Humanitarian Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust
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The Humanitarian Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust was created by the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) as a result of the "Meili Affair". The fund enabled the Swiss financial industry to participate in the process of paying reparations to the victims of Nazi looting during World War II that was abetted by Swiss banks and the failure of Swiss life insurance companies to honor the policies of Holocaust victims. The fund is administered by the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.
Christoph Meili was a Swiss whistleblower, later granted political asylum in the United States, who was a guard at the Swiss bank Union Bank of Switzerland in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997. He discovered that officials at UBS were destroying documents about orphaned assets, believed to be credit balances of deceased Jewish clients, victims of the Holocaust, whose heirs' whereabouts were unknown, as well as books from the German Reichsbank.[1] They listed stock accounts for companies in business during the Holocaust, including BASF, Degussa, and Degesch.[2] They listed real-estate records for Berlin property that had been seized by the Nazis, placed in Swiss accounts, and then claimed to be owned by UBS.[3] Destruction of such documents is against Swiss laws.[4][5] The "saved" documents reportedly predate the Nazi period, dating from 1897 to 1927.[6]
On 8 January 1997,[7] he took some bank files home. After a telephone conversation, he handed them over to a local Jewish organization, which brought the documents to the police, and eventually to the press, which published the document destruction on 14 January 1997. The Zürich authorities opened a judicial investigation against Meili[8] for suspected violations of the Swiss laws on banking secrecy,[9] which is a prosecutable offense ex officio in Switzerland.[10] After Meili and his family reported receiving death threats they fled to the United States and were granted political asylum via private bill.[11][12][13][14]
On 13 January 1998, Ed Fagan filed suit against UBS on behalf of the Jewish victims, in the amount of US$2.56 million. On 13 August 1998, a settlement was reached between the Swiss banks and the Jewish plaintiffs totalizing US$1.25 billion.[15][16][17]
Meili's revelations turned the Swiss banks into international pariahs, both by exposing their morally dubious behavior in hiding Jewish assets purloined by the Nazis and those deposited by Jew fleeing Nazi genocide, and then their attempt to cover up their culpability by destroying documents.[18] Credit Suisse Chairman Rainer Gut suggested the formation of the Fund to the SBA.[19] The Meili affair also influenced the holding of the London Conference on Nazi Gold (1997).[20]