Copyright

Roy L. Brooks (ed.)
When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice
New York: New York University Press (1999), pp. 68-76

Romani Victims of the Holocaust and Swiss Complicity

Ian Hancock

The Holocaust has been established in the historical tradition as something separate from both the Second World War and-for the overwhelming majority of historians-from the targeting of all populations regarded as undesirable in the Third Reich's new world order. While the latter distinction has been challenged on a number of grounds, the factor of genocide-the intent systematically to exterminate-justifiably sets just two ethnically or "racially" defined peoples apart: the Jews and the Romanies. From this perspective, the Holocaust becomes synonymous with the Final Solution, and while Romani and Jewish scholars may argue that the treatment of their own individual populations by the Nazis was quantitatively or qualitatively unique,¹ Reinhardt Heydrich's directive of July 31, 1941, which set the machinery of the Holocaust in motion, ordered the Einsatzkommandos to begin the eradication of "all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients"; no other groups were included in that order. Heydrich, who was the chief architect of the Final Solution, included mental patients because, like Jews and Romanies, they too were regarded as genetic contaminants in the body of the master race. Romanies were included "with no regard to the degree of their racial impurity" in the transport order issued by Heidrich Himmler, acting upon a direct order from Adolf Hitler, following the Wannsee Conference in 1942.²

Background

Indications of the racist rationale for singling out Romanies (called Sinti in German-speaking countries) parallel the emergence of Germans' sense of their own racial exclusiveness and date from the very time of the Romanies' arrival in Germany.³ Martin Luther's anti-Semitic and anti-Romani proclamations in the sixteenth century have prompted statements of apology and regret from the Lutheran Church today.

In 1721, 220 years before Hitler, Emperor Karl VI ordered the extermination of all Romanies everywhere; in 1725 his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm I, condemned all Romanies of eighteen years and older to be hanged. In 1793, the Lutheran minister Martin Zippel compared Romanies in a "well-ordered state" to vermin on an animal's body. In 1808, Johann Fichte wrote in his Addresses to the German Nation that the "German race" had been chosen by God to lead humanity. Two years later, the German nationalist Friedrich Jahn wrote that a people without a homeland is "nothing-a bodiless, airless phantom, like the Gypsies and the Jews." In 1835, Theodor Tetzner wrote that Romanies in Germany were the "excrement of humanity," wording repeated by Robert Knox in his Races of Men (1850). The German sense of racial superiority was greatly fueled by Joseph Gobineau's statement in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, that the Aryan peoples constituted "the cream of mankind," and that "the Germans [were] the cream of the cream: A race of princes."

A significant phrase coined by Richard Liebich appeared in an anti-Romani treatise he wrote in 1863: "lives unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertesleben). Again with reference to Romanies, it was picked up and used by Richard Kulemann in 1869. It became part of the title of an influential book by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche that appeared in 1920, and was the name of one of Hitler's first laws, introduced July 14, 1933, not long after he became chancellor.⁴ In 1871, Charles Darwin described the behavior of "Jews and Gypsies . . . which contrasted sharply with the culturally advanced Nordic Aryan race," influencing Cesare Lombroso (1876), whose work appeared in German, and who typified Romanies as "a whole race of criminals." In 1886, Otto von Bismarck called for the "especially severe" treatment of Romanies and introduced legislation to control their movement. This led in 1890 to a national conference on "the Gypsy Scum" at which the military was empowered to expel Romanies from any area. In 1899, the Gypsy Information Agency was established in Munich to monitor the movements of the Romanies throughout Germany and to begin their complete registration. This was also the year that Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century appeared, in which he credited the German people with the greatest scientific and cultural accomplishments and called for them to lead a "newly-shaped" and "especially-deserving Aryan race."

