Credit Suisse, on the trail of the ‘Nazi ratlines’ in Argentina

In 1945, according to the records of Time magazine, Fritz Mandl — the most important arms merchant in interwar Europe (1918-1939) — owned 278 custom-made suits. His children remember the details of his attire. For instance, the Hermès shoes that bore his initials on the soles: FM. The same was true of his Rolls-Royce fleet; each car had a burgundy–and-black combination.

The family’s interpretation of this signature sense of style traces back to a loss: in 1920, a group of Bolsheviks burned down Fritz’s father’s munitions factory. From those flames, Mandl, who had been born in Vienna 20 years earlier, built a conglomerate of companies and became the richest man in Austria. He wanted to restore the family name and make his initials indelible.

Mandl was an Austro-fascist closely associated with Prince Ernst Rudiger Starhemberg and Benito Mussolini. However, he kept his ideology separate from his business: his client list ranged from Republicans in the Spanish Civil War to Hitler’s army. And, in the future, he would also supply Bolivia and the United Arab Emirates, among many other parties.

In the United States, Mandl received double the attention. In 1933, he married Hedy Lamarr, the actress who that same year starred in Ecstasy, which was considered to be the first non-pornographic film with explicit sex and a female orgasm (depicted by Lamarr). Mandl, who had bought Gloria Pictures, tried to acquire all the copies of Ecstasy due to his jealous rages. This was according to his daughter, Pupé Mandl.

Fritz and Hedy divorced shortly afterward. Lamarr made a name for herself in Hollywood with hits like Algiers (1938) and Boom Town (1940). Meanwhile, as described by historian Ronald Newton, Mandl became “one of the most mysterious men of the era” for readers of American tabloids.

The U.S. intelligence services closely monitored Mandl’s movements in Argentina for several reasons. After Germany’s invasion of Austria in March of 1938, the businessman made a deal with the Nazis to protect his assets. He then sailed to Buenos Aires. During Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy, he had met an ambitious military officer, Juan Domingo Perón, whom he financially supported in the February 1946 election campaign, which would make him president of the South American country.

A supplier to the national arms company (Fabricaciones Militares), Mandl intended to create an independent arms industry with Argentine officers, as Newton notes in The Nazi Menace in Argentina, 1931-1947 (1992). Once settled in Argentina, where he lived for over a decade, he diversified his holdings: he bought properties in Buenos Aires, in the province of Córdoba and further south, in Patagonia. Later, he acquired brick factories and even the furniture company that furnished his home. He followed a pattern: if he liked the furniture, he bought the factory.

Alexander, one of Fritz Mandl’s six children, waited for EL PAIS at Josephina’s Café in the Barrio Norte neighborhood of Buenos Aires. He was wearing a suede jacket and a sweater. The 71-year-old, speaking Spanish with a French accent, explained that his father’s life was extraordinary, while his own was rather ordinary. He ordered a pitcher of ginger lemonade.

In the first months of 2020, Alexander Mandl obtained access to an email response from Credit Suisse that had been sent to the grandchildren of the deceased Argentine-German businessman Ludwig Freude. The heirs were claiming the family fortune, which was allegedly held by the bank. Named by The New York Times as one of the 10 richest men in Latin America, Freude had been one of the largest recipients of German investment in Argentina in the 1930s. He owned a lumber company and a bank: he was among the top members of the business elite to which Mandl belonged.

Freude was a member of the Nazi Party in Argentina. In 1944, the German Embassy in Buenos Aires — as journalist Uki Goñi points out in La Autenica Odessa (2002), a book about how several Nazis escaped to Perón’s Argentina — entrusted him with secret funds to finance Nazi activities. Following the rupture of relations between Argentina and Germany in 1944, he became the unofficial Nazi ambassador. His mansion in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires was a meeting place for Argentine officers and members of the German National Socialist movement.

