There is new evidence that the Italian insurance giant Generali knows which of its unpaid life insurance policies from the World War II era may have belonged to Holocaust victims, a lawyer for heirs of the victims is claiming.

For a decade, the heirs of Holocaust victims have been fighting Generali in a Manhattan court to learn what became of life insurance policies they say were held by relatives. Without copies of the policy or a death certificate, the relatives have had difficulty cashing in claims. Generali, which has refused to open its records from that time period, has said its records from the era are quite limited.

Moreover, the company has said that policy forms did not distinguish whether an insured or beneficiary was a Jew. That could mean the company’s surviving records won’t immediately suggest which unpaid policies belonged to victims of the Holocaust.

A lawyer from Miami, Samuel Dubbin, is now saying that a Generali audit of its records rebuts the company’s claim that it doesn’t know which unpaid policies probably belonged to Holocaust dead. The audit states “the examination of the enclosed data on unpaid policies shows that some of the insured had to specify their ‘Jewish race.'” The audit is publicly available. It was conducted by Generali for the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, to which the company has contributed about $135 million. “Contrary to what Generali has claimed for decades, we now know that it knew exactly which of its policy holders were Jewish,” Mr. Dubbin told The New York Sun. “The excuses for not finding and paying survivors or heirs immediately after World War II are obliterated by this finding.”

Not all agree that the audit shows that Generali has extensive data on which insurance policies belonged to Jews and were never paid out. The audit, which examined 17,995 unpaid policies, says only 32 people with 41 policies were “declared to be of Jewish race.” A lawyer for Generali, Marco Schnabl of the New York office of the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, said “the notion that this shows we asked people for their religion, or collected that information, or gave that information out, is preposterous.”

Mr. Schnabl said a 1938 Italian law required Jews to declare their religion for certain financial transactions, and that is why a small number of insurance records indicate that the policy holders were Jewish.

“By law we were required to write that down,” Mr. Schnabl said. “Most people violated that law because it was very dangerous to report yourself as a Jew. Our files show that only 32 people complied.”

The auditors crosschecked all of the unpaid Italian policies in their possession against several lists of Italian Jews who died in the Holocaust.

In an interview, Mr. Dubbin put forward a hypothesis for why the number of declared Jews might seem so low. He suggested the company turned over the proceeds of policies to Mussolini’s government, and then recorded the policies as having been paid, in which case they may not have been audited. Mr. Dubbin provided the Sun with a 1945 letter from Generali to the “Republic Prefect of Milan” titled “Liquidation Measures for Jewish Assets.”

“We renounce the aforementioned policy and signify to you that the same is in effect for an insured sum of L 100,000,” the letter, which describes a policy belonging to a Mr. Arrigo Lopes Pegna, states.

By e-mail, Mr. Schnabl wrote: “This letter does not strike me as more than what it says — a ‘renunciation,’ under circumstances we cannot possibly reconstruct, of someone’s policy. Why or who caused it to happen is entirely unknown.”

This week a federal judge in Manhattan approved a settlement with Generali that would provide about $50 million to heirs.

Mr. Dubbin, who represents several plaintiffs who refuse to settle, said he would ask an appellate court to overturn the settlement.