The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony about newly uncovered links between the Nazis and a Swiss banking conglomerate, amid an ongoing legal dispute over restitution to Holocaust victims.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), committee chair, told reporters before Tuesday’s hearing that an independent investigator found 890 accounts with potential Nazi links at Credit Suisse, which UBS acquired in 2023.

“These accounts were once used by individuals or entities who participated in or assisted Nazi war efforts,” Grassley said. “That includes wartime accounts for the German Foreign Office, a German arms manufacturing company and the German Red Cross.”

“Credit Suisse’s connection to all three of these entities was previously unknown, or only partially known,” Grassley told reporters. “The investigation also found evidence that Credit Suisse’s banking relationship with the SS was more extensive than we knew before.”

Nazi Germany and members of the Nazi party had extensive relationships with Swiss banks before, during and after World War II, taking advantage of Swiss neutrality and the country’s banking secrecy laws to shelter assets, including wealth seized from Jews during the Holocaust.

Neil Barofsky, an independent ombudsman employed first by Credit Suisse and now by UBS to investigate those links, told senators on Tuesday that despite its claims of transparency, UBS is now engaged in efforts to stymie his investigation.

“Shortly after I told UBS that this committee was considering holding this hearing, UBS informed me that it would, for the first time, conduct a privilege review and withhold certain relevant, privileged materials from me and my team,” Barofsky testified.

“Unless UBS reverses course, the results may be stark. I will be unable to completely test the bank’s work in any area in which information is withheld from me,” he told the committee. “I will be unable to report on the content of the relevant documents withheld, including whether they impact any of the investigation’s findings, and I will be unable to provide assurance in my final report that the investigation has truly left no stone unturned.”

In 1999, Swiss banks including UBS and Credit Suisse settled a lawsuit with Jewish groups and Holocaust victims for $1.25 billion. That settlement covered all claims “in any way relating to the Holocaust, World War II and its prelude and aftermath, victims or targets of Nazi persecution, transactions with or actions of the Nazi regime” or “any related cause or thing whatever.”

UBS general counsel, Barbara Levi, told senators that its claim of legal privilege over the documents Barofsky sought is intended to shield the bank from further lawsuits in spite of the comprehensive wording of the 1999 settlement.

“This is a small set of documents,” Levi said. “We are talking about less than 300 documents versus 16.5 million documents that have been produced so far.”

Levi also noted in her testimony that her family was “tragically impacted by the Holocaust,” and her colleague Robert Karofsky, president of UBS Americas, noted that he was a “proud Jewish-American.”

“The reason that on this specific set of documents we have claimed the privilege is that these documents refer to the 1999 Holocaust litigation, which is a specific subject matter that we are in threat of litigation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and others,” Levi testified.

The investigator, Barofsky, told senators that each “document” that UBS is shielding could contain hundreds or thousands of pages of records.

“Picture the final scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ That’s what the Credit Suisse archives are like,” Barofsky said. “You line documents from here, you almost get it back to my home in New York City.”

The World Jewish Congress, which was one of the lead plaintiffs in the 1999 settlement, has expressed interest in re-opening the settlement based on Barofsky’s findings.

“We probably left $5 to $10 billion on the table,” Ronald Lauder, president of the congress, told Bloomberg in January. “I said to myself, ‘We’re not going to make that mistake again.’”

The commission of inquiry that contributed to the 1999 settlement focused largely on Swiss bank accounts that the Nazis seized from Jews or that lay dormant after their Jewish owners were killed.

Barofsky testified on Tuesday about more extensive links between Nazi Germany and Swiss banks than has previously been reported, and the role that those banks played in helping Nazis evade justice after the war.

“Credit Suisse had maintained bank accounts for many of the key operatives of this so-called ‘rat line,’ and it is almost certain that it is from those accounts that bribes were paid to French and Swiss officials in order to clear a path for these Nazi war criminals to a life of luxury and prosperity in Argentina as they fled Allied justice,” Barofsky said.

Both Republican and Democratic senators expressed frustration that UBS has refused to waive its legal privileges and allow Barofsky and Jewish groups investigating the bank’s collusion with the Nazis to publish conclusive findings.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) compared the efforts of UBS executives to shield their bank from contemporary litigation to the greed of Swiss bankers during the war.

“That’s what this is still all about, isn’t it? The money,” Kennedy said. “It was about the money when your predecessors took the Nazi money, and it’s about the money right now.”

“The smart play here for you is to release these documents and let Mr. Barofsky finish his report and let the chips fall where they may, and then, in front of God and country, if you owe more money, then by God pay it,” Kennedy said.