''A Mutual Responsibility and a Moral Obligation'': The Final Report on Germany's Compensation Programs for Forced Labor and Other Personal Injuries

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“A Mutual Responsibility and a Moral Obligation”

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“A Mutual Responsibility and a Moral Obligation” The Final Report on Germany’s Compensation Programs for Forced Labor and other Personal Injuries Edited by Michael Jansen and Günter Saathoff on behalf of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

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Contents Foreword and Prefaces Preface by the Editors to the English edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Foreword by President Horst Köhler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lutz Niethammer From Forced Labor in Nazi Germany to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” . . . . . . . . . .

7 11 13

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I. From work-motivated migration to racism and extermination . . . . . . . . . . II. Postponement and return of the compensation question . . . . . . . . . . . . . III. Establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

18 36 48

Michael Jansen, Günter Saathoff, Kai Hennig Final Report on the Compensation Programs Carried Out by the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

87

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I. An Overview of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 II. The payment program for forced laborers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 III. Other personal injuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 IV. Property claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 V. Insurance claims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 VI. Humanitarian funds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 VII. Financial management in the Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 VIII. Conclusion of payment program for forced labor, insurance losses and “other personal injuries” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 IX. Use of residual funds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 X. The Remembrance and Future Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

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Philomena Franz (Juri Durkot) . . . . . . Vladimir Naumov (Alexander Sosnowski) Yefim Gorin (Sabine Brandes) . . . . . . . Karl Pajuk (Vera von Wolffersdorff) . . . . Marian Siewiera (Gabriele Lesser) . . . . .

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Annex Statement by Federal President Johannes Rau concerning the agreement on the level of Foundation funding for compensation of the victims of forced labor, issued on December 17, 1999, in Bellevue Palace, Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 The Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Announcement of the German-American Agreement concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Statistics 1. Statistics on the Funding Ceilings Defined by the Foundation Establishment Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Statistics on the Payments to Former Forced Laborers and their Legal Heirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Statistics on the Payments to Former Forced Laborers and their Legal Heirs by Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Statistics on Payments Within the Ceiling for “Other Personal Injury” . 5. Statistics on the Payments for Property Claims by Country . . . . . . . 6. Statistics on Compensation for Holocaust-Era Life Insurance Policies .

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212 222 223 224

Members of the Board of Trustees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Members of the Foundation’s Board of Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Partner organizations and other organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Photography Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

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Contents

Preface by the Editors to the English edition

It was not until the year 2000 that Nazi-era forced laborers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, first received compensation payments from the Federal Republic of Germany for work they performed under the harshest of conditions and for the injustice inflicted upon them by the Nazis. This situation changed with the conclusion of the international negotiations held from 1998 to 2000 under American and German auspices and the founding of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” This publication begins with an introductory essay outlining the historical dimension of forced labor performed in the Third Reich both for institutions of the Nazi state and for private German companies and households. Moreover, the essay documents the conflict-laden international debate leading up to the establishment of the Foundation. It is clear that the Foundation would not have taken the shape it has nor been endowed with the financial base provided (then valued at 10 billion German marks or 5.1 billion euros) without the class-action suits filed in the U.S. against large German companies and without the cooperation between the German and U.S. administrations. For this work, we were able to enlist the services of renowned German historian and noted forced labor specialist Professor Dr. Lutz Niethammer to depict the chain of events that led up to Preface by the Editors

the establishment of the Foundation. The German government asked Professor Niethammer in 1998 to develop a concept for the Foundation. This concept would form the initial basis for the subsequent international negotiations. One half of the Foundation’s capital assets were provided by the German government while the other half was paid by German business. The establishment of the Foundation and the associated U.S.-German Executive Agreement simultaneously served to protect German companies in the U.S. against further legal action. An essential part of this book is the report on the complex process of implementing the Foundation’s mission of distributing the payments mandated by the agreement to surviving forced laborers and other victims of Nazi injustice in nearly 100 countries around the world. Given the age of the victims, this was truly a “race against time.” Such an extensive and international program to pay out compensation to victims of Nazi injustice had never been realized before. This work would not have been possible without the cooperation that existed among the Foundation, the seven international partner organizations and the likewise multinational Board of Trustees. The board membership included not only U.S. government representatives, German politicians, and an American lawyer for the 7

victims but also representatives of those countries that had suffered the most under German occupation and Nazi forced labor (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic and Belarus) as well as representatives of victims’ associations and of the State of Israel, which was founded after the war. The Foundation and the partner organizations were successful in gathering and processing the claims, verifying the entitlements and finally paying out compensation to more than 1.66 million surviving forced laborers and other Nazi victims, all within a period of six years. During this time, tens of thousands of further Nazi victims who had suffered property losses, health damage caused by criminal human experiments, or “insurance losses” also received the financial payments provided for in the Foundation Establishment Act. The report also describes the special fund created by the Foundation Establishment Act to bring humanitarian and medical aid to tens of thousands of especially needy Jewish, Sinti, and Roma victims of Nazism. The Foundation’s payment programs for Nazi victims—for forced laborers as well as for victims of insurance and property loss—were formally concluded in 2007 by resolution of the international Board of Trustees and with the consent of all representatives from the participating countries. All the funds were paid out to the beneficiaries or, where residual moneys existed, used by the seven partner organizations to pay for humanitarian and medical programs to help Nazi-era victims. The Board of Directors decided to present a final report on the Foundation’s compensation programs that would contain a description of the legal and practical problems that occurred along the way and that would be written for consumption by a wider public. After publication in German in 2007 this report is now being presented 8

in English translation. It is consciously aimed at an international public, given that the majority of the forced laborers in question came from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the survivors today live either in those countries or in Israel, America, Asia or Australia. Something else that speaks in favor of publishing this report in English is the fact that most of the lawsuits against German companies, which generated such a strong impetus for the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and its compensation programs, were filed in the United States and evoked a great deal of interest there. To illustrate the various aspects of the issues involved, this volume contains representative personal portraits of former forced laborers as well as an extensive appendix documenting, among other things, relevant international agreements and a verbatim document of the act that grew out of the international negotiations to establish the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” The interested reader is given a detailed report which clearly illustrates that the evolution and work of the Foundation served as a political “lesson” in dealing with historical injustice, despite the fact that this lesson was not learned until many years following the events of World War II. The Foundation will in future continue to learn the lessons of history. The parties that established the Foundation, the German parliament and the U.S. government, had already in 2000 decided that the Foundation should continue to operate even after all compensation programs have been concluded. It will primarily function as a “promotional foundation,” supporting international projects aimed at preserving the memory of Nazi injustice for current and future generations, at promoting inPreface by the Editors

ternational understanding and at fostering democracy and human rights. The section of the report on the payment programs was compiled with the assistance of the members of our academic research staff. The Board of Directors would like to thank all those who contributed to the completion of specific chapters of the report. The individual contributions to this publication fall under the editorial responsibility of the respective authors. The copyright situation regarding the representative portraits and photos reproduced here can be taken from the picture credits.

Preface by the Editors

In December 1999, the former German president Johannes Rau declared publicly his satisfaction with the agreement reached through international negotiations to settle compensation payments to former forced and slave laborers. He labelled this project a commitment to “a mutual responsibility and a moral obligation” of the German government and the German industry that derived from the wrongs that were perpetrated by the Nazi Regime. We chose this expression as the title for this publication. Johannes Rau’s declaration is printed in its entirety in the Annex (p. 173). Dr. Michael Jansen Günter Saathoff Berlin, autumn 2008

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Foreword by President Horst Köhler

On December 17, 1999, a final agreement was reached in Berlin on the amount of money to be provided for compensation payments to persons still living who were exploited as forced laborers by the Nazi regime. The special nature of this agreement as well as its considerable moral and political significance were reflected in a statement made here at the Presidential Palace by my predecessor, Johannes Rau. In this internationally noted statement he expressed his gratitude and relief that an agreement of this kind had finally been reached, so many decades after the end of the Second World War. At the same time, he made it clear that everyone who was involved in the Industry Foundation Initiative, on behalf of the German government or on behalf of German industry, had accepted the mutual responsibility and moral obligation that derive from the wrongs that were perpetrated by the Nazi regime during the war. He asked for forgiveness in the name of the German people. Today I can express my own gratitude and relief at the fact that the Foundation has successfully completed the task it set for itself seven years ago, a relatively short period of time, when you stop to consider the number of persons that were involved. Financial compensation was made

Foreword by President Horst Köhler

to more than 1.66 million surviving victims of the Nazi regime in the course of this program. This is an outcome we have every reason to be pleased with. The unanimous support provided for the Foundation Establishment Act by the various political parties represented in parliament as well as voluntary and equal contributions from industry and from the government for the financial endowment of the Foundation constituted an initiative that was quite unprecedented. At the same time, it was an initiative in bitter need of being undertaken with a view to promoting peace and reconciliation. There is no way that the wrongs these people suffered in the past can actually be made up for. The victims of these crimes cannot simply be “indemnified.” But the payments the Foundation made helped to promote public recognition that this wrongdoing was indeed criminal and that responsibility for it needed to be expressed in tangible financial terms. I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the successful work done by the Foundation. They took on a difficult task imposed on us by our past. In completing this task they have opened the door to a positive path that will bring us all closer together in the future. Berlin, April 2007

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Preface by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” report being presented here, to the German public, and to the international community as a whole, in connection with the completion of compensation payments to persons, still living, who worked as slave and forced laborers for the Nazi regime, impressively documents how the German government and German industry, in a joint effort, succeeded in living up to their historical and moral responsibility to address a chapter of the Nazi past that was still open and unresolved. Victims who had been taken from their native countries and forced to work in concentration camps or other detention centers, or for publicly or privately owned companies, often under very poor conditions, had to wait more than fifty years after the end of the Second World War for recognition of the wrongs that were done to them. The establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” in response to this challenge constitutes an entirely new approach, unprecedented in German history. The uniqueness of the solution that was found is reflected in the composition of the Foundation’s twenty-seven member Board of Trustees, the work of which it has been my privilege to help direct and shape as chairman since its constituent meeting in September 2000. Preface, Chairman Board of Trustees

Germany’s legislative and executive branches of government, German industry, the governments of the seven countries where most of the surviving victims live, as well as a number of international organizations are represented on the Board of Trustees. As such, it has become part of the complex fabric of transatlantic relations, the relationships we have with our Central and Eastern European neighbors and Russia, as well as with the State of Israel and the Jewish world as a whole. The Board of Trustees saw itself as an institution charged with the duty of finding mutually acceptable solutions to a series of practical problems. This had to be done on the basis of international cooperation, in continuation of the negotiations that had originally led to the establishment of the Foundation. In the Foundation Establishment Act lawmakers consciously avoided regulating every detail and, instead, chose to concede extensive decision-making powers to the Board of Trustees in its role as supervisory body. In the course of the work it has done over the past seven years the Board of Trustees has made constructive use of these powers. It has addressed all issues with great prudence and sensitivity, but also openly and with a sense of the practicable. It was not always easy to arrive at adequate solutions to the complex problems we were faced with. However, the fact that in many 13

cases decisions made were based on unanimous votes, is testimony to the successful nature of this cooperation and the level of mutual understanding achieved. As the focus of the Foundation’s work shifts to project funding we hope that the positive experience we have accumulated on the Board of Trustees as a result of our international composition and the opportunities we have had to exchange views with one another will continues to be of benefit to us. The goals we have set for ourselves with the “Remembrance and Future” Fund are transboundary in nature. Our objective is to establish relationships and promote cooperation based on partnership between people in Germany and in the countries

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that suffered most under the Nazi regime, or where large numbers of victims of Nazi crimes and their descendents live today. I would like to thank the Board of Trustees, the Board of Directors, and all the Foundation staff for seven successful years in which we worked in the interest of former slave and forced laborers. A humanitarian gesture was made in recognition of their misfortune. The further work of the Foundation is intended to keep the memory of the wrongs that were perpetrated alive in future generations. Combined with this is the task of drawing conclusions from the past for the present and the future and helping to see to it that a grief-filled era of history cannot repeat itself. Dr. Dieter Kastrup

Preface, Chairman Board of Trustees

Lutz Niethammer*

From Forced Labor in Nazi Germany to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” A Tentative History

Sixty years after the fact In July 2000, the German Bundestag enacted a law establishing the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” in implementation of a plan to compensate persons who were exploited as forced laborers by the Nazi regime. Sixty years had passed since the practice of impressing foreigners into the wartime workforce first began and nine out of ten of the persons concerned were no longer alive. An agreement on the payment of compensation to former forced laborers was finally concluded on December 17, 1999, just two weeks before the end of the 20th century, when President Johannes Rau made a state-

* Lutz Niethammer (born 1939 in Stuttgart, Germany) is a German historian and university professor. He is an expert in the field of German postwar history and Oral History. In 1993 he was called to the University of Jena where he stayed—except for various visiting professorships—until receiving the emeritus status in 2005.Concerning the question of the former slave laborer’s payments, Niethammer was the historical expert of the Federal Government of Germany. Niethammer is considered to be the pioneer of Oral History in Germany.

ment to an international audience at Bellevue Palace in Berlin (see Annex, p. 173). Now that the process of getting the compensation payments to their recipients has essentially been completed and initial attempts are being made to record this chapter for posterity, we need to do more than just write up an after-the-fact report on the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” We need to go back a bit further and try to find answers, at least in general terms, to three questions that arise on closer examination of our subject matter. Question number one: What was behind the use of foreign civilian workers and the exploitation of detainees in concentration camps for the German wartime economy? What were the reasons for the growing amount of forced labor, a phenomenon that eventually took on gigantic proportions, involving more than ten million foreigners, and what procedures were used in their recruitment and then deployment in Germany? Why was there a particularly urgent need to make a symbolic gesture of recognition and assistance toward Jews, Sinti, Roma, and other former concentration camp detainees who were victims of systematic crimes and who are now subsumed under the term “slave laborers,” as well as toward forced laborers taken from Eastern

From Forced Labor to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

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Europe, who were also victims of systematic racial discrimination? Question number two: The criminal character of forced labor under the Nazi regime was noted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Why then did it take more than half a century to produce at least a humanitarian gesture of this kind toward the some million and a half surviving slave and forced laborers? And this, despite the fact the Federal Republic (West Germany) began negotiating agreements on reparations payments to survivors of the Holocaust and other victims of the Nazi regime just three years after it was founded. Even though there was really nothing that could have been repaired, this practice was expanded over the ensuing decades. It constituted a unique example of solidarity with the victims of violence that had been perpetrated by a government on a unique scale. Why wasn’t forced labor one of the reasons for German reparations payments, even though the volume of these payments was close to 100 billion German marks after reunification? Question number three: Why was there a departure from the practice of making reparations for Nazi crimes solely at the government level? In this latest effort to address the wrongs of the past by providing financial compensation, that policy was replaced by government cooperation with a private initiative. Half of the endowment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” was provided by a consortium of German companies and the other half by the German government. What international impetus and thinking contributed to the creation of this foundation? Is the basic motivation behind it, i.e., a need on the part of German government and society to make a late gesture of responsibility and solidarity to the Jewish world as well as to the countries of Eastern Europe 16

in recognition of the crime of forced labor, owed to these international influences? The structure of the following essay is based on an analysis of these three complexes in which a wide range of problems are dealt with. I inserted explanatory and/ or supplementary notes here and there but did not include a scholarly compendium of historical sources. As if to demonstrate that there are exceptions to every rule, I preceded the notes with brief references to recent publications that readers might be interested in looking at. The essay is written from the standpoint of a historian, but it is not intended to be a scholarly work. The subject is too broad and the space available too limited for that kind of an approach. Individual aspects of the subject have been studied, and records thereof are accessible to degrees that differ too much from one another. The author has been, too, heavily influenced by privileged memories and prejudiced views gained as a witness who was involved for a time. I was able to check, correct, and expand on my recollections in the process of going through my notes as well as those taken by the staffs of the two leading politicians who were involved on the German side.1 I cannot quote from these files. It should be noted that they were only excerpts from the history of a complex set of international and transnational negotiations, which doubtless will have to be studied primarily on the basis of press publications and personal recollections for some time yet. This is a further reason for taking refuge in the subjective nature of an essay for this publication. I have attempted to analyze major factors in short form. There are only two instances where I go into greater detail on the events that took place immediately prior to the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” In these cases I wanted to try to further elucidate points that, in my view, Lutz Niethammer

the public has been given a much too onesided account of thus far. The first of these two points is the political constellation on the basis of which international negotiations were held in 1999/2000 and the unique character of the Foundation that was created. The second point is the role played by the use of its funds, to the extent that the money was used to compensate former forced laborers and to establish the Remembrance and Future Fund. This was around 9 out of a total of 10 billion marks. The dramatic changes that have taken place in the political culture and in the interplay of governmental and societal forces at the national and international levels as a result of the compensation of slave and forced aborers seem to me to have hardly been noticed by the general public thus far. A depiction of the lessons to be learned from these complexities of history and justice in the new Europe cannot be reduced to a global triumph of human rights and imperial justice, nor to a blackmailing of German industry that it was possible to put a positive face on, without running the risk of making gross distortions of the underlying historical realities. On the other hand, the image of the negotiations that was projected by a large part of the media at the

time was that of a bitterly fought battle over who would pay how much money and an arm-wrestling match for or against the interests of Holocaust survivors. In the fall of 1999 there were, indeed, difficult negotiations on who was to provide the funds for the Foundation and in what amounts. But, at least as far as compensation for forced labor was concerned, the distribution of burdens in the key areas was agreed on rapidly and without a great deal of noise in what was, for the most part, a very cooperative and businesslike process, the results of which have proven to be quite adequate, as we are now able to determine at the conclusion of the compensation payment programs. One last prefatory remark: I have restricted myself here to the compensation of former forced laborers as the main focus of the events leading up to the establishment of the Foundation and to which more than four-fifths of its endowment was dedicated. Other issues, for instance those concerning banks, insurance companies, and other restitution matters, the history of which is not yet fully clear and was, in part, separated out, I have touched on only to the extent that they were of relevance for the compensation of former forced laborers.2

From Forced Labor to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

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I. From work-motivated migration to racism and extermination

Central Europe has always been a region marked by encounter, exchange, conflict, and outward mobility. Given its history, it would seem to be the part of Europe least likely to be susceptible to fantasies of separateness or ethnic purity. But it was precisely here, in the midst of European syncretism, that this bizarre phenomenon gained sway. This multifaceted region in the center of the continent was late to enter the modern age. But when it finally did it showed unparalleled economic and cultural dynamism, driven not least of all by its military-industrial complex. Its large market attracted eastern immigrants, particularly Poles and Jews, for whom it often seemed to offer the nearest opportunity to improve their lot in life. Long before the Third Reich, attempts were made to counteract this kind of immigration with citizenship laws based on ethnicity, restrictions on the number of immigrants allowed in (particularly with regard to Jews because of their “racial characteristics,” as stated in an order issued by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1912), and official discrimination between native citizens and immigrants. Despite this, some 1.2 million foreigners were employed in the German economy in the years prior to the First World War (58 percent of them in industry). In 1907, 4.4 percent of all industrial workers in Germany were from other countries (with heavy concentrations in quarries, brick factories, mining, and construction). Most of them came from the multinational countries of the Habsburg Monarchy and from the Russian Empire. There were particularly large numbers of 18

Czechs, Poles, and Italians. The percentage of transnational migrants was still rather low in today’s terms, but this group constituted a modern factor for the most part. They cannot be reduced to the Polish field workers who helped out on farms east of the Elbe during the harvest season and were required to return to Poland as soon as their services were no longer needed.

Earlier developments The First World War is seen as having been a preparation for the Second World War. This also applies to what was learned about the nature of a wartime economy and the use of forced labor. As such, it may well be worth our while to at least take a brief look back to try to understand what developments of this nature had already taken place and what constituted the specific character of forced labor in the Third Reich. Large numbers of the foreign workers from Austria-Hungary returned to their homeland when war broke out in 1914, that is to say, when they were called up for military service, and workers from neutral countries were also able to return home in many cases. Initially, this considerable loss of qualified workers did not have a noticeable effect, given the rapid rise in unemployment that occurred in the German Reich when the war began. However, by the end of 1914 and in the years that followed, two opposite trends were observed with regard to the employment of foreigners: on the one hand, this was the use of some 2.5 million prisoners of war as a labor force in Lutz Niethammer

violation of international law. The military leadership had not reckoned with such large numbers of prisoners, and they by far exceeded the available budgets and infrastructures for maintaining them. For this reason they made two-thirds of them available to the economy as laborers and transferred the cost of maintaining them to their employers (nearly two-thirds of whom were in the agricultural sector). On the other hand, there was a rapid growth in the demand for labor in the German economy as a result of the fact that more than a generation of young men had been withdrawn from the workforce to serve in the military. The initial response on the part of the authorities was to lift the existing order requiring Polish seasonal workers to return home and to impose an order prohibiting the return of anyone from enemy territories. In addition to this, they began to “recruit” workers in the occupied parts of the Russian Empire and later also in Belgium. What this really meant in most cases was that the people in question were captured and deported to Germany. A decree issued in October 1916 against “work dodgers” in the occupied territories facilitated increased deportations. But there were still countervailing forces at work. They were found in the labor movement, in the Reichstag, in consideration of the rights of third-party states under international law, or in the treatment of German prisoners in Russia. At the higher levels of government, consideration was given to putting a stop to the counterproductive deportations from Belgium and attempts were made to reverse this policy during the second half of the war. Contradictory and ambivalent measures dominated in practice. On the one hand, resistance and escape attempts on the part of recruited foreigners had given rise to increasingly repressive forms of forced labor management such as detention in

guarded camps. On the other hand, it was realized that forced labor managed this way was a rather expensive and ineffective instrument for employers and that there was a need to liberalize the regime and create work incentives. By the time this was attempted under decrees issued during the second half of the war interest and power structures had already formed in practice at the lower levels of administration in a kind of apartheid regime that was almost impossible to influence. The treatment of some 100,000 Eastern European Jews, who had been relatively easy to recruit to work in Germany as a result of the deteriorating living conditions in their home areas, was particularly contradictory. Many of them were totally unfit for heavy physical labor or were seen as setting examples of refractoriness among foreigners. They encountered strongly anti-Semitic reactions, but, on the other hand, they later provided a reason to loosen repressive regulations with a view to motivating them to work. According to Ulrich Herbert, the historian who probably has the most detailed knowledge of this matter, by the end of the war the powers that be had learned a significant lesson: “Forced labor […] was worthwhile only if it was total and carried out on a grand scale; the prerequisite for this, however, was the German administrative authorities not needing to give consideration to views expressed by the political opposition, in particular those of the organized labor movement, or to criticism from abroad, or to the situation in the occupied territories. These conditions were not given in Wilhelminian Germany and also not under the dictatorial leadership of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. However, it had become clear with a view to the future that if the appropriate prerequisites were given, then mass forced labor

From Forced Labor to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

19

could be cited as a promising option […] in the boom phases of a wartime economy.” The formulation of this long-term vision may seem somewhat strange at first, given that Germany’s ruling class was toppled at the end of the First World War. The future seemed to belong to a democratic republic in which the labor movement would play a major role and the employment of foreign workers would be a peripheral phenomenon (ranging between 236,000 in 1928 and 108,000 in 1932). But enough continuity remained in industrial management and in the bureaucratic elite to be able to draw certain conclusions from the experience gained during the war, even though there was no current need to act on that knowledge. In our case this analytical capacity was embodied in the person of a social and security policy expert by the name of Friedrich Syrup. In 1918 he had already analyzed in great detail the experience accumulated in connection with the industrial employment of foreigners in the wartime economy. During the Weimar Republic he wrote a commentary of the Arbeitsnachweisgesetz (Employment Registration Act) of 1922, which introduced centralized control of worker mobility, something that had been missing during the First World War. At the end of the Weimar Republic he held the office of Labor Minister in the Schleicher Cabinet, was President of the Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung, and, in 1938, State Secretary at the Reichsarbeitsministerium when the Reichsanstalt was incorporated into the FourYear Plan. By the beginning of World War II, the leading expert on labor management was able to ensure that a seamless system of control over foreign workers and the employment of workers in general was in place and coordinated with law enforcement and security agencies. All the other 20

conditions required for the use of forced labor on a large scale had long since been fulfilled in the Third Reich. There was neither a labor movement nor a political opposition to contend with and little or no attention was paid to international public opinion. What dominated was the general determination to pursue a policy of ruthless occupation and exploitation in the coming war, particularly in the countries to the east. No real evidence has been found in the historical record of specific prewar plans for the use of millions of forced laborers in the German economy. We are more likely to find statements to the effect that the labor shortages experienced as arms production boomed in the late 1930s might be offset by reserves of skilled labor available as a result of unemployment in annexed Austria as well as in the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” The consensus among officials responsible for putting together Göring’s Four-Year Plan was that in a wartime situation prisoners of war should be used as a source of labor on quite a large scale, particularly for the agricultural sector. There was no discussion of legal reservations now, merely a reference to the progress that had been made with regard to control of the labor force. When Himmler integrated NSDAP military units into the police system and placed them under his central command in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt instruments of terror became available with which to enforce an ideology of “racial purity” in German society in a ruthless manner that would have been totally unthinkable at the time of the First World War. There was the Gestapo, the elimination of police accountability for the most part, and the construction of concentration camps. The latter were originally used by the SA to suppress their political enemies, but by 1935 most of Lutz Niethammer

Prisoners from the concentration camp on the island of Neuengamme digging a canal from a brick factory to a lateral arm of the Elbe near Hamburg (SS photo estimated to have been taken in 1941/1942).

these prisoners had been released (all but about 7,000). The camps were then placed under central SS command, uniformly organized, and rebuilt as permanent facilities. At the time very few people understood why this was being done. Himmler cited a number of reasons, ranging from the need to maintain the racial purity of the nation to a racist variant of crime prevention. Their use as a source of cheap labor was not among the reasons given. A strict regime of forced labor had already existed in the camps before the war, when almost all of the prisoners were Germans and Austrians. Their labor was used to maintain the camps themselves as well as to provide quarried stone for the construction of monumental architectural projects planned by the Nazi regime. However, the real purpose of these camps and the forced labor employed in them was to produce terror

and isolation in a lawless environment. It was not until after the beginning of the war and in particular after the invasion of the Soviet Union that the economic potential of slave labor was gradually developed in the system of concentration camps. In the fall of 1942, Hitler sided with the arms industry in a dispute with the SS so that from then on work related to the war effort was not to be taken into the concentration camps; instead, prisoners were to be rented out to industry in battalion-strength contingents and housed in camps built close to the respective production sites. This led to an enormous expansion of the system of concentration camps and their industryrelated external sites. The SS continued to replenish the supply of concentration camp laborers from arrests made in the occupied territories as well as by transferring in foreign workers and POW s who were consid-

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21

ered rebellious. By the end of the war, the concentration camp system had grown severalfold to a volume of some 600,000 prisoners (of whom 480,000 were considered fit to be used in the labor force). The share of non-German prisoners was well above 90 percent.

Forced labor and extermination Before we turn to the task of providing a brief description of the different sectors and establishments in which slave and forced labor were used in the German wartime economy, we need to discuss how this related to the persecution and slaughter of European Jews and mutatis mutandis Sinti and Roma.3 The persecution of Jews was not a consequence of war. But the break with civilization that the killing of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and in the gas chambers of Auschwitz represented was made possible by the war situation. More than twelve million workers were drawn together from across Europe to sustain Germany’s wartime economy. The fact that more than five million people were murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppen and in the extermination camps, many of whom could have been used to help support the wartime economy, is often underlined as an obvious contradiction. This is instructive in that it shows that racial ideology was a separate factor motivating the actions of the Nazis and that economic or other practical interests were important, but certainly not the only factors taken into consideration. The gruesome nature of this contradiction is reflected in the fact that war-industry managers actively sought to prevent the extermination of hundreds of thousands of concentration camp detainees so that they could be used as laborers. Germany began using Jews as a source of 22

slave labor before the war. Some 13,500 persons were affected by this in the spring of 1939. By mid-1941 their number had risen to 55,000, nearly half of them in Berlin. During the Blitzkrieg phase of the war the policy of concentrating Jews in specific houses, companies, or neighborhoods was still seen as a preparation for their eventual expulsion to a reservation to be established in Africa or somewhere in the east. This practice of using Jews as a source of slave labor was expanded to include growing numbers of Jews in the occupied territories, Poland in particular, until the Holocaust began with its large-scale deportations to extermination camps. I am unable to provide any specific figures in this connection. In most cases when people were killed in the Holocaust any documentation indicating the stages they went through prior to their being executed (e.g., periods of forced labor) was destroyed along with them. The mere task of reconstructing the names of those who were murdered is something that has been worked on at Yad Vashem for decades now. We have partial sets of data relating to work carried out for certain companies or camps and we have estimates for ghettos. But the overall dimension, doubtless in the millions, is impossible to determine. As a result, no figures could be given prior to the payment of compensation. In 1999 the experts involved estimated that former slave laborers among the Holocaust survivors, including those able to escape at an early stage of the persecution, accounted for only about 60 % of the applications that were approved for payment, i.e., 158,600. But there is another key factor involved here. What was endured by Jews or by Sinti and Roma was slave labor at its worst. It not only involved exploitation, denial of rights, deprivation of freedom, and separation from family and homeland. For most Lutz Niethammer

Photos made for card ﬁles or ID documents of labor camps inmates: Yekaterina Ivanovna Sineok (born in 1924), who was taken to a labor camp near Dresden in 1942.

Vladimir Danilovitch Rebyonok (born in 1927), who was taken to a labor camp in the Dortmund area in 1942.

of them it was also a prelude to dying. In the Wannsee Protocol* — being one of the most important documents for those historians that argue for the “intentionalist” origin of the Holocaust — slave labor was openly proposed of as one means of carrying out the planned genocide: “… in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.” The document goes on to say that the possible final remnant would have to be

subjected to “special treatment.” Death came to most victims of the Holocaust either in the mass executions that were carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories as the German Army advanced into the Soviet Union or, in millions of cases, in a form previously unimagined, that of inhaling poisonous fumes in a gas chamber. The selections that took place on the arrival ramps not only filled the gas chambers. They also filled the satellite labor camps that surrounded Auschwitz and Majdanek. In some cases new factories had been built there for the express purpose of exploiting the slave labor of Jews until they were executed or died of other causes. In his history of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer recurrently describes conflicts that took place between German authorities in the occupied territories. There was a com-

* Translator’s annotation: The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, held in Berlin on January 20, 1942, documenting initial planning of the “final solution.”

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23

petitive relationship between those whose interest was extreme exploitation and those whose interest was mass murder, but their interests were by no means mutually exclusive. He describes cases where extermination was postponed, for able-bodied young Jews at least, on the basis of requests made by war-related industries, by the armed forces, and even by the SS itself. He juxtaposes this with descriptions of times when the pace of deportation and murder was dramatically speeded up. One of these turning points was in the spring of 1942, when an arson attack carried out by a Jewish-communist resistance group (Baum) targeted a propaganda exhibition in Berlin entitled, “Soviet Paradise.” Fearing acts of despair on the part of Eastern European Jews and, more generally, agitation by Jewish revolutionaries on the home front, Hitler and Goebbels ordered the deportation of Jews in Berlin for use as forced labor (“factory action”). The actions taken in response to Heydrich’s assassination were much more radical in nature. They included extremely brutal retaliatory measures against the Czech civilian population (Lidice) as well as the systematic gassing of Polish Jews at the concentration camps in Chelmno, in eastern Poland (Aktion Reinhard), and then in Auschwitz. At first, Jews were used for slave labor while the Nazis were in the process of gathering them together in ghettos. Later, when the extermination process was in full swing, they started selecting able-bodied young Jews for temporary use as slave labor from among people slated for extermination. When the Red Army started getting closer to Germany, a third phase kicked in. The Jewish inmates who remained in the camps of Eastern Europe were transferred to camps in Germany to be used as a source of slave labor there. As the eastern front moved steadily westward, those Jews who 24

had not yet been murdered or died of disease or overwork were moved, under difficult conditions and with considerable loss of life, to the restructured system of concentration camps inside Germany. There they were held in totally overcrowded compounds and forced to work until they died or were liberated, in conditions so bad that they were hard to imagine even for concentration camps. Thus, for Jews, forced labor was usually tantamount to what was literally a murderous form of exploitation, which very few survived, through luck and personal strength, and, only in exceptional cases, with the help of non-Jews. Their exploitation as slave labor had made it possible for them to survive up to this point, but this was not what saved them. They continued to live in danger until the camps were finally liberated by Allied forces.

Prisoners of war between starvation and forced labor The German army used most of the prisoners of war it held not just for camp maintenance, for community service, and as farm workers, but also in war-related industries, in violation of international law. There was also a graded system of treatment for prisoners of war that depended on how they were rated in racial terms as well as the country they came from and its role in the war. These two factors could result in prisoners of war enjoying almost normal conditions of detention (for instance, in the case of Scandinavians or Dutchmen) or their being given the status of civilian workers, particularly for use in agriculture (as was most commonly the case for prisoners of war from Poland and France during the Blitzkrieg phase). However, at the other end of this graded scale there were excruciating examples of the fine line that Lutz Niethammer

POWs used for forced labor 1939-1945 As of 1/1/1945

Total number 1939-1945

Of whom civilians

Survivors mid-1945

Of whom civilians

Poles

34,691

300,000

205,000

220,000

185,000

Belgians

57,392

65,000

0

65,000

0

637,564

1,285,000

220,000

1,250,000

215,000

Frenchmen Britons

101,564

105,000

0

105,000

0

Serbs

100,830

110,000

0

105,000

0

Soviets

972,388

950,000

several 1000

Italians

32,945

495,000

460,000

465,000

450,000

Others

253,241

275,000

—

265,000

—

2,190,615

4,585,000

885,000

3,425,000

850,000

Total

1,950,000 several 1000

Source: Mark Spoerer, op. cit., p. 221.

existed between and exploitation and extermination. The worst example of these other crimes against humanity involving millions of victims, and one that is not talked about nearly enough, was the treatment given to Soviet prisoners of war captured in unexpectedly large numbers during the invasion of the Soviet Union in the second half of 1941. As time went on, it became evident that, contrary to expectations, Stalin’s empire was not going to collapse like a house of cards. The Nazi regime, bent on expansion and incapable of responding to actual conditions in the field, failed to realize that the situation was transitioning into a long war with the enormous manpower requirement that this implies. Unprepared for this eventuality and at a loss as to how to provide for such a large number of POWs, the Wehrmacht let three-and-a-half million men starve to death, mostly in improvised enclosures set up on open fields. This gigantic instance of bureaucratic manslaughter, which killed around two-thirds as many

people as died in the Holocaust, stood in stark contrast to the recruiting of workers from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union that began not long thereafter. The Slavic population of Eastern Europe was not a focus of racial hatred in the same way that the Jews were, but in the Nazi ideology the Slavs were considered inferior to the point of being referred to as subhuman. Thus it was that the Nazis had little or no qualms about murdering the three-and-ahalf million members of the Soviet armed forces who were taken prisoner immediately after their invasion of Russia. Nearly two million Soviets taken prisoner in the further course of the war and used as forced laborers received the worst treatment of all the forced laborers exploited by the Nazis. Only about half of them survived to the end of the war. Toward the end of the war there was another large group of POW s who received very bad treatment as forced laborers in Germany. In this case, the reason behind it was not racial ideology. Indeed, Italy under

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25

Mussolini had set an example for and been an ally of Nazi Germany. In 1943, an Anglo-American invasion force and bands of Italian partisans began the process of liberating Italy from the south. The Germans occupied the northern half of the country and in the process detained nearly half a million Italian soldiers. Although most of them no longer had military status, they continued to be referred to as Italian military internees (IMI s) and were sent to Germany as forced laborers. Italian civilians who were recruited from the fascist partner country when the process of mobilizing foreign workers for the German wartime economy began had been at the top of the hierarchy of “guest workers.” Now the IMI s were subjected to particularly oppressive treatment to punish them for what was seen as Italian disloyalty.

Civilian foreign workers Civilian workers accounted for by far the largest part of the effort to mobilize labor reserves for the German wartime economy from occupied, allied, and neutral countries as well as from the concentration camps operated by the SS , the Wehrmacht, and the Security Police. A total of nearly eightand-a-half million persons were affected by this. The largest number of people in this forced labor force at any one time was reached in mid-1944 with a figure of nearly six million. That was around 21 percent of the overall number of persons employed in the German economy at the time. The additional use of POW s and concentration camp detainees makes it impossible to provide an exact figure for the overall number of foreigners in the workforce, but it can safely be said that it was well above 25 percent. The percentages in the different sec26

tors of the economy varied considerably. As of 1944, nearly one out of every two persons employed in the agricultural sector (46 percent) was from another country. In the mining and building industries it was around a third. This was followed by the metalworking industry, the chemicals industry, and the transport sector (in particular the railway system) where the figure was well above a fourth of the total workforce (between 30 and 26 percent). Expressed in absolute numbers, 2.75 million foreigners were employed in the agricultural sector, 1.69 million in the metalworking industry, 0.48 million in the building industry, 0.43 million in the mining industry, 0.38 million in the transport sector, and 0.25 million in the chemicals industry. It can safely be assumed that by the time a state of “total war” was reached in 1943, food and energy supplies for the nation as well as core areas of the arms industry could not have been sustained without the use of foreigners in the workforce. In contrast to concentration camp detainees, forced laborers and other civilian workers were employed for the most part in private areas of the wartime economy. This ranged from major arms-industry groups to every other kind of industry, skilled crafts and trades, even the churches, on down to farms, and individual households. This influx of foreign labor made it possible for hundreds of thousands of German women to avoid being drawn into the active workforce. Theoretically, they would have had to work to support the war effort, but this requirement was not enforced rigorously. Indeed, as a result of a steady supply of laborers from Eastern Europe, half of whom were young women, they were able to employ more maids than ever before in their households. It is true that public offices, authorities, and companies employed foreign workers, but they Lutz Niethammer

Germans and foreigners in the civilian workforce in the Third Reich

Germans Balts

Number as of 9/30/1944

Of which women

22,936,961

49.3 %

Total number 1939-1945

Still alive as of mid-1945

—

—

44,799

36.5 %

75,000

75,000

199,437

14.7 %

375,000

365,000

Bulgarians

16,257

12.6 %

30,000

30,000

Danes

15,970

23.7 %

80,000

80,000

Belgians

646,421

6.6 %

1,050,000

1,015,000

Greeks

Frenchmen

15,658

20.0 %

35,000

35,000

Italians

287,347

7.8 %

960,000

940,000

Croats

60,153

28.4 %

100,000

100,000

Dutchmen

254,544

8.2 %

475,000

465,000

Poles

1,375,817

34.4 %

1,600,000

1,470,000

Swiss

17,014

30.4 %

30,000

30,000

Serbs

37,607

22.4 %

100,000

100,000

Slovaks

37,550

44.5 %

100,000

100,000

Soviets

2,461,163

49.3 %

2,775,000

2,525,000

Czechs

276,340

16.1 %

355,000

330,000

Hungarians Others Total foreign civilian workers Overall total

24,263

29.1 %

45,000

45,000

206,633

31.5 %

250,000

240,000

5,976,973

16.5 %

8,435,000

7,945,000

28,913,634

46.0 %

—

—

Source: Mark Spoerer, op. cit., p. 222.

accounted for only about a fourth to a third of the total (depending on the definition). In the case of concentration camp detainees it was just the other way around. Here well above half were employed by public and governmental authorities. A look at the statistics for the countries that provided the foreign workers who were to become an increasingly important factor in the German wartime economy shows which of them contributed most heavily:

around a million-and-a-half Poles, up to a million Frenchmen, and more than twoand-a-half million Soviet citizens from Ukraine, White Russia, as well as the western and southern regions of Russia. These three contingents account for four-and-ahalf of the six million foreign workers who were employed in the German economy in the summer of 1944 or for nearly five-anda-half of the total eight-and-a-half million foreigners in the civilian workforce.

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27

Nazi officials did not want a massive presence of foreigners in Germany. Their objective was to carry out a program of ethnic cleansing and to create a purely German race. One of the few specifically formulated goals in the NSDAP party platform, and the only one that was declared to be unshakable, was a kind of “get-theforeigners-out” slogan aimed at Eastern European Jews. It was hard for the cheering supporters of the Nazi movement in the euphoria of the Blitzkrieg years to accept that the fulfilled dream of German military victory on almost all fronts should result in an enormous flow of “subhuman” Slavic immigrants into Germany. The Nazis felt that appropriate measures needed to be taken to regulate the situation and that the Slavs should be identified as slaves, isolated, and openly oppressed. Ulrich Herbert describes the racist scenario laid out in Nazi government orders of 1940 and 1942 regarding the status of Polish and then Soviet forced laborers as a core element of the policy on foreign workers in the Third Reich.4 These decrees ordered the denial of rights to and oppression of more than half of the total number of foreign workers right from the outset, turning them into helots and placing them on the lowest level of the racial hierarchy in the Nazi apartheid system alongside Jews and Gypsies. With the stroke of a pen these people were condemned to work for less pay, under worse conditions, with smaller food rations, to be housed in guarded camps, and to be deprived of all legal rights. They were to be kept away from the German population as much as possible and at best were to be allowed to live in barns or stables. Eating meals at the same table with them was prohibited. Having sexual relations with them was to be punished with public humiliation and death by hanging. Initially, when the Poles present in rural areas were still seen 28

as traditional seasonal workers, many of these regulations were not observed. And then, after the arrival of large masses of workers from the Soviet territories, it was in many cases impossible to enforce them. But these decrees gave informers a tool to work with. Intended to reconcile the people who constituted the Nazi base with the technocratic necessity of importing labor from the East, they were implemented time and again throughout the country. In the end these decrees were shown to be totally unrealistic since, among other things, half of the Soviet workers who had been depicted as rapists by Nazi propaganda turned out to be women, most of them quite young. This fact also meant that it would be impossible to extract the amount of work from these workers that had originally been expected of them. In 1943 the German defeat at Stalingrad gave at least some Nazi officials a more realistic take on things. The policy on foreign workers was revised, modifying to a certain extent the original decrees on the status of Polish and Soviet forced laborers based on populist ideology and apartheid. By way of example, under the onslaught of Allied bombing it was no longer practical to insist on housing the workers in separate guarded camps. This requirement was dropped, at least temporarily. Work incentives were created on the basis of offers of better pay and food rations. However, none of the discriminatory and racist regulations were eliminated. Indeed, they were made even more stringent. Initially, these changes aimed at increasing productivity and improving discipline looked quite promising. It was, in fact, possible to increase the productivity of civilian workers by improving their working conditions. On the other hand, Allied bombing had a strongly disruptive effect on discipline. Gangs of workers, mostly Slavs, were escaping from their Lutz Niethammer

employers in increasingly large numbers and had formed a kind of underground. In 1943, the number of workers who escaped more than doubled, rising from 20,000 to 46,000 a month. There was public unrest over this internal colonization of the country and increasing breakdown of the wartime economy. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that an appreciable, albeit smaller, number of foreign workers, particularly those from Western, Northern, and Southern Europe, had not been abducted and enslaved. They had been recruited and in most cases were not denied their rights in the same way. That applied right from the beginning of the war for workers recruited from allied fascist countries such as Italy, Vichy France, Hungary, Croatia, or Slovakia. But as occurred with Italian military internees (IMI s, also referred to as Badoglios), privileged status could be lost very quickly and turn into just the opposite. The imperatives of war and the loss of all integrity in the legal system in Nazi Germany had effects on the status of recruited foreign workers, independent of their racial classification or their willingness to collaborate. This was the case for many French workers, for instance, who fell victim to the same kind of policy trick that was used against foreigners during the First World War. Freely recruited workers, such as those from France, were initially allowed to return home whenever they wanted to. Faced with a shortage of labor, the German authorities changed this freedom to return home at will into a prohibition to return home at all. In this way, they were able to retain urgently needed French workers, who had been recruited on a voluntary basis but who had become disillusioned by the war and dissatisfied with their working conditions. As a result of this change, the voluntary nature of the employment of

these workers gradually disappeared as the war went on. Needless to say, this had been a farce right from the outset for Eastern European workers. The same situation developed for many of their Western European counterparts as large parts of the foreign voluntary civilian workforce came under a forced labor regime without the option of legal return to their countries of origin.

