Cite as: 539 U. S. 396 (2003)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
concocted by insurers and ministerial officials," insurers satisfied property loss claims by paying the State only a fraction of their full value. G. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933-1945, p. 227 (2001); see Bazyler, supra, at 114; App. 27-28 (declaration of Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Assoc. Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center) ("There is documentary evidence that the insurance companies paid only one-half of the Jewish insurance proceeds to the Reich and kept the other half for themselves.").
The Court depicts Allied diplomacy after World War II as aimed in part at settling confiscated and unpaid insurance claims. Ante, at 403. But the multilateral negotiations that produced the Potsdam, Yalta, and like accords failed to achieve any global resolution of such claims. European insurers, encountering no official compulsion, were themselves scarcely inclined to settle claims; turning claimants away, they relied on the absence of formal documentation and other technical infirmities that legions of Holocaust survivors were in no position to remedy. See, e. g., Hearings on H. R. 2693 before the Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations of the House Committee on Government Reform, 107th Cong., 2d Sess., 14-15 (2002) (statement of Rep. Waxman) ("Some survivors were rejected because they could not produce death certificates for loved ones who perished in Nazi concentration camps. Other insurance companies took advantage of the fact that claimants had no policy documents to prove their policy existed."). For over five decades, untold Holocaust-era insurance claims went unpaid. Id., at 38 (statement of Leslie Tick, California Dept. of Insurance).
In the late 1990's, litigation in American courts provided a spur to action. See Bazyler, supra, at xi; Feldman, supra, at vii; Neuborne, Preliminary Reflections on Aspects of Holocaust-Era Litigation in American Courts, 80 Wash. U. L. Q. 795, 796 (2002). Holocaust survivors and their descendents initiated class-action suits against German and
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