Nazis, Swiss Banks, & the Jewish Money that Vanished

Rabbi Ephraim Meir doesn’t look like someone who is slated to inherit many billions of dollars one day. Every inch the great-grandfather, he begins our meeting by telling me about his children, his grandchildren, and his wife, a retired occupational therapist; he apologizes profusely for being so hard to reach, explaining that he learns in kollel in the afternoons, and he had his great-grandson’s upsherin the night before. He wants to be sure that I’ve left a good lunch for my children before coming to meet up with him for what would turn out to be just the first part of our ten-hour interview.
His ready, congenial smile is disarming; in fact, I find myself wondering whether this lead will turn out to be legit. Could it really be that the unpretentious, jovial man seated across from me is at the heart of a high-stakes, cloak-and-dagger story of epic proportions?
As if reading my mind, Ephraim leans forward and carefully unzips his large briefcase. The documents he hands across the table confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is definitely much more here than meets the eye. Behind the jocular, unassuming grandfather is a relentless powerhouse, a well-connected diplomat who will stop at nothing to fight for justice and the golden opportunity to forever rewrite the playbook on Torah-true philanthropy.
And here’s the kicker: He’s going to do it all with Nazi-owned money.
No, not through payouts or reparations, but with Nazi bank accounts that have been bequeathed to him by their rightful heirs, to the tune of billions of dollars. All his to claim, with virtually zero strings attached.
Sounds like a fantasy or a very imaginative hoax? Ephraim thought so too, until he discovered the shocking truth.
I’ll let him tell the story in his own words, but first, a little background.
Rabbi Meir comes from an illustrious family of German descent. His brother, Gideon, served as the Israeli ambassador, first to Washington and then to Italy. Ephraim has been heavily involved in chinuch, government work and public affairs in addition to serving as a rabbi in the IDF. Most notably, he spent many years as right-hand man to Rabbi Chaim Druckman, z”l, who led the dati leumi world and served as an MK in the National Religious Party. Later on, Rabbi Meir also began learning dayanus and studying legal mediation.
As he advanced his mediation skills, Rabbi Meir decided to tap into more lucrative opportunities than those available in Israel. At the time, in the early 2000s, mediation was only just emerging in Germany, which put his services in demand. What’s more, the country had just switched over from the Deutschmark to the euro, which wreaked havoc on the economy and created confusion between contractors and customers as they now contended with a problematic gap between what was owed in the different currencies. Since Ephraim’s parents had given him German citizenship and he spoke the language fluently, he began working as a mediator with law firms in Germany, where he quickly chalked up quite a few successes.
In 2007, Ephraim got a bizarre phone call from a complete stranger who introduced himself as a lawyer from East Germany. The man’s request sounded like such a scam that he nearly slammed down the phone.
“We have information on six Swiss numbered accounts that belonged to Nazis during World War II. They’re worth billions of dollars. We want you to take these accounts and try to retrieve the money in them.”
“Me? Billions of dollars?! Yeah, right!” Ephraim snorted. “Tell me another one!”
Then he did slam down the phone and had himself a good laugh.
But the lawyer wouldn’t give up so easily.
Over the next few days he bombarded Ephraim with numerous faxes containing detailed information about the accounts and the plan he had concocted for procuring the money. As the picture fleshed out, it became clear that what the lawyer was saying was true. He had been contacted by relatives of ex-Nazis who lived in East Germany and had held accounts in Swiss banks during the war. They had only basic information regarding the accounts and were afraid to come forward to investigate further, let alone try to claim the accounts. Even though over a decade had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the pervasive mindset of fear and suspicion that had been imposed on the East Germans during their time under Communist rule made them wary of exploring sensitive matters, especially anything that could reassociate them with their Nazi past.
After doing some initial research, the lawyers this group turned to had come to a dead end. They could not identify the bank where the accounts were being held, nor could they uncover the necessary details that would eventually allow them to access the vast sums of money in the accounts. Their only hope, they felt, was to somehow get Jewish or Israeli involvement in the case. This step, they felt, would get things moving and break through the barriers of secrecy and bureaucracy to unlock the accounts. If they could only find the right person to spearhead the project, the lawyers speculated, they could get their billions. Ephraim Meir and his people would get a modest percentage for their efforts, and everyone would call it a day.
These Nazi accounts, the lawyers explained, were numbered accounts, which add a layer of anonymity to traditional bank accounts by not requiring any name to be attached to them. The brainchild of Swiss banks, these accounts were originally created by European clients looking to avoid paying World War I-era taxes. While they do provide additional banking secrecy, they are not completely anonymous, as the name of the client is still recorded by the bank and is subject to limited, warranted disclosure.
Numbered accounts were, and still are, the favored way of keeping funds private and have caused no small amount of aggravation and frustration to heirs who have tried to retrieve their rightful funds, because they require special passcodes and unique identifiers for withdrawals, such as the name of the account manager at the bank who originally set up the account.
Much of the necessary information related to the accounts was already in the lawyer’s possession, but there was yet another hurdle to overcome: in the massive maelstrom of World War II and the post-war financial upheaval, many banks had been closed or acquired by larger financial institutions, bank records had been poorly maintained, and now, decades later, accounts proved difficult to trace. Add in the fact that Switzerland was not eager to relinquish the hefty accounts in its possession, and you have a situation like the one this lawyer now encountered, where money lay somewhere, ripe for the taking, but requiring enormous diplomacy, pressure and detective work to access it.
