- Originally published in the LA Times on April 14, 2005 [more]
L.A. woman shares in $21-million award by tribunal that denounces banks' betrayal of Jews.
By David Rosenzweig, Times Staff Writer
Denouncing Swiss banks for their "widespread betrayal of Jewish
clients," a tribunal Wednesday awarded an elderly Los Angeles woman and
a dozen relatives $21 million from a fund established to compensate
Holocaust survivors whose assets were illegally seized during the Nazi
era.
It was the largest award to date by the Claims Resolution
Tribunal, formed in 1998 in the settlement of class-action lawsuits
brought against Swiss banks in Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court.
The suits charged that the banks collaborated with the Nazis and
withheld from Holocaust survivors and their heirs vast sums of money
deposited for safekeeping before World War II. To settle the case, a
consortium of Swiss financial institutions agreed to pay $1.25 billion
to Holocaust victims.
Sharing in the award announced Wednesday will be Maria V.
Altmann, 89, who fled her native Austria after the Nazi takeover in
1938. She eventually made her way to Los Angeles and opened a dress
shop.
Altmann said she didn't know the banks had passed her family
fortune to the Nazis until her lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, persuaded
her to file a claim with the tribunal.
"It's like a beautiful fairy tale," Altmann said after learning
of the award. "And an ugly one for the Swiss banks…. I never dreamed
there was so much money stolen from our family."
Last year, Altmann won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case
allowing her to pursue a lawsuit to recover six paintings valued at
$150 million. The paintings had been confiscated by the Nazis from her
uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy Viennese merchant.
The contested paintings by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt,
including a world-famous portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele, have been
on display at an Austrian national gallery.
Austria, supported by the U.S. government, argued that it was
immune under a federal law blocking most lawsuits against foreign
governments.
But the high court ruled 6 to 3 for Altmann and sent the case
back to Los Angeles federal court for trial, which is pending.
Altmann said she harbors no hard feelings toward the Swiss,
noting that they provided sanctuary to her uncle when he fled Vienna
after Nazi Germany's takeover of Austria.
The Claims Resolution Tribunal, however, was highly critical of
the Swiss banking establishment's conduct during the war. In a 52-page
report, the tribunal said Bloch-Bauer's treatment was "a striking
example of the widespread betrayal of Jewish clients by Swiss banks."
Bloch-Bauer, who died in poverty in Switzerland in 1945, had been
a major shareholder in Osterreichische Zuckerindustrie AG, Austria's
biggest sugar refiner.
Just before the Nazi takeover, the company's Jewish owners
transferred their shares for safekeeping to an unnamed Swiss bank with
the promise that they would not be sold or transferred without the
owners' consent.
Sadly, the tribunal's report said, the bank did not live up to
its legal and fiduciary obligations. When the Nazis moved to seize
control of the company, the bank cooperated by selling the owners'
shares to a designated Nazi "purchaser" at a fraction of their value,
the tribunal found.
"Having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe as a safe haven
for their property, Swiss banks repeatedly turned Jewish-owned property
over to the Nazis to curry favor with them," the report said.
The tribunal report said its authors were struck by the fact that
the bank kept no records of its receipt or disposal of the Jewish
owners' stock shares. The documents on which the $21-million award was
based were obtained from outside archival sources.
"We will never know how many other examples of betrayal were
buried in the records of the 2,757,950 accounts — of the 6,858,116
opened in Swiss banks between 1933-45 — the banks concede they have
destroyed," the report continued.
Austrian Jews, the report said, have experienced exceptional
difficulties obtaining restitution for losses suffered during the
Holocaust.
It is telling, said the report's authors, that the Austrian
government official who oversaw post-war restitution proceedings
regarding Bloch-Bauer's company was a Nazi Party member who had worked
in the office responsible for confiscating Jewish assets in 1938.
As of January, the Claims Resolution Tribunal had received more than 32,000 claims from Nazi victims or their heirs.