430
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
Justice Ginsburg, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Scalia, and Justice Thomas join, dissenting.
Responding to Holocaust victims' and their descendents' long-frustrated efforts to collect unpaid insurance proceeds, California's Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act of 1999 (HVIRA), Cal. Ins. Code Ann. § 13800 et seq. (West Cum. Supp. 2003), requires insurance companies operating in the State to disclose certain information about insurance policies they or their affiliates wrote in Europe between 1920 and 1945. In recent years, the Executive Branch of the Federal Government has become more visible in this area, undertaking foreign policy initiatives aimed at resolving Holocaust-era insurance claims. Although the federal approach differs from California's, no executive agreement or other formal expression of foreign policy disapproves state disclosure laws like the HVIRA. Absent a clear statement aimed at disclosure requirements by the "one voice" to which courts properly defer in matters of foreign affairs, I would leave intact California's enactment.
I
As the Court observes, ante, at 401-402, and n. 1, the Nazi regimentation of inhumanity we characterize as the Holocaust, marked most horrifically by genocide and enslavement, also entailed widespread destruction, confiscation, and theft of property belonging to Jews. For insurance policies issued in Germany and other countries under Nazi control, historical evidence bears out, the combined forces of the German Government and the insurance industry engaged in larcenous takings of gigantic proportions. For example, insurance policies covered many of the Jewish homes and businesses destroyed in the state-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht. By order of the Nazi regime, claims arising out of the officially enabled destruction were made payable not to the insured parties, but to the State. M. Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts 114 (2003). In what one historian called a "charade
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