It soon came to light that the lawyers managing the case had in fact turned to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, hoping that he could make the retrieval of these Nazi accounts an official Israeli cause and apply diplomatic pressure to wrest them from the Swiss. But Sharon was hesitant to deal with such astronomical sums of money, so he handed the case to Natan Sharansky.
“The case then hit a dead end. Nothing further was done with it. The matter was forgotten,” Ephraim tells me.
All this back-and-forth was carefully recorded, and Ephraim reviewed the emails detailing this chain of events with his own eyes. This was not a hoax; it was legit. But still, why in the world would the lawyers have contacted him, of all people?
“I’m an educator, a public servant, involved in humanitarian affairs and public relations. I’m not a businessman, and I’m certainly not a private investigator! For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what they wanted from me!” he says with genuine bewilderment.
Sometimes the most complex of questions has the simplest of answers. Upon seeing that the Israeli government was not interested in getting involved, the German lawyers looked for a second choice. This brought them to consult with a well-respected colleague for a recommendation on who could be enlisted to front their cause. And to whom, of all people in the universe, should they providentially be referred?
None other than one Ephraim Meir of Beit El, an Israeli mediator highly recommended by the German law firm with whom he contracted. In addition to his sterling reputation as an upstanding person and talented mediator, Meir also had other key qualities that made him an asset to the case: his background as a journalist and a public-relations figure, along with his parliamentary work assisting Rabbi Druckman, meant he had many connections in the Knesset. These connections, the German lawyers posited, would come in handy in advancing their cause.
The slew of persuasive faxes from the lawyer in East Germany was followed by further phone calls from other East German lawyers, all begging Ephraim to come on board. In the face of such relentlessness, Ephraim’s wife suggested that he at least consult with his good friend and former neighbor in the Old City, Yaakov Neeman, a former finance minister and justice minister.
When Neeman heard about the opportunity that had landed on Ephraim Meir’s doorstep, he looked the lawyer straight in the eye. “Lech tatzil min haari umin hadov!” he quoted. “Go and save that money from the claws of the Nazis!”
“But this is a complete fantasy! A total pipe dream!” Ephraim protested.
“No,” Neeman told him. “I’ve heard about this story and it’s authentic. Go and do it!”
Neeman was so adamant about the need to pursue the Nazi funds that he even offered to partner with Ephraim on the project. They had gone so far as to draw up a contract with the particulars of how they intended to work together and were about to finalize it when Neeman was forced to withdraw due to a conflict of interest (since he worked within the banking system that might be affiliated with the bank where the accounts were being held).
Ephraim was on his own again. But he turned to Ronen Dimor, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, whom Ephraim knew from his army days.
“I told him, ‘This is the case. These are the facts. What do I do?’ Ronen immediately said, ‘We’re involving the Mossad.’”
But Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, couldn’t handle a case of this magnitude because he was heavily involved with other, more pressing issues.
“Even though they wouldn’t directly involve themselves in this case, they did play a part behind-the-scenes, both then and now,” Ephraim tells me, sotto voce. “More about that later…”
After the Mossad declined to help directly, Rabbi Meir went to an organization that specializes in helping heirs redeem their inheritance, only to be stabbed in the back by their staff.
“They seemed very interested in helping out, to the point that the organization’s lawyer suggested that we go to Germany together to do an initial assessment of the file to see if it was a go or not. They even offered to pay for the trip!” Ephraim relates. “Sure enough, we went to Germany, and right after our meeting I get a call from the East German lawyer. He tells me, ‘You Israelis are crazy. The minute you left the meeting, you know what that other guy did? He turned to me and said, ‘Why do you need that guy Meir here? Work with me directly and cut out the middle man!’
“The lawyer told him very firmly: ‘Ephraim is the case. He’s our connection. He’s the only one we’re willing to work with, and that’s final.”
Hakadosh Baruch Hu had obviously tapped Ephraim Meir—and only Ephraim Meir!—for this very unusual case. But there were still too many question marks. Who owned these Nazi accounts, and how could the rightful heir be located? Did the money truly belong to Nazis or was it actually stolen Jewish money? And most of all: Was there really a chance that the money would one day materialize, or was it simply an illusion, fueled by the lawyers’ ambitious hopes?
Despite these doubts jangling uncomfortably in the back of his mind, Ephraim pressed on, intent on doing his part in this very unusual situation. He took off for Switzerland, where he hoped to poke around for more information about the Nazi accounts, but it was during a stopover in Antwerp that he had a huge breakthrough in the case.
“A random Yid came over to me in shul and asked me my name,” Ephraim relates. “When I told him, he said, ‘I know your brother Gideon. I’m connected with the Mossad. How can I help you? Why are you here?’ I wasn’t exactly at a point where I would be telling him my strange story right there on the spot, so I improvised and said, ‘I’m a tour guide.’ The guy looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re not a tour guide. Tell me what you need and let me help you.’”
Ephraim immediately realized that this was yet another sign from Hashem pushing him in the right direction. The two met, and Ephraim took a chance, revealing everything. It didn’t take long to realize that he had struck gold. His new friend referred him to a lawyer who was the division head of one of the major banks in Germany and whose specialty was locating and accessing dormant accounts. As Ephraim soon discovered, the information at this lawyer’s fingertips was unparalleled.
