Word: zurich
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...country started with little things. A gold ring. A novel. A chair. Before long, a chain reaction of seemingly disconnected events, an assortment of powerful personalities and a series of Swiss blunders culminated in a moral crusade to track down stolen wealth hidden away inside the vaults of Zurich and restore it to the victims of the Holocaust. The proximate cause was money, but the soul-searing intent of the men and women who set the hunt in motion was to peel back the veil time had cast over the evils of Nazism and expose the truth...
...Amato much moved by critics like Rolf Bloch, the main spokesman for Switzerland's 18,000 Jews. "We are Jews in a Swiss way," says Bloch. "We don't want to blame all the Swiss or put them under assault." A Jewish lawyer in Zurich representing 20 people seeking information on wartime accounts considers D'Amato's and Bronfman's tactics counterproductive. "So aggressive, so hostile," he says. "This banging on the head is wrong, and it has provoked reaction. Now we are seeing signs of anti-Semitism in Switzerland...
Number 45 Bahnhofstrasse is an imposing building in central Zurich. Its monumental columns are topped by the sculpted heads of a peasant patriot, a mother, the god Mercury and William Tell, the mythic Swiss hero. This secular temple is the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland. Inside, there are acres of reddish brown Tessin marble. The ornate overhead moldings frame a 20-ft. by 30-ft. skylight. A uniformed guard approaches: "Who are you? What are you doing? Identification papers, please." Is this brusque aggressiveness necessary? "I am only following orders," he says in German...
...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...
...during the war, announced Monday that it will contribute "generously" to the fund. The firm's chairman called it an important gesture to remove tensions between Switzerland and the US. "It's more than likely that other companies will follow suit soon," Mark van Huisseling, business editor with a Zurich weekly, told TIME Daily. "Several other Swiss businesses producing war materiel operated in the region along the German border...