See http://www.bslaw.net/altmann/ozag/

Some press below.  The award itself is at
http://www.bslaw.net/altmann/ozag/award.pdf.  The NY Times also has a great
photo slideshow on its website next to the story at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/nyregion/14holocaust.html?ex=1114142400&en
=ca4f052a96b78065&ei=5070.
 

Swiss Banks Called to Account for Nazi Ties
--------------------

In awarding $21 million to an L.A. woman, a tribunal says Jews were betrayed
during the war.

By David Rosenzweig
Times Staff Writer

April 13 2005, 8:31 PM PDT

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.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-holocaust14apr14,0,2568649.story?col
l=la-home-headlines

Visit latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com

April 14, 2005    E-mail story Ê Print Ê Most E-Mailed
THE NATION
Swiss Banks Called to Account for Nazi Ties
*    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 banksÉ. 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 Ñ of the 6,858,116 opened in Swiss banks
between 1933-45 Ñ 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.
 
 
 

NEW YORK REGION |  April 14, 2005
For Betrayal by Swiss Bank and Nazis, $21 Million
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/nyregion/14holocaust.html?ex=1114142400&e
n=ca4f052a96b78065&ei=5070>
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
A judge approved the award to two Jewish families in a lawsuit that blamed a
Swiss bank for collaborating with the Nazis.
 
 

For Betrayal by Swiss Bank and Nazis, $21 Million
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Published: April 14, 2005

Eight days before Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, at a time when much
of the world shrugged at the approach of Nazism, two prominent Jewish
families in Vienna raced to a Swiss bank. Coolly realistic about the
troubles facing them and determined to preserve their ownership of one of
the country's largest sugar refineries, they set up a trust account to
protect their ownership.

The attempt quickly unraveled. Within months the bank had violated the terms
of the account, and the business was "aryanized" - sold for a fraction of
its value to a Nazi sympathizer. In a letter dated Dec. 22, 1938, a bank
officer provided an explanation as blunt as it was chilling: "The situation
has changed."

Yesterday, 67 years later, Edward R. Korman, a federal judge in Brooklyn,
approved a $21.8 million award to surviving members of the two families, the
Bloch-Bauer and Pick families, which owned the sugar company with other
investors. The decision blamed the bank for the families' losses, but did
not name the bank.

The award is believed to be one of the largest in the $50 billion
restitution programs undertaken since World War II. It is by far the largest
award in a claims process that is distributing $1.25 billion paid by Swiss
banks in 1998 to settle a vast class-action suit. In that suit, the banks
were accused of violating the trust of their Holocaust-era depositors to
curry favor with the Nazis.

In a way, to the living descendents of those two families and to a world
where the number of surviving victims of the Nazis and their collaborators
is dwindling, the huge award is more than that. It provides a detailed trip
back to a dark time, showing exactly how the banks' actions helped the
Nazis, how lifetimes' achievements were lost in days, and how the process
was masked in the language of ledgers, legalisms and banking.

Yesterday's ruling said the story of the Bloch-Bauers' sugar company was an
example of the Swiss banks' "widespread betrayal" of their depositors during
the Holocaust. Quite a tale it is, one that includes duplicity, a visit by
the Gestapo, coercion, a sham tax investigation and what the decision
referred to as the bank's "active participation in the confiscation" of the
sugar company by the Nazis.

"Having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe as a safe haven for their
property," the decision said, "Swiss banks repeatedly turned Jewish-owned
property over to Nazis in order to curry favor with them."

The 1998 settlement, in Brooklyn federal court, followed a heated
international debate about the role of the Swiss banks during the Holocaust.
The banks said that they did not help the Nazis in the widespread seizure of
their depositors' assets and that much of the evidence of what happened to
depositors' accounts was ambiguous.

Yesterday, Roger M. Witten, a lawyer for UBS and Credit Suisse, said
assertions of systematic appropriation of the assets of Holocaust victims
and other wrongdoing by the Swiss banks had been rejected by several
commissions. "These allegations are false," he said.

Under the 1998 settlement, though, more than $250 million has been returned
to more than 3,000 bank depositors or their heirs by a claims tribunal set
up by Judge Korman. Until yesterday, the largest award was one issued in
2002 for $5.9 million to the family of a concert singer who was killed in a
concentration camp and left behind several large Swiss accounts.