“That was my first introduction to Harald Reichart, and the real story started from the moment I met him,” Ephraim explains. “Harald immediately began to do due diligence on the case and realized how huge and explosive it really was. ‘I want to help you with this!’ he told me. From that moment on, we worked in the bank together and became partners. We remain close to this day; even after he retired from his banking job, he continues to work on this.”
As the two men worked slowly and meticulously to unravel the details of the six Nazi bank accounts, they first had to identify which bank held the accounts today. A hunch led Ephraim to sit down with a Swiss professor whose expert grasp of history yielded a pivotal clue to the next step in the search.
“When I explained what I was after, this very knowledgeable historian gave me incredibly accurate information that led us to an understanding of where our accounts were probably held. He detailed the whole process of what had happened with the banking system during and after World War II and I listened, open-mouthed. These were facts that I was completely unaware of until that very moment, and they shook me to the core.”
What Ephraim goes on to relate is not only chilling but also disrupts the very foundations of Switzerland’s “neutrality” stance that the country self-righteously maintained as Europe was ravaged by war—and ever since.
“Everywhere the Nazis conquered, in every occupied territory, they would send armed German soldiers to the banks, together with a representative of a Swiss bank, and effectively rob the bank at gunpoint. They would take all the money, clean out the vaults and transfer all the stolen booty to the Swiss bank. There, the Swiss clerks dutifully recorded each item under its new ownership by their Nazis clients. Along with all the valuables and other assets came all the accounts that were held in that particular foreign bank. In the Nazi takeover, all those accounts now fell under Nazi ownership in the Swiss bank. This is all heavily documented,” says Ephraim.
Well-researched, eye-opening documentaries have shown indisputable evidence of Switzerland’s role in funding World War II, with pointed accusations that they were complicit not only in maintaining but also in prolonging the death and destruction.
Politically isolated and economically devastated after World War I, Germany’s first priority in rebuilding itself was rearming their military and restarting their economy. The problem was that they had no access to foreign currency, and it had become increasingly difficult to pay in gold, as the countries with whom Germany still had business relations had introduced gold embargoes. How, then, could the Germans purchase arms? This is where Switzerland began to play an immensely helpful role: only there could Germany turn gold into foreign currency.
The Swiss “generosity” in doing brisk business with Nazi Germany has led historians to cynically question: Was World War II a good business deal for Switzerland? Did the country use its economy as a weapon to maintain peace?
While nearly all of Europe was left bombed, burned and utterly ravaged by the horrific war, Switzerland survived completely intact and unscathed.
“Sunday has not lost its charms,” came a wartime report out of sunny Switzerland. “People go on excursions. We attend sporting events…”
No wonder a journalist went on to comment, “Hitler has no interest in attacking Switzerland. Why attack your own vault? They were harmless, but useful.”
At various points in the war, the Nazis were in imminent danger of running out of funds, but they always managed to pull through—with the help of the Swiss banks. The systematic plunder of banks as the Germans conquered country after country filled the Nazi coffers with foreign currency, happily exchanged by the Swiss for gold, jewelry, precious metals and private assets that had been seized.
In total, an estimated $440 million in gold was looted by the Nazis and transferred to Swiss banks, including an approximate 83 tons of Austrian gold, 3.5 tons of Czech gold, 65 tons of Italian and Albanian gold, and many tons from Luxembourg and Belgium, in exchange for much-needed cash. No one analyzed the legalities of the gold. No one asked questions. The Swiss National Bank, while famously cautious and uptight over ethics, never asked for certificates of origin for the vast amounts of gold being rushed into their vaults. There is even proof that a significant quantity of the gold bars was composed of dental gold, extracted from concentration camp victims, smelted in Berlin at Reich’s Bank and sent to the Swiss National Bank…without so much as even one question being raised as to its origin and documentation.
Walther Funk, a Nazi official and economist, unequivocally declared, “If Switzerland stopped exchanging hard currency for its gold, we could not hold out for more than two months.”
The irony of Switzerland’s shameless virtue signaling is not lost on historians and has also not been fully digested by the average layman to this day: “I am neutral, therefore I must do business with Germany as I do with the Allies,” was its self-serving mantra. How could they refuse German gold if they theoretically accepted Allied gold? Switzerland kept the Nazis supplied with cash until the final hours of the war, profiting tremendously from the arrangement.
In addition to the favors Swiss banks did for the Nazi regime, many Nazi officers benefited from the Swiss banking system, which was happy to accommodate them as well. A preferred bank for Nazi officials was Basler Handelsbank, where they did brisk, shady business, transferring suitcases full of money, often via accomplices (many of whom were actually Swiss lawyers), until it reached the Swiss bank for safekeeping. By working in cash, the Nazis avoided creating a paper trail, while the Swiss turned a blind eye to where the money was coming from. All these goings-on were carefully documented, including a well-known drop-off point in Constance, Germany, where valuables and cash were surreptitiously sent by Nazis for transport to their Swiss accounts.
