
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 13, 1995                   TAG: 9509130062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: FRANKFURT, GERMANY                                LENGTH: Medium

$34 MILLION IN SWISS BANKS MAY BELONG TO HOLOCAUST FAMILIES

After denying for years that they were holding any money belonging to descendants of Nazi Holocaust victims, the Swiss banking community announced Tuesday that at least $34 million in dormant bank accounts opened before the end of World War II might have belonged to Jews.

The bankers said they would set up an independent office, a banking ombudsman, to help relatives of Holocaust victims look for suspected lost accounts.

The banks' about-face came after a summer of intense pressure from Jewish groups, the Israeli government and scores of Jewish survivors of World War II living in Eastern Europe.

Since the fall of communism, many Jews in Eastern Europe are able to travel freely for the first time and seek to recover wealth they believe to be in Switzerland.

Before and during much of the war, Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe often crossed the Swiss border with large sums, at the risk of being shot, or sent emissaries to make deposits to secret accounts to keep the money from the Nazis.

After the war, many relatives of those who did not survive found that Swiss bank secrecy laws and the high cost of lawyer's fees for the search made recovering money almost impossible.

Between 1962 and 1973, the Swiss banking community repaid more than a thousand individuals and some Jewish charities $9 million, saying that was the remainder of dormant World War II accounts. Many Jewish groups and lawyers in Switzerland discounted such efforts as inadequate, particularly since the banks did not search for accounts set up under company names.

Tuesday the Association of Swiss Bankers announced that a preliminary search had uncovered 893 pre-1945 accounts worth $34.1 million. The association said that the search was not finished and more assets may yet turn up.

by CNB