The French cosmetics company L'Oréal profited from a house which had been confiscated from its Jewish owners when they were sent to their death in concentration camps during the second world war, it was claimed in the appeal court in Paris yesterday.
Edith Rosenfelder, the sole survivor, now 76, has embarked on a long legal battle for compensation from the company, which had its German headquarters on the site of her childhood home for more than 30 years.
The case is complicated by years of confusion, worsened by the frequent sale and resale of the property, but the family claims that L'Oréal is guilty of receiving stolen goods.
"L'Oréal know that the property was confiscated, and they know that the owners are still alive, Mrs Rosenfelder's daughter Monica Waitzfelder said.
"All the other businesses which took Jewish property have since returned it, without any great debate. I don't understand why L'Oréal should be any different from the others."
The battle has been waged by three generations of the Rosenfelder family. In 1937, as the Nazi persecution of Jews increased, the family abandoned its three-storey house in the German industrial city of Karlsruhe and fled to France.
Fritz Rosenfelder was forced to sell the house to a Nazi offi cial who ran an insurance company, BGV.
Ms Waitzfelder says that the proceeds of the sale, which amounted to only 12% of the 1936 value of the house, were never paid to her family.
The family was later deported. Edith Rosenfelder escaped but her mother died in Auschwitz in 1942 and her father died in a Red Cross camp in Switzerland in 1945.
The Jewish restitution legislation signed by the allies at the end of the war stated that even transactions which appeared to have been made with the owners' consent could be declared invalid.
The Rosenfelders' case centres on the argument that since the original sale was illegal, all subsequent sales were equally unlawful.
They stress that although a restitution payment was made in 1951 to the Jewish Restitution Successor Organisation, it was done without the family's knowledge and none of the 5,000 German marks paid by the insurance company BGV ever reached the family.
In 1954 BGV sold the property to an offshoot of L'Oréal, Haarfarben und Parfümerien GmbH - later L'Oréal Allemagne - which introduced the brand to the German market.
L'Oréal says it bought out the offshoot in 1961, and cannot be held responsible for transactions before then. The property was sold for DM5.3m in 1991. Yesterday the court began considering whether L'Oréal can be sued for compensation.