Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says new investigations show money may still be hidden that German government and military leaders stole during the wartime years of the early 1940s.
Grassley, who serves on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, says he’s stunned there’s still some plundered funds that haven’t been returned to the ancestors of those who likely died in concentration camp gas chambers.
“Ever since World War Two, the Western world, led by the United States, has been trying to uncover all the money that Nazi leaders stowed away in Swiss banks,” Grassley says.
In 2020, Grassley says Credit Suisse was given credible information that it was holding Nazi-linked accounts. An ombudsman was hired who turned up evidence, who Grassley says was then fired.
“We learned of this through whistleblowers and through an investigation,” Grassley says. “The person they fired issued a report anyway, we got a copy of that report through a subpoena. We got this information out public and it raised more questions.”
Based on the ongoing Senate Budget Committee investigation, the bank has rehired the ombudsman so he can, in Grassley’s words, dig deeper into the “troubling details” of the bank’s history.
“Maybe, finally, Credit Suisse is coming clean, but we won’t know until this guy gets done with his investigation,” Grassley says. “But we’re not going to give up until we get every dollar that the Nazis hid in Swiss banks, make it public and give it back to the descendants of those Jewish people.”
A budget committee statement from August said: “Despite the limitations, the records revealed that Credit Suisse, now part of UBS Group AG, maintained nearly 100 previously undisclosed Nazi-linked accounts—some of which remained open until as recently as 2020—among other Nazi connections.”