Work education camps and concentration camps The system of foreign and forced labor in Nazi Germany was bad enough in itself. But apparently it was not yet bad enough to generate the kind of fear needed to bring about the total subjugation the Nazis were aiming to achieve. Himmler’s perverted police system developed two instruments for this purpose. One of them was the concentration camps, well known as such, but not very well known for the function they had in the system of forced labor. The other instrument was the “work education camps,” which had remained largely unknown up until the recent past. The latter became known to more than just a small group of specialists as a result of a study published by Gabriele Lotfi in 2000 (see bibliographical note), while the forced labor compensation negotiations were still going on. The purpose of these camps was to provide a means of exposing foreign workers to extreme terror for shorter periods of time. The Gestapo and Security Police had been given the authority to detain workers who were rebellious, tried to escape, or in some other way drew attention to themselves, something that was occurring more and more frequently with foreigners, and to hold them without any kind of formal proceedings or court hearings for up to three months in camps

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29

Jewish women and children at a “transshipment point” in the Warsaw Ghetto (1943).

that they ran themselves. The persons in question were to be taught a lesson they would never forget. Extreme methods of physical and mental cruelty were used to remind the victims that they had no rights whatsoever and to serve as a deterrent in the future. In March 1940, these camps were officially designated Arbeitserziehungslager, which translates into English as “work education camps.” AEL s, as they were called, were often set up at the request of local authorities and company managements, in some cases on company land and with company financing. Jointly operated by the Gestapo and the local police, their purpose was to discipline workers who were found guilty of “breaches of contract” and to serve as a warning to the overall 30

workforce. As the war progressed they came to be used more and more to discipline foreign civilian workers and POW s from the Soviet Union without having to transfer them to a different detention status. Employers had an interest in keeping their workers terrorized by the police. That way they would be more likely to continue to work for them and not be transferred to a concentration camp, where they would work for Himmler instead. Lotfi’s research shows that an alliance was formed between the local police, the arms industry, and local government with a view to getting around strict compliance with the orders issued by Himmler so that their effort to maintain discipline and to increase productivity in heterogeneous company workLutz Niethammer

Women prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau being marched back from their workplace outside the camp.

forces would not lead to increasingly large losses of manpower. Workers were normally transferred to work education camps as a result of being informed on by someone in the company they worked for. The decision to carry out this “corrective” measure was at the discretion of the local police. The treatment routinely meted out by the Gestapo or by ordinary police officers was aimed at breaking down the will to resist. The prisoners were subjected to extreme discipline and forced to do work that was totally senseless. They were forced to continue to do this work until they reached the point of total exhaustion. These camps also served as execution sites for persons, usually Polish and Soviet workers, to whom the Gestapo was authorized to apply “special treatment” without the need for any legal procedures.5 In the middle phase of the war, work edu-

cation camps were used primarily to discipline foreign workers who had escaped and been captured again. The purpose was to break their will before sending them back to the companies they worked for, among other things so that they would serve as deterrent examples. In the final phase of the war, AEL prisoners were used primarily to work exhaustingly long and dangerous shifts clearing away debris after bombing attacks on industrial complexes and the cities they were located in. In the spring of 1941, there were eight work education camps with a total capacity of around 2,000. The system was steadily expanded and by the end of the war, there was room for at least 40,000 prisoners in more than two hundred camps. There is no precise data on the overall number of people who went through the work education camp system, but estimates made on the basis of available

From Forced Labor to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

31

“Recruitment” of forced laborers in the Warsaw Ghetto (1941).

information would seem to indicate that about one out of every twenty foreign workers was subjected to extreme work terror in one or another of the AEL s. This adds up to a total of around 400,000 persons. This all sounds horrible enough. But the fact of the matter was that work education camps were a Gestapo activity at the local level, closely coordinated with the companies in question, and they were meant to be a means of threatening foreign workers and giving them a foretaste of what lay ahead for them if they failed to take to heart the lessons they were supposed to learn, in other words, what would happen to them at a concentration camp. Here, again, the police had the authority to decide whether or not prisoners would be sent on to concentration camps and there was no need for legal procedures. The length of time they would be kept in a concentration camp and their status there was decided by the SS and was not dependent on any kind of court 32

proceedings. Although companies were interested in stability and instilling discipline in their foreign workers, they had no interest at all in their being used as workers in concentration camps, given the increasing shortage of labor being faced as the war dragged on. The SS, for whom work had been a means of tormenting prisoners in concentrations camps during the prewar period, took a while to get used to the idea of using their prisoners to do productive work in the wartime economy and not least of all in privately owned companies. Initially it was the policy of the SS to supply labor to companies involved in producing arms and military equipment or to set up production sites of this kind in the concentration camps, often with a view to gaining direct access to good supplies for SS fighting units. But their approach to work continued to be oppressive and unproductive for the most part. This led Hitler to approve a decision in September 1942 to introduce a Lutz Niethammer

Lithuanian soldier leading Jewish men to forced labor (July 1941).

new policy for making use of concentration camp prisoners for war-related industries as proposed by Speer in opposition to the SS . This plan involved the renting out of sizeable contingents of concentration camp prisoners to companies whose production was vital to the war effort. The prisoners were housed at or near the production sites in “external camps” under the same kinds of conditions as prevailed at the actual concentration camps. In most cases the companies involved were not the driving force behind this extreme form of exploitation of foreign workers. To them it would have made better economic sense to employ suitably qualified and motivated workers. But wherever this kind of labor was lacking and it was at all possible to set up an external camp near the production site, companies would accept the labor of concentration camp prisoners in order to be able to keep producing. A number of companies demanded better food rations and

other facilitations with regard to working and living conditions for the concentration camp prisoners working for them. On the basis of the historical record left behind by the Nazi dictatorship, it is frequently hard to distinguish between a company’s natural interest in its employees being able to work productively and a form of humanitarianism constrained by the conditions that existed. In any event, the massive use of concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers for the war effort outside the camps themselves was a phenomenon that took place during the second half of the war, between 1943 and 1945. This involved at least half a million people, almost none of whom were German. In contrast to the relatively brief periods of maltreatment prisoners were put through at work education camps (three months), slave laborers worked for periods of more than two years, facing a constant risk of death as a result of undernourish-

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33

ment, epidemics, miserable accommodations, overwork, and arbitrary violence. Many of them died of the psychological effects of dehumanization, ruthless exploitation, loneliness, and despair. Thirdly, in contrast to what was reported in the press in connection with the compensation negotiations, most of this work was not done at production sites in the private sector, but rather at government owned and operated companies and building sites. Here again there are no precise figures available. The best estimates as to the number of concentration camp prisoners used as slave laborers for war production in the private sector vary between 120,000 and 230,000 thousand (the latter is an estimate given by SS economics expert Oswald Pohl at the Nuremberg trials). On the other hand, it is known that some 130,000 of these prisoners were used by the government agency headed by Fritz Todt (“Organization Todt”) to help construct military installations (ranging from defenses on the western front to airbases inside and outside Germany). Some 140,000 prisoners were used to help move war-related industries to locations in western parts of the country and below ground. A prominent example was the effort undertaken under the management of a highranking SS officer, Hans Kammler, to move rocket-production facilities underground in the final phase of the war. As a rule there was quite a difference between working for the SS and working for private industry. For the most part concentration camp prisoners who worked for private industry were given jobs that involved routine activity on an assembly line. The companies in question normally had a fundamental interest in keeping them alive so as to be able to use the skills they had to offer. This attitude was relativized at production sites such as IG Farben’s Buna plant in Ausch34

witz, where a constant supply of new labor made it easy to replace prisoners who fell by the wayside. One thing is certain. The vast majority of slave laborers from concentration camps who were moved to external camps to work for the German wartime economy from 1943 onward were used for the construction of military installations and the relocation of war-related industries within the framework of special government projects, where the conditions were incredibly inhuman and the death rate extremely high.

Violence, exploitation, and denial of rights There is no way that this very rough outline of the components of the forced labor system in Nazi Germany can do justice to historical reality. Here it is intended only to provide a basis for understanding two things when considering the criminal nature of the system and the compensation provided for it. First of all, there were many different forms of exploitation (particularly of foreigners) in Nazi Germany during the war, and there was a certain amount of interplay between these forms. By way of example, prisoners of war from Poland or later from Italy were given the status of civilian workers to make it easier to exploit their labor. Civilian workers who had originally been recruited became forced laborers de facto as a result of being prevented from returning to their countries of origin. Civilian workers and prisoners of war could be shifted back and forth between jobs in agriculture and industry or could be punished by transferring them to the slave status of prisoners at work education camps or concentration camps. Accordingly, there is no way to clearly structure this multifaceted and in most of its manifestations crimLutz Niethammer

inal phenomenon by institutions or by economic factors with a view to being able to establish criteria for defining limits and differentiations for compensation. After half a century of neglecting this matter, any attempt to reduce these various forms of forced labor to a purely economic issue would be doomed to failure. They were forms of economic violence. Providing compensation for these acts of violence cannot be conceived of merely as late payment of withheld wages by former employers. Ironically, the very worst of the perpetrators in question no longer exist. In general, the payment of compensation to such a large group of persons cannot take into account the individual fates suffered by the victims. Exceptions should be allowed, though, in special instances and provisions made for hardship cases as well as for other flexible measures. Definitions and categories need to be found that reflect the systematic deprivation of rights experienced by the groups that suffered the most. This deprivation of rights created the basis for all the further violence and exploitation

that was perpetrated. Seen from this standpoint we could define two categories of victims who suffered most as approximate solutions. On the one hand, there were those, such as the Jews and the Sinti and Roma, whom the Nazi regime denied the right to live and who were to be exterminated as a race in the course of a campaign of genocide. Or there were those who, on the basis of a police order or for other reasons, were to be “eliminated” from society; however, they were not to be killed immediately but rather isolated and mistreated in concentration camps or similar camps where the risk of dying was quite considerable. On the other hand, there were those who were deported to Germany to be exploited as labor but were viewed as a source of danger. These persons were systematically singled out and oppressed on the basis of a racist interpretation of their ethnic origin. Their fates were determined by arbitrary decisions on the part of administrative authorities. This applied to the majority of civilian workers and POW s who came from Slavic-speaking countries.

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II. Postponement and return of the compensation question

The criminal nature of slave and forced labor in Nazi Germany has never been expressed as clearly and analyzed as authoritatively in the more than half century since the end of the war as it was in a ruling handed down by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in October 1946. Only two Gauleiter were among the Nazi war criminals to be given death sentences. One of them was Julius Streicher, a fanatical anti-Semite from Franconia. The other was Fritz Sauckel. He was responsible for giving Thuringia the first Nazi-controlled regional government in Germany and for making Weimar a place of pilgrimage for right-wing radicals. But that was not why he was sentenced to death. It was because he had served as Plenipotentiary-General for Labor Mobilization from 1942 to the end of the war. In other words he had been the man in charge of forced labor. The Nuremberg Tribunal did not yet make a semantic distinction between slave labor and forced labor, but it meant both when it called slave labor a crime against humanity and handed down a death sentence against the person who had borne primary responsibility for this. Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for his role in making use of slave labor. This emphasis on the criminal nature of the forced labor policy in the Third Reich raises the question as to why slave and forced labor did not become an object of comprehensive indemnification or at least compensation for withheld wages right after the war. This issue stopped being a main focus of attention in the immediate post36

war period and then got ploughed under by the general problem of reparations. It did not have what we would refer to today as agency. It was a claim without effective representation. Generally speaking there were at least three reasons for this: (1) The perception of slave and forced labor was weakened by a strong focus on worse crimes such as the Holocaust. (2) The vast majority of persons who would have been legitimate claimants had returned to what was rapidly becoming the Soviet Bloc (and thus the wrong side of the Iron Curtain). Aside from the fact that the Soviet Union was itself a prime exploiter of forced labor, it refused to represent the claims of Soviet victims of forced labor in Germany and, indeed, treated them and all Soviet POWs who had been held in German prison camps as traitors. Soviet returnees, to the extent that they were lucky enough not to be put in a prison camp on returning home, were not allowed to talk about the subject at all and they were discriminated against when it came to employment. (3) Germany was bankrupt and the financial volume in question would have been too large to deal with. It would have involved more survivors with claims against the German government than in any other group of war victims, except perhaps for expellees and war refugees. If we want to understand this failure to see forced labor as an important issue in the context of postwar indemnification, we need to project ourselves back into that era and be aware of the fact that in postwar Germany there was hardly any perception of forced labor as having been something criminal in nature. In contrast to the HoloLutz Niethammer

caust, the use of forced laborers was known to everyone. There was no medium-sized company, no small town, and almost no farm that did not employ foreign workers. A small city like Jena, to take an example close to my own experience, had sixty-four camps for foreign workers during the war. The formation of an underclass created upward mobility for many people and made career advancement possible while standing still. There was hardly a German skilled worker back then who did not suddenly become foreman and boss over a number of foreign workers. Mindful of the unrest that arose on the home front during the First World War, the Nazis were afraid to be too stringent in enforcing the official requirement for women to work in support of the wartime economy. In 1943, more than 350,000 girls from the Ukraine alone were placed in German households to work as maids. Let us turn to the extremely complicated matter of indemnification, a process from which forced laborers were excluded for a period of sixty years, by which time close to nine-tenths of those who managed to survive the war had died of other causes. Claims for restitution of property that had been “Aryanized,” i.e., confiscated or stolen in some other manner by the Nazis, and for indemnification of victims of persecution had already been filed by representatives of Jewish organizations during the Second World War, before the reality and the enormous scale of the effort that was being undertaken to annihilate European Jews had become visible and credible. In case of victory over Germany they wanted to prevent Jewish claims from being lost in the calculus of intergovernmental reparations agreements. Given the reality of the Holocaust and the fact that survivors had sought refuge in a number of countries, Palestine and the United States being the

most prominent among them, they emphatically put forward to the Allies and to the United States in particular their desire to find a solution to this problem. As recent Polish research has shown, similar measures were taken by the London-based Polish government in exile. It, too, had filed reparations and indemnification claims on behalf of the large number of Poles who had suffered losses before half the territory of Poland was confiscated by the Soviet Union and the country shifted westward, along with large parts of its population. The thinking in German resistance groups and among politicians in exile with regard to the postwar indemnification of persons who had been persecuted for racial, political, or religious reasons also went in the direction of individualized reparations. A key reason for this was a desire to document the existence of “a different Germany” and to counteract assumptions of collective guilt. At the end of the war none of these groups was able to bring sufficient pressure to bear to draw attention to this matter so that they were dependent on aligning themselves with Allied interests and problem assessments. But there was no uniform stance on this question among the Allies. The Soviet Union and France had a strong interest in the annexation of territories and classical reparations in the form of dismantled plants, deliveries of goods, cash payments, and the provision of battalions of reparations workers (this latter objective was achieved by using German POW s as forced laborers after the war). On the other hand, the United States, which had suffered much less as a result of the war and, indeed, came out of the war in considerably better economic shape than when it went in, expressed reservations about the extensive reparations being demanded by some of its allies. The U.S. government wished to avoid

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a repetition of the disaster that took place as a result of the reparations regime that was put in place after the First World War. At the same time, the U.S. government was open to the idea of civilian courts dealing with cases involving restitution and indemnification of victims of the Nazi regime who were individuals and/or nongovernmental players in some other sense. It was the government most likely to be willing to accept the insistence of the courts on inalienable human rights and property rights pertaining to individuals. There were clear differences between the United States and Great Britain after the war both in terms of economic strength as well as in terms of specific interests. The United States had been the place of exile of choice for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. Now the United States was representing the interests of its citizens and permanent residents, while Great Britain in its role as the mandate power in Palestine was, to an ever increasing extent, in conflict with Holocaust-survivor immigration to Palestine and other Zionist interests. Basically, we can distinguish three very unequal phases of indemnification. In the following I describe the first two phases in greater detail than the third. This is, first of all, because it was during those phases, which extended over decades, that forced labor was not yet seen as an issue that needed to be addressed. The third phase, in which this need was finally recognized, is discussed only briefly here, since it is given a great deal more attention later on.

Phase one In the first decade after the war, the German policy of indemnification for the victims of Nazism evolved in two variations, caused by the formation of polarized Cold 38

War blocs. In the first two to three years after the liberation of the concentration camps, welfare and relief measures were taken throughout the four occupation zones to help improve the situation for victims of the Nazi regime. In part these measures were organized by the affected parties themselves with the help of the occupying powers, in part by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA ) for displaced persons still in Germany (the term used after the war to describe former concentration camp detainees, foreign POW s, and foreign civilian workers), and in part by German administrative authorities in the various regions and zones of the occupied country. Assistance from ordinary Germans tended to be the exception rather than the rule, given the difficult situation they were in themselves. These emergency administrative activities were aimed at ensuring that people had shelter, clothing, food, and medical treatment. Using former Nazi resources in organizing these services proved to be quite difficult, and if any were found they were rapidly exhausted. Poverty was a widespread phenomenon, particularly in the bombedout cities, and relief measures were needed to help house and feed those who had been made homeless by bombing and expulsion. These emergency administrative structures were the most accessible means of going about applying for restitution of stolen or confiscated property to individuals and their families or to organizations. However, as a rule this option was available only to German victims and had an immediate effect only if the stolen property in question could be located, if it was still in the hands of a Nazi organization or governmental agency, and if the occupying powers had no interest in standing in the way of its being returned. These measures were usually coordinated at the regional or zonal Lutz Niethammer

level, and the laws that applied varied from region to region. In the fall of 1945 Thuringia became the first region to pass laws regulating matters of this nature. Six years later Thuringia was also the first region to repeal such laws. The attitude taken toward restitution in the Soviet occupation zone changed in tune with the Cold War policies formulated in Moscow. Soviet demands for reparations were wide-ranging. They were satisfied in large part by the disruptive removal of industrial assets from their occupation zone. This fact made them quite unpopular with people in East Germany. The German communist party required that this activity be referred to as “indemnification” and that it be strongly supported. Initially there were quite a number of relief measures available for victims of the Nazi regime. As time went on there was an increasingly strong focus on victims who were associated with the KPD and/or SED . Other victims, particularly those who had been persecuted for racial reasons, were pointedly pushed aside. The SED had initially considered permitting restitution of Jewish property but then decided against it. In retrospect it can be said that the confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazis was seen by the SED as a useful step in the direction of communism. At the height of the Cold War, the East German Association of the Victims of the Nazi Regime was dissolved and a two-class system established for the victims of Nazism. A distinction was made between a communist controlled Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters, the members of which received better pay, higher pensions, and enjoyed public prestige, on the one hand, and the ordinary “Victims of Fascism” who were mostly non-communist victims of racial, religious, or political persecution, on the other. The latter were not given the same importance as positive examples for

society. As of 1965, they received considerably smaller pensions than the alleged “resistance fighters,” although these pensions still amounted to quite a bit more than the average East German salary. A number of groups of victims of the Nazi regime were not allowed to have even these lower pensions. Even after it had recognized the Oder and Neisse rivers as borders with Poland and the Soviet Union had ended its dismantlement and removal of industries as a form of reparation (1953), the East German (GDR ) government continued to insist on these separate categories for victims of Nazism. Until 1988, it refused to make any indemnification payments to Holocaust survivors outside its own borders. The communist regime resolutely refused to assume responsibility for crimes committed by Nazi Germany, and where it was forced to do so because of its relationship with the Soviet Union, it reacted with compensatory symbolism, for instance by referring to the reparations extracted from East Germany in the manner described above as “indemnification.” Needless to say, none of the individual Soviet victims of Nazism, whether Holocaust survivors, repatriated civilian workers, or Soviet POW s used as forced labor, ever saw a single ruble of those reparations. In the American occupation zone a legal basis was established for the restitution of property, particularly to Jews. Principles of indemnification were adopted for victims of Nazism in general in the form of a law issued by the U.S. military government. In cooperation with a few dedicated German partners on the regional council in their zone, the Americans helped to move forward with the development of German legislation to deal with this issue. Model legislation was developed for dealing with further indemnification issues. Representatives of the U.S. government made it clear

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at the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany that they would be willing to talk about lots of other issues if this model were to be widely adopted and implemented. These kinds of targeted compromises were referred to at the time as “package deals.” Progress with regard to granting greater sovereignty to the new Federal Republic or with regard to the reintegration of officials with a compromised past or other more or less denazified individuals would have a better chance of approval by the U.S. High Commissioner (who had a basic interest in the consolidation of the Federal Republic and in its contribution to the Western Alliance) if it were to be accompanied or, better yet, preceded by progress with regard to indemnification of victims of Nazism, particularly Jews, in Germany and in other Western countries. When compensation was denied to communists who had been victims of the Nazi regime and were now members of the KPD , the Americans had no objections. The Cold War was making itself felt. By far the most important of these “package deals” was the Luxembourg Agreement concluded in 1952 between the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (JCC ). This was followed by the conclusion of the London Debts Agreement in 1953. Under the Luxembourg Agreement West Germany gave the young and cash-strapped State of Israel a lump-sum compensation in the amount of DM 3 billion, a very considerable sum of money at the time. This reparation was provided primarily in the form of deliveries of German goods. The JCC , whose operations extended beyond Israel to the Jewish diaspora, was given a further half billion DM . In addition, principles were agreed on for the standardization of restitution and indemnification law for individual victims, 40

based on the model legislation developed in the American occupation zone. After these principles had passed through a number of evolutionary phases and fiscal problems that were holding back their implementation were resolved with the Finance Ministry, they became the long-term legal basis for West German reparations in the Federal Indemnification Act of 1956. The fact that the latter was based on the principle of territoriality (jus soli) kept Bonn from having to make compensation payments to victims of Nazism living in the communist countries of Eastern Europe until after reunification in 1990. An even greater benefit derived from the London Debts Agreement. The United States helped negotiate conditions for German war debts and debts owed to other countries that were extremely favorable for the Federal Republic and its economy. In doing so the United States helped to establish international creditworthiness for its most important European trading partner. In this context the Americans also made it possible to include a provision under which the biggest compensation item being faced, the indemnification of the more than ten million forced laborers who had worked in the German wartime economy, the majority of whom were still living at the time, was declared a reparations matter and postponed indefinitely until such time as a peace treaty might be signed with Germany. The vast majority of the former forced laborers lived in the communist bloc countries.

Phase two The second phase of indemnification, extending from the passage of relevant legislation in West Germany and the introduction of a pension of honor in East Germany, was more than three times longer than the Lutz Niethammer

first, i.e., from 1956 to 1990. But it was a great deal less eventful, given that the basic structures had already been established. We might refer to this phase as a time of “unsystematic systematization.” Only a few main trends are discussed here. The eastern part of the nation was left out for the most part, except for the observation that a heavily indebted GDR , shortly before its demise in 1989, deviated from its traditional refusal to make compensation payments outside its own borders by announcing a symbolic lump-sum payment for Holocaust victims. It had been hoped that this would help persuade the United States to grant a trade facilitation. West Germany’s unsystematic systematization phase under the inactive and tightfisted policies of the Bonn Finance Ministry began with the conclusion of a series of global agreements with Western European partners. In these agreements the compensation claims coming from these countries, except for those filed by Jews and Germans, were referred back to the governments in question, and a fund was set up from which legitimate claims could be settled. This eliminated a source of potential conflicts in the process of European integration. As time went on more and more groups of victims were discovered who had not yet been taken into account in the existing legislation. This resulted, for instance, in the creation of a number of hardship agreements for victims of medical experiments carried out in concentration camps. When the West German government began to pursue a new policy toward the communist countries of Eastern Europe (Ostpolitik), special arrangements of this kind were also made for citizens of individual countries. Global agreements were concluded with Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland. A very comprehensive agreement was made with Poland in connection with pension compensation

settlements. For all of these global and hardship agreements, most of which were negotiated with diplomatic discretion and hardly taken note of by the German public, the Federal Republic provided nearly as much money in nominal terms from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s as the DM 3 billion that was provided in connection with the highly controversial Luxembourg Agreement with Israel. However, by then the same amount of money was worth considerably less. Relative to the size of greatly expanded federal budgets and the period of time over which the payments took place the cost of the agreements in question constituted only minor expenditures. The majority of payments were not made on the basis of reparation diplomacy but rather on the basis of implementation of the Federal Indemnification Act in its various amended forms, for which a cumulative amount of more than 90 billion marks had been provided by the turn of the century. What is involved here are not just one-time payments but also pensions. In addition to the large amounts of money paid out, a key characteristic of the second reparation phase in West Germany was a shift in public opinion on this issue that can be explained on the basis of the long-term effects of a collective conscience focused on the past and the presence of a younger generation in government. In the 1980s, in particular, public debate on this subject, was conducted thoughtfully and self-critically. In sensitive circles at least, it was no longer about too much indemnification and drawing a line under it all. It was about not enough indemnification. A whole new debate arose about victims who had been forgotten, in particular about fringe groups that were oppressed by the Nazi regime (e.g., Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, victims of forced sterilization). The alternating emotion and dignity of this debate

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reflected the need to abandon a long tradition of neglect and, indeed, disdain. To an increasing extent this process of rethinking included the realization that the vast majority of deported and murdered Jews were not Germans. The vast majority of all victims of Nazism were not German, not least the forced laborers. Looming large among them were Polish and Soviet workers who, as Slavs, were stripped of all rights. The suffering of these people, whose ranks were thinning with the passage of time, cried out for recognition. The impetus for this came from historians, from new opportunities for international exchange, and from a tradition of critical attitudes toward capitalism on the part of former participants in the 1968 student movement. Social Democrats and Greens took up this cause. They sought the cooperation of corporate management in financing the compensation of former forced laborers in German industry within the framework of a general legislative initiative aimed at gaining recognition for these forgotten victims. They clearly stated their intention, but were unable to resolve the problems they encountered in the legislative process at the time. Nonetheless, we owe it to them that this issue of international importance was taken up and placed in the political arena at a time when Europe was still divided. It was a curious coincidence that in Bonn the Bundestag Internal Affairs Committee was holding its first hearing on the forced labor question at the initiative of what were then opposition parliamentary groups at the same time that the Wall was coming down in Berlin. Outside Germany the collapse of communism brought about an enlivening change of perspective with regard to the forced labor question. Suddenly it was possible to forge links across the former dividing line between East and West. In the domestic context, on the other hand, these revolutionary 42

events had a slowing effect, given the huge workload that had to be dealt with unexpectedly in connection with the unification of Germany.

Phase three During the process of German unification many international observers speculated that the Germans could fall into a national and perhaps anti-communist frenzy and that their admirable culture of self-critical remembrance might soon come to an end. Nothing of the kind has materialized thus far. The Buchenwald Memorial is now receiving three times as many visitors as it did when East Germany still existed as a country, and this without communist-party-prescribed visits by school classes and brigades of factory workers. The GDR system of pensions for victims of Nazism was expanded and brought up to the western German level without any form of discrimination against the communists who used to have privileged status.6 The Jewish Claims Conference rapidly applied for the restitution of properties in the eastern German states and negotiated German pension programs for Holocaust survivors in other former communist bloc countries. The amount of these monthly pensions is much higher than the average pensions paid by many CIS countries. The policy pursued by Bonn during the reunification process was a major success in fiscal terms. The so-called Two-PlusFour Agreement (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany) was concluded between West Germany, East Germany, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States on the termination of Four Power rights and responsibilities relating to Berlin and to Germany as a whole, thus opening up the Lutz Niethammer

way for reunification. The German understanding of the treaty is that it obviates the need for Germany to conclude a peace treaty with its former adversaries. The charm of this is that the provision made in the London Debts Agreement for postponement of the reparations question until such time as a peace treaty can be concluded will never be able to take effect. It remains to be seen whether or not the other participants failed to see the implications of this understanding of the treaty. We will have to wait until all the archives are opened for a definitive clarification of this matter. In any event, there do not appear to be any major differences of opinion between Germany and the former Four Powers on this issue. In Western Europe, the European Union, with its processes of development, growth, integration, prosperity, and security, was seen as the solution to problems caused in the past by unhealthy competition between nation states. In Maastricht and on other European stages it derived renewed impetus from the end of the Cold War and from the reunification of Germany. However, at that point in time the situation for our Eastern European neighbors was still quite different from our own. They were not yet member of the EU . They were not yet certain of the security of their borders, their membership in a military alliance, their political leadership, and their regained sovereignty. At the same time, the social problems connected with the transition from communism to capitalism were accumulating and, as everywhere in Eastern Europe, the perceived distance from the Second World War seemed much shorter than in the West. In my view, Bonn showed a great deal of prudence and patience in its reactions to this complex situation. It indicated its complete satisfaction with the reunification of the country, it formally recognized its borders, and it did not try to use the ex-

pulsion of the German civilian population from the former eastern territories as a means of offsetting Nazi crimes. That wasn’t very easy for political leaders who had grown up with and lived for decades in a tradition in which the illusions of the expellee organizations tended to be given more attention than the interests of their members in receiving compensation for property lost. Bonn quickly became a spokesman for its neighbors in the enlargement of NATO and the EU to the east. It worked to promote economic integration and, in preparation for this, advocated advance distribution of funds from Brussels. It was also a willing interlocutor on matters regarding assistance for victims of Nazism. But in this latter area there were clear limits to flexibility on both sides. On the one hand, Bonn did not want to get involved in a general debate on reparations and then be presented with a bill that had been postponed indefinitely in the London Debts Agreement. On the other hand, one of the biggest problems in its relations with a number of Eastern European neighbors was its failure to recognize and provide some sort of compensation to victims of Nazism in general and to former forced laborers in particular. The latter had been exploited by the Nazis. They had been discriminated against for decades by the communist system in their countries. Now they were not recognized by Germany. Feelings were running pretty high that something needed to be done to remedy the situation.7 Wary of the danger of getting involved in a reparations debate as a result of the forced labor problem, Bonn tried to resolve the problem with the sum of DM 2 billion, not an unattractive sum at first, but on sober analysis far from sufficient. It had also not made any provisions for distributing the funds (something hardly in keeping with Bonn’s own views).

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At the beginning of the 1990s, the German government made use of a modified form of the global agreements used successfully in Western Europe in the 1960s to set up reconciliation funds in Russia, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine and in the Czech Republic, the German-Czech Future Fund in a different form. In the Czech Republic the German-Czech Future Fund was set up somewhat differently from the others. It operates under its own jurisdiction in Prague to compensate victims of Nazism (but not former forced laborers, since they are defined as a reparations item). These global agreements are modified in comparison with their historical predecessors in that the governments they were negotiated with were not made the direct beneficiaries of the funds. Except in the Czech Republic the German side has for the most part not been directly involved in the distribution work done by the Reconciliation Funds. Perhaps they wanted to avoid having to witness the failure of yet another attempt to do the impossible. However, that turned out to be a careless and counterproductive move. The majority of the Reconciliation Funds paid out most of the money at their disposal to victims of Nazism in general, including former forced laborers, particularly those whose health had been damaged. The resultant one-time compensation payment for individual victims was DM 700 per person, a laughable amount, even in Eastern Europe. The comparison of this to the pensions the JCC negotiated for Jewish victims at a later date (DM 200 and more a month) has served to strengthen antiSemitic feelings that lie latent in many of the countries in question.8 Radiating out from the United States, public discourse on the matter of restitution and compensation was renewed across Europe in the second half of the 1990s. Stuart Eizenstat, Special Representative of the 44

President and Assistant Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues during the Clinton administration, declared that the objective was to take care of “the unfinished business of World War II” before the turn of the century. This discussion extended to a wide range of topics, including cases of collaboration in France, Jewish-owned real estate in Poland, Nazi gold deposits and blocked accounts containing money from Holocaust victims in Swiss banks, the restitution of art collections to their rightful owners (some museums resisted giving them back after the war) such as in the case of the Rothschild collection in Austria, or Jewishheld life insurance policies embezzled by a number of European insurance companies. The common denominator was that these were all unresolved claims of victims and survivors of the Holocaust, which the United States had taken an interest in belatedly, but then pursued with great determination, seeing itself as a kind of postwar moral arbiter. Forced labor was placed on the political agenda very late in the day, but it was to become a project of enormous proportions. On closer examination of the situation it was soon realized that the vast majority of the victims of forced labor who had survived the war and had not yet been recognized did not live in the United States or Israel but rather in Eastern Europe and, for the most part, were not Jewish.

Payments made by companies Before taking a closer look at the effects of being more aware of this period of history, problems in relations with our eastern neighbors deriving from the past, and the efforts undertaken by the United States to bring about the settlement of unresolved financial claims from the Holocaust era that eventually led to the establishment of Lutz Niethammer

Payments made by German companies to forced laborers or organizations supporting them (in millions of DM ) Company

Date

Sum

Value 2000

See below

See below

4/1958

30.00

105.37

O

oV

2. Friedrich Krupp

12/1959

10.00

34.83

O

Hs

3. AEG/Telefunken

8/1960

4.00

13.70

O

Hs

4. Siemens & Halske and/or Siemens

5/1962

5.00

16.26

O

Hs

1. I.G. Farben

5. Büssing 6. Rheinmetall, HispanoSuiza, Diehl 7. Feldmühle-Nobel / Deutsche Bank 8. Daimler-Benz 9. Volkswagen 10. Hamburgische Elekricitäts-Werke 11. BASF, Bayer, Daimler-Benz, Hoechst 12. Degussa 13. Adlerwerke / Dresdner Bank 14. Diehl Total 1945-2000

11/1966

2.00

5.77

O

Hs

9/1998

20.00

20.56

I

oV

6/1965

0.00

0.00

I

Hs

5/1966

2.50

7.21

O

Hs

1/1986

5.00

6.81

O

Hs

6/1988

20.00

26.96

O

oV

10/1991

12.00

14.75

O

oV

9/1998

20.00

20.56

I

oV

3/1995

0.50

0.54

O

oV

9/1995

0.20

0.21

I

oV

1997

?

–

I

oV

7/1998

0.08

0.08

I

oV

3.00

3.08

I

Hs

134.28

276.70

9/1998

Source: Spoerer, op. cit., p. 248.

Abbreviations: I = payments to individuals; O = payments to organizations; Hs = entitled recipients are Holocaust survivors; oV = entitled recipients are other victims of Nazism.

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45

the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” we ought to pause briefly to take into account the compensation and humanitarian financial assistance German companies provided for former forced laborers in preceding years. Mark Spoerer listed the nominal lump sums paid at the time and converted them to their equivalent values in the year 2000. An overview of this kind evokes mixed feelings. It goes without saying that these are admirable efforts made at various points in time by individual companies. However, they add up to a major failure on the part of German industry and, as such, warrant closer examination. First of all, the payments made by the above-listed companies, and the lack thereof in the case of many other companies that also made use of forced labor, need to be seen in the context of the distinction made in Germany between Wiedergutmachung (indemnification that is provided voluntarily by a government) and reparations (punitive damages demanded from a government by other governments). German industry made a significant contribution toward the funding of Wiedergutmachung on the basis of the taxes it paid. German industry and the German government both refused to pay compensation for forced labor in the form of reparations, in part because the Allies had already extracted reparations after the war, and in part because the definitive amount of these reparations was to be determined in the context of a peace treaty. Secondly, it is a highly conspicuous fact that in the first half of the history of West Germany, industrial companies very rarely paid allocations for the benefit of forced laborers. They were much more likely to make payments for the benefit of slave laborers, who were represented for the most part by Jewish interest groups. The 46

clear priority these companies showed for compensating Holocaust survivors (over all other victims of Nazism) was no exception in the overall history of West German Wiedergutmachung. On being approached for indemnification payments companies would often excuse themselves by saying that they had been forced to employ slave and forced laborers by the Nazi regime. This was part of the same general picture. Thirdly, since the 1980s, and as a general rule before they started feeling the pressure of transatlantic lawsuits, a number of internationally prominent companies such as Daimler-Benz, Degussa, Siemens, and Volkswagen undertook a two-pronged initiative of their own. On the one hand, they made what were often individual payments to their own forced laborers, each applying its own in-house philosophy in determining or negotiating the type and amount of compensation to be paid. On the other hand, these companies had their Nazi-era past studied by independent and distinguished historians, setting an example that has since been followed by a number of major banks and other companies.9 These initiatives, based on civil responsibility and historical self-reflection, show that these companies, similar to a number of scientific, cultural, and political organizations, were key players (albeit often isolated) in an effort that was undertaken to promote remembrance of the past, public recognition of Germany’s responsibility for the past, as well as a new critical understanding of its image in the world and its relations with its neighbors. Fourthly, when we take into consideration the fact that these companies played a leading role in getting all this started, it comes as no surprise to find them in the vanguard of those forces that were assembled to establish the German Industry Foundation Initiative. Both their internaLutz Niethammer

Press conference after the seventh meeting of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Preparatory Committee. Stuart E. Eizenstat, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and Otto Graf Lambsdorff shaking hands on the agreement reached.

tional interests as well as their efforts to analyze their own history had made them aware of the need for this. The awareness they acquired included the insight that prominent companies with international business dealings are easier to remind of their own responsibilities. It also included

the insight that the injustice created by taking the forced labor issue out of the Wiedergutmachung category and, as a result of this, delaying compensation for decades, could not be left to the government alone, nor could it be resolved at the level of individual companies.

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47

III. Establishment of the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation

Starting point The Social Democrats and Greens won the general election held on September 28, 1998. Three weeks later they signed a coalition agreement. One of the objectives formulated in it was the establishment of a national foundation for the compensation of Nazi-era forced labor “with the involvement of German industry.” This had been a moral interest of these two parties for many years. Gerhard Schröder, the candidate for the office of Chancellor, had reaffirmed this interest in a public discussion held in Warsaw just a few months earlier (June 17). There had never been a financial basis for or an agreement on a project of this kind at any previous time in the past. Schröder met in Hanover with the CEO s of thirteen major German companies the same week the coalition agreement was signed. In light of the class-action lawsuits being filed in the United States that summer against German insurance companies and banks as well as against industrial companies that had made use of forced labor, this group of CEO s had started thinking about creating a German industry reconciliation fund. After a meeting held in early September they decided to ask Schröder, then still Premier of the State of Lower Saxony, if he could help them find a political solution. Himself a member of the VW Supervisory Board, Schröder was familiar with the issues involved. At the time only the forerunners were visible of what turned into a rising tide of class-action lawsuits, but it was rapidly becoming evident that some sort of action 48

was going to have to be taken. On April 25, 1998 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an article in which it reported that the United States Assistant Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues, Stuart Eizenstat, himself of Polish-Jewish descent, had laid out before representatives of Swiss banks, the World Jewish Congress, and American class-action lawyers the idea of a global solution in which the defendants were to be included and protected against further lawsuits after the establishment of appropriately endowed funds. A few days later the first class-action lawsuits were filed for compensation of slave labor on behalf of American Holocaust survivors against major German companies with business interests in the United States such as DaimlerBenz. Israel Singer (native of Brooklyn, son of Austrian refugees), Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress and President of the Jewish Claims Conference, like some of the class-action lawyers a former activist in the American civil rights movement, held meetings with the CEO s of a number of leading companies in Germany to plead with them to do the morally right thing at the end of the millennium. The battle lines were drawn and the legal artillery pieces rolled into position. A series of long-drawn-out court cases in the United States involving Holocaustera issues would have been devastating for the image of the German companies being sued. In addition, they would have resulted in less than satisfactory outcomes for the victims, should the latter have lived long enough to see their lawsuits brought to a conclusion. Lutz Niethammer

With this in mind the CEO s decided to disregard the qualms their lawyers had about teaming up with the government and to approach the new German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, with a request for political protection and assistance. Schröder’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl, had always responded to requests of this kind with the remark that the government coffers would remain closed. Schröder agreed with the view taken by the CEO s that in line with established precedents the companies in question could not be sued in German courts over matters relating to forced labor. The problem was that this legal opinion was not shared by courts in the United States. Schröder opted to support a proposal put forward by the American ambassador in Bonn at the time, John Kornblum, a Jew whose family had immigrated from the Ukraine. Kornblum’s idea was to establish a humanitarian fund, voluntary but substantial in size, as a substitute for direct compensation in exchange for the definitive dismissal of all lawsuits of this nature pending before courts in the United States. Although at the outset there was no certainty at all as to how a transatlantic “legal peace” could be arrived at in this matter, the industry spokespersons indicated their willingness to make a constructive effort to help find a solution. Chancellor Schröder put his new chief-of-staff, Bodo Hombach, in charge of coordinating this effort. Hombach was widely known for having good relations with industry as well as his feelings of friendship for Israel. In his policy statement of November 20, 1998, Schröder noted that before taking office he had started moving in the direction of addressing the difficult task of finding a solution to the problem of providing compensation for former forced laborers at the level of civil society (i.e., not or not primarily financed by the government):

“Of late […] major German companies have been directly confronted with the [Nazi] past. For this reason, before I took office I decided to call together the companies concerned to discuss the establishment of a joint fund to satisfy justified claims by forced workers. Joint fund here means one established by the companies. It is my impression that the companies are willing to arrive at a fair solution with regard to justified claims. But I say just as clearly, in cases where the claims are not for compensation for an injustice suffered we will provide protection for our companies and the employees who work for them, both at home and abroad.” The points of emphasis were clear. Regardless of the specific reasons they were being sued, the various companies involved, including banks and insurance companies, were to finance compensation for former forced laborers jointly. For the skilled tactician Schröder the one thing “jointly” did not mean was “jointly with the government.” The questions as to who would be recognized as forced laborers, what the criteria would be for distinguishing between justified and unjustified claims, and in what way the government intended to provide protection for German companies in the United States remained unanswered. The last question was key for the companies. They had still not decided among themselves whether a joint fund was really the best solution since it would require banks and insurance companies, on the one hand, and industrial companies, on the other, to bring together their differing interests for the purpose of providing compensation to former forced laborers on a scale that had yet to be determined. Doubts were also expressed by Jewish representatives. As the Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, noted at the

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49

time, restitution claims against banks and insurance companies concerned only them, but some 95 percent of the claims for forced labor regarded non-Jews. In addition, no one had any way of knowing whether major companies with subsidiaries or other significant interests in the United States that already had lawsuits pending against them would be able to persuade other companies that bore as much or more responsibility for forced labor, but were less exposed to legal attack in the United States, to take part in a joint initiative on the part of German industry.

German position Like Chancellor Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Bodo Hombach came from a humble background. His family, too, had suffered as a result of the war, having been driven out of house and home and become refugees. He, too, was a young radical in the student movement of the late 1960s. After that, he became a budding political star at the side of Johannes Rau in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. As he rose to positions of leadership in industry and government, he developed an admiration for the United States and became a dedicated friend of Israel. Before that, while holding the position of an SPD executive secretary at the state organization level, he had been a very active supporter of the Solidarność movement during the period when Poland was under military rule. He was originally chosen to assume responsibility for seeing to it that the Chancellery under the new government quickly became a well-oiled and smoothly running machine. However, he soon focused his energies on the reconciliation fund, hoping to be able to ensure the success of this strategically and morally ambitious project 50

amidst a number of patently amateurish moves on the part of the Schröder government in its initial phase. In November 1998 he brought political and historical experts into the Chancellery as his personal advisers. Twice in that one month he summoned the CEO s of major German companies to meetings in Bonn to discuss the further course of events and to try to get them to accept the Kornblum proposal.10 He set up working groups to address the very complicated legal issues that arose in the context of transnational relationships and to handle public relations for the future German Industry Foundation Initiative. In Jerusalem he asked friends and relevant members of the Israeli government for their support and assistance as intermediaries. He met with an advance team of legal experts from Eizenstat’s staff at the State Department in Washington. In talks with their German counterparts the members of the advance team dispelled any hopes that German industry might be granted legal peace before compensation was paid. Worse yet, the American officials for the first time hinted at what would be stated much more clearly the following spring and what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would officially formulate in the difficult final round of negotiations in 2000, i.e., that in her view the question regarding World War II reparations, postponed by the wording of the London Debts Agreement, had not been done away with by virtue of the fact that the Two-Plus-Four Agreement (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany) had been concluded instead of a peace treaty. In the meantime, letters from pretty much the entire spectrum of victim-interest representatives had begun to pile up in the Chancellery. Understandably enough, they were demanding that they be allowed to take part in the preliminary talks on a comLutz Niethammer

pensation agreement. Answers had to be sent out to the senders of these letters, explaining that negotiations were not yet being conducted on matters they could be involved in. The process being gone through at that juncture was that of defining the preconditions that had to be satisfied for negotiations to take place. The most frequent and urgently formulated of the representations received from within Germany came from the Central Council of Sinti and Roma whose chairman, Romani Rose, was under the impression that his constituency was in danger of being passed over once again. There was no intention at all of doing this, but it was not until several months later during a reception at the Chancellery that he was finally convinced that this was the case. Letters from the representatives of Jewish interests, such as the director of the German office of the Jewish Claims Conference, Karl Brozik, were usually a great deal more conciliatory, probably because they felt they were in a better position.

Warsaw excursion Against the backdrop of lawsuits filed both in the United States and in Germany by Polish victims of forced and slave labor, the only Eastern European victims to do so at the time, the Polish government applied diplomatic pressure in an effort to bring about a bilateral settlement of these compensation issues. The German government rejected this move. However, the Minister of State in the Office of the Prime Minister of Poland, Wieslaw Walendziak, was received at the Chancellery in Bonn in late January 1999 for a special meeting to explain the situation11 and Hombach soon reciprocated this visit in Warsaw. No other country in Eastern Europe was given the

same kind of attention in this matter and at this level. No one in Bonn had ever considered the possibility of excluding Poland from a multilateral compensation agreement. Quite on the contrary. The industry spokesman, Manfred Gentz, the representatives of the government coalition groups, and, not least of all, Hombach’s own advisers had told him from the outset that the greatest difficulty in reaching a compensation agreement would be encountered in Eastern Europe, first and foremost in Poland and Ukraine. Despite the fact that Bonn was Poland’s strongest supporter in the question of EU membership, and the Poles were highly appreciative of this (as I was told in a meeting held at the Polish Foreign Ministry early in 1999), official talks regarding the compensation of forced laborers remained generally cool, tense, and full of mistrust. The reason for this became clear a few months later when it came out that the Polish foreign minister had asked Eizenstat to suspend the multilateral compensation talks until a satisfactory result could be reached in negotiations between Poland and Germany on general reparations. Needless to say, he was turned down. The German government had assumed that Poland’s renunciation of further reparations from Germany in an agreement signed in 1953 and the reaffirmation of this in a further agreement concluded in 1970 would be respected. The fact that this was not the case now was the result of the view held by some members of the Polish government who had been part of the opposition movement in communist times that the government of the People’s Republic of Poland was a Soviet puppet regime that had no right to renounce reparations on behalf of the Polish people. In connection with Germany’s recognition of the Oder and Neisse rivers as its borders with Poland the post-communist govern-

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51

ment of Poland had also signed an agreement with Bonn, saying that no further claims from the past would be asserted between the two countries. The problem was not, as Eizenstat incorrectly maintained in his book,12 that the United States government had to persuade Germany to include its Polish neighbors in the forced labor compensation scheme. On the contrary, representatives of the academic community, industry, and government had long since called for the inclusion of Eastern Europe in general and of Poland in particular. The German foreign minister had already made an official decision to this effect. And the Chancellery had issued a corresponding policy paper on the foundation initiative that was in the making long before Eizenstat claims to have forced the Germans to do this. The problem was that it was not understood in Germany why this goodneighborly impetus should be taken as a pretext for reopening a reparations issue between the two countries that had been declared closed on a number of occasions. Indeed, many of the German players involved in this belated compensation effort saw their purpose as that of finally being able to provide compensation and demonstrate good will in Eastern Europe as well, not least of all in Poland, and in doing so to open up a new chapter in relations with their neighbors to the east.

Position paper Let us focus our attention on the evolution of the German position in the forced labor question as it began to take shape in January and February 1999. A “position paper for the Chancellery chief-of-staff on current questions regarding forced-labor compensation” was completed on January 14. A working group in the Chancellery13 had 52

analyzed the current state of affairs and used proposals made at previous meetings to develop a model that combined the policy on compensation being pursued by the parties in the government coalition, the German Industry Foundation Initiative, and Kornblum’s ideas into a package that would make it possible to move forward in a coordinated manner. A number of the proposals contained in the position paper were to become a permanent part of the final settlement. • The name of the future foundation and its function as the administrative body for a compensation fund, the money in which would be distributed as soon as possible, and a fund for cultural and transnational tasks for the future, the spirit of which should derive from the motivation for establishing the Foundation. • The breakthrough to a formula for providing compensation of Nazi forced labor without prejudice to continued adherence to traditional German legal positions by defining it as a voluntary humanitarian gesture. This definition was based on two things. On the one hand, on the fact that a direct allocation or offset of collective damages was no longer possible after the end of the Cold War. On other other hand, on a desire, deriving from gained insights and a sense of responsibility, to help those surviving victims who had been most heavily affected. • The primary focus of recognition and compensation is to be on those victims of forced labor who suffered the most damage, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion, or gender. This included, on the one hand, slave laborers who had been kept in concentration camps and ghettos, totally stripped of their rights, and exploited for their labor under the constant threat of death. On the other Lutz Niethammer

hand, it included Poles, citizens of the Soviet Union (referred to by the Nazis as “Ostarbeiter”), and other Slavs who were exploited for their labor while being systematically subjected to extreme forms of racial discrimination and regimentation, including having to live in guarded camps. Most Soviet forced laborers were subjected to renewed discrimination from their own government on returning home after the war. They were denied any share in the reparations taken from Germany as a form of Wiedergutmachung.14 • The inclusion of all forced laborers in the compensation scheme, regardless of whether the company they worked for then still exists today and whether it or its successor paid into the compensation fund. Other proposals in the position paper were relatively short-lived.

