new york (ap) | A federal judge has approved a $21.9 million award to heirs of two wealthy families victimized by the Holocaust, more than 65 years after a Swiss bank passed their fortune to the Nazis.
The award was by far the largest single claim paid thus far in a case against Swiss banks accused of betraying their Holocaust-era clients to gain favor with the Nazis. Lawyers said the previous high for an award was about $4 million.
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 — Bloch-Bauer’s niece — “is very gratified,” said her attorney, E. Randol Schoenberg. “It’s a very generous award.”
U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman in New York City 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.
Holocaust survivors and their families sued Credit Suisse Group, 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.
In 1938, with Austria on the brink of a Nazi takeover, Bloch-Bauer, Pick 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 transferred the shares to a Nazi investor.
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 to the Nazis in order to curry favor with them,” the tribunal wrote.