In the latest front of Holocaust-related litigation, a federal class-action suit was filed Wednesday on behalf of survivors of Nazi death camps, alleging that Bayer AG, the giant German-owned chemical and pharmaceutical company, participated in cruel medical experiments by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.
The suit, filed by a group of lawyers already involved in a spate of other Holocaust-related litigation, alleges that Bayer "monitored and supervised those experiments, and used them as a form of research and development for its corporate benefit."
The suit would open a new front in the rapidly growing field of Holocaust-related lawsuits. Existing suits have alleged that companies profited indirectly from Nazi actions--banks that allegedly hid assets stolen from victims, for example. Other suits have alleged that major German companies, including Daimler-Chrysler, Volkswagen, BMW and Siemens, used slave labor drafted from concentration camps--something that Bayer has admitted.
But the current suit is the first to directly allege a company's active involvement in some of the Nazis' most horrifying war crimes.
At the time of his death in Brazil in 1979, Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, was considered the worst Nazi war criminal to have evaded postwar trials.
Attempts to obtain comment from Bayer AG, which is headquartered in Germany and is the parent company of Bayer Corp., based in Pittsburgh, were unsuccessful.
On Tuesday, Bayer AG was among a group of a dozen German companies that said they would participate in a $1.7-billion fund to compensate individuals who had been used as slave labor and forced labor during World War II.
The plan was announced by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who said a primary role of the fund was "to counter lawsuits, particularly class-action lawsuits, and to remove the basis of the campaign being led against German industry and our country."
The announcement of the new suit, however, is yet another sign that Holocaust suits are unlikely to end any time soon. Indeed, the litigation is likely to go well "into the new millennium," said Michael Bayzler, a professor of international law at Whittier Law School, who has been studying the suits.
"The floodgates of litigation have opened," Bayzler said. The named plaintiff in the new suit, filed in federal court in Indiana, is Eva Mozes Kor, one of 1,500 sets of twins subjected to grotesque experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