Yesterday's award stems from a claim filed for the extended Bloch-Bauer and
Pick families, who are related by marriage. Maria V. Altmann, who is now 89
and lives in Los Angeles, filed the claim in 2001 as a member of the last
generation of her family to come to adulthood in Vienna.

Mrs. Altmann has been fighting for years to recover hundreds of millions of
dollars of property she says was stolen after the Nazi annexation of
Austria. Last year, she won a decision from the United States Supreme Court
in a separate case that will permit her to pursue a lawsuit against the
Austrian government for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt, the
Austrian Art Nouveau painter, that once belonged to her uncle, Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer.

Mrs. Altmann said in a telephone interview that yesterday's decision sounded
like a crime novel in its narrative of how the sugar company slipped from
the family's control. "I am shuddering," she said. "It is unbelievable for
me to grasp that there were people doing such things, and especially a
bank."

The narrative began, in a way, with Maria's gilded wedding in Vienna in
December 1937. "It was really the last Jewish wedding in Vienna, before
Hitler came and everything changed," she said.

It was the Bloch-Bauers' last party, a gathering that included those who ran
or were heirs to the sugar company. Maria's uncle, Ferdinand, ran the
business. He and his wife, Adele, long dead by then, had had no children.
Maria's father, Gustav, a lawyer, was Ferdinand's brother. Maria had a
sister and three brothers. The Bloch-Bauers' partner in the sugar business
was a wealthy Vienna industrialist, Otto Pick, whose daughter had married
Maria's brother Leopold.

The refinery was in the riverside town of Bruck, outside Vienna. It
supplied, the ruling said, one-fifth of the country's sugar, the sweetener
for, among so many other things, Vienna's pastries. The company was called
…sterreichische Zuckerindustrie, or Austrian Sugar Industry. Its
headquarters was on the top floor of Ferdinand's expansive Vienna home.

Life changed quickly after the wedding: Maria's husband, Fritz Altmann, was
briefly held at the Dachau concentration camp in 1938.

The families' March 1938 visit to the bank that resulted in the trust
account, the decision said, was an obvious effort to shield the company from
the Nazis. The account gave the bank control over a block of stock but said
the company could be sold only if the shareholders agreed unanimously.

But two days after the annexation of Austria, according to the decision, the
Gestapo went to the sugar company's office and appointed a cashier, the only
employee who was a Nazi party member, to run the business. That July,
Maria's father died of cancer.

Maria's brother Leopold was arrested by the Gestapo and held until he
promised to turn over his sugar-company stock. Nazi officials began a sham
criminal tax proceeding against the company that was intended to depress the
price that a Nazi purchaser would have to pay.

Soon, the decision said, Swiss bank officials wrote letters to family
members, many of whom had fled Austria. The bank officials described an
offer for the company made in Vienna by a Cologne businessman who was a Nazi
sympathizer. The letters, found in archives, included an acknowledgement
that the bank had been unable to get unanimous agreement to a sale as
required by the trust. Some shareholders, a letter said, "did not find the
Vienna offer worthy of discussion."

But, the bank's December 1938 letter said, "we should like to propose" that
the trust agreement requiring unanimous agreement to a sale be dissolved.
"If we have not received information to the contrary by 15 January 1939, we
shall assume your approval."

The decision said the bank did not even wait for that deadline. Soon, the
Cologne businessman with Nazi ties was the owner of the sugar refinery in
Bruck.

The sale was illegal, the decision said, though it did not explain why the
bank violated its agreement. But it did refer to a bank memorandum from that
era that seemed to lay out a framework for such cases. It was uncovered in a
2002 report by a Swiss historical commission that studied the banks'
Holocaust-era actions.

The memorandum, written in 1939, acknowledged that there could be legal and
moral objections to transferring funds from a depositor's account when it
appeared that the withdrawal request was being made under duress. But, the
memorandum continued, that bank still had "important interests in Germany,
and should avoid friction and unpleasantness whenever possible."

Mrs. Altmann and her husband ended up in Los Angeles. Her brother Leopold
and much of the rest of the family went to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Their mother, Theresia, Gustav Bloch-Bauer's widow, died in Vancouver in
1961.

In Canada, Leopold, with his wife's brother, a member of the Pick family,
began a business that is today one of the world's largest lumber companies,
Canfor Corporation. Almost as soon as he arrived in Canada in 1938, Leopold
changed the family's last name from Bloch-Bauer to Bentley. "He made up his
mind that this was permanent," his son Peter Bentley, 75, and the chairman
of Canfor, said in an interview.

