Austrian-born Holocaust survivor wins large compensation from Swiss fund

A tribunal has awarded an elderly Los Angeles woman and a dozen relatives US$ 21 million from a fund established to compensate Holocaust survivors whose assets were illegally seized during the Nazi era. It was the largest award to date by the Claims Resolution Tribunal, formed in 1998 in the settlement with Swiss banks in a New York court. The suits charged that the banks collaborated with the Nazis and withheld from Holocaust survivors and their heirs vast sums of money deposited for safekeeping before World War II. To settle the case, a consortium of Swiss financial institutions then agreed to pay US$ 1.25 billion to Holocaust victims. Sharing in the award announced on Wednesday will be Maria V. Altmann, 89, who fled her native Austria after the Nazi takeover in 1938. She eventually made her way to Los Angeles and opened a dress shop. Altmann said she did not know that the banks had passed her family fortune to the Nazis until her lawyer persuaded her to file a claim with the tribunal. Last year, Altmann won a case before the US Supreme Court allowing her to pursue a lawsuit to recover six Gustav Klimt paintings valued at US$ 150 million. The paintings had been confiscated by the Nazis from her uncle, a wealthy Viennese merchant.