In 1905, Alfred Dillman's Gypsy Book appeared, the product of the 1899 resolution, which listed names and personal data for all Romanies throughout Germany. The first part of the book called upon the German people "unflaggingly to defend itself" against Romanies, which it referred to as "pests" and a "plague." This academically sanctioned dehumanization, and the likening of Romanies to infestation and disease, steadily gained momentum and was a major tool in generating public disdain in Nazi Germany. Binding and Hoche's 1920 book argued for the disposal of certain categories of people through euthanasia; their second category-people with incurable hereditarily transmitted defects-was considered to apply to Romanies, since their supposed criminality was interpreted as a genetic disease. This "criminality," it should be pointed out, included lighting fires in public areas, stealing food, and trespassing-all social responses to centuries-old �discriminatory legislative measures.

During the 1920s, laws were introduced that forbade Romanies throughout Germany to enter public facilities such as parks, fairgrounds, or baths; required their wholesale photographing and fingerprinting; and incarcerated those without employment or fixed abode in specially created camps. When Hitler came to power tight legislative control of Romanies was already firmly in place, and public sentiment against them needed no prompting.

Nazi Germany

The July 1933 law against "lives not worthy of life" was directed "specifically [at] Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color"-that is, mainly the Afro-European children resulting from unions between Senegalese troops (brought in by the French during World War I) and local German women. From 1934 on, Romanies were selected for sterilization by injection or castration to prevent any "hereditarily-diseased offspring" and sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen, Marzahn, and Vennhausen. In 1935, Romanies became subject to the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which forbade marriage or sexual unions between non-Aryan and Aryan people. The National Citizenship Law that same year deprived both Romanies and Jews of their civil rights. In June 1938, "Gypsy Clean-Up Week" saw the beating and arrest of hundreds of Romanies throught Germany and Austria. In March, 1938, the first document referring to "the introduction of the total solution to the Gypsy problem on either a national or an international level" is drafted under the direction of State Secretary Hans Pfundtner of the Reichs Ministry of the Interior.The first Nazi documents to mention The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question ("die endgültige Lösung der Zigeunerfrage") are issued on March 24 and December 8, 1938, signed by Himmler. In January 1940, the first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust took place at Buchenwald, where 250 Romani children were used as guinea pigs to test the Zyklon-B crystals later used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Deportation orders followed Himmler's directive of December 16, 1942, and by 1945 between half a million and 1.5 million Romanies, perhaps half of all Romanies in Nazi-controlled Europe, had perished in the Porrajmos ("the Devouring"), as the Holocaust is called in Romani.⁵

Switzerland

The arrival of Romanies in Switzerland was first documented in 1428; "Gypsy hunts" were encouraged among its citizens from 1514 on, as a means of clearing Romanies out of the country. A twentieth-century Swiss attempt to destroy its Romani population came to light in 1986, when it was revealed that "proto-Nazi ideas of race hygiene" motivated Pro Juventute's "Operation Children of the Road," which since 1926 had been forcibly removing the children of Romani and non-Romani traveling families for permanent placement in state institutions.⁶ The Swiss provision of refuge to the Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, who until 1938 were arriving "in extraordinary proportions,"⁷ was never extended to Romanies.⁸ Instead, and despite the general understanding to the contrary, the Swiss government was handing its Romani citizens over to the Nazis and certain death.⁹ It has also been revealed that during the Nazi period, a "high number" of forced sterilizations were carried out upon Romanies in Switzerland. When the news broke in 1977, "a health ministry spokesman declined to comment, saying the issue was a thing of the past."¹⁰ Since 1945, Romanies in Switzerland have continued to suffer ongoing, systematic incarceration and abuse in police custody.¹¹

The Romanies, like the Jews prior to 1948, have lived in Europe as a nonterritorial population since their arrival in the West from Asia at the beginning of the four-teenth century. Because of this distinctive history, Romanies have lacked political, economic, national, and military strength, a situation which remains unchanged today. For this reason, they have been easy prey to discriminatory legislation, and have been powerless to defend themselves against it. The most pervasive form of legalized antigypsyism over the centuries has been the countless edicts forbidding Romanies to stay in an area-keeping them on the move in a constant search for an income, food, and shelter.¹² Because of this, the Romani presence in Western Europe has been characterized by constant movement, and the subsequent lack of access to establishment institutions, including banks.

