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. Walter J. Levy was married to Augusta (1918–1981), née Sondheimer, as of April 1942. The couple had two children, Robert Allen and Susan Clementine. Studies Levi studied economics and law in Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, Heidelberg (1929–1930), Berlin (1930–1931), and Kiel (1931–1932). In Kiel he was awarded a doctorate in law in 1933. Exile in Great Britain As a result of the Nazi seizure of power and the ensuing anti-Semitic laws and measures, Levy went into exile in Britain in 1933. He found employment with the Petroleum Press Bureau, which began publishing the Petroleum Press Serivce in 1934, a multilingual trade journal. Levy took up the study of statistics and wrote a book on oil in war, which attracted the attention of British economic officials, whom he subsequently provided with specialized information. After the start of World War II, he initially worked for the British Minister of Economic Warfare, but was then interned as an Enemy alien. Oil expert in the USA Levy emigrated to the United States in 1941 and settled in New York City. There he first worked as a petroleum journalist for Fortune. 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. He was subsequently responsible for petroleum research at the U.S. State Department before moving to the Economic Cooperation Administration, which administered Marshall Plan funds. Levy founded the consulting firm W. J. Levy Consultants Corp. in New York in 1949. His clients included oil industry companies and numerous governments, government officials, and agencies, including those