Zaugg & Cie.

Zaugg & Cie. is a private Zurich bank whose discreet operations preserve more than money: its numbered accounts and deposit boxes hold a route into the hidden documentary record of the Nazi regime. In Xavier March’s investigation, the bank is at once a guarded financial institution, a repository for wealth Berlin cannot reach, and the setting through which evidence of the Wannsee Conference comes back into view.

Identity and Operations

Founded in 1877 by the Franco-German financier Louis Zaugg, the bank is headed in the novel’s 1964 present by his grandson Hermann Zaugg, who is identified as chief director. It is one of Zurich’s small family-run concerns: a modest staff, a suite of offices, and a discreet brass plate rather than a conspicuous public presence. Its entrance lies on a side street behind a jeweler, and a remote camera watches the door. The arrangement makes the bank’s unremarkable exterior part of its security: access is controlled, and visitors must identify themselves over an intercom before being admitted.

The bank’s reputation and private status also place it within the broader system of Swiss financial secrecy. March learns that the old numbered accounts remain valid despite a postwar Swiss ban on opening new ones, because the terms of existing agreements must still be honored. Such accounts can be sold between holders, and Zaugg has developed particular expertise in them. Their continuing existence gives the bank an unusual afterlife: an old account is both a financial instrument and a transferable claim to whatever has been concealed within its associated arrangements.

Wartime Wealth and Berlin’s Frustration

Berlin has monitored Hermann Zaugg’s activities for more than two decades. In the 1940s, the bank dealt extensively with German nationals considered politically unreliable. By the time of March’s investigation, Zaugg is suspected of holding millions of Reichsmarks in cash, art, bullion, jewelry, and precious stones that should have been confiscated. The Finance Ministry has tried for years to gain access to these assets without success. The bank’s independence therefore has a concrete political consequence: wealth linked to the Reich’s wartime world has remained beyond the reach of the German state.

The available account of Zaugg himself is limited. He is fifty-four, married, has one son, and owns a mansion on the Zürichsee. He is described as respectable and private, with powerful friends in the Swiss government. The contrast between this established public standing and Berlin’s long-running suspicions gives the bank’s secrecy a double edge. It protects clients and old agreements from outside scrutiny, while also frustrating official efforts to recover property that the state claims should be seized.

Account 2402 and the Route to the Archive

The bank enters the investigation through a small, carefully preserved set of documents: a brass key and a letter on thick blue paper bearing the heading Zaugg & Cie., Bankiers, at Bahnhof-Strasse 44 in Zurich. The letter, dated July 8, 1942, identifies its bearer as a joint holder of account 2402 and is signed by Hermann Zaugg. March recognizes the danger of the papers because German citizens were forbidden to hold foreign bank accounts without Reichsbank permission, an offense carrying the death penalty. Their importance rests not only in what they authorize, but in the risk their possession reveals.

When March and Charlotte Maguire reach the bank, Zaugg is reluctant to surrender information, but the account’s own rules oblige him to answer. He identifies Martin Luther as the person who opened it and describes the arrangement as one box with four keys. The box’s contents are not ordinary valuables: Maguire retrieves a flat cardboard container, sealed with red wax and labeled as property of the Reich Foreign Ministry Treaty Archive in Berlin, with a separate Gothic marking identifying it as a top-secret state document. A Swiss numbered account has thus become the means of storing German government papers outside the archive named on the label.

The papers connect the bank’s custody to a specific history of bureaucratic concealment. Among them is Reinhard Heydrich’s letterhead correspondence confirming the rescheduling of an interagency discussion to January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee villa. March and Maguire compare the documents with archive records and discover that the minutes of that meeting have been removed at the request of the Reichsführer-SS. A notice records the removal on April 6, 1964, only eleven days before March finds it. The bank’s box does not itself explain the meeting, but its papers give the investigation a documentary path to the missing record.

Documentary Evidence and Significance

The bank’s role becomes clearer when the recovered correspondence is set beside Heydrich’s original invitation and Hermann Göring’s July 31, 1941 directive. The invitation refers to Göring’s commission to prepare measures for a complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe, while the directive charges Heydrich with making the necessary organizational, technical, and material preparations. Together with the January 1942 meeting notice, these documents turn the numbered account from a clue to hidden wealth into a conduit for evidence of state policy.

The records are vulnerable even after discovery. March’s copies are poor and hastily made; Rudi Halder, frightened by Heydrich’s invitation, insists that they leave the archive by a rear entrance and then withdraws from further contact. Meanwhile, the official minutes have been taken out of the records system under the pretext of state security. The contrast is central to the bank’s narrative function: the formal archive can be altered by those in power, while documents diverted into a private account survive outside the state’s direct custody. Zaugg & Cie. is not presented as the author of the political crimes recorded in the papers; it is the guarded financial intermediary whose old account and box make the concealed evidence accessible to March’s investigation.