Suing Hitler's Willing Business Partners: US Justice & Holocaust Morality

[Ian David]

It's curious that this article makes no mention of Prescott Bush, but otherwise, it's worth a read...


Suing Hitler's Willing Business Partners:
American Justice and Holocaust Morality
Michael J. Bazyler


The Holocaust restitution lawsuits, filed mostly as class actions in American courts in the latter half of the 1990s, yielded billions of dollars in settlements for Holocaust survivors and their heirs. The American lawsuits, and the concomitant political campaign by American Jewish leaders and American government officials, also unearthed valuable historical data about the financial crimes of the Nazis and their cohorts during WW II. This post-Holocaust restitution movement, while viewed as a success, nevertheless created troubling moral issues, and this article focuses on five of them. First, does the demand for financial restitution demean the memory of the Holocaust? Second, once the funds are collected, how are they to be fairly distributed? This raises the provocative issue of who should be deemed a "Holocaust survivor." Third, should some of these restitution funds be allocated for Holocaust education and remembrance, or do they belong solely to survivors? Fourth, while payments to individual survivors from these settlements were in the thousands of dollars, the class-action attorneys earned fees in the millions. Are these attorneys entitled to such fees, even though the fees represent less than 2 percent of the total amounts collected through the litigation? Fifth, many of the lawsuits were defended by Jewish lawyers. Although European corporations accused of wrongful conduct both during and after WW II are free to hire Jewish lawyers to defend their interests, should lawyers who are Jewish have taken on the defense of such suits?

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Wilmer's successful representation of the Swiss banks also led to the firm being asked to represent other European defendants sued for Holocaust-era wrongs. This time, however, the clients would not be Swiss banks, whose country was neutral during the war, but German companies that worked hand in hand with the Nazis. The companies were being sued by Holocaust survivors who had been their slaves during the war. For these suits, the Wilmer partners could not keep the internal controversy private; it emerged in another Washington Post article, which explained:

For the firms' many Jewish lawyers, the real problem was the inescapable sense that they were on the wrong side. Wilmer, Cutler's work for Krupp, for instance, put them at odds with people such as Rachel Grunebaum, a Romanian-born 75-year old who is a plaintiff in one of the class action lawsuits....Jewish groups contend that companies that used forced laborers weren't reluctantly playing by the rules foisted on them by an immoral regime. Krupp and others, they say, badgered the Nazis for more bodies, eager to boost profits.66

Nevertheless, the firm's partners also decided to take the defense of the German firms. For the next four years, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering became the leading American law firm defending corporate Europe for its dealings during the war.

In the end, Wilmer, Cutler decided to represent Siemens AG, Krupp AG and other German companies accused of exploiting forced laborers during the Nazi era. But there is lingering anger among some of the firm's rank and file, and sympathy for an associate who disclosed during the arguments that his Jewish grandfather had been a forced laborer at Siemens. "It came down to issues of conscience warring against issues of business," said one Wilmer lawyer, who requested anonymity. "And business won."67

In contrast, Stuart Eizenstadt, now in private practice, stated that if he had been asked by the European defendants to represent them, he would have declined.68

More:
http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-bazyler-f04.htm


But isn't this nice... the firm did some pro-bono work helping the local Holocaust Memorial buy some real estate. That makes it all better, doesn't it?

See also:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-17,GGGL:en&q=site:www.wilmerhale.com+holocaust



Also:

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Wilmer Cutler)

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP, which also goes by the shorter market name WilmerHale, is an American law firm with major offices in Washington, Boston and New York and smaller offices in Palo Alto, Baltimore, London, Oxford, Brussels, Beijing, Berlin, Munich, Northern Virginia and Waltham, Massachusetts. It was created in 2004 through the merger of the Boston-based firm Hale and Dorr (established 1918) and the Washington-based firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering (established 1962), and employs more than 1,000 attorneys worldwide.

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Notable Cases

In 2004, the firm defended Swiss banks from Holocaust victims seeking Post-Holocaust Restitution for collaborating with the Nazis. During this case, Judge Korman cited the Swiss banks, and Attorney Wilmer personally, for providing misleading information during trial. In re Holocaust Victim Asset Litigation, 302 F. Supp.2d 59 (E.D.N.Y. 2004) http://www.www.aclu.org/iclr/bazyler.pdf> The judge compared the tactics of Wilmer and the Swiss Banks to the Big Lie tactics of the Nazis themselves.


After Wilmer's successful representation of the Swiss banks, ostensibly from a neutral country, he went on to represent European defendants directly tied to The Holocaust, that worked hand-in-hand with Hitler's Genocide machine. David Segal, "Past v. Future: Nazi-Related Suits Put Law Firms on Defensive," Washington Post, 9 March 1999, p. E1.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_Cutler