Wednesday, Feb 12, 2025

The Great Swiss Swindle

 

Investigators Discover Secret Nazi Accounts in Leading Swiss Bank

 

A Senate Budget Committee investigation has released bombshell allegations that a leading Swiss bank hid from investigators crucial information regarding its complicity with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Credit Suisse sought to cover up the extent to which it helped the Nazis store looted assets during World War II, by placing their account information under a secret file with the stamp “American blacklist.”

The bank reached a settlement with survivors in 1998 while keeping them in the dark about the true scope of Swiss perfidy.

Credit Suisse’s ties with the Nazis first became publicly exposed in the 1990s when, following public outrage over funds withheld from Holocaust victims, two congressional investigative committees were tasked to scrutinize Swiss banks’ conduct before, during, and after World War II.

The committees found that Swiss bankers systematically ignored the plundering of Jewish assets by the Nazis and obstructed families’ attempts to reclaim their funds. They used several outrageous tactics to reject claims from Holocaust survivors and their families.

Your account is “nonexistent,” survivors were told. Yet many were later found by investigators to be active or to have been emptied of their contents and transferred to other accounts under the bank’s control.

“Where’s the death certificate?” bankers cynically demanded, before turning claimants away for lack of documentation about the mass murder of their loved ones in Nazi death factories or killing pits.

Other cruel tactics included applying the statute of limitations—arguing that claims were invalid because too much time had passed since the end of the war—and citing the bank’s “secrecy laws,” even if the account owners were dead or untraceable.

Under the threat of economic sanctions by the United States, the revelations about the banks’ corruption led to a $1.4B settlement with tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors seeking restitution in a class-action lawsuit.

The lawsuit leveled accusations even more severe than those raised by the investigative committees. Plaintiffs alleged that Credit Suisse and UBS, two of Switzerland’s largest financial institutions, were not only complicit in aiding the Nazis to loot Jewish accounts but also actively participated in the systematic theft of Jewish-owned assets.

The legal brief further accused senior Swiss bankers of playing a direct and deliberate role in the orchestration of these crimes. [See Sidebar]

The scandal shattered claims of Swiss “neutrality” and destroyed the banks’ vaunted reputation for ethical conduct and confidentiality. From there it was largely downhill for Credit Suisse. In subsequent decades, the bank was plagued by a series of corruption scandals and loss of public trust that culminated with its recent financial collapse.

Once considered an untouchable giant of global finance deemed too big to fail, Credit Suisse was bought out last year for a humiliating knock-down price by its fierce rival UBS.

 

Senate Committee Calls Out Credit Suisse for Lack of Transparency  

 

The Swiss Banks Holocaust Agreement was finalized in 1998 during the Clinton Administration, spearheaded by special envoy Stuart Eizenstat and ratified by Judge Edward Korman, who also set up a mechanism for distribution of the monies to survivors and their heirs.

As part of the settlement, survivors and their heirs agreed to drop the class action lawsuit in the process of being litigated in a New York district court.

In many ways, the settlement was merely a symbolic gesture, with most survivors receiving a meager few hundred dollars after a burdensome application process, while Swiss authorities walked away with an air of virtue for supposedly rectifying past crimes.

Amid last week’s disclosures by the Senate Budget Committee, however, a very different picture has emerged. It turns out that Credit Suisse had only pretended to come clean about its wartime collaboration with the Nazis, and that much of the sordid story remained untold.

“Our oversight has pulled back the curtain on decades of inaction and wrongdoing by Credit Suisse and raised concerns about the bank’s integrity in conducting its internal review. Out of respect for Holocaust victims and their families, we cannot turn a blind eye to these shortcomings,” said Senator Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, in a press release.

According to the WSJ drawing on the Senate Budget Report, recently unredacted documents from Credit Suisse archives reveal that a vast amount of incriminating information had been withheld during the 1990s investigation into the bank’s Nazi ties, while Credit Suisse essentially pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

Tens of thousands of documents had been kept under the wraps in the earlier probes, especially those of the 1990s. Among the files that have surfaced are 3,600 hard copies and an estimated 40,000 microfilms, considered to have a “high relevance rate” concerning Nazi connections.

 

‘American Blacklist’ Opened a Can of Worms

The documents had been hidden in a secret file stamped with the term Amerikanische schwarze Liste’ — ‘American Black List’ —  maintained by individuals and companies that were directly financed by the Nazis and their allies, or were known to regularly do business with them, the Senate Budget Committee report said.

Clues leading to the secret documents were first unearthed in a storage room in Buenos Aires by Argentinian investigator Pedro Filipuzzi, who stumbled across files that revealed the names of 12,000 undercover Nazis who lived in Argentina during the 1940s. Scores of these Nazis had bank accounts at Credit Suisse, according to a report in The Telegraph.

Filipuzzi passed the documents, which ran to more than 500 pages, to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) who went public with the material in early 2020. The SWC’s expose was explosive, demonstrating that Credit Suisse’ ties to the Hitler regime ran much deeper than anyone had known.

In a March 2020 letter to the bank, the Simon Wiesenthal Center stated, “We believe it very probable that these accounts held funds looted from Jewish victims, under the Nuremberg Aryanization laws of the 1930s. We are aware that you already have received claims from people alleging they are heirs of Nazis named in the list.”

Credit Suisse launched an investigation in response and last month said it had found no evidence to support SWC’s allegations that many individuals on the list had accounts at Credit Suisse during Adolf Hitler’s reign, the Telegraph reported.

However, a US Senate committee rejected the bank’s declaration and accused it of throttling its own investigation. After using its powers of subpoena, the Senate committee obtained a scathing internal bank report claiming Credit Suisse maintained more than 100 previously unknown Nazi accounts.

In response, Credit Suisse backed down and agreed to investigate. The bank retained a forensic research firm to conduct the review and also hired an independent auditor, prominent U.S. prosecutor Neil Barofsky, to work alongside the research firm.

While prior commissions had stopped short of fully investigating Nazi intermediaries, Barofsky and his team flagged Credit Suisse accounts for several hundred alleged former Nazis and Nazi intermediaries that were suspected of holding looted Jewish assets.

The investigators identified 21 accounts from a list of notorious high-level Nazis provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, including one that belonged to a Nazi commander who was sentenced at Nuremberg, and another account belonging to an SS commander convicted of war crimes in a post-Holocaust European court.

 

‘Shooting the Messenger’

Barofsky’s findings so threatened Credit Suisse that he was pressured to curtail his research into sensitive areas. When he persisted in the probe, the bank fired him and suspended the investigation, claiming his work was plagued with “factual errors” and an “incomplete understanding of the facts.”

However, shooting the messenger in this case did not work. A year later, Barofsky released a damning detailed preliminary report which alleged that senior Nazi commanders who fled to Argentina after the war, maintained accounts with the bank as recently as 2002.

In one case, an account controlled by senior Nazi SS officers of an “elite unit” and a Swiss intermediary was discovered, whose purpose appeared to be the transfer of Jewish plunder.

In another case, a German manufacturer who relied extensively on concentration camp slave laborers opened an account at Credit Suisse to which slave labor profits reportedly flowed.

In yet another instance, a Nazi who oversaw a German bank and also had an account at Credit Suisse would “Aryanize” Jewish assets by requiring Jews to transfer their accounts to the German bank. After they did so, the accounts were pilfered and transferred to the Nazi’s secret account at Credit Suisse.

After UBS acquired Credit Suisse as a subsidiary, and under pressure from the U.S. Senate, Barofsky was re-hired and allowed to resume his high-stakes investigation.

“We’ll continue pushing for a full and complete investigation at Credit Suisse until all questions related to these Nazi-linked accounts are resolved,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement.

 

Credit Suisse and Nazi Ratlines

Barofsky also uncovered a “significant connection” between Credit Suisse and many individuals who helped Nazis hide assets and aided them in fleeing Europe in the wake of World War II via “ratlines.” These were secret routes by which Nazis escaped justice by hiding in Argentina and other South American countries with the help of Nazi-sympathizers.

Working with scholars specializing in ratline research, Barofsky’s team identified more than three dozen intermediaries connected to the ratlines who had accounts at Credit Suisse that should be subject to investigation, they said.

According to an article in the Daily Mail, German prosecutors who examined secret files from Brazil and Chile discovered that as many as 9,000 Nazi officers and collaborators from other countries found safe havens through the ratline.

About 5,000 ended up in Argentina. They were explicitly invited by Argentine president Juan Peron, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

With hundreds of thousands of German immigrants already living in the country since before the war’s outbreak, Argentina had maintained close ties with Germany while officially remaining neutral for much of World War II. Peron’s sympathy for fascist ideology translated into an eagerness to be of assistance to Nazis even after Hitler and Mussolini were both dead.

Argentina thus became the safest haven for Nazis on the run.  In 1946, Peron secretly ordered his intelligence department to establish “ratlines” through ports in Spain and Italy to spirit Nazi war criminals into Argentina. Peron’s actions were also self-serving. He was eager for German scientists, jet-plane designers and nuclear experts to head his arms industry.

What he got for the most part, ironically, were people with few talents beyond mass murder.  On his immigration papers, Adolph Eichmann listed his profession as “technician.” The infamous sadist Josef Mengele claimed to be a “mechanic.”

UBS which now owns Credit Suisse has publicly committed to a thorough investigation of its secret Nazi accounts, including the “go-betweens” who helped Nazis find refuge in South American countries while hoarding Jewish plunder.