Because most Romanies carried their wealth on their person-in the form of gold teeth, necklaces, rings, bracelets, coins serving as buttons on clothing, earrings, and so on-rather than protecting it in safety-deposit vaults or converting it to paper assets, little documentation exists for property stolen by the Nazis from the Romani people. Carrying coins and other small items of value is an established Romani practice; they were useful for buying one's way out of trouble when such situations presented themselves. However, it was illegal in Nazi Germany for private citizens to own gold, and this was a premise for its confiscation by the police. Receipts were generally not provided, and the documentation available to us today is scant for the precious metals, gems, jewelry, furniture, conveyances, farm animals and implements, and musical instruments that were taken from them. Thus the greater part of the assets confiscated from Romanies were not in the form of appropriated bank accounts, but rather were personal valuables only later converted into bankable property by the Nazis, and categorized as "non-monetary gold."

At the end of 1996, when the news broke that money confiscated by the Nazis was being held in Swiss banks, compounded by the discovery the following January by a security guard of Nazi-related bank records about to be destroyed-in violation of a federal ban-charges were made that the central bank had routinely laundered plundered gold for the Nazis throughout the Second World War. The response from the Swiss government was swift: It announced that restitution would be forthcoming to those who could present valid claims. The amount first mentioned was 5 billion Swiss francs, or 4.7 billion U.S. dollars. But in all of the ensuing international media coverage, Romanies were not mentioned.

On February 12, 1997, the Swiss government agreed to explore with Jewish groups, but not with Romani groups, how to compensate Holocaust survivors.

After meeting with representatives of the State of Israel and of the World Jewish Congress, Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs Flavio Cotti announced that as of March 1, 1997, a fund of $70 million would be put in place, donated by the Union Bank of Switzerland, the Swiss Bank Corporation, and Credit Suisse, Switzerland's three largest banks. On March 5, the Associated Press reported Swiss President Arnold Koller as saying that his government would set up an additional fund of $5 billion to aid victims of the Holocaust and of any other genocide or disaster, and would finance it by selling off tons of gold over the next few decades.

This is not the first such deal involving Swiss banks. Some thirty-five years earlier in 1962, after having consistently denied holding any victims' assets, a number of Swiss banks announced that they had "discovered" $7 million belonging to Jews killed in the Holocaust, which were then turned over to various Jewish charities. Responding to ongoing pressure from attorneys representing Jewish groups, they unearthed a further $28 million in 1995, although those attorneys claim that as much as $7 billion still remains unaccounted for. Whether this money was demonstrably only of Jewish origin, or had in part been converted from property also taken from Romanies, was not addressed at that time, though there is no reason to believe that the situation thirty-five years ago was any different from today's. Nor is Switzerland alone in its complicity, since some of the gold in its banks was then sent on by the Nazis to pay neutral countries, such as Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina, for war materials and supplies.¹³

On April 16, 1997, the Swiss Federal Council announced that it had appointed a prominent Swiss businessman, Rolf Bloch, to head a new committee to oversee the disbursement of the stolen funds. In consultation with the World Jewish Restitution Organization, an umbrella group of major Jewish organizations together with Israeli state representatives, three prominent Jews were selected for membership on the same board to serve alongside the four members appointed by the Swiss government. All of the media coverage, without exception, focused on the property confiscated from the Jewish victims of the Nazis, prompting the representative of one Swiss Romani association to complain that they were treating the situation as though it were "purely a Swiss-Jewish concern";¹⁴ indeed, a year later USA Today could still refer to the "$300 million in gold stolen from Jews."¹⁵ The Romani representative, not even named in the article, despaired that arguments over who was to serve on the board "have eliminated a role for the Nazis' number two victims [since]... no Gypsies were named to the seven-member board."¹⁶

An eighteen-member advisory council was also created by Swiss and non-Swiss organizations, which was to include representatives of various groups victimized in the Holocaust. "European Gypsies" were included in this proposal, and two were appointed: Dr. Rajko Djurić, president of the International Romani Union and now residing in Berlin; and Robert Huber, president of Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse, the main Swiss organization of Romanies and non-Romanies travelers. Not appointed, but working closely with the various parties, is Jan Czory, of the Kris Rom International, and Dr. Jan Cibula, past president of the International Romani Union, both of whom reside in Switzerland.

