March and Charlie investigate Stuckart's Swiss bank account in Zurich

The Zurich investigation brings Xavier March and Charlotte Maguire from the suspicion of a numbered Swiss account to a hidden object with direct ties to wartime plunder. March obtains a short exit visa by persuading Artur Nebe that he has a concrete lead: Martin Luther flew to Zurich and returned to Berlin, and may have used an account connected to Stuckart. In Zurich, the account’s sparse records point to Luther as its opener; inside its box, March and Charlie find a wooden portrait panel concealed beneath a false official label. The journey makes financial secrecy tangible, and reveals how a system built to hide wealth can also preserve evidence of its violent origins.

From the Berlin Lead to a Swiss Visa

March asks Nebe for permission to leave Germany, naming Switzerland as his destination. His request initially draws laughter: Nebe treats the idea as absurd in light of March’s extensive file and the threat of a concentration-camp commandant. March then gives the request a specific investigative purpose. Lufthansa has reported that Luther flew to Zurich on Sunday afternoon and returned to Berlin on the final flight Monday night; March believes Luther had access to a numbered bank account.

The second part of March’s case is physical evidence from Stuckart’s apartment. He places an envelope on Nebe’s desk, and Nebe examines its letter under a magnifying glass, immediately noticing that the key is missing. Rather than simply refuse, Nebe orders his adjutant to take March’s passport to the Interior Ministry and obtain an immediate, twenty-four-hour exit visa, valid from six that evening until six the next. The permission is not freedom to defect. Nebe insists that the Swiss Criminal Police will watch March from his arrival until his return flight, warns him not to evade them, and requires him to report everything he learns upon returning to Berlin. The investigation is therefore authorized as a tightly supervised excursion, with the threat of arrest and deportation defining its limits.

The Journey and the Swiss Banking System

March has been awake for thirty-three of the previous thirty-six hours and falls asleep aboard the aircraft. He misses the safety demonstration and barely registers takeoff. Only when the plane is cruising at ten thousand metres and the pilot announces that it is passing Leipzig does he wake to find Charlotte Maguire seated beside him, pretending to read a magazine. Her unexpected presence changes the journey from a solitary inquiry into a joint operation.

The Rhine below the aircraft marks the passage out of the Reich and into Switzerland. March sees the river from the air for the first time, then the misty mountains, rectangular fields, pine forests, steep red roofs, and small white churches. The border crossing is not merely scenery: March is travelling under a visa that will expire in twenty-four hours, while the account he seeks belongs to a financial world organized around concealment and distance from state scrutiny.

Charlie explains why the Swiss account could outlast the wartime upheaval. Before the war, Swiss banks had come to regard German business as too risky and cumbersome; communication with clients was nearly impossible, many owners abandoned their accounts, and the numbered-account trade had collapsed by 1939. After 1939, however, people desperate to move property out of Germany created a new demand. Banks such as Zaugg & Cie. offered an account arrangement for a fee of two hundred francs: a box, a number, a key, and a letter of authorization. A holder could pay for multiple keys and letters, allowing another person to claim the contents without the bank having to participate in the transfer. Charlie’s example of an elderly woman depositing her savings and her son later collecting an inheritance clarifies both the arrangement’s convenience and its capacity to separate property from its owner.

At Zaugg & Cie.

The pair seek out Zaugg & Cie., a small, family-run bank of the kind found behind the public face of Bahnhof-Strasse. Its entrance is in a side street behind a jeweller, and a remote camera watches the discreet door, matching the security camera outside Zaugg’s villa. March identifies himself to the intercom and introduces Charlie as Fräulein Maguire; their access begins not with a public banking hall but with a guarded threshold and an unseen listener demanding their names and business.

Zaugg’s records provide a narrow but decisive answer. Under the bank’s own rules, he identifies Martin Luther as the person who opened the account. It comprises one box and four keys. The only information Zaugg will disclose about its use is the dates on which the box was opened: July 8, 1942; December 17, 1942; August 9, 1943; and April 13, 1964. The latest date confirms March’s suspicion that Luther had made a recent trip to Zurich. The three earlier dates establish that the account was used only four times across more than two decades, while its four keys suggest that access could be distributed even though the box itself was singular.

