, what matters is that the pressure on the banks broadened quickly into a general examination of Switzerland’s wartime record, including the gold purchases of the SNB, the refugee policy and the conduct of the insurers and industrial companies.

In May 1997 the United States government published a preliminary study coordinated by the Under Secretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat and prepared by the State Department historian William Slany. Based on the declassification of more than 800,000 pages of documents, it described Switzerland as the principal banker and financial broker of Nazi Germany and concluded that the SNB and private Swiss bankers had known that they were handling vast sums of looted gold. It also judged that neutrality had collided with morality.⁴ The Eizenstat report provoked indignation in Switzerland, where many regarded it as a one-sided indictment by a government that had itself profited from Swiss services during the war. It also convinced the Swiss authorities that only an independent historical investigation with full access to the sources could answer the accusations.

The federal decree of 13 December 1996

The legal basis for that investigation had already been created some months earlier. On 13 December 1996, the Federal Assembly adopted a federal decree on the historical and legal investigation of the fate of assets that had reached Switzerland as a result of the National Socialist regime. The decree defined the subject of the investigation as the volume and fate of assets of all kinds held by banks, insurers, lawyers, notaries, fiduciaries, asset managers and other persons and institutions, where the assets had belonged to victims of National Socialist persecution, had been seized under discriminatory measures or had belonged to the National Socialist party and its organisations. It instructed the Federal Council to set up an independent commission of experts to investigate these questions historically and legally.⁵

Two provisions of the decree made it unique in Swiss law. Article 4 prohibited the destruction of any files that might be useful to the investigation, as well as their transfer abroad or any other measure that would make them harder to access. Article 5 obliged the persons and institutions concerned to grant the commission access to all relevant files and provided that this duty took precedence over any statutory or contractual duty of confidentiality. Banking secrecy, the professional secrecy of lawyers and the confidentiality clauses of private contracts thus yielded to the needs of historical research. In return, the members and staff of the commission were bound by official secrecy. The results were to be published in full, with personal data anonymised where this was justified.⁶ No Swiss research body before or since has been given such powers over private archives.

Members, mandate and resources

On 19 December 1996 the Federal Council appointed the members of the commission. Its president was Jean-François Bergier, professor of economic and social history at ETH Zurich. The other members were Władysław Bartoszewski of Warsaw, Saul Friedländer of Jerusalem, Harold James of Princeton, Georg Kreis of Basel, Sybil Milton of Washington, Jacques Picard of Bern, Jakob Tanner of Bielefeld and Zurich, and the former director of the Federal Office of Justice Joseph Voyame of Saint-Brais.⁷ The composition combined Swiss and foreign historians, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, and a lawyer with long experience of federal administration. There were later changes. Joseph Voyame resigned in April 2000 and was replaced by the international lawyer Daniel Thürer. After Sybil Milton died in October 2000, the economist Helen B. Junz took her place in February 2001.⁸

Bergier himself was an unusual choice for a commission that would become a symbol of historical self-criticism. Born in Lausanne in 1931, the son of a pastor, he had studied at the University of Lausanne and at the École des Chartes in Paris, taught at the University of Geneva from 1963 to 1969 and at ETH Zurich from 1969 to 1999. He was a specialist in the economic history of the Alps and of the late medieval and early modern period, influenced by Fernand Braudel and well connected internationally.⁹ He had no prior involvement in the controversies about the Second World War, which gave him an authority that a specialist of the period might have lacked.

The Federal Council’s decision listed the subjects to be investigated: the gold trade and foreign exchange transactions, the roles of the SNB and of the private banks, asset management, the trade in looted property, armaments production, the measures taken by the state and their legal basis, the identification and restitution of looted assets, and the official historical documentation of these matters. The commission was to present its final report within five years and to publish interim reports on completed areas of research. Its initial budget was CHF 5 million.¹⁰ As the scale of the task became clear, the budget was raised in the spring of 1997 to CHF 22 million. The commission employed more than forty researchers over its five years, most of them young historians who would later shape the historiography of Swiss economic history. The records of the Swiss Clearing Office alone, which the commission helped to transfer to the Swiss Federal Archives, filled more than 1,000 boxes.¹¹

Reports and findings

The commission published its first results well before the end of its mandate. The statistical overview of the gold transactions appeared in December 1997 and the interim report on gold in May 1998. The report on ransom extortions in the Netherlands appeared in 1999, as did the report on refugee policy, which followed in December of that year. Between August 2001 and March 2002, the commission published twenty-five volumes of studies with the Chronos publishing house in Zurich. The final report, a synthesis of 597 pages, was completed in December 2001 and published on 22 March 2002 simultaneously in German, French, Italian and English.¹²

