Customer Reviews

The Victim's Fortune: Inside the Epic Battle Over the Debts of the Holocaust

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The Victim's Fortune is a good read and it offers interesting insights into the compensation talks saga. It is written in the style of `barbarians at the gate,' i.e. it tells a story by following the people involved and the personal axes they have to grind.

At the time, I followed the news of the Swiss banks and German companies with half an eye, dismissing it as (tedious) legal blackmail. But this book, which fell into my lap by chance, brought the whole dispute to life for me, including yes the greedy lawyers but also the victims and companies who tried to do the right thing. As with everything, it is much more interesting when you feel you know the people involved. Contrary to a previous review, the authors do not simplify the conflicts or the characters, which is a strong point. The 'gossip' in the book is what makes it human, and a book about these settlements that does not take the human angle runs the risk of being exceedingly boring.

I also learned a thing or two about the grounds for compensation-the use of slave labor by daimler, even ford; and the arrogance with which insurance companies asked for a death certificate to honor life insurance of holocaust victims. As a victim says, 'at auschwitz, they didn't give death certificates.'

But it's not just for novices- those with a greater knowledge and interest in the compensation dispute will certainly find an extra couple of layers of intrigue and emotion.

The book is also about the difficulty of trying to compensate for something as profoundly horrific as the holocaust, the uselessness of monetary compensation.

For such a complicated issue, with so many actors involved, it is quite an easy and pleasant read.

The publisher says "John Authers and Richard Wolffe offer a spellbinding investigative account" of the international struggle to retrieve some of the debts owed to Holocaust victims for more than half a century by bankers, insurers and industrial executives. I rarely agree with a publisher's endorsement of abook but in the case of "The Victim"s Fortune" I can only agree with the judgement.
The authors meticulously give their sources for what participants say and do, and, by having visited many of the major protagonists are able to sketch accurate and very lively pen-pictures not only of people but of locations: there are 45 pages of notes and sources and a full index - the general reader may not need them but they are there to reinforce the veracity of the account.
It would have been easy to have been less than even-handed to some of the powerful characters encountered in the book: it is a tribute to the authors that they maintain an even keel while charting the reader through a variety of events which could easily have seemed an incoherent maelstrom. The story starts in 1995 and culminates in June 2001 when payments of $5000 begin to be made to the dwindling band of holocaust survivors. The six years saw the involvement of a swathe of characters, from Jewish leaders, lawyers, bankers, insurers, judges, to President Clinton and Christoph Meili, a security guard at UBS who found in the course of his patrol that key documents had been put ready in the shredding room. In return for his whistle-blowing he had to flee his native Switzerland when he received death threats and warnings that his children would be kidnapped, and make a home in USA, the first Swiss citizen ever to seek asylum there on grounds of political persecution.
It is a roller-coaster of a book with new, well-defined and important characters arriving in most chapters. It is a fascinating read both for the issues involved and the egos on display. I have only had time to read the book once and will certainly do so again. It is no exaggeration to refer to the epic battle over the debts of the holocaust: I am profoundly grateful to the authors for opening my eyes to the reality of how deals get made, who truly benefits in such a tangled web. Lawyers, companies, governments even, had their own agenda: the payment was too little, too late; to quote one former slave-labourer "if it had been earlier or larger, it would have been no more moral".
This book is a triumph and deserves to be widely read.

John Auteurs and Richard Wolffe have written a thorough, often mesmerizing, account on recent efforts to win compensation for Holocaust survivors from Swiss, German, Austrian and Italian banks and insurance firms and German and Austrian firms. "The Victim's Fortune" chronicles how an unlikely alliance of American Jewish leaders and lawyers successfully confronted these banks and firms, winning long-overdue compensation to those who had lost savings and life insurance policies to the Nazis and their allies or were slave laborers working for German and Austrian firms during World War Two. To their credit the authors wade successfully through an intriguing mix of characters, covering in separate chapters legal battles in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Austria. This important book should be required reading by those interested in World War Two, The Holocaust, and present efforts in seeking compensation from those countries and individuals who supported Al Qaeda's dastardly terrorist attacks on the United States last year.

What a great book. Not only did I learn the intimate details of one of the most fascinating legal battles in recent decades, but I was thoroughly entranced. It reads like one of those great non-fiction legal thrillers that have come out recently, like A Civil Action. Full of incredible details, like the contents of hand-written messages passed across the table during furious negotiations inside grand Swiss halls, and incredible personalities: Al D'Amato, Edgar Bronfman, Bill Clinton, Jorg Haider...what more could you ask for!?!?

This is an excellent investigative and thorough book.
It is a very sensitive and emotional subject that has been treated by the authors with tact. John Authers and Richard Wolffe have done an excellent job at remaining unbiased and even handed which cannot be said for some of the other books on the same subject.

I thought "The Victim's Fortune" by John Authers and Richard Wolffe
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002) might help me understand the strange
process by which the Claims Resolution Tribunal goes about granting
awards to Jewish claimants for a small percentage of the money that
the tribunal decided to give them.

The book did no such thing. I read the first 106 pages which were filled with gossipy details about the many competing lawyers, dropping snide remarks about many of them along the way, especially Ed Fagan, whom the authors describe as a small-time personal-injury lawyer (even though Fagan was well enough off to afford having his office on the 84th floor of the World Trade
Center).

The book is also filled (up to where I stopped reading) with other
put-downs, such as the one where U.S. District Judge Edward Korman
tries to have the competing lawyers bury the hatchet by inviting them
to dine at Gage and Tollner, a non-Kosher Brooklyn eatery where poor
Israel Singer has to make do with a glass of water.

In the end, an award is hammered out. But there are many references
to a separate audit by a group headed by Paul Volcker, and to an
Independent Committee of Eminent Persons (ICEP). None of this is
explained. Nor is the process by which the ICEP determines who will
get what, whether the information is based on the Volcker audits, why
only 35% of the award is paid out while the rest is held back in case
of competing claims, even though claims were closed several years ago.

I now know a great deal about how some of these lawyers acted without
hope of being paid while others (Fagan is targeted here, along with
some others) are acting on a contingency basis. But I still know
nothing about the process in operation.

Starting on Page 107, the authors do their thing about insurance,
slave labor, property confiscations, etc. I could not bear to punish
myself any more.

This topic is fascinating but deserves a thorough historical and analytical treatment, not a series of often disjointed anecdotes and descriptions of personalities of the moment. I expected more from reporters of the Financial Times.