Foundation Initiative What the companies wanted first and foremost was a definitive end to the class-action lawsuits that were plaguing them. At the same time, no one was able to provide a realistic estimate of how much money would be needed and how much could actually be raised for this purpose.15 The Chancellery had stated that it would contemplate the option of establishing a complementary government foundation only for cases that could not be covered by the industry fund and, as such, only after the latter had become active. Hombach noted that the industry fund was a civil society complement to the government indemnification process that was viewed as completed. Needless to say, this relationship of mutual complementarity did not look like

something that could remain completely free of conflict. It seemed more like a potential source of political leverage, and there were strong objections to it in the industry camp right from the beginning. A German industry foundation, followed perhaps at a later point in time by a government foundation, made the achievement of a just solution for the victims and their representatives no more certain than a proposed division of labor between industry and the government in the question of raising the money. The companies accepted the ideas laid out in the position paper for the most part, including its two-track approach of addressing slave labor from concentration camps along with forced labor from Eastern Europe. However, criticism was voiced by their spokesmen Michael Jansen, Gerhard Cromme, and, in particular, by Daimler-Chrysler CEO Jürgen Schrempp in written statements to the Chancellery. They pointed out that the position paper was focused exclusively on forced labor issues and that property restitution matters relating to insurance companies and banks16 were not discussed in it at all. The same applied to the procedure to be followed by the Foundation Initiative to ensure that it would be able to stem the rising tide of class-action lawsuits and bring about legal closure in the United States. However, the responsible working group in the Chancellery felt that these matters would be better off in the hands of an envisaged working group dedicated to the task of dealing with the insurance companies in cooperation with lawyers, corporate legal advisers, as well as government legal experts in ministries and the diplomatic corps. The most important of these legal advisers turned out to be a large American law firm that had approached the Foundation Initiative early on, saying that it was fa-

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53

miliar with the subject matter, politically opposed to Eizenstat’s network, and generally opposed to the Democratic administration in Washington.17 The lawyers from this firm immediately placed maximum demands on the table. They wanted a government foundation to be created in Germany along with an industry foundation and the overall responsibility to be assumed by a public-private partnership. They indicated that an executive order would be needed from the United States government to put an end to the class-action suits being brought against German companies for policies pursued during the Nazi era and that a German-American intergovernmental agreement would be needed as a basis for this. In the end this is almost exactly what happened. But when these objectives were first outlined in November 1998, and then formulated in greater detail the following spring, they seemed like a confrontational challenge to the two governments, something more likely to complicate and delay an agreement than to help bring one about. Bonn was unwilling to commit to the creation of a government foundation involving a budget contribution of as yet unknown size before industry had assumed an irrevocable and irreversible commitment to provide financial compensation in recognition of its responsibility in the framework of civil society. In Washington it seemed politically unthinkable that the government would block legal recourse for U.S. citizens who were Naziera victims. After all, this administration had espoused the cause of promoting progress in human rights around the world. It saw itself as an advocate for Holocaust victims and wanted to help them settle outstanding financial claims before the end of the century. And it counted the majority of the class-action lawyers among its most faithful supporters. 54

We need to be aware of all of this to be able to appreciate the courage and the responsibility it took for the CEO s of a group of thirteen companies (the chemicals giants Bayer and Hoechst had only recently signed on) to formally establish the Foundation Initiative with a public statement made on February 16, 1999. This took place after a meeting with Chancellor Schröder, who welcomed the German industry initiative to establish the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” praised it, and promised his government’s support. The text of the statement essentially followed the draft proposed by the Chancellery. But the latter had been merged with the program proposed by Robert Kimmit (Republican, American Ambassador to Germany 1991-1993), a lawyer who represented the Foundation Initiative in its dealings with the Clinton administration. The goals formulated in the statement were the achievement of legal security, elimination of the basis for class-action lawsuits and campaigns detrimental to Germany’s reputation, speedy creation of a government foundation linked to the Industry Foundation Initiative, and the conclusion of an intergovernmental agreement. Added to this was the reminder that with their taxes the companies had helped to finance the government’s indemnification payments in the past and that they had already made compensation payments of their own. But there was another message as well. The CEO s said the following: “The companies wish, out of a sense of solidarity, justice, and self-respect, to send a conclusive material signal as the century draws to a close.” The first goal they listed, before mentioning legal security, was “to meet the moral responsibilities of German companies arising from the use of forced labor, aryanization, and other grave injustices committed under the Nazi dictatorship” Lutz Niethammer

and “based on this understanding of the Nazi past, to support humanitarian and forward-looking projects.” They announced the creation of two foundations in accordance with the Kornblum proposal. They thanked the governments of the United States, Israel, and Germany for their support in achieving legal security. They expressly welcomed the German government’s intention to continue to pursue its compensation policy in agreement with the Foundations in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Czech Republic. They went on to say: “The paramount goal of the fund is to provide cooperative, fair, unbureaucratic, and above all prompt assistance to victims of Nazism. Given the advanced age of those concerned, the prime humanitarian objective must be to put the Initiative in place quickly, if possible by September 1, 1999.” This was unprecedented stuff coming from the mouths of top-flight industrial leaders. They were responding to Eizenstat’s demand, expressed during his visit to Bonn two weeks previously, that the Foundation Initiative finally be made more tangible by announcing its existence to the public. In return he would be willing to recognize this as an event of historical importance and to accept the Initiative as a partner in further negotiations on legal closure.18 It was only a few days after the CEO s had unveiled their plans, February 27, 1999, when Eizenstat, again in Bonn, showed them the instruments and proposed five possible solutions: • Creating a fund large enough to make possible an international agreement (as conceived of by Kimmit) • Settling with the class-action lawyers in United States courts

• Making the industry initiative fund large enough so that the plaintiffs would desert their lawyers and take the German offers • Reopening the question of the final settlement of the problem of reparation deferred in Article 5 (2) of the London Debts Agreement and answering this question in international negotiations • Any appropriate combination of the above-indicated options Having to choose between the plague and cholera was not an appealing prospect for the German side. They recognized that they were going to have to enter the negotiating process without any certainty of being able to limit the risks to their interests. And that was something new to most of them, particularly the lawyers. One thing was clear to all of them, and was repeated with great frequency in the course of the negotiations. They did not want to have to pay twice: jointly in the form of voluntary contributions to a humanitarian foundation and then individually on the basis of rulings handed down by American courts. The financial volume, the timing, and the purpose of the Foundation needed to be chosen with a view to eliminating the prospect of having to continue to deal with class-action lawsuits. This was going to have to be done in the framework of international negotiations. It was this factor for the most part that caused the negotiations to drag on for so long and evoke widespread criticism. Before I go on to describe the three phases of this negotiating process (in somewhat broader brushstrokes now) and discuss distribution problems in a bit more detail, I would like to step back for a moment from the close-up view I have given of the beginnings of the Foundation Initiative and the conflicting forces that were at work in what might be compared to a giant

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55

game of poker and, with the benefit of a certain amount of hindsight, try to analyze what is new in historical terms about what took place. The transition from the position taken by the Kohl government to the one taken by the Schröder government made it possible for the first time to contemplate the possibility of creating a public-private partnership in order to address the problem of compensation and, in doing so, to openly recognize responsibility for the past instead of denying it. The German Industry Foundation Initiative expressed clear recognition of the responsibility borne by German civil society for actions undertaken during the Third Reich. It had been motivated to face up to this responsibility because of, among other things, pressures contributed to by economic globalization. This development came on the heels of more than two decades of scholarly and media reflection on the Nazi past inside of Germany. There can be no denying that the complex international and transnational forces that had come into play were the initial motive. But the fact that German industrial leaders approached this situation creatively and did not allow denial and rejection of responsibility to get the upper hand cannot be explained solely on the basis of outside pressures. There was also a new attitude on the part of this generation of German managers, made possible by the fact that, in virtually every instance, there was no personal guilt involved. They did not have as much of a problem with the concept of collective responsibility for the Nazi past. This was an important factor in bringing about general recognition of the need to accept responsibility for this part of Germany’s past. What was not achieved in the same way, however, was an acceptance of legal responsibility. Supporters of the Clinton administration around the world and 56

other proponents of progress in the area of human rights at the end of the 20th century had hoped that in the course of the final round of negotiations on the settlement of material claims from the Holocaust era there would be a breakthrough to a new recognition of legal responsibility on a global scale. Providing “a measure of justice,” a phrase used to characterize the humanitarian gesture of the compensation of forced labor, did not lead to these hopes being fulfilled. However, this can be seen as progress in the way we deal with history. It gave political and material form to an ethic of responsibility that extended across generations and national borders, even if it did not lead to a concrete manifestation of legal responsibility. It was a goodwill gesture toward and an act of support for long-forgotten victims. It brought recognition of the injustice done to the victims, those who were still alive as well as those who had already died.

The international negotiations: An overview The negotiations that were held alternately in Washington and Bonn (later Berlin) and finally led to the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” after dragging on for nearly a year and a half, were unusual in a number of ways. First of all, it was unusual for one side to refer to the subject of the negotiations as “compensation” while the other side referred to it as a “humanitarian gesture.” And it was certainly unusual for the two sides to conduct very detailed negotiations on the criteria for determining eligibility to receive payments. Secondly, they were negotiating on the distribution of a sum of money, the size of which was not Lutz Niethammer

known at the outset and only very gradually emerged in the course of the talks. Even then, it was not clear for a time who was actually going to provide the money. Thirdly, these negotiations had the general character of proceedings aimed at reaching an out-of-court settlement, although none of the participants conducted any part of them before a judge. The negotiations were owed to the existence of an option under U.S. and Canadian law that does not exist in the German or any other European legal system, i.e., that of filing class-action lawsuits.* However, the purpose of the negotiations was to establish a foundation under German public law. Foundation payments were to be made almost exclusively to individuals residing in a variety of countries and were to be effected by reconciliation foundations in five Eastern European countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and the Czech Republic). These organizations varied a bit in form, but were essentially government-related foundations that assumed the task of distributing the money provided by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” in Germany. In part, they were also responsible for paying compensation to eligible claimants in other CIS countries and the Baltic States. Other organizations involved included the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC ), established at Adenauer’s urging during initial compensation negotiations with the West German government in 1952 and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The latter only found out after the negotiations were completed that it had been chosen to act as a fiduciary for all unrepresented claimant interests. * Translator’s annotation: In such suits, an individual represents a group of complainants in a court case and the judgement then applies to all members of the group.

First phase: Public vs. private The reconciliation foundations and the Claims Conference were later referred to as partner organizations. In the initial phase of the negotiations they had semi-official status. Outwardly they appeared to be nongovernmental in nature but they liaised closely with government delegations or were even part of them. Needless to say, there were plenty of players at the negotiating table who were unequivocally nongovernmental. They included the representatives of the German Industry Foundation Initiative and a considerable number of American law firms. Most of the lawyers represented the interests of individual Holocaust survivors. One law firm represented the interests of German industry. Another one was there to represent the interests of Eastern European victims of Nazism. And a number of them worked together with European law firms. Last but not least, representatives of the governments of Israel, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Belarus were present at the negotiations to ensure that the interests of victims in their countries were given appropriate consideration. Representatives of the American and German governments more or less had the role of honest brokers in this highly complex mix of interests. They were also there on behalf of the two countries who had signed an agreement creating a legal foundation on which the results of the negotiations could be based. Since this agreement had been approved by the German parliament, and the content thereof was to be incorporated into a federal law establishing the Foundation, and since, from the outset, the objective had been to carry out this national project on a non-partisan basis (something which in the end proved to be not quite achievable), as of fall 1999 the justice and home

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affairs spokespersons from all five parties in parliament were present at all major negotiating rounds as observers and advisers: Dieter Wiefelspütz (SPD ) and Volker Beck (Alliance 90/The Greens) for the government; Wolfgang Bosbach (CDU/CSU); Max Stadler (FDP ); and Ulla Jelpke (PDS ) for the opposition. Formally, the two host governments were equal partners. However, the American government unmistakably played a leading role under Stuart Eizenstat’s careful guidance. This was the case not least of all since the German government had asked him to act as an intermediary. His intention was to keep the negotiations as businesslike as possible, but the opening plenary session, held on May 11, 1999, seemed designed for confrontation. As it turned out, however, there was much less aggressiveness than one might have expected. It should be noted here that these plenary sessions were not where the real hard bargaining took place. As Eizenstat noted in retrospect, the plenaries were intended to give everyone the feeling that they were part of the process. The actual negotiations were held in small working groups and behind closed doors for the most part. Here again, the negotiating format was based on an American initiative. The proposal had been made early on to divide up the subject matter to be negotiated into “windows” (for legal issues, insurance issues, bank and restitution issues, slave labor, and, separate from these, forced labor). Only representatives of the mediator governments as well as relevant experts for the plaintiffs and the defendants were supposed to be present. This structure was intended to enhance the efficiency of the work being done and reduce possible competition between victim groups. The Eastern Europeans were not scheduled to be involved until the last window came up 58

and, as such, had trouble understanding why the negotiations were taking so long. There were frequently times in the major negotiating rounds when there was a general feeling that things were not moving forward. This was, in particular, at the beginning, and then again in the final rounds, when the lawyers started fine, tuning their agreements, and the representatives of the United States government and German industry got increasingly bogged down over how and when legal closure would be achieved. Eizenstat had laid out his negotiating strategy so that the less controversial issues on which a consensus had pretty much been reached already by the Germans and the other Europeans would be dealt with first (such as the distinction between slave and forced labor, the basic structures of the Foundation, and the form of cooperation with partner organizations), thus gaining ground, getting used to making compromises with one another, and passing the point of no return in the negotiations as soon as possible. It was only then that Eizenstat wanted to tackle the really hard issues such as the financial volume of the German Foundation and legal closure in the United States. While all this was going on, pressures were beginning to build up as a result of public expectations. The parties increasingly found themselves in a situation in which they had no choice but to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion because of, among other things, the advanced age of most of the future recipients of compensation payments. Despite the willingness of some of the lawyers to release information to the media, the latter were in fact poorly informed. They had the impression that the lawyers for the victims were haggling with German industry over every last mark. The truth of the matter was that they had not even started to talk about money before fall. They had disLutz Niethammer

cussed various side issues, such as the fact that there were to be different categories of former forced laborers who would be eligible to receive compensation payments. However, given the lack of data on the number of people in these categories they were unable to agree on the exact nature of distinctions of this kind and what the practical consequences would be. Bodo Hombach was appointed to the position of Balkan Stability Pact Special Coordinator for the European Union on July 30, 1999. On July 21, Chancellor Schröder appointed Otto Graf Lambsdorff to replace him. The American strategy had been quite successful up to that point, given that it had not yet run into any sticking points. But all the easy stuff had been used up. Now they were going to have to address the question of how much money had to be raised and the criteria for distributing it. Until these questions were resolved there could be no progress on the ultimate goal of achieving legal closure. The classaction lawyers had announced that they would be shooting for the amount of 20 billion dollars. At the fourth plenary session, held in Bonn at the end of August, Eizenstat put forward an initial compromise proposal with regard to the financial volume of the Foundation, i.e., 12 billion marks. Up to that point in time German industry had been thinking in terms of somewhere between 1 and 3 billion marks. The Foundation Initiative spokesman immediately stated that the figure of 12 billion marks was out of the question. But Eizenstat saw the connection between the two main issues in contention pretty much the same way Melvyn Weiss, the spokesman for the class-action lawyers, did. Weiss had summed it up by saying that for lots of money you get lots of legal closure and for less money you get correspondingly less closure.

Second phase: Doing the numbers However, there were still two important factors to be determined. First of all, no one knew yet how many former slave and forced laborers were still living in what countries and how their numbers could be accurately determined. But it was suspected that whatever number was determined, it would result in costs exceeding any of the figures that had been contemplated by the Foundation Initiative thus far. Secondly, it was not yet clear exactly who was going to be involved in raising the money to be put into the Foundation and used to compensate former forced laborers. There was growing pressure on the German government from the country’s industrial leaders as well as from the Clinton administration to finally state its position on the question of creating a government foundation and to stop seeing it as something that would come after the Foundation Initiative. This was leaving the Initiative exposed to a continuing flood of class-action lawsuits. In the early autumn of 1999, the German side came to a rapid agreement on the conditions for addressing these two questions, freeing up the arena for the battle that was to ensue over the size of the pie. There were no objective criteria for this. Instead, there was an interplay of political forces at work that went on for nearly four months before ending in a compromise in what were literally the final days of the 20th century. How was it going to be possible to get a realistic estimate of the number of persons who were entitled to receive compensation payments broken down by categories, eligibility criteria, countries, and/or ethnic groups? This question had started to present itself with considerable urgency at the fourth plenary session in Bonn, in view of the demands that were being made, and it

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threatened to block political progress, given that no one had precise data on the victims who were still alive at the time. My initial projections seemed to the representatives of industry to be too high and to the representatives of the victims not to be high enough. However, as a result of both the cooperation that had taken place since the beginning of the year and an international workshop on facts and figures in the forced labor question that was held in Buchenwald early in July, a level of trust had developed among the experts working for the various parties to the negotiations so that when this crisis arose they were able to come up with a solution in short order. They surprised the main players with a proposal to hold a closed-door meeting, saying that the preparations had already been made so that it would be possible to reach an agreement on a solid estimate on the basis of the data available to them. Given the wild speculation that was making the rounds with regard to irreconcilable fronts among competing victim groups, this evoked a certain amount of skepticism. But in the absence of a better solution it seemed at least worth a try. A meeting was held by twelve experts representing all of the parties to the negotiations. Ten days later (September 4, 1999), at the European University Institute in Florence, I was able to present an improved set of data for the forced labor question to Graf Lambsdorff and all the other parties to the negotiations. The data had been compiled in a cooperative effort, checked with scientific methods, and unanimously approved. Broken down by partner organizations, it contained information on category A, “slave labor” in concentration camps, ghettos, and comparable places of detention (214,000 plus 67,700 from other camps), and B, “forced labor,” defined as laborers subject to racial discrimination deported to 60

the Reich to work for public and industrial employers (623,000). In addition, there were 154,000 children in slave and forced labor camps. The number of forced laborers who were subject to racial discrimination and used in the Reich as agricultural workers was estimated at 539,500, while the number of laborers of this kind who were used in the occupied territories was estimated at 243,500. The use of forced laborers outside the farm sector was estimated at 567,000 (a rough estimate without documented evidence). This last figure was not included in the distribution agreements because of the fact that it could not be documented. The figures established for the categories A and B and for the individual partner organizations turned out to be fairly reliable as a basis for the further negotiations on distribution, disqualifying initial skepticism and in some cases even outrage expressed by some parties on the German side with regard to the overall numbers as well as attempts made by parties on the other side to adjust the figures upward. These negotiations ended half a year later with a layered compromise on the eligibility criteria and on the lump sums for the individual partner organizations. Now all that was left to do was to get an agreement on the money. When the true dimensions of the problem began to emerge, an unexpected alliance developed among the parties to the negotiations in opposition to the interest the German government had shown in keeping the Foundation Initiative separate from a future federal foundation that was to have a complementary function. This alliance was led by the companies, who were being buried in an avalanche of lawsuits, and by the American government. They felt that the success of this project would depend on gaining the support of the German government now Lutz Niethammer

and not waiting for a demonstration of civic responsibility on the part of private enterprise. In their view, this would provide a guarantee for the ability to raise a larger amount of money before beginning this part of the negotiating process. It was just at this point in time that Bodo Hombach left and the German government was in need of someone new to head up its negotiating team. A replacement was found in the person of Otto Graf Lambsdorff. A practicing lawyer, a former Minister of Economics, and Honorary Chairman of the FDP , Lambsdorff was well liked in industrial circles. He took on this difficult task pro bono and, as such, was able to make demands without any risk of criticism for personal gain. He was authoritative, careful, and fair in his approach to the task at hand. Like Bismarck, he was a man of few words. When decisions were needed he made them. They were clear-cut and people were well advised to heed them, including people in industry. He introduced himself at the next negotiating round with the statement that they were all “condemned to success,” adding that success in this matter would mean that to one degree or another they would all be dissatisfied with the outcome. With this sober assessment he immediately gained the confidence of the parties. They realized that this would doubtless be the way they would feel at the end of the negotiations. Lambsdorff had excellent contacts in the United States, the Jewish world, and Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia. His experience told him that his predecessor’s strategy of holding back government assistance in favor of a display of civic responsibility on the part of industry was no longer tenable if they were to be able to raise sufficient money for distribution. The importance attributed to this question by the American side had increased to

the point that, at Eizenstat’s request, President Clinton wrote a letter to Chancellor Schröder on September 2, 1999 in which he expressed his support for an immediate merger of the Foundation Initiative with a government foundation. The key arguments in favor of this were the use of slave and forced labor by public authorities from the national on down to the local level, by publicly owned companies, as well as by the agricultural sector, although the German government had considerable reservations about this last argument.19 Eizenstat’s estimate at that point in time for a distribution of burdens between the government and industry was a ratio of 1 to 5 for a total financial volume of 12 billion marks. Schröder’s inclination was to emphasize the civil-society side of the forced labor compensation question and, in doing so, to keep the related budget expenditure as low as possible. His thinking was initially that the government share of the money should be provided by publicly owned companies and by them alone. The Foundation Initiative strongly disapproved of this. Its funding had come strictly from the private sector up to that point and so it was hoping there would be strong contributions to the Industry Fund from publicly owned companies when they joined its ranks. As it turned out, neither of the aboveindicated estimates reflected the historical facts any more than the constant agitation that was being directed against the companies in most press publications across the political spectrum did. They failed to take into account the considerable numbers of slave and forced laborers used by Nazi government agencies, local authorities, publicly owned companies, and political organizations, particularly those groups who were subject to the worst forms of discrimination and exploitation. Precise data on this was not available, but an esti-

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mate based on solid historical evidence seemed to indicate that government and industry use of slave labor was about the same, and the ratio with regard to the use of forced labor by these entities was 1 to 3 or 1 to 4. Adding to this the fact that only the government could provide compensation for forced labor in the agricultural sector, the share of responsibility borne by the public sector ended up being close to 50 percent.20 On the basis of a report compiled by Stuttgart-based economic historian Mark Spoerer, I presented this estimate at the closed-door meeting in Florence, evoking dutiful opposition from the representative of the Finance Ministry. The next day I also presented it to Graf Lambsdorff. After Clinton’s intervention and shortly before a meeting Schröder had scheduled with industry spokesmen on September 6, 1999, a solution was sought, in close cooperation with the Foreign Minister and the Finance Minister in Bonn, with a view to distributing the financial burden more evenly between government and industry, making it possible to bring together a larger sum of money for the Foundation in response to American demands. At that point in time, even the lowest of these demands was three to four times greater than any of the figures that had been given up to then by the German side. After what was reported to have been a rather tense and emotional meeting between Schröder, Lambsdorff, and the Foundation Initiative spokesmen, it was publicly announced that a legislative initiative was being undertaken for the creation of a government foundation (which would include the Industry Foundation Initiative). Internally, consideration was being given to a governmentindustry burden-sharing ratio of 1 to 2 and, using this, to present a “final” German offer of 6 billion marks at the next plenary 62

session in Washington in early October. This offer failed to produce a deal, but it was nonetheless a breakthrough. The negotiations on the main issues were now being conducted on more realistic terms and with the participation of all the key players. The German government was now one of the parties involved, and not just in the role of an honest broker. This certainly didn’t make Lambsdorff’s part in the negotiations any easier, but it did make it easier for him to urge the various industry partners to get their contributions together. Since a legislative process had been initiated, parallel to the negotiations, that would take at least three-quarters of a year to complete and would have to be coordinated with the results of the negotiations, the number of political players who had to be taken into account in parliament and in the ministries increased severalfold. But the fog had lifted, and now everyone could figure out for themselves, on the basis of a given overall total and given eligibility criteria, how much money would have to be raised by whom and how much of it could be offered in recognition of the wrongs of the past and as a humanitarian gesture to surviving former slave and forced laborers. In the final analysis this drove up the overall price of the deal, but it also drew attention to the existence of limits and the art of compromise. The incorporation of the Industry Foundation Initiative into a public-private partnership in the form of a national foundation and the expansion of the financial volume of the Foundation in the second half of 1999 were not owed only to a realization of the size of the compensation problem. There were more concrete reasons for this, as Stuart Eizenstat never tired of explaining to his incredulous German partners, deriving from the complexities of the American legal system. The operational Lutz Niethammer

word here was scope. This meant that the more compensation cases that could be referred to the future foundation as the appropriate instrument of recourse, the better the U.S. government would be able to protect German companies against future lawsuits.21 We recall the remark by Melvyn Weiss, the spokesman for the class-action lawyers, to the effect that less money buys less legal closure. But German industry wanted closure in an absolute sense. So the other side pushed for the inclusion of forced laborers in the agricultural sector as well as the vaguely known number of Eastern Europeans who were conscripted into forced labor in their own countries while they were under German occupation (dislozierte Zwangsarbeiter), to name only the largest groups. At least, this is what Michael Hausfeld said. Hausfeld led the charge against the Swiss banks, but he had become increasingly isolated among his fellow lawyers as a result of his advocacy of Eastern European interests (his desire to solicit Eastern European clients was the way his colleagues put it). Leading spokespersons for the Jewish Claims Conference tried to sideline him, calling him a “traitor” to the Jewish cause because he had taken the liberty of placing slave and forced labor in one and the same context, not to speak of various restitution claims in the area of banks and insurance companies (which the German side viewed as having been largely resolved). The JCC continued to conduct tough negotiations on these separate issues until its social fund was filled to the point that they would be able to satisfy the needs of Holocaust survivors and their families. If all of these points of contention were not to be included in the settlement, then German companies would not be protected against lawsuits from all these different directions in the future. Eizenstat’s strategy of concluding a German-American agree-

ment to achieve legal peace in the matter of compensation claims deriving from wrongs suffered during the Nazi era, while at the same time avoiding domestic problems for the American government by arriving at an out-of-court settlement in the form of a satisfactory solution with regard to the Foundation, was now bearing fruit. But it also made it possible for the negotiating parties to play their hands to the limit. The more the pledges for the Foundation rose, from 6 then 8 and, finally, to 10 billion marks, the more the problems with regard to scope and legal closure melted away. In the end, the Foundation Initiative pledged the sum of 5 billion marks. The government, which was also under pressure from spokesmen for the parties in parliament to carry its fair share of the load, gradually understood that it was going to have to match this amount and that it was capable of doing so. Earlier plans to have government-owned companies provide this money or to hand off half of the bill to state and local governments22 faded into the background. The year and the century were rapidly drawing to a close. Eizenstat decided to meet the German side halfway with a compromise proposal, in which the other side lowered its offer from 12 to 10 billion marks (the lowest possible doubledigit figure in the billions). The class-action lawyers agreed to give up their much higher demands, and a deal was struck in Berlin for 10 billion marks in exchange for an assurance by the American government that it would guarantee legal peace to the greatest possible extent on the basis of an intergovernmental agreement and by issuing a statement of intrerest every time further lawsuits were filed.23 The most difficult obstacle had thus been overcome. But the negotiations were still far from over at this point. The German side had yet to actually raise the money, some-

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thing that was going to require a lot of convincing, given the voluntary character of the Foundation Initiative. And the American side had not yet kept its promise to bring about a binding legal peace. Once the top-down approach taken by the German negotiators on a capped total had been accepted and the amount of money available for distribution had been defined, competition among the various recipient groups became a concrete problem that had to be dealt with. The disintegrative forces that this brought with it would have been extremely difficult to contain if a general consensus had not been reached in advance. This included a credible symbolic act that was both simple and straightforward. After the Berlin agreement, President Johannes Rau made the statement I quoted at the beginning of this essay, in which he unequivocally called slave and forced labor injustices and in the name of the German people asked the victims for forgiveness.

Third phase: Compromises After the next plenary session, held in Washington, there was a certain amount of relief when Graf Lambsdorff was able to report back to the chief-of-staff at the Chancellery that there had been no more challenges to the agreed total. We were now in the final phase of the negotiations, which continued up until the passage of the Foundation Establishment Act in mid2000. It took another year after that before the various bodies of the Foundation were formed and the German Industry Foundation Initiative managed to collect all of the money that had been pledged. This added up to the largest “voluntary” political expenditure on the part of German industry since 1945. The agreement reached on the overall sum had done more than evoke sat64

isfaction. It also triggered a flurry of final claims and refusals. The mood was occasionally rather bitter in this concluding phase, but the contention was rarely in reference to the forced labor question. On the one hand, there were recurrent tensions between the American side and German industry on the matter of legal closure. On the other hand, new fronts opened up, particularly between representatives of Polish and Jewish interests. To our surprise, these conflicts broke out in the Jewish camp, between different groups of lawyers, between them and the Claims Conference, and between all three and Eizenstat. They took place in back rooms, corridors, and hotel bars in the style of a loud and emotional family fight. Investigative journalists from the Financial Times researched this phenomenon quite thoroughly and reported all the juicy details so that there is no need to go into the matter any further here, all the more so since what was involved for the most part were restitution matters and Jewish social funds.24 However, there are three things in this last phase that are of importance in our context: • The layered compromise on the question of distribution to forced laborers that was reached at the Washington plenary in March 2000 • A number of points of friction relating to the way the results of the international negotiations were implemented in national legislation • The importance of the form in which legal closure was found in the United States. (1) Competition among victims and compromise on distribution issues From the very beginning, the distinction between forced laborers in ghettos, conLutz Niethammer

centration camps, and comparable places of detention (“slave laborers” or “category A”) and deported civilian workers, particularly from Eastern Europe, who were stripped of their rights, exploited, and in many cases kept in guarded camps (“forced laborers” or “category B”), was a thread that ran through all the planning on the German side. This was confirmed in the initial phase of the international negotiations, and it was agreed that slave laborers ought to receive a larger compensation. What was still a matter of contention, however, was just how large the difference should be. Since virtually all Jewish claimants fell into the slave laborer category and the majority of them lived in Western countries with a higher cost of living, the representatives of Jewish interests wanted the difference to be as big as possible, while a number of representatives of Eastern European, particularly Polish interests, thought that a ratio of 2 to 1 was an excessively large difference. There were no objective criteria for deciding what the difference should be, so the question remained on the political agenda. The ratio of 3 to 1 came to be accepted in the course of the long negotiating period. This was because the negotiators gradually got used to it, parallel talks on restitution came out well for the JCC , problems with the Eastern Europeans had been effectively defused by “option clauses,” and it had become clear that plans were being made to provide the sum of 5000 marks to former forced laborers. This was an acceptable, in fact, quite a sizable amount of money in the Eastern European countries. However, this prospect came to be threatened by the option clauses. The latter became increasingly important for two groups in the negotiations, i.e., for forced laborers in agriculture and for persons who were used as forced laborers

within their own countries. The distinction that was drawn between them and POW s used as forced laborers was less controversial, although it was something that had to seem like a horrible injustice to many people from Poland, the former Soviet Union, and Italy. Everyone knew that the use of POW s as forced laborers (particularly in the Soviet Union) was also a sore point in Germany and Austria. The potential explosiveness of this issue could have undermined the support that existed at that point in time across Germany’s political spectrum for providing a sizable compensation to Nazi-era forced laborers. At the same time, Austrian right-winger Jörg Haider advocated keeping checklists of mutual wrongdoing and asserting compensation claims against the CIS countries for the German and Austrian POW s who were used as forced laborers by the Soviet Union during and after the war. Agricultural workers, displaced persons used as forced labor in their own countries, and detainees from “other camps” constituted factors of a different kind. In the wake of the deal made at the closed-door meeting in Florence, the dimensions involved became visible to those involved in the negotiating process. The effect of this began to be felt in Poland, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. They would only be able to provide reduced amounts of compensation, based on the option clauses, to 71 %, 60 %, 55 %, and 41 % of the former forced laborers, respectively. In Florence, the Eastern European partners were willing to provide precise data for the main groups in categories A and B only if the information they had on former forced laborers in agriculture as well as displaced persons used as forced labor in their own countries was included in the Annex, where the statistical data was indicated. Part of the negotiations that lay ahead would be devoted to the task

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of excluding these groups from the category of victims who have a guaranteed right to compensation (as demanded by the German side) and, at the same time, to make it possible for the partner organizations, particularly in Poland and the former Soviet Union, to bend the rules a bit so as to be able to compensate them. This was done with the indicated option clauses. The principle of equality established in the name of the victims at the beginning of the negotiations was done away with in the end, at the wish of a majority of the victim nations. Neediness was not reintroduced as a humanitarian criterion for eligibility. The numbers in question were politically weighted before the final amounts were calculated for the individual nations. But that only slightly mitigated the loss of international equality that was sacrificed on the altars of national solidarity. In the end, the smaller payments made to the larger numbers of agricultural workers and also to the displaced persons used as forced labor in their own countries were taken, in part, from the respective national allocations for category B. The more of them that were included, the more the payments fell short of the amount provided for by international agreement. With regard to the power structures in the negotiations, it is worth noting that several representatives of Jewish interests proposed separating Jewish issues from the rest and got nowhere with it. At the same time, they successfully prevented the occurrence of similar redistribution trends with regard to category A. Once the data was weighted, the allocations calculated for the partner organizations were accepted on the basis of a fairly broad consensus and were later codified in the Foundation Establishment Act. Conspicuous in this last phase of the negotiations, after an agreement had been reached on the total amount that was going 66

to be available for distribution, was the tendency to search through the agenda for further factors on which allocation claims could be based. There were three prime targets: the revenues of the respective other interest groups; the reserves to be set aside for victims who were not represented in the negotiating process (and were soon being referred to as the “rest of the world”); as well as reserves for the Future Fund. Aside from isolated gambits undertaken, it seems to me to be worth noting that competition among the groups of victims represented in the negotiations, while quite noticeable as a latent factor, did not find much expression, at least in the area of forced labor compensation. By contrast, there were constant attacks against the interests of victims who were not represented in the talks. If it had not been for a rare display of unity by the German side in their defense, the Sinti and Roma would not have had a reserve set aside for them, and the International Organization for Migration would not have had more than half a billion marks to distribute, nearly half of it to non-Jewish slave laborers in the West and in the Balkans. The Remembrance and Future Fund was essentially a product of American political philanthropy and was given surprisingly little attention in the objectives formulated by German industry until quite late in the negotiations. The size of its endowment was reduced first to 10 and then ultimately to 7 percent of the overall total, after having originally been intended to comprise half thereof. Here again the German delegation displayed a large measure of unity in defending the Future Fund against further encroachments by other interest groups (with the exception of the Greens, who assigned priority to making the payments to individuals as large as possible). But there were different reasons for this. The Foundation Initiative Lutz Niethammer

Forced labor compensation and partner organizations Billion DM

Percentage

Jewish Claims Conference

2.072

25.6

International Organization for Migration

0.540

6.7

Poland

1.812

22.4

Ukraine

1.724

21.3

Russia (including Latvia and Lithuania)

0.835

10.3

Belarus (including Estonia)

0.694

8.6

Czech Republic

0.423

5.2

Total

8.100

100.0

saw it as a good thing that the Remembrance and Future Fund caused the notion of compen-sation to be moderated by the humanitarian character of the overall process and the fact that younger companies unaffected by class-action lawsuits had also been recruited to contribute to the fund. In political terms the Remembrance and Future Fund was a statement that the majority of those who would have been eligible for compensation had died either during the war or at some point in the period of time that has elapsed since the war ended, and that in the long run there was a need to invest in cross-border cultural and social projects aimed at promoting international understanding and remembrance of the dead. (2) “Racial discrimination” vs. “prison-like conditions” There was very little latitude for parliamentary involvement in the process of incorporating the results of the negotiations in a federal law, since no one wanted to have to renegotiate the package that had taken so much time and trouble to put together.

There were a number of points on which some members of the Bundestag Internal Affairs Committee were not aligned with German industry. For their own political motives they wanted to promote the interests of as many Nazi-era victims as possible who had not yet been considered for compensation and to prevent the reserves for the groups not involved in the negotiations from being plundered. An Internal Affairs Committee hearing was held to address this matter. The objective was to defend the reserve for the “rest of the world,” which was under threat and had already been reduced by 260 million marks. They would have liked to expand it again, but this proved impossible to achieve. Any changes in the amounts that had already been agreed on could have caused the overall deal to fail. The solution that was found in the end was to use the interest earned by the Foundation to fill this gap. The interest groups were successful in improving the eligibility criteria for specific groups of forgotten victims, and the American side was certainly not expected to voice any objections to this. Where the dispute lay was reflected by the main issue dealt with in this late phase

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of the negotiations, i.e., finding a satisfactory definition for category B, “forced laborers.” This was an area where insights had continued to develop over the preceding two years, and, as a consequence of this, a need was seen to adjust some of the formulations. However, there was stiff resistance to this from the Finance Ministry and the Foundation Initiative. In a position paper issued by the Chancellery and in an initial statement issued by the Foundation Initiative, the assumption was made, in keeping with their humanitarian understanding of the problem, that, with the exception of slave laborers, the compensation funds should be concentrated first and foremost on those forced laborers employed by industry who had suffered the strongest discrimination and exploitation under the Nazi regime. These were Polish civilians, Ostarbeiter (Soviets), as well as of other Slavic-speaking peoples who had been deported into the Reich and placed in nonagricultural jobs, primarily in industry. Up until 1943 they were usually kept in guarded camps. At a workshop held in Buchenwald in July 1999, experts reported to us that this had, indeed, been the case for the most part up until 1943, but that after that, as a consequence of the growing chaos caused by Allied bombing and some improvements that had been made in wage and living conditions for Eastern European laborers based on productivity incentives, “racial discrimination” and “prison-like conditions of internment” began to move apart from one another as categorization criteria. The message was that it was not prison-like conditions or “internment in guarded camps,” as it was termed then, that was the main factor distinguishing them from the rest of the civilian workforce, but rather the racial discrimination they were subjected to as a result of Nazi government orders regarding the status of Polish and 68

Soviet forced laborers issued in 1940 and 1942. Under these orders they were to be stripped of all human rights and most social rights, subjected to extremely difficult working and living conditions, paid particularly low wages, and threatened with the death penalty if found to be guilty of having sexual relations with Germans. These were the core components of the policy of racial discrimination25 that had been put in place and were by no means empty threats. After being informed of this we, in our capacity as historical advisers, dropped “guarded camps,” leaving “racial discrimination” as the sole categorization criterion. The only resistance to this was among representatives of German industry and an official at the Finance Ministry who had been responsible for Wiedergutmachung matters for many years. The official in question staunchly resisted our efforts to reformulate the relevant parts of the law and was backed up in this by the industry CEO s, who had fears of their own. According to them, the objections that had been brought forward by the experts were not a result of new information, but rather a trick aimed at placing forced laborers from Eastern Europe who had worked in the agricultural sector into the next-to-the-worst victim category on the basis of the Nazi regime’s racial discrimination orders, even though they had not had it so bad on German farms and, indeed, some of them even remembered this as having been the best time of their lives. There is a certain amount of merit to this argument, but it certainly would have been possible to accommodate the positions taken by both sides. What occurred in the process of implementing the international negotiations in German law was that even though this new information was made the subject of discussion, the resistance put up by government officials Lutz Niethammer

on the German side won out in the end. Traces of this conflict can be seen in the text of the law. Section 11 (2) states, with regard to the eligibility of persons for compensation in category B, that they had to have been in detention or “subjected to conditions resembling detention or similar extremely harsh living conditions.” (3) Legal closure or legal progress? My preference for the American term legal closure instead of Rechtsfrieden (legal peace), a euphemism that has come to be widely used in German, is based on my view that blockage of legal recourse cannot be seen as progress or as peace in a system that is based on the rule of law. The classaction lawsuits in the United States focused the attention of the German companies in question more on their business interests in the American market than on the role they played during the Nazi era, although it did bring about long-overdue recognition of their responsibility in this regard. As a consequence, they declared their willingness to establish a foundation of considerable size, if this guaranteed that they would never again be exposed to this kind of legal assault. In this connection they sought political assistance and protection in Bonn and Washington. They were faced with the fact that the United States government considered the lawsuits to be justified in principle and saw its role as a mediator taking place only after there was a substantial satisfaction of the class-action lawsuits, in scope if not necessarily in the amounts of the claims being brought forward. The American position was that a much larger amount of money from German industry and matching funds from the German government would be needed to create the conditions for a settlement. The U.S. government wanted to

ensure that the interests of class-action plaintiffs would be satisfied in a collective settlement to such an extent that further class-action lawsuits could be ruled out in the future. Only then would it be willing to officially oppose further use of this legal instrument to assert financial claims on the part of Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers. A key concession was made, to the disappointment of the classaction lawyers, basing the settlement on a complex political arrangement that did not require the confirmation of U.S. courts, thus avoiding the risks that would have been involved in further court proceedings and the setting of undesirable legal precedents. The objective pursued by the German companies who were the subject of the class-action lawsuits, i.e., to rule out further recourse to the courts in the matter of forced labor compensation, was achieved in the negotiations. The companies succeeded in holding on to their view that their contributions to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” were not compensation in the same sense as what they might have been required to pay as a result of court rulings, but rather voluntary contributions made out of the sense of “historic responsibility” stated in the preamble to the Foundation Establishment Act. With this in mind, it is hard to say that legal progress was made here. Instead, the question arises as to why the Clinton administration contented itself with less, given that it had espoused the cause of international progress in human rights in many areas. One might assume that this could have been the result of a lack of assertiveness. But then it would be hard to understand why it assumed the role of a mediator and refused to grant the class-action lawyers their wish to have a court-decided settlement. One might also assume that

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after the dismissal of two class-action lawsuits by U.S. courts at an early stage in the negotiations, the administration became uncertain as to whether its own belief in the justification of the lawsuits was shared by the courts. This, in turn, leads to the question as to why the Foundation Initiative wanted to rule out legal recourse in the courts right away and not just in the future. In my view, there is another explanation that is more likely. The American government found itself in a conflict of political interests. On the one hand, it was seeking to promote international progress with regard to the respect of human rights. At the same time, it was seeking to promote the recognition and recovery of material claims by Holocaust survivors. This included efforts to enforce payment of compensation for the slave labor of Holocaust survivors. It gradually became clear as this policy developed that, although the Jews had suffered most under the forced labor system in the Third Reich, the vast majority of victims were non-Jews. Given its focus on the unique nature of the Holocaust, what was involved here was not primarily progress with regard to the respect of human rights as expressed by the sanctioning of forced labor and the establishment of universal standards of responsibility and payment, but rather an effort to find closure for a chapter from the past.

