It always amazes me how deeply the actions of Germany's NAZI regime continue to reverberate through the Europena business community even fifty years later. Given my personal background in deep historical research and archival records, more than once my casework has delved into this treacherous area and turbulent era.

Each time I have found the work fascinating - even thrilling, but also terribly depressing. This though, seems to be very good news indeed for two Jewish families who in 1938 saw their saw their Austrian sugar manufacturing company "aryanized" with the help of the very Swiss bank they had approached to provide protection in the face of the German advance:

...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 Crédit 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.

To read the rest of this fascinating piece, which first appeared in the New York Times, click here.

-- MDT