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Suing Hitler's Willing Business Partners: American Justice And Holocaust Morality, Michael Bazyler

Michael 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? …