Intercultural practice Quite a few steps, not all of them very pretty, still had to be taken before the deal reached on the establishment of a foundation and on legal closure could become law. In the end these steps were taken, and it finally became possible to begin distribution of the long-delayed payments to surviving victims of slave and forced labor through 70

the Foundation and its partner organizations. It is my express wish to end this essay without providing a historical assessment of the chain of events it describes. It would doubtless be too early for an evaluation of this kind anyway. At any rate, it would not be fitting for me to do this, a historian who, at the age of sixty, had the privilege of spending two years engaged in the most intensive studies of his life on the sidelines of the process that led to the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” There was a great deal that was new about the process that established this foundation. Most outstanding in this regard was perhaps the multilateralism involved when different governmental, nongovernmental, national, transnational, and international players work together. This was evident for everyone to see in Eizenstat’s integrative round, but it was also something that the German side been mindful of and sought after prior to that. It will not be until many of these players have written their memoirs and opened up their personal files for examination and the life histories and experiences of many hundreds of former slave and forced laborers have been studied (see the documentation program under the supervision of Alexander von Plato, initiated in the spring of 2005, financed by the Remembrance and Future Fund) that we will have the foundations for making accurate historical assessments. Of necessity, my report contains frequent references to oppression, injustice, contempt, indifference, exploitation, mercenary attitudes, collisions of interest, and levers of power. It also contains references to the tortuous paths that led to a certain amount of justice being done and left a considerable amount of injustice unaddressed. In my comments on the negotiations I make no mention of the victims, or Lutz Niethammer

even of the partner organizations without which a correct and effective distribution of the payments would not have been possible. This is appropriate with regard to the negotiations, but not with regard to the problem as a whole. I would like to use these last few pages to try to balance out the image that has been projected thus far by looking back on my experience as a person who was between the two fronts in the context of the negotiations. The counterweight consists of the fact that, even though I am not always able to report successes, and definitely not able to report manifestations of high moral principle, I can report the existence of mutual sympathies, displays of expert knowledge, a need that was felt to engage in cooperation, expressions of constructive criticism, manifestations of compassion, outbreaks of anger and other ingredients that went into the overall mix, which constituted a willingness to engage in a process aimed at arriving at an agreement that transcends national, group, disciplinary, or other cultural constraints, in particular, the inherited front between victims and perpetrators. I also counted the academic community, a world in which I have lived for many years, among the ingredients needed for reaching an agreement that would pave the way for future understanding given its development of transnational standards and forms of information exchange, as well as its ability, through historical research and comparisons, to lessen the effects of collective memory and identity, to help people arrive at a somewhat more realistic view of themselves, and to help them develop a greater interest in understanding the experience of others. Our experience in networking expertise among the negotiating parties was very positive. By way of example, the database established in Florence proved to be very

useful in limiting competition between the various groups of victims during the negotiations on distribution. I would like to discuss this at the end of my essay, since the “measure of justice” that was ultimately achieved is something that could not have been negotiated in one fell swoop. It was a process that gradually led to the intended objective, i.e., an exchange of information based on mutual respect and confidence, but without this ruling out critical analysis, careful judgment, and the occasional bit of humor here or there. Monetary compensation as an expression of responsibility for the past was intended to be only a transitory phase in the process of forming a shared deposit of cultural capital that will acquire its full value only after an effort has been made to drill down and find more complex truths that encompass all of us and also take into account the victims who are no longer living. In my description of the establishment of the Foundation I reported on the working group that existed in the Chancellery in the winter of 1998/99. The fact that it was headed by independent academic advisers made it easier for the working group to access the expertise of the ministries and parliamentary groups on short notice in the process of formulating the government position paper. In this connection it was able to break down ways of thinking that had been established for decades and to determine the realistic dimensions of the justice problem in the forced labor question. Before the German Industry Foundation Initiative adopted this approach and combined it with its objective of achieving legal closure in the United States, I traveled to Israel and shortly after that to the relevant countries of Central and Eastern Europe, at Bodo Hombach’s request. There I sought out the advice of experts, many of whom were victims of Nazism (and many who

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had also been victims of Stalinism), gathered current data on which to base distribution estimates, requested information on urgent needs and suitable ideas for a humanitarian fund, and looked for partner organizations, to the extent possible, nongovernmental ones, that could take charge of the distribution process on a cooperative basis. I went to see Israel Gutman and Yehuda Bauer, leading Israeli scholars on the Holocaust, as well as representatives of the Claims Conference there, in particular Moshe Sanbar, former Governor of the Bank of Israel and Treasurer of the Claims Conference at the time. I visited all the Eastern European reconciliation funds, numerous victims’ organizations (particularly in Minsk, Kiev, and Prague), as well as historical initiatives, including my friends in the Moscow society “Memorial,” Irina Sherbakova and Arseniy Roginskiy. Also on my list were persons with recognized records of services rendered in support of German-Polish understanding such as Wlodzimierz Borodziej, historian and then vice rector of Warsaw University; Adam Krzeminski, editor of the weekly magazine Polytika; and Jerzy Kranz, then head of the planning directorate at the Polish Foreign Ministry. In keeping with the nongovernmental character of the Foundation Initiative we were looking for nongovernmental partner organizations in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Despite considerable differences in the way they operated, I found the reconciliation funds established in Warsaw, Kiev, Minsk, and Moscow on the basis of the global agreements concluded by the Kohl government, and, in particular, the German-Czech Future Fund, which came later, to be better than their reputations. Indeed, there was simply no alternative to them in terms of their expertise, databases, and strategic positions. With the exception 72

of the German-Czech Future Fund, they were not nongovernmental in the true sense of the term. They were government-associated and structured in accordance with the political cultures of the countries in question. The various interest groups among the victims of Nazism were represented in them. Their business practices, which at times seemed alarming at first sight, ultimately turned out to be in the best interests of the victims.26 Thankfully, Daimler-Chrysler sponsored a conference in Buchwald that summer on “Facts and Figures on the Nazi-Era Forced Labor Question,” at which we tried to gather together the expertise of leading international experts from the historical community as well as from the future partner organizations. There were disputes in individual instances, but, on the whole, the attending experts were in agreement as to how the data on forced labor was to be interpreted. Above all, they agreed that there was a justification for distinguishing between “slave laborers,” i.e., former concentration camp prisoners who were exploited as laborers under constant threat of death, on the one hand, and “forced laborers,” on the other. They agreed unanimously that it would be wrong to consider a subgroup of forced laborers particularly worthy of compensation based on the extent to which they were housed in guarded camps, given that the extent to which they were guarded varied over time but without any accompanying improvement in living conditions or restoration of the rights they had been stripped of, the absence of which was lifethreatening. Instead, forced laborers were to be defined as a group on the basis of the extensive loss of rights prescribed by the racial discrimination orders affecting Polish and Soviet workers. Needless to say, most of the experts regretted the fact that it was not possible for political reasons and Lutz Niethammer

for reasons deriving from international law to include POW forced laborers in a compensation program, in particular those from the Soviet Union and Italy. We summarized the results of the Buchenwald conference and supplied this information to the parties to the negotiations as well as to the general public. The next stage was Florence. That summer, the political negotiations had heated up over details and were in danger of grinding to a halt. I suggested that the experts from both sides, working together, would be able to reach an agreement on the numbers of eligible claimants for the various categories of slave and forced laborers within one day. This was confirmed by the representatives of the Claims Conference, by the representatives of the Eastern European reconciliation funds, and, to everyone’s surprise, by Michael Hausfeld, the most knowledgeable of the American class-action lawyers, whose expertise extended beyond his Jewish clientele to Eastern Europe in general. The Chancellery immediately provided the financing for a conference at the European University Institute in Florence, where I once had a Jean Monnet Fellowship. Our meeting there ten days later was attended by the two governments (represented by J. D. Bindenagel, U.S. special envoy for Holocaust issues and Germany specialist; O. Löffler, senior official at the Finance Ministry, responsible for Wiedergutmachung issues; and G. Fieberg, Lambsdorff staff member), the class-action lawyers (represented by M. Hausfeld); the German Industry Foundation Initiative (represented by O. Nübel, Daimler Archive); the five Eastern European reconciliation funds (represented by their presidents V. J. Gerassimov, Minsk; T. Kafka, Prague; I. N. Lushnikov, Kiev; P. Marguiev, Moscow; and J. Turczynski, Warsaw); and the Claims Conference (represented by Karl

Brozik, representative of the Claims Conference in Germany). With the exception of Brozik, who was constantly on the telephone coordinating his estimates with the JCC offices in New York and Tel Aviv, all of the above had filled out the data questionnaires we had sent out and were able to back them up more or less with computer printouts regarding payments made in the 1990s for concentration camp prisoners and foreign workers. There wasn’t any documentation of this kind for the Jewish side so that we had to rely on estimates provided to us by experts at the Claims Conference. The fact that this estimate was smaller than the number of applications actually approved in the course of the payout is proof of the conservative nature of the estimates we and our partners came up with. We were able to agree on approximate figures and to back them up to a certain extent with projections carried out by Mark Spoerer on the basis of Reich statistics and country-specific mortality tables. We were also able to form reserves for those groups of victims (“rest of the world”) who were not represented, based on our own projections. The most effective control of our data was the fact that we all did this together and that the results were approved by consensus. I think it was pretty clear to most of us that our data was going to have less of an influence on the size of the pie than on the way it would be divided up. As critically important and amicable as this cooperation was, it had its limits. The representatives of the partner organizations also saw themselves as lawyers for their respective groups of victims, and the latter were usually much larger than originally foreseen on the basis of the eligibility criteria agreed on in the negotiations. More precise data in keeping with these criteria could only be obtained by taking into account data on other camps, forced laborers

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in the agricultural sector, children, and internally displaced forced laborers in Eastern Europe. I agreed to do this but added characterizations to each of the data categories, indicating whether they had been agreed on or not and whether they were based on data or estimates. I recommended that the estimates given for internally displaced forced laborers not be taken into account, given our inability to verify them. I also recommended that hardship case categories be formed for agricultural workers from Poland and the Soviet Union as well as for children from concentration camps. Graf Lambsdorff charged me with the task of bringing about an intercultural agreement on the purpose of the Future Fund. This was still very much up in the air, leaving the fund open to attack. Its volume had already been reduced at that point. I was eager to take on the task in question, since I felt that it would not be meaningful merely to make one-time compensation payments of a few thousand marks and then do nothing else after that. The compensation payments needed to be seen as a necessary expression of recognition and assistance. In my view, the injustices that occurred in the process of providing these compensation payments could only be overcome by means of social and cultural practices that were in keeping with the purpose of the Foundation and remembrance of those who died. As such, I continued to expand our intercultural network of experts and soon noticed that, despite the considerable differences in our approaches and areas of emphasis, some common basic ideas began to emerge. Most important in this regard was the distinction between the short-term funding provided by the Future Fund to public humanitarian aid institutions to help survivors and safeguard their memory, on the one hand, and long-term tasks involving cross-border cultural and political 74

cooperation, on the other. This cooperation was a multilateral relationship among Germany, Poland, and the former Soviet Union, as well as Israel/Palestine.27 In the tense atmosphere that prevailed during the final negotiations in the spring of 2000, a meeting of cultural experts from the various groups that was supposed to be held in Munich failed to materialize. This and other initiatives undertaken by Graf Lambsdorff28 to define the purpose of the Remembrance and Future Fund in the Foundation Establishment Act failed as a result of the unwillingness of the companies to commit themselves having rounded up their half of the money that was needed to finance the Foundation and without which it would not be possible to achieve legal closure in the United States. When I resumed my duties in the history department at the University of Jena, I was saddened by the fact that we had not succeeded in reaching an agreement prior to the establishment of the Foundation on the tasks the latter would have above and beyond the payment of compensation. But in the years since then I have learned that my sadness then was both vain and premature. The cultural network that I had wanted to create for the Remembrance and Future Fund took shape without me. Certain practices emerged which, despite the fact that entirely different points of emphasis were brought to bear by those who took over decision-making responsibility, were not dissimilar to the notion of cultural capital extending beyond forced labor compensation that I had developed on the basis of the meetings I had held in Weimar, Jerusalem, Warsaw, Florence, New York, and Moscow. I could tell from the pleasure I took from this fact that I had recovered from my excursion to the peripheries of government activity and was able to take a more relaxed and sober view of my role as a mediator. Lutz Niethammer

What remained first and foremost was a feeling of gratitude for being given the privilege of having this experience, even if it entailed an element of failure. I was a witness to highly complex negotiations addressing a kind of injustice that cannot be compensated for but which needed to come as close to being compensated for as possible, the results of which I strongly welcomed. In my view, the compensation of forced laborers was a long overdue supplement to German Wiedergutmachung policy. I found its double focus on Jewish

and Eastern European victims correct and in keeping with a nongovernmental contribution on the part of German industry. I would be greatly pleased if the intercultural approach we employed in compiling our tables in Florence were to help bring about a realistic perception of the dimensions of this chapter from the past and provide a measure of satisfaction to as many as possible of the surviving slave and forced laborers exploited by the Third Reich as well as financial assistance to those in need or, at least, a token of good will.

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Bibliography

The following are publications of fundamental importance for the history of Naziera forced labor. Eva Seeber: Zwangsarbeiter in der faschistischen Kriegswirtschaft. Die Deportation und Ausbeutung polnischer Bürger unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lage der Arbeiter aus dem sogenannten Generalgouvernement 1939-1945, Berlin (DDR) 1964. Edward L. Homze: Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany, Princeton N.J. 1967. Ulrich Herbert: Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des “Ausländer-Einsatzes” in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, (first published 1986) 2nd printing, Bonn 1999. For an account of a particularly drastic chapter of Nazi terror against foreign laborers see Gabriele Lotfi: KZ der Gestapo. Arbeitserziehungslager im Dritten Reich (preface by Hans Mommsen), Stuttgart/Munich 2000. For the connection between forced labor and major Nazi crimes against humanity, see Saul Friedländer: Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, 2 vols., vol. 1: Die Jahre der Verfolgung, Munich 1998, vol. 2: Die Jahre der Vernichtung, Munich 2006; Michael Zimmermann: Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage,” Hamburg 1996; Ulrich Herbert/ Karin Orth/Christoph Diekmann (eds.): Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (first published 1998) 2 vols. Frankfurt/M. 2002, see in particular section 4 (p. 533 ff.); Christian Streit: Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945, Stuttgart 1978. Overviews of the current state of historical 76

scholarship on this subject are given in Mark Spoerer: Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz. Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939-1945, Stuttgart/Munich 2001; Ulrich Herbert: Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland. Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge, Munich 2001, in particular, chapter III (p. 129 ff.). Pioneering studies on forced labor in individual companies were written by Gerd Wysocki: Zwangsarbeit im Stahlkonzern. Salzgitter und die Reichswerke “Hermann Göring” 1937-1945, Braunschweig 1982; Gustav-Hermann Seebold: Ein Stahlkonzern im Dritten Reich. Der Bochumer Verein 1927-1945, Wuppertal 1981; Barbara Hopmann, Mark Spoerer, Birgit Weitz, Beate Brüninghaus: Zwangsarbeit bei Daimler-Benz (Beiheft 78, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte), Stuttgart 1994; Hans Mommsen, Manfred Grieger: Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf 1996; Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anity Kugler, Nicholas Levis: Working for the Enemy. Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War, New York/Oxford 2000. A study that for the first time focuses on a single sector in the occupied territories is provided by Klaus Tenfelde, Hans-Christoph Seidel (eds.): Zwangsarbeit im Bergwerk. Der Arbeitseinsatz im Kohlebergbau des Deutschen Reiches und der besetzten Gebiete im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg, vol. 1: Forschungen, Essen 2005 (currently 5 vols.). Lutz Niethammer

Readers bringing together works by different authors have been important in internationalizing research and debate on this period of history. Ulrich Herbert (ed.): Europa und der “Reichseinsatz.” Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland, 1938-1945, Essen 1991. Rimco Spanjer, Diete Oudesluijs, Johan Meijer (eds.): Zur Arbeit gezwungen. Zwangsarbeit in Deutschland 1940-1945, Bremen 1999. A comparative approach is taken in: Dittmar Dahlmann/ Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.): Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation. Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, Essen 1999. Oliver Rathkolb (ed.): Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy. Coming to Terms with Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution, Innsbruck 2002; Dan Diner, Gotthard Wunberg (eds.): Restitution and Memory. Historical Remembrance and Material Restoration in Europe, New York 2006. HansChristoph Seidel, Klaus Tenfelde (eds.): Zwangsarbeit im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bewältigung und vergleichende Aspekte, Essen 2007. The following eye-witness accounts have been published: Carola Sachse (ed.): Als Zwangsarbeiterin 1941 in Berlin. Die Aufzeichnungen der Volkswirtin Elisabeth Freund, Berlin 1996; Tamara Frankenberger: Wir waren wie Vieh. Lebensgeschichtliche Erinnerungen ehemaliger sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiterinnen, Münster 1997. Since then sources and documents have become available in the context of local historical initiatives that are too numerous to be listed here in detail. Some that have come into existence as a result of visitors’ programs funded by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” have been studied by Anja Kräutler: Dieselbe Stadt – und

doch eine ganz andere. Kommunale und bürgerschaftliche Besuchsprogramme für ehemalige Zwangsarbeiter und andere Opfer nationalsozialistischen Unrechts, Berlin 2006. A large international project under the supervision of Alexander von Plato recorded personal testimony from former slave and forced laborers. This work was completed recently for the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and is scheduled for presentation in the near future. A general history of reparations is provided by Jörg Fisch: Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Munich 1992. A history of Wiedergutmachung is given by Constantin Goschler: Schuld und Schulden. Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, Göttingen 2005. For an account of the exclusion of forced labor from Wiedergutmachung see: Benjamin B. Ferencz: Lohn des Grauens. Die verweigerte Entschädigung für jüdische Zwangsarbeiter – ein Kapitel deutscher Nachkriegsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 1981; Ulrich Herbert: Nicht entschädigungsfähig? Die Wiedergutmachungsansprüche der Ausländer; op. cit.: Arbeit, Volkstum, Weltanschauung. Über Fremde und Deutsche im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 157-192; Klaus Barwig, Günter Saathoff, Nicole Weyde (eds.): Entschädigung für NS-Zwangsarbeit. Rechtliche, historische und politische Aspekte, Baden-Baden 1998; Sando Blanko: Der lange Weg zur Entschädigung von NS-Zwangsarbeitern, in: Peer Zumbansen (ed.): Zwangsarbeit im Dritten Reich: Erinnerung und Verantwortung. Juristische und Zeithistorische Betrachtungen, BadenBaden 2002, pp. 259-275. An account of the Polish perspective up to CSCE is provided by Krysztof Ruchniewicz: Polskie zabiegi o odszkodownia niemieckie w latach 1944/45-1975, (Historia CLXXIV ) Wroclaw 2007, English summary pp. 331-334.

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The best journalistic reports on the international negotiations (1999-2000) can be found in: John Authers, Richard Wolffe: The Victims’ Fortune. Inside the Epic Battle over the Debts of the Holocaust, New York 2002. In German there is Matthias Arning: Späte Abrechnung. Über Zwangsarbeiter, Schlussstriche und Berliner Verständigungen, Frankfurt am Main 2001. Franziska Augstein’s excellent analyses and commentaries regarding the negotiations, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, have unfortunately not been collected in a book. German industry’s prime interest in legal peace is described in a study by Susanne-Sophia Spilotis: Verantwortung und Rechtsfrieden. Die Stiftungsinitiative der deutschen Wirtschaft, Frankfurt am Main 2003, (see page 238 ff. for a very useful chronicle of the negotiations). For her study she was able to make use of the personal notes and recollections of representatives of the German Industry Founda-

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tion Initiative. See also the critical retrospective written by foundation spokesman Manfred Gentz: Die Verstrickung von Unternehmen in Unrechtsstaaten, in: Jürgen Lillteicher (ed.): Profiteure des NS-Systems? Deutsche Unternehmen und das Dritte Reich, Berlin 2006, pp. 200-215. The American mediator, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs at the State Department and later Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. After the Clinton presidency he went back to practicing law. In his otherwise very instructive account of the negotiations he tends to overstate the U.S. role as an advocate of international justice, doing so at the expense of his German partners, particularly those from industry. See Stuart E. Eizenstat: Imperfect Justice. Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, New York 2003.

Lutz Niethammer

Notes 1 In the 1980s I proposed and supervised the research that was carried out by Ulrich Herbert on the subject of foreign workers and was to be of key relevance in this context. From late 1998 to mid- 2000 I advised the top representatives of the German government in connection with the creation of the “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” Foundation, Bodo Hombach (SPD ) and Otto Graf Lambsdorff (FDP ), to the best of my ability as a historian and also with regard to intercultural bridge-building. In doing research for this essay I was able to make use of files kept by the staffs of Hombach and Lambsdorff in addition to my own. 2 To avoid any potential misunderstandings I feel it is important to note that I did not write this essay in any official capacity and that I alone am responsible for the opinions expressed here as well as any errors or shortcomings it may contain. 3 Anti-Semitism was a core element of Nazi ideology from the very beginning. Persecution of the Sinti and Roma (gypsies) had a slightly different history. In this case the Nazis merely continued to pursue traditional prejudices and public discriminations against already marginalized minorities. There was neither a traditional religious conflict involved nor any deep-seated desire to marginalize them on the basis of racist beliefs. The fact of the matter is that this was something of a paradox. The Nazis wanted to marginalize a group who, in accordance with their own racial criteria, were much more Aryan than the Germans, the latter obviously being anything but racially pure themselves. Michael Zimmermann describes the various stages of their persecution. The first thing that was done was to allege that most Sinti and Roma were halfbreeds of some kind and for this reason socially unacceptable, thus creating a motive for their marginalization. Racially pure gypsies, on the other hand, were to be placed on reservations, under protection, as it were. However, in the course of the war these ideological contortions played hardly any role at all as the process of ethnic cleansing took on its characteristic dynamic.

The men in the Einsatzgruppen who were doing their dirty work behind the lines along the eastern front did not bother to distinguish between racially pure gypsies (to be kept on reservations) and halfbreed gypsies (to be killed). They simply murdered any Sinti and Roma they came across, just as they did with the Jews. A camp for gypsy families at Auschwitz seemed to enjoy special status for quite some time. However, the SS did not hesitate to gas these prisoners as soon as they needed additional room for the last largescale transports of Jews, particularly from Hungary. 4 Herbert, Ausländerpolitik, p. 133, Herbert summarizes the Nazi government decrees regarding the status of Polish and Soviet forced laborers that were issued by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt on March 8, 1942: “The Poles were forced to live in camps. Those employed in agriculture were required to live in quarters separate from those used by German farm hands. They had to wear a clearly visible sign (‘P’) on their clothing. Any contact with Germans outside the work situation was prohibited. They were paid the lowest-level wages that existed on the German wage scale. In addition, 15 percent was deducted from their earnings and taken by the German government as a punitive measure. […] Poles were to be paid only for the work they actually did, meaning that if they were sick they got nothing. Employers were not allowed to pay them bonuses of any kind. […] Poles were not allowed to use public transport or public bathing facilities. The holding of church services for Poles was prohibited. Poles were not allowed to leave their place of employment or the local district they were employed in. The decree even prohibited Poles from using bicycles. […] If found not to be working up to expectation they faced the prospect of being sent to one of the work education camps that were created for this express purpose. Polish men who had sex with German women ran the risk of being executed and the women involved ran the risk of being humiliated in public (having their hair cut off and being forced to wear signs telling what they did). The Nazi government order regarding the status of Soviet

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civilian laborers of February 2, 1942, and its later amendments went even further. Soviet workers were to be kept in guarded camps surrounded by fences. Men and women were to be kept separate from one another. Families were allowed to live together. Those who were unable to work, children under the age of fifteen, and pregnant women were sent back to where they came from. There was no freedom of movement for these laborers. They were not allowed to leave their camps except when they had to work. Recreational activities were organized by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF ). Excursions under the supervision of accompanying German personnel were offered as a reward for working particularly well. Everything possible was done to avoid placing Germans and Soviets in the same work groups so as to avoid the development of feelings of solidarity between Germans and Russians. Soviet forced laborers were guarded by industry security officers, private security services, and German workers who were recruited as deputy industry security officers. The camps were managed by persons appointed by the political security officers of the companies in question. Soviet women were guarded by men. There was a strict rule that Soviet workers had to wear a distinguishing patch on their clothing (Ost). A system of Soviet informants and camp elders was put in place. Soviet laborers were allowed to receive and send mail twice a month. They were not allowed to take part in religious services. If found to be breaking rules they were severely disciplined (use of firearms included). The camps had their own systems of punishment […] The camp managers were allowed to mete out ordinary disciplinary punishment. All other levels of punishment were handled by the Gestapo. Escapees were sent to work education camps and concentration camps. The punishment for murder, political offenses, and sexual intercourse with Germans was death. (op. cit., p. 138 f.) 5 During the last six months of the war executions of this kind were carried out in large numbers and mostly involved workers from Eastern Europe. We do not have a complete set of data on this, but Lotfi (p. 304 ff.) docu-

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6

7

8

9

10

ments at least 998 police executions in the Rhenish-Westphalian defense district from November 1944 to April 1945. Compensation for victims of communism has been provided since 1991, more rapidly thus than was the case for victims of Nazism. However, it was not more than the latter. It took seventeen years, until 2007, for the announcement to be made that there would be (small) pension supplements for (needy) former political prisoners in the GDR , going a little above the levels provided for by the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (Federal Compensation Act). There was an example of this kind in the Soviet Union during the glasnost period. A false newspaper report created the impression that Memorial, an anti-Stalinist organization whose Moscow office was then based in a private apartment and consisted of only a few activists, was going to have something to do with the future compensation of Soviet forced laborers. The result was that this organization received several hundred thousand letters from former forced laborers. Opening, evaluating, and documenting these letters in 1990 was one of the first GermanRussian cooperation projects (with particular support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation). The table on page 81 gives an overview of the international global agreements as well as the comparable payments made to the Jewish Claims Conference as a compensation for Nazi injustices in accordance with the calculations provided by Mark Spoerer. Of lasting value for the history of forced labor in Germany were early projects carried out by leading companies in the automobile industry such as Daimler-Benz and Volkswagen as well as a large-scale project funded for the entire mining sector by Ruhrkohle (see bibliography). The talks with Schröder were conducted by the CEO s of Allianz (Schulte-Hüllen), Deutsche Bank (Breuer), Krupp-Hösch (Cromme), BMW (Pischetsrieder), and VW (Piech). Breuer and Cromme assumed the role of spokesmen. What was involved now was bringing further affected companies into the mix (e.g., Degussa, Dresdner Bank, DaimlerLutz Niethammer

Payments made by the Federal Republic of Germany to other countries as well as to the JCC, from which former forced laborers also received compensation (in millions of DM) Country/Institution Israel JCC

Luxembourg Norway Denmark Greece Netherlands France Belgium Italy Switzerland Austria Great Britain Sweden Poland Russia Ukraine Belarus Estonia USA Lithuania Czech Republic Latvia Former Yugoslavia Total

Year

Amount

Value 2000

1952 1952 1980 1998 1959 1987 1959 1959 1960 1960 1960 1981 1960 1961 1961 1961 1964 1964 1975 1991 1993 1993 1993 1995 1995 1996 1997 1998 1998

3,000 450 2,200 200 18 12 60 16 115 125 400 250 80 40 10 101 11 1 1,300 500 400 400 200 2 3 2 140 2 80

11,244 1,687 3,616 206 63 16 209 56 394 428 1,370 387 274 134 33 338 34 3 2,586 615 455 455 228 2 3 2 145 2 82

10,118

24,985

Note: Spoerer’s indication (op. cit., p. 246) that forced laborers were also compensated from these lump-sum payments was doubtless true in numerous cases; however, it should be pointed out that victims who also fell into the forced laborer category were not recognized as such under the terms of use defined for the funds by the German side and the majority of the victims in question did not feel that they had received compensation for having been forced laborers.

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Chrysler, Siemens) and having the appropriate expertise at the top working level. Daimler-Benz CFO Manfred Gentz, who had early on begun addressing the forced labor issue at his company, rapidly moved to the fore on the basis of his qualifications. Leading roles were also played by Michael Jansen (General Director of International Corporate Affairs at Degussa and former Chief-ofStaff for Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher), Horst Teltschik (member of the BMW Group Board of Management and former National Security Adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl), and Berthold Kohler (Chief Legal Adviser at Deutsche Bank). 11 One day after Hombach’s first meeting with Eizenstat, but only because Walendziak had not been able to make it to a meeting that had been scheduled a few days earlier. 12 Eizenstat (p. 205 ff.) tells a story full of personal impressions and details intended to show that it was under his guidance that reluctant players were led to the double objective of providing a reasonable level of compensation for the victims and achieving legal closure for German industry. However, the descriptions he gives are not always precisely dated or in agreement with the written record. By way of example, he claims to have urged the government in Bonn to include Poles and other Eastern Europeans at a time when the German Foreign Minister had long since made the decision to do just that. Thus, some of the things he says must be seen as subjective assessments on his part. 13 It consisted of specialists from the ministries involved (Michael Geier, Foreign Office; Otto Löffler, Finance; Christoph Schumacher, Labor and Social Affairs; Wolfgang Suhr, Chancellery) as well as from the governing parties (Günter Saathoff, Alliance 90 / The Greens, Siegfried Vergin, SPD ), as well as Ulrich von Alemann and myself. We took into account the views the companies put forward in meetings with Hombach, relevant Chancellery files from the time of Helmut Kohl’s government, a fundamental decision given to me by Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on January 5, 1999 at Hombach’s request (to include Eastern Europe right from the outset in any compensation

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agreements), diplomatic experience with the reconciliation funds in Eastern Europe, as well as advice from experts such as Egon Bahr, Ignatz Bubis, Ulrich Herbert, Volkhard Knigge, and Hans-Jochen Vogel. 14 The argument in favor of applying the principle of equality in the final compensation agreement (something that would have made it truly credible) could not be maintained in light of the systematically unequal treatment meted out in the Third Reich. Its inclusion remained a source of conflict right up to the end, and it failed in the face of determined resistance on the part of industry, which did not want to have to face up to its involvement in the racism of the Nazi era and, even less, to be held liable for racial discrimination against Soviet workers used in agriculture. It was agreed that to be eligible for compensation foreign workers would have to have been deported into the Reich and kept there in guarded camps. Given the large number of labor camps that existed at that time, this would make it harder for the victims in question to provide proof of their status and could imply less than we might think it would, seen from today’s perspective. A consequence of rejecting the historically correct criterion, racial discrimination, was that it created considerable difficulty in justifying the exclusion of the IMI s (Italian military internees held during the last two years of the war) from consideration in the Foundation Establishment Act. IMI s were not subjected to discrimination for racial reasons but rather as a form of revenge. Their situation was made worse by the fact that they were stripped of their POW status. 15 At meetings held on the Kornblum proposal there was unofficial whispering to the effect that it would be possible to raise somewhere around two billion marks for a voluntary fund of this kind. In the negotiations, which began in the spring, no discussion of the size of the fund occurred until the fall. The senior class-action lawyer had intimated to a German partner at the outset that his target figure was 15 billion dollars. At the same time, less discrete colleagues were bandying about much higher figures. The difference between Lutz Niethammer

millions and billions was not always clear in media reports. 16 Finance Ministry specialists, among others, were unable to find very much in the way of assets that could be restored to their rightful owners in the banking and insurance sector and no programs had been set up by the governing parties for this sector. It accounted for the last tenth of the overall figure agreed on for the Foundation Establishment Act. It was a sensitive issue and important for the strength and cohesion of the Foundation Initiative as well as for the willingness of the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC ) to accept compromise in the international negotiations. A key factor on the side of German industry was the strength and influence of the financial sector, which had contributed higher-than-average amounts to the foundation fund. Being in the vanguard of the globalization movement, the financial sector was in a good position to be able to convince reluctant companies that it made good sense to become part of the Foundation Initiative. Deutsche Bank also had its planned merger with Bankers Trust to think about. The deal had been delayed as a result of political questions regarding the bank’s record during the Nazi era. This motivated its spokesman, Rolf Breuer, to work closely together with the Schröder-Fischer government and with Jewish organizations in the United States until the blockade was overcome. For the JCC the tenth billion was of major importance, since it was the last large-scale contribution it could expect to receive, and it was going to continue to have major expenses on its hands, first and foremost for Holocaust survivors and their Zionist representatives. Since the property claims against the financial sector were still uncertain, it was determined that if the money provided for this purpose was not made use of, it should be placed in a JCC social fund. This would be a considerable increase over the 650 million marks in humanitarian payments that had been planned by the banks and insurance companies anyway. In a conversation I had with World Jewish Congress Secretary General Israel Singer in March 1999 he vehemently defended this special future fund for

the JCC , calling it a tax for the sin of corporate collaboration with the Third Reich. He felt he had bought the right to this fund by remaining silent at the time of Deutsche Bank’s takeover of Bankers Trust, just when its role in helping to finance Auschwitz was getting a great deal of attention in the press. 17 Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering had already represented the defendants in the struggle to bring about the Swiss bank compromise in the “stolen gold affair.” The firm now employed Robert M. Kimmit, former American Ambassador in Bonn with excellent connections on both sides of the Atlantic. Kimmit headed the team of lawyers put in charge of this case. 18 At any rate this is the impression one gets from the German sources. In his book Eizenstat paints a different picture, namely that he was taken by surprise when the creation of the Foundation Initiative was announced and angered by the fact that it had been a unilateral move. The announcement provoked a furious reaction from the classaction lawyers in the United States, who saw it as an effort to impose a settlement and cut them out. This enabled Eizenstat to assume his role as a mediator acting on behalf of the American government. Where the Foundation Initiative went from there was based for the most part on proposals put forward by the ambassador in Bonn. Eizenstat could not have been very happy about the law firm that represented the German companies in the United States. It responded repeatedly with the sophistry of a traditional political adversary, alluding to failures on the part of past U.S. administrations (for instance the failure of the Carter administration to resolve the hostage crisis in Iran) and placing them in the same context as Eizenstat’s plans of taking care of the unfinished business of World War II and his insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. 19 If the negotiating process had not been so heavily determined by executive government, the inclusion of forced laborers in agriculture would certainly have been conceivable at the parliamentary level. In Austria, where media coverage of the international negotiations in Germany was followed

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closely, the ÖVP government emphasized the need to include forced laborers in agriculture in the compensation regime and, in so doing, provide a gesture of reconciliation on the part of its rural base. 20 During and after the negotiations, a number of media voices recurrently pointed out that the government was already financing about half of the money being provided for the Foundation Initiative due to the fact that the companies would be able to deduct it from their taxes. The intended implication was that further financial involvement by the government would not be needed. Everyone was aware of this during the negotiations, but it was not relevant, since no one was about to dispute the right of German companies to deduct the contributions they made to the Foundation from their taxes, not even the Ministry of Finance. Similarly, the class-action lawyers were not out to punish present-day German companies in the negotiations but rather to obtain a measure of compensation for the last surviving victims. 21 The planned legal instrument, requiring the U.S. government to issue a statement of interest whenever cases of this nature are filed in U.S. courts with a view to having them dismissed out of consideration for the country’s foreign policy interests, would have been open to attack, given that the rights of Holocaust survivors are an extremely sensitive issue in American society. With this in mind, the government wanted to make sure that everything possible was done in advance to avoid the occurrence of conflicts of this kind. Since German companies could only ever hope to find legal peace by covering all the bases, the negotiations dragged on and the financial volume continued to increase until the last possible source of conflict that could attract the attention of the American public had been taken into account in one way or another. 22 In Lambsdorff’s files it can be seen that his staff gathered information (which it did not make use of) on how the government’s side of the compensation funds could be raised by tapping the gold reserve or by selling other assets owned by the Bundesbank.

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23 This was preceded by a renewed exchange of letters between President Clinton and Chancellor Schröder on December 13 and 14, 1999 (see Spilotis, p. 312 ff.), in which the procedure to be followed to achieve legal peace was stated, the final overall financial figure was confirmed, and both sides underscored the fundamental importance and exceptional character of the solution that had been found. 24 See “A Piece of Raw Meat,” in: Authers/ Wolffe, op. cit., p. 231 ff. 25 See Chapter 1. In contrast to the provisions of the Foundation Establishment Act we did not speak of “racial” but rather of “racist” discrimination, for race, even in its negation, is not an inherently understood concept. In contrast to nationality or religion, the notion of race does not lend itself to objectification. In recent European history it has been used as a construct for making arbitrary definitions and exclusions in the framework of racist ideologies. 26 Here are two examples. When I visited the Belarusian Understanding and Reconciliation Foundation in Minsk in early March 1999, I was very skeptical about the Lukashenko regime. However, I was outraged to discover that a KGB officer was on the Board of Trustees ex officio, that the Board of Directors was headed by two former Red Army colonels, and that my visit to the offices of the Foundation (situated in the former GDR embassy building) was totally staged. Later I met another member of the Board of Trustees, an elderly women, a professor of English by the name of O.A. Lechay. She was also president of “Lyos,” Association of Former (Adult) Prisoners of Fascism, founded in 1991. After my encounter with this friendly and self-confident individual, I knew that the interests of victims of Nazism who were not close to the regime would have an intelligent and staunch voice to represent them in the Foundation. (In the Soviet Union only young people taken prisoner by the Nazis were officially recognized as victims of Nazism. Under the Stalin regime adults who spent time in German prison camps were suspected of collaboration, the reasoning being that they had preferred to be capLutz Niethammer

tured rather than to fight to the death. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that it became possible for persons who spent time in Nazi prison camps as adults to form an organization of their own and Professor Lechay helped them do this.) As regards my meeting with the chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, V. Y. Gerassimov, this was the only time on my trip that I got into an argument with one of my interlocutors, something I normally would not do. He got me started when he claimed I was trying to marginalize his organization. I later apologized to him. Over a period of a year he was the only foundation chairman who supplied me with consistent computerbased data on the victims of Nazism he was responsible for (and not just in Belarus). He fought hard and fair with us over the question of “other camps” in Belarus. As I came to see then, he was so conscientious in implementing the provisions of the Foundation Establishment Act that his foundation in Belarus was the only one where the number of victims actually eligible for compensation was considerably lower than the figures originally claimed, as many claims were not always in keeping with the provisions of the laws. I am not sure whether or not I should be pleased by this degree of strict adherence to the law. One thing I can say for sure is that this is where I least expected to see it. (By way of explanation, the other camps in Belarus, like so many of the prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union, were death camps. What was characteristic of these camps was that the prisoners died of starvation on open fields that had been hastily fenced off with barbed wire and that the German side did not use them for any kind of work.) On my visit to Poland I was skeptical about the fact that there were a number of young conservatives in the Foundation and that some of them were making use of their German-financed jobs to spread antiGerman propaganda. The Kohl government had neglected to fill the German seat on the supervisory board. When this position was

finally taken by Hans Koschnik, former mayor of Bremen, a man with international experience and a commitment to dealing with the past, complaints of this kind ceased. I had been warned about the business practices of the Polish foundation. In the period of time before the conditions had been created for making compensation payments to victims it had used the 400 million marks it had received from Germany to speculate on the financial market. Among other things it had invested several million in a bank that went belly up a short time later. A year later, I learned that the Polish Foundation’s willingness to risk losses by speculating on the money market had paid off. The fact of the matter was that it had earned a great deal more than it had lost as a result of the bank that went broke. It was the only foundation that was able to make a second payment to eligible victims in the amount of between one hundred and two hundred marks. This on top of an average first payment of around 700 marks added up to a respectable sum of money in the Polish context. 27 The Polish-born pioneer of Israeli Holocaust research, Israel Gutman, pointed out the long-term importance of this relationship to me during my visit to Jerusalem. 28 In the wake of my failure, Graf Lambsdorff nominated former SPD chairman and spokesman for the non-partisan initiative “Against Forgetting—for Democracy,” Hans-Jochen Vogel, to be the moderator for the Future Fund. At first this move was widely acclaimed, but in the end it was rejected by the Foundation Initiative. At the time I put together a lengthy report and collection of documentary material for Lambsdorff and Vogel showing my preliminary findings. I published an excerpt from this report in connection with the passage of the Foundation Establishment Act in the Bundestag (“Der Schlussstein soll ein Grundstein werden,” FAZ , July 19, 2000, reprinted in Lutz Niethammer: Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungsversuche, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 2002, pp. 253-259).

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Michael Jansen, Günter Saathoff, Kai Hennig

Final Report on the Compensation Programs Carried Out by the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation

Introduction When, in September 2000, the Foundation’s Board of Directors began—with the support of its international Board of Trustees—to establish a foundation, it was unable to model itself on any precedents for the project set out in the Foundation Establishment Act. What is more, there was no experience whatsoever of making payments to what was then estimated to be a total of more than a million potential, but unknown, beneficiaries. Looking back now, memories of the organizational difficulties during the start-up phase and of the accompanying public disagreements have begun to fade. What still remains as vivid as ever is the renewed confrontation with the horrors of National Socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, which have once again been painfully called to mind by the work of the Foundation. The German Bundestag, together with German industry, has admitted political and moral responsibility for the victims of Nazism and for the people coerced into slavery and forced labor by the Nazi state. Serious injustice was inflicted on them through deportation, imprisonment, exFinal Report

ploitation and even annihilation through labor, and a variety of other human rights abuses. The foundation took up its work in a spirit of political and moral responsibility for these victims. Its principal goal was to perform the tasks laid down in the Foundation Establishment Act. These tasks and their funding had been agreed upon during the course of long and drawn-out international negotiations. The intention and focus of the Foundation Establishment Act was to bring peace to those former forced laborers who had suffered the most under the Nazis. The Act also governs payments to other groups of Nazi victims, such as those subjected to medical experiments or individuals who suffered property or insurance losses. But the Foundation Establishment Act was not a comprehensive compensation act covering all forms of Nazi injustice and can therefore not be viewed as a second Federal Indemnification Act. The scope of this legislation in terms of both time and intent can only be understood in the context of previous settlements reached under Germany’s compensation policy, particularly in the foregoing decade. Specific reference is made 87

here to the global agreements concluded between Germany and Poland, between Germany and the CIS countries of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as other parallel agreements, such as the German-Czech Future Fund. All previous global agreements, including those concluded decades earlier with Western countries, primarily benefited individuals who had suffered detention and damage to health as a result of Nazi injustices and who were experiencing severe material hardship. Critics on many sides decried the fact that these global agreements did not require Germany to provide restitution for forced labor under the Nazis. This gap was then “closed” by means of the Foundation Establishment Act. As painful as it may have sometimes been for those groups of victims not covered by the Act, the reality is that the Foundation’s Board of Directors and the partner organizations designated to process claims and disburse payments were duty-bound to act within the confines of the legislation. They were of course free to implement the provisions, such as to maximize benefits to the victims, but not to go beyond their limitations. It was the political decision of the international negotiators and the German parliament that a total of DM 10.1 billion (plus interest accrued by the Foundation) would be made available to fulfill the Foundation’s legal mandates, and that there would be no obligation on the part of the donors—the German government and German industry—to make supplementary payments. Many victims’ organizations fought for greater compensation claims for those forced laborers who had suffered the greatest hardship—such as concentration camp inmates—as compared, for example, to forced laborers who had worked in agriculture. This is why the Foundation Establishment Act provided for different pay88

ment levels for different groups of victims. The name of the Foundation—“Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”— clearly reflects the mission of the organization. It summarizes the full spectrum of the Foundation’s purpose as developed through international negotiations and the legislative process. Many affected persons sought, not only financial restitution, but also the acknowledgment by Germany that forced labor must be treated as a Nazi injustice and, hence, more than simply a “common side effect” of war and occupation, as it had been viewed in Germany for decades. The name of the Foundation also symbolizes Germany’s responsibility to keep the memory of this injustice alive for current and future generations. The foundation therefore devotes a portion of its funds to long-term support for projects commited to communicating the “never again” message. The primary aim of such projects is to convince future generations of the importance of protecting human rights and democracy. The words spoken by then German President Johannes Rau on December 17, 1999, with which he apologized on behalf of Germany for the wrongs suffered by former forced laborers, reflect the moral dimension of the Foundation’s mission. This moral mandate was anchored by lawmakers in the Preamble of the Foundation Establishment Act. What has the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” actually achieved? In an unprecedented effort, the Foundation, working with international partner organizations, has reached over 1.66 million people in nearly 100 countries on this planet, people whose youth was robbed more than fifty years ago and placed in the service of the Nazi war economy, often under conditions of extreme hardship. The foundation has disbursed a total of EUR 4.37 billion to these individuals. The

The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

payments were made in two installments through the partner organizations, who carefully supervised the payment tranches. The foremost aim here was to get the slated payments quickly and reliably to the victims, most of whom were quite advanced in age. The major advantage of this procedure was that lump-sum indemnification for a large number of victims took the place of the customary, personalized satisfaction for a few individuals, which could no longer be achieved through litigation. Independent complaints bodies took the place of court authorities, and in many cases the authentication of eligibility criteria took the place of hard legal evidence. In a coordinated effort on the part of more than 300 public and private archives in Germany, claimants from around the world have received support in their search for proof of their entitlement to benefit under the Foundation Establishment Act. In addition to the concentration camps listed in the Federal Indemnification Act, almost 4,000 other camps—especially in the parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe occupied by German troops—have been recognized as “other places of confinement” akin to concentration camps in the meaning of the Foundation Establishment Act. Surviving forced laborers from these camps have been able to receive payments in the highest category provided for by the Act. By recognizing forced laborers as victims of Nazism, the Foundation took an important step in rehabilitating these people, both in Germany and abroad. A similar development has likewise occurred in Central and Eastern European countries, especially in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. People who had been deported to Germany to perform forced labor were not exactly welcomed home with open arms by Stalin. Indeed, they were Final Report

considered traitors to their country who had served the enemy instead of resisting to the death. Many deportees even faced the accusation of having “volunteered” to go to Germany for work. Those who returned to the Soviet Union faced severe discrimination in the years that followed. A significant number were even persecuted a second time and ended up as prisoners in Soviet gulags. Following Germany’s recognition of these people as deported forced laborers, more and more of their own countrymen also recognized them as victims. The question of whether the money paid out actually made it to the surviving victims has been raised again and again. Such skepticism was justified given the financial irregularities uncovered in some so-called reconciliation foundations established with German funding in the nineties following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. These organizations were granted a lump total of DM 1.5 billion by the German government to be used for compensation payments to Nazi victims. The problem was that the government had not reserved the right to codetermine or oversee how the money was actually spent. The foundation and its partner organizations did not fail to learn from the experiences of the 1990s. The result was a close collaboration between the Foundation and the partner organizations, a collaboration that grew ever closer over the payment period. The implementation of an individualized claim, decision, and payment procedure did indeed ensure that the eligible persons actually received the money to which they were entitled. The many years of cooperation between the Foundation and the seven international partner organizations were more than just practical in nature. During this time, a mutual understanding developed of the fates of those per89

secuted in the various countries and of their material situation today. The international makeup of the Board of Trustees served to further strengthen this mutual understanding. In the public arena, little attention has been given to the fact that the Foundation has made payments to other victims’ groups besides former slave and forced laborers. For example, funds have been made available to compensate for property losses resulting from persecution and for claims arising from unpaid insurance policies from German insurance companies. Further monetary payments have been made to several thousand victims who suffered in homes for the children of forced laborers or as subjects of pseudomedical experiments. The payments issued by the Foundation, the many invitations made to eligible claimants to visit Germany, and the supplemental programs set up by the Remembrance and Future Fund have, more than five decades after the end of the war, sent out numerous signals of human solidarity with the victims of Nazi tyranny, particularly those living in Central and Eastern Europe and in Israel. In the countless encounters with survivors, one sentiment is expressed again and again: The belated recognition of their suffering was often more important than the money received. That modern Germany has publicly acknowledged their suffering means a great deal to these victims. This, more than the symbolic recognition of the injustice inflicted upon millions of people in the name of the Nazi war economy, has also done much to bridge the gap that had previously separated us from our neighbors to the east. Moreover, the detailed examination of a chapter of German history nearly forgotten by Germans

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themselves—though of course still painfully vivid in the minds of millions of Central and Eastern European survivors and their families—has served to strengthen the self-regard felt by the generations of Germans who today bear responsibility in their country. This historical examination also helps our eastern neighbors seeking to come to terms with an era that for many was ominously marked by two dictatorships. The belated payments to more than 1.66 million former forced laborers in no way represent comprehensive “indemnification” for the personal suffering they incurred. For many, however, the payments did indeed provide true material assistance. Invitations to victims to visit contemporary Germany and the many encounters between victims and young people have changed the way Germany is viewed from other countries. The concept of a Remembrance and Future Fund foundation and the long-term benefits of its work reinforce and bear witness to the commitment of the donors—the Federal Republic of Germany and 6,500 participating companies—to promote lasting international understanding based on the rule of law and human rights. The Foundation’s international programs in support of political history education are of value, not only with regard to sharpening Europe’s collective memory, but also in increasing public awareness of the threats posed by the propagation of national mythologies, which are often misused for political purposes. The programs simultaneously reinforce networks and cooperation within civil society on which a Europe committed to freedom, democracy, and human rights is now more dependent than ever before.

The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

I. An Overview of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

I.1 General information The story behind its establishment is not the only thing that makes the Berlin-based Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” so unique. It is also unusual due to the fact that it was established on the basis of special federal legislation and that it receives its funding from just two donors. These are the Foundation Initiative of German Industry and the German federal government. The primary mission of the Foundation was, in cooperation with international partner organizations, to provide financial compensation to former forced laborers and other victims of the Nazi regime as defined in the Foundation Establishment Act. No foundation before it had ever undertaken a mission of such a grand scale. The foundation began its work with assets for disbursement to survivors totaling DM 10.1 billion (around EUR 5.16 billion). Of this total, DM 5.1 billion (approx. EUR 2.6 billion) came from voluntary payments made by some 6,500 German companies, many of which did not even exist during the period of Nazi rule. The remaining DM 5 billion (approx. EUR 2.55 billion) was allocated by the federal government. Since its founding, the Foundation has also earned DM 653.5 million (approx. EUR 334 million) in interest and accepted donations

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totaling more than DM 20 million (approx. EUR 10.2 million). A large share of the cumulative total— just under DM 8.7 billion (approx. EUR 4.45 billion)—has been paid out over the past six years to surviving forced laborers in the form of individual one-time payments. The Foundation’s remaining monetary assets were used for the following purposes as mandated by the Foundation Establishment Act: • As compensation for property losses resulting from the actions of companies during the Nazi era (DM 200 million / approx. EUR 102.2 million) • For “other personal injuries” (DM 50 million /approx. EUR 25.6 million) • For insurance losses (DM 200 million / approx. EUR 102.2 million) For special humanitarian programs • (DM 650 million / approx. EUR 332 million) • For the costs of U.S. prosecuting attorneys (DM 125 million / approx. EUR 63.9 million) • For the costs of German prosecuting attorneys and counsel for forced laborers (DM 5 million / approx. EUR 2.55 million) • For the administration of the Foundation (DM 70 million / approx. EUR 35.8 million)

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I.2 The bodies of the Foundation I.2.1 The Board of Trustees The Board of Trustees is a type of supervisory board and hence the most important of the Foundation’s bodies. The Foundation Establishment Act grants wide-ranging powers to the Board of Trustees, which is primarily made up of representatives of the victims, of the “victim countries,” and of the donors. The twenty-seven board members perform their work in an honorary capacity for a term of four years. The German Chancellor designates the Board’s chairperson. The Board of Trustees gives a voice to all

groups who participated in the talks leading up to the creation of the Foundation or whose involvement was deemed essential to successfully accomplishing the Foundation’s mission. The members of the Board of Trustees are as follows (cf. page 225): • Four representatives for the “Foundation Initiative of German Industry.” • The Federal Republic of Germany is represented by five members of the parliament’s lower house (Bundestag) and two members of the upper house (Bundesrat). • The German Ministry of Finance and Foreign Affairs Office each have one vote. • Representatives from Israel, the United

August 31, 2000, in Berlin: Dr. Dieter Kastrup (left), Chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, opening the Board’s ﬁrst meeting. He is seen here with Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the Board’s Vice Chairman.

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Top picture: April 18, 2002, in Berlin: The 9th meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” Left to right: Dr. Hans Otto Bräutigam, member of the Board of Directors, Dr. Dieter Kastrup, Chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, Dr. Michael Jansen, Chairman of the Board of Directors. The bottom picture also shows a scene from the 9th meeting of the Board of Trustees.

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The representative of the U.S. adminstration in the Board of Trustees, ambassador J. Christian Kennedy together with the Foundation‘s chairman Dr. Martin Salm and director‘s board member Günter Saathoff.