The final report is organised in seven chapters. After an introduction and a chapter on the international context and national development, it treats refugee policy, the foreign trade and asset transactions of the war years in twelve sub-chapters, the legal questions, the property rights of the post-war period and, in a concluding chapter, the responsibility of Swiss decision-makers. The economic chapter covers foreign trade, the armaments industry, electricity exports, Alpine transit, gold, banks and financial services, insurers, industrial companies and their subsidiaries in Germany, forced labour, Aryanisation, cultural property and German camouflage operations.¹³ Its findings on the financial sector can be summarised in four points, each of which has been discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter. The SNB bought looted gold on a large scale, knowing or having every reason to know its origin, and justified its purchases with arguments that the commission found unconvincing. The commercial banks traded in German gold and securities, served German clients and camouflage structures and, after the war, did little to identify and restitute the assets of victims. The insurers adapted to the racial policy of the regime in their German business and later declined responsibility for confiscated policies. The state granted credits to the Axis, tolerated the export of war material and applied a refugee policy that sent thousands of people to their deaths.

The commission did not accept the argument that Switzerland had no choice. Although it recognised the constraints of encirclement and the need to secure supplies, it found that the decision-makers had more room for manoeuvre than they claimed, particularly after 1942 and 1943, and that they had used it too often to serve the interests of business and too rarely to protect the persecuted. It identified three areas of government responsibility: the refugee policy, the concessions to the Axis in economic policy that went beyond what was necessary, and the failure to deal properly with the restitution of assets after the war.¹⁴

Notes

1. Thomas Bürgisser, “Remembering the Second World War – but how?”, Swiss National Museum blog, January 2026, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2026/01/remembering-the-second-world-war-but-how/. Bürgisser reconstructs the preparation of the speech from the minutes of the Federal Council, which have been published by Dodis. ↩
2. Parliamentary Services, “Die Schweiz und der Zweite Weltkrieg – Chronologie”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf, entry of 23 April 1996: “Erstes Hearing des Bankenausschusses des U.S. Senats unter Vorsitz von Senator Alfonse D’Amato”. The affair is treated in detail in chapter F.VI. ↩
3. Parliamentary Services, chronology “Die Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf. ↩
4. Slany/Eizenstat, U.S. and Allied Efforts To Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During World War II. Preliminary Study, May 1997, https://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/Doc_5_Eizenstat_Report.pdf. The date of publication, 7 May 1997, is given in the parliamentary chronology “Die Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf. ↩
5. Bundesbeschluss betreffend die historische und rechtliche Untersuchung des Schicksals der infolge der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft in die Schweiz gelangten Vermögenswerte vom 13. Dezember 1996, Art. 1 and 2, https://www.uek.ch/de/auftrag/19961213bb_de.pdf. ↩
6. Federal decree of 13 December 1996, Art. 3, 4, 5 and 7, https://www.uek.ch/de/auftrag/19961213bb_de.pdf. The decree entered into force on the day after its adoption and was limited in time until 31 December 2001. ↩
7. Federal Council decision of 19 December 1996, https://www.uek.ch/de/auftrag/brb19961219.htm. ↩
8. “Bergier commission”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission (used for orientation). The changes in membership are also recorded in the introduction to the Commission’s final report, https://www.uek.ch/en/schlussbericht/synthesis/ueke.pdf. ↩
9. HLS, Lucienne Hubler, “Bergier, Jean-François”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/044591/. Bergier died in Blonay on 29 October 2009. ↩
10. Federal Council decision of 19 December 1996, https://www.uek.ch/de/auftrag/brb19961219.htm. ↩
11. UEK, Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War. Final Report, Zurich 2002, introduction, https://www.uek.ch/en/schlussbericht/synthesis/ueke.pdf. ↩
12. UEK, “Final Report”, https://www.uek.ch/en/_synthese.htm; for the date of publication see Parliamentary Services, chronology “Die Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg”, https://www.parlament.ch/centers/documents/de/ch-wk2-chronologie-d.pdf. The final report was published by Pendo in Zurich. ↩
13. UEK, “Final Report”, summary, https://www.uek.ch/en/schlussbericht/synthesis/SBezus.pdf. ↩
14. “Bergier commission”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission (summary of the final report’s conclusions, used for orientation); for the findings on the SNB’s monetary room for manoeuvre after 1943 see also Swiss National Bank, “The history of the SNB”, https://www.snb.ch/en/the-snb/organisation/history. ↩

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.