When Ephraim Meir found out that the Nazis had favored banking at Basler Handelsbank, he assumed that the six Nazi accounts he was pursuing had probably been held there as well. The trouble was that small banks like Basler Handelsbank no longer existed. They had been absorbed by larger banks, a move supported by the Swiss government in an attempt to stabilize the banking system. In 2000, two major financial institutions amalgamated many smaller banks under their respective umbrellas: Credit Suisse, which would later go bankrupt, and Union Bank of Switzerland, UBS, which had previously been a financial regulator organization and now became a brand-new bank.
While reorganizing the banks may have been a smart move financially, the havoc it wreaked on account holders was devastating. Suddenly, a person could not locate his bank account because it had been moved to a completely different bank! As Ephraim searched for the six Nazi accounts, he encountered exactly this problem. But in time and through careful investigation, it became indubitably clear that the accounts were being held at UBS.
Now it was time to finally come forward and authenticate the accounts. In March 2009, Meir and Reichart scheduled an official meeting with UBS to inquire about the accounts, using the account numbers, passcodes and other identifiers that they had been given at the very beginning of the case by the lawyers from East Germany.
This is where things went very awry.
“The bank had agreed to meet with us because Reichart, a distinguished lawyer, had written to them requesting a meeting, and it would be unseemly for them to decline. But what we asked them when we were sitting at their offices apparently caught them completely off-guard,” says Ephraim. “Most of the people who come to the bank to talk want to know one thing: Where is my money? That was apparently what they expected us to ask as well. Instead, we asked them a completely different question. We came at the case from an unusual angle, and they were not prepared with an answer…”
They met with the head of UBS’ legal department, Markus Diethelm, as well as Brita Delmas, who, Meir would soon learn, was a driving force in the drama that was about to play out.
Meir and Reichart presented the information they had gathered—original bank books with statements, account numbers and passcodes.
Then they popped the question.
“Where are these accounts located?” they asked.
The UBS official was stunned by the inquiry, which cut to the heart of the entire mess that had long plagued account holders. The answer that he blurted out would change everything for Ephraim and for thousands of Jews around the world.
“You can’t find these accounts in our bank anymore,” said Diethelm. “We have transferred them to the CRT.”
Ephraim Meir and Harald Reichart could hardly believe their ears. Nor could they believe that the bank official had dared to make such a statement on the record and so unequivocally. By making this explosive admission, the bank had, in fact, just implicated itself as having performed a highly illegal move, and possibly plunged itself into a massive scandal.
To explain the disastrous fallout of this simple statement, Ephraim delves into the details of the “CRT.”
“After the Holocaust, Switzerland came under scrutiny for its conduct during the war, particularly its practices around dormant accounts held by those who had been murdered by the Nazis. It became known that the bank was holding onto these accounts and making no attempt to return the funds to their rightful owners or heirs. The unspoken stance was, ‘This is spoils of war, and now that the war is over, we get to keep it.’”
Switzerland’s hubris was further revealed in a new law that required heirs to present a death certificate in order to claim their funds stored in Swiss accounts. Obviously the many millions of Jews who had been exterminated by the Nazis didn’t even have a proper grave, never mind a “death certificate” with which to redeem their assets!
In 1996 and 1997, a series of class action lawsuits were filed in several United States federal courts against Swiss banks and other Swiss entities. These lawsuits alleged that financial institutions in Switzerland collaborated with and aided the Nazi regime by knowingly retaining and concealing assets of Holocaust victims, and by accepting and laundering illegally obtained Nazi loot and profits of slave labor.
The lawsuits were litigated by Professor Burt Neuborne and a team of leading US class action attorneys. Judge Edward R. Korman, before whom the litigation was pending, actively encouraged the parties to settle. With his assistance, the parties reached a settlement in principle for $1.25 billion in August 1998, to be paid jointly by Credit Suisse and UBS, creating a class action fund to be administered by the court. The settlement had the support of the US government, which had first become involved with the matter in 1994, when Stuart E. Eizenstat, then serving as US ambassador to the European Union, had initiated an inquiry into the Holocaust-era activities of Swiss banks. This settlement was to be paid out via a channel called the CRT, the Claims and Resolution Tribunal.
According to its now-defunct website, the CRT was the administrative agency appointed by the Swiss banks responsible for processing claims relating to assets deposited in Swiss banks and other Swiss entities by victims or targets of Nazi persecution prior to and during World War II. It was established in 1997 in response to these lawsuits but also in the wake of an international scandal that erupted after what was known as the Meili Affair.
A security guard at UBS, Christopher Meili, testified that he had personally witnessed crates and crates of bank records dating back to the 1940s and 50s that had been designated by bank officials for shredding, ostensibly to make it impossible for owners and heirs to access their money. This was a serious criminal offense, since Switzerland had officially banned the destruction of bank archives.
Meili, whose sole motive was standing up to injustice, was suddenly thrown into the media spotlight. The bank immediately terminated him, labeling him a criminal. In fact, UBS investigated Meili for “violating bank secrecy,” an incredibly ironic charge when you consider that what he caught the bank doing—secretly—was violating the rights of its account holders by trying to steal their money. Without records of their accounts, the owners would never be able to claim their assets.
In the end, the US Congress offered Meili asylum in the United States—the first Swiss citizen granted such—and an enormous backlash threatened to tarnish the name of UBS. Since banks must maintain an image of trustworthiness and inspire confidence in their customers, UBS found itself in an uncomfortable position.