States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Czech Republic each have one seat. Five of the Foundation’s partner organizations are based in these countries (see page 97). The following organizations each have • one representative: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Jewish Claims Conference, JCC ); the International Organization for Migration (IOM ); the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR ); and the Federal Information and Counseling Association for Victims of the Nazi Regime. A joint seat on the Board of Trustees is • further reserved for Roma and Sinti organizations (the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, the Alliance of German Sinti, and the International Romani Union). These groups, however, have as yet not been able to agree on a mutual representative. • Finally, one seat is granted to a representative of the U.S. attorneys who had represented the interests of former Nazi-era forced laborers before U.S. courts. The Board of Trustees takes decisions on all issues related to the mission of the Foun94

dation. The earliest significant resolutions made by the Board concerned the establishment of fair procedures for former forced laborers and other affected persons. For example, the Board of Trustees charged the Board of Directors with the establishment of special-application acceptance offices and complaints offices in the Baltic countries that would work together with the responsible partner organizations in Russia and Belarus. The partner organizations were furthermore obliged to provide assistance as required to applicants in the search for evidence to back up their claims. In this context, the Board of Trustees approved generous funding for research in archives. The most important decisions reached by the Board of Trustees with regard to the payment programs concerned basic money matters. On the one hand, the Board stated that the partner organizations should be obliged to follow the basic rules of transparency, economic efficiency and thrift with respect to the work and costs involved in administering the payment programs. The victims themselves, however, viewed the decisions on how the Board of Trustees would use the interest earned by the Foundation to be of greater importance. Over

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May 25, 2000, in Berlin: Members of the Foundation Initiative of German Industry at a press conference where they reported on the funds received from the business sector to pay for compensation to former forced laborers. Left to right: Berthold Leibinger (Triumph), Bernd Fahrholz (Dresdner Bank), Manfred Gentz (DaimlerChrysler), Werner Gegenbauer (IHK Berlin).

the years, the accumulated interest added more than DM 653.5 million (EUR 334 million) to the Foundation’s budget. The Board of Trustees was also ultimately responsible for the procedure for recognizing the “other places of confinement” described in the Act (see page 122). The duties of the Board of Trustees further included the selection and supervision of the Foundation’s Board of Directors and the issuing of the annual budget resolution. Moreover, the 27-member body followed the recommendation of the Board of Directors and approved the programs and projects associated with the Remembrance and Future Fund (see page 146). Despite the wide range of diverging interests, the Board of Trustees still managed to reach unanimous decisions on most issues.

I.2.2 The Board of Directors The Foundation’s Board of Directors consists of three members, including the Chairperson, who are selected by the Board of Trustees to manage the affairs of the Foundation. As the executive body of the organization, it was responsible for ensuring that the payment programs were implemented Final Report

properly. It also acted as an oversight body to ensure that the partner organizations applied the Foundation Establishment Act in a proper and uniform manner. Legally speaking, these partner organizations were independent organizations that did not officially come under the authority of the Foundation but were beholden to the laws of their respective countries. It was therefore necessary to conclude partnership agreements with these organizations. These agreements laid out all the important duties and responsibilities associated with the application and payment procedures. It was the job of the Foundation’s Board of Directors to review the decisions taken by the partner organizations, to monitor the provision of the funds required for payments and to perform funds control. The Board of Directors furthermore represents the Foundation in both a legal and nonlegal capacity.

I.2.3 The departments of the foundation The responsibility for preparing the payment programs was initially in the hands of just six employees. The original staff in95

cluded an administrative head, an office manager, a press officer, and a general commissioner responsible for collaboration with the partner organizations. During the initial phase, the general commissioner was charged with negotiating the required partnership agreements that would govern the payment procedures. He was supported in this task by a lawyer responsible for formulating the actual drafts of the agreements. The head of the financial unit bore responsibility for the Foundation’s payment procedure and investment policy as well as for the financing and auditing of the partner organizations. The months that followed the establishment of the Foundation naturally saw a rapid increase in the amount of work that had to be done. New departments were created, while existing ones were expanded. In May of 2001, shortly before payments were scheduled to begin, the Board of Directors established teams charged with monitoring the processing of applications by the partner organizations. Other teams within the Foundation had the following tasks:

I.2.4 Control (legal oversight, financial auditing)

• To process cases involving “other personal injuries” To deal with issues involving the recog• nition of “other places of confinement” • To coordinate the payment procedures • To respond to countless queries from around the world • To process cases involving “insurance losses”

I.3.1 General information

At the peak of the payment phase, the Foundation had fifty people on its staff. Now that the payments to forced laborers and other Nazi victims have been concluded, only a few people remain employed in this area.

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The foundation is subject to the legal and budgetary oversight of the German Ministry of Finance. The Foundation’s annual budget (spending, staffing) is coordinated with the Finance Ministry, which, as mentioned above, also occupies a seat in the Board of Trustees. The Finance Ministry must approve the budget in its capacity of budget-oversight body. The budget is then submitted to the Board of Trustees for adoption. In addition, the German Federal Audit Office (Bundesrechnungshof) and the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (Bundesamt für zentrale Dienste und offene Vermögensfragen) perform an annual review of the Foundation’s financial management (see also page 140). The foundation submits an annual interim report on the payment programs to the Bundestag.

I.3 The partner organizations

The partner organizations are, legally speaking, not official bodies of the Foundation. Their mission was—within a limited time frame and within their territories of responsibility (Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, etc.)—to work with the Foundation to realize its primary objective of paying out compensation to former forced laborers and other eligible people. In most cases, the partner organizations were designated by their respective governments and stipulated during international negotiations even before the Foundation had been established. In the remaining cases, they were designated in the course of

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drafting the Foundation Establishment Act. In the agreements negotiated between the Foundation and its independent partners, the latter obligated themselves to applying the German law within their areas of responsibility. The following organizations acted as partner organizations of the Foundation: • The Jewish Claims Conference (JCC ) • The International Organization for Migration (IOM ) • The “Polish-German Reconciliation” Foundation • The Russian “Understanding and Reconciliation” Foundation The Ukrainian National “Understand• ing and Reconciliation” Foundation • The Belarusian “Understanding and Reconciliation” Foundation • The German-Czech Future Fund

I.3.2 The ceilings of the partner organizations The funds available to each partner organization for paying compensation to eligible parties were limited by a “ceiling.” These financial ceilings were determined during negotiations based on the estimates of historians, victims’ associations, and government institutions regarding the number of beneficiaries. This number was assumed to be 1,000,000 to 1,100,000. Everyone involved was aware that there could be a discrepancy between the estimated and actual number of Nazi-era forced laborers who were still alive. For this reason, it was decided to implement an important control by making payments in two installments. The first installment was a sort of interim payment generally equal to 50 percent of the expected total. This procedure gave the partner organizations Final Report

enough time to process all the applications submitted and estimate the total required funding. The responsible parties then set the amount of the second installment. The Board of Trustees gave the partner organizations the option of paying a first installment greater than the 50 percent described above, provided that the total amount paid out did not exceed the respective ceilings. Setting up the payment program with funds totaling DM 8.1 billion (approx. EUR 4.14 billion) at a time when there were still no firm figures on the number of eligible persons in the various countries made it necessary, not only to make payments in two installments, but also to introduce a deadline for submitting applications. This was the only way to be able to determine the actual number of eligible persons by a certain date and thus fix the funding requirement for the first installment, which in turn defined how much would be required for the second installment. Otherwise we would have run the risk of not having sufficient funds to cover second installment payments for all recipients. Initially, the available funds were split among the seven partner organizations as follows: • Poland received DM 1.812 billion (approx. EUR 929.5 million). • Russia (including applicants from Latvia and Lithuania) received DM 835 million (approx. EUR 427 million). • Ukraine (including applicants from Moldova) received DM 1.724 billion (approx. EUR 881.5 million). • Belarus (including applicants from Estonia) received DM 694 million (approx. EUR 355 million). These last three countries were jointly responsible for affected persons residing in the southern CIS countries. 97

June 28, 2001, in Warsaw: Two former forced laborers from Poland receiving the ﬁrst installment of their compensation payments at a bank in Warsaw. The sign above the bank counter reads: “Information—Payment of Compensation for Forced Labor by the Fund of the Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation.”

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Top picture: Warsaw. Payment of the ﬁrst installment begins. Bottom picture: June 22, 2001, in Frankfurt am Main: The late Karl Brozik, former head of the Frankfurt JCC ofﬁce, who died in 2004, presents the ﬁrst installment of compensation payment to former forced laborer Hedi Grün.

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• The Czech Republic received DM 423 million (approx. EUR 216.3 million) for its partner organization. • Jewish applicants who lived outside of these countries received their money from the Jewish Claims Conference. DM 1.812 billion (approx. EUR 929.5 million) was provided for this purpose. • The International Organization for Migration was responsible for non-Jewish beneficiaries residing outside of the countries listed above. It had a budget of DM 540 million (approx. EUR 276 million). For cases where estimates of the number of people entitled to compensation under the law turned out to be mistaken, two options were available. If the actual number of eligible people covered by a partner organization was less than the presumed figure, benefits could be granted to other Nazi victim groups under an “option clause” (see page 102-3). If, however, there were more eligible claimants than originally presumed, the Foundation Establishment Act provided for a further instrument to balance out deficits if the ceiling was exceeded. Any such deficits were to be balanced wherever possible using the interest earned by the Foundation. The foundation accrued this interest from its investment of funds not yet paid out. These funds were only released in phases, depending on the number of positive decisions reached by the partner organizations and on how much money was needed to cover administrative expenses. The question of when a deficit situation exists also had to be answered. The Board of Trustees decided to apply the following benchmark: how high would a partner organization’s ceiling have had to be if the number of eligible persons in categories A and B (as defined by the legislation, see next chapter) covered by the partner organization had been known at the time? 100

The “survey” on this question undertaken by the Foundation in 2005 produced very different results. On the whole, the original estimate of 1,100,000 eligible persons proved to be too high. In the end, there were fewer than 900,000 persons entitled to compensation. The ceilings for most of the partner organizations proved to be sufficiently high. This fact allowed them to apply the “option clause” on a broad scale. That is why a total of 1.665 million people ultimately received payment for forced labor performed. Nonetheless, three partner organizations required supplementary funding, which the Foundation was able to cover through the interest it had earned. In January 2005, the IOM received an additional EUR 150 million (including an external donation of over EUR 5 million from the Evangelical Church in Germany), the JCC received EUR 136 million and the Russian partner organization received EUR 16 million. The raising of its ceiling allowed the IOM , like the other partner organizations, to also help deportees subjected to forced labor in the agricultural sector. The additional funds taken from interest earnings raised the total sum available for forced labor compensation from DM 8.1 billion (approx. EUR 4.14 billion) to DM 8.7 billion (approx. EUR 4.45 billion). Besides the German Foundation Establishment Act, the Austrian Reconciliation Fund Act provided for a comparable legal basis for paying compensation for Naziera forced labor in Austria as well (cf. Austrian Reconciliation Fund (ed.), Zwangsarbeit in Österreich: 1938-1945, Fund for Reconciliation, Peace and Cooperation. Vienna 2005). Since it was not rare for forced laborers in the German Reich to work in the territories of both present-day Germany and present-day Austria, the two foundations worked in close cooperation

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to create a system to bring the two programs into alignment. The idea was to ensure both that no victim was forgotten and that no one received double payment.

I.4 The payment programs – an overview I.4.1 General information As stated previously, a total of DM 8.1 billion (approx. EUR 4.14 billion) was initially available for compensation payments to Nazi-era forced laborers. The interest earned by the Foundation brought this sum up to around DM 8.7 billion (approx. EUR 4.45 billion). The payments made in compensation for “other personal injuries” benefited victims of medical experiments during the period of Nazi rule as well as persons who had been separated from their parents when they were infants or small children and placed in special homes for the children of forced laborers. The foundation earmarked DM 50 million (approx. EUR 25.6 million) for these individuals. The foundation also aimed to provide financial compensation for property losses suffered during the Nazi era in cases where German companies participated in a “direct and harm-causing” manner. The Act provided DM 200 million (approx. EUR 102.2 million) for this purpose: DM 150 million (approx. EUR 76.7 million) for losses caused by Nazi persecution in the meaning of the Federal Indemnification Act, and DM 50 million (approx. EUR 25.6 million) for losses that resulted due to other acts of Nazi injustice. A three-member, independent Property Claims Commission was specially created to rule on these claims and to set the amount of compensation to be paid. Final Report

The Foundation’s mission further included compensation payment for unpaid or uncompensated claims against German life insurance companies during the Nazi era. In 1998, the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC ) was created for the specific purpose of paying compensation for such insurance losses, most of which were suffered by German Jews. The ICHEIC was tasked with developing a procedure for paying compensation for unpaid insurance policies from the Nazi era, and to do so not only for Germany but for the entire world. The Foundation Establishment Act made it necessary to conclude a separate agreement between the ICHEIC , the German Insurance Association (Gesamtverband der deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft, GDV ) and the Foundation. This agreement governed procedures on the filing, processing, and payment of claims. Three further special programs were set up to provide “humanitarian assistance” to especially needy survivors: DM 276 million (approx. EUR 141.1 million) was made available to the JCC for social purposes to benefit Jewish Holocaust survivors. • The IOM received DM 24 million (approx. EUR 12.28 million) for assistance to Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivors. • DM 350 million (approx. 179 million Euro) was budgeted primarily for humanitarian projects run by Jewish organizations in connection with the fund for insurance losses.

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I.4.2 The categories of eligible former forced laborers Difficult and morally delicate issues were raised on this topic during the international negotiations as participants sought to set 101

binding criteria required for the Act. How high should the payments be in general? Is the question of where and under what conditions forced labor was performed pertinent? Lawmakers decided that the duration of forced labor should not play a role because it would have taken such a long time to perform the required calculations that many older victims would not have lived to experience the outcome. On the question of the amount of compensation to be paid to former forced laborers, the victims’ associations agreed that the severity of a victim’s fate should be the primary factor in determining the entitlement sum. They argued in favor of a procedure that, in consideration of the age of the victims, could be implemented easily and quickly. It is for this reason that a payment system based on single lump-sum payments was selected. Three criteria were key in determining the amount of the payments: • The nature of the place of confinement and hence the confinement conditions • The severity of the forced labor • Whether or not deportation had occurred. Based on these criteria, lawmakers differentiated between two main groups of former forced laborers eligible for compensation: • Category A included persons whose labor was exploited in a concentration camp and persons forced to work within a closed ghetto. They received a payment of DM 15,000 (approx. EUR 7,670). This category also included forced laborers held in places of detention comparable to concentration camps. Since lawmakers gave the partner organizations the freedom to define subcategories with differ102

ent compensation amounts based on the severity of confinement conditions, compensation payments here ranged between DM 5,000 (approx. EUR 2,500) and DM 15,000 (approx. EUR 7,670). Category B included individuals who • were deported from their homelands to the territory of the German Reich or territories occupied by Germany and then subjected to forced labor in detainment, under conditions resembling detention, or under similar harsh living conditions. The Act provided for payments of up to DM 5,000 (approx. EUR 2,560) for people in this category. Besides the people described in these categories, there also existed further groups of Nazi victims in the various countries or in the territories supported by the various partner organizations who had suffered varying degrees of persecution or who could not be grouped into a compensation category that could be defined by the Act. These particularly included laborers forced to work in the agricultural sector. Some parties to the negotiations argued that persons who were deported and forced to perform domestic work, those subjected to forced labor in their homelands, and other groups who experienced similar fates should also be granted compensation under the Foundation Establishment Act. At this point, however, the total number of category A and B victims (those who had suffered the most) was as yet unknown. On the one hand, the drafters of the law wanted to give the partner organizations as much leeway as possible in addressing the concerns of further victim groups. On the other, the lawmakers also wanted to avoid any reduction of the per capita payments allocated to category A and B victims. In the end, a category C was established (also known as the “option clause”), the applica-

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tion of which was tied to certain conditions. The option clause authorized the partner organizations to award financial compensation to other victims of the National Socialist regime as well. This could only be done on the condition that sufficient funds within the organization’s ceiling limit were available to fulfill the obligations for eligible persons in the priority categories A and B. In addition, at least one of the compensation eligibility criteria set forth in the Act had to have been fulfilled, i.e. forced labor, detention or deportation.

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In this manner, hundreds of thousands of people who had been forced to work in agriculture were able to receive compensation. Some partner organizations with sufficient funds available were also able to include in this category forced laborers who had not been deported and Nazi victims forced to live in hiding. The amount of compensation was determined by the partner organizations themselves, with a maximum limit of DM 5,000. However, this figure was often much lower for persons who had not been subjected to forced labor.

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Russian forced laborers at a station on the eastern front awaiting transport to the German Reich (1942).

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With no gloves to protect their hands from the bitter cold, Russian forced laborers load rails onto a truck (1944).

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Inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp performing forced labor (1943?).

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Production of V2 rockets in the Mittelwerk, an underground factory in the Harz mountains: view of a storage hall for ﬁnished tail pieces for the V2 rockets in the Mittelwerk facility (probably Hall 35).

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Top picture: Production of V2 rockets in the Mittelwerk underground factory in the Harz mountains. Forced laborers were recruited in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Bottom picture: Albert Speer (3rd from right) and Gauleiter August Eigruber visiting a Salzgitter factory where prisoners were forced to work (Upper Austria, 1944).

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Top picture: Female forced laborers at a Ukrainian train station before being taken to Germany (1942). Bottom picture: Russian POWs performing clearance work in Hamburg (undated).

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Auschwitz concentration camp: Registration board for forced laborers in the Monowitz work camp (Monowitz workforce strength report of December 21, 1944).

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Ukrainian forced laborers being registered at a collection point where they received their work papers before being taken to Germany.

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Top picture: Jewish forced laborers hammering rocks (Russia 1941). Bottom picture: German soldiers taking Jewish men off to forced labor, (Poland 1939).

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Top picture: A boy performs forced labor on a machine tool in the ghetto in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania (1942/43). Bottom picture: Jewish women forced to work in a textiles factory in the ghetto of Dabrowa Gornicza, Poland (1941).

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II. The payment program for forced laborers

II.1 Informing the public When the Foundation began with its preparations for the payment program designed to help compensate for the suffering experienced more than sixty years ago, it had to first find answers to the following questions: How does one go about distributing DM 8.7 billion (approx. EUR 4.45 billion) to over one million individuals spread across the entire globe, many of whom, because of their age and living situation, did not even know what they were entitled to or how to submit an application? How does one deal with the reservations, let alone the contempt, felt by victims with respect to Germany? The foundation was obliged to announce its plans, worldwide and in an appropriate manner, within two months of the Foundation Establishment Act entering into force. But this deadline proved to be too tight. On November 2, 2000, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees therefore provided an extra DM 10 million to the partner organizations for the purpose of expanding public relations activities. The media was used to disburse information about the payment program to beneficiaries both in Germany and abroad. The German government’s special commissioner at the time, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, made repeated announcements concerning the planned compensation payments for forced laborers. A respected politician, Lambsdorff gave talks and interviews and hosted countless discussions with journalists in Germany and many other countries. The German Finance Ministry drafted general 114

information bulletins on the topic, sent them out to anyone who asked and placed them on the Internet. This allowed anyone with an interest in the subject to learn about the Foundation and its work and to get information on the application procedures and cut-off dates. An address list containing the contact details for all partner organizations was likewise made available. The German Foreign Office also took action. Even before the Board of Trustees’ first meeting, Germany’s diplomatic missions abroad had already begun disseminating information about the main points of the Foundation Establishment Act and what requirements had to be fulfilled in order to receive payments. The partner organizations and the governments of their countries also played a central role, not least due to their ability to communicate the information skillfully in their own language. They used a variety of measures to spread the word to the general public and to provide multifaceted support to the beneficiaries. The Czech Republic and Poland began their information campaigns quite early. In October of 2000, the German-Czech Future Fund sent informational material and application forms to 60,000 former forced laborers who had been registered under earlier payment programs. The Polish-German Reconciliation Foundation distributed application forms to people who had previously received money under the German-Polish global agreement. At the same time, it launched a campaign to place announcements in all leading Polish newspapers. In November 2000, posters were hung in all the branch

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offices of Polish insurance companies and a telephone information service was set up. In Belarus and Estonia, the local partner organizations focused on contacts with representatives of the victims’ associations. The Ukrainian and Belarusian partner organizations informed the public with the aid of news agencies, who then also passed the notices sent by the Foundation on to news agencies in other CIS countries. Announcements and application forms were also reproduced in the local and national newspapers and magazines in these countries. The partner organization in Russia made use not only of the media but also of the social assistance offices located throughout the country, where former forced laborers could obtain the paperwork required to file an application. The IOM was quick to launch its worldwide public information activities starting in July 2000. More than eighty IOM offices then began giving regular presentations on the payment program. The foundation and its representatives also worked to recruit victims’ associations, public authorities, international NGO s, churches, and various media to help spread the word. In addition to its international press relations work, the JCC was able to make use of a well-functioning network of Jewish organizations to publicize information about the program. In Tel Aviv and in Frankfurt am Main, the JCC set up information centers whose staff responded to telephone queries and written requests for information. The foundation itself organized a great number of informational events both in Germany and abroad. It also created a website where all the important information related to filing applications and obtaining compensation payments was available for download in eight languages. A special staff team was set up for the purpose of answering the rising flood of verbal and written questions. Final Report

II.2 The work of the partner organizations

II.2.1 Selection and mission As mentioned above, the advanced age of the victims meant that the procedures for filing applications and paying out compensation had to be expeditious and efficient. This is why the Foundation sought to make use of structures and organizations that were already in existence. In many Central and Eastern European Countries, so-called reconciliation foundations had been in place since as far back as the early 1990s. These foundations were created, as was the German-Czech Future Fund, for the purpose of processing compensation payments from Germany under the “global agreements.” Starting in 2000, the program was geared to taking advantage of this existing infrastructure and expanding upon it as required. As the JCC could look back on a more than fifty-year history of payment programs for Nazi victims, it was entrusted to handle the cases of Jewish claimants residing outside the territories covered by the Central and Eastern European partner organizations. The Geneva-based IOM took on the same task for non-Jewish victims living outside the territories of the partner organizations in Central and Eastern Europe. As emphasized above, the partner organizations (see list on page 94) formed the backbone of the entire payment process. They were in direct contact with the victims, could speak their language, and were familiar with their specific problems, for example, in gathering proof to back up their claims. The many responsibilities taken on by the partner organizations included the following: 115

• To publicize the program • To accept applications and provide advice to the applicants • To process the applications • To decide on the entitlement of applicants to compensation • To ensure that payments are received by the individual beneficiaries The services rendered by the partner organizations can be summarized by looking at a few statistics: The organizations had to individually process nearly 2.5 million applications, while also taking into account the applicants in the territory covered by the Austrian Reconciliation Fund. 1,665,000 beneficiaries received money from the German forced laborer program. Since payments were made in two installments (see page 97), two payment rounds were required, meaning that in total more than 3.3 million payment orders had to be executed. This work became especially complicated and time-consuming in cases where the recipients were the legal heirs to the actual victims (see page 121). It was the job of the Foundation to ensure that the partner organizations performed their mission in compliance with the legal requirements. The basic rules governing this work were codified in partnership agreements between the seven organizations and the Foundation’s Board of Directors. These agreements defined the application and payment procedures and guaranteed that the payment programs would be governed solely by the German Foundation Establishment Act and not by the laws of the various countries.

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II.2.2 The application and review procedures The Foundation Establishment Act set a cut-off date for receipt of applications by the partner organizations or the Foundation of December 31, 2001. An extension of this cut-off date to December 31, 2002, was only allowed for people who failed to meet the statutory deadline for reasons beyond their control (such as a serious and lengthy illness). The application forms all contained a standard text but also some small differences in wording, differences which reflected each country’s attempt to take account of the special circumstances of the victim groups in their territories. The partner organizations were tasked with processing and ruling on the applications. Besides the assessment of the severity of the persecution suffered, there were two formal requirements that were key to receiving a positive ruling. In addition to meeting the application cut-off date, each applicant was required to sign a waiver “irrevocably renouncing any further claim against the authorities for forced labor and property damage, and all claims against German enterprises in connection with Nazi injustice.” Understandably, some beneficiaries found it quite difficult to sign such a waiver. But this requirement was deemed necessary in order to avoid double compensation for forced labor and to provide the legal closure sought by German companies. Every two months, the Foundation received lists from the partner organizations showing which applications had been approved. These lists were compared with the lists of the other partner organizations and of the Austrian Reconciliation Fund (a few thousand people submitted multiple applications to different partner organizations). The applications were then subjected to

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Photographs and documents of former Ostarbeiter (“eastern workers” from conquered Soviet territories) forced to work in Germany. Such documents, along with many others, served as evidence to back up victims’ claims.

review on a random basis. These reviews were carried out not only in Berlin, but more often than not at the offices of the partner organizations, where teams of reviewers from the Foundation inspected the application documents. Performing the reviews in this manner first of all ensured maximum possible compliance with the Foundation Establishment Act. Secondly, it served to encourage a close dialog between the Foundation and the partner organizations. The parties worked together to answer questions and solve problems. The foundation was also there to provide advice and assistance to its partners. Discussions on various case scenarios revealed that the Act did not provide clear Final Report

guidance on a wide range of questions regarding how the law was to be applied. In such cases, however, the partner organizations urgently needed a single set of criteria to follow. To this end, the Foundation drafted a large number of instructions on the proper implementation of the Act. These included, for example, instructions on the “authentication” of eligibility in cases where documentary proof was not available. In many cases, review teams were able to recommend “upgrading” an applicant who had originally been given a lower classification. After foundation staff had performed their random review of applications included in the received lists and all errors 117

and general problems had been cleared up, the Foundation transferred the money for each reviewed list to the respective partner organization. The banks commissioned by the partner organizations then immediately paid out this money—by check, bank transfer or in cash—to the entitled beneficiaries. The aim here was to ensure that the beneficiaries could benefit from the money transferred to the partner organizations as quickly as possible. In order to verify that the beneficiaries actually received their full entitlement, the Foundation established a further review procedure in 2003. The Board of Directors sent letters to beneficiaries who were selected at random and asked them if they had indeed received the amount to which they were entitled. A total of twenty-four random mailings were carried out between the spring of 2003 and the fall of 2006. Approximately 8,500 letters and questionnaires were sent to people in over sixty countries. This check revealed no evidence of incorrect payments.

II.2.3 Proof and authentication Ideally, applicants would be able to back up their claims of persecution by means of documentary evidence. This might include a work card, factory identification card or written punishment order. But particularly those Nazi-era forced laborers from the former Soviet Union rarely possessed such documents. With few exceptions, these people were stripped of their papers in Soviet “filtration” camps upon their repatriation in 1944/45. Any such documents stored in the archives of the various countries were to be made available to the partner organizations upon request. The International Tracing Service (ITS ) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, which maintains a huge 118

inventory of documents, was also often able to help. Since it had previously often taken years to get a response to individual queries from the ITS , the Foundation and the ITS cooperated to set up a special expedited query service. This made it possible to cut the waiting period to one month for the basic information required by the partner organizations or appeals bodies to rule on an application. After it became clear, however, that the ITS was not able to help in many cases, the Foundation financed the creation of an “Archives Network” headed by the German Federal Archives and organized in cooperation with the Federal Information and Counseling Association for Victims of the Nazi Regime. Archives on the national, state, and city levels, archives maintained by companies and by concentration camp memorial sites in Germany, as well as archives in other countries—in total over 350 archives—worked within the network to support victims in their search for proof of the forced labor they had performed. Despite these efforts, many applicants were not able to produce original documents or other archival information to prove that they had been forced laborers. The Act therefore provided for a simplified verification procedure under which it was sufficient for victims to “authenticate” their personal history of persecution. A certain amount of leeway was granted to the partner organizations for this purpose. In Ukraine, for example, authentication was possible through the following means: the attestation of at least two witnesses who themselves had documentary evidence of their own fate; the certification of archives that had deemed an applicant’s statements to be “plausible” based on historical facts; postcards and photographs from the period of forced labor; or the statements made by applicants in earlier payment procedures.

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Registration card of a Polish inmate at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In another example, the Jewish Claims Conference was able to examine the applications submitted under the Federal Indemnification Act and to access pension records kept by the Israeli Finance Ministry. These authentication rules made it possible for several hundred thousand people with no historical records to gain entitlement to compensation. Although these foundation efforts were all intended to help beneficiaries, the Foundation was faced with a dilemma with respect to the application procedure as a whole. This was because individual applicants and some sectors of the public repeatedly demanded, on the one hand, that the Foundation extend the application cut-off dates or put more effort into digging for documentary evidence, but on the

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other that it speed up the process. The foundation therefore strove to find a compromise that could achieve the two goals of expeditious payment and maximum fairness. The Bundestag resolved to move the original cut-off date from the beginning of 2001 to December 31 of that year, and the Foundation, as mentioned, introduced an extended cut-off date ending one year later. At the same time, the verification procedure was accelerated by increasing efforts to get documentary proof and plausibility certificates to the applicants as quickly as humanly possible. The partner organizations were furthermore expected to organize their work such that payments could be made immediately to applicants who had provided clear proof of their eligibility.

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Ostarbeiter in an arms factory in southern Germany. Numbered armbands served to identify the workers (1943).

II.2.4 Proof submitted following the cut-off date The cut-off dates mentioned above represented a problem for all those applicants for whom the news of potential compensation came too late. The size of this group was surprisingly small. Just 2 to 3 percent of the applications rejected by the partner organizations were rejected due to late filing. On the other hand, there were cases where people had filed their applications on time, but these were rejected due to lack of proof. In such cases, it was still often possible to achieve a successful outcome. An appeals process was set up whereby applicants could submit the required documents or proof from archives (for example, to document detention in a particular con120

centration camp) even after the cut-off date and request a new ruling on their applications. The partner organizations were obliged to provide assistance in searching for proof by submitting a research request either to the International Tracing Service (ITS ) in Bad Arolsen, which we discussed earlier, or to the newly established Archives Network (see page 118). If such proof was received after the application and appeals process had been closed, the responsible partner organization could request that the proof be granted consideration up to an extended deadline, provided that this partner organization had not yet reached its funding ceiling. In all cases, however, the final deadline was September 30, 2006, the date when the payment program was scheduled to end.

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II.2.5 The appeals procedure The drafters of the foundation legislation wanted to ensure that a fair and regulated procedure was in place for all applicants. This was especially necessary for those people whose applications were rejected, something that might be done for any variety of reasons. In the course of processing the applications, however, it was found that even “positive” decisions taken by the partner organizations could be mistaken, or that additional proof submitted by the applicants entitled them to greater compensation. Independent appeals bodies were therefore established to review the decisions of the partner organizations. Separate bodies were also set up in the three Baltic states, countries where no partner organizations were based. An appeals proceeding, the rules of which were monitored by the Foundation, gave applicants the opportunity to have the rulings of the partner organizations subjected to review within a three-month period. The procedure allowed the complainant not only to introduce new arguments and proof. Often, the appeals bodies themselves sought to uncover new evidence by, for example, submitting follow-up queries to the ITS or to archives in their countries. The decisions of the appeals bodies were also subject to the review of the Foundation. If the review disclosed problems, the appeals bodies were obliged to reexamine their decision. Any rulings taken by the appeals bodies following a reexamination were then final. No higher-level appeals body existed. Neither the national courts nor any other body had a further say in the matter. This provision was quite deliberately included by legislators in order to preclude lengthy legal battles over relatively small amounts of money. Final Report

II.3 Special arrangements II.3.1 Legal heirs If an applicant died while an application was still pending, the surviving spouse or certain descendants could receive the benefits from an approved claim. The Foundation Establishment Act stipulated that the partner organizations were not to apply the inheritance laws of their respective countries, but must apply the special legal succession arrangements formulated in the Act. After all, payments were being disbursed across one hundred countries on this planet, and lawmakers wanted to avoid applying a hundred different sets of inheritance rules. This would have made the processing of applications much more complicated, particularly for the JCC and the IOM , and would have dragged out the process by many years. But the application of common rules on legal succession also produced unexpected difficulties. For one thing, when legislators passed the Foundation Establishment Act in 2000, they failed to stipulate the period within which legal heirs would need to file a “substitute” claim. The law was eventually amended to include a six-month filing deadline starting from the date of death of the original applicant. Secondly, the act of locating legal heirs and applying the share arrangements spelled out in the Act proved to be the greatest problem of all. A beneficiary who had lived, for example, in the Czech Republic, could very well have eligible children living in other countries. Since most payments had to be divided between the surviving spouse and the children, processing such payments became very complex and extremely time-consuming and was the main reason the partner organizations required more time than 121

originally foreseen to process all the applications filed. As a rule, the amount of compensation paid to legal heirs was the same as for the original beneficiary. But the Act also granted the partner organizations the option of forming subcategories for legal heirs and reducing the amount of compensation that the actual victim would have received. Some partner organizations used this option to ensure that the payments allocated to each surviving victim were as high as possible.

II.3.2 “Other places of confinement” comparable to concentration camps The highest category of compensation (category A, see page 102) had been reserved for forced laborers held in concentration camps or kept in a closed ghetto. To be fair to those forced laborers who had suffered in “other places of confinement” that were comparable to concentration camps, the Foundation Establishment Act broadened the category to include these potential beneficiaries. This move was necessary for legal reasons as well. For the purposes of the Foundation Establishment Act, concentration camps were those camps formally defined as concentration camps in the Federal Indemnification Act and named in a list included in this legislation. Going further back, the source used by the drafters of Federal Indemnification Act was a directory of Nazi detention sites compiled after the war by the research service of the International Red Cross to facilitate its own work. But this directory, and hence the official lists of camps included in the Federal Indemnification Act, did not contain many camps whose detainees were worthy of consideration under the Foundation Establishment Act on the basis of the comparable conditions to which they were subject122

ed. Such places included, for example, the many forced labor camps and the many detention centers operated by the Gestapo, both in Germany and in the German-occupied territories. The Foundation Establishment Act defined three criteria for designating a camp as an “other place of confinement” comparable to a concentration camp: • Inhumane conditions of detention • Insufficient nutrition • Lack of medical care Based on these criteria, the Foundation reviewed the applications submitted by the partner organizations and over the years recognized more than 3,900 camps as “other places of confinement.” This review required the drafting of expert assessments and extensive research in the relevant literature and in archives. Though historians were aware of the existence of many of these camps, they knew little about the conditions that prevailed there at the time. These gaps in the historical record could now be filled. In this way, information was collected that was of significance both for the current assessment process and for further research into these camps. This applies, for example, to the forced labor camps for Jews in Romania or for the Roma camps in Transnistria (in present-day Moldova). The great number of camps recognized as “other places of confinement” clearly shows just how widespread forced labor had become during the Third Reich. Camps in which people were held under brutal conditions and subjected to forced labor existed from Norway to Tunisia and Libya, and from southern France to deep inside Russia. The Foundation’s list of “other places of confinement” names twenty-four different countries. The knowledge compiled through these efforts will be published and made

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available to researchers of contemporary history. For many survivors of these camps, the Foundation’s list is of great significance, not only due to the consideration it gives them under the Foundation Establishment Act, but also because it is a sign of recognition for the suffering they experienced.

II.3.3 Children Under the Foundation Establishment Act, children were entitled to same compensation as adults if they fulfilled the criteria of the Act or of the option clause (see page 102-3). The question remained open as to whether those children of forced laborers who, because of their age, did not themselves perform forced labor could be granted consideration. These children were often abducted along with their parents, or were born when their parents were working as forced laborers. Others remained with their parents during their period of forced labor and suffered greatly both then and in later life under the strenuous and traumatic conditions they experienced. Nonetheless, the legal definition of forced labor did not apply to them. Some partner organizations solved the problem by means of the option clause, which allowed payments to children who were too young to be put to work but who had shared the fate of their parents or had been separated from them. A different solution was found for children who were interned in concentration camps, ghettos, or other places of confinement. Since forced labor was the rule in most concentration camps and ghettos, the Foundation’s Board of Trustees decided, in January of 2001, to presume that everyone interned in these places, including the children, had been subjected to or had participated in forced labor. This meant that Final Report

everyone who had been confined in a concentration camp or ghetto could receive compensation, regardless of their age and without having to prove that they had performed forced labor. The same applied to children kept in “other places of confinement” comparable to concentration camps, provided that forced labor was the rule at these sites. In all category A cases, children received the same compensation as the adults. A separate arrangement for children who had suffered in special homes for the children of forced laborers was made under the heading of “other personal injuries” (see page 126).

II.4 Victim groups not covered by the Act II.4.1 Prisoners of war Section 11 (3) of the Foundation Establishment Act reads as follows: “Eligibility cannot be based on prisoner-of-war status.” The parties to the negotiations came to the agreement that, in line with German indemnification laws, only civilians would be eligible for financial compensation for injustices suffered. This meant that no payments would be awarded to any prisoners of war from any country. During the international negotiations, the German government insisted that the victims’ legal status, and not the severity of their suffering, was the basis for consideration under German indemnification laws. Throughout the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, every government has drawn a strict line between civil damages, on the one hand, and reparations claims, on the other. The subjection of POW s to forced labor, however, falls under the international laws of war (reparations law) and not un123

der the indemnification laws for victims of Nazism, regardless of the conditions of forced labor in the various POW camps. At the time that the words quoted above became law, an estimated 20,000 of the total 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were still alive. Their status under international law made them ineligible to receive payments under the Foundation Establishment Act, even though their fates were often more troubling than those of many civilian forced laborers. For the surviving POW s, it was of course hard to understand why they were excluded from compensation, and trying to explain the reasons to them was also a difficult task. In a legislative oversight decision, the German government allowed two exceptions in which POW s could be eligible for compensation: If they had been interned in a concentration camp, the wrongs suffered there weighed more heavily than their POW status. POW s who were released and granted civilian status and then exploited as civilian forced laborers were also deemed eligible.

However, this action did not make the civilian forced laborers under the Foundation Establishment Act. A study commissioned by the German government concluded that the act of giving the IMI s the status of civilians was not valid under the law. The study stated that the victims were, legally speaking, prisoners of war until the end of the war, even though the Nazi regime denied them the better treatment required under the law of war. But as former POW s, the IMI s were excluded by the Foundation Establishment Act from any compensation payment unless they had been confined in a concentration camp. Some 100,000 military internees had filed applications for compensation to the IOM , all of which were denied. A number of lawsuits have been filed in opposition to the legal position taken by the German government and to the IOM ’s practice of denying applications based on this position. In 2007, one case was still pending before the European Court of Human Rights. IMI s

II.4.2 Italian military internees

II.4.3 Forced laborers from Western Europe

Italian military internees (IMI s) experienced a fate similar to that of the Soviet prisoners of war. Following Mussolini’s overthrow in the summer of 1943 and the signing of the cease fire agreement between the Allies and Italy, the high command of the German armed forces ordered that Italian soldiers who did not wish to continue fighting on Germany’s side were to be interned as prisoners of war. Hitler ordered that as of September 1943, these prisoners of war were to be designated military internees and, in an illegal move, that they were to be given the status of civilians, who were thereafter forced to labor under extreme conditions.

Forced laborers from Western European who fulfilled the category A criteria set forth in the Foundation Establishment Act received the same compensation as all other beneficiaries. The same applied with regard to category B victims in cases where Western European forced laborers were deported and subjected to conditions resembling detention. As a rule, no foundation funds were paid out to forced laborers from Western Europe who did not fulfill these conditions. Unlike the deported forced laborers of Slavic (Eastern European) origin, those from Western Europe who were not placed in confinement did not generally suffer under “extremely harsh living condi-

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tions,” nor were they discriminated against on the basis of racist laws. For Eastern European forced laborers, the slightest offence against the rules could result in their being sent to a concentration camp or even to death. This could not be said for forced laborers from Western Europe. The Foundation Establishment Act stated that prior-

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ity for compensation was to be given to those subjected to forced labor under extremely harsh conditions even if they were not placed in confinement. This is why nearly all of the compensation paid out to category B victims and to victims covered by the option clause went to former forced laborers from Central and Eastern Europe.

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III. Other personal injuries

The foundation also set up a payment program for individuals summarized under the heading of “Other Personal Injuries.” The beneficiaries here were: • People on whom medical experiments had been carried out • Children lodged in homes for the children of forced laborers Forced laborers who had suffered the • loss (death) of a child because the child had been forcefully abducted and lodged in a home For these victims, lawmakers established a separate program with a budget of DM 50 million (approx. EUR 25.6 million). Compensation for “other personal injuries” could be awarded in addition to payments for forced labor if the applicant fulfilled the relevant criteria. This was the case for many thousands of people who had been subjected to medical experiments, since these were, for the most part, conducted in concentration camps, where forced labor was the rule. The fate of children forced to live in special homes for the children of forced laborers (Zwangsarbeiter-Kinderheime) was similarly harsh. The Foundation Establishment Act stipulated that compensation for personal injuries other than those described here (such as damage to health) could only be paid if the fund ceiling had not yet been reached after payments had been made to the priority beneficiary groups named above. However, it soon became clear that the number of persons entitled to compensation in the priority categories defined by the Foundation Establishment Act would be much 126

greater than originally predicted. This meant that the DM 50 million (approx. EUR 25.6 million) was only enough to grant a compensation award of DM 8,300 (approx. EUR 4,240) to each applicant. The Board of Trustees therefore decided in September 2003 to raise this ceiling by EUR 11.3 million using funds from interest earned by the Foundation. Nearly eighteen months later, the ceiling was again raised by another EUR 17.3 million. In the end, these increases allowed compensation awards of DM 13,000 (approx. EUR 6,650) to be granted to each victim in the two priority compensation groups. The Foundation Establishment Act did not provide for subcategories in this context. The total “other personal injury” funding earmarked for beneficiaries covered by all the partner organizations was thus nearly doubled to over DM 100 million (approx. EUR 51.1 million) using the interest earnings allocated by the Foundation. The partner organizations were responsible for overseeing the application process for this program as well. And the Foundation again instituted a review procedure. The great majority of people who had suffered “other personal injuries” had already filed an application for forced labor compensation and only needed to add the necessary details. This meant that there was no need to resubmit proof of detention and place of confinement. The applicants did, however, need to show evidence that they were victims of medical experiments or that they had been lodged in homes for the children of forced laborers. For these types of damages, the important thing for the

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Experiments on prisoners carried out by the German air force in the Dachau concentration camp. In hypothermia experiments, subjects were forced to lie in an icy vat of water for up to three hours. The picture shows Dr. Holzlöhner (left), who committed suicide following his arrest; Dr. Sigmund Rascher (right); and, in the foreground, a prisoner wearing an air force swimming vest and protective suit.

applicants was to make their claims credible. This could be done by submitting the testimony of witnesses, indicative evidence or other accounts. Another useful aid was the directory of concentration camps known to have connections to medical experiments. This list had been compiled by the Foundation based on the documents held by the ITS in Bad Arolsen. In the interest of improving our understanding of events and to ensure that no victim of medical experiments was passed over, the Foundation and the JCC worked with external experts, including physicians and medical historians, to further research these connections and to exFinal Report

pand and improve the directory in cooperation with all partner organizations. In reviewing whether an applicant had been detained in a home for the children of forced laborers, the Foundation would, where no individual proof was available, base its decision on documented historical knowledge. It was, for example, assumed that the children of Polish and Soviet forced laborers born after late 1942 had been forcefully abducted and interned in special homes. A Nazi directive issued at the time ordered that pregnant forced laborers would no longer be sent home but had to remain in forced labor. Due to the lifethreatening conditions that prevailed in the 127

homes for the children of forced laborers, the Foundation assumed that children up to eight years of age had suffered health damage as a result of being lodged in such a home. The close cooperation between the Foundation and the partner organizations

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in deciding and reviewing these cases resulted in compensation being paid to over 8,000 victims or their legal heirs. In many face-to-face talks with survivors, they often emphasized the enormous importance of having their persecution recognized as a Nazi injustice.

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IV. Property claims

“Aryanization” was the term used by the Nazis to denote the transfer of huge amounts of wealth to the state, to businesses, and to private individuals. Most of this wealth was confiscated from the Jewish population, but other groups of Nazi victims also suffered the loss of property during the Third Reich. Past German indemnification laws provided for compensation to those victims (or their legal heirs) residing outside the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Those living east of this line, however, had barely a chance of receiving even marginal compensation for their economic losses. The Foundation Establishment Act sought to close this gap in justice that was created by historical and political circumstances. The Act therefore awarded compensation for property losses suffered with the “essential, direct, and harm-causing” collaboration of German enterprises to those who have had no opportunity to receive compensation under other German indemnification laws. Property losses inflicted with the collaboration of German enterprises were understood to be actions such as the expropriation of securities and monetary assets by credit institutions, particularly as part of the “Aryanization” of Jewish assets in the occupied territories of Central and Eastern Europe. Here is an example: A bank based in a country occupied by Germany was “Aryanized.” The shares in the bank held by Jews and other groups persecuted by the Nazis were impounded. This was done on the initiative of a German bank, which then took over the business of the seized bank. The former owners were Final Report

not able to apply for compensation under the Federal Indemnification Act (BEG ) or other German indemnification laws because on the cut-off dates for application they were residing in a country with which the Federal Republic of Germany did not maintain diplomatic relations. The Foundation Establishment Act served to remedy this situation both for the victims of property losses resulting from persecution within the meaning of the BEG and for people whose property and assets, even small valuables, were unjustly pilfered by German companies. For both of these groups, the Foundation Establishment Act allocated a total of DM 200 million (approx. EUR 102.2 million) for compensation payments, DM 150 million (approx. EUR 76.7 million) for property losses resulting from persecution and DM 50 million (approx. EUR 25.6 million) for “other” property losses. An independent commission conceived as a sort of arbitration tribunal was specially established to rule on these applications. Known as the Property Claims Commission, it consisted of three members: one nominated by the German Finance Ministry, one nominated by the U.S. Department of State, plus a chairperson selected by the other two members. The choice fell to a Swiss lawyer with extensive experience in arbitration. The program differed from those for forced labor compensation in that the Foundation was not authorized to perform a substantive review on the rulings. The commission possessed complete independence. Even the Board of Trustees had no say here on issues of policy and inter129

pretation. The commission’s independent status is derived directly from the Foundation Establishment Act. Since the Act did not specify how high compensation should be for each beneficiary, the commission members were free to make this decision on their own. The Foundation Establishment Act designated one of the Foundation’s partner organizations, the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM ), to accept and process the applications for property loss compensation and to carry out the payment of such compensation. The applications were reviewed and assessed at a central office of the IOM . The commission itself convened three to four times each year. It found that, sixty years after the fact, it was nearly impossible to adequately assess the value of the losses suffered at the time. The commission therefore decided to divide the applicants into groups based on the damages incurred and

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to make separate assessments for each group. This was the only way to tackle the large number of applications submitted, which had burgeoned to 35,000 from the 4,000 originally expected. Given the great number of applications and the complexity of the individual cases, the whole process took much longer than expected. But by mid-2005, rulings had been made on all applications and appeals. In June of 2005, payment of compensation to more than 15,000 beneficiaries in thirty countries commenced. The largest single compensation payments made from the two capped funds were in the range of 1,000,000 and 500,000 euros, respectively. But compensation was also awarded for objects of smaller value confiscated during the Nazi era. According to the IOM, the average amount of compensation for the majority of beneficiaries was around EUR 4,000. In all, nearly EUR 90 million was paid out in compensation for property losses.