The United States

In the United States, the national bureau of the International Romani Union, led by then UN Praesidium Head Dr. Ian Hancock and National Representative John Nickels, appointed Philadelphia attorneys Sebastian Rainone and Joseph Nicola to file claims for reparations on behalf of that organization. This required locating survivors and relatives of survivors who could prove their case. The ancestors of the overwhelming majority of Romani Americans, who number about one million, arrived in this country several decades before the Nazi period and consequently have no direct link to the Holocaust. Only five survivors have been located in the United States, and because of cultural restrictions on speaking of the dead, only a couple of those are willing to become involved in the campaign for reparations. There are more eligible individuals among the post-1990 influx of Romanies from central and eastern Europe, but their sometimes illegal status makes them reluctant to come forward. The national bureau is gathering the names of survivors in Europe, particularly in Poland and Romania, but Romani organizations in those countries have first access to them. In December 1997, an official statement by Dr. Hancock was circulated at the London Conference on Nazi Gold, and Dr. Donald Kenrick of the Romani Institute in London was deputized to present the Romani case. He gave an overview of the plight of Romanies in the Holocaust and reported that the International Romani Union was asking for a fund of $115 million to be created to help European Romanies. The request received no response. A very small number of Romani individuals reportedly have been given insignificant amounts of money (as little as $1,500) by way of compensation, and concerns have been raised that this will be seen as sufficient compensation and acknowledgment on the part of the Swiss. Those individuals were likely pleased to receive any money at all and were not in a position to decline it in the hopes of a more equitable settlement, which may or may not be forthcoming.

It may be that greater recognition of the Romanies will come from the United States than from Europe;¹⁷ the U.S.-based Executive Monitoring Committee, an informal network of more than eight hundred public finance officers, was instrumental in getting a joint U.S.-Swiss statement issued by the State Department reaffirming the commitment of both governments to "address openly all issues related to the Holocaust, and to its victims."¹⁸

In 1998, Senate Bill 1900 created a federal Commission on the Swiss Gold. In addition to two U.S. congressmen, four senators, and the chairperson of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the bill provides for the appointment of individuals from the private sector, and an effort was made to have John Nickels placed on this committee. The effort was not successful, and the Romani voice has yet to find a place.

Generally, however, efforts to become a part of the process have not been particularly successful. This is to a large extent because as a people Romanies are fragmented and have no funded, international organizational base. Romanies are divided not only geographically, but economically, for it takes money to meet together in person, engage legal representation, and even to maintain ongoing telephone and fax communication. Furthermore, antigypsyism is at an all-time high and, sadly, finds its way upward to the administrative levels. Romanies are simply not given the acknowledgment they are rightfully due, first as people, and second as central participants in the matter of the confiscated assets.¹⁹

The fate of the Romani people in the Holocaust is slowly gaining recognition. Organizations such as the Romani Archives and Documentation Center in Texas and the Sinti and Romanies Documentation Centre in Heidelberg are able to provide documented evidence of the Nazi appropriation of Romani assets; to give just two examples, all belongings were confiscated from Romanies being transported from Germany into Poland, and at Klincy in Russia, where the mass execution of Romanies was taking place, all of their possessions were collected and sent to Germany. The Romani Union is also gathering evidence that personal property stolen from Romanies in Serbia, in particular at the extermination camp at Jasenovac, was sent to the Vatican by the Ustashi, handed over to them by the Catholic monks who ran that camp. It was claimed at the London Conference that nearly $2 million in gold coins and personal jewelry was confiscated from the more than 28,000 Romanies murdered there. The Vatican refused to respond to this and other charges leveled at it during that conference.²⁰

Even if only 100,000 Romanies holding their family savings in the form of jewelry and money had been arrested-a considerable underestimation-and even if these assets were worth only $1,000 per family by today's standards, this would amount to $100 million. Romani organizations agree that if restitution is forthcoming, only part of it should go in the form of pensions to the survivors, while the rest should be used to improve the situation of Romanies in Europe today, particularly in the areas of human rights, health, and education.²¹

