THE security guard, Mr Christoph Meili, arrived as usual for his overnight shift. All the day workers at the United Bank of Switzerland's imposing headquarters on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse had gone home. He started his rounds.
But Thursday, January 9th, held a surprise for the 29-year-old Mr Meili. When he stuck his head around the door of the bank's shredding room, he noticed two cartloads of documents dating back to the second World War, waiting to be destroyed.
This presented Mr Meili, an earnest Protestant, with a quandary. He knew that the Swiss government had recently passed a law banning the shredding of any documents relating to the war. He knew also that the Swiss banks were desperately trying to minimise the compensation they would have to pay for their wartime "business".
He stuffed some of the documents into his jacket smuggled them out of number 45 Bahnhofstrasse, and handed them to a Jewish lobby group. The next day, the bank questioned his "motives", and he was fired.
For many, the treatment of Mr Meili confirmed a suspicion that while no one was looking, Switzerland had become a beautiful, independent, alpine, 16,000-square-mile, moral void.
It was into the same grey structure, through the same immense pillars, that young Jacob Friedman used to walk to deposit his father's money in the months before the war. Back then, the Bahnhofstrasse wasn't yet Europe's most expensive shopping street, but it was home to the "big three" Swiss banks: UBS, Credit Suisse and Swiss Bank Corporation.
In those pre-war days of runaway inflation, where years of hard work and savings could evaporate in a month of currency crisis, everyone knew two good things about the Swiss banking system. Firstly, they protected savings by keeping them in the hard-currency Swiss franc; and secondly, they issued secret, numbered accounts so that the civil authorities would never know of the transactions.
Jacob Friedman's family lived in Timioara, Romania, where there were severe penalties for smuggling money out of the country. Once, his father was nearly caught. From then on, Jacob made the trips to Zurich with the cash and each time, no one suspected that a boy of 16 was carrying cash worth around £10,000.
He recalls how he always stayed with friends of the family, at 60 Anwandstrasse, opposite a synagogue.
Today, a Zurich taxi driver will raise an eyebrow at anyone requesting the destination. Ask the driver to wait a few minutes when you get out of the car, and his neck will rotate to display a lascivious grin. Tell him you're looking for a synagogue and he'll laugh out loud.
For Anwandstrasse is now considered part of the city's red light district, replete with more than its fair share of drug addicts.
Last week, the four-storey apartment building was still there, and orthodox, Hassidic Jews still live in it, but the synagogue was nowhere to be seen. Two elderly men, sporting the traditional black hats and long beards, said they didn't know anyone called Friedman. But they pointed to the synagogue - it was still right opposite, at number 59, its brown, peeling shutters hiding any identifying symbols.
Mr Friedman, however, lives in Brooklyn, New York City. His father, his mother and the rest of his family were put into the ovens of Auschwitz, but he escaped.
In the 1970s, he went looking for his father's money, now worth at least £500,000. The Swiss banks told him that if he couldn't remember the number, they were obliged to keep the cash for themselves.
Estelle Sapir used to live in Warsaw. She now lives in Queens, New York City. Her father was a wealthy investment banker, who often deposited sums of £20,000 with Credit Suisse. He too, along with her mother and most other relatives, was slaughtered in the Holocaust.
When Ms Sapir travel led to Geneva in 1947, she walked straight from the railway station down to Place Bel Air, the main branch of Credit Suisse. There, she presented officials with a deposit slip from 1938.
Now 70, she remembers how the bankers looked her up and down, then asked her for a death certificate for her father.
She pointed out that issuing death certificates for those they gassed was one bureaucratic procedure that Hitler Himmler and Mengele had overlooked. The bank officials said they were sorry, but without proof that he was dead the bank would have to keep the money.
Mr Friedman, Ms Sapir and almost 10,000 others are now part of a US "class action" suit to force the banks to hand over the cash from dormant pre-war accounts. It could amount to hundreds of millions of pounds.
Until the end of 1995, the billionaire chief executive of Seagram and president of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, had been working quietly behind the scenes to this end. But he met a stone wall of Swiss banking secrecy, compounded by what he saw as a disrespectful attitude.
Eventually, Mr Bronfman went public. He had lunch with Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York who some would estimate as being in one person a more relentless self-publicist than any three Irish politicians put together. With the largest Jewish community anywhere in the world forming part of his constituency, he knew just what to do.
