Saving History From the Shredder (Page 2)

So on "a cool day in the wintertime, January 8, 1997," when Meili was doing his job of checking the different rooms in the vast headquarters of the Union Bank of Switzerland after hours, he unlocked the shredder room and "I saw the stuff, two big containers overfilled with books...old books, really old museum books. I had the feeling that something is wrong." He examined the ledgers and found that "there was from 1864 to 1970 a complete bank record documenting banking business."

At first he didn't think about evidence of Nazi ties. "I like old stuff, you know, museum stuff." But then he looked more closely and found a ledger from 1945. He remembered the recent newspaper stories about the Volcker Commission, the committee headed by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker commissioned by Swiss banks and Jewish organizations to search for funds deposited by people who became Holocaust victims. The 1945 ledger documented "properties in Berlin in the thirties and forties. I think they belonged to Jewish people." Suddenly he understood what he had in his hands, "and I more than understood why they'd be shredding them."

He smuggled the ledgers out of the bank and took them home, intending to turn them over to Jewish organizations or to the Volcker Commission. That turned out to be much harder than he had thought. He remembered reading just two weeks earlier about Senator Alfonse D'Amato coming to Switzerland looking for information about Jewish bank deposits. The newspaper had run an announcement giving a phone number for anyone with information. Meili called the newspaper asking for the phone number, but nobody could give it to him. Next he called the Israeli Embassy in Bern and told someone what he had found. "She told me to mail it to them. I said, 'No, I can't mail it, security reasons.'" But they insisted, "so I say, 'Forget it.'" Then he called a Jewish cultural group in Zurich. They told him to bring the ledgers right over. He brought one and kept some others. "And these people, the same day, they turned it over to the police."

The police promptly opened an investigation of Meili for violating the bank secrecy act--even though the bank's intended destruction of records was illegal. The Jewish organization promptly provided a lawyer. "When I came home the lawyer was waiting for me and said we have to go to the police and make a statement. So that's what I did. The next day the police went public" with their charges, the bank suspended him, and then the chairman of the Union Bank of Switzerland went public with a statement questioning Meili's motives. Swiss TV showed up at his house, and soon he was receiving letters saying he was being paid by the Mossad (the Israeli CIA).

He wanted to defend himself in public, "but I had no idea; I know nothing about the press, about TV stuff, nothing. And the whole world's changed from asking about the documents to asking about Meili: Who is Meili? Nobody asks anymore about the documents. But it's the first time that you have documents where you can see that private Swiss banks were involved with business in Nazi Germany. Before, documents like this did not exist, and when you asked the banks, they said, 'We have nothing.'"

People began harassing him on the train and in the bars and cafes. People would "speak bad" or "make jokes." "I speak with them," he said, "but the Swiss people are believing the headlines. And you can't explain anytime, all the time. So I can't anymore take the train. I had to taxi." He calls it "a tough time." Unemployed, he started to read everything he could find on Switzerland in World War II. "Fifteen hours a day I worked on this stuff. I get the picture, and I don't get it. The only thing people in Switzerland are interested in is to be quiet. They don't get it, they don't get what they have to do with history."

Finally he developed his own analysis of what had happened--to him and to Switzerland. The postwar settlement transformed Nazi-occupied Europe. A new generation came to power. "But at the end of the war, the Allies didn't come to Switzerland." Switzerland had no denazification, no postwar political reconstruction. As a result, the same kind of people who ran Switzerland when it was cooperating with Nazi Germany are still in power today. "Nazis still in the banks and the insurance companies, in the army and in politics, in the machine factory companies, still the same people," Meili says. "Nothing happens, nothing changes. The whole Swiss system is still the same. Go to Germany today and they are completely different people than they were during the war. But not here."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.