But, before that, Meili has to be certain that these documents are being destroyed, meaning a crime is being committed, so he returns to work the next afternoon (Thursday 9 January), and goes straight to the shredding room, where he finds the two trolleys are now empty – all that remains are the covers of the books. But outside the room he finds two additional books, with information about loans to German companies from Swiss banks. He manages to smuggle these out of the bank, under his jacket, at the end of his shift.
The next day, Christoph phones the Israeli Embassy and tells them about the documents he’s found. The embassy doesn’t seem to share his sense of urgency, and, bizarrely, he’s told to put the documents ‘in the post’. Understandably, he doesn’t want to do this, and now Giuseppina suggests giving them to a Jewish cultural organisation she’s aware of, based there in Zurich. So, soon afterwards, Meili takes all the material to the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zurich (the ICZ), the largest Jewish organisation in the city, and hands it over to staff there. Werner Rom, the ICZ president, and Ada Winter, secretary general, immediately realise how serious the implications are and give the material to the Zurich police that same afternoon.
Nothing happens over the weekend, but on Monday a Jewish representative of ICZ visits Meili at his home and explains that the material has been handed over to the Swiss police. Meili is now very scared, but the man says, ‘You’re a smart guy, you’ll be OK.’ The following day Christoph learns he’s been suspended from his job at UBS. Also on Tuesday 14th the local judge (former lawyer for the bank Credit Suisse) allows UBS to issue a statement about the incident, and then releases his own communiqué, stating that thanks to the full co-operation of UBS this matter has now been cleared up. Infuriated by this response, the ICZ call an immediate press conference, and from this point on Meili’s discoveries become a global story. He is forthright about why he’s done what he’s done, explaining that his actions were not just for the Jewish community but also to safeguard the integrity of Switzerland, and the historical commission which had just been launched: ‘The Swiss people should know their banks were involved with Nazi corporations.’
Initially Meili is treated as something of a hero in Switzerland, for exposing UBS’s shocking behaviour. In the next days and weeks he and his family are besieged by international media at their little house just outside Zurich. The ICZ provide him with a lawyer to help him navigate the media storm and ongoing issues with the Swiss authorities. An American senator, Alfonse D’Amato, gets involved in the case and urges him to come to the US to testify before a Senate committee. UBS panic at how they are completely losing the public battle of opinion, and send their hapless president, Robert Struder, to the national TV studios to accuse Meili of simply being a publicity seeker. This strategy is, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful, not least because Meili and his family come across as very modest, model Swiss citizens, with strong religious and ethical convictions. But Struder’s TV appearance backfires most spectacularly with his admission that UBS had indeed ‘regrettably’ shredded Holocaust-era documents – this understandably overshadows everything else, and feeds the growing media firestorm. And what is the response of the Swiss authorities to all of this? They launch a judicial investigation – not against UBS for their crimes, but against Meili for suspected violations on laws of banking secrecy! (No action was ever taken against UBS for destroying the wartime documents in the first place.)
The Swiss banks now move towards damage control, and offer to establish a $200 million fund for Holocaust victims affected by their actions. However, now things begin to get more complicated for Meili and his family – the US-based Anti-Defamation League arrive and present him with an award, and announce the establishment of a $36,000 legal defence fund for Meili, as well as a vast legal action against the Swiss banks. Although some of this seems positive at the time, the financial aspects soon begin to muddy the waters. Meili now reflects that ‘What I did was not about money. It was about history and helping the poor people whose lives had been ruined by what these banks had done. But when money came into the picture, so did politics.’
The Swiss media then begin to turn on Meili and an ugly strain of antisemitism emerges; there are absurd stories about him being a Mossad agent, a gold-digger, a traitor. All of this begins to sour the atmosphere markedly. Family members and friends cut off contact, journalists follow Meili’s children to school, taking pictures, and then come the death threats – one letter simply reading ‘we will hunt you down’. Urgent action is needed. Meili and his family leave for the US at the end of April 1997, and on 29 July President Clinton signs an Act of Congress which grants Meili and his family political asylum in the US (reputedly the first Swiss nationals to be granted American asylum).
In January 1998 an action claiming $2.56 billion on behalf of Jewish Holocaust victims is filed against UBS and other Swiss banks involved in collaboration with Nazism. On 13 August 1998, a settlement is reached with the Swiss banks agreeing to pay a total of $1.25 billion in reparations. Significantly, the terms of this settlement are wider than originally anticipated, and specify that five categories of ‘Victims of Nazi Persecution’ will be eligible for compensation from this fund – Jewish, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and the disabled. Without Meili’s ethical commitment and courage it is unlikely that such a resolution could ever have been reached. The former US undersecretary of commerce Stuart Eizenstat, who was a key figure in the negotiation of this settlement, describes in his 2009 book Imperfect Justice how critically important the ‘Meili Affair’ was in the Swiss banks’ decision to participate in the compensation process for victims of Nazism. He wrote that Meili’s actions ‘did more than anything to turn the Swiss banks into international pariahs by linking their dubious behaviour during and after the war to the discovery of a seemingly unapologetic attempt to cover it up now by destroying documents’.
*
Back outside Liverpool Street station I look up at the UBS office windows and wonder if shredding machines are still being used by corporations, or whether more sophisticated ways of getting rid of ‘difficult’ information have now been developed. I also wonder how much of the $1.25 billion compensation actually came from UBS and Credit Suisse, and how much was paid by the Swiss government, i.e. the taxpayers. And I’d like to know whether the senior management of these banks today really have any understanding of the fatal role that their predecessors had played in the 1930s and 40s – essentially, as American diplomat Walter Sholes put it, being ‘pro-fascist financial operators’.2 What does it actually mean to have helped the process of confiscation of Jewish families’ assets from Germany? Or to have accepted massive transfers of funds from Nazi banks (at least $6 billion in today’s money from the Reichsbank alone), and profits from German corporations across occupied Europe using slave labour? These columns of numbers in the ledgers Christoph Meili discovered in the shredding room at UBS are just as lethal as any gun.
UBS’s connections with the Holocaust do not end there. UBS is also closely linked to IG Farben, the huge German chemicals conglomerate, without which Hitler could not have waged war.fn4 In 1957–8, UBS became the majority shareholder in a company called Interhandel, which had originally been established in Switzerland in 1929 as IG Chemie, a holding company for IG Farben – today broken down into its constituent companies, including BASF, Bayer, Agfa and Hoechst. IG Farben’s largest industrial complex had been the vast Buna chemicals plant at Auschwitz, where tens of thousands of slave labourers died; a subsidiary company also manufactured the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers. After the war when IG Farben was broken up by the Allies, Interhandel was described as its ‘prize asset’. So when UBS bought out the remaining shareholders in 1961 to gain sole control of Interhandel the bank developed immense financial power. The 1965 sale of the American company GAF (owned by Interhandel) netted UBS $122 million – equivalent to just under $1 billion today – and this further transformed UBS’s equity base and allowed it to overtake Credit Suisse and Swiss Bank Corporation to become Switzerland’s leading bank and one of the most powerful in Europe.