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Brooklyn Law School professor, author and FindLaw columnist Anthony J. Sebok joined Law Chat, Wednesday, March 14, 2001, to talk about the recent lawsuit against IBM that claims the company aided the Holocaust and about the recently published book that makes similar allegations. Law Chat is produced with FindLaw. CNN.com provided a typist for Sebok. The following is an edited transcript of the chat.

CNN Host: Thank you for joining us today, Anthony Sebok.

Anthony Sebok: Thank you very much for having me.

CNN Host: Explain the lawsuit against IBM. Who is suing, for how much, what is the company accused of doing?

Anthony Sebok: The lawsuit is a class action with five representative plaintiffs, some living in the United States and some in Europe. All are Holocaust survivors suing under a special cause of action called the Alien Tort Claims Act. They are suing for damages and injunctive relief flowing from IBM's involvement with Nazi Germany's prosecution of the Holocaust.

They have very specific argument as to what that involvement is. Their argument is that the historical record shows IBM was not merely connected with the Nazi government, but in a very unusual way, and acted so closely with the Nazis that the company's relationship was identical to that of certain German businessmen who were prosecuted after World War II for war crimes.

Question from Chat Room: Are any of the people that where responsible still alive?

Anthony Sebok: I doubt it. I don't know for sure, but the lawsuit is not dependent on that. It depends on identifying IBM's corporate conduct. IBM could still be liable even if the persons involved are not still alive.

Question from Chat Room: Is there a statute of limitations here?

Anthony Sebok: Yes. There is a statute of limitations. Under the Alien Tort Claims Act, depending on the specific tort alleged, the statute of limitations may be as short as one year or as long as 30 years. In any event, the plaintiffs recognize that they have a statute of limitations problem. They have already indicated that they will get around it by arguing that intentional acts of concealment by IBM has prevented the victims from bringing this claim until now.

Question from Chat Room: Where is this case filed? In the U.S.A. or Germany?

Anthony Sebok: It is filed in Brooklyn, New York.

Question from Chat Room: While it seems there is no doubt that IBM hardware was used by the Nazis, what is the evidence that IBM had any idea of the uses to which they were putting that hardware?

Anthony Sebok: The evidence has been around for a while, and a book was just published by Edwin Black, "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" (February 2001), that suggests many bits of circumstantial evidence leading to the conclusion that IBM was more than a passive bystander.

The gist of the claim is that IBM knew through its American employees about the specific racial categories that the census of 1933, 1937 and 1939 would be used for. And that after 1940 (late 1940) when IBM in the United States lost control over IBM in Germany, that IBM in the United States maintained and aggressively pursued contacts with the German subsidiary throughout the war even though America and Germany were enemies.

Question from Chat Room: How is this different than the claim by some black Americans demanding restitution for slavery?

Anthony Sebok: The claim by African-Americans for restitution would be similar if made against American corporations. And I know that there currently is talk of lawsuits against existing American corporations who have benefited from slavery, even though slavery ended over 100 years ago. It is different to the extent that one wants to draw a distinction between the 19th and 20th century and between chattel slavery and racial extermination.

Question from Chat Room: What evidence has caused this all of a sudden to come into the limelight?

Anthony Sebok: The publication of a book, "IBM and the Holocaust," published almost the same day the lawsuit was filed. The book collects together information that was available to the public, but probably not pulled together in one place or along a single argument.

The author has not uncovered a secret new source of information. Rather the author uses information any one of us could have looked at. And I would observe three things:

(1) Much of the information was provided by IBM itself when it gave archival info to most universities.

(2) The lawsuit seems to be directed at forcing IBM to provide more information, but there is no hard evidence there is any more information IBM is withholding.

(3) Finally, if it is true that all this book does is organize publicly available information, then the argument concerning statute of limitations (described earlier) is weak.

CNN Host: How does this lawsuit relate to the legal efforts to obtain compensation for Nazi-era slave laborers?

Anthony Sebok: There is a very close connection in at least one respect. It is that one of the lawyers in one of the law firms behind the lawsuit against IBM, Michael Hausfeld, is one of the major figures in the class action suit against various German banks and corporations and Swiss and Austrian institutions. There we see the people involved are similar, and it makes perfect sense.

The connection is interesting. The slave labor claim is for lost property, literally, the theft of labor. And the claim against IBM is for a war crime. It is for a crime against humanity. And it is for the murder and torture of people.

And while it is easy to lump everything together because of the word Holocaust, one should not lose sight of the technical foundations of the claims. They are very different. On another level, from the perspective of German companies, Mr. Hausfeld is pursuing a very similar set of concerns with the IBM suit that he pursued with the slave labor suit.

The companies point out that Hausfeld and his colleagues are reopening the question of compensation for the Third Reich's actions, 50 years later, because they cannot pursue the real villain, which is the German government. And the German corporations feel that they are being used as a second-best solution to a problem that was badly handled by the Allies after the end of the war.

CNN Host: Have other corporations been sued as IBM is being sued? If so, how is the IBM case different?

Anthony Sebok: I do not know of any lawsuit specifically based on the Alien Tort Claims Act for crimes against humanity, against an American corporation. I do know that the slave labor lawsuits did include American corporations such as Ford. Those claims, however, were for unjust enrichment.

Question from Chat Room: Why did it take this long for this to become public?

Anthony Sebok: The information has always been available to the public, or at least within recent history. There were very well-documented investigations by the FBI and the Treasury Department of IBM's connections with the Nazi regime during the war. These investigations took place during and after the war. IBM certainly was not the only American company that came under suspicion. People might be forgetting that trading with the enemy was a constant concern of both the government and popular culture through the 1940s.

I think that what is interesting about today's concern is how the conduct that we are discussing has been reinterpreted so that no longer are we asking the question, "Did IBM commit treason against the United States?" but, "Did IBM commit a crime against humanity, against the victims of the Holocaust?"

So my guess is the reason why there is a lawsuit in 2001, the reason why there is a CNN chat in 2001 about IBM, is because in the last 10 years there is a renewed interest in asking about who is responsible for the Holocaust. Nobody feels similarly concerned about asking who was responsible for World War II. And let me explain why I say that.

I found that the most interesting part of the book by Edwin Black just published was not his overt argument about IBM and the victims of the Holocaust, but rather something that he did not explicitly raise, but which is woven throughout his footnotes and his various chapters. It is that whatever IBM's machines allowed the German census bureau to do, IBM's data processing machines were much more directly connected to the German war ministry. And directly connected to the strength of the German military forces, who were fighting first the French and English, but ultimately, Americans.

CNN Host: Do you have any final thoughts to share with us today?

Anthony Sebok: Yes. As I mentioned in my column on FindLaw, I am skeptical of a legal case against IBM, but I found looking at these pieces of information that the story of IBM in Germany is a very sobering one. This is because my sense of what happened is that IBM as a corporation did not wish for the horrible outcomes that came from its active engagement with Germany, but that the company was driven by a fear of losing global market power for its technology.

And that is a motivation which many people and many corporations can experience and can lose sense of perspective as a result of. So I think the book and story make a very useful tale for our modern times about the way the desire to build a company can lead to a certain moral blindness.

CNN Host: Thank you for joining us today.

Anthony Sebok: Thank you. I enjoyed it.