Almost 54,000 unclaimed accounts in Swiss banks may have belonged to Holocaust victims, according to a report published in Zurich yesterday by an international panel of experts. The report criticised the banks for taking an insensitive and sometimes obstructive attitude to attempts by victims' heirs to reclaim the accounts.
"The handling of these funds was too often grossly insensitive to the special conditions of the Holocaust and sometimes misleading in intent and unfair in result," the report said.
Switzerland's two biggest banks last year agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle a class action taken in the United States by a group of victims and their heirs. The panel trawled through the records of all 59 Swiss banks, comparing the names of accountholders with those of 5.5 million Holocaust victims listed in Israel, the United States and elsewhere.
Mr Georg Krayer, the chairman of the Swiss Bankers' Association, acknowledged that the bankers had not been sufficiently aware of the suffering of Holocaust victims before the controversy over the accounts.
"I should like to apologise for all the disappointments and hurt feelings this inadequacy may have caused," he said.
But the banks welcomed the conclusion that there was no evidence of systematic destruction of records. The panel did, however, condemn some banks for "questionable and deceitful actions" in handling accounts and for a reluctance to respond to inquiries about lost funds.
In one case, an account-holder who had fled to Chile asked his bank to make payments for food packages to be sent to his wife in a concentration camp. The bank refused and transferred the money to the Nazi Reichsbank in Berlin and to a bank in Luxembourg.
The panel also found 1,622 accounts that may have belonged to senior Nazis and collaborators.
