Einstein, Freud on Holocaust bank list

Sigmund Freud: The founder of psychoanalysis

ZURICH, Switzerland -- Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud are among the names of 21,000 dormant bank accounts believed to have belonged to Holocaust victims.

The Swiss banks' list, published on Monday, marks another step in attempts to return unclaimed wartime wealth to its rightful owners.

Officials were unable to say whether the listed account holders were really the German-born physicist and the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, or if the names were just coincidence.

"If you look into the Swiss phone book for Slobodan Milosevic, you get four," a spokesman for the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) noted, referring to the former Yugoslav president.

Einstein, a German-born Jew, generated some of his most startling insights into the nature of the universe while working as a Swiss patent clerk. He died in the United States in 1955.

Freud never lived in Switzerland, but had ties to the psychiatric community there.

A Jew, he escaped with his family to England when Germany annexed Austria and died in 1939.

Three-year search

The list is the third to be released as banks try to counter allegations by victims and Jewish groups that they have wrongfully withheld funds of people exterminated by the Nazis during World War II.

The banks deny charges of stonewalling, but Switzerland's two biggest banks, UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group, agreed in 1998 to pay a $1.25 billion settlement to end an increasingly bitter stand-off.

The clash spawned class-action lawsuits in the United States and threatened to spark U.S. boycotts of Swiss banks and other businesses.

A SBA spokesman said independent auditors had come up with the 21,000 names after combing Swiss bank records for three years.

Their list originally contained nearly 54,000 accounts deemed probably or possibly linked to Nazi victims, but this has since been reduced to 36,000, the spokesman said.

Swiss banking regulators have limited publication to the accounts most likely to produce a match, but the remaining 15,000 are registered on a central database.

The spokesman said grounds for inclusion included accounts showing a clear match between the account holder and a listed Holocaust victim or those that had shown no activity since 1945.

Only 2,600 accounts on the list are still open. The rest have been closed in the meantime by people whose identity remains unknown, he said.

"The banks say we have no evidence to suggest that these accounts were closed other than in the course of normal business."

But Jewish activists question whether such accounts were paid out to Nazis or other unlawful recipients.

The spokesman said both sides had worked out a compromise to ensure access to the 4.1 million wartime accounts examined by the independent auditors during their search.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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New York Psychoanalytic Institute: FreudNet
Albert Einstein Archives
Dormant Accounts Web site of the Swiss Bankers Association

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