Not many lawyers get to see their work recognized decades after its conclusion. Even fewer receive that recognition from the very government they exposed for victimizing its citizens. But Professor Richard Weisberg, who was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2008 from then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, is seeing further international recognition for a lifetime of legal sleuthing and litigation that helped bring a measure of justice to thousands of French Jews who suffered and perished in the Holocaust.
Weisberg’s meticulous work exposed the use of more than 200 French laws passed by the Vichy government during World War II to persecute French Jews, deprive them of their property and ultimately send 75,000 to death camps out of France.
On Nov. 15, he will detail his lifelong work on behalf of victims of the Holocaust and their heirs in an address in Paris commemorating the 20th anniversary of the agency he helped oversee in its restitution efforts.
At the “Between Compensation and Restitution” conference, Weisberg will review the effort to uncover the evidence that led to the creation of a compensation fund for the victims. The fund was financed primarily by the same banks that confiscated Jewish property during the war. In asking Weisberg to speak at the conference, the French are honoring the role he played in uncovering the truth.
In the 1980s while historians were beginning to explore the role of Vichy France in the victimization of French Jews during the Nazi occupation, Weisberg focused on the behavior of legal and financial institutions in their persecution.
“I entered into the nitty-gritty of everyday anti-Semitism in the courts and the agencies, in the government ministries and the halls of academia, in private law firms and corporations, and in the public records of French jurisprudence,” he told a congressional banking committee in 1999.
That work eventually led Weisberg to implicate the upper echelons of French banking in the conspiracy against Jewish citizens. The ensuing litigation resulted in a historic settlement and the creation of a victim’s compensation fund worth millions of euros.
On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the institution earmarked by that settlement to disperse the funds, Weisberg will re-join French colleagues in telling the story of this dark chapter in the nation’s history.
The looting of Jewish property was done with the cooperation of the French Vichy government by a consortium of major banks in a manner described by Weisberg as “legalistic”—that is following a set of rules and regulations. This financial conspiracy helped institutionalize anti-Semitic policies that allowed the confiscation of bank accounts at the same time the government was forcing Jews out of their jobs and limiting the numbers of Jewish lawyers and law students through quotas. These regulations “gradually squeezed the lifeblood out of France’s Jews,” Weisberg said in his testimony.
Weisberg’s 1996 book “Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France,” which has since been translated as “Vichy, la Justice, et les Juifs,” details his findings. His earlier work, “The Failure of the Word,” has been translated into German and Italian and recently into French as “La Parole Defaillante.” It is considered a seminal work in the area of law and literature and deals with the corruption of justice through legalese language as depicted in great works of literature.
Many of the big banks of Europe during World War II cooperated and conspired in the liquidation of Jewish assets to produce profits. Weisberg and other lawyers brought critical cases against the banks, which included not only 23 major French banks but also America’s J.P. Morgan Chase and Great Britain’s Barclays.
The cases led to a settlement and the creation of a reparation fund for victims and their survivors. Weisberg, part of the plaintiffs’ counsel in the case of Bodner v. Banque Paribas, was a signatory to the multilateral agreement, which resolved the case and set up the machinery for French payment to victims.
Weisberg’s research has focused on the role of laws in corrupting justice. The banks’ effort to block Jews’ accounts is a chilling example of how laws can be used to dismantle human rights to advance a genocidal regime.
Weisberg detailed how laws were used to bleed the Jews of their assets and then to punish them for non-payment of “legal” government taxes on Jews. During World War II, those defined as Jews under Vichy law were deported to death camps under laws, regulations and decrees from the government.
Despite early resistance from the French government, Weisberg ultimately was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his work exposing the connections between the law, the government and financial institutions in this activity.
Weisberg’s research also revealed the French courts’ examination of “Jewishness.” In his work, he details how the French courts were used to ascertain who was a Jew. This involved detailing lineage and marriage records. The second question put before the courts, according to Weisberg, was “how to eliminate Jewish influence from the French economy.”
One of the fatal results of Vichy law was the creation of "special camps" in unoccupied France into which French administrators and police herded “foreigners of the Jewish race.” Three thousand died in the camps.
Billions of francs were confiscated from French Jews. It was this money that Weisberg and other lawyers argued should be reclaimed and returned to the individuals or their heirs. As counsel, he played an active role writing briefs based on historical data from his research.
Later he was a key player in negotiating the Washington Accords of 2001, and was appointed the plaintiffs’ representative in Paris. For nearly a decade, he worked with French officials and U.S. State Department personnel to manage restitution to claimants.
In recognition of Weisberg’s work, some of the unclaimed funds from the separately settled suits against JPMorgan and Barclay's were granted to Cardozo School of Law and used to establish the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights, and the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic.