SKOPJE, Macedonia, April 19 (UPI) -- It is an irony of history that the struggle of the Sudeten Germans is greatly aided by the recent successful settlement of claims of -- mostly Jewish -- holocaust victims.
U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 562 dated Oct. 13, 1998 -- in support of these claims -- calls upon "countries which have not already done so to return wrongfully expropriated properties to their rightful owners or, when actual return is not possible, to pay prompt, just and effective compensation, in accordance with principles of justice ... to remove restrictions which limit restitution or compensation ...to persons who reside in or are citizens of the country..."
As early as 1952, West Germany enacted the Federal Indemnification Law (BEG). Other laws aimed at compensating the victims of the holocaust followed in 1953, 1956, and 1965. Austria has similar legislation on its books. But, contrary to popular mythology, these laws were shamefully stingy and heartless. They have mostly lapsed now. Survivors were given small monthly sums to amortize health care and medical costs. Eligibility criteria were so strict and application procedures so convoluted that a cottage industry of restitution lawyers and advisors has sprung up.
Some victims still receive monthly allowances from the German social security fund. The slave labor of a few workers is even recognized for the purpose of accumulating pension benefits. A tiny group of mothers receive symbolic child rearing benefits. The State of Israel support the vast majority of these crippled and traumatized people from funds it allocates under its Invalids and Nazi Prosecution Law.
Despite the fact that the holocaust occurred mainly in central and Eastern Europe, holocaust survivors behind the iron curtain were ineligible for German compensation. A "Hardship Fund" was set up in 1980 and paid 5,000 deutschemarks each to 180,000 claimants from these countries. But Jews residing in the region are still not eligible to any other kind of aid -- 13 years after the downfall of communism.
In response to repeated complaints, the German government has set up a Central and East European Fund (CEEF). It pledged to contribute to CEEF $180 million in 4 annual installments starting in 1999. By end 2001, the Fund has paid about $150 million to more than 17,000 survivors, with maximum monthly benefits of $120.
All told, the Germans allocated $220 million to victims from Poland and less than $470 million to survivors from Russia and Ukraine combined. More than 4.5 million people perished in these three countries -- exterminated in camps such as Auschwitz. At least 10,000,000 people served as slave laborers between 1933-1945, enriching a clutch of German firms and senior Nazis in the process. About 2,000,000 of them are still alive.
It took decades of negotiations -- and a re-unified Germany -- to secure funds for formerly ineligible survivors. The Article 2 Fund was established in 1993. The very few who fulfill the myriad, cumulative, conditions, receive less than $250 a month. Germany claims that since it has provided 12 west European governments with "global compensation" funds between 1959 and 1964, their subjects are not eligible either.
Austria set up its compensation fund in 1995, conveniently well after most of the victims died. The maximum indemnity Austria pays is $6,000 per person. In a typically cynical fashion, Austria auctioned off art looted from the Jews in 1996 and used the proceeds to compensate the victimized former owners through its Mauerbach Fund.
The governments of formerly Nazi-occupied territories proved sometimes to be more generous than the perpetrators of Nazism. Denmark and the Netherlands financially support disabled victims to this very day. Norway established in 1999 a $58 million fund for its few remaining Jews. Even Switzerland founded, in 1997, Shoa -- a $183 million fund for 310,000 Needy Victims of the Holocaust.
The corporate and banking sectors were next.
Following intensive public pressure by Jewish organizations -- and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic backlash -- funds to compensate slave laborers were set up by various firms (Siemens, Volkswagen). Allianz, BASF, Bayer, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bank, Degussa-Hüls, Dresdner Bank, FrieDrive Krupp, Hoesch-Krupp, Hoechst, Siemens and Volkswagen and 50 other wartime exploiters -- boosted by matching funds from the German federal authorities -- grudgingly and reluctantly formed a "Foundation Initiative of German Firms: Memory, Responsibility and Future." The Foundation has $5 billion to distribute to slave laborers and their descendants.