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V. Insurance claims

V.1 General information A total of DM 550 million (approx. EUR 281 million) was allocated by the Foundation Establishment Act for financial compensation to be paid to those persons, mostly Jews, whose German insurance policies were confiscated or unpaid during the Third Reich. Determining compensation for these claims was the work of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC ). This commission was established in 1998 by U.S. insurance regulators, a number of large European insurance companies (Generali, AXA, Winterthur, Zürich and Allianz), Jewish organizations, survivor associations, and the State of Israel. Its mission was to establish a process for identifying and paying claims on unpaid insurance policies held by victims of Nazism who had not yet received compensation. The founding of the ICHEIC had been spurred by class-action suits in the United States against the insurance companies and the threats by US insurance regulators to possibly deny licenses to insurance companies for the lucrative American market. To avoid such incalculable damage, the companies decided to join the ICHEIC in 1998. In a Memorandum of Understanding, the companies committed themselves to settling the unresolved insurance claims of Holocaust victims. They furthermore agreed to cover the administrative costs of the ICHEIC and to have their research subjected to a thorough review procedure. The ICHEIC was allotted a budget of around USD 500 million, including the funds provided by Germany. Final Report

The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” was obliged by law to help seek legal security, not only for the German companies active in the ICHEIC, but, if possible, for all other German insurance companies as well. It was therefore necessary to include the ICHEIC in the Foundation Establishment Act. The U.S. German executive agreement of July 17, 2000, stated that an agreement should be concluded between the German Insurance Association (Gesamtverband der deutschen Versicherungswirtschaft, GDV ), the Foundation, and the ICHEIC that would describe the procedures for processing and paying compensation claims for unpaid insurance policies issued in Germany. A total of two years elapsed before negotiations on this agreement could reach their conclusion. The talks proved difficult not only because of the complexity of the subject matter. The deep-felt mistrust that existed between the organizations representing Jewish and other survivors and the representatives of the German insurance sector also made for very strenuous negotiations. The suspicion was repeatedly raised that insurance companies had for sixty years held back money that rightfully belonged to Nazi victims and their heirs. The insurance companies countered with their firm conviction that they had, in essence, paid compensation for all unsettled policies from the Nazi era as part of the Wiedergutmachung (indemnification) measures undertaken during the 1950s and 1960s. The companies, however, were not able to back up this conviction with unequivocal proof. The agreement finally came to be signed on October 16, 131

2002. Soon thereafter, the Foundation transferred DM 550 million (EUR 281 million) to the ICHEIC . Of this total, DM 200 million were earmarked for administrative costs incurred by the ICHEIC and for compensation payments. DM 350 million were set aside for humanitarian purposes. The primary purpose of the agreement was to set forth criteria for making compensation for unpaid or confiscated insurance policies. Life insurance policies were deemed eligible for compensation if they had been in force between January 1920 and May 1945, provided they were issued by a German insurance company and had become due. In addition, the individual who was the policy beneficiary, the policyholder, or the insured person at the time had to have been a victim of Nazi persecution. One important restriction was that the policy in question must not have been covered by a previous compensation settlement.

evidence to this effect, they would reject such claims. In many cases, however, the ICHEIC nonetheless decided to award payment. Before making such decisions, the ICHEIC first had to find answers to a number of questions. What sort of evidence was acceptable for such cases? How much plausibility must a claimant’s “story” have? How large should humanitarian payments be? The ICHEIC appointed a special working group to deal with these questions. All told, the insurance companies rendered a positive decision on 14,000 applications. A total of USD 238 million was paid out in compensation. Another 31,000 individuals received 1,000 dollars each as a humanitarian gesture. Thirty and one-half million dollars went to 2,900 applicants who had held policies with an insurance company that either no longer existed or which had in the meantime been nationalized. This means that nearly 34,000 people received a total of some 61.5 million dollars in awards made for humanitarian reasons.

Total number of applications filed with the Number of applications related to the German insurance market

ICHEIC

According to its own records, the ICHEIC received 132,000 applications. This number included 40,500 claims not eligible for compensation under this program because, for example, they dealt with forced labor or pension payments or had been filed twice. This left around 91,500 claims for insurance policy compensation to be processed by the ICHEIC . In 31,500 cases, applicants had specified the name of the insurance companies in question, though the names given were not always correct. For the 60,000 claims that did not name a specific insurer, the companies first had to verify whether or not a policy had indeed existed. If the insurers were not able to find 132

Of the 91,500 applications received by the ICHEIC and deemed to be potentially eligible, 19,500 related to the insurance market in Germany. A further 29,000 applications related to the Eastern European market. These were processed by German insurance companies engaged in this market. What did these 19,500 claims mean for the German insurance market? For seventy German insurance companies, it meant 1.6 million research queries in their archives and databases. In addition, some 16,000 applications were sent to the German federal filing agency (Bundeszentralkartei) in Düsseldorf for further research. While this

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A chart showing Old German handwriting and type used to decipher insurance policies.

research was underway, the insurance company named in the claim checked its own archives to determine whether a policy had existed and whether payment or compensation had already been made in the past for this policy. If all these research efforts led to the conclusion that no payment or compensation had been made for the policy, the insurance company would make an offer of compensation to the claimant. For Final Report

the German market, some 102 million US dollars were distributed to over 8,650 individuals. The payment process consisted of several stages. First, the insurance companies collected and reviewed the applications. Approved applications were sent to the Foundation, where they were compiled each month into payment lists. The applications on the list were then subjected to a formal 133

check, after which the Foundation would withdraw the required amount of money from the ICHEIC ’s account and then transfer these funds to the GDV, which then made the money available to the eligible beneficiaries. To receive compensation, applicants had to sign a statement agreeing to accept the insurance company’s offer and to refrain from further legal action. As with the forced labor compensation program, applicants here could also file an appeal if their insurance claims were rejected. The application cut-off date was December 31, 2003.

V.2 Excursus: A list of Jewish residents in the German Reich between 1933 and 1945 In the agreement signed between the ICHEIC , the GDV , and the Foundation, the parties agreed to produce a list of Jewish policyholders. For their part, the insurance companies provided a list of all policyholders from the period 1920 to 1945 for whom electronic records were available, a total of 8.5 million data records. The foundation assumed the task of compiling a list of names of Jews who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This list would be used to help locate Jewish policyholders. The 1939 census served as the starting point for the list. This was then supplemented by nearly one hundred further sources, including archives, memorial books, emigration lists, deportation lists, etc. The work of producing this list of policyholders was headed by the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv). It received support from an advisory body that included representatives of the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, insurance 134

companies, Jewish organizations, the Foundation and archival experts. A total of 2.5 million pieces of data were screened from this material. The next step was to match this data against the 8.5 million records from this time period held by the insurance companies. In the end, 360,000 data records potentially linked to Jewish policyholders were identified. The list was published on the ICHEIC ’s website in April 2003. This allowed descendants of Holocaust victims to find out whether a relative had held a life insurance policy from a German company. As the policyholder list was being compiled, it was realized that there existed no uniform list of Jewish residents in the German Reich. The foundation, in consultation with the German government, therefore took on the special task of taking the 2.5 million pieces of data and producing a consolidated list with the names of all Jewish residents (not just the policyholders) who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The aim was to create as comprehensive a list as possible of Jews living within the German borders of 1937. This work was based on the data collected for insurance policy compensation. The compilation of this residents list represented a historical opportunity to fill one gap in the research of Jewish life in Germany. These efforts were sponsored jointly by the Foundation and the Federal Archives. For the years 2004 to 2006, the project received one million euros in funding from the German government. The foundation contributed EUR 120,000 in 2005 to support data acquisition work, and then another EUR 200,000 in 2007. In December of 2004, Israeli and German researchers as well as victims’ representatives agreed that the list should also contain the names of those people who had

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Finding names for anonymous victims: A Jewish family and a telephone book from the 1930s.

been, or who had felt themselves to be, persecuted by the Nazis because they were, or were thought be, Jewish. It was further agreed to include all Jewish residents, regardless of nationality, who had lived in Germany within the borders of December 31, 1937. Additional sources were added to the data search, including literary references, Jewish community archives and the data of the ITS in Bad Arolsen. Because of the great number of sources used, it was unavoidable that some names came up two or more times. Such redun-

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dancies had to be identified and removed. The list is the property of the German government, which also decides on who should be granted access to this data. Making this list public could be viewed as a right to privacy violation by the estimated 10,000 Jews still alive in 2007 who counted among the 600,000 Jews who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945. For this reason, potential recipients (museums, memorial sites, archives) had to pledge to comply with the German laws on the protection of personal data.

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VI. Humanitarian funds

The Foundation Establishment Act defined and provided funding for three independent humanitarian funds. These are described below.

VI.1 The DM 276 million program of the Jewish Claims Conference Since the JCC was founded in 1951, one of its main missions has been to support needy Jews who had suffered persecution by the Nazi regime. It does so by financing and fostering organizations and institutions around the globe that provide social services for Nazi-era Jewish victims. As the survivors advance in age, the need for such services—medical, social, or psychological—continues to grow. To help these people, the Foundation Establishment Act allocated DM 276 million to the JCC . By the end of 2003, the JCC had passed nearly all this funding on to project organizers (sponsorship was limited to two years). The last of these projects is scheduled to be completed in 2007. The allocation of this assistance was based on certain criteria, including need for or the lack of sufficient government programs and welfare. In all, the fund was able to support 230 projects in twenty countries. The great majority of this assistance went to the United States, Israel, and to the countries of the CIS . In what follows, we will look at examples of how this money was put to use.

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Israel Israel is home to the majority of Jewish victims of the Nazi era. Many are not well off and rely on social welfare and other assistance to get by. The funds provided by the Foundation under this program were therefore granted to support projects such as neighborhood assistance programs for elderly survivors, day care centers, home care, assisted living, senior citizen and nursing homes, and geriatric facilities. A large share of the money went to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims. This organization provides longterm, at-home assistance to more than 5,000 Holocaust survivors. It helped some 7,000 needy survivors to purchase medical items not covered by the Israeli health system, such as eye-lens implants, dentures, hearing aids and orthopedic equipment. Funding also went to AMCHA (national center for the psychosocial support of Holocaust survivors in Israel) to support psychological therapy and other social assistance for Holocaust survivors and their families. More than 1,800 people make use of the AMCHA ’s services each month.

Central and Eastern Europe In Hungary, home to an estimated 20,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust era, home care assistance is provided to hundreds of Holocaust survivors by the Hungarian Jewish Social Support Foundation (Hesed). The programs run by the Hesed organize and fund meal deliveries, soup kitchens,

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home care, heating fuel and winter clothing. They also provide for therapeutic assistance, medical equipment and aids, and the dispensing of medicines. In all, some 265,000 people in Central and Eastern Europe received assistance from the humanitarian funds.

North America In the United States and Canada, the Jewish Family and Children’s Service (JFS ) is the primary organizer of social assistance to survivors. Its network stretches across twenty-three states in the United States and has offices in more than fifty cities. The Foundation’s humanitarian fund made money available to the JFS to finance social projects aimed at providing home care to Nazi-era victims.

VI.2 The DM 24 million fund of the International Organization for Migration for Sinti and Roma The Foundation Establishment Act allocated DM 24 million to social projects designed to benefit persecuted Sinti and Roma. For the IOM , implementing the objectives of the fund proved to be an extremely complicated task. The living situation specific to the Roma communities in Eastern Europe, which was characterized by social discrimination and the often deep-seated rivalries within the community, made organizing the aid program very difficult. Another problem was the fact that many Roma families lived in remote places. In addition, organizers were at the outset by no means certain as to how many individuals were even eligible for assistance. The IOM was ultimately able to Final Report

identify 70,000 persons eligible for humanitarian relief in thirteen Central and Eastern European countries. In organizing direct assistance, the IOM relied on collaboration with the small number of local agencies who had experience in delivering such aid. The IOM program served primarily to provide material assistance, mostly in the form of food supplies. The provision of the most basic relief goods such as food, clothing, and heating fuel often served to build confidence and pave the way for counseling and encounter projects. The original intent of the humanitarian aid was to contribute to a fundamental improvement of the living situation of the Sinti and Roma. In practice, however, this objective proved illusionary. In places where no social structures existed, attempting to build sustainable structures would have required so much time that the results of such efforts would likely have only benefited the descendants of the survivors, and not the survivors themselves. While globally active development aid organizations normally focus their efforts on promoting long-term skills and integration among the younger generations, the IOM concentrated on getting direct aid as quickly as possible to the most needy elderly Sinti and Roma. Seen in this light, the provision of assistance to 70,000 needy individuals was a success that should be followed up by further assistance from the international community. The program served to finally open the window on the huge need for the most basic relief goods that had until then gone largely unnoticed.

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Top picture: Roma survivors in Slovakia receiving humanitarian assistance through the IOM. Bottom picture: The heads of the partner organization IOM Dirk de Winter (left) and Norbert Wühler (right) after being rewarded with the Federal Cross of Merit for their accomplishments. Günter Saathoff (middle) held the laudation.

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VI.3 The DM 350 million fund of the International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims Like the JCC and the IOM , the ICHEIC also received money—DM 350 million (some EUR 179 million)—to set up a humanitarian fund. This money was used to finance a number of different projects. • The largest of these projects by far was the Social Welfare Program. This program, which was implemented through the JCC , had a budget of 132 million U.S. dollars. Its primary focus was on providing home care to Jewish survivors of the Nazi dictatorship. • The Jewish Agency in Israel developed a further project known as the Initiative for Holocaust Awareness in Jewish Literacy for Youth in the Former Soviet

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Union. This initiative worked to impart knowledge of Jewish culture, traditions, and history to young people living in the former Soviet Union. Particular emphasis was placed on Holocaust education, the aim being to teach today’s youth about the murder of the European Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime during World War II. The program, which will run until 2008/2009, has received financial support totaling USD 10.3 million. • The Yad Vashem memorial in Israel launched a further Holocaust education program with a budget of USD 10 million. This program is scheduled to run for a total of ten years. • The ICHEIC Service Corps is a program in which university students provide assistance to survivors in their home communities. An eighteen-month pilot project in Miami and New York was awarded a total of USD 1.5 million by the ICHEIC.

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VII. Financial management in the Foundation

Upon its creation, the Foundation disposed of capital assets totaling DM 10.1 billion (approx. EUR 5.16 billion). Such a large sum demanded professional financial management. This job was made more complex by the fact that most of this money (DM 8.1 billion according to original estimates) was to be paid out quickly and reliably to more than 1.6 million people around the globe, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. This meant that short-term investment opportunities had to be found for these funds.

VII.1 Payment procedure and investment management The Foundation Establishment Act provided for a decentralized payment procedure using partner organizations as intermediaries. The details had yet to be agreed, but the main objective was to ensure that payments could be made reliably and quickly while keeping overhead costs to a minimum. In consultation with the Foundation, the partner organizations selected the correspondent banks in the various regions and signed the contracts with these banks. Each partner organization had one correspondent bank tasked with paying out the compensation awards. The only exception to this rule was found in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government at first wanted to use ten banks to disburse the compensation payments. This number was later reduced to eight. Given this large number of banks, the Foundation secured a separate letter of indemnity from the Ukrainian National Bank to cover the payment procedure. 140

To ensure the reliability of the payments, the Foundation regularly scrutinized the correspondent banks with regard to their financial standing, capital resources, deposit insurance, partners, and associates. It further examined how many branches each bank had and how these were distributed. The partner organizations submitted lists of applications on a regular basis, normally every two months. These were then subjected to random inspections. Once the required funding (the tranche) was determined, the money was transferred to the local bank account of the partner organization. Finally, the partner organization issued the money, within days, to the individual beneficiaries, either in cash, by money transfer, or by check. For each payment, the partner organizations submitted a certificate of payment from the banks. The payments were made at essentially no cost to the recipients. In negotiations with the various governments, the Foundation was able to ensure that these payments would not be subjected to taxes or other charges or subtracted from social welfare benefits. Any funds that were not paid out by the partner organization were then subtracted from the next tranche. If the partner organization earned interest from these funds, these monies were offset against administrative costs. The introduction of the new euro currency on January 1, 2002, represented yet another challenge, namely to ensure that euro notes were available for payment to beneficiaries in Eastern Europe. Thanks to a coordinated effort between the partner organizations, the regional correspondent

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banks, and the German Federal Bank (Bundesbank), the switch to the new currency went off without undue difficulties. In choosing where to invest its funds, the Foundation placed special priority on the security of its investment and on continuous liquidity. Assets had to be at the Foundation’s disposal around the clock so that it could fund the various payment programs. The foundation therefore chose to place its money in call accounts, fixed-term deposits, and short-term loan notes. As of December 31, 2006, interest earnings had topped EUR 337 million. This money allowed the Foundation to balance the deficits produced by some partner organizations and certain programs where spending exceeded the set ceilings. It also served as a source of money (“residual funds,” see page 145) to support the humanitarian programs. The investment goal for the capital placed in the Remembrance and Future Fund was different from that for the monies used to pay compensation to Nazi-era forced laborers. Asset managers for the Remembrance and Future Fund sought long-term, high-yield investments for the starting capital of DM 700 million, the objective being to maintain the solidity of the fund’s assets while achieving reasonable earnings. A long-term investment strategy was therefore deemed appropriate for the Remembrance and Future Fund (see page 146). The objective was and still is to secure the funds assets over the long term while accruing additional earnings. By investing most of the money in highquality, fixed-interest securities, the Remembrance and Future Fund was looking to earn regular dividends for use in financing its work and projects. The strategy for controlling the risks associated with such investments involved putting a maximum of (currently) 30 percent of the funds assets Final Report

in leading European stocks. In addition, relatively large reserves were put aside during the fund’s first years. The majority of the funds assets were invested in special funds. A further share is managed by the Foundation within its own holdings. Following deductions for the costs of fixed assets, personnel, and projects, the assets of the Remembrance and Future Fund had, by December 31, 2006, topped EUR 424 million, more than EUR 66.4 million above the starting figure of DM 700 million, thus clearly outpacing inflation. Regular net earnings from the investments made by the Remembrance and Future Fund, i.e., interest and dividends after costs, and without consideration of gains or losses in share price, ran at around EUR 13.6 million annually.

VII.2 Administrative costs and auditing of the partner organizations The task of organizing the disbursement of money to Nazi-era victims entitled to compensation demanded a certain amount of administrative effort and the costs associated with it. This was true not only for the Foundation but for the partner organizations as well. Agreements were reached with each partner organization stipulating a percentage of the funds made available for compensation payments as the maximum level of administrative expenditure to be paid for from within that partner organization’s funding ceiling. The foundation was responsible for reviewing the economic plans and auditing the annual accounts of the partner organizations. The funds required to pay for administrative expenditures were in most cases transferred in quarterly installments, 141

with the amount paid offset by any interest earned by the partner organizations. For its outreach campaign aimed at publicizing its work, the Foundation relied on the support of the partner organizations and reimbursed them for their efforts to the tune of DM 10 million. To oversee the use of funds allocated for administrative expenditure at all partner organizations, the Foundation contracted with KPMG Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, the German member of the KPMG financial services network. The oversight work included audits to ensure compliance with the contracts made between the partner organizations and the banks chosen to issue payments. With these audits, most of which were conducted on a semiannual basis, the Foundation ensured that the money allocated for administration was used efficiently and could not be misappropriated. Similar audits were also carried out by KPMG for the humanitarian fund of the IOM (DM 24 million fund), while the firm AWT Audit Wirtschafts-Treuhand AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft audited the JCC (DM 276 million fund), and the ICHEIC was audited by the American CPA firm McGladrey & Pullen.

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VII.3 Special arrangement with Poland In contrast to the other partner organizations, the Polish organization demanded that the funds earmarked for compensation payments be transferred in the Polish national currency, the z¥oty. It was therefore agreed in 2001 to institute a procedure for converting deutschmarks to z¥oty. Later on, however, the Polish partner organization expressed its dissatisfaction with the conversion procedure and the rate of exchange. The row over the z¥oty aroused heated public debate in both Germany and Poland. On December 20, 2002, the Foundation and the Polish partner organization agreed on a solution to the problem that also found the support of the victims’ associations represented in the board of the Polish foundation and of the governments of Germany and Poland. The agreement provided that the Foundation and the Polish partner organization would take all interest and future interest earned in z¥oty during the entire period between the time the first installment was converted and the time it was completely paid out and make this money (which added up to around 259 million z¥oty, then worth about 77.4 million euros) available for lump-sum payments to beneficiaries in Poland. At the end of the payment program, it turned out that more than 5 million z¥oty (then valued at 1.5 million euros) were left unspent. This money was given to the Polish partner organization to pay for humanitarian projects benefiting Nazi-era victims. The foundation then issued the second installment of compensation funds in euros (as it did for all other partner organizations), and not in z¥oty. Responsibility for converting this money into z¥oty and accountability to the beneficiaries then fell to the Polish partner organization itself.

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Top picture: November 30, 2003, in Warsaw: Public announcement marking the start of second installment payments to former forced laborers by the PolishGerman Reconciliation Foundation. Bottom picture: The delegates of the Polish and Czech government during the international negotations: Dr. Jiˇrí Šitler (left) and Professor Jerzy Kranz (second to right) and the present members of the Director’s Board of the Foundation Günter Saathoff (second from left) and Dr. Martin Salm (right).

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VIII. Conclusion of payment program for forced labor, insurance losses, and “other personal injuries”

When lawmakers passed the Foundation Establishment Act in 2000, they expected that the payment program would be carried out quickly and in a more or less “uncomplicated” manner. The idea, after all, was to get entitlements out to the aging survivors as quickly as possible. In cases where the victims passed away while claims were still pending, payments were to be made to their legal heirs. Realizing this objective, however, was hampered by unexpected organizational problems (see page 119), and special legal provisions were required to govern such cases. As early as 2002, the partner organizations reported an increasing number of cases in which beneficiaries did not come forward to accept the payments to which they were entitled. They did not respond to approved compensation notices or had moved to an unknown address. Some checks went uncashed for years. Nor did the legal heirs always come forth to assert their claims. The frequency of such cases increased during the second installment round, and they were also seen in connection with claims for “other personal injuries” and insurance losses. The original payment procedure did not regulate how to proceed in such cases. The partner organizations, who, as

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described above, were acting under a timelimited mandate, called for a binding policy in this matter, since having hundreds or thousands of “open” cases on their hands for years would have required keeping the partner organizations alive until the last case was settled. Lawmakers finally agreed on another solution. This required that the partner organizations conduct a public information campaign in their territories in 2005 and 2006, the message being that all beneficiaries who had not yet come forward would have until a set deadline to assert their claims or their entitlement would be considered forfeited. The legislation set this deadline for September 30, 2006. The partner organizations then had until December 31, 2006, to initiate any outstanding payments. This date thus marked the end of the statutory payment procedure for these foundation payment programs. The money that was forfeited by individuals because of this policy was returned to the Foundation’s partner organizations. In the end, this money did serve to benefit Nazi-era victims as it was used to fund a new program. The need for which was not originally foreseen by the Foundation.

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IX. Use of residual funds

It was soon realized that the partner organizations, after paying out the second installment, would not require all the funds allocated to cover individual compensation awards. The preceding chapter described some of the reasons for this. Moreover, there was still some money left over from the funds set aside for appeals proceedings and from the sum earmarked for administrative costs. Added to this was the interest earned by the Foundation by the end of 2006, which did not make it into individual compensation payments by the legal deadline for payment completion. In 2005, the Board of Trustees decided that the Foundation would not retain these residual funds but that they should be used to finance humanitarian projects. The money was divided up between the partner organizations following a formula agreed upon by the Board of Trustees. These funds were used to realize medical and social assistance projects. • In Poland, the money was used primarily to finance health resort stays, medical services, and nursing care. • The IOM used the residual funds allocated to it for humanitarian aid and for social programs to benefit former Roma forced laborers.

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• In March 2006, the Ukrainian partner organization started a project to help needy victims get hip and eye operations. • The Russian partner organization chose to use the money to pay for eye operations and health therapies. • Belarus used part of the money to pay for medical assistance to Nazi victims suffering from cancer and to help people who had not only been persecuted by the Nazis but were also victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. • The JCC passed its residual funds on to associated foundations and victims organizations in Hungary, Israel and the United States. These organizations provided help to people threatened by homelessness, for emergency medical care where government assistance was lacking and for material goods such as wheelchairs, eyeglasses, hearing aids, dentures and special sitting and sleeping aids. In the Czech Republic, the local partner • organization established a social fund to pay for medical aids and drugs. Residual funds amounting to some EUR 20 million were thus used to support supplementary aid programs to the benefit of surviving Nazi-era victims.

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X. The Remembrance and Future Fund

X.1 Founding and mission When the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” was founded, the plan was also to establish a fund that would carry on aid and support work far into the future. Of the money contributed by the two donors, 93 percent was allocated for the individual compensation payments described on the preceding pages. The remaining 7 percent (EUR 358 million), however, was earmarked as foundation capital for the Remembrance and Future Fund. With assets amounting to EUR 424 million (as of end 2006, including earnings and interest), this fund counts among the largest foundations in Germany. Its continuing task, as formulated by legislators, is to “use the income primarily produced by the means allocated to it from Foundation moneys to foster projects that serve the purposes of better understanding among peoples, the interests of survivors of the National Socialist régime, youth exchange, social justice, remembrance of the threat posed by totalitarian systems and despotism, and international cooperation in humanitarian endeavors. In commemoration and respect of those victims of National Socialist injustice who did not survive, it is also intended to further projects in the interest of their heirs.” (Foundation Establishment Act, Section 2,2). As a public-law foundation, the fund supports programs that are approved and opened to competitive bidding by the Board of Trustees. The procedures developed for channeling program support have proven effective both in Germany and in 146

the countries with which the Foundation has worked most intensely. These include those nations that suffered the most under the Nazi dictatorship and its aftermath, i.e., Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Israel (due to the large number of Nazi victims who live there), and the United States. When deciding on which project proposals to sponsor, the fund bases its choice on the vote of independent juries of experts. These juries develop special quality criteria for each project and critically monitor the results of sponsorship activities on the ground. Thorough “market analyses” for innovative sponsorship programs are essential, as are regular internal and external evaluations. The results of the sponsorship activities are presented to the public and the experience gained is shared among professionals in the international arena. In 2006, the fund presented its first report detailing its sponsorship activities and the results they produced during the first five years of the fund’s existence. With its multifaceted sponsorship policy, the Foundation strives to attract other public and private sponsors to collaborate in achieving its objectives. In this way, the Foundation seeks to extend the reach and impact of its sponsorship work.

X.2 Sponsorship focus In the run-up to its regular sponsorship work, the Foundation, in 2001 (shortly after its founding), initiated projects aimed at helping forced laborers find proof for

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their claims and at providing humanitarian assistance for Nazi-era survivors. Such projects were launched in many countries, including Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Once the fund had its administrative organization set up and its policies in place, it officially took up its work on April 18, 2002. In January 2005, the Board of Trustees agreed on general guidelines staking out where to direct its sponsorship spending. Following an intensive phase of program development between 2003 and 2005, the fund in 2006 had a total of 8 million euros available for endowments to programs and projects. By the end of that same year the fund was able to appropriate a total of 32 million euros to 1,007 different causes. The programs to promote humanitarian cooperation work, political history education, human rights initiatives and scholarships were above all aimed at encouraging a commitment to international understanding among young people. The programs are classified under six main sponsorship fields, which together define the profile of the Foundation.

Forced laborers and other Nazi-era victims—testimonies to their fate The fund promotes face-to-face encounters with victims of the Nazi regime and the documentation of their life stories. The program encourages young people to independently learn from these witnesses to the past.

tection of minorities. It provides support to initiatives to develop a European awareness of history.

International humanitarian cooperation The fund supports international humanitarian projects, in particular for the victims of Nazism in Central and Eastern Europe and Israel. By fostering international partnerships in the field of geriatric assistance, the fund hopes to strengthen citizen and community initiatives to provide proper care and services to the elderly.

Young volunteers take responsibility The fund helps young people from Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and Israel to perform international volunteer work in social and cultural projects. Through their work, young volunteers have the opportunity to deepen their cultural and historical understanding of their host country and help foster cross-border understanding.

Leo Baeck Program The fund supports education concerning the intellectual and cultural heritage of German-Jewish history at schools and universities. The program is named for Dr. Leo Baeck, a German rabbi who lived from 1873 to 1956. German President Horst Köhler has assumed patronage of the program.

History and human rights Scholarship programs The fund urges today’s youth to take up the banner of democracy, human rights, international understanding, and the proFinal Report

Together with various partners, the fund awards scholarships to outstanding school 147

A letter from the past: The greatgranddaughter of Sergei Chesnokov, a former forced laborer, reading a letter that Chesnokov wrote to his children during his period of forced labor. The letter contains his recollections of this time. Next to the letter lies the spoon that Chesnokov kept with him throughout the entire war. The photograph was taken in December 2005 in Berdsk (Novosibirsk Oblast), Russia.

October 2004 in Donetsk, Ukraine. An employee of “Bochumer Haus,” a social aid clinic in Donetsk, measuring the blood pressure of Alexandra Dimirievna Buegakova in her apartment. The Bochumer Haus is supported by the BochumDonetsk Friendship Association.

April 2005, Simferpol, Ukraine. Nurse Tatiana Telnaya measuring the blood sugar level of Mrs. Semankova, a former forced laborer suffering from diabetes.

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A survivor shows pictures to her family. The photo was taken in the social medical center for former concentration camp prisoners in Łódz, Poland, which receives support from the Remembrance and Future Fund through the Gestures of Reconciliation program.

June 8, 2002, Auschwitz concentration camp. Marcin Hetnal, a member of a foundation-sponsored project for Polish and German youth, lays a wreath at the Wall of Death in the Auschwitz camp.

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»Remembrance and Future« executive Günter Saathoff complements the laureates of a student‘s contest by the Foundation. The participating students were asked to deal with biographies of survivors of National Socialism.

and college students and young scientists from Central and Eastern Europe and Israel. It further works to help representatives of minority groups defend their interests. The historical background of the Foundation combined with the partnership between its private- and public-sector donors make the Foundation a unique vehicle for sponsorship and support. It encourages

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awareness of the history and consequences of the Nazi dictatorship and keeps the memory of the victims alive. The foundation will continue to foster international initiatives and projects aimed at protecting human rights and promoting tolerance. These international programs and projects are helping to build a future founded on democracy and human rights and committed to international solidarity and understanding.

The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Over the past years, the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” has disbursed compensation payments to over 1.6 million forced laborers and their legal heirs. Though this figure is often cited, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this number represents 1.6 million individuals with very diverse histories. So we would like now to take a close-up look at the people whom the Foundation was primarily intended to serve. The foun-

dation asked a number of journalists to visit a few of the 1.6 million recipients, to record their stories, and to portray how they live today. The following pages examine just five of 1.6 million biographies. But even this small number of samples is sufficient to demonstrate how different the fates of forced laborers were and how present these fates still are in the minds of the victims. For many survivors, the importance of the work of the Foundation and its partner organizations lay not only in the compen-

November 11, 1999, Zittau, Germany. Former forced laborer Nadya Petrova during her visit to Germany. She is standing in a ﬁeld where she was forced to work. The house in the background was where she was lodged during this period. Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

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sation payments as such, but almost even more so in the opportunity to finally have their personal stories heard and their suffering recognized. True compensation, says Philomena Franz, who worked as a forced laborer in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, comes when she meets the young people who come to her talks to hear her story. Even after the last payment is made, the Foundation will still feel a duty to bear witness to the fates of these individuals. As part of a project documenting the biog-

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raphies of former forced and slave laborers, over 580 interviews were conducted with victims in twenty-eight countries. These interviews will be made available for use in exhibits, political history education programs and for research. Back in 2002, the Foundation launched an encounter program that supports projects designed to bring young people into personal contact with surviving former forced laborers and other victims of Nazism. This program will continue its work in the years ahead.

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Philomena Franz “Young people have a right to their history.”

It is cold in the Bergisches Land region. Philomena Franz stands straight as an arrow next to her car, dressed in her highnecked fur coat. An elegant lady who appears fifteen, maybe twenty years younger than her true age of 84. The clouds hang low in the sky as we drive through a misty fog to the apartment block where Philomena Franz lives. Her son lives one flight above her together with his wife and their little girl. “The block is monitored by cameras,” Philomena says as she works her way out of the car, “I feel safe here.” Safe from racist attacks, she means to say. From the large window in her pleasantly furnished apartment one looks out onto a park full of trees. They are bare now, but in summer everything is green. “Yes, that is nice,” remarks Philomena in her warm, melodious voice. “But the freeway is close by and the air can really smell of exhaust, depending on which way the wind blows. Seems that people just have to pave over everything.” She smiles and raises her arms with her palms turned upward—a gesture intending to say there is probably nothing one can do about it. Yesterday she was visited by “her school kids,” as she lovingly calls them, who interviewed her for an article in their school paper. Philomena Franz gives talks at schools and universities in which she tells listeners about her suffering during the Nazi years, tirelessly recounting her story in order to keep the memory alive. She is a Sintisa, a witness and victim of Nazi atrocities, a former forced laborer and Auschwitz surviPhilomena Franz

Philomena Franz

vor, and she has made it her mission in life to tell young people about the crimes she was personally forced to suffer. “We know that it is very important, we can’t allow it to go to sleep, we need to be very active and alert, because we all know how many are still marching and how many are living in hiding,” explains Philomena. Talk after talk, her life story touches the hearts of the young listeners. After she has finished, schoolchildren come up to her, often with tears in their eyes, and want to 153

put their arms around her. She has been doing this for thirty-five years in the hope that others may learn from her experience. Does she ever think about quitting? Sometimes, she says, but she doesn’t suppose she can. Philomena laughs. Her laugh sounds unencumbered and lighthearted. She received several thousand euros from the foundation program for former forced laborers. She recalls that the atmosphere at the IOM in Geneva, where she submitted her application, was positive, and she is grateful for the understanding she encountered there. “You can tell when people respect what you went through and when they really want to help. Whenever I had questions I could always call them.” Now she says she wants to “burn a little” of the money she received, and she is planning a trip to the United States, probably in fall. Naturally she is looking forward to it. But that should not disguise her basic criticism of the compensation payments. “Not enough,” she says tersely. “What good does a symbol do me? You can’t really call that amends.” At Auschwitz, Philomena was subjected to experiments carried out by concentration camp physician Josef Mengele. Over the course of several weeks, she received agonizing injections of an unknown fluid into the middle of her chest. In one instance, a syringe broke. The doctors simply left the needle sticking in Philomena’s body. A fellow prisoner later used pliers to pull the metal fragment out of her chest. Fever and vomiting, pain and hair loss were the immediate consequences of these experiments. After the war, Philomena Franz suffered severe symptoms of paralysis, presumably an aftereffect of the experiments carried out in Auschwitz. As compensation for this suffering, Philomena received 6,700 euros from another foundation program. She donated a good 154

third of this sum to an orphanage. But she still has mixed feelings about the money she received. “I get angry whenever I think about the size of the payments. It’s just a drop in the bucket. And it is a disgrace for Germany.” And the fact that it took so long for the Sinti to be recognized as Nazi victims still makes her furious today. “We Sinti were the last to get compensation. There are Sinti who were thrown out of school by the Nazis because they were not Aryan. That’s why there are still so many illiterate Sinti today. Most of them didn’t even know that they were entitled to payments. We were the fifth wheel on the wagon. The Central Council for the Sinti in Heidelberg should have done more to help these people,” says Philomena sternly. What most appalls her is “when people who were imprisoned in concentration camps get such a small pension that they can’t even pay their rent. Then they have to go on welfare.” A deep wrinkle appears between her eyebrows. “They could have at least spared these people this humiliation.” Her pension, too, is alone not enough to live on. “But the money is not the important thing to me.” Her compensation, she says, are the young people she meets during her talks. “They are my hope.” “Young people have a right to their history. We have yet to come to terms with it. And it isn’t over yet,” says Philomena in explaining her motivation. Her work is her calling. “I enjoy the contact with our youth. And I know how easily impressionable young people are, especially if they have family problems or worries about the future.” She hopes that those young people who finish school will also be able to find work that they like. Something that she herself was denied. Philomena Franz, born in 1922 in Biberach am Riss to a prosperous family of musicians, was held for years by the Nazis in Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

concentration camps. Her inmate number is tattooed on her lower left arm. When she was just 16-years-old she was forced to work in an arms factory in Stuttgart. In 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz. With the help of a relative, she managed to make it from there to Ravensbrück. Philomena had heard that her sister had been taken to the camp there. In the camp’s ammunitions factory, she was put to work building bombs. Her body turned yellow from handling so much explosive material day after day with no protective mask. She escaped, but was discovered in the woods a few days later. Her punishment was to be hanged in a mock execution. She was severely injured, but still alive. Then she was beaten and returned to Auschwitz. As she was about to enter the gas chamber, an SS soldier called her away. She was ordered to shovel the ashes of the murdered onto trucks. The final station of her wartime journey was Wittenberg, where she was forced to labor in an aircraft factory. She managed to flee again just a few weeks before the end of the war. Of the ten members of her family, only Philomena and two of her brothers survived. But the survivors had no idea where fate had taken the others. It was not until the early 1990s that Philomena was able to meet with one of her brothers again. Philomena wrote a book to put her experiences to paper, and to keep the haunting memories of this terrible time in check. Even after regaining her freedom, she suffered for years with severe depression. Today, when she speaks at schools, there are still many experiences that she cannot talk about. “My whole life story takes up too much time. So I talk to young people about those things that I think will really move them.” Like her escape from the forced labor camp near Wittenberg. Twenty female prisoners managed to break out. They Philomena Franz

knew that they could not stay together, so Philomena tried to make it on her own. She concealed herself from the guards by taking cover in the Elbe river, hanging on to the reeds on the river’s bank. She heard the henchmen approaching and hid in the water until they had moved on. The next day she swam to an island in the river, where she found bird’s eggs to still her hunger. She swam back and, with her last reserves of energy, dragged herself along the riverbank in the direction of the thunder of Russian canons she heard in the distance. She couldn’t go on any further. “I was too weak, in those wet clothes, with no food, I fell to the ground and slept. In my subconscious, I heard the sound of boots coming closer. I lay there and looked up. I saw a uniform, and the boots and thought, ‘I am going to die.’” On her knees she begged for her life. The man in the uniform asked her to stand up. “Please, my dear, you do not need to kneel before me,” he said to her. “When I heard how politely he spoke to me I knew that maybe he would help me,” says Philomena, recalling the joyous moment of her rescue. “The others would always insult me or call out my number when they spoke to me. We didn’t have names. We were just heads of cattle to them.” With this gesture of human respect from a stranger, Philomena realized that not all Germans were Nazis. “I always had the feeling that the people knew about the existence of the concentration camps, but that most of them were not aware of what really went on there.” Of that she is sure. Since that time, Philomena Franz has courageously dedicated her life to reconciliation work. The path she has followed was anything but easy, and she has had moments of near total despair. But somewhere along the line she realized for herself that “human greatness lies in the ability to forgive.” 155

Sometimes, people approach her on the street to thank her for what she has taught them. And Philomena Franz has plenty to keep her busy. Besides her speaking tours, she organizes benefits for ailing children in Germany, with music provided by her nephew’s band, for her family still boasts some excellent musicians. Philomena is also the winner of the 2001 Women of Europe Award for Germany and has been invited to attend many international conferences and symposia.

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But today’s younger generation remains the most important aspect of her work. “They are the ones who will one day govern and shape this country,” she says, “and I think that the prospects are very promising.” This is why she allows young people to look through her eyes for a brief glimpse at the abyss of Germany’s modern history. It is a glimpse into the darkness. Those who dare to look, so she hopes, will see the responsibility that every person bears for the future. Vera von Wolffersdorff

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Vladimir Naumov “Professor Naumov’s Easter Pudding”

Professor Vladimir Naumov laughs a lot. He can laugh even when he thinks about his time as a forced laborer in Germany. It all began on June 15, 1941. Vladimir’s grandmother had until then not yet seen her grandson. So during the holidays that year, Vladimir’s father took his nine-year-old son to visit his grandmother in the village of Odintsovo, not far from the city of Smolensk. But then the war broke out, exactly one week later. Late June saw the first bombing of Smolensk and by July 16th the city had fallen. The German military command set up its post in the village. Vladimir had no choice but to remain in occupied Odintsovo until the end of 1943. He helped his grandmother around the house and was even able to attend school. The school had only two classrooms, and the youngest and oldest pupils were taught together. Naumov: “We weren’t allowed to learn about history or geography or other related subjects. Math was just about all we had, and I loved it. A large portrait of the Führer was hung in our classroom. All the boys secretly shot blotter paper at it. The teachers warned us not to do it, but the Hitler that hung in our classroom was always smeared with ink anyway. Then they said they wanted to renovate the classrooms. But that was just a trick to swap the smeared portrait with a new one.” On September 19, 1943, the military command posted the following order: “All village residents are ordered to evacuate their houses by 12 noon tomorrow. Anyone who disobeys this order will be shot.” Vladimir Naumov

Vladimir Naumov

That night, the Naumovs fled secretly to a distant farmstead in the woods in the hopes of escaping capture and imprisonment. But a village resident betrayed them by revealing their whereabouts to the military. The farmstead was burned down. Vladimir, his grandmother, his brothers and all the others were taken through the smoldering city of Smolensk to the other side of the Dnieper river. Naumov: “All of us were afraid of falling out of the group. We huddled together like lambs and held each other tight. All around us were soldiers with dogs. We were cold and hungry. One week later we were herded onto wooden freight cars and the train pulled away. On a scrap of paper I wrote 157

that we were being transported to an unknown destination. I wrapped the paper in a piece of cloth and threw it out the window. I hoped and hoped that by some miracle this message would reach my mother or my father, but it never did.” A week later, the train stopped in Soest, a town located near the city of Dortmund in Germany. A real slave market had been set up in the town. The buyers walked down the rows and inspected everyone as if inspecting cattle. They felt people’s muscles and examined their teeth. What Vladimir feared the most was being separated from his family members. Naumov: “All of a sudden, a German approached us and took our whole family with him. Today I would very much like to believe that this was a simple act of human kindness performed by a normal person. He probably felt sorry for us. We were put in a bus and sent to Bielefeld and to the textiles factory located in the city’s Brackwede district.” They were all lodged in a room where the bicycles were kept. The floor was of plain cement; there were no furnishings and just one tiny window. And this room was home to three families. They were hungry all the time. Breakfast consisted of a pot of ersatz coffee and during the day they were given rutabaga soup to eat. Once in a while they got a boiled potato. To avoid starvation they found another way get food. In the factory where they worked, starch flour was used in production. The prisoners learned to use it to make a jelly, the consistency of which reminded them of thick marmalade. The factory site had a network of pipes from which hot steam would rise. When the guards were busy on the other side of the grounds, one of the laborers would hold a bucket over the steam. The starch flour boiled up into the bucket, which was then concealed under 158

old rags. By evening it had hardened into a thick mass that could be cut with a knife. How the children loved sucking on bars of starch flour! Sometimes his grandmother would say, “Vladi, go into town and collect some alms.” And he would go through the streets and beg for help. Once in a while he would even get a piece of bread with margarine. Naumov: “Once, an older worker from the shop said to me, ‘Tomorrow is a holiday, it’s Easter. Come over to my place, please.’ When I got there, he and his wife were waiting for me. I went into their house and was greeted by a real feast! On the table stood a bowl of semolina pudding with strawberry sauce. For me it was like a true miracle. Unbelievably delicious. It was like a fairy tale. Then he showed me his sons’ room. One son had fallen on the Eastern front. The whereabouts of the second son were unknown. I spent several hours there and can to this day still taste that pudding.” The Americans took Bielefeld on April 2, 1945. All the factory workers were placed in collection camps. In early June of that year, British forces took control of that zone of occupation. Everyone was registered and received temporary identification papers. The British urged Naumov and his family to emigrate to Canada, for they knew exactly what awaited the survivors of German detention if they returned to the Soviet Union. But the family rejected the offer and were taken to Magdeburg, which was located in the Soviet occupation zone. Naumov: “We were standing on one side of the barrier with the British. They patted us on the shoulder to show us that everything would be all right and filled our pockets with chocolate bars. Then the barrier went up and we walked over to “our” side. We had been waiting two years for this moment! We expected that they Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

would welcome us with open arms, warm us up and give us food to eat. But then we realized that the soldiers on the other side were shaking their fists at us, saying “You traitors! We’ll show you!’” That was a bitter moment. Everyone who had been taken prisoner or who had been in the occupied territories was automatically considered a traitor to their country. That is why all prisoners, forced laborers, and forced deportees were subjected to humiliating interrogations. Naumov says that everyone over the age of 12 was interrogated. He spent nearly two months in this camp before being sent to Moscow. Naumov: “I walked down the street where our house stood and asked myself what I would do if the house was no longer standing and my parents were dead. But lo and behold, the house was still there. I went inside and met a neighbor who recognized me right away and screamed, ‘Run home! Run home, quick, to your mother, she’s there!’” Children quickly forget evil. Vladimir was now back in school where he again took up his beloved math, and physics too. He graduated from school with a gold medal for excellence. This entitled him to go to the university of his choice and to skip all entrance exams. He chose the University of Moscow. The university’s entrance committee had him first fill out a questionnaire with forty-one questions, including “Were you in the occupied territories?” Two weeks later he received a notice of rejection with no reasons given. It was then that he realized that the events of his past would prohibit him from ever getting a college degree. Naumov: “Completely frustrated, I was walking down the street when I saw a sign on the side of a house that said ‘Students wanted’ followed by ‘Mechanical College’. That seemed to mean no need to worry Vladimir Naumov

about a security clearance. Maybe I should give it a try? I went to the entrance committee, who immediately registered me for an interview and gave me the same stupid questionnaire. I filled it out and knew right away that I wouldn’t have any luck there either.” Despite all his doubts, he was accepted. But he soon found out that the institute belonged to the country’s defense industry. Vladimir was again at risk of being expelled from the college. But here again, either luck was on his side or the NKVD failed to read his questionnaire. Whatever the case, he stayed on at the college. Naumov developed into one of the college’s finest students. He was even given the opportunity to defend his thesis before the famous Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. As always, Vladimir achieved the highest score, still, no one wanted to give him a job. Certain details of his life were simply not acceptable. Naumov remained a simple engineer in the college’s physics department, despite his fear that a real career in the sciences would always be closed to him. Against all odds, he soon achieved the rank of chief engineer, became a doctoral student, wrote his dissertation, taught at the university and gained a professorship. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, Naumov was able to speak openly and without fear about the years he spent in Germany. It turned out that there were thousands of people who just like him had performed forced labor while still underage. They started to hold meetings, and later formed an association. Naumov was elected to the board of the Society of Underage Victims of Fascism. The society heard about the work of the Remembrance and Future Fund and learned that it also provided financial assistance. In making its spending decisions, the fund looked at where the underage laborers were forced to 159

work, the length of their detention, and the working conditions. Following a detailed examination of all the facts, the applicant was notified of the compensation payment decision. Vladimir Naumov was one of the first to submit an application to the fund. In May 2002 he had already received his first payment. Three years later—nearly sixty years to the day following his return from forced labor—Naumov received his full compensation. In all, Vladimir Naumov received

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over 2,000 euros from the Remembrance and Future Fund. Naumov: “This was a generous and humane gesture by the people and the government of Germany to support the people who survived these years of hardship. For us, this help came at a very difficult time in our lives. If the fund continues its work, it should organize its aid in a more targeted way. For example, to help those of us who most need medical treatment or an operation.” Alexander Sosnovski

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Yefim Gorin “Like a tree”

The year is 1994. It is a hot summer’s day in Volinskaya, Ukraine. The trembling hand caresses the name, feeling each Cyrillic letter engraved in the high, black wall. Gorin Josef Ben Abraham. It is the first time that these fingers have made contact with this cold granite. Then the emotions pour out in an uncontrollable rush. The hands belong to a man named Yefim Gorin. He hides his face in his arm, leans his entire weight against the immovable stone as if to brace himself. He sobs and is shaking from head to toe. He runs his hand again and again over the lines of the name, as if to make sure that it is not just an illusion. People in a small group close by look on, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, visibly moved by the scene. Gorin is not ashamed to mourn. He has been waiting fifty years to finally mourn. For Yefim is Josef’s son. The video cassette he recorded during his trip to the Ukraine buzzes as it rewinds to the beginning. Gorin lays the VCR ’s remote control on the table next to his black kippah, the traditional head covering worn by Jewish men. He is standing in the middle of the room, looking into the gray screen. His wife, Manya, sits on the sofa behind him, sobbing quietly. “I can’t help it, when I see his tears,” she whispers, a bit embarrassed as she wipes her red eyes with a tissue. The year is 2007. One of the last days of winter in Ashkelon, Israel. Gorin turns around and lets his shoulders hang, drained of all energy: “I lived in Ukraine for forty-seven years without ever knowing where my father’s grave was.” He Yefim Gorin

Yeﬁm Gorin

slides down slowly into a big armchair. The chair’s burgundy-colored slip cover is a bit scuffed at the edges. “I had to emigrate to Israel before I could say the mourners’ prayer at his grave. I am a devout man.” After a moment of reflection he clears his throat and sits up straight. His gaze is now fixed. “This moment was important for me. I needed to know where my Aba is buried and give him back his name.” Aba is the Hebrew word for father. Josef Gorin was laid in a mass grave with seventy-three other soldiers. Just like the other 3,500 fallen comrades in Volinskaya. Yefim Gorin was born in 1938, the first and only son of Josef and Sarah, in the town 161

of Khotyn, a religious center in a district where 15,000 Jews lived and worked. It was not a good year for a Jewish child in this part of the world, which at the time belonged to Russia. He was just three years old when his family was deported to Transnistria, a 250 forced march through the biting cold. It was pure hell. “Many people died, their bodies were left to lie on the road. We were so thirsty we drank water out of puddles.” All his memories were given to him by his mother. He himself recalls nothing of life in the ghetto. But that doesn’t lessen the pain when he thinks about what he and his family went through. From the fall of 1941 to the winter of 1942, his father and mother worked in the Popovtsy ghetto. After that time all three were taken to Kusmintsy. The family of Manya, Yefim’s wife, was also interned in the Kusmintsy ghetto. They were also originally from Khotyn. Yefim’s mother talked a lot about their life in Kusmintsy. “It was worse than a nightmare.” From morning to night, they had to cart coal for the Nazis. They had barely anything to eat and had to sleep together with sixty other people in a tiny heating room. “Every morning, ten to fifteen people were found dead.” Groin’s aunt and uncle died in the ghetto, as did his grandparents and his wife’s sister. She was just eight years old. Hunger, cold and typhus dragged them from this life. After the rest were freed in March of 1944, Gorin was drafted into the Red Army. He never saw his son again. After the war, mother and son returned to Khotyn. “There was nothing left standing. The city was just a pile of rubble.” But the two somehow managed to build a life again. They worked for a farmer, who gave them a tiny lodging and regular meals. At seventeen, Yefim was his family’s sole provider. His mother had become very ill. “She never got over that life in the ghetto 162

and the death of my father,” he says. “No, it wasn’t easy, but it’s our history, it belongs to us.” After a tough life in Ukraine, Yefim and his wife decided in 1991 to emigrate to Israel along with their two children and Manya’s mother. “We are Jewish, and the people made us very aware of this fact. This anti-Semitism is devilish,” says Manya. She cannot conceal her anger. Back in the here and now there is a knock on the door. A neighbor woman, speaking in Yiddish, says hello and asks how the couple is doing. Yefim and his wife are still fluent in this language, this nearly forgotten combination of German and Hebrew. “It’s the language of our parents,” Manya remarks and smiles gently. “You have to preserve the memory.” The Gorins do not live in the past and they can’t abide people who walk around all day with a frown on their face. The present is now. And it shows. Yefim wears modern jeans and a dark blue V-necked sweater over a light blue shirt. Manya sparkles in a black top with rhinestone appliqué. “We accept the past, honor the memory and live with optimism,” says Yefim. He brooks no contradiction on this point. They are both infinitely proud of their children. Lev works as an oncologist in the Beer Sheva hospital and Ina is employed as a laboratory assistant. The find joy in their three grandchildren, in the chirping of birds, the red geraniums flourishing on the living room window sill, dark Russian bread and, every now and then, a glass of sherry. “Laughter is a right and good thing,” says Gorin in a voice booming with conviction. “You have to keep on doing it as long as you can.” Even if it isn’t always easy.” And it is certainly not always easy for the Gorins. Money has been tight ever since they emigrated from Ukraine. Yefim is a trained medical attendant, but at first he Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

had to get by as a security guard. He finally found work as a geriatric nurse. He retired nearly three years ago. The couple today receives 2,800 shekels (around 500 euros) a month from the Israeli national insurance system. From this small amount, they need 60 euros just to pay for medicine. Two years ago, Yefim had to undergo a bypass operation. Manya suffers from age-related glaucoma. The Gorins cannot afford an apartment of their own. They live together with their daughter, Ina. In return, the couple takes care of their 13-year-old grandson and does the household chores while Ina is at work. Fifteen years ago, when they first heard in the radio about the work of the Foundation, it was like a blessing, Yefim recalls. During a meeting with representatives of the Jewish Claims Conference in Tel Aviv, the Gorins learned of the requirement to prove that their families had really been in the ghetto. This was anything but easy, they said, looking back. “After all, no one ever gave us a certificate.” But Gorin did in the end manage to obtain the papers he needed. In a painstaking process, he retraced his father’s footsteps as a soldier in the Red Army until he discovered where his father had fallen. He

Yefim Gorin

received two payment installments from the Foundation totaling DM 15,000. In addition, Yefim and his wife have since 1997 received a monthly pension as compensation for their time in the ghetto. Though money can never truly compensate for the suffering inflicted on his and Manya’s families, Yefim says that in a way the Foundation helped him twice. “First of all, of course, there was the money. We don’t know what we would have done without it. And second, it was through the Foundation that I was able to find my father.” He puts his hands in his pants pockets and recites his favorite allegory, which he borrowed from a Russian writer. He doesn’t know exactly which one. “Man is like a tree. He has roots and branches that point in different directions. Our fruits are the mitzwot, the good deeds. The more a tree bears, the better.” It is a policy that the 69-year-old Gorin lives by. Twice a week he packs a small case with pencils and folders and becomes a teacher. Although his Hebrew still isn’t perfect after sixteen years, he teaches the language to retired Russian immigrants in the community center around the corner. No charge. He laughs out loud. “I guess they are my fruit, even if they have a few grammatical flaws.” Sabine Brandes

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Karl Pajuk “I began to pray without asking the Lord for anything.”