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NOTES

1. Some Jewish Holocaust scholars, such as Selma Steinmetz (Oesterreichs Zigeuner im NS-Staat: Monographien zur Zeitgeschichte [Frankfurt: Europa Verlag, 1966], p. 5), have argued that "numbers decide" in the ranking of victimhood; others point to the pathologically obsessive and ruthless targeting of Jews not matched by any other victimized group. Some Romani scholars argue that oppressive anti-Romani laws were already in place before 1933, and that the criteria for determining who was Romani were exactly twice as strict as those determining who was Jewish. Neither position is productive; they both create aspects of a "suffering Olympics," as well as tensions between Romanies and Jews that serve only to delight the common enemies of both peoples. See Ward Churchill, "Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context," in his A Little Matter of Genocide (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), pp. 19-62; David Young, "The Trial of Remembrance: Monuments and Memories of the Porrajmos," in Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, ed. Colin Tatz (Sydney: Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, 1997); Ian Hancock, "�Uniqueness' of the Victims: Gypsies, Jews and the Holocaust," Without Prejudice: International Review of Racial Discrimination 1, no. 2 (1988): 45-67.

2. Ian Hancock, "Responses to the Porrajmos; The Romani Holocaust," in Is the Holocaust Unique? ed. Alan Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 39-64.

3. Ian Hancock, "Gypsy History in Germany and Neighboring Lands: A Chronology Leading to the Holocaust," in The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, ed. David Crowe and John Kolsti (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), pp. 24-25.

4. This is also the title of a recent book on the Holocaust. See James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

5. Estimates of Romani losses vary enormously. Those given here are from Sybil Milton, former senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, who estimates that "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half Romanies and Sinti were murdered in Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945." Judith Latham, First U.S. Conference on Gypsies in the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: Voice of America Transcript, 1995), No. 3-23928.

6. See Frances Williams, "Swiss Shame over Stolen Children," Sunday Times (London), June 8, 1986, p. 10; Reto Pieth, "Switzerland's Secret Crusade against the Gypsies," In These Times, January 27-February 2, 1988, p. 4.

7. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York and London: Holmes and Meiel, 1985), p. 55.

8. Swiss immigration officials refused to admit the Romani refugees seeking asylum who had marched to Geneva from Germany in 1993, led by Rudko Kawczynski, following the German government's declaration-subsequently carried out-to return them to eastern Europe.

9. Hans Caprez, "Zigeuner an die Nazis ausgeliefert" ("Romanies Handed over to the Nazis"], Brennpunkt 17 (1997); 10-13.

10. Jacqueline Fihr, "Swiss Women's Groups React with Outrage over Gypsy Sterilizations," RNN News Bulletin, Geneva and Westeros, August 27, 1997.

11. The best source documenting this over the years is the periodical Scharotl, published by the Genossenshaft der Landstrasse Interessengemeinschaft des Fahrendes Volkes in der Schweitz, available from the Secretariat, Postfach 1647, 8048 Zurich, Switzerland.

12. This has given rise to the romanticized image of the "wandering Gypsy" in Western literature, reinterpreted as an innate urge to be free to travel. Even during the period of the Third Reich, this so-called Zigeunerromantik flourished; a number of German films were made reflecting this theme, even as Romanies were being sent to the extermination camps.

13. Maria Puente, "Report Says Nazis Paid Neutral Nations with Stolen Gold," USA Today, June 2, 1998, p. 6-A.

14. "Gypsies Aggravated at Being Left Off Holocaust Fund Board: Omission by the Swiss Government Is Called an Insult to the Memory of Nameless Victims," Fort Worth Star Telegram, April 20, 1997, p. 2.

