SEATTLE - A group of Polish World War II slave laborers filed a proposed class-action lawsuit today against dozens of German multi-national corporations, claiming the companies illegally profited from the use of Nazi slave labor drawn from Poland during the war.

If approved by the United States District Court of Central California, the suit would represent potentially hundreds of thousands of survivors, as well as their heirs. The suit is believed to be the first to specifically represent former slave laborers from Poland.

According to Steve Berman, the Seattle attorney who filed the class action suit, Polish citizens were considered by the Nazis to be an inferior, subhuman race, and were categorically forced to work as slave laborers for a number of German companies. Hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners were forced to wear a yellow badge with a violet "P" on it, imprisoned in barbed wire-encircled camps, starved and forced to labor for the German companies.

"These German multi-nationals fully cooperated with the Nazis to exploit and profit from the forced labor of these innocent citizens taken from Poland," Berman says. "Polish citizens were forced to work under brutal and intolerable conditions, while the companies they worked for prospered. As if that wasn't enough, these Polish prisoners were not only brutalized by the the Nazis, but the defendants' employees as well," he added.

According to the suit, by 1944 the defendants and other German companies in cooperation with the Nazis, had forced over 1.6 million Poles to work at their plants under intolerable conditions.

The named plaintiffs in the suit include Polish born citizens Ryszard Staniszewski, Eugeniusz Konecki, Danuta Krzyzanowska and several others, all of whom are now permanent residents of the United Kingdom.

The suit names numerous defendants including Bayer Corporation, Daimler Chrysler Corporation, Daimler Chrysler AG, Thyssen Krupp AG, Krupp USA, Inc., Siemens AG, Siemens Corporation and German Doe Corporations 1-100.

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About Hagens Berman
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP is a consumer-rights class-action law firm with offices in nine cities. The firm has been named to the National Law Journal’s Plaintiffs’ Hot List seven times. More about the law firm and its successes can be found at www.hbsslaw.com. Follow the firm for updates and news at@ClassActionLaw.

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