Leopold believed, Mr. Bentley said, that the anglicized last name, selected
from a telephone book, would help in the family's adjustment to life far
from the Vienna they left in 1938.

Some of the family's history has been forgotten. But recent scholarship and
records uncovered in Mrs. Altmann's legal battles show memories stretched
across generations of what some family members thought of as the looting of
the family in Vienna. A 2003 book on the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka,
who, like Klimt, was a friend of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's, included a 1941
letter from Ferdinand to Kokoschka. "They took away everything from me," he
wrote from Zurich, where he was living alone.

"I am totally impoverished," he wrote, "and probably will have to live very
modestly for a few years, if you can call this vegetation living." He died
in Zurich in 1945.

Mrs. Altmann's Los Angeles lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, is a grandson of
Arnold Schoenberg, the Vienna-born composer, who was also a Jewish exile
from Nazism. In the scheme of the wrongs of the Holocaust, he said after
learning of yesterday's award, the theft of a sugar refinery near Vienna
long ago was a small injustice.

"But now, 70 years later," Mr. Schoenberg said, "this is one of the few
wrongs you can actually remedy."
 

For Betrayal by Swiss Bank and Nazis, $21 Million

Published: April 14, 2005
 
 

Leopold Bloch-Bauer, Maria Altmann's brother, was arrested by the Gestapo
and held until he promised to turn over his sugar-company stock. This is a
family photo taken in 1979 in Vancover, Canada.
 

Last year, Maria Altmann won a decision from the United States Supreme Court
in a separate case that will permit her to pursue a lawsuit against the
Austrian government for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt, the
Austrian Art Nouveau painter, that once belonged to her uncle, Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer.
 

Federal Judge Signs Off On $21.9 Million Award In Holocaust Case

POSTED: 8:02 pm EDT April 13, 2005

NEW YORK -- A federal judge on Wednesday approved a $21.9 million award to
heirs of two wealthy families victimized by the Holocaust -- by far the
largest single claim paid thus far in a case against Swiss Banks accused of
selling out to the Nazis.
 

U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman in Brooklyn approved the payment based
on the recommendation of a court-appointed tribunal that disburses funds set
aside under a settlement between Holocaust survivors and the banks. Lawyers
said the previous high for an award was about $4 million.

In a 52-page report dated Wednesday, the tribunal called the award "unique
in its size," and "a striking example of the widespread betrayal of Jewish
clients by the Swiss banks."
 

Holocaust survivors and their families sued Credit Suisse, UBS AG and other
Swiss banks, accusing them of stealing, concealing or sending to the Nazis
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Jewish holdings and destroying bank
records to cover the paper trail. In 1998, Korman approved a $1.25 billion
settlement, and appointed the tribunal to process thousands of claims.

The $21.9 million award stems from a claim by Holocaust survivor Maria
Altmann, 89, of Los Angeles, and about two dozen unnamed heirs of Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer and Otto Pick, both major shareholders in a large sugar refinery
in Austria before World War II.

Altmann "is very gratified," said her attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg. "It's
a very generous award."

In 1938, with Austria on the brink of a Nazi takeover, Bloch-Bauer --
Altmann's uncle -- Otto and their families sought to protect their interest
in the refinery by transferring their shares to a bank in Zurich.

The bank guaranteed the shares would not be sold without the families'
consent. But after family members were arrested or fled the country, the
banks bowed to pressure to transfer the shares to a German investor in a
Nazi campaign to "aryanize" Jewish-owned businesses, the tribunal report
said.

The case demonstrated that "having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe
as a safe haven for their property, Swiss banks repeatedly turned
Jewish-owned property over the Nazis in order to curry favor with them," the
tribunal wrote.

No records of the Jewish shareholders' deal with the bank were found in its
files. Instead, the tribunal relied solely on documents provided the heirs
and independent archives.

"There was no record of this, which is significant because we've been
suspicious all along that the banks destroyed an enormous amount of
information," said attorney Burt Neuborne, a court-appointed representative
for survivors worldwide.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Altmann could sue the Austrian
government to retrieve $150 million worth of family paintings stolen by the
Nazis. The parties were in mediation this week in California over the six
Gustav Klimt paintings now hanging in the Austrian Gallery, including a
portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

In the Swiss bank case, Holocaust survivors and their heirs so far have
received more than $254 million in awards. The average award amounts to
about $130,000.

