BERNE - After a bout of extraordinary soul searching, Switzerland will today formally agree to set up a multi million pound fund - described by its leading bankers as "a moral gesture" - for victims of the Holocaust. Next week, an independent committee of experts will meet for the first time in what the Swiss Foreign Minister, Mr Flavio Cotti, describes as an attempt to "reassess our history", to help the Swiss finally to come to terms with a past most of them have hitherto refused to confront.
The committee, under Mr Jean Francois Bergier, a respected Swiss historian, will investigate his country's role financing Hitler's Germany by accepting gold looted by the Nazis from the central banks of occupied countries or melted down from the personal belongings of individual Jews. He will also shed light on another dark episode - the turning back of thousands of Jews at the Swiss frontier.