Restitution, But At What Price?

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The lawyers involved in these cases argue that the civil justice system is the only mode of recourse. "You can't send a company to jail for these things," says Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who helped slap Ford with a slave-labor suit last March. Both Ford and General Motors have been fighting charges, reported last week in the Washington Post, that their German subsidiaries aided the Nazi war effort. Ford has admitted that its German plants were seized by the Nazis, but the company maintains that it severed all ties to these outposts during the war. GM issued a statement "categorically denying" that it aided the Nazis in World War II.

Others contend that even if the charges are true, the pursuit of monetary restitution is misdirected. "When you're taking money from Volkswagen today, it's coming not from the Nazis but from a 30-year-old German," says Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. Then there's the question of who is entitled to the money from any settlements. Survivors have yet to see a dime from the Swiss settlement, because lawyers and Jewish organizations are still hammering out the details. Under one proposal being floated by the World Jewish Restitution Organization, after specific claims are settled, 80% of what's left would go to destitute survivors and 20% to Holocaust education. Gizella Wiesshaus, the 69-year-old survivor who brought the first claim against the Swiss banks, protested this kind of arrangement outside the State Department conference last week, claiming that the money should go only to those who suffered.

Many claimants, like Bernard Lee, have pledged to give anything they receive to charity. Yet time is not on their side. Lee, who is 77 and was recently hospitalized for heart trouble, is worried that "every day some new survivor passes away." The lawyers, undoubtedly, will carry on.

--With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit