Nazis on bank list Swiss

New York Daily News published 25/07/1997 at 12:00 AM by Richard Sisk

Washington Swiss bank officials yesterday confirmed suspicions that major assets hidden by Nazi war criminals may have been mingled with those of Holocaust victims in a list of dormant accounts. The Swiss Bankers' Association in Basel said that at least nine names of high-ranking Nazis and collaborators identified by Jewish organizations and Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) appeared to match those on the list of more than 1,800 World War II-era accounts published Wednesday. "We do think that there is a possibility that they correspond to names on the list," the association said in a letter to Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

Hier identified two more names on the list as suspected war criminals: Mercier du Paty, chairman of the "Commission on the Jewish Question" in France's Vichy government, and Vojtech Tuka, head of the puppet state in Slovakia. The Swiss Bankers' Association told Hier that it was working with Swiss federal investigators on "further measures to be taken in this important matter.

" Hier said he believed that there was more than a "possibility" of a match of names, since the Swiss knew the date and birthplace of all account holders. He said the disclosure of Nazi names meant that "the center of the investigation should shift to the perpetrators' accounts" in the effort to learn the extent of Swiss dealings with the World War II Nazi regime.