Swiss bank Credit Suisse served the accounts of the Nazis and those connected with them until 2020. The US Senate Budget Committee came to this conclusion. published the results of the relevant investigation.
“Credit Suisse appears to hold accounts of at least 99 individuals who were high-ranking Nazi officials in Germany or members of Nazi-linked groups in Argentina,” the document says.
According to the US Senate, there was no previous information about these accounts. Of these, 70 opened after 1945, at least 14 remained open in the 21st century, some with a Swiss bank in service in 2020.
At least one of these accounts belonged to a high-profile Nazi official and the other to an SS officer. Both were convicted at the Nuremberg Trials, but Credit Suisse served for one of them until 2002. The authors of the investigation suggest that the money in the accounts was money confiscated from Jews during the Holocaust.
The results of the investigation “raise new questions about the bank’s possible support for Nazis fleeing justice after World War II with the so-called ‘rat marks’,” the Senate said in a statement. We are talking about the officials and the army of the country.
US officials’ own investigation began after they suspected Credit Suisse was trying to thwart official investigations into Nazi ties. This case began in 2020, after the Simon Wiesenthal Center (which deals with human rights protection, counter-terrorism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust studies – socialbites.ca) received information about 12,000 Nazis who fled to Argentina after. The end of the Second World War. Some had accounts in Swiss banks.
Credit Suisse launched an investigation into these facts and appointed the AlixPartners audit firm and an independent ombudsman to oversee the process. However, as reported in the U.S. Senate, the bank set a very narrow and rigid framework for judgment and eventually dismissed an independent observer. This aroused the suspicions of the US authorities.
The Wall Street Journal writes that the Senate Committee received evidence from the same fired ombudsman – attorney Neil Barofsky. He reported that the bank actually refused to fully examine its Nazi connections. In particular, according to Barofsky, Credit Suisse did not explore the possible financing of “rat tracks”, which were supposed routes to South America and escape plans for representatives of the Nazi elite fleeing the Nuremberg Trials.
The Credit Suisse report on this investigation says that employees of the financial giant are checking the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s information, and also checking new listings with listings compiled in 1997.
In the end, the Swiss bank said it found no evidence to support the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s basic claims that Holocaust victims’ money was kept in accounts. And the information found only complemented what the bank administration knew about previous ties to the Nazis.
But Barofsky said he gave much more detail in his report. In June 2022, however, the bank refused to review them, summarize the overall results, and fired an independent auditor in November last year. The lawyer associates this decision with the arrival of the new head of the legal service of Credit Suisse.
In 1997, the Wiesenthal Center published evidence that a Swiss bank was servicing the accounts of Nazis profiting from the Holocaust. The following year, Credit Suisse agreed to pay its victims $1.25 billion, about one-third of what human rights activists have demanded.
While other countries rejected such deals, Switzerland and its banks bought gold from the Nazi regime. They did after 1945. Most of the world’s financial institutions returned their assets to Holocaust victims and their families only after lawsuits and threats of US sanctions during the 1990s protests.