Freude’s son, a blond Argentine-German named Rodolfo, began working as Perón’s personal secretary. This job had been granted in return for the assistance that the president had received from Rodolfo’s father, who had given the then-candidate Perón personal protection and financing during the 1946 campaign. Rodolfo, or Rudi, as Eva Perón (the president’s second wife) called him in some of the letters in which she mentions him, was a key figure in the connection between the Nazis who arrived in Argentina and Perón’s government. Goñi points out that Freude’s brother-in-law, Werner Koennecke, was the accountant for the Nazi spy network in Argentina. He was in charge of distributing money to Hitler’s agents: the funds were stored in a safety deposit box at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires.

In its 2020 response to the Freude-Koennecke family, Credit Suisse stated: “We are not entitled to provide information about any client relationship with Credit Suisse AG to a third party. In this case, the heirs should contact the third party directly for further information. In the case of companies, [they should contact] their governing bodies, or, alternatively, contact the competent courts of international commercial law to obtain the required information regarding legal assistance or recognition (in the case of foreign jurisdiction), or go through the Swiss courts (in the case of Swiss jurisdiction).”

This seemingly irrelevant response would have unexpected repercussions for the investigation pushed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center into the financing of the so-called “ratlines” to Argentina. The Latin American country harbored the highest number of escaped Nazi war criminals, including high-profile figures like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Through their inquiries, the heirs of these two key businessmen who played a crucial role in the relationship between Argentina and Nazi Germany had alerted authorities to the existence of these possible funds. The Freude family’s case was particularly relevant to the Wiesenthal Center’s complaint.

“When I asked if there were any funds belonging to my father,” Alexander Mandl explains, “[Credit Suisse] simply said that there were none. [But] the reaction to [the] Freude-Koennecke [family] was different.”

Mandl has launched a private investigation into the matter. And he has indications that his father’s money is, indeed, in the hands of the bank in question. “He had an account at Credit Suisse and he conducted numerous business deals… [he] received commissions from Mussolini, who also had accounts there,” he points out.

The person who alerted him to the email response from Credit Suisse was a Nazi document hunter: the engineer Pedro Filipuzzi. In the first half of 1984, when democracy had just returned to Argentina, Filipuzzi stumbled upon a list of 12,000 members of the Argentine branch of the Nazi Party. He found them in the archives of a state-owned bank, where he worked. These members also held funds in a single account at Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA), which was later acquired by Credit Suisse. Ludwig Freude appeared on that list as member number 405. And his funds — as Jaime Rosemberg revealed in the Argentine newspaper La Nación in March 2020 — were deposited into account number 4063 at the same bank.

According to Filipuzzi, Rodolfo Freude filed 14 claims with the Swiss bank to recover his father’s money. He did this until he died in 2003, at which point his children continued the claim. Filipuzzi’s father met the Freude-Koennecke family, with Pedro Filipuzzi reconnecting with them in 2014.

In February of 2020, the Freude-Koennecke family gave him a document that was handled by the attorney Oliver Widmer, of the Pestalozzi law firm in Zurich. The document bore the signatures of Credit Suisse bank employees Reto Hosli and Christian Kung. “The purpose of the document was for me to present it to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in order to solve the mystery of the Nazi accounts and to demonstrate that the current Freude-Koennecke family is opposed to Nazism,” Filipuzzi tells EL PAÍS, before handing over a copy at a pizzeria a few feet from the Obelisk in Buenos Aires.

Ariel Gelblung, president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Latin America, took charge of the complaint, leading the investigation that followed the discovery of the document. Gelblung is a commercial lawyer who began as a volunteer at the Wiesenthal Center in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. He has served as the organization’s director for all of Latin America since 2015. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2020 complaint focused on a particular aspect of a ratline: the banking of illicit funds. And Credit Suisse became a central focus of the investigation.

“It’s a type of investigation,” the Center’s offices say, “that’s never been done before. We’re tracing financial transactions that may appear in a diplomatic mission or in a central bank’s accounting records.”

In June of 2021, following the Wiesenthal Center’s complaint, former U.S. prosecutor Neil Barofsky was hired by Credit Suisse itself. In Barofsky’s words, the objective was “to provide independent oversight of the investigation, which Credit Suisse voluntarily initiated after the Simon Wiesenthal Center raised allegations about the existence of undisclosed relationships between Credit Suisse, the Nazis and Nazi accounts.”