If only to silence the looming threat of boycott and also avoid being sued by infuriated account holders, the bank reached a historic agreement “to bring moral and material justice” to those who had lost their fortunes during the war. They agreed to pay out a settlement through a committee that would oversee and investigate claims on an individual basis, and thus, the CRT was born.
From 1997 until 2001, the CRT and then its second iteration, CRT-II, was set up to process claims of victims and heirs of departed account holders. It was also charged with awarding retribution to those who could claim having been forced to provide slave labor without proper compensation, as well as restitution to those who had been robbed or looted by the Nazis. In exchange for the $1.25 billion payment, the plaintiffs and class members agreed to “release” or forgo all future Holocaust-related claims against the defendant Swiss banks, as well as virtually all Swiss business and governmental entities.
Now it becomes eminently clear why Ephraim Meir was flabbergasted to hear the official representative of UBS state, on the record, that the six Nazi accounts had been sent to the CRT. Quite simply: The CRT was only set up to contain money from accounts that belonged to people persecuted, enslaved or robbed by the Nazis. Mixing Nazi money into the fund was completely and utterly illegal.
In light of this bombshell discovery, Meir now shifted his focus and investigative prowess to delve into the inner workings of the CRT in order to locate the assets. But while he was originally bent on recovering only Nazi accounts, what he unintentionally discovered shook him to the core and added a new layer to his mission.
“As I researched the CRT, I made a terrible discovery. Instead of justice and fairness, I uncovered a web of lies, deception and the colossal theft of Jewish accounts that I could not, in good conscience, ignore,” he alleges. “While the original CRT, which was closed in 2012, had done an admirable job investigating claims and trying to pay out as accurately and honestly as possible, a second CRT, dubbed CRT-II, was later opened, and that’s where the problems began.”
He has signed affidavits from far too many Holocaust survivors and heirs who revealed that their well-documented claims were summarily denied by the CRT committee with no reasoning or recourse offered. The final report, comprising thousands of pages, was submitted by attorney J. Gribbetz and handed in years after the CRT officially closed. Meir alleges that it is rife with fudged data to conceal the deception and robbery that took place throughout CRT-II’s ignominious proceedings.
Meir says he has obtained sworn testimony from a witness who worked in the CRT offices, revealing that even after all the payouts were distributed, only about 1% of the money allocated for the fund actually went to account holders and rightful claimants. The whereabouts of the rest of the money are anyone’s guess—and, according to Meir, should be everyone’s speculation.
Perhaps most confounding: Meir reveals that Judge Edward Korman ordered all the documents related to the second CRT sealed until 2070, shrouding the entire process in mystifying secrecy. One wonders, why the need to keep things so classified, and who might be benefiting from this intensive secrecy? A similar question mark hangs over the protocol that allegedly saw the CRT conduct all claim transactions in a highly furtive manner, transferring all documents in sealed envelopes so that not even Judge Korman could oversee the committee’s decision-making process.
Interestingly, and most importantly, Judge Korman himself issued a ruling that if there would ever be clear evidence that proved any wrongdoing associated with the Commission, it could be reopened for examination and reevaluation.
The more Meir learned about the CRT’s conduct, the more convinced he became that the Tribunal was actually destroying bank archives, effectively wiping out Jewish claims to their rightfully-owned bank accounts by making them untraceable. There are further allegations that Jewish-owned art, jewelry and other valuables are still sitting in vaults in Switzerland with the full knowledge of bank officials, while nothing is being done to reunite them with their heirs.
Brita Delmas, whom Meir and Reichart met at UBS in 2009, was an attorney who served as the liaison between UBS and the CRT. According to Meir, she may be complicit not only in actions that constituted an abuse of power in her role but also behavior that was potentially criminal in nature.
“What we learned very early on was that UBS was sending accounts over to the jurisdiction of the CRT with strict instructions to immediately destroy those accounts so that the money would never be claimed. Essentially, the CRT had become the long arm of UBS. The bank could claim innocence and keep their noses clean because the CRT was willing to do the dirty work. It was just an elaborate attempt to embezzle the money and assets in those dormant accounts,” Ephraim alleges.
He claims he has documentation to prove, among other charges, that members of the committee deposited these funds into secret foreign accounts in Malta, and that a Russian mafia group awarded themselves a huge chunk of the money in a massive cyber attack. He has sworn testimony from workers in the archives who saw documents being destroyed, as well as from a computer programmer attesting to the fact that UBS forced him to falsify data on bank accounts to make them appear to be worth far less so the bank would not need to pay out the true value of the account.
After stumbling upon these discoveries, it seemed clear to Ephraim that the Ribbono Shel Olam had not only appointed him to seek out Nazi money, but that he had also just been tapped to help reunite Yidden with their stolen assets. Providentially, the two missions melded together into one, and it appeared that the time had come for justice to be served. Together with his legal team, Meir decided to set up a system that would enable all heirs to claim their assets—even those who had already previously turned to the CRT to lay claim to their money. Details on this development will follow, so stay tuned! But first, let us return to our original story of Meir on the hunt for the Nazi-owned accounts.
