Walter J. Levy

Walter James Levy (21 March 1911, Altona – 10 December 1997 in New York City ) was a German-American lawyer and expert on oil issues. He advised numerous companies and governments.

Family Walter was the son of the Jewish couple Moses Levi and Betty Lindenberger; he had two older and one younger sister. His father worked as a lawyer and died in March 1938. His sisters survived the Holocaust; his mother was deported to the Auschwitz death camp in July 1942. The couple had two children, Robert Allen and Susan Clementine. at the University of Freiburg, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Heidelberg University (1929–1930), the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (1930–1931), and Kiel University (1931–1932). At Kiel University, he was awarded a doctorate in law in 1933. He found employment with the Petroleum Press Bureau, which began publishing the Petroleum Press Service in 1934, a multilingual trade journal. Levy took up the study of statistics From 1942, at the request of William J. Donovan, he was an employee of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. There, as a section chief in the Enemy Oil Committee, he was particularly concerned with German petroleum deposits, oil supply routes, refineries, and plants for the synthetic production of fuel (→ coal liquefaction) in order to identify targets for air attack. Studying reports of altered freight rates in publicly available German railroad journals helped him encircle appropriate targets. and the Federal Republic of Germany. The United Nations and the European Economic Community were also among his clients.

He retired in the mid-1980s. He also published a number of essays, notably in Foreign Affairs. He was also a guest on well-known programs and broadcasters, such as Meet the Press (1973, 1979 and 1980), This Week with David Brinkley (1982), and the BBC (1980). The New York Times called him the "dean of oil consultants" in 1969,

Honors In 1947, he was awarded the President's Certificate of Merit for his service in World War II. In 1979, the Federal Republic of Germany honored him with the Great Cross of Merit.

Archival material Legacies of Levy's consulting work are archived as the Walter J. Levy Papers, 1911–1998 in the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

Literature Levy, Walter James. In: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss, Dieter Marc Schneider, Louise Forsyth: Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933–1945. Vol. 1: Politik, Wirtschaft, Öffentliches Leben. De Gruyter, Berlin 1980, p. 439.