A year later, Barofsky was dismissed by Credit Suisse because his report, the bank stated, “contained numerous factual errors, gratuitous and misleading assertions, as well as unsubstantiated accusations based on an incomplete understanding of the facts.” The U.S. Senate Budget Committee took up the matter, accusing Credit Suisse of obstructing and limiting the investigation, while refusing to pursue new leads. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, publicly addressed the matter.

In February of 2023, Barofsky submitted a report with his findings to the Budget Committee. And later that year — after UBS completed its acquisition of Credit Suisse — he regained his position at the bank. According to Barofsky’s memo to the committee dated December 17, 2024, he has since received full cooperation.

“The investigation has identified client documents and other evidence that demonstrate a significant connection between Credit Suisse and one of the key routes, known as ‘ratlines,’ through which Nazis and their collaborators fled justice after World War II,” his memo reads. He adds that the investigation “has focused on the funds required to operate the ratline, including to pay for bribes, false identification documents, and transportation.”

The money trail

The aim of the investigation is to shed light on one of the unresolved issues of 20th-century history: the fate of funds looted from Jewish victims in Germany and transferred to Argentina to support pro-Nazi businessmen. Some of these funds were partially returned to Europe through Credit Suisse and other financial institutions.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has taken various actions in Switzerland and Argentina. According to the organization, the bank accounts are linked to companies such as IG Farben — the supplier of Zyklon-B gas used in the extermination camps — and the German Transatlantic Bank and the German Bank of South America, which allegedly facilitated cash transfers to Switzerland. In 2020, the Wiesenthal Center sent a letter to Credit Suisse Vice President Christian Küng, requesting access to internal files. According to the document, Argentina received 15% of the Nazi funds deposited outside of Europe, an amount equivalent to the total accumulated in all of Latin America.

On February 18, 2025, a delegation from the Wiesenthal Center, including Gelblung and lawyers working with Barofsky, met with President Javier Milei to explain the scope of the investigation into the financing of the ratlines and to request access to previously classified or unavailable state and government documents.

Milei initiated two courses of action. First, he ordered his cabinet to provide the organization with unpublished documents. Since then, the researchers have received materials from the Central Bank, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other state agencies. And, this past April, the president also made 1,850 documents available online: concerning Nazis in Argentina, they were declassified in 1992 by the administration of Carlos Menem (1989-1999). Suddenly, through press reports, the general public was reminded of this uncomfortable history: the lives of Nazi leaders in Argentina.

In the fall of 2025, 12 wooden champagne crates caught the attention of workers from Argentina’s Supreme Court. They had been clearing the basement of archives, which were to be moved to a newly-created museum.

When officials opened the boxes, they were shocked by another part of the past resurfacing. They found hundreds of Nazi Party membership cards, passports, documents and propaganda materials that had supposedly arrived in Argentina in 1941. They traveled from the German Embassy in Tokyo on the Japanese ship Nan-a-Maru.

At the time, the German Embassy in Buenos Aires had declared the contents to be “personal items.” Customs officials randomly selected five boxes and opened them: hidden among publications labeled as “scientific, literary and cultural” were the propaganda materials. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, as it involved a foreign country. The boxes remained in storage for 84 years.

It hasn’t yet been established whether the recent discovery is related to the digitized declassified documents, or the investigation into the financing of the ratlines. Argentina’s Supreme Court has cleaned, inventoried and digitized the 6,000 documents from the boxes and is preparing a report that doesn’t yet have a publication date.

Barofsky will deliver his own final report in the first months of 2026. Documents that aren’t yet publicly available were sent by Milei’s administration to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and are currently in the hands of Barofsky’s team. These include records from Fabricaciones Militares that detail secret missions from Argentina to the U.K., Sweden and Switzerland to hire “foreign technical personnel” and finance research for national defense. The total amount was more than $4.8 million (approximately $60 million today), disbursed between 1945 and 1950. The uses and expenditures of the money are under scrutiny.

The names of the individuals hired aren’t provided, suggesting that there may be more to this than mere discretion. However, the names of the Argentine military and civilian personnel who traveled are included. And there’s also an interesting coincidence: the initials of Fabricaciones Militares are the same as those of Fritz Mandl… FM.

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