In August 1998, Switzerland's two major banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, agreed to set up a $1.25 billion fund to settle claims by holocaust survivors and their relatives. The red-faced Swiss government threw in $210 million. It seems that banks, from the United States to Switzerland, were in no hurry to find the heirs to the murdered Jewish owners of dormant account with billions of dollars in them.
A settlement was reached only when legal action was threatened against the Swiss National Bank and both public opinion and lawmakers in the USA turned against Switzerland. It covers owners of dormant accounts, slave laborers, and 24,000 refugees turned back to certain death at the Swiss border -- or their heirs.
A high level international commission, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, identified 54,000 accounts opened by holocaust victims -- not before it inspected 350,000 accounts at an outlandish cost, borne by the infuriated banks, of $400 million. A similar, though much smaller ($45 million) settlement was reached with Bank Austria and Creditanstalt of Vienna. Another $2 billion is claimed from 9 French banks.
Five major insurance firms -- Allianz AG, AXA, Generali, Zurich and Winterthur Leben -- formed an International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance to deal with unresolved insurance claims of holocaust victims. Assicurazioni Generali went ahead and set aside $12 million in a compensation fund. But the claims may total $1 to 4 billion.
Surprisingly, calls for the restitution of Jewish real estate, property, bank accounts, insurance policies, and art works confiscated by the Nazis and their collaborators are fairly recent. The International Committee on Restitution took until 1999 to appeal to the Austrian government to restore assets to their rightful Jewish owners.
Governments from Austria to France and from Belgium to the Netherlands appointed commissions to investigate Jewish claims. The United Kingdom has posted to the Internet a list of tens of thousands of assets confiscated -- mostly from refugee Jews -- under the 1939 Trading with the Enemy law.
More than $60 million were set aside by 18 governments in the 1997 London conference on Nazi gold. A French commission, chaired by Jean Matteoli, a resistance fighter, identified $1 billion in expropriated Jewish property, including 40,000 apartments and hundreds of thousands of works of art.
According to the World Jewish Congress, Germany and Poland confiscated $3 billion of Jewish property each (in 1945 values), Romania and France $1 billion each and the Czech Republic and Austria about $700 million each. Hungary saw $600 million appropriated and the Netherlands $450 million. Russia still holds 200,000 looted works of art. Plundered pieces by Monet and van Gogh, among others, were identified and restored to their Jewish owners all over the world, from Boston to Berlin.
Matters are more complicated in Eastern Europe where the concept of property rights is novel and communist confiscations followed Nazi ones, hopelessly complicating the legal situation. Moreover, victims and survivors of waves of ethnic cleansing have recently lodged claims with post-communist governments. Macedonians from the Aegean part of Greece, recently repatriated Kosovars, Serbs expelled from Croatia, Croats exiled from Serbia, Hungarians everywhere -- are all studying the Jewish example and its precedents thoroughly.
The Bulgarian ministry of finance has just announced that it will pay reparations to some of the 350,000 Turks forcibly expelled from Bulgaria to Turkey during Todor Zhivkov's communist regime in 1984-89. The Haskovo City Council demanded compensation for 550 bulldozed houses. The government -- which includes in its coalition the ethnic-Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) -- agreed to cough up the funds. The accommodation of such demands for compensation by an ethnic minority is unprecedented. It could be the harbinger of massive, politically destabilizing, claims, expensive court battles, and multi-billion dollar settlements.
This tidal wave is not confined to Europe. Aborigines in Australia, descendents of slaves in the States, Japanese-Americans incarcerated during WWII are all suing. Extraordinarily, so are descendents of African American slaves liberated in the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65.
"The Economist" wrote in its review of Elazar Barkan's "The Guilt of Nations": "Negotiations over these claims are not really about the past, but the future. However they are resolved, they give victims, usually the poor and dispossessed, a voice and a reason to believe that they have a stake in their society. And such negotiations force the better off to recognize their obligations to those beneath them in the pecking order. A society which can face the ugly episodes in its own history, and agree a way to repudiate them, is also a society capable of setting moral standards for itself, of constraining its own worst instincts, and of aspiring to a better future."
