San Francisco (October 2, 2000) - Just as the Swiss banks begin paying out 1.25 billion dollars to elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors, a new class action to be filed October 3, 2000 against the Swiss National Bank (Naumovic v. Swiss National Bank, United States District Court for the Northern District of California) seeks an accounting and restitution of Swiss National Bank-Nazi wartime transactions valued at 1.7 billion Swiss Francs.

The new class action filed by California attorneys Thomas Easton and Jonathan Levy is on behalf of the 12 million plus civilian victims of the Nazis from the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia who were excluded from the original Swiss Bank case.

A report issued by Special Master Judah Gribetz in the original Swiss banks Holocaust case found that in regard to looted assets, the Nazis treated all loot in the same manner regardless of origin. Much of the victim gold and silver collected from concentration camps, forced laborers, and occupied territories was sent to Berlin for reprocessing, deposited in the German State Bank and then exchanged through the Swiss National Bank and other Swiss banks for hard currency. The Nazis then used the hard currency to buy vital war materials from neutral countries.

Easton and Levy have charged that the Swiss ultimately prolonged the war by providing much-needed foreign exchange for the Nazis. The dealings with the Germans and their Axis partners were apparently so profitable that the Swiss continued the practice through April 1945 despite warnings from the Americans and British that they were dealing with genocide tainted gold.

In August 2000, Easton and Levy filed a similar lawsuit implicating the Swiss National Bank and Vatican Bank in illicit financial dealings with Croatian Nazis. (see www.vaticanbankclaims.com )