Recovery, in practice
Written from inside a case that has been open since 1958. What actually moves, what wastes years, and the document most families wrongly believe they need first.
Last updated August 27, 2026
An inheritance is rarely stolen in one act. It is moved. Assets get signed into a trusted third party's name for tax or political reasons, and then that person dies, or does not give them back, or is never asked. In our case a fortune was placed under a lawyer's name in Venezuela in the 1950s. Sixty-eight years later no one in the family has collected a cent. Finding out how it moved tells you which registry to write to. Chasing the sum tells you nothing.
Families stall for decades waiting on a foreign death certificate. Ours did. For a Swiss bank asset search, it is not mandatory. The Swiss Banking Ombudsman's published requirements say that where no inheritance documents can be produced, the family relationship may be documented instead by birth certificate and certificate of marriage. If a registry in another country has ignored you for years, check whether the institution you actually need has an alternative route. Very often it does.
You do not have to guess the bank. Every bank in Switzerland is legally required to report assets without contact and dormant assets to a central database. The Central Claims Office, connected to the Swiss Banking Ombudsman, queries that database for entitled persons who do not know where the assets sit. Processing fee CHF 100. Separately, assets dormant for sixty years are published at dormantaccounts.ch for one year, or five years where last contact was 1954 or earlier, after which they pass to the state and all rights are extinguished. Check the published list first. It is free and takes ten minutes.
Names drift across borders. The man at the centre of this case appears in the record as Othmar Jakob Hitz and as Othmar John Hitz, and the second form is in both a will registered in Caracas in 1954 and an official Swiss estate notice of 1960. A search run on one spelling would return nothing and feel conclusive. Give every institution every variant you have ever seen, including the wrong ones, and say plainly that the variant is not your error.
In Switzerland every citizen has a Heimatort, a place of origin that follows the family regardless of where anyone actually lived. The civil registry there holds the family register. Ours is Seewis im Prättigau, and that office was able to confirm a direct ascending line across four generations from its own books. That single document then satisfies the bank, the state archive and the claims office. If your family has an equivalent, start there rather than with the country where the money was lost.
State archives, land registries and civil registries in Switzerland replied to us within days, several without charging. Court registries in a country in institutional collapse have produced nothing in sixty-eight years. Both were pursued. Only one moved. Spend your first year on the archives that answer, and treat the silent registry as a long-term project run by a local lawyer, not as the thing your case waits on.
A claims office assessing entitlement wants a clean family line and a credible connection to the country. It does not want, and will slow down for, an unproven allegation of fraud or murder. Two documents, two registers. The claim states relationship and facts. Everything you believe about how the money was taken belongs with a lawyer, or in the book.
Anna Maria Hitz was ten when her father died in Caracas in 1958 and the estate disappeared. She was placed in foster care in Switzerland. At seventeen she was front-page news on three continents. She died in 2019 having never received any part of it. The public case file, about 144 original documents, is at the archive. The open questions are here. If you are searching for something similar and want to compare notes, come forward.