Jewish News of Northern California: "Are millions waiting for you? Perhaps, says banker"

No, this isn't spam from Nigeria. The idea involves secret Swiss bank accounts from the Holocaust era.

Could you — yes, you — the young Jewish wastrel living in a basement apartment and eating ramen every night, actually be the sole legitimate heir for a secret Swiss fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

Don’t trade in your ramen for rondelle of salmon just yet. But according to a veteran American banker who’s been living and working in Switzerland for two decades, hundreds or perhaps thousands of Jews may be blissfully ignorant of massive accounts waiting for them overseas in “trustee accounts.”

“The question is, who does this money belong to? If the trustee dies, you’ve got big accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars, and it’s sitting there with no one claiming it,” said Charles Epping, a banker and consultant turned novelist who is scheduled to speak on San Francisco radio stations and make a bookstore appearance Friday, July 14 through Sunday, July 16 . . .

At around the time Hitler marched into Austria and began asking banks for account holders with Jewish names, a number of well-off Jewish families throughout Europe decided to protect their life savings — and to do that you needed someone with a non-Jewish name.

So they started trustee accounts (in German, treuhand accounts) via non-Jewish bankers or lawyers in Switzerland. Those accounts were significant; Epping estimates that values of $100,000 or more, a fortune at the time, are not unreasonable.

Tags: Swiss Banks, Jews, Holocaust