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German banks under fire
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June 4, 1998: 2:18 p.m. ET
Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank named in $18B lawsuit on looted Nazi gold
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Deutsche Bank, Germany's leading financial house, asserted on Thursday that an $18 billion class action lawsuit brought by Holocaust survivors presented "no new facts."
The 25-page suit was filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court by three plaintiffs representing at least 10,000 Holocaust survivors claiming the bank collaborated with the Nazi regime to plunder and sell Jewish assets.
The plaintiffs, including an 85-year-old New York woman, claim that Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, Germany's second largest financial institution, collaborated with the Nazis in accepting and selling personal property taken from concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald and other camps.
The suit seeks a full disclosure of all accounts held at the bank through the end of World War II. The plaintiffs allege that the banks conspired to hide evidence about the accounts after 1945, when the allied powers expropriated their assets outside Germany.
The suit echoes a similar one accusing Switzerland's largest banks of harboring Holocaust assets in long-dormant accounts. The latest claims come just days after the release of a U.S. report that concluded Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Turkey accepted $300 million in looted Nazi gold, valued at more than $2.5 billion at today's prices, as payment for war munitions.
Jon Hartzell, a spokesman at Dresdner Bank's North American headquarters in New York, said Thursday that the bank's headquarters in Frankfurt had only just received a copy of the suit and needed time before it could reply formally.
"Within a day or two, we'll have a complete comment to make," he said.
Hartzell added, however, that Dresdner Bank already had done a lot of its own digging into its past. Last July, he noted, Dresdner asked an independent research group in Germany, the Dresden-based Hannah Arendt Institute, to prepare a report on the bank's dealings with the Nazis. The report is due out sometime this summer.
"The bank has been very open about its wartime and Nazi period history for a long time," Hartzell said.
In a statement issued in Frankfurt Thursday, Deutsche Bank said it had not yet had a chance to review the class action suit thoroughly.
But the material it had reviewed, the bank said, appeared to offer nothing of a revelatory nature: "The claim sheet, which focuses on German banks' dealings in looted Nazi gold, could not yet be analyzed in detail," the statement read. "However, an initial reading uncovered no new facts concerning the involvement of Deutsche Bank."
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