This commitment comes amid increasing pressure from lawmakers and advocacy groups still seeking accountability for the unresolved theft of Jewish-owned assets related to Holocaust-era banking practices.

“The findings,” writes The Telegraph, “may lead to renewed calls for reparations or further settlements for victims’ families who were denied access to their rightful assets.”

*****

A Holocaust Settlement Built on Grossly Undervalued Assessments

 

The Swiss banks Holocaust settlement of 1998 played a pivotal role in paving the way for subsequent slave labor restitution settlements with Germany and Austria. But there were many moments during the negotiations when a settlement seemed out of reach, especially when Swiss banks refused to budge from a $600 million rock-bottom offer after eight weeks of talks.

The shabbiness of the offer disgusted the plaintiffs and Jewish leaders. They discussed calling a halt to the negotiations and proceeding with the class-action lawsuit. Both sides were about to throw in the towel.

What galvanized the Swiss to return to the bargaining table were the looming sanctions about to be imposed on Swiss banks, beginning September 1,1998, by 20 states led by New York, New Jersey and California.

The talks reached a turning point when District Judge Edward Korman invited both sides to a semi-official dinner meeting. There, a ten-member committee representing thousands of survivors, along with representatives of the World Jewish Congress, met with the 7-member Swiss team in the presence of Judge Korman.

The class-action attorneys were asked to make a presentation of their evidence, justifying their demand for a minimum settlement of $1.5 billion from Swiss banks.

As described in media reports at the time, attorneys for the survivors set forth their evidence for over four hours. Over 500 documents retrieved from U.S. and European archives were presented, demonstrating the open flow and transfer of funds and stolen assets from the Nazis to Swiss banks.

The presentation told how the banks knowingly profiteered from the looting and expropriation of Jewish wealth, without regard for the suffering of the victims. Among the archival material quoted that night were documents portraying a harrowing scenario that recurred repeatedly at the Swiss border during the Holocaust years.

The documents described how Jewish prisoners were brought at gunpoint to the border by Nazi guards, where Swiss officials presented them with forms to sign authorizing the transfer of their Swiss bank accounts to the Third Reich. Only after being coerced into the sham procedure of signing the documents were the prisoners allowed to escape into Switzerland, stripped of their life’s savings.

Much of the evidence produced by survivors’ attorneys came from the reams of intelligence reports American agents sent to the U.S. government in the 1940s, on the economic cooperation being afforded the Nazis in Switzerland and other “neutral” countries.

These reports assessed the worth of Nazi-looted assets and slave labor profits accruing to Switzerland, whose banks laundered the Nazi loot. The assessments played a role in the final determination of the $1.25 billion settlement to which all parties eventually agreed.

As we now know from the latest findings of the Senate Budget Committee report, those 1940 estimates of Swiss-laundered Nazi profits and plunder were grossly undervalued.

 

*****

Are The Swiss Still Hoarding Nazi Gold?

When members of the World Jewish Restitution Organization first raised the issue of dormant Jewish Swiss bank accounts in 1995, bank officials insisted that there were only 774 such accounts and that they totaled no more than $32 million.

Ultimately, more than 50,000 accounts were found.

About three-fifths of them had been closed under suspicious circumstances “that deserve greater scrutiny,” investigative committee chairman Paul Volcker said at the time. He alluded to evidence that countless Jewish-owned accounts had been opened and drained of their assets, when the victims had failed over a period of several years to access them.

In some cases, the pilfering had been done by Swiss residents who had been given power of attorney by depositors who trusted them.

Jewish accounts had been depleted by the Swiss government in other ways. As the post-war communist governments of Europe began nationalizing all private property, Swiss citizens living under these regimes called on their government to protest the confiscation of their property.

The Swiss government came up with a deal that satisfied both Swiss citizens and communist officials.  Monies were taken from the accounts of Jewish victims whose accounts were labeled “dormant” and paid to communist authorities in various countries, who then used a part of these funds to compensate Swiss citizens.

In addition, the Swiss banks that enriched themselves through the looted gold and other valuables plundered from the victims by laundering these assets for the Third Reich, succeeded in buying themselves protection from all future lawsuits for a mere $1.25 billion.

That amount is a pittance when measured against the many billions of dollars of profit that accrued to the Swiss through their services to the Hitler, as documented by historian Tom Bower in Nazi Gold.

The Telegraph quoted Mark Pieth, a professor of criminal law at the University of Basel, who notes that “around 80 percent of gold held by the Nazis was transferred to Switzerland during the war years, while the rest went to Italy, Portugal and Turkey.”

He adds that about 90 percent of the gold that was shipped to Switzerland was deposited in the Swiss National Bank.

“As Credit Suisse has been integrated into its erstwhile rival, UBS,” concluded The Telegraph, “Nazi gold will be one issue on a long list of problems that UBS will be forced to contend with.”

 

 

 

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