BERN, Switzerland — A U.S. woman who led the fight by relatives of Holocaust victims to recover money from Swiss bank accounts has been awarded $100,000 by a Brooklyn court, according to court documents obtained Friday.
U.S. District Judge Edward Korman gave Greta Beer the award "in recognition of her services" to other Holocaust claimants, said the order from Korman's court in Brooklyn, dated Wednesday.
"A long struggle is coming to an end," Beer told the Swiss service of The Associated Press from her Brighton, Mass., home.
Korman is overseeing the distribution of a $1.25 billion settlement by Swiss banks of claims from Holocaust victims and their descendants who say they were unable to recover their money at the end of World War II.
Korman also authorized payments of $3.6 million to lawyers involved in a class action lawsuit, according to Aufbau, a German-Jewish biweekly newspaper in New York.
Beer, formerly of New York but now living in Massachusetts, testified before the Senate Banking Committee in 1996 as part of her campaign to get access to an account opened by her father, a Romanian Jewish businessman.
Beer and her mother started looking for the money in the 1960s but were unable to track it down.
In 1998 UBS and Switzerland's second-largest bank, Credit Suisse, agreed to pay $1.25 billion into a fund for Holocaust survivors.
Almost 65 percent of the fund, $800 million, was set aside for individuals who deposited money in Swiss banks for safekeeping as the Nazis gained power in Europe, expecting to retrieve it later. After the war, they claimed they were stonewalled by the banks while trying to reclaim the assets. In some cases, they lacked detailed account information; some bankers demanded impossible-to-obtain death certificates of people killed in Nazi concentration camps. About 21,000 accounts remained unclaimed.
The Holocaust victims and their heirs filed a class action lawsuit against the banks to get the money back.
The remaining $450 million was allocated to wartime refugees who were turned back at the Swiss border, people forced to work as slave laborers by the Nazis, and victims whose belongings were plundered by Hitler's regime.
An organization based in Geneva said Friday it had recently completed payments of $1,000 each to 136 former slave laborers under the Korman-supervised settlement.
"All beneficiaries performed slave labor under the National Socialist regime and were persecuted by the Nazis for being Roma, Jehovah's Witness, handicapped or homosexual," said the International Organization for Migration.
To avoid overlap with other organizations, the IOM is responsible primarily for claims of the non-Jewish Nazi victims.
An IOM statement said the payments brought the number of former slave laborers who have received $1,000 to 436. It says it plans to make two more rounds of payments by the end of this year.
The recipients are among 11,960 people who submitted claims that they were victims of the Nazi slave-labor program.