'The situation has changed.'

A federal judge in Brooklyn approved one of the largest awards of a $50 billion restitution program to two families whose sugar factory was illegally sold to the Nazis by an unnamed Swiss bank.

The Bloch-Bauer and Pick families had set up a trust account with the bank to protect the refinery just eight days before the Nazis annexed Austria, where the refinery was located.

"Having marketed themselves to the Jews of Europe as a safe haven for their property," the decision said, "Swiss banks repeatedly turned Jewish-owned property over to Nazis in order to curry favor with them."

...

Mrs. Altmann's Los Angeles lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, is a grandson of Arnold Schoenberg, the Vienna-born composer, who was also a Jewish exile from Nazism. In the scheme of the wrongs of the Holocaust, he said after learning of yesterday's award, the theft of a sugar refinery near Vienna long ago was a small injustice.

"But now, 70 years later," Mr. Schoenberg said, "this is one of the few wrongs you can actually remedy."