The Swiss bank was loyal to high-ranking officials of Nazi Germany and their followers from Argentina even after the Second World War

Credit Suisse serviced Nazi accounts until 2020

The Swiss bank was loyal to high-ranking officials of Nazi Germany and their followers from Argentina even after the Second World War

The original of this material

© IA “RBC”18.04.2023, U.S. senators release report on Nazi accounts in Credit Suisse

Natalia Anisimova

The US Senate Budget Committee published reportwhich says that the Swiss bank Credit Suisse serviced the accounts of the Nazis or people associated with them, in some cases until 2020.

As noted by The Wall Street Journal, the investigation of the senators was initiated after the publication of data from the Simon Wiesenthal Center – an organization whose activities are aimed at protecting human rights, combating terrorism, anti-Semitism and studying the Holocaust. In 2020, the Center received information about 12 thousand Naziswho fled to Argentina. According to the researchers, many of them had Swiss bank accounts where they kept money confiscated from Jews.

A document on the Senate Committee’s website says that Credit Suisse maintained accounts most of which were previously undisclosed, such as those of 99 people who were either high-ranking Nazi officials in Germany or members of Nazi-linked groups in Argentina. 70 accounts were opened after 1945. At least 14 of them continued to be served in the 21st century, with some in 2020.

Two of the accounts belonged to a Nazi commander and an SS commander who were convicted at Nuremberg. The latter remained open until 2002.

As the senators note, after the publication of the Simon Wiesenthal Center data, Credit Suisse agreed to conduct its own investigation, but, in their opinion, the bank “set an unreasonably rigid and narrow framework” and refused to take into account new data discovered during the audit. The committee believes that the bank’s management interfered with the investigation and “inexplicably fired” an independent reviewer, reports Reuters. The committee said it would continue to monitor the situation.

Credit Suisse responded by saying that its own review found no evidence to support the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s key claims that the accounts held Holocaust money.

Credit Suisse is one of the oldest banks in Switzerland, founded in 1856, and the second largest in terms of assets. After the bank’s largest stock drop in history, rival UBS acquired it in March.

How Nazi money from Argentina ended up in Switzerland

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© swissinfo.ch03/06/2020, Credit Suisse bank may hold Nazi money from Argentina

A list of 12,000 Nazis has been found in Buenos Aires who may have lived in Argentina since the 1930s. According to media reports, many of them or Nazi sympathizers kept their money in one or more accounts at the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt bank, which later became known as Credit Suisse.

This list was published by the Jewish Human Rights Center named after Simon Wiesenthal. The list was given to the Center by the historian Pedro Filipuzzi, who in turn discovered the document in Buenos Aires. The list contains the names of Nazis whose accounts were placed with the Swiss bank Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, now Credit Suisse.

The Center assumes that assets may still be stored on these accounts, including those seized from persons of Jewish nationality who became victims of Nazi persecution. “It is very likely that these dormant accounts contain money seized under the Nuremberg racial laws from Jewish victims of Nazism,” the Simon Wiesenthal Jewish Human Rights Center said in a statement this week.

Credit Suisse, one of the leading Swiss banks headquartered in Zurich, recalled that between 1997 and 1999, an independent commission of experts led by François Bergier had already conducted a detailed study of the archives of this and 60 other Swiss banks in order to identify accounts that could have belonged or may have belonged to victims of Nazi persecution.

The Commission concluded that its investigation “was unique in its kind… [и] was the result of long and painstaking work of a large number of experts. This allowed us to get as complete and comprehensive a picture as possible of the Swiss accounts and money in them of the victims of Nazi persecution – taking into account the (then) circumstances, ”Credit Suisse responded to an inquiry from SWI swissinfo.ch. The bank then added that “they will look into this issue again.”

Why were there so many Nazis in Argentina?

In a statement, the Wiesenthal Center said the original list of 12,000 names was found in an old archive by Argentine scholar Pedro Filippuzzi while he was working through documents from the Nazi headquarters in Buenos Aires. According to the Wiesenthal Center, up to 1,400 members of the NSDAP and its foreign branch lived in Argentina in the period up to 1938, and approximately 12,000 people supported the pro-Nazi secret Unión Alemana de Gremios (“German Union of Trade Unions”) and another 8,000 people supported other Nazi organizations.

“This also includes German companies such as IG Farben, the supplier of Zyklon-B gas, which was used to exterminate Jews and other victims of Nazism, as well as financial institutions such as Banco Alemán Transatlántico and Banco Germánico de América del Sur. Both of these banks appear to have been transferring Nazi money to Switzerland,” says Shimon Samuels, director of international relations at the Wiesenthal Center.

After the end of the war in various countries of South America, in particular in Argentina, dozens of Nazi criminals found refuge, including Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. The presence of a large number of Nazis in Argentina was the result of the policies pursued in the 1930s by the pro-Nazi military regime of President José Félix Uriburu (1968-1932) and his successor Agustín Pedro Justo (1876-1943).

In 1938, Justo’s regime was replaced by the anti-Nazi President Roberto Ortiz (Roberto Marcelino María Ortiz, 1886-1942), who created a Special Commission to Investigate Anti-Argentine Activities, mainly with the aim of “denazifying Argentina”.