| Fifty years after the end of World War II, the ghosts of the Holocaust still stalk the corridors of Swiss banks surprising banks too. A year ago last June, Hans Baer, then chairman of Switzerland's best-known Jewish-owned bank, Bank Julius Baer, read a Wall Street Journal article alleging his bank had mistreated heirs of victims of Nazi persecution. The article was in part accurate. After receiving a request in 1987 from the daughters of former client Moses Blum for a search for missing funds they believed to be held by the bank, the bank had replied "icily" the newspaper claimed that there were no records of such funds within the past 10 years. Under Swiss law, the bank's letter was quoted as saying, the bank was not obliged to keep records dating any further back. (The law in fact applies only to records of accounts that have been closed.) The bank had reportedly charged the Blum daughters Sfr100 ($82) for this information. Crucially, the story (repeated a week later in an Israeli magazine) reported that the daughters believed Blum had deposited money in the bank before being interned in the Dachau concentration camp in 1938. |