A probe has found that dozens of people and entities connected to the Third Reich had ties to the Swiss bank, the outlet has reported
One of Switzerland’s largest banks, Credit Suisse, withheld crucial information about its links to the Third Reich from investigators, the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing an ongoing probe.
Investigations into Credit Suisse and another prominent financial institution, UBS, in the 1990s had failed to uncover the full scale of the banks’ cooperation with the Nazis, the outlet said in an article on Saturday.
The audits, conducted three decades ago, ended with the two banks paying $1.25 billion in restitution to Holocaust victims who lost their Swiss accounts or had been used as slave laborers during the Second World War.
In 2023, UBS purchased Credit Suisse in order to prevent its collapse.
According to the outlet, a new independent probe has discovered a cache of client files marked ‘American blacklist,’ a designation for those financing or trading with Nazis or their Axis partners, in Credit Suisse’s archives.
The WSJ said that it had seen a letter sent to the US Senate in late December by the head of the probe, Neil Barofsky, who is a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block and a former US prosecutor.
In the document, Barofsky revealed that “the investigation has identified scores of individuals and legal entities connected to Nazi atrocities whose relationships with Credit Suisse had either been previously unidentified, or for which the relationship had been partially identified but the full nature of the bank’s involvement has not yet been reported publicly.” Among other things, the probe uncovered a previously unknown account controlled by officers of the SS (an elite Nazi paramilitary unit) and a Swiss intermediary. The enterprises that had been using it promoted the Third Reich’s economic policies, including seizing businesses from Jewish owners and profiting from forced labor at concentration camps, the report read.
Barofsky said that there are indications that Credit Suisse had covered up its links to the Nazis during investigations in previous years by not always sharing what it knew. The bank’s general approach has been to provide only requested information and not offer additional insights, he explained.
