Switzerland: Credit Suisse Withholds Information About Nazi Leaders’ Bank Accounts
Sensational revelations by a U.S. Senate investigative committee: during investigations in the 1990s, a Swiss bank “did everything to conceal the existence of secret accounts attributed to hierarchs of Hitler's regime.” The money was confiscated during the Holocaust from Jewish families across Europe and placed in encrypted bank accounts in the Swiss Confederation
For Swiss banks, “money has no smell”: the former Swiss banking group Credit Suisse systematically withheld vital information during investigations in the 1990s into bank accounts opened by Nazi Germany’s leaders during World War II.
These sensational revelations can be read in a new report that presents the preliminary findings of a sweeping investigation by the U.S. Senate Budget Committee into Swiss bankers’ dubious ties to Nazi-fascist leaders. “The tens of thousands of documents that have been released as a result of the investigation provide compelling new evidence of the existence of account holders linked to Hitler’s Nazism who were previously unknown or only partially known,” said a statement released by the U.S. Senate on Saturday, January 4 (Sunday, January 5 in Europe – ed.). The money accumulated in encrypted bank accounts in the “neutral” Swiss Confederation was mostly the money confiscated, or rather stolen, during the Holocaust from wealthy Jewish families, massacred in Hitler’s concentration camps.
The U.S. Senate disclosures followed the spooky revelations of former prosecutor Neil M. Barofsky (pictured), who was appointed ombudsman for the Swiss banking institution in 2021, fired in 2022 and rehired in 2023 after Credit Suisse merged with the UBS banking group. According to the U.S. Senate, “Barofsky did not succumb to intimidating pressure from the Swiss lending institution’s management to limit and censor his investigations.” Barofsky’s team found documents pointing to many Credit Suisse clients with Nazi ties, including many high-ranking SS officers.
In a letter drafted by the U.S. Budget Committee in mid-December 2024 and released by the Senate on Saturday, January 4, Barofsky states that Credit Suisse did everything it could to hide very important information. The U.S. Senate emphasized in an almost threatening tone that “the Budget Committee’s investigation is not yet complete.” This despite the fact that back in 1998, “Swiss banks in the USA reached an agreement on the issue of unclaimed assets, contributing $1.25 billion to Jewish Holocaust survivors.”
The UBS Banking Group, as a first response to the serious allegations, announced that it had “pledged to contribute to the compilation of a complete register of old accounts of the former Credit Suisse Bank linked to Nazism and promised to provide Barofsky with all necessary support to enable him to continue to shed light on this tragic historical period.”
