More than a billion dollars. This is already the compensation that the two largest Swiss banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, had to pay in 1998 to the victims of the Shoah for their collaboration with the Nazis. But they were still hiding things. Independent detectives, commissioned by a US Senate parliamentary investigation into Credit Suisse, have found a cache of previously unknown customer files. Stamped “American blacklist”, they belonged to Nazis or Axis partners. Another discovery: evidence of a concealment of this information by the bank.
According to a letter to the Senate from the inquiry’s mediator, Neil Barofsky, that the Wall Street Journal was able to consultCredit Suisse did not provide crucial information to previous commissions of inquiry in the 1990s. This is, for example, the case of a bank account controlled by officers of the SS – the paramilitary unit of Adolf Hitler’s elite– and a Swiss intermediary. The companies that used this account participated in the economic effort of the Third Reich, despoiling Jewish owners and relying on forced labor from concentration camps.
The trajectory of this new investigation itself points to a lack of transparency from Credit Suisse. The bank appointed Neil Barofsky, former prosecutor and lawyer at the firm Jenner & Block, as mediator of the investigation in 2021, before dismissing him a year later. The bank’s executives then minimized his discoveries and believed that he had gone too far.
The US Senate Banking Committee got involved, and what was only an investigation requested by the Jewish organization Simon Wiesenthal Center became a parliamentary investigation. Neil Barofsky returns to his position at the end of 2023, after the rescue and takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS.
The horizon is clearing. The new owner completely opens the archives and puts fifty investigators on the job. You need that to examine the 3,600 boxes from the “Inf department” buried in the reserves. It contains information on certain clients listed in the American blacklist at the time for their links with the Nazi regime.
In addition, Neil Barofsky’s team realized that the internal investigation carried out in the 1990s had indeed identified a register card linked to the SS officers’ account, and had traced it up the hierarchy. Testimonies from former employees and newly discovered emails confirm this. Credit Suisse nevertheless affirmed before the commissions of inquiry in 2001, then in April 2023, that no document allowed it to link one of its accounts to any member of the SS.
Fourteen Nazi clients already identified by previous investigations
This investigation therefore hopes to finally lift the veil on the dark past of Swiss banks. Because the soap opera lasts. In the mid-1990s, awareness of the disappearance of Holocaust victims’ assets pushed Paul Volcker, the chairman of the American Federal Reserve, to search through bank files to find dormant or stolen accounts. Added to these audits is the investigation by the Swiss Parliament, led by Jean-François Bergier.
Their main conclusions? Swiss bankers easily turned a blind eye to the theft of Jewish funds by their Nazi clients. And these banks often hindered the efforts of the victims’ families to recover the money. In detail, Credit Suisse was able to identify fourteen Nazi clients. UBS, for its part, isolated two accounts: that of a former president of the Reichsbank, and another opened by the widow of an SS officer several decades after the war.
In court, the two banks agree to pay $1.25 billion (1.21 billion euros) in reparations to Jewish families who were denied access to accounts in Switzerland, as well as to survivors of forced labor in the camps or to their heirs. An agreement welcomed by most Jewish organizations at the time.
But we will have to wait for this new investigation, and in particular the testimonies of former employees of Credit Suisse who worked on the investigations of the 1990s, to know the extent of the bank’s cover-ups. Neil Barofsky was in fact told that Credit Suisse only shared information strictly requested by investigators, and not always crucial additional facts. The final report is expected in early 2026.
Source: www.slate.fr
