Germany’s highest court recently ruled that the Jewish community here cannot sue a French bank to recover reparations payments embezzled by a former leader of the community.
On April 20, the Federal Court of Justice in the southwestern city of Karisruhe dismissed a suit brought by the Central Council of Jewish Communities in Germany against the French bank Societe Generale-Elsass.
As a result of the decision, the Jewish community will not be able to recover any of the funds embezzled by Werner Nachmann, the late president of the council.
Nachmann, a businessman who died in 1988, had allegedly transferred through the French bank to his own private accounts some $13.4 million of compensation payments paid by the German government to Holocaust survivors.
The council had accused the French bank of acting carelessly in the case and had filed suit for the immediate return of $125,000.
In May 1988, when news of the embezzlement scandal first surfaced, leaders of the German Jewish community had explained that the missing money was the interest accrued on $238 million worth of reparations payments provided by German federal authorities between 1980 and 1987.
The fund was to be used to distribute onetime payments to Jewish victims of Nazism in Eastern Europe who had been unable to make the 1965 application deadline for payments.
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