New York – In a bizarre mixup, Swiss bank money belonging to a wealthy New York philanthropist who survived the Holocaust was apparently awarded to the wrong family.
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The Holocaust Claims Resolution Tribunal paid about $120,000 to survivors of Hans Leipziger, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
But relatives of Henry Leir – who avoided the death camps by fleeing to the United States in around 1939 – say the money is theirs.
“Something is wrong here, and they are corrupt,” said Arnon Dauber, 35, a Tel Aviv man who says he’s a distant relative of Leir, a Jewish businessman who amassed a huge fortune in metals and mining and died in 1998.
It appears to be a case of mistaken identity. Leir was born in Germany in 1900 with the name Hans Leipziger. The Hans Leipziger who died in the Holocaust was born in 1905 in either Poland or Germany. [nypost]