For more than forty years he played a leading role in efforts to obtain compensation for Jews and Roma (Gypsies) who had been persecuted, maltreated and robbed of their possessions by the Nazis.
[2] Benjamin Ferencz, the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trials, wrote in his book "Less than Slaves (1979) that Kurt May, with whom Ferencz had worked on behalf of Holocaust victims, had also been one of the driving forces in efforts to obtain compensation for former Jewish slave laborers who had been forced to work under horrendous and often fatal conditions at I.G.
Farben was the privately-owned German chemicals conglomerate allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews in the Holocaust.
The Daily Telegraph wrote in its obituary (June 1, 1992) "Kurt May was engaged in an historic act of redress and helped tens of thousands to rebuild their lives."
He conducted his work with a passion for justice, an unshakable belief in the right to demand the redress for wrongs and always maintained the greatest degree of dignity in the pursuit of this cause."
The Times of London added (June 3, 1992): "As a young man Kurt May had been strikingly handsome, and he retained his looks in old age, along with an uncomplicated sense of humour and much of the stamina that had once made him an outstanding tennis player.