Credit Suisse announced this Tuesday (18) that, after two years of investigations, it found no evidence that Nazi citizens exiled in Argentina had bank accounts during the 1930s, according to an indictment made by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2020.
Investigations were conducted by forensic investigation firm AlixPartners. They involved 50 people who analyzed 480,000 documents and “found no evidence to support the center’s accusations,” the bank said in a statement.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked Credit Suisse in March 2020 to investigate a list of 12,000 individuals, which the center said included Nazis who arrived in Argentina in the 1930s, many suspected of having transferred large sums of money into Swiss accounts.
The list was based on members of the Union Alemania de Grêmios (UAG), an Argentine union linked to Nazi ideology. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, many of them had accounts at the Swiss bank Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, a direct predecessor of Credit Suisse.
Investigations
According to Credit Suisse, AlixPartners investigators discovered that the list of 12,000 people, in addition to having many duplicates (and in reality being less than 9,000), did not include members of the Argentine Nazi Party, according to the list compiled by the United States government in 1946 of members of the Nazi Party.
From the list provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, investigators found only eight members who may have had an account at the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt between 1933 and 1945, but “seven of these were closed in 1937”, Credit Suisse said. “Only one remained open during World War II, that of a UAG member who had emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s, and who was not on the US government’s list of members of the Argentine Nazi Party,” the Swiss bank added. in the communiqué.
Historic
Credit Suisse noted that the conclusions are similar to those published two decades ago, in the context of the 1999 Global Settlement (in which the Simon Wiesenthal Center also participated) and which, as the Swiss bank recalled, “put an end to the controversy over Swiss banks during World War II”.
That agreement to compensate Holocaust victims and their heirs, the statement said, “definitively cleared Swiss banks of all charges relating to World War II, the Holocaust, its victims and any dealings with the Nazi regime.”
Credit Suisse invited the Simon Wiesenthal Center to bring its staff together with those of AlixPartners to present the research results in more detail.
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