Settlement yields wartime documents on German banks

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A $40 million settlement between Holocaust survivors and Austrian banks has yielded World War II era documents that will help survivors and their heirs collect money from German banks, a lawyer for the claimants said Tuesday.

U.S. lawyer Ed Fagan said two of Germany's biggest banks being sued by Holocaust survivors -- Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank -- have refused to release their World War II era documents. Representatives of the banks could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lawsuits against both the German and Austrian banks accuse them of stashing assets belonging to Jews headed for Nazi death camps and profiting from slave labor. Fagan said the settlement reached in March with Bank Austria and its subsidiary, Creditanstalt, was the first in which documents were divulged as part of an agreement.

``The beauty of the Austrian settlement is that it opens a door previously closed to expose what the Germans had done,'' Fagan said at a press conference in Jerusalem, starting a campaign to notify potential claimants in Israel.

``They (the documents) are the vein to the mother lode of German banks,'' Fagan said.

Creditanstalt was taken over by Germany's Deutsche Bank during the Nazi era after Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.

Deutsche Bank has said it was forced during the war to turn over Jewish holdings to the Nazi regime, and has since repaid all claims and turned unclaimed assets over to the postwar government.

The documents in Creditanstalt's archives can be used to trace the activities of Deutsche Bank, Fagan said.

At the press conference, Fagan stood before enlarged copies of several of the documents which he said implicated several German banks and companies employing slave labor. He said the documents also showed how the Austrian banks were controlled by Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and the German company VIAG.

``These documents give us the ability to follow the paper trail against the German banks and lead to a settlement that will make the Swiss bank liability look like peanuts,'' Fagan said.

Swiss banks agreed in August 1998 to pay about $1.2 billion to settle a lawsuit accusing them of hiding dormant accounts and other assets belonging to victims.

Meanwhile, copies of the notice to apply for the Austrian bank settlement will appear in Israeli newspapers Friday, Fagan said.

Notification of the settlement will appear in 36 countries and 22 languages worldwide. The notification campaign began in the United States on Sunday.

Those eligible to file claims include: survivors and their heirs who had assets in Bank Austria and Creditanstalt confiscated; those whose assets were looted elsewhere by the Nazis and transferred to those banks; those whose money transfers to concentration camp inmates through the banks were diverted; and those whose slave labor produced profits for the two banks.

Survivors and their heirs must apply or exclude themselves from the settlement by October 18. On Nov. 1, a hearing will be held on the settlement in New York City in U.S. District Court before Judge Shirley Wohl Kram.