Word: swiss
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...Swiss thought they had dealt with the past, at least in legal terms, through their 1946 agreement with the Allies to return $60 million worth of gold that was believed to have been looted by the Nazis from the central banks of occupied states. The issue of dormant private accounts first came up in 1962. Prompted by Jewish agencies and the state of Israel, the Swiss Bankers Association ordered its members to search for deposits abandoned by Holocaust victims. The process netted a mere $7 million, and though only 26 of 500 banks had bothered to respond...
...most damaging blow to Swiss credibility came on the night of Jan. 9. During regular rounds at the main Union Bank of Switzerland office in Zurich, security guard Christoph Meili, 29, peeked into the shredding room. There he saw two carts full of documents waiting to be destroyed. Meili noticed that some of them concerned dealings with Germany during the 1940s, including sales of confiscated properties. All of them were protected by recent Swiss regulations forbidding the destruction of any documents that might help clarify Switzerland's wartime banking role...
Meili, a devout Protestant who believes that God led him to the documents, made off with two large ledger books and pages from a third. He gave them to a Swiss Jewish organization, which then handed them over to the police. Immediately suspended from his job by the private security firm that employed him, Meili is now being investigated for violating bank-secrecy laws. Bank president Robert Studer insists that no Holocaust-related documents were destroyed but admits that the shredding was "clearly a mistake, and we have to take responsibility for it." Studer, whom a Swiss court found...
Even if the banks and government now see the need to respond to Jewish demands, there is a lot of resentment on the part of ordinary Swiss citizens who feel unfairly accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Says army veteran Daniel Besson, 77, of Vuarrens: "I bitterly regret the five winters I spent under arms during the war, with all the privations that involved, in order to guard that mountain of Jewish gold [in the Swiss banks]. If they want to revive the anti-Semitic sentiments of before the war, they couldn't go about it any better...
...fear of such anti-Semitic backlash makes some Swiss Jews wish the Americans would back off a bit. "Many Swiss resent that they are made to feel guilty," says Rolf Bloch, 66, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities. "If they are attacked in a collective way, they will react. One reaction is anti-Semitism. In Switzerland today, there is not as much anti-Semitism as in the '30s. But it's flaring up again...