An obscure nameplate marked "CRT" is the only sign that this gloomy block near the center of the capital of Swiss banking houses one of the most secretive courts in Switzerland, the Claims Resolution Tribunal.
A videophone sorts through visitors who appear at the entrance, just a few steps away from Zurich's seedy red light district, and a distant voice emerges to dismiss unwanted inquiries.
The tribunal, managed by the World Jewish Congress, was appointed by US District Court Chief Judge Edward Korman to settle about 32,000 claims from Holocaust victims or relatives who say they had never recovered money from a bank account in neutral Switzerland.
In the mid-1990s, an investigation found that some Swiss banks had not returned deposits which people fleeing Nazi persecution had given to them for safe keeping.
Now, five years after a combination of global power diplomacy and a bruising legal battle in US courts appeared to resolve the dispute over Holocaust funds and dormant accounts, only a small fraction of those claims have been satisfied, according to data released by the tribunal.
It took years of international pressure that revolved around Korman's courthouse in New York, including threats of a boycott and the White House's intervention, before Swiss banks, led by UBS and Credit Suisse, paid US$1.25 billion to settle legal action in 1998.
About 10 percent of that amount has been paid back to Holocaust victims or their heirs so far, or 14 percent of the US$800 million attributed to settle claims on Swiss accounts.
Thomas Borer, the former Swiss diplomat who then led Switzerland's attempts to clamber out of the crisis, recently described the issue as one of the "bitter ironies of history."
"In 1995, when the affair broke, everyone said that the money must be handed over quickly because Holocaust survivors were dying every day," Borer recently told a Swiss television documentary.
"It's a scandal that eight years later, only 10 percent of that money has been paid," he said.
The CRT declined to respond directly to inquiries, only making the report it sends to the Swiss Justice Ministry every six months available. Data and case files are also published on the tribunal's Web site.
Only 924 awards worth US$113 million had been approved on Sept. 1, out of 33,946 claims the tribunal is handling.
Twenty-seven of the awards have been made to Holocaust survivors who have managed to live long enough to see their money again.
"I am convinced that they are waiting for all the victims to die, to keep the money," Greta Beer, an elderly Romanian Jew who tried for years to recover savings her father deposited in Swiss banks before the war, told Swiss TV.
The largest payment so far, US$4 million, was made to the family of Bertha Rothschild, a wealthy German who held securities valued at 436,000 Swiss francs in 1936 in Switzerland.
The award was equivalent to part of the estimated dollar value today of her securities.
The CRT said her savings were seized after the Nazis passed a law in 1936 obliging all its citizens to register assets with German banks.
A source close to the dormant accounts issue said that the tribunal places the burden of proof on a bank, which has to prove that it did not have an account or was justified in closing it.
Otherwise it automatically makes an award from the fund, the source added,
One payment of 181,000 Swiss francs (US$131,000) was made by the CRT after a bank was unable to check on the claim because it had destroyed account records decades ago, according to a case file.
"It's like the lottery, you can win the jackpot," another source commented, adding that "black sheep" had probably joined the flood of genuine plaintiffs to try to get some money.
About 12,000 of the total claims do match published names of dormant account holders found by Swiss banks and investigators, the CRT said.
A Swiss historian, Thomas Maissen, told the Swiss news agency ATS that not enough people would have a rightful claim to compensation, and the money left over would likely be paid to Jewish groups under the terms of the agreement struck in New York.
Most of the successful claimants so far live in the US (399) or in Israel (146). Eighty-two live in France and 29 in Switzerland.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist