The group's lawyer says the banks accepted and sold looted personal property, including the gold teeth of concentration camp inmates.

Gold marked with a German stamp

Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank "misappropriated and converted the deposits into their own property," the 25-page lawsuit filed with Manhattan federal court says.

The $18bn (£11bn) action demands disclosures and identification of all accounts established before 1946.

The plaintiffs' attorney Edward Fagan said: "These two banks conspired with the Nazis.

"The German banks made money stealing assets from people under horrific circumstances ... They profited from Holocaust victims."

Two Holocaust survivors taking part in the action described how their families were stripped of their property.

One of the group, Michal Schonberger, 69, of Bayside, New York, said: "The SS robbed us of everything, even by pulling gold teeth, gold jewellery and gold coins from our live and dead bodies."

And Ruth Abraham, 85, of New York City said she wanted information about a $90,000 (£55,000) account her father had with Dresdner Bank before the war.

She said she had asked the bank about the account but officials told her they knew nothing about it.

Fighting on a broad front

Jewish groups are already fighting legal battles on other fronts to establish which countries and institutes benefited from working with the Nazis.

On Tuesday an official American report accused several countries, including Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Argentina, of trade dealings with the Nazis and of being paid in gold stolen from Holocaust victims.

The report concluded that about $300m (£183m) in looted Nazi gold, worth $2.6bn (£1.6bn) today, went to pay Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Turkey for war materiel and three-quarters of this was transferred from Germany through the Swiss National Bank.