In September of 1942, Karl Payuk dreamed a strange dream while waiting in a collection camp in Lviv prior to being deported to Germany. A few days earlier, the 16-year-old had been selected for forced labor together with a neighbor from the village of Matskivtsi in the Khmelnytska region of western Ukraine. In his dream, he was standing in a pond. The water reached up to his knees. He dreamed of fields wrapped in dazzling sunlight. The sun stood high in the cloudless blue sky. Just as it does in late summer during the harvest. The next day, he told his dream to a girl, who was startled by the story and said, “You will experience a terrible misfortune.” Karl’s voice is very calm. With his crooked fingers—arthritis has clearly taken its toll— he taps on the armrests of his old chair. A friendly smile shines from the depths of his eyes. The sun-bathed room in a slabblock apartment complex in Pervomaiskyi stands in stark contrast to the house with its large chunks of peeling stucco. In the stairway, with its shattered window panes, mold and fungus eat away at the building. But stepping through the door one enters into another world—one with green plants, snow-white curtains, three red carnations adorning the table, and an icon of Mother Mary in the corner. The nearest Catholic church is in Poltava or in Kharkiv. A long way, more than sixty miles. After the last visit, the 81-year-old looks weakened. “I don’t feel too well. Probably caught a cold.” Then he gestures with his hand, as if to shoo away any thoughts of illness. He 164

Karl Pajuk

plans on going back to work next week. In Pervomaiskyi, where he is considered a jack-of-all-trades, he is currently renovating a shop. The shop is located in a slab-block building, not far from his apartment. The whole area, in fact, consists of nothing but slabblock buildings. The city, founded in the 1920s under the name of Lykhacheve, grew to a population of 40,000 when a chemicals factory was built there after the war. Shortly before that it was rechristened Pervomaiskyi in honor of the first of May. Five Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

cities in Ukraine bear this name, which commemorates the international day for workers’ solidarity. But this memory has long passed into history. Today, the factory lies in ruins. It used to employ 10,000 people, but now there is only silence. This still makes Karl angry. Following independence, the fourteen directors of the factory stole everything they could get their hands on. This was a fate suffered by many an industrial town in eastern Ukraine. The road from Kiev to Pervomaiskyi is nearly 400 miles long. On the left side of the road, somewhere between Poltava and Kharkiv, stands a memorial to the victims of the 1937 purges. Hundreds of thousands of people were declared enemies of the people by the Stalin regime and sentenced to death. In the fall of 1942, no one any longer wanted to give their lives for the Soviet Union. The purges, the horrors of forced collectivization, the terrible hunger, and the first months of the war were too deeply etched in the minds of Ukrainians. “Stalin sits there smoking his pipe and we’ve got nothing to put in our mouths.” So goes the song about the hunger of 1932 that was sung by the women in the collection camp in Lviv. The Payuk family survived only because Karl’s mother risked her life three times that winter to cross the Polish border, some forty miles away, where she was able to trade vodka for flour. Two years earlier, the Payuks, with their eight cows and three horses, were decried as Kulaks and their possessions were confiscated. They were deported to the north, to the forests of the Komi Republic, nearly 200 miles from the nearest railway line. Karl’s father died there. When the family returned they were forced to settle in the east of the Ukraine. Karl’s uncle fell victim to the “great purge” of 1937 and his older brother Leonid died shortly after the war broke Karl Pajuk

out. When the Red Army left eastern Ukraine, they tore down and cleared out the factories. Since there was no more time to evacuate the people, the Soviets just shot them dead. Karl sits stone-faced in his chair, his fingers now gripping the armrests. This is not the first time he has told this story, but there is still no mistaking the pain it causes him. And the worst was yet to come. In Germany, he is first sent to work in the town of Hannoversch Münden. Together with Leonid, who was two years older, Karl works digging trenches for gas lines. Until one day when Leonid gets the idea to escape. Two days later, the boys are driven by hunger into a village, where they are grabbed by the police and handed over to the Gestapo. Karl was sent to prison in Kassel. It is hard to say how long he was there. In the prison cells it was always night. Only when he heard soldiers singing or the drone of tanks outside could he tell that it was day. What was the worst experience after that? Was it the twenty-two days in the penal camp in Liebenau, where he was interned in December 1942 and where a sentence of fifty-six days was equivalent to the death penalty? Was it the daily roll call during which the prisoners had to stand for two hours in the bitter cold without moving, and which cost the lives of up to five people a day? Was it the cruelty of the guards, who never missed an opportunity to brutally lash prisoners with their whips? Was it the day when they returned to camp after their shift with three corpses in tow? Or was it the nearly two and a half years under the railway bridge in the concentration camp at Salzgitter-Drütte, where he bore prisoner number 15,002, and where a small chunk of bread in his pocket would have made him the happiest man in the world? Karl Payuk doesn’t say, and it would be unfitting to ask. 165

In Drütte, Karl began to pray. He always whispered the same prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. Karl was not even sure if he was saying it right. But that didn’t matter to him He wanted nothing from God. He didn’t ask for anything. He simply said his prayer. Every day. At the time he weighed about seventy-five pounds. That he was suddenly ordered to do cleaning work seemed like an act of divine intervention to Karl. There were only four men in the camp assigned to cleaning duty. It was hard work, but the reward was a full bowl of soup every day. Karl revived. Then he had his second dream. He dreamt that the men from his village were fixing the sun. The big yellow ball was lowered down on a thread. The sky was cloudy, and the moon came out from behind the clouds. At that moment, Karl knew that he would survive. But he still needed a lot of luck on his side. When the camp was evacuated in 1945, British bombers attacked the convoy killing three-and-a-half thousand people. He was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he had to hold out for seven more days before finally being freed on April 15, 1945. He probably wouldn’t have made it much longer. His liberators placed him in their military hospital, where he was treated for dysentery and typhus fever. Later, God again placed his protecting hand over Karl. Following the war, Karl was drafted into the army, where he spent five years as a medic in the city of Schwerin in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Normally, prisoners, concentration camp inmates, and forced laborers who returned directly home were accused of being traitors and thrown into Soviet camps. Karl picks up a book. It is a volume of poetry by Mykola Lukiv. A bit syrupy and effusive. “When I was young I never liked poems. But I do now.” 166

He points to his bookshelf, not without pride. There is Turgenev, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Gogol. “I have read almost every book here,” says Karl, a man who only ever made it to the fifth grade. But Karl Payuk doesn’t hold a grudge against anyone for his lack of schooling. For what he experienced after the war, though, it’s a different story. Because he had been born a pole and held in a German concentration camp, the Soviet authorities always looked upon him with suspicion. He married and moved to the Poltava Oblast, where he raised two sons and a daughter. He worked there for many years as a combine operator on a collective farm. But the stain of having been a concentration camp prisoner stuck with him. “The Party secretary shook my hand. I won competitions, but I never received any honors.” There’s one other thing that makes him mad. The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen needed eight years to answer his request for information. “They delayed everything on purpose,” says Karl, brimming with rage. The first compensation payments made in the 1990s, when Ukraine received DM 400 million, were, in his opinion, not distributed fairly. “Everyone got the same amount. It didn’t matter if a person had spent two years or two months in a concentration camp.” In contrast, he is satisfied with the compensation awards granted by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” “This time around, the concentration camp prisoners were given much fairer treatment. But all that was only possible because of the pressure exerted by the Americans.” Karl didn’t wind up in Pervomaiskyi until 1999. After his wife died, he moved in with his daughter. A year later, he remarried. Now he lives here with a pension of 70 euros a month and is happy with his Ludmilla. A late, Ukrainian-style happiness. A typical Ukrainian story. Juri Durkot Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Marian Siewiera “A journey back to childhood”

The sea behind the hill. Was it a dream? Or was it a fading childhood memory? Did the sea, the big oak tree, and the manor house with the two lions on the front stairs really exist? And then there was the man in uniform who drove to work every morning in a black sedan. Who was that? Marian was ten years old when he returned with his parents, Stefan and Franciszka, to Poland in 1945 after doing forced labor in Nazi Germany. He barely remembered his three older brothers, who had remained in Poland. The eldest he was never to see again. Polish communists shot him before his mother’s eyes on the threshold of his parents’ house. They weren’t even allowed to hold each other in their arms one last time. “We moved,” says Marian, now 67 years of age. That was hard. My parents were farmers. Farmers can’t pick up and move just like that.” But they couldn’t remain in their house in Kużnica Kaszewska, a village near Łódź. The memories were too much to bear. “Maybe my parents destroyed all their papers from Germany for fear of the communists?” Marian Siewiera, deep in thought, rubs his hand over his nearly bald head. He doesn’t know. “We hardly ever spoke again about my parents’ time as forced laborers in Schwarzenhof.” In the late 1990s, Polish newspapers reported that the planned German foundation known as “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” would also be paying at least symbolic compensation to former Polish forced laborers. At first, Marian Siewiera dismissed the idea. The certified electrician didn’t have Marian Siewiera

Marian Siewiera

any papers documenting that his parents had been subjected to forced labor, nor did he have any precise memories of the time. He didn’t even know where this “Svartsenkhov,” as his parents pronounced it, was located. Somewhere in the north, he figured, near the sea. As a child, he had never actually glimpsed the sea behind the hill, but, when it was foggy, he did hear the long, drawn-out blaring of ships’ horns. Friends of his found several Schwarzenhofs on the Internet, including two near large lakes and canals in the north German region of Mecklenburg. This resparked Siewiera’s interest in his childhood past. He decided to go ahead and write a letter to 167

the German-Polish Reconciliation Foundation, the Warsaw-based partner organization of the German foundation. Even if he didn’t get any compensation, his thinking went, the Foundation may still be able to help him find out more about the five years that he and his parents lost in Germany. In August of 2000, Marian Siewiera takes a piece of folio paper from the cabinet and writes to the Foundation. “In 1939, my father, my mother and I were taken to Łódź and from there deported together in freight cars to Germany. From our village the Mielczarek family was also deported. I can only remember the names of the children, Krystyna and Józef. Our parents worked on a farming estate in Schwarzenhof until the spring of 1945. I cannot say exactly where this town is located. Probably near the sea, or by a river, since I remember hearing foghorns from time to time and the long drawn-out blasts of horns from large ships. But I never actually saw the sea. We weren’t allowed to leave the town. I remember that the estate owner was an officer who wore a uniform and drove to work every day in a black sedan. There was a fine manor house there and a large garden. In the village, which belonged to the estate, there was also a prisoner of war camp. The prisoners there were probably Russian, French and Italian. They sometimes gave us children candy and chocolate.” Siewiera’s pulse is racing as he finishes his letter. He reaches for his heart medicine and lies down for a minute. “Why am I doing this?” he asks himself. “Wouldn’t it be better to let bygones be bygones?” Despite his doubts, he sends the letter to the Foundation. He also sends letters to the Red Cross, to the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, and to archives in Warsaw and Łódź. The letters all say the same thing: “Does your archive contain documents 168

concerning the deportation of my parents and their subjection to forced labor in the Third Reich?” The answers came quickly. Each as disappointing as the next. Not a clue to be found. The Warsaw-based foundation attaches a list of further archive addresses in Germany. His memories are worth nothing without documents. Siewiera writes another dozen letters. Months go by. “We are sorry,” “We regret to inform you,” “We were unfortunately unable to locate any files on your case.” The responses are always nearly the same, the disappointment grows. Finally, in June, a different kind of letter arrives. Siewiera feels a flash of new hope. The archive in Schwerin, Germany, had forwarded his letter to the town of Waren in Mecklenburg, which is close to a village called Schwarzenhof. This village lies directly on the large inland lake called the Müritz. Heike Severin from the district administration office in Waren likewise wrote that they had no relevant documents in their archive but that they could do further research. To do so, however, they would need more information. She asked whether he could recall names or any other details. She sent a few photographs in which the old manor house could be seen. “When the pictures arrived in Cracow, the first thing I had to do was sit down,” says Siewiera, telling his story in the Cafe Stylow in the Nowa Huta district of Cracow. “I held my hand over my heart to keep it from bursting. Then I experienced a rush of images and memories which I had thought were long forgotten.” But he couldn’t remember any names. He was, after all, only five years old when he was deported with his parents. More details? “Two hunting dogs running behind the car. The road to the manor was straight as an arrow. Two stone lions on the front stairs of the manor.” That was all. But it Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

was too little for Heike Severin to work with. She knows that Siewiera is not making up his story, but there is no more she can do. It was too little for the Foundation in Warsaw as well. Without documents, there is nothing anyone can do. Memories alone are not enough. After coming so close, this defeat was bitter. Siewiera is disappointed. He had in the meantime set his hopes on receiving money from the Foundation. He wanted to use it to travel to Schwarzenhof. As the child of forced laborers, he couldn’t expect to receive all that much money, just DM 2,000 (EUR 1,000). The length of time his parents worked in Nazi Germany was of no importance here. 1,000 euros for five lost years of life was no more than a symbolic recognition. And even this was now being denied him. The money in itself never really mattered to him. But he had hoped to take his children and grandchildren with him on his journey to the past. And he would never be able realize this dream on his meager electrician’s pension. He had worked his whole life in the Lenin Steelworks in the Nowa Huta district of Cracow. The workers there thought very little of the model socialist city that was growing up around them. Instead of attending party meetings in their free time, they preferred to build churches, including the largest and to this day most famous of all, the Lord’s Ark Church, which also played a role in the Solidarity movement. As an electrician and devout Catholic, Marian Siewiera worked on nearly all the churches. For whenever his growing family moved to a new apartment, the workers were in the middle of building a new church nearby. Even today, Siewiera likes to pack his kids in the car that take them to “his” churches, which are spread across all of Nowa Huta, the satellite town on the edge of Cracow. Marian Siewiera

That he was finally able to realize his dream was thanks to a report about “Marian S.” that appeared in Poland’s highest circulation newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, and in some German papers. “When I read the article in the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, I was a hair’s breadth away from jumping into the car and driving to Cracow to bring this child of forced laborers to Mecklenburg,” chuckles Oswin Werner, a police officer in Oranienburg, Germany. “You have to help out in such a case,” concurs librarian Nora Ilgenstein from Brandenburg. And Peter Kretschmar, a farmer from Blumenow, simply nods his head in agreement. All three had spontaneously and independently of one another invited Marian Siewiera to come to Schwarzenhof. Heike Severin of the district administration office in Waren joined the trio in their efforts to help. And the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung pitched in by sponsoring a bus for the entire trip. It is October of 2002. Marian Siewiera stands with his daughter, Marta, and grandson, Krzystof, on the banks of the Müritz in Mecklenburg. The sharp wind dashes the first snowflakes of winter into their faces. “The sea behind the hill!” cries the old man into the wind and closes his eyes. Water runs down his face. Or is it tears? Krzystof presses his hand. “If it were foggy,” his grandfather says in a hoarse voice, “we would now hear a foghorn. Just like back then.” The manor house stands no more. A few spruce trees grow on the site where the house once stood. The building’s foundations are still visible in the grass. “It burned down shortly after the war,” the proprietress of the Hotel Kranichrast tells them. “Probably arson.” There is also no sign left of the two small wooden houses used to accommodate forced laborer families. Only the old hunting lodge is still standing, though it is 169

now in the neighboring town of Speck. Siewiera demands to see the lion’s on the front stairs. But he then finds himself, somewhat confused, standing in front of a wild boar hewn in stone, with a hunter ramming a spear into its opened mouth. He turns around seeking help, “No lions? Where are the lions?” No one can help him. A little while later, the small group comes upon a young woman in the small village church. “Oh yes,” she says, reassuring Siewiera, “the lions still exist. But they are inside now.”

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Months later, long after his return to Cracow, the mailman hands him a registered letter from the Foundation in Warsaw. Even though Marian Siewiera is not able to produce the required documents, the Foundation has awarded him a symbolic compensation payment of 1,000 euros. The records of his research, the articles in the newspapers, the invitations by people in Mecklenburg to visit Schwarzenhof, all this served to convince the Foundation of one thing: “The story is credible.” Gabriele Lesser

Portraits of Former Forced Laborers

Annex

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Statement by Federal President Johannes Rau Concerning the agreement on the level of Foundation funding for compensation of the victims of forced labor, issued on December 17, 1999, in Bellevue Palace, Berlin

I am grateful and relieved that agreement on compensation for the victims of forced labor has finally been reached. I thank everyone who helped bring this about. The people who were misused by the Nazi machinery of war have had to wait since the end of the war, fifty-four years ago, to receive compensation. Negotiations on this issue have only been possible since the division of Europe was repaired. At the time, many companies profited from the victims of forced labor. Some of them have already publicly accepted the responsibility they bear and have concerned themselves with providing material compensation. It is, however, only with the Foundation Initiative of German enterprises that this commitment has been given a broader basis. Now, as many companies as possible must join the Initiative as quickly as possible, to make clear that German industry will live up to its responsibility. Some companies are participating without themselves ever having used forced laborers. The German state is making a very significant contribution. In this way all contributors to the Foundation Initiative, both government and business, accept the shared responsibility and moral duty arising from the injustices of the past. Statement by Federal President Johannes Rau

We all know that no amount of money can truly compensate the victims of crime. We all know that the suffering inflicted upon millions of women and men cannot be undone. Nor is there any point in totting up past wrongs. Slave and forced labor did not merely mean that a just wage was withheld. Such labor meant being carried off, stripped of a homeland and rights, and having one’s human dignity brutally violated. It often intentionally served the purpose of working people to death. This compensation comes too late for all of those who lost their lives back then, just as it is for all those who have died in the intervening years. It is now therefore even more important that all survivors receive, as soon as possible, the humanitarian payment agreed today. I know that for many it is not really money that matters. What they want is for their suffering to be recognized as suffering and for the injustice done to them to be named injustice. I pay tribute to all those who were subjected to slave and forced labor under German rule and, in the name of the German people, beg forgiveness. We will not forget their suffering.

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The Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” of August 2, 2000, which entered into force on August 12, 2000 (Federal Law Gazette I 1263), last amended by the Law of December 21, 2006, which entered into force on December 29, 2006 (Federal Law Gazette I 3343)

Preamble Recognizing that the National Socialist State inflicted severe injustice on slave laborers and forced laborers, through deportation, internment, exploitation which in some cases extended to destruction through labor, and through a large number of other human rights violations, that German enterprises which participated in the National Socialist injustice bear a historic responsibility and must accept it, that the enterprises which have come together in the Foundation Initiative of German Industry have acknowledged this responsibility, that the injustice committed and the human suffering it caused cannot be truly compensated by financial payments, that the Law comes too late for those who lost their lives as victims of the National Socialist régime or have died in the meantime, the German Bundestag acknowledges political and moral responsibility for the victims of National Socialism. The Bundestag intends to keep alive the memory of the 174

injustice inflicted on the victims for coming generations as well. The German Bundestag presumes that this Law, the German-U.S. intergovernmental agreement, the accompanying statements of the U.S. Government as well as the Joint Declaration by all parties to the negotiations provide adequate legal security for German enterprises and the Federal Republic of Germany, especially in the United States of America. With the concurrence of the Bundesrat, the Bundestag has passed the following Law: Section 1: Establishment and Headquarters (1) A legally recognized foundation with the name “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” shall be established under public law. The Foundation comes into being as of the entry into force of this legislation. (2) The headquarters of the Foundation shall be in Berlin. Section 2: Purpose of the Foundation (1) The purpose of the Foundation is to make financial compensation available through partner organizations to former

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

forced laborers and to those affected by other injustices from the National Socialist period. (2) A “Remembrance and Future” fund will be established within the Foundation. Its continuing task is to use the income primarily produced by the means allocated to it from Foundation monies to foster projects that serve the purposes of better understanding among peoples, the interests of survivors of the National Socialist régime, youth exchange, social justice, remembrance of the threat posed by totalitarian systems and despotism, and international cooperation in humanitarian endeavors. In commemoration and respect of those victims of National Socialist injustice who did not survive, it is also intended to further projects in the interest of their heirs. Section 3: Donors and the Foundation’s Capital Assets (1) Contributors to the Foundation’s capital fund shall be the companies joined together in the Foundation Initiative of German Industry, and the Federal Government. (2) The Foundation shall be endowed with a capital fund consisting of the following: 1. Five billion deutschmarks that the companies joined together in the Foundation Initiative of German Industry have agreed to make available, including the payments that German insurance companies have provided to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims or will provide in the future. 2. Five billion deutschmarks that the German Federal Government is making available in the year 2000. The contribution of the Federal Government includes the contributions of enterprises of which the Federal Government is sole owner or in which it has a majority interest.

(3) There is no obligation for the donors to make supplementary payments. (4) The Foundation is authorized to accept contributions from third parties. It shall endeavor to obtain additional contributions. The contributions are exempt from inheritance tax and gift tax. (5) Income from the Foundation’s capital fund and other income is to be used only for the purposes of the Foundation. Section 4: The Bodies of the Foundation The bodies of the Foundation are: 1. the Board of Trustees 2. the Board of Directors. Section 5: The Board of Trustees (1) The Board of Trustees is made up of 27 members, namely: 1. the chairman, to be named by the German Chancellor; 2. four members to be named by the companies joined together in the Foundation Initiative of German Industry; 3. five members to be named by the German Bundestag and two by the Bundesrat; 4. one representative of the Federal Ministry of Finance; 5. one representative of the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs; 6. one member to be named by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany; 7. one member to be named by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, the Alliance of German Sinti, and the International Romani Union; 8. one member to be named by the Government of the State of Israel; 9. one member to be named by the Government of the United States of America; 10. one member to be named by the Government of the Republic of Poland;

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11. one member to be named by the Government of the Russian Federation, 12. one member to be named by the Government of Ukraine; 13. one member to be named by the Government of the Republic of Belarus; 14. one member to be named by the Government of the Czech Republic; 15. one lawyer to be named by the Government of the United States of America; 16. one member to be named by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; 17. one member to be named by the International Organization for Migration in accordance with Section 9, Paragraph 2, Number 6; and 18. one member to be named by the Federal Information and Counseling Association for Victims of National Socialism e. V. [Registered Association]. The sending body may designate a substitute for each member of the Board. A different composition of the Board of Trustees may be decided by a unanimous decision of the Board of Trustees. (2) The term of office for members of the Board of Trustees shall be four years. If a member should resign before the end of his term, a successor may be appointed for the remainder of the term. The members of the Board of Trustees can be recalled by the sending body at any time. (3) The Board of Trustees shall establish its own rules of procedure. (4) The presence of half the membership of the Board of Trustees plus one shall constitute a quorum. The board shall make decisions on the basis of a simple majority. In case of a tie, the vote of the chairman shall determine the outcome. Decisions can also be made in writing unless one third or more of the members of the Board of Trustees object to such procedure in an individual case. Such a decision requires the accor176

dance of the majority of the members of the Board of Trustees. The sentences 4 and 5 do not apply to the election of the members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation (Para 6.2). (5) The Board of Trustees has the right to decide on all fundamental matters that have to do with the tasks of the Foundation, specifically with regard to budgetary plans, the annual report, and the existence of the specific characteristics referred to in Section 12, Paragraph 1. It monitors the performance of the Board of Directors. (6) The Board of Trustees makes decisions regarding the projects of the “Remembrance and Future” Fund based on proposals by the Board of Directors. (7) The Board of Trustees establishes guidelines for the use of resources insofar as their use is not already specified in this Law. In this connection, it shall particularly endeavor to see to it that the partner organizations are able to draw in fair shares upon the eligibilities for payment referred to in Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Numbers 1 and 2. (8) Members of the Board of Trustees serve in a pro bono capacity; necessary expenses will be reimbursed. Section 6: The Board of Directors of the Foundation (1) The Board of Directors shall consist of the chairman and two additional members. Members of the Board of Trustees may not at the same time belong to the Board of Directors. (2) The members of the Board of Directors will be named by the Board of Trustees. (3) The Board of Directors shall direct the day-to-day business of the Foundation and shall implement the decisions of the Board of Trustees. It is responsible for distributing the resources of the Foundation to the

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

partner organizations and for the management of the “Remembrance and Future” fund. It oversees the purposeful and prudent expenditure of the Foundation’s funds, in particular adherence by the partner organizations to the provisions of this Law and the guidelines established by the Board of Trustees for the use of its funds. The Board of Directors shall represent the Foundation, both in judicial and extrajudicial matters. (4) The details shall be determined by the by-laws. Section 7: The By-laws The Board of Trustees shall adopt a set of by-laws by a two-thirds majority vote. If a set of by-laws has still not been adopted within three months of the initial meeting of the Board of Trustees, the chairman shall propose a set of by-laws that will be passed by a simple majority. The Board of Trustees may amend the by-laws on the basis of a two-thirds majority. Section 8: Oversight, Budget, Auditing (1) The Foundation is subject to legal oversight by the Federal Ministry of Finance. (2) The Foundation shall prepare a budget in timely fashion before the start of each fiscal year. The budget shall require the approval of the Federal Ministry of Finance. (3) The Foundation shall be subject to being audited by the Federal Court of Audit. Without prejudice hereto, the Foundation’s accounts and the management of its budget and finances are to be audited by the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues. Section 9: Use of Foundation Resources (1) Resources of the Foundation that serve the purpose of the Foundation referred to in Section 2, Paragraph 1, will be allocated to partner organizations. They are to be

used for one-time payments to persons eligible pursuant to Section 11, as well as for covering the personnel and non-personnel expenses of the partner organizations. Persons eligible under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1 or Sentence 5 can receive up to 15,000 deutschmarks, and persons eligible under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 2, or Sentence 2 can receive up to 5,000 deutschmarks. Receiving a payment under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1 or 2 does not preclude receiving a payment under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 3 or Sentence 4 or 5. (2) The partner organizations shall have available 8.1 billion deutschmarks including 50 million deutschmarks in accrued interest for payments to persons who suffered personal damage as referred to in Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Numbers 1 and 2, and Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 2, insofar as [the payments are] intended for compensation for forced labor. The total amounts shall be divided into the following maximum amounts: 1. for the partner organization responsible for the Republic of Poland, 1,812 million deutschmarks; 2. for the partner organization responsible for Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, 1,724 million deutschmarks; 3. for the partner organization responsible for the Russian Federation and the Republic of Latvia and the Republic of Lithuania, 835 million deutschmarks; 4. for the partner organization responsible for the Republic of Belarus and the Republic of Estonia, 694 million deutschmarks; 5. for the partner organization responsible for the Czech Republic, 423 million deutschmarks; 6. for the partner organization responsible for the non-Jewish claimants outside

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the states referred to in Numbers 1 through 5 (the International Organization for Migration), 800 million deutschmarks; the partner organization must pay over up to 260 million deutschmarks of this amount to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany; 7. for the partner organization responsible for the Jewish claimants outside the states referred to in Numbers 1 through 5 (the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany), 1,812 million deutschmarks. The partner organizations must use these monies to make the stipulated payments for all persons who on February 16, 1999, had their principal domicile in their [the organizations’] individual regional areas of responsibility and on that date belonged to their material sphere of responsibility. The partner organizations referred to in Numbers 2, 3, and 4 are also responsible for those persons who on February 16, 1999, had their principal domicile in other states, which were republics of the former USSR ; in each case that partner organization is responsible from whose area the claimant was deported. (3) 50 million deutschmarks are intended for compensation of other personal injuries in connection with National Socialist injustice. Claims are to be addressed to the partner organizations referred to in Paragraph 2. These organizations shall determine the merits and amount of the damage claimed. The amount of the compensation payments shall be determined by the Commission referred to in Paragraph 6, Sentence 2, in accordance with the ratio between the totality of the damages recognized by the partner organizations and the total amount of the monies referred to in Sentence 1, with due consideration given to Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 5. The partner organizations may request the Com178

mission referred to in Sentence 4 to assign the determinations referred to in Sentence 3 to an independent arbitrator. A partner organization that prefers not to make the determinations referred to in Sentence 3 itself must bear the costs of the arbitrator. (4) The sum of one billion deutschmarks of the Foundation’s monies is intended for payments to persons who suffered property loss. This amount is divided into the following maximum amounts: 1. 150 million deutschmarks for property losses resulting from persecution within the meaning of Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 3; 2. 50 million deutschmarks for other property losses within the meaning of Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 4; 3. 150 million deutschmarks for the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims to compensate unpaid or revoked and not otherwise compensated insurance policies of German insurance enterprises, including the costs incurred in this connection; 4. 300 million deutschmarks for social purposes to the benefit of Holocaust survivors through the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany; 24 million deutschmarks of this shall be paid over to the partner organization referred to in Paragraph 2, Number 6, which shall use it for social purposes vis-à-vis the similarly persecuted Sinti and Roma; 5. 350 million deutschmarks for the humanitarian fund of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims. (5) If additional interest is earned from the monies made available to the Foundation except for the monies intended for the Future Fund, up to 50 million deutschmarks of this shall be made available to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims to compensate insurance

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

losses within the meaning of Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 3, for foreign subsidiaries of German insurance enterprises and for costs incurred in this connection, as soon as the monies are available. Monies referred to in Sentence 1 and Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 3, may also be used for the other purpose in each case. (6) Claims for payments from the monies envisaged in Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Numbers 1 and 2, are to be addressed to the partner organization referred to in Paragraph 2, Number 6, regardless of the claimant’s residence. Determinations concerning these payments shall be made by a commission to be formed under this partner organization. The commission shall consist of one member each to be named by the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Department of State of the United States of America and a chairperson to be chosen by those two members. The commission shall establish supplemental principles concerning the content and procedure of its determinations, insofar as these are not already established under this Law or the by-laws. The commission shall rule on the submitted applications within a year after expiration of the application deadline. The Property Claims Commission shall rule on appeals against its initial determination subsequent to renewed consultation as the appeals organ within the meaning of Section 19. The costs of the commission, the appeals organ, and the partner organization are to be covered pro rata from the total amount referred to in Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Numbers 1 and 2. If the amount of damages recognized by the commission exceeds the monies available under Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 1 or 2, the payments to be made are to be reduced in proportion to the available monies. (7) 700 million deutschmarks including the interest accruing thereto are to be used for

projects of the “Remembrance and Future” Fund. Of this amount, 100 million deutschmarks may be made available for other than its intended purpose, if well-founded requests are filed based on insurance claims that could not be met under Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 3, and Paragraph 5. (8) In concert with the Board of Trustees, the partner organizations may subdivide the category of forced laborers, within its quota, in accordance with Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1, insofar as this involves persons interned in other places of confinement, as well as affected persons within the meaning of Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 2, into subcategories depending on the severity of their fate and may set correspondingly gradated maximum amounts. This shall also apply to the eligibility of legal successors. (9) The maximum amounts under Paragraph 1 may only be paid out for the time being in the amount of 50 % for claimants under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1, and 35 % for claimants under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 2 or Sentence 2. Another payment of up to 50 % of the amounts mentioned in Paragraph 1 for claimants under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1 and up to 65 % of the amounts mentioned in Paragraph 1 for claimants under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 2 or Sentence 2 shall be paid out after conclusion of the processing of all applications pending before the respective partner organization, to the extent possible within the framework of the available means. The partner organizations may set up a financial reserve for appeals under Section 19, in the amount of up to 5 % of the monies allocated. To the extent the reserve has been set up, payment of the second installment under Sentence 2 may be made before the conclusion of the appeal proceedings. The Board of Trustees

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has the right, at the request of individual partner organizations, to allow an increase in the installment payments laid down under Sentence 1, insofar as it is assured that the monies allocated in Paragraph 2 are not exceeded. (10) Payments under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 3, with the exception of the payments of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims and payments under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 4 or 5 can take place only after all applications pending before the competent commission have been processed. (11) Monies allocated under Paragraph 2 but not completely depleted are to be used for persons entitled to payments under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Numbers 1 and 2. Should the funds provided under Paragraphs 2 and 3 not be completely depleted in spite of payment of the maximum amounts under Paragraph 1, Sentence 3, the Board of Trustees shall decide how they shall be used. Just as in the case of the use of additional monies, the Board must compensate, in particular, any shortage incurred by individual partner organizations in making payments under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Numbers 1 and 2. The Board will decide on the other use of monies allocated under Paragraphs 2 and 3, which will be available due to a discontinuation of eligibility under Section 14 Paragraph 4. Sentence 4 shall also refer to monies under Paragraph 2, which can no longer be used for payment procedures by the respective partner organization following the decision on the allocation of the second installment to be paid to eligible persons. Monies referred to in Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Numbers 1 and 2, which are not drawn down shall go to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany; those referred to in Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 3, to the International 180

Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims. The Board of Trustees may allow the maximum amounts under Paragraph 1, Sentence 3 to be exceeded if all partner organizations have been able to make payments in the amounts of these maximum amounts. (12) Personnel and non-personnel costs shall be paid from the Foundation’s funds, insofar as they are not to be assumed by the partner organizations in accordance with Paragraph 1, Sentence 2. The costs to be borne by the Foundation also include outlays for attorneys and counsel whose activity on behalf of persons entitled to payments under Section 11 contributed to the establishment of the Foundation or otherwise were favorable to its creation, particularly by taking part in the multilateral negotiations that preceded the establishment of the Foundation or by filing suits on behalf of claimants under Section 11 between November 14, 1990, and December 17, 1999. There is no legal claim to payments pursuant to Sentence 2. An arbitrator named by the Foundation will determine the allocation of an amount set by the Board of Trustees, based on guidelines that shall be determined and published by the Board of Trustees. Requests for the payments stipulated in Sentence 2 are to be submitted to the Foundation by the attorneys and counsel themselves and on their own behalf within eight months after publication of the guidelines. They must be accompanied by documentation of the outlays claimed. Every attorney and counsel shall make a declaration in the request proceedings to the effect that he waives any claims against his clients upon receipt of a payment under Sentence 2. He is under obligation to advise his clients that he has waived any claims. (13) For pending litigation concerning matters covered in this Law, court costs shall not be levied.

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

Section 10: Distribution of Resources through Partner Organizations (1) The approval and disbursal of one-time payments to those persons eligible under Section 11 will be carried out through partner organizations. The Foundation is neither authorized nor obligated in this regard. The Board of Trustees may decide for another mode of payment. The partner organizations shall cooperate with appropriate associations of persecutees and local organizations. (2) Within two months after entry into force of the Law, the Foundation and its partner organizations are to publicize the possibility of compensation under this Law in an appropriate manner to all groups of eligible people in their respective countries of residency. These publications shall specifically include information about the Foundation and its partner organizations, the conditions on which compensation can be awarded, and application deadlines. Section 11: Eligible Persons (1) Eligible under this Law are: 1. persons who were detained in a concentration camp as defined in Section 42, Paragraph 2 of the German Indemnification Act or in another place of confinement outside the territory of what is now the Republic of Austria or a ghetto under comparable conditions and were subjected to forced labor; 2. persons who were deported from their homelands into the territory of the German Reich within the borders of 1937 or to a German-occupied area, subjected to forced labor in a commercial enterprise or for public authorities there, and detained under conditions other than those mentioned in Number 1, or were subjected to conditions resembling detention or similar extremely harsh living conditions; this rule does not apply to persons who because

their forced labor was performed primarily in the territory of what is now the Republic of Austria can receive payments from the Austrian Reconciliation Foundation; 3. persons who suffered property loss as a consequence of racial persecution with essential, direct, and harm-causing collaboration of German businesses as defined by the laws on indemnification and who could not receive any payment or could not file their claims for restitution or compensation by the deadline because they either did not meet the residency requirements of the Federal Indemnification Act or had their domicile or permanent residence in an area with whose government the Federal Republic of Germany did not maintain diplomatic relations, or because they could not prove that an asset that had been expropriated due to persecution outside the territory of the German Reich in its 1937 borders and could no longer be located there, had been removed to the Federal Republic of Germany, or the proofs of the validity of their claims under the Federal Restitution Act [Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz] and the Federal Indemnification Act [Bundesentschädigungsgesetz] became known and available only due to German reunification, and the filing of the claims under the Law on the Settlement of Open Property Matters or the Law on Indemnification of Victims of Nazism was not allowed, or to the extent that restitution payments for monetary claims expropriated outside Reich territory were denied for lack of the possibility of assessing them, and no payments could be claimed either under the Currency Conversion Act, the Federal Indemnification Act, the Equalization of Burdens Act, or the Reparation Losses Act; that also applies to other persecutees within the meaning of the Federal Indemnification Act; special arrangements within the framework of the International Commission on Holo-

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caust Era Insurance Claims shall remain unaffected. 4. The partner organizations may also award compensation from the funds provided to them pursuant to Section 9, Paragraph 2 to those victims of National Socialist crimes who are not members of one of the groups mentioned in Sentence 1, Numbers 1 and 2, particularly forced laborers in agriculture. These awards, with reservation as to Section 9, Paragraph 8, must not result in any reduction in the payments to persons eligible under Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1. The funds provided for in Section 9, Paragraph 4, Sentence 2, Number 2 are intended to compensate property damage inflicted during the National Socialist regime with the essential, direct, and harm-causing participation of German enterprises, but not inflicted for reasons of National Socialist persecution. The funds referred to in Section 9, Paragraph 3, shall be awarded in cases of medical experiments or in the event of the death of or severe damage to the health of a child lodged in a home for children of forced laborers; in cases of other personal injuries they may be awarded. (2) Eligibility shall be demonstrated by the applicant by submission of documentation. The partner organization shall bring in relevant evidence. If no relevant evidence is available, the claimant’s eligibility can be made credible in some other way. (3) Eligibility cannot be based on prisonerof-war status. (4) Payments from the Foundation are exempt from inheritance tax and gift tax. Section 12: Definitions (1) Specific characteristics of other places of confinement referred to in Section 11, Paragraph 1, Number 1 are inhumane conditions of detention, insufficient nutrition, and lack of medical care. 182

(2) German enterprises referred to in Sections 11 and 16 are those that had their headquarters within the 1937 borders of the German Reich or have their headquarters in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as their parent companies, even when the latter had or have their headquarters abroad. Enterprises situated outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich in which during the period between January 30, 1933, and the entry into force of this Law, German enterprises as described in Sentence 1 had a direct or indirect financial participation of at least 25 percent are also considered German enterprises. Section 13: Application Eligibility (1) Awards under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Numbers 1 or 2, or Sentence 2 or Sentence 5 are strictly personal and individual and must be applied for in one’s own name. In a case where the eligible person has died after February 15, 1999, or where an award under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Number 3 or Sentence 4 is being applied for, the surviving spouse and children shall be entitled to equal shares of the award. If the eligible person left neither a spouse nor children, awards may be applied for in equal shares by the grandchildren, or if there are no grandchildren living, by the siblings. If no application is filed by these persons, the heirs named in a will are entitled to apply. Special arrangements within the framework of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims shall remain unaffected. The claim to payment cannot be ceded or attached. (2) Juridical persons shall not be eligible. They can file applications as representatives of their shareholders eligible under this Law if specifically authorized by these shareholders. If a religious community or organization suffered property losses with the essential, direct, and harm-causing

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

participation of German enterprises, Sentence 1 does not apply to them or their legal successors.

12 months prior to this expiration date and again at least six months prior to this expiration date.

Section 14: Cut-off Dates (1) Eligibility pursuant to Section 11 can no longer be determined if an application has not been received by a partner organization by the end of 31 December 2001. This shall also apply if upon conclusion of processing by the respective partner organization within the meaning of Section 9, Paragraph 9, Sentence 2 the application forms, documentation and evidence required to take a decision on the application have not been received. (2) Applications that are received directly by the Foundation or by an inappropriate partner organization shall be forwarded to the appropriate partner organization. Special arrangements within the framework of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims shall remain unaffected. (3) If an application has been filed within the application period specified in Paragraph 1 and if within six months after the death of the eligible person none of the persons eligible as legal successors pursuant to Section 13, Paragraph 1, Sentences 2 through 4 have notified the partner organization of their legal succession, the eligibility for an award shall expire. Paragraph 2 shall apply to the notification of legal succession mutatis mutandis. (4) Any eligibility under Section 11 will expire after September 30, 2006. If it is within the responsibility of the partner organization that performance could not be made within the period stated then payment can be made until December 31, 2006 despite the expiration of eligibility under Sentence 1. The partner organizations are obliged to announce the expiration of eligibility in an appropriate way for the first time at least

Section 15: Treatment of Other Payments (1) Payments for injustices suffered under National Socialism are supposed to benefit the persons eligible and not lead to a reduction of income received from the social security or health care system. (2) Payments made earlier by enterprises in compensation for forced labor and other National Socialist injustices, even if made through third parties, shall be counted against payments under Section 9, Paragraph 1. Special arrangements within the framework of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims shall remain unaffected. Section 16: Exclusions from Claims (1) Payments from public funds, including social security, and from German business enterprises for injustice suffered under National Socialism as defined in Section 11 may be claimed only under the terms of this Law. Any further claims in connection with National Socialist injustices are excluded. This applies also to cases in which claims have been transferred to third persons by operation of law, transition, or a legal transaction. (2) Each claimant shall provide a statement within the framework of the application procedure irrevocably renouncing, without prejudice to Sentences 3 through 5, after receipt of a payment under this Law any further claim against the authorities for forced labor and property damage, all claims against German enterprises in connection with National Socialist injustice, and forced-labor claims against the Republic of Austria or Austrian enterprises. The renunciation becomes effective upon re-

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ceipt of a payment under this Law. Accepting payments for personal damage under Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 1 or 2, or Sentence 2 or Sentence 5 shall not mean the renunciation of payments for insurance or other property damage in accordance with Section 11, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1, Number 3, or Sentence 4, and vice versa. Sentence 1 does not apply to claims arising from National Socialist injustice committed by foreign parent companies with headquarters outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich without having any connections with their German subsidiaries and the latter’s involvement in National Socialist injustice. Sentence 1 also does not apply to any claims to restitution of artworks, insofar as the applicant undertakes to pursue this claim in Germany or the country from which the artwork was taken. The renunciation also pertains to compensation of legal costs for the prosecution of the claim, insofar as Section 9, Paragraph 12, does not provide otherwise. The details of the procedure shall be determined by the by-laws. (3) More extensive compensation arrangements and settlements of the consequences of war at the public expense shall not be prejudiced by the above.

terprises. The German Bundestag shall determine whether these preconditions exist.

