In early 1997 , Meili had been working as a night guard at the Union Bank of Switzerland ( UBS ) in Zürich , Switzerland . He discovered that officials at UBS were destroying documents about orphaned assets , believed to be credit balances of deceased Jewish clients whose heirs ' whereabouts were unknown , as well as books from the German Reichsbank . They listed stock accounts for companies in business during The Holocaust , including BASF , Degussa , and Degesch . They listed real-estate records for Berlin property that had been seized by the Nazis , placed in Swiss accounts , and then claimed to be owned by UBS . Destruction of such documents is against Swiss laws . The documents Meili saved reportedly predate the Nazi period , dating from 1897 to 1927 . On 8 January 1997 , he took some bank files home . After a telephone conversation , he handed them over to a local Jewish organization , which brought the documents to the police , and eventually to the press , which published the document destruction on 14 January 1997 . The Zürich authorities opened a judicial investigation against Meili for suspected violations of the Swiss laws on banking secrecy , which is a prosecutable offense '' ex officio '' in Switzerland
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Christoph Meili