The First National Bank of Boston, the face of the Yankee financial establishment here and abroad for more than 200 years, was linked by US intelligence with Nazi financiers while World War II was well underway.
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The Buenos Aires office of Boston Insurance Co., known in Spanish as Boston Compania Argentina de Seguros. (Globe Photo / Daniel Luna)
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Operating through an Argentine insurance company that conducted discreet commerce among mortal enemies, officials of the bank did business with collaborators in Buenos Aires who greased the wheels of the Axis war machine, according to newly declassified US spy records.
The allegations are contained in an April 1943 report of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA. The report is among 3 million pages of intelligence files declassified under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
Fleet Financial Group -- which in 1999 acquired BankBoston, a successor to First National -- now finds itself among many American financial institutions that have fallen into a gray area of having had indirect links to Axis businesses, but with no discernable evidence that it profited from the Holocaust.
Companies such as IBM, Ford, General Motors, and Chase Manhattan, which either had subsidiaries in Axis countries or direct ties there, have faced compensation claims from Holocaust victims or their heirs. First National Bank of Boston, however, had no traceable corporate relationship with the Argentine insurance firm, called the Boston Insurance Co.
The declassified documents outline the convoluted business relationships that linked First National Bank of Boston interests with Hitler's financiers. Spanish and Mexican companies in business with Germany's Munich Re helped set up an insurance risk pool in Argentina. Both First National and Swiss Re, among others, took part in this pool, according to the April 1943 OSS report. Swiss Re and Munich Re were the global leaders in "reinsurance" -- the selling of insurance to insurance companies.
One of the directors of Boston Insurance Co., the First National Bank-linked firm, was Erwin Pallavicini. He is described in the OSS file as a US-blacklisted Nazi collaborator who also served on the board of a German insurance firm in Argentina. The OSS found that business competitors complained about Pallavicini's role on the insurance company's board, which is said to have promised that Pallavicini would be replaced at a March 1942 stockholders meeting. But seven months later, the OSS learned that he was still on the board of Boston Insurance. His own insurance group, Pallavicini & Co., was a regular customer of Boston Insurance, according to the OSS report.
"The Boston Insurance Company is still writing all kinds of insurance of blacklisted names, and they are placing this business in the London market," the OSS report said. That meant "the Boston," as the document referred to the insurance firm, was spreading cash and information within and between both the Allies and the Axis.
"The Boston is known to have American board members and stockholders, having been formed by interests affiliated with the First National Bank of Boston," the OSS report said.
It also quoted from a letter by the American Foreign Insurance Association, which asked "just where does this leave the managers of the Boston Bank who are co-members on the board of the Boston Insurance Company with other directors [of blacklisted firms], particularly since the Boston Insurance Company apparently still writes [outlawed] business?"