15. Puente, "Report says Nazis Paid Neutral Nations with Stolen Gold," p. 6-A.

16. Ibid.

17. Although this country's record regarding recognition of the Romani victims of the Holocaust has not been exemplary; while their fate was acknowledged at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials following the Second World War, where Josef Goebbels is on record as stating that Nazi policy determined that "Jews and Gypsies [should be exterminated] unconditionally" (War Crimes Tribunal File No. 682-PS, USGPO, 1946, p. 496), the then Chief Prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, founder of Pace University's Peace Center in New York, did not recommend that the U.S. War Refugee Board include Romanies in their compensation payments to survivors, which amounted to several hundred million dollars. "Gypsies" are not mentioned anywhere in their documentation, and to date Mr. Ferencz has not replied to requests for clarification. Ludwig Eiber ("The persecution of the Sinti and Roma in Munich, 1933-1945," in Susan Tebbutt, ed., Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature,New York: Berghahn Books, 1998, pp. 17-33), documents the situation for Romanies immediately following the war: Survivors founded the �Committee of German Gypsies' in 1946 in Munich. They demanded authorization to represent the German Gypsies, a prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, recognition as victims of persecution during the Nazi regime and compensation. They also demanded to be recognized as an ethnic minority, with the right to be treated equally in economic and cultural terms. Their attempt to rehabilitate the persecuted Sinti and Roma was, however, to no avail.

In fact, the opposite was the case. The discrimination on the part of the police and authorities continued uninterrupted. The old law concerning the Gypsies and the work-shy was still in force and it was not until 1947 that it was repealed by the U.S. military government, on the grounds that it was not in accordance with legal principles [however . . . ] the practices of registering and discriminating were continued, and Nazi files continued to be used. It was not until 1970 that the law was finally repealed and not replaced (p. 32).

18. Swiss Monitor: An Update on Switzerland's Progress in Making Restitution to Holocaust Survivors (June 1998): 1.

19. This extends to due acknowledgment of the status of Romanies in the Holocaust generally. See Hancock, "Responses to the Porrajmos"; Ian Hancock, "The Roots of Antigypsyism: To the Holocaust and After," in Confronting the Holocaust, ed. Jan Colijn and Marcia Sachs Littell (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997), pp. 19-49. By way of a contemporary example, the ongoing opposition to the erection of non-Jewish memorials at Auschwitz does not take into account that Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main killing center for Europe's Romanies, too, most of whom were Christian.

20. Maureen Johnson, "Gypsy Gold in the Vatican?" Associated Press news feature on America Online, December 4, 1997, p. 1.

21. Since this was written, The United Romani Educational Foundation, Inc., has been created in the United States with the purpose of creating a network of centers linking Europe, Australia and North and South America from which scholarships for qualifying Romanies would be disbursed and monitored. Funding to make this possible is to come from the funds originating with the Looted Swiss Assets, though the details of their ultimate distribution by the committee overseeing them have yet to be finalized. As of August 2003, we are still awaiting a decision.

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AFX Global Ethics Monitor, June 3rd, 2003

Swiss court dismisses Gypsies' Holocaust case against IBM; GENEVA (AFX-GEM) - A Swiss court has dismissed a case against US computer giant International Business Machines Corp which sought compensation from the firm on behalf of Gypsies persecuted during the Nazi era, IBM said.

Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action (GIRCA), an organization set up to help the Gypsies claim for moral damages, said it will launch an appeal against the ruling within 30 days.

GIRCA claims that IBM was complicit with Nazi torture since it supplied the regime with machines enabling the identification of Jews and Gypsies who were later killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Henri-Philippe Sambuc, a Geneva-based lawyer representing the organization was filing for the maximum compensation allowed under Swiss law, 100,000 Swiss francs (65,124 euros).

The First Instance Court in Geneva, Switzerland dismissed its case against IBM on the basis that it fell outside its jurisdiction. The court said IBM had only an "antenna" in Geneva.

A statement from GIRCA Tuesday contested the findings claiming that from 1936, IBM had a non-registered business-'International Business Machines Corporation New-York, European Headquarters'- from which it managed company activities in the territories occupied by the Nazis.

The court was still in the process of writing up the case and Judge Marquis, who presided over the hearing was not able to comment until the process was complete.

Roger Warner, a spokesman for IBM Europe told AFX Global Ethics Monitor: "We can confirm that the court ruling said the case was outside its jurisdiction but are unable to comment further at this stage for legal reasons."

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