March presses for more, asking whether Luther opened the box on Monday and what mood he was in. Zaugg refuses. He invokes client privilege and the Swiss Banking Code, saying that he has already provided everything he is entitled to disclose. March and Charlie then ask to inspect the box themselves. The inquiry shifts from an argument over what a banker may say to the direct examination of what has been kept out of sight.

The Box and the Hidden Portrait

A small elevator carries March, Charlie, Zaugg, and his bodyguard down to the vault. The confined lift leaves them pressed together; beyond it lies a white-tiled corridor thirty metres long, with barred sides and a guard seated at a desk beside the gate. Zaugg uses a heavy bunch of keys chained to his belt. The setting makes the account’s promise of privacy feel less like an abstraction than a guarded physical enclosure.

At the box, Charlie turns the key. At first she thinks the compartment is empty, but then finds a flat cardboard case about fifty centimetres square and five centimetres deep. Red wax seals its lid. A typewritten label claims it is the property of the Reich Foreign Ministry Treaty Archive in Berlin, and Gothic lettering identifies it as a top-secret state document. The official wording invites the expectation of a treaty; instead, the label serves as a misleading cover for what has been placed in the box.

March breaks the seal using the key. Inside the cardboard case lies an object wrapped in oilcloth. When he lays it on the desk and removes the covering, the object proves to be a scratched, ancient wooden panel with one corner broken away. The portrait itself remains intact: a young woman with pale brown eyes, black beads looped twice around her neck, and long fingers holding a small white-furred animal in her lap. Charlie recognizes its beauty. The panel’s damaged edges suggest that it was wrenched from its setting, while its concealment beneath a false government-archive label turns the box into more than a repository for money or documents: it is a hiding place for a displaced work of art.

Plunder, Secrecy, and the Investigation’s Stakes

The Zurich discovery belongs to a wider pattern of official plunder. During March’s earlier conversation with Rudi Halder, reports from the occupied General Government expose the contrast between state advertisements promising German settlers free farms and guaranteed income and accounts of poor soil, hard labour, disease, and danger from local partisans. Halder also describes the luxury surrounding Hans Frank’s administration at Wawel Castle in Krakau: paintings, tapestries, church treasures, jewellery, and bribes. March connects that context to the wealth of Josef Buhler, noting that it explains why Buhler had a house on Schwanenwerder. The account investigation thus takes place against a landscape in which occupation produces both advertised settlement and private enrichment.

The scale of the art theft is made explicit when Odilo Globocnik reports a secret inventory compiled by Polish museum authorities in 1940. From Warsaw alone, the listed losses include 2,700 paintings by European artists, 10,700 paintings by Polish artists, and 1,400 sculptures. Globocnik says that sculptures are then being dug up in a garden and describes how the collections were dispersed: some went to the Führermuseum, Hermann Göring’s museum at Carinhall, and galleries in Vienna and Berlin. The discrepancy between Polish records of what was taken and German records of what was received points to a second stream of theft beyond the destinations acknowledged by the regime.

In Globocnik’s account, Buhler could arrange for objects to be shipped under escort to Stuckart at the Interior Ministry, where the transfers could be made to look legal. Stuckart could then store the works or smuggle them out of the Reich in exchange for cash, jewels, gold, or other portable, untraceable assets. The Swiss account’s numbered box, multiple keys, and minimal record of use fit the broader mechanics of concealment: official-looking transfers, dispersed access, and assets detached from their visible owners. The panel in Luther’s box does not by itself explain every step of its passage, but it gives the investigation a material trace of the art traffic and links the secret account to the world of looted cultural property.

The episode also sets the account’s concealed valuables against a still more brutal inventory. In Martin Luther’s Auschwitz inspection notes, a camp storehouse called Canada contains mountains of prisoners’ belongings and a list of property sent to the Reich, including 132,000 men’s shirts, 155,000 women’s coats, 3,000 kilograms of women’s hair, and thousands of children’s garments. That documented accumulation of clothing, hair, and other possessions is not the same transaction as the art transfers, but both expose a regime that turns seized property into administrable quantities and movable wealth. Against those vast inventories, the single damaged panel in Zurich becomes an intimate remnant: an object hidden, displaced, and still recognizable beneath a counterfeit bureaucratic identity.