Judge Awards Freud Descendant $164,885 in Holocaust Case
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In a settlement for money stolen by the Nazis from Sigmund Freud’s Swiss bank accounts, a federal judge in Brooklyn yesterday awarded more than $160,000 to a descendant of the famed psychiatrist.
The award, granted by U.S. District Judge Edward Korman, is part of a $1.25 billion settlement in a class action filed by Holocaust survivors against leading Swiss banks for their role in Nazi crimes during World War II. Freud’s grandson, Anton Walter Freud, filed a claim for a portion of the settlement on the basis that his grandfather, a Jew, was a victim of Nazi persecution who never received money from accounts that were closed without his knowledge in 1938.
“This is one of those rare cases where we have hard evidence that the bank transferred the money to the Nazis instead of the true owner,” the lead settlement counsel, Burt Neuborne, said.
Freud, known as the “father of psychoanalysis,” was 82 and stricken by cancer when he fled Vienna for London in June 1938, three months after the German annexation of Austria. Although Freud used diplomatic channels to secure an exit visa, documents cited in the court’s decision indicate the Nazi Gestapo raided his home and publishing house in Austria, and even targeted him after his arrival in London.
The Germans confiscated Freud’s money and publishing house, and he left Vienna with some personal belongings, books, and papers. Yet, according to letters he wrote at the time, he still believed he had funds in a Swiss bank account the Gestapo promised to let him keep. Unbeknownst to Freud, the account had been closed weeks earlier.
Freud later tried – unsuccessfully – to save his four elderly sisters by arranging for their move to England. They all died in concentration camps during the war.
“He was treated like any other Jew was treated by the Nazis,” the acting director of the Freud Museum in London and the editor of his diaries, Michael Molnar, said of Freud. “He was robbed, he was driven out, and his family was murdered.”
Freud died in September 1939 at age 83. Anton Walter Freud, a chemical engineer who served in the British army during World War II, died in 2004 while his claim on his grandfather’s accounts was being processed. The news of the award came as a surprise to his son, David Anthony Freud, who had not heard about the decision when reached by phone in London last night.
“I was pretty dubious about it, frankly,” Mr. Freud, 55, said. “Clearly, it’s a pleasant surprise.” The money – $164,885 – will go to Anton Walter Freud’s estate, and his son said it would be divided among his heirs.
There were few records of Freud’s Swiss bank accounts, and Judge Korman said in his ruling that it was unknown how much money they contained when they were closed. The figure of 216,000 Swiss francs – adjusted for inflation – was determined according to the average amount of money left in such accounts at the time, as found by an audit of 350,000 accounts after the $1.25 billion settlement was reached in 1998.
So far about $765 million has been disbursed from the fund to nearly 366,000 people. Freud’s award was one of 23 decisions totaling nearly $3 million announced by Judge Korman yesterday.