© 2005 by The Associated Press.
 

Schweizer Bank muss Erben von Nazi-Opfern entschŠdigen
14.04.2005 04:32

NEW YORK - Eine Schweizer Bank muss zwei šsterreichischen Familien eine
EntschŠdigung in der Hšhe von 26,45 Millionen Franken zahlen, weil sie in
der Nazi-Zeit an der Enteignung von Aktien aktiv beteiligt war. Das hat ein
US-Schiedsgericht entschieden.
Um welche Bank es sich handelt, ist nicht bekannt, wie die šsterreichische
Nachrichtenagentur APA am Donnerstag berichtete. Das Finanzinstitut werde in
der Entscheidung des "Claims Resolution Tribunal" nicht namentlich genannt.
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer und Otto Pick waren HauptaktionŠre der …ZAG
(…sterreichische Zuckerindustrie AG). Wegen ihrer jŸdischen Herkunft wurden
sie von den Nazis verfolgt und mussten um ihre Aktien fŸrchten. Noch vor dem
"Anschluss" …sterreichs ans Dritte Reich trafen sie trafen deshalb eine
Vereinbarung mit der Bank.
Nach dem "Anschluss" im MŠrz 1938 habe die Bank dieses Abkommen rechtswidrig
verletzt, befand jetzt das US-Gericht. Gegen den Willen der AktionŠre seien
die Anteile an den deutschen Nazi-Strohmann Clemens Auer Ÿbereignet worden -
zu einem Bruchteil ihres Wertes.
Die Enteignung der …ZAG war von den Nazis systematisch betrieben worden.
Wenige Tage nach dem Einmarsch wurde gegen die …ZAG ein Steuerstrafverfahren
eršffnet, das sich auf PrŸfberichte eines deklarierten Nazis und Antisemiten
grŸndete.
Damit wurde der Preis der Aktien gedrŸckt. Nach der †bernahme durch Auer sei
das Steuerverfahren eingestellt worden, heisst es in der Entscheidung.
Erhoben wurde die EntschŠdigungsforderung von Maria Altmann. Die Nichte von
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer war aus …sterreich vor den Nazis geflŸchtet. Die heute
89-jŠhrige Frau lebt in Kalifornien. Die EntschŠdigung kommt den Erben von
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer und Otto Pick zu Gute.
 

 AUSLAND

EntschŠdigung fŸr NS-"Zuckerraub"

Die Forderung wurde von der vor den Nazis aus …sterreich geflŸchteten Maria
Altmann, Nichte des verstorbenen Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, erhoben. Auch gegen
…sterreich lŠuft ein Verfahren.
 

Washington/Los Angeles/New York - Ein Schiedsgericht hat den von den Nazis
beraubten Familien Bloch-Bauer und Pick eine EntschŠdigung in Gesamthšhe von
26,45 Millionen Schweizer Franken (17,1 Millionen Euro) zugesprochen, weil
eine Schweizer Bank an der Enteignung ihrer Zucker-Aktien beteiligt gewesen
war. Das "Claims Resolution Tribunal" wirft der ungenannt bleibenden
Schweizer Bank den Bruch eines Syndikatsvertrags und Komplizenschaft mit den
Nazi-Behšrden bei der "Arisierung" der …sterreichischen Zuckerindustrie AG
(…ZAG) vor. Die KlŠgerin und Bloch-Bauer-Nichte Maria Altmann, vertreten
durch Anwalt E. Randol Schoenberg, enthŠlt von der auf die Erben
aufgeteilten EntschŠdigungssumme weniger als ein Zehntel.

Zucker-Aktien vor "Anschluss" gerettet

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer und Otto Pick hatten wenige Tage vor dem "Anschluss"
…sterreichs an Nazi-Deutschland im MŠrz 1938 ihre …ZAG-Aktien bei einer
Schweizer Bank deponiert um sie vor einer befŸrchteten Enteignung zu retten.
Die als TreuhŠnder agierende Bank habe aber bald ihre Verpflichtungen aus
dem Syndikatsvertrag verletzt, hei§t es in der Entscheidung des
Schiedsgerichts.

