IN THE largest single award against Swiss banks who betrayed their clients to the Nazis, a payment of $21.9 million (£11.6 million) to an elderly Los Angeles woman and a dozen relatives was approved by a US court, 65 years after their family’s fortune was stolen.

The award stemmed from a claim by a Holocaust survivor, Maria Altmann, 89, and about two dozen other, unnamed heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and Otto Pick, both big shareholders in one of Austria’s largest prewar sugar refineries.

It is the latest made out of a $1.25 billion fund created in 1998 after a consortium of Swiss banks settled a class- action lawsuit brought by thousands of Holocaust survivors whose accounts and businesses were transferred by Swiss financial institutions in an attempt to curry favour with the Nazis.

The victims and their families sued Credit Suisse Group, UBS AG and other banks, accusing them of stealing, concealing or sending the Nazis hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Jewish holdings and destroying millions of bank records.

Mrs Altmann’s case began in the dramatic days before the Nazi annexation of her native Austria, in March 1938. Eight days before the Anschluss, her uncle, Herr Bloch-Bauer, and Herr Pick, the patriarchs of two prominent Jewish Viennese families, raced to a Swiss bank in an attempt to protect their interest in the sugar refinery. They asked to transfer their shares to a bank in Zurich.

The bank, unnamed in yesterday’s ruling, guaranteed that the shares would not be sold without the families’ consent. But after family members were arrested or fled the country, the banks bowed to pressure to transfer the shares to a German investor in a Nazi campaign to steal Jewish-owned businesses, according to the Claims Resolution Tribunal in New York, which adjudicates each claim.

The tribunal wrote that the case demonstrated that “having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe as a haven for their property, Swiss banks turned Jewish-owned property over to the Nazis to curry favour with them”. No records of the Jewish shareholders’ deal with the bank were found in its files. Instead, the tribunal relied on documents provided by the heirs and independent archives.

“We will never know how many other examples of betrayal were buried in the records of the 2,757,950 accounts . . . the banks concede they have destroyed,” the tribunal wrote.

Mrs Altmann never realised that the banks had passed on her family’s fortune until her lawyer persuaded her to file a claim with the tribunal.

She said: “It’s like a beautiful fairytale. And an ugly one for the Swiss banks. I never dreamt there was so much money stolen from our family. It is unbelievable for me to grasp that there were people doing such things, and especially a bank.”

The previous highest individual award, of the $254 million awarded in total, was $4 million. The average amount has been $130,000.

In a separate matter, the US Supreme Court ruled last year that Mrs Altmann could sue the Austrian Government to retrieve $150 million worth of family paintings stolen by the Nazis, including six by Gustav Klimt. The parties were in mediation this week over the Klimt paintings, which hang in the Austrian Gallery. One is a portrait of Mrs Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer. Austria, backed by the US Government, argued unsuccessfully that it was immune under a federal law blocking most lawsuits against foreign governments.

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