A U.S. senator said late Monday that an ongoing investigation into Credit Suisse’s historical ties to Nazi Germany has identified “hundreds” of accounts with potential links to Nazi-era officials and industrialists, including fresh evidence of the bank’s relationship with the SS, Bloomberg reported.

Investigators have uncovered “previously unknown or only partly known” relationships between the Swiss lender and the German War Office, a German armaments manufacturer, and the German Red Cross, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told reporters Monday evening, in comments cited by Bloomberg. The accounts “were once used by individuals or entities who participated in or assisted Nazi war efforts,” he said. 

The senior lawmaker, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, also said the review “found evidence that Credit Suisse’s banking relationships with the Nazi SS was more extensive than we knew before,” Bloombergreported.

The new scrutiny lands as UBS Group AG, now the owner of Credit Suisse, faces questions from U.S. lawmakers about whether previous investigations fully captured Swiss banks’ exposure to Holocaust-era assets and relationships, the news agency said. 

Swiss banks paid $1.25 billion in a 1998 settlement over their handling of Holocaust victims’ accounts, but activists and politicians have spent years pushing for a broader reckoning, arguing earlier probes were incomplete.

The bipartisan investigation, led by Grassley and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), launched following a 2020 Simon Wiesenthal Center report on some 12,000 suspected Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in Argentina, some of whom allegedly contributed money to accounts at a predecessor bank of Credit Suisse as they fled at the end of World War II, according to the report. 

Grassley said he became more involved in 2023 after the bank dismissed Neil Barofsky, the independent ombudsman overseeing the investigation, later reappointed after UBS acquired Credit Suisse in March 2023, Bloomberg reported.

Barofsky is scheduled to testify Tuesday and will highlight findings from a 78-page interim report, with Senate aides expecting him to argue that investigations leading to the 1998 settlement were inadequate. The forensic investigation is expected to conclude by early summer, with a final report anticipated by the end of 2026, Bloomberg said. 

Read more at Bloomberg