Bank verschleuderte Anteile

Die Bank habe die Anteile gegen den Willen der AktionŠre zu einem Bruchteil
des Wertes an einen von den Nationalsozialisten ausgewŠhlten KŠufer, den
deutschen GeschŠftsmann Clemens Auer, Ÿbereignet. Um welche Schweizer Bank
es sich handelte, ist unklar. Das Finanzinstitut wird nicht namentlich
genannt, sondern nur als "Bank" bezeichnet.

EntschŠdigung aus Bankenfonds

Die EntschŠdigungsforderung wurde von der aus …sterreich vor den Nazis
geflŸchteten Maria Altmann, Nichte des verstorbenen Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer,
erhoben. Die heute 89-jŠhrige Altmann lebt in den USA. Sie wurde von Anwalt
E. Randol Schoenberg vertreten. Die Entscheidung des "Claims Resolution
Tribunal" (CRT) wurde am Mittwoch von Richter Edward Korman in New York
bestŠtigt. Die EntschŠdigung kommt den Erben von Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer und
Otto Pick zu Gute und wird aus dem von Schweizer Banken 1998 eingerichteten
1,25-Milliarden-Dollar-Fonds geleistet. Es ist die hšchste bisher
zugesprochene Summe.

Ein Anwalt der Schweizer Banken UBS und Credit Suisse, Roger Witten, wies
gegenŸber der "New York Times" (Donnerstagsausgabe) den CRT-Vorwurf
systematischen Fehlverhaltens durch Schweizer Banken als "falsche
Anschuldigung" zurŸck.

Kunstsammler starb 1945 mittellos

Zur Enteignung der jŸdischen Familie Bloch-Bauer nach dem "Anschluss" wurde
ein Steuerstrafverfahren eingesetzt. "Die Nazis begannen das Verfahren der
Arisierung der …ZAG mit Ma§nahmen, die nach au§en den Anschein der LegalitŠt
hatten", hei§t es in der CRT-Entscheidung. Als PrŸfer war Guido Walcher,
NSDAP-Mitglied und Antisemit, ernannt worden, der in seinem Bericht
zahlreiche UnregelmŠ§igkeiten in der Unternehmensgebarung behauptete. Als
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer nach Prag und dann in die Schweiz flŸchtete, war sein
Vermšgen enteignet. Der ehemalige "Zuckerbaron" und Kunstsammler starb 1945
mittellos in ZŸrich.

Klagen gegen …sterreich anhŠngig

Die Entscheidung hat nach Ansicht des Anwalts der KlŠgerin Bedeutung fŸr ein
EntschŠdigungsverfahren gegen …sterreich. Die Nichte von Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer fordert das Haus Elisabethstra§e 18 in Wien zurŸck, das als
Abgeltung fŸr angebliche Steuerschulden ihres Onkels von den Behšrden
konfisziert worden war, an die Reichsbahn versteigert wurde und heute im
Besitz der …BB ist. Auf die vor einem US-Gericht anhŠngige Klage von Altmann
gegen die Republik …sterreich auf RŸckgabe von sechs Klimt-Bildern habe die
Entscheidung hingegen weniger Einfluss, meint Anwalt Schoenberg.