Senator D'Amato launched a US Senate investigation into Switzerland's role in the war. And with access to recently de-classified wartime documents, each week brought a new, and often sordid, revelation.
By the start of this year, the "Big Three" faced an organised boycott by, among others, New York city and state. Kicking and screaming, the banks agreed to establish a 100 Swiss franc fund for Holocaust victims, pending a full, rigorous, Swiss investigation.
THE banks' imprimatur for the fund came as a huge relief to the government in Berne. Already, an internal cable from its ambassador in Washington had been leaked to the newspapers by a rival in Switzerland's department of foreign affairs.
The diplomat, Carlo Jagmetti urged his minister to "wage war against those making allegations that Swiss banks had acted improperly.
But far worse, from Berne's point of view, was the growing evidence of active and systematic Swiss collaboration with the Third Reich.
The government's problem revolves around the hundreds of tons of gold bullion that it accepted from Hitler's central bank in exchange for Swiss francs. The Nazis needed the neutral Swiss currency to buy, among other commodities, steel from Switzerland and tungsten from Portugal.
Then, as now, there were few secrets between Europe's central bankers, and the Swiss officials reportedly knew exactly how much gold Germany had in reserves in 1939. But by 1945, the Swiss had bought far more than thin amount from the Nazis.
It seems that they never thought to ask where the extra gold was coming from. Historians now know it was either plundered from the treasury vaults of 11 Nazi-occupied countries, or ripped from the teeth and fingers of prisoners in the moments before they were put to death.
And Switzerland's collaboration ran deeper than subduing its curiosity and acting as Hitler's money launderer. It was the Swiss who came up with the idea for the notorious "Jew Stamp" for passports. The Berne authorities suggested the measure to the Reich in order to speed up their own border refusals of Jew seeking shelter from the Nazis. The Germans thought it a capital idea, and implemented it.
Swiss companies with German subsidiaries became rich on the goods made by Hitler's Ukrainian slaves. And archivists now say that Swiss officials allowed German troops and their weapons take short cuts by train through Switzerland from Italy to fight the advancing Russians.
All this, and the famed bank secrecy that allowed high-ranking Wehrmacht and Gestapo officers on leave to slip across into Switzerland to deposit the cash and art works they had just looted.
In a book to be published this month, Prof Jean Ziegler, a whistle-blowing member of the Swiss parliament, states that without the collaboration of his country's banks, the war would have ended in 1943. Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, he adds.
Prof Ziegler, who as a young man was Sean MacBride's assistant at the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, points out that the alpine confederation was not always the world's second richest country, with more Ferrari automobiles than any other country on earth, and an estimated 40,000 millionaires.
Banking secrecy - and the attraction it held first for the Nazis, then for the mafia, then for dictators everywhere, and now for the world's narcotics traffickers - was the catalyst for Switzerland's upward mobility, he argues.
Most ordinary Swiss, and their government, are finding all of this very hard to take. They feel no personal guilt about the Holocaust, and have a sense that they are being singled out unfairly for opprobrium by the world. But they recognise what one senior banker privately admitted this week as a "catastrophe that will just go on and on unless we do something".
The government has now appointed a "task force", headed by an able and open diplomat, Thomas Borer, to examine every aspect of Switzerland's conduct during the war.
Last week, its first open meeting held in a small room in the federal archive building in Berne, was packed. More than 250 reporters listened as one academic, Guido Koller, described how Switzerland's main concern in its policy of refusing tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was "protection of the job market and warding off so-called foreign elements".
"The Nazi policy of destruction failed to sway this stance," he added.
"Prof Christoph Graf, of the national archives, rose to make a painful speech. Switzerland, he said, had been sustained by myths the myth of being a "special case", the myth of being better than any other country, the myth of its fearsome citizen army.
These were useful in their time, he told the room, but they were now a hindrance. Because Swiss society clung so dearly to these ideas, he said, the country was being dragged backwards, prevented by its own citizens from participating in European and global interdependence.
Mr Borer's task force and Mr Bronfman's World Jewish Congress are now getting along well. Jacob Friedman, Estelle Sapir and thousands of others will soon get some of what is theirs.
In Berne, the archivists grind on through the documents; the "big three" banks, the Swiss central bank and the administration are sure to be confronted with irrefutable proof of complicity with the Nazis.
Shame-faced declarations will be made, and perhaps Swiss society will emerge weaker but wiser. But before such apologies are taken at face value, many will ask one more question: When will Mr Meili, the security guard, be offered his job back?