By this point, Meir was tirelessly following the money trail to these accounts, fueled by a sense of purpose to take this treif money and “kasher” it for use by Jewish organizations and causes. He didn’t know where his investigations would lead or if he would hit an impenetrable dead end, but he was determined to see it through. Although he had set up a non-profit to handle the administrative part of the work, his fundraising efforts never yielded much, especially since he refused to work with organizations or government institutions so as to avoid becoming embroiled in politics. In essence, he was funding nearly everything—travel, legal counsel and private investigations—on his own, and he often wondered how he could continue. “But we kept getting more and more information, and we kept discovering how huge the case was, so I somehow kept going forward,” he says, and his smile, while disarming, is staunchly determined.
Now that UBS had admitted to transferring his accounts to the CRT, and now that he knew they had likely been summarily destroyed, Meir turned his attention to obtaining the last piece of information he needed to finalize his access to the money: Tracking down the owner-heir to the accounts.
While numbered accounts could originally be redeemed solely on the basis of account numbers, passcodes and other identifying details, new laws passed in 1998 required the name of the account owner as well as the beneficiary to the account.
“We sat together at the bank, me and Reichart, wracking our brains trying to think how in the world we could find the name of the person who owned the Nazi accounts,” Ephraim tells me. “It sounds like an absolutely impossible feat; a needle in a haystack, to put it mildly. Where does one even begin?”
They began, it turned out, by making phone calls and inquiries—to the original East German lawyer who had contacted Ephraim, to other lawyers and to locals, asking if they or anyone they knew of might have any knowledge of an individual who would be heir to significant Nazi money. There were many disappointments and red-herring leads along the way. But Meir wouldn’t give up, and Hakadosh Baruch Hu intervened.
“In a crazy, miraculous chain of events, I reached a certain person named Ganzel, who had originally been part of the group who held the Nazi accounts. He told me to seek out someone named Grosser, who would be able to give me the information I needed,” Meir explains. “We had no idea if this Grosser would be good or bad for us; we were pretty ambivalent about going into the meeting with him. We decided that Reichart would meet with him privately at the bank, and I would wait downstairs in the car. I got the guy from my Mossad detail to give us a pen that would secretly record the conversation.”
(Given the delicate nature of his missions, Meir’s trips abroad are usually accompanied by a security detail. As with all Mossad-related activity, he cannot reveal too much of what actually transpires, but he takes necessary precautions, and his friends in high places work to ensure his safety.)
“I could hardly breathe, I was so anxious to know what would happen,” Meir admitted. “After meeting Reichart, Grosser agreed to speak to me himself. He was forthcoming. He was willing to help us. He gave us specific details and directions, and he instructed us to go to a certain location where we would find the son of the Nazi who owned the bank accounts. It was a complete breakthrough in the case!”
A week later, Reichart and Meir traveled together to Zwickau, a small city near Dresden, in East Germany, to meet the heir to the Nazi bank accounts.
It was a historic moment for them. An achievement, the result of hundreds of hours of careful, methodical detective work, superhuman patience and phenomenal siyata dishmaya. It was also fraught with uncertainty, as to their reception as well as the outcome.
They never could have anticipated the kind of welcome they were in for.
“The man was sitting there, wearing a national insignia of Germany. He saw me, with my beard, and with the Israeli flag on my lapel pin, and he began to cry. He said, ‘This is the first time that I’m looking at a real Jewish person!’” Ephraim recounts. “He gave me a hug and was very overcome. Immediately afterward, he announced, ‘I’m going to give you a present!’”
Detlev Köhler, the heir to the accounts, had grown up with his father’s cryptic stories about the Holocaust. He knew for a fact that his father had not been involved in the killing of Jews and had held low-level positions in the Nazi Party. Primarily, his father had been an intelligence officer; he had a special talent for figuring out codes and for reading and creating maps. Now, upon meeting an authentic Jew for the first time, Köhler instinctively felt a longing to mitigate the past.
The gift that he presented within moments of their meeting rendered Ephraim speechless.
“He opened a secret compartment in what he told me was his father’s desk, and in it was a hand-drawn map. I was absolutely incredulous when he told me that the map showed the precise location of Jewish treasures that the Nazis had secretly buried near the Buchenwald death camp.”
They hadn’t even broached the topic of the six bank accounts and already they had been given a priceless gift of epic proportions! (The map has been verified, the entrance to the tunnel has already been discovered, and permission has been granted by the German government to dig, but extensive tests must first be conducted to determine the safety of the expedition, as there is a fear that the Nazis may have booby-trapped it to make it inaccessible.)
Soon, the conversation shifted to the main topic, when Köhler pulled out a yellowed envelope and showed it to his two guests.
“My father told me that this envelope is worth billions, and that if no one else comes to claim it, it belongs to me,” he stated simply.
Detlev Köhler’s father had died in the 1990s. Incredibly, Köhler had never questioned his father about the envelope and had never even tried to pursue the money himself. Ephraim attributes this phenomenon to the Communist hush-hush culture in Eastern Germany, in which the population was conditioned by consistent persecution under the merciless arm of the government to be fearful of asking questions and hesitant to do anything that might be construed as suspicious. “A collective paranoia,” he surmises.
With the scant few details that the heir did know, the mystery of the money was finally put to rest. Köhler’s father was a bright guy with an eye for detail and a keen talent for grasping opportunity. He and his cronies were avid collectors of the same things most of their confederates were after: money. In the chaos of war, there was an abundance of money and valuables haphazardly changing hands. Köhler and his friends would later become famous—or infamous, as it were—as the Odessa Group.