Artikel vom 14.04.2005 |apa |hpHuge award details how bank aided Nazis

By William Glaberson The New York Times

Thursday, April 14, 2005

NEW YORK   Eight days before Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, while much of the world shrugged at the looming specter of Nazism, two prominent Jewish families in Vienna raced to a Swiss bank.
.Coolly realistic about the troubles facing them and determined to preserve their ownership of one of the country's largest sugar refineries, they set up a trust account to protect their ownership.
.But the attempt quickly unraveled. Within months the bank violated the terms of the account, and the business was "aryanized" - sold for a fraction of its value to a Nazi sympathizer.
.In a letter dated Dec. 22, 1938, a bank officer provided an explanation as blunt as it was chilling: "The situation has changed."
.On Wednesday, 67 years later, Edward Korman, a federal judge in the New York borough of Brooklyn, approved a $21.8 million award to surviving members of the two families, the Bloch-Bauers and Picks, which owned the sugar company with other investors. The decision blamed their losses on the Swiss bank, which was not named.
.The award is believed to be one of the largest ever in the $50 billion restitution programs that have taken place since World War II. It is by far the largest in a claims process that is currently distributing $1.25 billion paid by Swiss banks in 1998 to settle a vast class-action suit that accused the banks of wholesale violation of the trust of their Holocaust-era depositors to gain favor with the Nazis.
.But in a way, to the descendants of those two families, and to a world where the numbers of those victimized by the Nazis and their collaborators are dwindling, the huge award is more than that. It is a detailed trip back to a dark time, showing how the banks' actions helped the Nazis, how lifetimes' achievements were lost in days and how the process was masked in the arcane language of ledgers, legalisms and banking.
.The ruling Wednesday said the story of the Bloch-Bauers' sugar company was an example of what it called the Swiss banks' "widespread betrayal" of their depositors during the Holocaust.
.And it is quite a tale, one that includes duplicity, a visit by the Gestapo, coercion, a sham tax investigation and what the decision referred to as the bank's "active participation in the confiscation" of the sugar company by the Nazis.
."Having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe as a safe haven for their property," the decision said, "Swiss banks repeatedly turned Jewish-owned property over to Nazis in order to curry favor with them."
.The 1998 settlement, in Brooklyn federal court, followed a heated international debate about the role of the Swiss banks during the Holocaust.
.The banks said that they did not help the Nazis in the widespread seizure of their depositors' assets and that much of the evidence was ambiguous about what happened to depositors' accounts.
.Roger Witten, a lawyer for UBS and CrŽdit Suisse, said Wednesday that the assertions of systematic appropriation of the assets of Holocaust victims and other wrongdoing by the Swiss banks had been rejected by several commissions.
."These allegations are false," he said.
.Under the settlement, though, more than $250 million has been returned to more than 3,000 bank depositors or their heirs by the claim tribunal set up by Korman.
.Until Wednesday, the largest award was one issued in 2002 for $5.9 million to the family of a concert singer who was killed in a concentration camp and had left behind several large Swiss accounts.
.The huge award announced Wednesday stems from a claim filed for the extended Bloch-Bauer and Pick families, who are related by marriage.
.Maria Altmann, who is now 89 and lives in Los Angeles, filed the claim in 2001, as the last member of a generation of her family that came to adulthood in Vienna.
.Altmann has been fighting for years to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of property she says was stolen after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Last year, she won a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in a separate case that will permit her to pursue a lawsuit against the Austrian government for the return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt, the Austrian Art Nouveau painter, that once belonged to her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.
.Altmann said in a telephone interview that Wednesday's decision read like a crime novel in its narrative of how the sugar company slipped from the family's control.
."I am shuddering," she said. "It is unbelievable for me to grasp that there were people doing such things, and especially a bank."
.The March 1938 visit to the bank by the families that resulted in the trust account, the decision said, was an obvious effort to shield the company from the Nazis. It gave the bank control over a block of stock but said the company could be sold only if the shareholders agreed unanimously.
.But two days after the annexation of Austria, according to the decision, the Gestapo went to the sugar company's office and appointed a cashier - the only employee who was a Nazi party member - to run the business. That July, Altmann's father, Gustav, died of cancer in Vienna.
.Altmann's brother Leopold was arrested by Nazi officials and held until he promised to turn over his sugar company stock. Nazi officials began what the judge's decision called a farce criminal tax proceeding against the company that was intended to depress the price a Nazi purchaser would have to pay.
.Soon, the decision said, Swiss bank officials wrote letters to the family, many of whom had escaped from Austria. The bank officials described an offer for the company made in Vienna by a Cologne businessman who was a Nazi sympathizer.
.The letters, found in archives, included an acknowledgment that the bank had been unable to get unanimous agreement to a sale, as required by the trust. Some shareholders, a letter said, "did not find the Vienna offer worthy of discussion."
.But, the bank's letter of December 1938 said, "we should like to propose" that the trust agreement requiring unanimous agreement to a sale be dissolved. "If we have not received information to the contrary by 15 January 1939 we shall assume your approval." The decision said the bank did not even wait for that deadline. Soon, the Cologne businessman with Nazi ties was the owner of the sugar refinery in Bruck, outside of Vienna.
.The sale was illegal, the decision said, though it did not explain why the bank violated its agreement.
.But it did refer to a memorandum that seemed to lay out a framework for such cases that was uncovered in a 2002 report by a Swiss historical commission that studied the banks' Holocaust-era actions.
.The 1939 memorandum acknowledged that there could be legal and moral objections to transferring the funds in a depositor's account when it appeared the withdrawal request was being made under duress. But, the memorandum continued, the bank still had "important interests in Germany, and should avoid friction and unpleasantness whenever possible."

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