Swiss Bank’s Nazi Rat Line Triggers UBS Court Hearing in NY (1)

Tucked under the arcade at 49 Marktgasse in Bern’s historic city center is an opaque glass entranceway with a small sign identifying it as a branch of UBS Group AG, one of hundreds across Switzerland.

But the late-Baroque facade of the building conceals a special, darker history, one that reflects persistent political and legal problems for the bank thousands of miles away, in the US.

For at least two years in the late 1940s, the building, then owned by a predecessor bank of Credit Suisse, housed a key stop on the secret routes that allowed Nazi officials to escape justice ...