Köhler had a particularly good name among the group. So when one person needed to be entrusted with the bank accounts and codes so that collective money and assets could be discreetly deposited, Köhler was chosen for the task. He opened the six accounts between the years 1936 and 1939, but the group only began depositing money and valuables into them in 1943, taking advantage of the atmosphere to siphon some of it for themselves.
As the Nazis began to fall, the group grabbed as much as they could find, often relying on messengers to make the drop-offs for added discretion. The Odessa Group hoped to be able to use the funds to make their escape to foreign countries and start new lives for themselves. This was another reason they chose Köhler to man the accounts: Since he was uninvolved in murder and war crimes, he would never be tried after the war, and his personal assets were not in danger of being seized by the Allies.
By the end of the war, the sums in the accounts had swelled to astronomical proportions, to the tune of many hundreds of billions of dollars.
The money sat for over 70 years, untouched and accruing interest. “When we explained what we wanted to do with the accounts and how we had investigated them, Köhler immediately said: ‘Okay, go ahead! Take them!’” Meir remembers. “That was that! It was the final step in the process. Now we not only had the correct name on the accounts, but we also had verbal permission to claim them.”
But verbal permission wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, so Ephraim went one step further.
“In 2023, we arranged with Detlev to give over the full rights to the money in the accounts to me solely and completely. Not just power of attorney but incontrovertible legal ownership. My lawyers in Switzerland arranged it, and it went over beautifully. We met in Zug, Germany, and Detlev Köhler signed the documents together with his sister.”
Why would the heirs sign over billions of dollars willingly and unflinchingly?
“Because they really didn’t believe they’d ever get the money any other way,” Ephraim posits, and it’s not a bad theory. After the lengths to which Ephraim had to go to overcome countless hurdles just to uncover the location of the accounts, never mind trying to find the money itself, it’s unlikely that this elderly son of a Nazi officer would have succeeded in getting this done on his own. “And it definitely didn’t hurt that I made an agreement with him that when I do get the money, he’ll get a very nice payout, a percentage of what’s in there.”
The deal was now legally locked down tight, but in another display of siyata dishmaya, Köhler presented another surprise to Ephraim: a signed affidavit from an eyewitness, Genzel—the one who had led Ephraim to speak to Grosser, who introduced him to Köhler—confirming that he had seen the group of Nazi friends sign over ownership of the Swiss accounts to Köhler’s father and detailing the exact names of the signees from the Odessa Group.
Ephraim was now covered for every eventuality. He walked away from the Köhler home feeling overawed by the way Hashem had perfectly orchestrated every detail leading to this outcome.
So, are we at the happily-ever-after part of the story where Rabbi Ephraim Meir inherits billions of dollars and uses the money to transform the entire Jewish world through unparalleled philanthropy?
Well, it depends who you ask.
UBS is not planning to give in or give up. Meir, having anticipated this reaction, is, together with his legal team, making progress even now to force UBS to relinquish the money that is rightfully his.
UBS has refused to meet with Meir and his lawyers ever since their disastrous 2009 meeting. Meir has, once again, put forward a request that the head of the bank, Sergio Ermotti, meet with him to discuss how to proceed and make restitution.
If the meeting goes as planned and Ermotti agrees to pay out Meir’s money, the latter will also insist that they reopen the entire chapter of dormant Jewish accounts and come to an agreement for how to pay heirs who were never granted access to their money (including those who had submitted claims to the CRT and were denied).
“I intend to make it clear to UBS that in addition to the accounts bequeathed to me, I also insist on setting up a third CRT, run with complete and total honesty and transparency, which will allow anyone to file a claim and will settle their accounts with fairness, pro bono. I will take it upon myself to be the one and only address for anyone and everyone concerning Jewish-owned dormant accounts. I will work with other organizations and individuals who have similar goals to create a final, truly just claims process. And I will sign an agreement with the bank that after they pay out a specified sum to this last settlement, from now on anyone who has a claim or complaint of any kind will clear it with me and my team. With this plan, I will be offering UBS something priceless: The opportunity to finally clear their name and be declared completely absolved from further Jewish claims against it.”
With a rueful shake of his head, he makes one last clarification.
“Believe me, I don’t need this headache, and the settling of Jewish accounts has absolutely nothing to do with my Nazi money,” he explains. “I could very well have turned a blind eye to the terrible things I saw when I began investigating the CRT. But I can’t, in good conscience, allow my fellow Jews to be robbed blind. If Hakadosh Baruch Hu brought me to discover the things I learned, it probably means He wants me to act on them. So I will!” he concludes.
Of course, there’s also the little matter of the Jewish-owned valuables stashed away in vaults allegedly within the UBS offices in Zurich, but no doubt Meir has a plan for those as well…
He invites anyone with questions or claims about Holocaust-era Jewish-owned accounts in Switzerland to contact the lawyer who will be heading this inquiry and working, pro bono, on behalf of the claimants: Dr. Gerhard Podovsovnik, LL. M, M.A.S, Vice President of AEA Justinian Lawyers, via email, [email protected] or by phone, +436641103403.
