Ten years ago this week, on the hottest day of a sweaty New York summer, an excited crowd gathered around a courthouse in Brooklyn to hear history proclaimed. A scrum of business-suited lawyers and Jewish activists emerged on the steps as Alfonse D’Amato, a US senator, read out a brief statement announcing that UBS and Credit Suisse, the two biggest Swiss banks, had agreed to pay $1.25bn to Holocaust survivors.

It appeared to bring an end to an extraordinary episode. For three years, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), in a self-proclaimed attempt to “write the last chapter of the Holocaust”, had pursued Switzerland’s banks over money deposited with them by Jews seeking a haven before the war. The WJC alleged that the Swiss had allowed these accounts to remain dormant. It said that rather than help Holocaust victims and their relatives to locate their money following the war, the banks actively obstructed them; survivors came forward with stories of being told by bank tellers to produce death certificates for relatives who had perished in Auschwitz.