http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000339931511020&rtmo=aCq6hW5J&atmo=99999999&
pg=/et/01/2/18/wibm18.html
IBM sued as 100 US firms are accused of Nazi links
By Tony Paterson in Berlin and David Wastell in Washington
UP to 100 American companies suspected of profiting from trade with Nazi
Germany are being targeted by lawyers working for Holocaust survivors.A
lawsuit was launched against the computer giant IBM last week. The action,
however, threatens to jeopardise an existing £3.3 billion deal to compensate
slave labourers from the Nazi era, according to warnings from Germany.The
suit against IBM alleges that the company, through its German subsidiary,
knowingly co-operated with the Third Reich during the 1930s and 1940s by
supplying the regime with punch-card machines used to catalogue Jews sent to
concentration camps.A Washington legal firm has compiled a list of a further
100 American corporations - identified by records culled from the FBI and the
United States Treasury department - as having traded with the Nazi regime in
1941, just as America entered the Second World War.They include leading
industrial and chemical companies and some of the top names in US banking,
according to Michael Hausfeld, the leading attorney behind the IBM case. Mr
Hausfeld refuses to identify the firms involved until more research has been
done. He said: "There has been huge interest as a result of the IBM case and
a lot of people have offered their assistance."He insisted that the lawsuit
did not breach the terms of a compensation deal - agreed with German firms
last year after more than 18 months of tortuous negotiations - because it
focused on the American parent company. Wolfgang Gibowski, a spokesman for
more than 50 German firms involved in the compensation accord, including
Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank and Krupp, dismissed Mr Hausfeld's argument. He
said: "This is plainly nonsense."The ground-breaking agreement was secured
only after German companies were promised "legal peace" - shorthand for a
guarantee that they would face no further court action. They now fear that
they could be dragged into the new bout of legal action in America.Mr
Gibowski said: "These crimes were committed in Germany and the German
subsidiaries of IBM are implicated. The whole compensation programme is now
at risk. The German firms involved will not make the payments unless they are
assured legal peace preventing further claims being made against them. The
IBM lawsuit shows that this is patently not the case."Such fears could lead
to a long delay before compensation is paid, and, as the 900,000 or so
intended beneficiaries living in Europe and the US are already aged, Mr
Gibowski said out that many could die before receiving any money, . Mr
Hausfeld said that he might consider dropping his case if it posed a serious
threat to the compensation deal.