If UBS does not meet with Meir, the stakes will escalate significantly. Meir and his legal team will go a sophisticated legal route, which will prove calamitous to UBS. The bank recently made headlines when it announced its hope to relocate the entire institution from Switzerland to the United States, citing stifling Swiss restrictions on privacy, bureaucracy and other onerous reporting obligations as reasons for the move. What Meir and his legal team intend to do is reach out to the US government and lay bare the evidence he has collected over the past 11 years showing UBS’ utter contempt for and deceitful handling of its Jewish clients, and the sheer debt it has accrued in doing so. He is certain that once the US recognizes the bank’s heavy liabilities and foul business practices, they will compel UBS to settle its debts before any kind of move can be considered.
“When it becomes clear to UBS that they can no longer run and hide from their liability to pay back the stolen money and artifacts, they’ll have no choice but to comply—or collapse. At that point, Ermotti will come begging to meet with me, if only to mitigate the damage to the bank’s public image, because their actions constitute the biggest heist in the history of mankind!” Ephraim says with conviction.
In addition to engaging in high-level diplomatic efforts to leverage UBS’ desire to move to American soil, Ephraim and his team have prepared yet another calculated route. They have been in contact with Swiss diplomats and their American counterparts to try to cut a deal that might stall the implementation of the 40% tariffs that President Trump is due to impose on Switzerland, which are likely to negatively impact the economy. Ephraim’s team is working on diplomatic channels to coordinate efforts that would potentially see Trump agree to forestall the tariffs in exchange for Swiss pressure on UBS to finally come clean about dormant accounts.
It’s a modern-day David and Goliath story: one man against a gargantuan financial institution with branches around the world. But when you see the fierce determination in Ephraim Meir’s eyes and the conviction, dedication and professionalism of the people working with him on this case, you immediately believe that the odds are in his favor.
In addition to the above legal and diplomatic strategies, Ephraim and his attorneys, working with a team of top-tier lawyers in the States, have also crafted an elaborate plan to file a class-action suit against UBS in the US to freeze their assets, alleging that they hid dormant accounts and used them to grow the bank. They believe that this discovery order will be granted very quickly—within two to three weeks—which will, in effect, deliver a stunning blow to UBS and require the bank to disclose why they have the right to withhold dormant accounts.
Media attention to this explosive story is growing. The German tabloid Bild ran a story on Ephraim Meir and the hidden Nazi accounts a couple of months ago, and just recently Ronald Lauder, president of the Jewish World Congress, who originally spearheaded the push that led to the establishment of the CRT back in 1995, is now calling for the reopening of investigations into dormant Jewish accounts, alleging the concealment of documents that would prove how much more is owed than what was paid out originally.
The projection is that Ephraim will be called into court within three weeks from the date that his lawyers file to present the evidence he has carefully, methodically collected for the past 11 years, but there’s no telling how long it will take to litigate the case. Furthermore, there’s no telling what will happen when all the data is analyzed, all the crookedness is straightened out, and transparency begins.
“UBS will need to open the books and show how they acquired each of their thousands of assets,” explains Gerhard Podovsovnik, the lawyer working closely with Ephraim on the case. “We will be arguing that those assets have been acquired by ill-gotten gains, through stolen Jewish money. They will need to prove otherwise.”
The timing could not be more providential, since UBS recently acquired Credit Suisse, which had also absorbed many smaller banks in Switzerland and also faced allegations of theft and deception from Jewish dormant accounts—consolidating all dormant Swiss accounts under one roof.
It’s time for them to answer for each and every euro.
It could take years. It could take decades. Or this whole story could be over and done with in a few days if the bank decides to cooperate. But one thing Dr. Podovsovnik is sure of is that the moment will come when Ephraim Meir will get the billions that have been signed over to him from the Nazi accounts.
For his part, Meir already has a plan for utilizing the money to the max. The first thing he has pledged to do is donate 18 sifrei Torah in memory of the 18 pure souls snatched away in the heinous terror attack at Yeshivas Merkaz Harav. That attack coincided with Ephraim’s first meeting with UBS, prompting him to promise to consecrate the successful completion of this matter in this way.
“A rav I’m close to told me, ‘Ephraim, you will use part of the money to build the Beis Hamikdash,’” he shares with feeling.
Whatever happens, Ephraim Meir will continue to live in his modest home in Beit El, continue to take utmost pride in his children and grandchildren, and continue to learn half-day in kollel. But he will also take the money bequeathed to him and distribute it to the poor, to the sick, to the lomdei Torah, to the chesed organizations and the needy, quietly, determinedly, remodeling the entire face of Jewry.
“I’m going to change the whole image of the typical ‘shnorrer’ from someone holding out his hand, begging for a few coins, to a person spreading out both hands that are overflowing with so much money he can hardly even catch it all,” Ephraim says. “That’s my vision.”
From Nazi-owned accounts to Jewish-owned ones, from a shadowy Odessa group to a shady Claims Resolution Tribunal; from an eerie map of buried Jewish treasure near Buchenwald to a subterranean vault in Switzerland filled with stolen Jewish treasures, Meir’s story is the collective story of our people, persecuted, pillaged and plundered.
But as we just reminded ourselves in these Days of Awe, yesh din v’yesh Dayan.
It’s not the Swiss and it’s not the banks, and it’s definitely not the Nazis who run the world.
There is One Who sees all, and He keeps the most careful of accounts.
It may take a year, a decade or close to a century. But when the Master of the Universe so decrees it, justice will be served. ●

To read more, subscribe to Ami