Zürich

Zürich is both a refuge beyond the Reich’s borders and a crucial point in the investigation of Nazi officials’ hidden wealth and secrets. Xavier March and Charlotte Maguire follow Martin Luther’s financial trail to the city, where numbered accounts, keys, and authorization letters reveal how assets could cross borders while leaving the banks with little visible responsibility. In Zürich, the concealed machinery of wartime finance becomes legible, and the city’s polished streets stand beside the crimes whose proceeds they help shelter.

Setting and First Impressions

March arrives expecting less of Zürich than he finds: an old city gathered around a broad lake, with green-and-white trams passing lit shops and cafés. The Voice of America, blurred by static in Berlin, comes through clearly here. That ordinary difference in reception marks the border as more than a line on a map: information and movement that are constrained in the Reich can travel differently in Switzerland.

The Baur au Lac stands a street’s width from the water. Its expense makes March’s room a conspicuous luxury for a detective with little time and a dangerous investigation ahead. From there he studies a map and locates See-Strasse, where Hermann Zaugg has a house. The city’s landscape first appears as a practical aid to the search, but its lakefront addresses soon connect to the less visible geography of private money.

Banking and the Numbered Account

Charlotte traces Zaugg & Cie. through a European bank directory in the public library at Nollendorf-Platz, after losing her press accreditation. She then goes to the U.S. Embassy to consult Henry Nightingale. Her route from a public reference work to diplomatic assistance supplies the starting point for investigating a bank that still operates in Zürich on Bahnhof-Strasse.

The city’s financial center does not announce itself as a separate world. Bahnhof-Strasse looks like a shopping street, while banks occupy courtyards behind the shops and offices above them. The firms are described as small, family-run concerns, often with only a dozen or two employees and a modest brass plate. Zaugg & Cie. fits this pattern: its entrance lies on a side street behind a jeweler, and a remote camera watches the door. March and Charlotte have to identify the discreet entrance and state their business over an intercom before they can seek out Zaugg.

The investigation explains why this arrangement mattered. Before the war, Swiss banks had come to regard German accounts as risky and difficult to service; communication with German clients was nearly impossible, hundreds of accounts were abandoned, and publicity made the business unattractive. By 1939, the once-profitable German numbered-account trade had collapsed. After the war began, however, demand rose sharply as people tried to move property out of Germany.

Banks such as Zaugg’s responded with a deposit arrangement that separated access to the assets from the bank’s direct role. For a fee of 200 francs, a customer received a box and a number, together with a key and a letter of authorization. The holder could buy multiple keys and letters, giving other people independent means of access. A customer could deposit savings and later have an heir arrive with the required documents and claim them without questions. The system’s convenience was also its opacity: it could preserve property across years and borders while making ownership difficult to see from outside.

Evidence Converges in Zürich

Zürich becomes more than the destination of an account search when March reconstructs Luther’s movements. At Wannsee, March understands that Luther had been among fourteen men summoned by Reinhard Heydrich on January 20, 1942, to a conference about the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. By the time March presents the documents to Nightingale, six of the men have been murdered, four have committed suicide, one has died in an accident, and two are said to have died naturally; Luther is the sole survivor. March suspects that Luther hopes to exchange documentary proof for a new life in America. The inference makes the Swiss connection a potential route not only for money but for testimony about state crimes.

The timeline of the account deepens that connection. Less than five months after the Wannsee meeting, in the heat of midsummer, Luther entered Zaugg’s offices and opened an account with four keys. The arrangement’s multiple credentials suggest a deliberate plan for future access, though March’s evidence does not resolve every detail of Luther’s purpose. Zürich is thus linked to a sequence in which a secret political meeting, a bank account, and the later prospect of an American escape meet in the same investigation.

March’s research also ties the city to the concealment of looted art. In the account of the wartime thefts, officials moved works from occupied Poland through administrative channels and arranged for some to be stored or smuggled out of the Reich in exchange for cash, jewels, or gold. The gaps between Polish inventories and German records show that formal destinations such as state collections did not account for everything taken. Luther’s Swiss account belongs to the same larger pattern of transferring valuable, portable assets beyond ordinary scrutiny.

Art, Provenance, and the Limits of the Record

The case surrounding the stolen works gives the Zürich investigation a cultural as well as financial dimension. The collection identified by investigators includes paintings attributed to Raphael, Rembrandt, and Rubens, works by Bellotto and Canaletto, and engravings by Dürer and Kulmbach. Such names are not simply a measure of market value: they point to objects removed from their original settings and placed into new collections through an administrative system that could make plunder look orderly.

The Veit Stoss altarpiece makes that rupture visible. It had been removed from the Church of Our Lady in Krakau in November 1939. Other paintings bear traces of the places from which they were taken, including masonry powder attached to their edges. Those material remnants contradict the clean appearance of inventories and official transfers: an object may cross into a private or state collection, but its damaged edges retain evidence of its departure.

Another work associated with the investigation is Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, historically connected to the Polish collection of Prince Adam Czartoryski and photographed in Krakau in 1932. Its subsequent whereabouts are unknown. The loss of a painting from the record parallels the problem of the numbered account: both objects and wealth can disappear into systems whose documents record only part of their passage. Zürich’s significance therefore lies not in a proven claim that every missing work reached the city, but in its place within the cross-border financial investigation and the broader concealment of portable assets.

Narrative Significance

The city is drawn through contrasts of visibility. Trams, lakefront buildings, shops, bank signs, and hotel registers are public and recognizable; the courtyards, discreet doors, account numbers, duplicate authorizations, and concealed histories sit just behind them. The city’s ordered surface does not erase the violence that has sent people and property across its borders. Instead, the investigation follows the small mechanisms by which that violence leaves an economic afterlife.

In the novel’s Zürich episodes, a key or letter can do what a public record cannot: grant access while keeping the person who controls the wealth difficult to identify. The city also becomes a possible passage for evidence, as March asks Nightingale to consider whether Luther is offering documents in exchange for escape. Zürich consequently holds two kinds of inheritance in tension—the money and artworks transferred out of sight, and the proof that could make concealed crimes visible again.