Prison sentences ranging up to 18 months and fines up to $8,000 were demanded today for five defendants in the case of the “Jewish Restitution Bank,” founded here in 1949 with the aim of putting blocked and nontransferable Jewish restitution funds to work.
The demand was made by the prosecution at the conclusion of an involved nine-month trial. The defense will make its final summation this week. A verdict is expected about mid-August.
The bank, which included on its board of directors many prominent members of the German Jewish community as well as the Mayor of this city, was padlocked by the State of Hesse in 1950 for alleged violations of German currency regulations and other alleged irregularities. The bank was closed down at a time when a member of the Rothschild banking family was about to assume the bank’s ownership and management.
The original indictment charging huge defaults received extensive publicity in Germany, but was completely discredited in the course of the trial. It was also revealed that the bank’s president and vice-president were permitted to flee abroad apparently because they enjoyed the status of displaced persons and might have demanded that the case be tried in a court of the United States High Commission rather than in a German court.
The five defendants, who have been on trial for the last nine months, played a subordinate role in the year that the bank was open for business. Best known among them is Joseph Klibansky, a prominent attorney who was counsel for the bank but not an employee or an officer. The prosecution demanded that he be sentenced to 18 months in jail and fined $8,000 for “being an accessory to violation of certain provisions of corporation law and of foreign currency control regulations.”
The second Jewish defendant is Siegfried Frohlich, the bank’s cashier, who is a refugee from Eastern Germany. The prosecution contented itself with asking a fine for him and also for Wolfgang Steege, a Hamburg German banker who aided in carrying out foreign currency transactions.
In the case of Dr. Hans Erwin Wolff, an ex-concentration camp inmate who had been appointed the bank’s custodian in the summer of 1950, the prosecution pleaded for six months’ imprisonment on charges of bribery. With regard to Wilhelm Marrien, a German banker who had been hired as the bank’s technical advisor because it was not known that he had been a friend of Nazi Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht, the sentence proposed by the prosecution was ten months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
