UC Law lecture looks at complicated issue of Holocaust era theft, restitution

The story of the paper trail of “Jewish money” stolen by various European institutions during the Holocaust is a complicated and still incomplete narrative. The upcoming lecture, “We Used It When We Had It: The Alien Tort Claims Act in Successful Litigation Against 26 Banks for Holocaust-Era Theft in Vichy France,” presented by Professor Emeritus Richard H. Weisberg, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, will explore the way that U.S. federal courts assisted in both bringing a firmer factual base to historians and a measure of justice to those victimized by property theft during the Second World War. Professor Weisberg  also will discuss why more recent changes in the law have made it far less likely that Holocaust victims and their heirs could successfully bring federal court actions against private or governmental entities today.

This event, the 2024 Victor E. Schwartz Lecture in Torts, will be held at 12:15 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 in Room 160 of the College of Law (2925 Campus Green Drive).  CLE: 1 hour of general CLE has been approved for OH and KY.  

The story of the paper trail of “Jewish money” stolen by various European institutions during the Holocaust is a complicated and still incomplete narrative. This lecture speaks to the way that U.S. federal courts assisted in both bringing a firmer factual base to historians and a measure of justice to those victimized by property theft during the Second World War.

During WWII, commercial banks operating under the antisemitic Vichy regime in France confiscated the assets of those depositors recognized as Jews under Vichy law. After the war, many efforts to recover these seized funds (from banks both in France and many other European nations) foundered due to what the banks characterized as a lack of adequate records—essentially once again victimizing the depositors, whose papers had been confiscated and often destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new wave of class action litigation against European institutions successfully broke the logjam. Benisti v. Banque Paribas, for example, was a class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York under the Alien Tort Claims Act, naming 26 banks, including two American and one British bank, as defendants. Rejecting the arguments the banks had previously relied on to avoid liability, the district court ruled in 2000 that the case could go forward. The ruling prompted a series of settlements that resulted in the payment of millions of dollars in compensation to claimants whose deposits had been confiscated.

The successful plaintiffs in Benisti and other Holocaust tort cases relied in part on Professor Weisberg’s 1996 book, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, which included a “smoking gun” in the form of documentation from the archives regarding the non-French banking defendants. In this year’s Victor E. Schwartz Lecture in Torts, Professor Weisberg, who was of counsel to the plaintiffs throughout the litigation and until the ultimate settlement in the State Department offices during the waning days of the Clinton Administration, will comment on Benisti and other litigation arising out of the Holocaust. The lecture will explain why more recent changes in the law have made it far less likely that Holocaust victims and their heirs could successfully bring federal court actions against private or governmental entities today.