Section 17: Transfer of Funds (1) The Foundation is to make funds available quarterly to the partner organizations according to their documented need as outlined in Section 9, Paragraphs 2 and 3. The utilization of funds will be appropriately monitored by the Foundation. (2) The first allocation of funds to the Foundation requires as a precondition the entry into force of the German-American Intergovernmental Agreement Concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” and the establishment of adequate legal security for German en-

Section 19: Appeals Process The partner organizations are to create appeals organs that are independent and subject to no outside instruction. The appeals process itself is to be free of charge. However, costs incurred by the applicant are not to be reimbursed.

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Section 18: Requests for Information (1) The Foundation and its partner organizations are authorized to receive information from agencies and other public bodies that is necessary for the fulfillment of their responsibilities. Information will not be provided if this would be contrary to specific official regulations on the use of the information, or when justifiable protection of the interests of the party concerned outweighs the general interest favoring disclosure. (2) The information received may be used only for the purpose of carrying out the goals of the Foundation, and an applicant’s personal data may be used only for the grant procedure under Section 11. The use of these data for other purposes is admissible only with the express consent of the applicant. (3) Applicants under this Law may request information from enterprises in Germany for which or for whose legal predecessors they performed forced labor, insofar as this is requisite for determining their eligibility for awards.

Section 20: Entry into Force This Law enters into force on the date after its promulgation. Section 14 in the version of the Law of August 4, 2001 shall enter into force at the latest as of August 11, 2001.

Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

Announcement of the German-American Agreement concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Federal Law Gazette 1372, Year 2000, Part II No. 34, issued in Bonn on November 27, 2000

The Agreement signed in Berlin on July 17, 2000, between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the United States of America concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” did, in accordance with Article 5, enter into force on October 19, 2000. It is published below together with the letters cited in the Preamble of the Agreement from the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Counsel to the President of the United States of America dated June 16, 2000, and from the Foreign Policy and Security Advisor to the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany dated July 5, 2000, and with the notes exchanged on October 19, 2000. A related Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”, signed by the interested parties and dated July 17, 2000, is published below. Berlin, October 26, 2000, Ministry of Foreign Affairs By order Dr. Hilger

German-American Agreement

Agreement Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and The Government of the United States of America – Intending to shape relations between their two States in a spirit of friendship and cooperation for the future and to successfully resolve issues stemming from the past, Recognizing that the Federal Republic of Germany has, building on Allied legislation and in close consultation with victims’ associations and interested Governments, provided, in an unprecedented manner, comprehensive and extensive restitution and compensation to victims of National Socialist persecution, Noting the historic announcement on February 16, 1999, made by the Federal Chancellor and German companies, in which the companies stated their intention to establish a foundation to compensate forced laborers and others who suffered at the hands of German companies during the National Socialist era and World War II , 185

Noting that, by means of the Foundation Initiative, its member companies wish to respond to the moral responsibility of German business arising from the use of forced laborers and from damage to property caused by persecution, and from all other wrongs suffered during the National Socialist era and World War II , Recognizing as legitimate the interest German companies have in all-embracing and enduring legal peace in this matter, and further recognizing that such interest was fundamental to the establishment of the Foundation Initiative, Noting that the two Governments announced that they welcomed and support the Foundation Initiative, Noting that the Federal Republic of Germany and German companies have since agreed on the creation of a single Foundation, “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (the “Foundation”), formed under German federal law as an instrumentality of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by contributions from the Federal Republic of Germany and the German companies, Recognizing that German business, having contributed substantially to the Foundation, should not be asked or expected to contribute again, in court or elsewhere, for the use of forced laborers or for any wrongs asserted against German companies arising from the National Socialist era and World War II , Recognizing that it is in the interest of both parties to have a resolution of these issues that is non-adversarial and non-confrontational, outside of litigation, Recognizing that both parties desire allembracing and enduring legal peace to advance their foreign policy interests, Noting in this regard the June 16, 2000, letter of the Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security 186

Affairs and the Counsel to the President of the United States and the July 5, 2000, letter of the Foreign Policy and Security Advisor of the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, copies of which have been made public, Having worked as partners, in consultation with other interested parties and governments, to assist German companies to achieve wide support for the total amount of funds and the eligibility criteria of the Foundation and for the establishment of all-embracing and enduring legal peace, Noting that the Foundation will assure broad coverage of victims and broad participation by companies which would not be possible through judicial proceedings, Believing that the Foundation will provide as expeditious as possible a mechanism for making fair and speedy payments to now elderly victims, Having in mind that the Foundation covers, and that it would be in the interests of both parties for the Foundation to be the exclusive remedy and forum for addressing, all claims that have been or may be asserted against German companies arising from the National Socialist era and World War II , Recalling that for the last 55 years the parties have sought to work to address the consequences of the National Socialist era and World War II through political and governmental acts between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany, Noting that this Agreement and the establishment of the Foundation represent a fulfillment of these efforts, Recognizing that the German Government has tabled a Bill before the German Federal Parliament (“Bundestag”) to establish the Foundation – Have agreed as follows: German-American Agreement

Article 1 (1) The parties agree that the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” covers, and that it would be in their interests for the Foundation to be the exclusive remedy and forum for the resolution of, all claims that have been or may be asserted against German companies arising from the National Socialist era and World War II . (2) The Federal Republic of Germany agrees to ensure that the Foundation shall provide appropriately extensive publicity concerning its existence, its objectives and the availability of funds. (3) Annex A sets forth the principles that shall govern the operation of the Foundation. The Federal Republic of Germany assures that the Foundation will be subject to legal supervision by a German governmental authority; any person may request that the German governmental authority take measures to ensure compliance with the legal requirements of the Foundation. (4) The Federal Republic of Germany agrees that insurance claims that come within the scope of the current claims handling procedures adopted by the International Commission of Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (“ICHEIC”) and are made against German insurance companies shall be processed by the companies and the German Insurance Association on the basis of such procedures and on the basis of additional claims handling procedures that may be agreed among the Foundation, ICHEIC , and the German Insurance Association.

Article 2 (1) The United States shall, in all cases in which the United States is notified that a claim described in article 1 (1) has been asserted in a court in the United States, inGerman-American Agreement

form its courts through a Statement of Interest, in accordance with Annex B, and, consistent therewith, as it otherwise considers appropriate, that it would be in the foreign policy interests of the United States for the Foundation to be the exclusive remedy and forum for resolving such claims asserted against German companies as defined in Annex C and that dismissal of such cases would be in its foreign policy interest. (2) The United States, recognizing the importance of the objectives of this agreement, including all-embracing and enduring legal peace, shall, in a timely manner, use its best efforts, in a manner it considers appropriate, to achieve these objectives with state and local governments.

Article 3 (1) This agreement is intended to complement the creation of the Foundation and to foster all-embracing and enduring legal peace for German companies with respect to the National Socialist era and World War II . (2) This agreement shall not affect unilateral decisions or bilateral or multilateral agreements that dealt with the consequences of the National Socialist era and World War II . (3) The United States will not raise any reparations claims against the Federal Republic of Germany. (4) The United States shall take appropriate steps to oppose any challenge to the sovereign immunity of the Federal Republic of Germany with respect to any claim that may be asserted against the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the consequences of the National Socialist era and World War II .

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Article 4 Annexes A, B and C shall be an integral part of this Agreement. Article 5 This Agreement shall enter into force on the date on which the parties agree by exchange of notes. at Berlin on the 17th day of July, 2000, in duplicate in the German and Eng-

DONE

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lish languages, both texts being equally authentic. For the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany Wolfgang Ischinger For the Government of the United States of America John Kornblum

German-American Agreement

Annex A to the Agreement between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the United States of America concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” Principles Governing the Operation of the Foundation Article 1, Paragraph 3 of the Agreement stipulates that the principles governing the operation of the Foundation shall be set forth in Annex A. This Annex reflects key elements of the Foundation that form a basis for the Parties’ mutual commitments in the Agreement. 1. The Foundation legislation will state that the purpose of the Foundation is to make payments through partner organizations to those who suffered as private and public sector forced or slave laborers and those who suffered at the hands of German companies during the National Socialist era and to establish a “Remembrance and Future Fund” within the Foundation. It will state that the permanent task of the “Remembrance and Future Fund” is to support projects that (a) serve to promote understanding between nations, and serve social justice and international cooperation in the humanitarian sector; (b) support youth exchange programs and keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and the threat posed by totalitarian, unlawful regimes and tyranny; and (c) also benefit the heirs of those who have not survived. 2. The Foundation legislation will provide for a Board of Trustees that consists of an equal number of members appointed by the German Government and German companies and by other governments and victims’ representatives, except that the Chairman shall be a person of international German-American Agreement

stature appointed by the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Board may be reduced in size after four years, but the balance of the membership will continue, to the extent appropriate. The Board will adopt by-laws by a two-thirds majority vote. All Foundation operations will be transparent and by-laws and similar procedures will be made public. 3. The Foundation legislation will provide that the Foundation will be audited by the Federal Accounting Office and that all partner organizations will also be audited. 4. The Foundation legislation will provide that persons who were held in concentration camps as defined under the Federal Indemnification Act (“BEG ”) or in another place of confinement or ghetto under comparable conditions and were subject to forced labor (“slave laborers”) will be eligible to receive up to DM 15,000 each. The Foundation legislation will also provide that persons who were deported from their homelands into the territory of the 1937 borders of the German Reich or to a German-occupied area, and were held in prison-like or extremely harsh living conditions (“forced laborers”) not covered by the above definition will be eligible to receive up to DM 5,000 each. In addition, from the allocated funds to make payments to forced laborers, partner organizations will be authorized to make payments to others who were forced to work during the National Socialist era. These other forced laborers will receive up to DM 5,000 each. The eligibility of all laborers covered by the Foundation Act will be limited to survivors and heirs, as defined under paragraph 8, of those who died after February 15, 1999. In addition, victims of “other nonlabor personal injury wrongs,” including, but not limited to, medical experimentation and Kinderheim cases, will be eligible to receive payments, within the limits of 189

the amount allocated for that purpose. Victims of medical experimentation and Kinderheim cases are given priority over other non-labor personal injury wrongs. The eligibility of a victim to receive benefits for all “other non-labor personal injury wrongs” will not be affected by whether or not he or she also receives benefits for forced labor. The funds allocated for “other non-labor personal injury wrongs” will constitute a separate allocation. The partner organizations will receive, review, and process applications for payments from the amount allocated for “other personal injury.” At the request of a partner organization, the property committee referred to in paragraph 11 will appoint an independent arbitrator to review and process applications to the particular partner organization. The amount allocated will be distributed to each partner organization so that each approved applicant is provided a pro-rata amount of the total amount for all approved “other personal injury” applicants. The decisions of the partner organizations and any arbitrator that may be appointed will be based on uniform standards approved by the Board of Trustees. The Foundation legislation will provide that any costs associated with reviewing and processing applications, including those associated with an arbitrator (if selected), will be drawn from the allocations for each partner organization. Excess amounts in the labor category allocated to any partner organization under the distribution plan annexed to the Joint Statement will be reallocated to labor, with the aim of reaching equal levels of payments to former slave and forced laborers wherever they reside. The Board of Trustees will be entitled to authorize payments above per capita ceilings should circumstances warrant. 5. The Foundation legislation will provide that a slave or forced laborer will not 190

be able to receive payments for the same injury or wrong from both the Foundation and the Austrian Foundation for Reconciliation, Peace and Cooperation. 6. The Foundation legislation will provide that persons who suffered loss of or damage to property during the National Socialist era as a result of racial persecution directly caused by German companies are eligible to recover under the payment system set forth in paragraph 11. The eligibility of such persons will be limited to those who could not receive any payment under the BEG or Federal Restitution Law (“BRueckG”) because they did not meet the residency requirement or could not file their claims by the deadline because they lived under a government with which the Federal Republic of Germany did not have diplomatic relations, those whose claims were rejected under the BEG or BRueckG where legal proof became available only after the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany, provided the claims were not covered by post-reunification restitution or compensation legislation, and those whose racially-motivated property claims concerning moveable property were denied or would have been denied under the BEG or BRueckG because the claimant, while able to prove a German company was responsible for seizing or confiscating property, was not able to prove that the property was transferred into then-West Germany (as required by law) or, in the case of bank accounts, that compensation was or would have been denied because the sum was no longer identifiable, where either (a) the claimant can now prove the property was transferred into then-West Germany or (b) the location of property is unknown. 7. The Foundation legislation, by making available the amount of DM 50 million, will provide a potential remedy for all nonGerman-American Agreement

racially motivated wrongs of German companies directly resulting in loss of or damage to property during the National Socialist era. The Foundation will refer such matters for review and processing to the committee referred to in paragraph 11. All funds allocated to payment for property matters will be distributed within those categories. 8. The Foundation legislation will provide that the heirs eligible to receive payments under paragraphs 6 and 7 consist of the spouse or children. In the absence of the victim, spouse and children, then payments under these paragraphs will be available to grandchildren, if alive; if not, to siblings, if alive; and if there are neither grandchildren nor siblings, to the individual beneficiary named in a will. 9. The Foundation legislation will provide that all eligibility decisions will be based on relaxed standards of proof. 10. The Foundation legislation will provide that legal persons will be allowed to make claims on behalf of individuals when those individuals have given powers of attorney. The Foundation legislation will also provide that where an identifiable religious community has suffered damage to or loss of community property, as distinct from individual property, resulting directly from the wrongs of a German company, a duly authorized legal successor may apply for payment to the committee referred to in paragraph 11. 11. The Foundation legislation will establish a three-member committee for property matters (paragraphs 6 and 7). The United States and the Federal Republic of Germany will each appoint one member; these two members will appoint a Chairman. A secretariat will be largely responsible for the initial review of applications. The Foundation legislation will require the Committee to establish simplified proceGerman-American Agreement

dures, including simplified and expedited internal appeals. The Committee will not have the authority to reopen any case that has been finally decided by a German court or administrative body, or that could have been decided by application in time, except as specified in paragraph 6. All of the Committee’s expenses will be funded from the amount allocated for property claims and the funds will be subject to audit. 12. The Foundation legislation will provide that the Committee referred to in paragraph 11 will distribute the funds allocated to it on a pro-rata basis. 13. The Foundation legislation will make clear that receipt of payment from Foundation funds will not affect the recipient’s eligibility for social security or other public benefits. There will be offsets for prior compensation payments made by German companies for forced labor and other National Socialist era injustices, even if made through third parties, but there will be no offsets for any prior Government payments. 14. The Foundation legislation will provide that each applicant for a Foundation payment will be required to state that, upon receipt of a payment from the Foundation, he or she will waive any and all alleged National Socialist era claims against German companies and all National Socialist era labor and property damage claims against the German Government. Such a waiver will not preclude applicants from being eligible to receive payments under the Foundation legislation for other wrongs, for example other personal injuries or loss of property, or any combination thereof. Such a waiver also will not preclude an applicant from bringing an action against a specific German entity (i.e., Government agency or company) for the return of a specifically identified piece of art if the action is filed in the Federal Republic of Germany 191

or in the country in which the art was taken, provided that the applicant is precluded from seeking any relief beyond or other than the return of the specifically identified piece of art. 15. The Foundation legislation will provide that each partner organization will create an internal appeals procedure. 16. The Foundation legislation will require that the Foundation provide appropriately extensive publicity concerning the benefits that the Foundation will offer and how to apply. The Board of Trustees, in consultation with the partner organizations, will determine the form and content of such publicity.

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17. The Foundation legislation will allow applications to be made to the partner organizations for at least eight months after the enactment of the Foundation law. 18. The Foundation legislation will authorize the Foundation and its partner organizations to receive information from German Government agencies and other public bodies that is necessary for the fulfillment of their responsibilities, in so far as this is not contrary to particular statutes or regulations or the legitimate interests of the persons concerned. 19. The Foundation legislation will enter into force no later than when the funds of the Foundation are made available to it.

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Annex B of the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Elements of U.S. Government Statement of Interest Pursuant to Article 2, Paragraph 1, the United States will timely file a Statement of Interest and accompanying formal foreign policy statement of the Secretary of State and Declaration of Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat in all pending and future cases, regardless of whether the plaintiff(s) consent(s) to dismissal, in which the United States is notified that a claim has been asserted against German companies arising from the National Socialist era and World War II . The Statement of Interest will make the following points: 1. As indicated by his letter of December 13, 1999, the President of the United States has concluded that it would be in the foreign policy interests of the United States for the Foundation to be the exclusive forum and remedy for the resolution of all asserted claims against German companies arising from their involvement in the National Socialist era and World War II , including without limitation those relating to slave and forced labor, aryanization, medical experimentation, children’s homes/ Kinderheim, other cases of personal injury, and damage to or loss of property, including banking assets and insurance policies. 2. Accordingly, the United States believes that all asserted claims should be pursued (or in the event Foundation funds have been exhausted, should timely have been pursued) through the Foundation instead of the courts. German-American Agreement

3. As the President said in his letter of December 13, 1999, dismissal of the lawsuit, which touches on the foreign policy interests of the United States, would be in the foreign policy interests of the United States. The United States will recommend dismissal on any valid legal ground (which, under the U.S. system of jurisprudence, will be for the U.S. courts to determine). The United States will explain that, in the context of the Foundation, it is in the enduring and high interest of the United States to support efforts to achieve dismissal of all National Socialist and World War II era cases against German companies. The United States will explain fully its foreign policy interests in achieving dismissal, as set forth below. 4. The United States’ interests include the interest in a fair and prompt resolution of the issues involved in these lawsuits to bring some measure of justice to the victims of the National Socialist era and World War II in their lifetimes; the interest in the furtherance of the close cooperation this country has with our important European ally and economic partner, Germany; the interest in maintaining good relations with Israel and other Western, Central, and Eastern European nations, from which many of those who suffered during the National Socialist era and World War II come; and the interest in achieving legal peace for asserted claims against German companies arising from their involvement in the National Socialist era and World War II . 5. The Foundation is a fulfillment of a half-century effort to complete the task of bringing justice to victims of the Holocaust and victims of National Socialist persecution. It complements significant prior German compensation, restitution, and pension programs for acts arising out of the National Socialist era and World War II . For the last 55 years, the United States has 193

sought to work with Germany to address the consequences of the National Socialist era and World War II through political and governmental acts between the United States and Germany. 6. The participation in the Foundation not only by the German Government and German companies that existed during the National Socialist era, but also by German companies that did not exist during the National Socialist era, allows comprehensive coverage of slave and forced laborers and other victims. 7. Plaintiffs in these cases face numerous legal hurdles, including, without limitation, justiciability, international comity, statutes of limitation, jurisdictional issues, forum non conveniens, difficulties of proof, and certification of a class of heirs. The United States takes no position here on the merits of the legal claims or arguments advanced by plaintiffs or defendants. The United States does not suggest that its policy interests concerning the Foundation in themselves provide an independent legal basis

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for dismissal, but will reinforce the point that U.S. policy interests favor dismissal on any valid legal ground. 8. The Foundation is fair and equitable, based on: (a) the advancing age of the plaintiffs, their need for a speedy, non-bureaucratic resolution, and the desirability of expending available funds on victims rather than litigation; (b) the Foundation’s level of funding, allocation of its funds, payment system, and eligibility criteria; (c) the difficult legal hurdles faced by plaintiffs and the uncertainty of their litigation prospects; and (d) in light of the particular difficulties presented by the asserted claims of heirs, the programs to benefit heirs and others in the Future Fund. 9. The structure and operation of the Foundation will assure (or has assured) swift, impartial, dignified, and enforceable payments; appropriately extensive publicity has been given concerning its existence, its objectives, and the availability of funds; and the Foundation’s operation is open and accountable.

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Annex C of the Agreement between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the United States of America concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future”

Definition of “German companies” “German companies,” as used in Article 1(1) and Article 2(1), are defined as in Sections 12 and 16 of the legislation establishing the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” as follows: 1. Enterprises that had their headquarters within the 1937 borders of the German Reich or that have their headquarters in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as their parent companies, even when the latter had or have their headquarters abroad. 2. Enterprises situated outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich in which during the period between January 30, 1933, and the entry into force of the legislation establishing the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” German enterprises as described in Sentence (1) had a direct or indirect financial participation of at least 25 percent. 3. “German companies” does not include foreign parent companies with headquarters outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich in any case in which the sole alleged claim arising from National Socialist injustice or World War II has no connection with the German affiliate and the latter’s involvement in National Socialist injustice, unless there is pending a discovery request by plaintiff(s), of which the United States is provided notice by the defendant with copy to plaintiff(s), seeking discovery from or concerning World War II or National Socialist era actions of the German affiliate. German-American Agreement

The White House Washington, D.C.

June 16, 2000,

Dear Mr. Steiner: We are now on the verge of an historic accomplishment, for which the Chancellor’s leadership has been indispensable. We have agreed upon a DM 10 billion capped fund for the resolution of slave and forced labor claims and for all other wrongs committed by German companies arising out of the Nazi era. We have also agreed upon the precise allocation of the DM 10 billion to the various types of claims and for a Future Fund. We have now resolved the difficult issue of reparations. This letter clarifies the exchange of correspondence between the parties and states the final position of the Administration on legal closure. Let us reiterate on behalf of the President, that the President and the Administration are committed, as provided for in the proposed executive agreement, to enduring and all-embracing legal peace for German companies, for present and for future cases, for consensual and non-consensual cases. We agreed to commit in the agreement to file U.S. statements of interest in U.S. courts, stating, among other things, the U.S. foreign policy interests in dismissal. This was in the President’s December 13 letter to the Chancellor. The Chancellor accepted the President’s letter as the basis for legal closure, stating that “I greatly welcome the commitment of the U.S. Administration to state that the dismissal of all ongoing and future lawsuits would be in its foreign-policy interest.” We have since strengthened this commitment to give German companies even greater comfort against future suits. Let us review these and then offer our own assurances on behalf of the President: • We have strengthened the wording of 195

the Elements of the Statement of Interest as Count Lambsdorff requested of Deputy Secretary Eizenstat. • We have strengthened the language in the Elements of the Statement of Interest as German companies suggested by going beyond the President’s letter so that it now reads that it would be in the foreign policy interests of the United States for the Foundation “to be” the exclusive remedy for claims against German companies, rather than that the Foundation “should be regarded” as the exclusive remedy. At our own initiative, to further strength• en our Statement of Interest, we have stated that the President has concluded that dismissal of cases against German companies would be in the foreign policy interests of the United States, rather than simply asserting that it was in the foreign policy interests of the United States. • Further, at our initiative, we will have the Secretary of State issue a formal statement of U.S. foreign policy emphasizing our strong interests in the German Foundation as the exclusive remedy and forum for claims and strongly favoring dismissal of Nazi-era cases brought against German companies that could threaten it. This will be accompanied by a declaration by Deputy Secretary Eizenstat that these negotiations, which have resulted in this Executive Agreement, continue a 55-year effort by the United States government to work with the German government to address the consequences of the Nazi-era and World War II . We want to add our assurances, on the President’s behalf. We have worked together with you to develop this historic German initiative. We do not wish to take any action that would perpetuate present or future cases. Indeed, it will be the endur196

ing and high interest of the United States to support efforts to achieve dismissal of all World War II -era cases, and the United States will act accordingly. To do otherwise would threaten the very Foundation Initiative to which all of us, including the President and Chancellor, have devoted so much time and effort. We will state in our Statement of Interest and in the Executive Agreement that for the last 55 years the United States has sought to work with Germany to address the consequences of the Nazi-era and World War II through political and governmental acts between the United States and Germany. Because the President believes that it is in the enduring and high interest of the United States, the Department of Justice will state to a court that the dismissal of all cases is in our foreign policy interests, and will affirmatively recommend dismissal on any valid legal ground, which, under the United States system of jurisprudence is for the U.S. courts to determine. Moreover, the United States will take no legal position in U.S. courts on pending and future cases which would itself preclude dismissal of these cases, and will, in fact, enumerate the real, legal hurdles plaintiffs face. We appreciate your confirmation on behalf of both the German Government and German companies that these assurances resolve this important issue. Sincerely, Samuel R. Berger Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Beth Nolan Counsel to the President The Honorable Michael Steiner Foreign Policy and Security Advisor in the Office of the Federal Chancellor Berlin German-American Agreement

Office of the Federal Chancellor, Berlin, July 5, 2000 Foreign Policy and Security Advisor to the Federal Chancellor Dear Sandy: Thank you very much for the letter of June 16 which you together with Beth Nolan, Counsel to the President, sent to me following our telephone conversations and the talks held in Washington on June 12 between Graf Lambsdorff, Dr. Gentz and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Eizenstat. The letter accurately reflects the agreement reached between Graf Lambsdorff, the Foundation Initiative of German Enterprises and Mr. Eizenstat. I would like to thank you for your personal commitment towards resolving the difficult issues surrounding legal peace for German industry within the framework of the Foundation Initiative. We were very much aware of the constitutional problems on the American side. I have been asked to inform you that the agreement now reached on lasting and comprehensive legal closure for German companies regarding suits in the United States relating to the involvement of German companies in the crimes committed during the Nazi era or World War II , has been accepted by both the German Government and the German companies participating in the Foundation Initiative. The Chancellor regards the personal commitment of the President of the United States as crucial to the establishment of the Federal Foundation. The agreement now reached has removed the most important obstacle to the completion of the Foundation Act which will most likely be adopted by the German Bundestag on July 6. The German Government remains determined to begin compensation payments to former forced laborers by the end of this year. After the entry into force of the act on German-American Agreement

the Foundation Initiative it will largely depend on the plaintiffs’ lawyers and American judges whether this objective can be achieved. The German side will do everything in its power to make the necessary preparations, including the conclusion of agreements with partner organizations so that payments can begin as soon as the pending cases have been dismissed. Sincerely Yours, Mic hael Steiner The Honorable Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs, Samuel R. Berger The White House Washington, D.C.

Foreign Office Berlin, October 19, 2000 Diplomatic note The Auswaertige Amt presents its compliments to the Embassy of the United States of America and has the honor to refer to Article 5 of the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany believes that the “Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” which went into force on August 12, 2000, with further explanations and interpretation provided in the letters of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, Commissioner for the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, to Stuart E. Eizenstat, United States Treasury Deputy Secretary, dated July 7, July 11 and 197

July 14, is in full compliance with Annex A of the Agreement. Based on this understanding, the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concurs that the Agreement, in compliance with Article 5, shall enter into force today, this being the day of exchange of notes between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. The Auswaertige Amt avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Embassy of the United States of America the assurances of its highest consideration. To the Embassy of the United States of America Berlin

The Embassy of the United States of America Berlin, October 19, 2000 The Embassy of the United States of America presents its compliments to the Auswaertige Amt and has the honor to refer to Article 5 of the Agreement between the

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Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” The United States of America believes that the “Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” which went into force on August 12, 2000, with further explanations and interpretation provided in the letters of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, Commissioner for the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, to Stuart E. Eizenstat, United States Treasury Deputy Secretary, dated July 7, July 11 and July 14, is in full compliance with Annex A of the Agreement. Based on this understanding, the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany concurs that the Agreement, in compliance with Article 5, shall enter into force today, this being the day of exchange of notes between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. The Embassy of the United States of America avails itself of this opportunity to renew to the Auswaertige Amt the assurances of its highest consideration.

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Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future”

The Governments of the Republic of Belarus, the Czech Republic, the State of Israel, the Republic of Poland, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the Governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America, The German companies that founded the initiative to establish a foundation, which have since been joined by thousands of other German companies, and As further participants, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. and the undersigned attorneys, Recalling the proposal presented to the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany by German companies on February 16, 1999, to send, as the century draws to a close, “a conclusive humanitarian signal, out of a sense of moral responsibility, solidarity and self-respect,” Acknowledging the intention of both the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and German companies to accept moral and historical responsibility arising from the use of slave and forced laborers, from property damage suffered as a consequence of racial persecution and from other injustices of the National Socialist era and World War II , Recalling with appreciation the December 17, 1999, statement of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany paying German-American Agreement

tribute to those who were subjected to slave and forced labor under German rule, recognizing their suffering and the injustices done to them, and begging forgiveness in the name of the German people, Affirming the consensus reached by all participants on December 17, 1999, at the 7th plenary meeting in Berlin on the establishment of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” Understanding that the Foundation is a sign of solidarity with the victims living in Central and Eastern European states and also a means of providing funds for victims from Central and Eastern Europe, most of whom benefited little from prior German compensation and restitution programs, Understanding that insofar as the sum of DM 10 billion to be made available by the German public sector and the German companies for the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” is concerned, that sum is both a ceiling and the final amount and that all payments made towards former National Socialist slave and forced laborers, for other personal injury, for damage to property and for the Future Fund envisaged as part of the Foundation, as well as other costs incurred in connection with the Foundation, shall be financed from this sum, from any contributions from others, and the interest thereon, Understanding that additional contributions by others for use by the Foundation are welcomed, Recognizing that the Foundation will provide dignified payments to hundreds of thousands of survivors and to others who suffered from wrongs during the National Socialist era and World War II , Accepting the common objective that German companies (including parents and subsidiaries as defined in Annex A) receive all embracing and enduring legal peace, Recognizing that it would be in the par199

ticipants’ interests for the Foundation to be the exclusive remedy and forum for the resolution of all claims that have been or may be asserted against German companies arising out of the National Socialist era and World War II , Recognizing that the establishment of the Foundation does not create a basis for claims against the Federal Republic of Germany or its nationals, Declare as follows: 1. All participants welcome and support the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” and declare their agreement with its elements, including the annexed distribution plan (Annex B). The interests of the former forced laborers, other victims and heirs have been duly taken into account. Based on the circumstances, all participants consider the overall result and the distribution of the Foundation funds to be fair to the victims and their heirs. The Foundation opens up the prospect of payment being made, even if, 55 years after the end of the war, the wrongdoer can no longer be traced or is no longer in existence. The Foundation is also a means of providing funds for forced laborers in addition to payments made by Germany so far. 2. Given the advanced age of the victims concerned, the primary humanitarian objective of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” is to show results as soon as possible. All participants will work together with the Foundation in a cooperative, fair and non-bureaucratic manner to ensure that the payments reach the victims quickly. 3. Payments are to be made to applicants on behalf of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” irrespective of their race, religion and nationality. Insofar as the participants them200

selves distribute funds, they will base their decisions on the criteria of eligibility set out in the German law establishing the Foundation and will act justly in this regard. 4. The participating Governments and other participants will proceed as follows: a) The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (“Germany”) and the German companies shall each contribute DM 5 billion to the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future.” b) Germany and the Government of the United States of America (“United States”) will sign an Executive Agreement. Such agreement contains the obligation undertaken by the United States to assist in achieving all-embracing and enduring legal peace for German companies. c) The Governments of the participating Central and Eastern European States and Israel will implement the necessary specific measures within the framework of their national legal systems to achieve all-embracing and enduring legal peace. d) Assuming the request for a transfer referred to in paragraph (e) is granted, the DM 5 billion contribution of German companies shall be due and payable to the Foundation and payments from the Foundation shall begin once all lawsuits against German companies arising out of the National Socialist era and World War II pending in U.S. courts including those listed in Annex C and D are finally dismissed with prejudice by the courts. The initial portion of the DM 5 billion German Government contribution will be made available to the Foundation by October 31, 2000. The remainder of the German Government contribution will be made available to the Federal Foundation by December 31, 2000. Contributions from the German Government will begin earning interest for the benefit of the Foundation immediately The German-American Agreement

German Government may advance some of its contribution to the partner organizations for certain startup costs before the lawsuits are finally dismissed. The German companies will make available reasonable advanced funding to provide appropriate publicity of the upcoming availability of Foundation benefits. German company funds will continue to be collected on a schedule and in a manner that will ensure that the interest earned thereon before and after their delivery to the Foundation will reach at least 100 million DM . e) Counsel for German company defendants and counsel for plaintiffs (each seeking to assemble at least a substantial majority of defendants’ and plaintiffs’ counsel respectively) have filed requests with the Multidistrict Litigation Panel seeking a transfer under appropriate conditions to a mutually agreeable federal judge of the federal district court cases listed in Annexes C and D, for the purpose of implementing the other steps in this Joint Statement and in order to facilitate carrying out the objectives of the Executive Agreement by dismissing with prejudice the transferred cases and any later filed cases thereafter to be transferred as “tag-along” cases. f) Germany will immediately establish a preparatory committee for the Foundation. The preparatory committee, after consulting with victims’ representatives, will provide the publicity envisaged in paragraph (d) prior to the formal establishment of the Foundation, and, in consultation with partner organizations, prepare for the collection of applications for payment by the partner organizations. g) The counsel for the plaintiffs will file motions or stipulations to dismiss with prejudice all lawsuits they have filed currently pending in U.S. courts against German companies arising out of the National Socialist era and World War II , including those listGerman-American Agreement

ed in Annex C. They will also cooperate in seeking dismissal with prejudice by the courts of all other such lawsuits, including those listed in Annex D. h) Germany and the United States will bring into force the Executive Agreement and the United States will thereupon file the Statement of Interest as provided therein. i) The German Government will encourage German companies to open their archives relating to the National Socialist era and World War II. Done at Berlin on the seventeenth day of July of the year Two Thousand in a single original, copies of which will be made available to interested parties.

V. N. Gerassimovitch For the Government of the Republic of Belarus Jiří Šitler For the Government of the Czech Republic Benjamin Shalev For the Government of the State of Israel Jerzy Kranz For the Government of the Republic of Poland V. A. Kopteltsev For the Government of the Russian Federation Oleksandr Maidannyk For the Government of Ukraine Stuart E. Eizenstat For the Government of the United States of America 201

Dr. O tto Gra f Lambsdorff For the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany Dr. Ma nfred Gentz For the Foundation Initiative of German Enterprises I sra el Miller G ideon Taylor For the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. L awren ce Kill Li nda Gerstel L awren ce Kill for Anderson, Kill & Olick, P.C. Stephen A. Whinston E dward W. Millstein E dward W. Millstein Stephen A. Whinston for Berger and Montague, P.C. Ri cha rd E. Shevitz I rwin B. Levin Ri cha rd E. Shevitz for Cohen & Malad, P.C. Mi cha el D. Hausfeld Michael D. Hausfeld for Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, P.L.L.C. E dward Fagan Edward Fagan for Fagan & Associates Carey D’Avino Carey D’Avino B arry Fisher Barry Fisher for Fleishman & Fisher

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Dennis Sheils Dennis Sheils Robert Swift for Kohn, Swift & Graf, P.C. Morris A. Ratner Morris A. Ratner for Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, L.L.P. Martin Mendelsohn Martin Mendelsohn for Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, Mc Pherson and Hand Deborah M. Sturman Melvyn I. Weiss Deborah M. Sturman Melvyn I. Weiss for Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach, L.L.P. J. Dennis Faucher J. Dennis Faucher for Miller, Faucher, Cafferty & Wexler, L.L.P. Burt Neuborne Burt Neuborne New York University School of Law Myroslaw Smorodsky Myroslaw Smorodsky Melvyn Urbach Melvyn Urbach Stanley M. Chesley Stanley M. Chesley for Waite, Schneider, Bayles & Chesley Michael Witti Michael Witti

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Annex A to the Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” done at Berlin, 17 July 2000

Definition of “German companies” “German companies” are defined as in Sections 12 and 16 of the legislation establishing the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” as follows: 1. Enterprises that had their headquarters within the 1937 borders of the German Reich or that have their headquarters in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as their parent companies, even when the latter had or have their headquarters abroad. 2. Enterprises situated outside the 1937

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borders of the German Reich in which during the period between January 30, 1933, and the entry into force of the legislation establishing the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” German enterprises as described in Sentence (1) had a direct or indirect financial participation of at least 25 percent. 3. “German companies” does not include foreign parent companies with headquarters outside the 1937 borders of the German Reich in any case in which the sole alleged claim arising from National Socialist injustice or World War II has no connection with the German affiliate and the latter’s involvement in National Socialist injustice, unless there is pending a discovery request by plaintiff(s), of which the United States is provided notice by the defendant with copy to plaintiff(s), seeking discovery from or concerning World War II or National Socialist era actions of the German affiliate.

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Annex B (see Tables below) to the Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” done at Berlin, 17 July 2000

Joint Chairmen’s Proposal Table 1a) Labor

Suballocation Amount (Billion DM)

Slave Labor

3.630 DM

Forced Labor

4.420 DM

Capital for Slave and Forced Labor

Amount (Billion DM)

Percentage of Amount for Labor

8.050 DM

Overall percentage

80.50 %

Suballocations (Slave and Forced Labor Combined) Partner Organizations1 Claims Conference2

1.812 DM

22.51 %

Republic of Poland

1.796 DM

22.31 %

Ukraine

1.709 DM

21.22 %

Russian Federation

0.828 DM

10.28 %

Republic of Belarus

0.687 DM

8.54 %

Czech Republic

0.419 DM

5.21 %

Rest of Eastern Europe & Rest of World (incl. Sinti and Roma)3

0.800 DM

9.94 %

Other Personal Injury Cases4

0.050 DM

0.50 %

1) Amounts for each country foundation (Republic of Poland, Ukraine, Russian Federation, Republic of Belarus and Czech Republic) calculated using the same proportions (not percentages) as in January 31 CEE proposal. 2) Amount includes payments to 120,800 slave laborers. 3) Includes up to 260 Mio. DM to be distributed by the Claims Conference to Jewish slave and forced laborers. 4) Other Personal Injury Cases (e.g., medical experimentation and other cases).

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Table 1b) Labor

Suballocation Amount (Billion DM)

Amount (Billion DM)

Total Capital for Labor

8.100 DM

Total Capital for Non-Labor

1.000 DM

Banking Claims

0.150 DM

Other Property Claims/ Catch-All5

0.050 DM

Banking/Humanitarian

0.300 DM

Claims6

0.150 DM

Insurance Humanitarian/

0.350 DM

Insurance

Percentage of Amount for Labor

Overall percentage 81 %

ICHEIC

Future Fund

0.700 DM

7%

Administration

0.200 DM

2%

Total Capital for Non-Labor; Future Fund and Administration

1.900 DM

Total Foundation Capital

10.000 DM

Programs for Heirs7 Reserve for Insurance Claims8

0.100 DM

100 %

5) “Catch-all” option clause (property claims not otherwise covered). 6) Includes ICHEIC administrative expenses. Insurance claims in excess of DM 150 million allocation to be paid from interest earned (DM 50 million). Insurance claims in excess of DM 200 million to be paid from Future Fund reserve of DM 100 million. 7) 10 % (minimum) of Future Fund to be for programs for heirs. 8) Reserve for Insurance claims, in the event that actual claims exceed DM 200 million.

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Table 2a)

Labor

Supplemental Funds (Billion DM))

Slave Labor

Suballocation Amount with Supplemental Funds1 (Billion DM)

Percentage of Amount for Labor with Supplemental Funds

0.100 DM

Supplemental Funds Comments

Swiss Fund

Forced Labor Capital for Slave and Forced Labor Suballocations (Slave and Forced Labor Combined) Partner Organizations Claims Conference

1.812 DM

22.37 %

0.050 DM

Interest Earned to CEEs

Republic of Poland

1.812 DM

22.37 %

Ukraine

1.724 DM

21.29 %

Russian Federation

0.835 DM

10.31 %

Republic of Belarus

0.694 DM

8.56 %

Czech Republic

0.423 DM

5.22 %

Rest of Eastern Europe & Rest of World (incl. Sinti and Roma)

0.800 DM

9.88 %

Other Personal Injury Cases 1

Amounts reflect reallocation of supplemental funds.

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Table 2b)

Labor

Supplemental Funds (Billion DM))

Total Capital for Labor

Suballocation Amount with Supplemental Funds1 (Billion DM)

Percentage of Amount for Labor with Supplemental Funds

Supplemental Funds Comments

8.250 DM

Total Capital for NonLabor Banking Claims Other Property Claims/ Catch-All Banking/Humanitarian Insurance Claims

0.050 DM

Interest Earned

Insurance Humanitarian/ ICHEIC

Future Fund Programs for Heirs Reserve for Insurance Claims Administration Total Capital for NonLabor; Future Fund and Administration

1.950 DM

Total Foundation Capital

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Annex C to the Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” done at Berlin, 17 July 2000

Annex D to the Joint Statement on occasion of the final plenary meeting concluding international talks on the preparation of the Federal Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,” done at Berlin, 17 July 2000

List of known World War II and National Socialist era cases against German companies pending in U.S. courts filed by plaintiffs’ counsel participating in the negotiations.

List of known World War II and National Socialist era cases against German companies pending in U.S. courts filed by plaintiffs’ counsel not participating in the negotiations.

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1. Statistics on the Funding Ceilings Defined by the Foundation Establishment Act In accordance with the Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (Foundation Establishment Act, officially abbreviated as EVZStiftG ), the primary missions of the Foundation are the provision of individual and humanitarian payments to former forced and other victims of the Nazi era and the sponsorship of projects through the Remembrance and Future Fund. Funding for this mission was donated in equal halves by the Foundation Initiative of German Industry and by the German Federal Government and totaled 5.164 billion euros (10.1 billion deutschmarks). Supplementing this capital was the 416 million euros taken in by the Foundation through interest earnings and other donations.* The resulting total sum of 5.580 billion euros were allocated as follows: Ceiling

1.

Amount (EUR billion)

Ceiling for Compensation for Forced Labor Including – Payments made by partner organizations – Administrative costs of partner organizations

4.529 4.363 0.166

1

Ceiling for Compensation for Other Personal Injury Including – Payments made by partner organizations – Administrative costs of partner organizations

0.054 0.052 0.002

2

Ceiling for Compensation for Property Claims Including – Payments – Administrative costs

0.102 0.089 0.013

3

4.

Payments for Compensation for Insurance Losses

0.102

4

5.

Ceiling for Humanitarian Projects Including – Ceiling for social projects of the JCC – Humanitarian and social programs of the IOM

0.153 0.141 0.012

6.

ICHEIC Humanitarian Fund

0.179

7.

Foundation Funds Including – Administrative costs and outreach for partner org. – Expenditures for attorneys and legal advice

0.102 0.036 0.066

5

Remembrance and Future Fund

0.358

6

2.

3.

8.

ICHEIC = International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims

Statistics on the Funding Ceilings Defined by the Foundation Establishment Act

209

Notes: * Includes interest earned in złoty due to special arrangement with Polish partner organization (see page 142). - Data as per December 31, 2006. General information: The amounts specified for the “payment ceilings” (items 1 thru 4 above) include residual funds that could not be paid to entitled beneficiaries within the set time frame and which were channeled to humanitarian projects that benefit surviving Nazi-era victims. All residual funds combined were less than one percent of the total funds made available for compensation payments. 1 For information on the payments made by the various partner organizations to former forced laborers see Statistics Section 2 (information on payments to former forced laborers) and Statistics Section 3 (payments to former forced laborers by country). 2 For information on payments to the various partner organizations within the ceiling for compensation of Other Personal Injury, see also Statistics Section 4. 3 For information on payments for Property Claims, see also Statistics Section 5. 4 For information on payments for Insurance Losses, see also Statistics Section 6. 5 In accordance with the Foundation Establishment Act, foundation funds were also used to pay the costs for attorneys and legal advisors who assisted in the establishment of the Foundation or contributed to the success of the international negotiations. 6 The amount given here represents the assets of the Remembrance and Future Fund. The fund finances its sponsorship activities using the interest earned on its assets.

210

Statistics on the Funding Ceilings Defined by the Foundation Establishment Act

2. Statistics on Payments to Former Forced Laborers and Their Legal Heirs The payments made within the ceiling for compensation for forced labor were awarded to surviving forced laborers and their legal heirs. The payments were made in two installments for persons in the main categories defined by the Law on the Creation of a Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and in the subcategories established within these main categories by the partner organizations and for persons covered by the “Catchalls” (option clauses) of the partner organizations. The following overview shows the total payments made by each partner organization and the number of payment recipients. Partner Organization

Belarus Including – Belarus – Estonia

Number of Recipients

Total Payment (EUR million)

129,000 120,000 9,000

345.50 324.80 20.70

90,000

386.00

Jewish Claims Conference

159,000

1,149.00

Poland

484,000

979.00

Russia Including – Russia – Latvia – Lithuania – CIS states

256,000 228,000 13,000 12,000 3,000

426.00 380.00 22.60 18.40 5.00

76,000

210.00

471,000

867.00

1,665,000

4,362.50

IOM

Czech Republic Ukraine All partner organizations

Notes: − The figures in the table have been rounded since some partner organizations were still settling their accounts at the deadline (December 31, 2006). The precise figures may therefore vary slightly. − For the same reason (ongoing accounting), the payment totals given also include any residual funds that may accrue, primarily due to the forfeiture of payments. These residual funds are used by the partner organizations for humanitarian projects to benefit survivors of the Nazi era. − For information on the grounds for forfeiture, see page 144.

Statistics on Payments to Former Forced Laborers and Their Legal Heirs

211

3. Statistics on the Payments to Former Forced Laborers and Their Legal Heirs by Country Payments within the funding ceiling for compensation for forced labor were issued in a total of 98 countries. The following table shows the number of recipients (surviving victims and legal heirs) by country and issuing partner organization. Country

Payment made by …

Albania

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

245 2 247

Algeria

International Organization for Migration Total:

4 4

Argentina

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

624 190 814

Armenia

Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

52 47 17 116

Aruba (Dutch Antilles) (Netherlands)

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

1 1 2

Australia

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Total:

8,195 3,844 4 1 12,044

Austria

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

542 507 1 1,050

Autonomous Repuplic of Abkhasia (Georgia)

Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

5 2 7

Autonomous Repuplic of Adjara (Georgia)

Belarusian partner organization Total:

1 1

212

Recipients

Statistics on Payments by Country

Country

Payment made by …

Azerbaijan

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

Bahamas

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

Belarus

Belarusian partner organization Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

119,292 290 113 2 2 119,699

Belgium

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Total:

3,135 757 1 3,893

Bolivia

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

Bosnia-Herzegovina

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

3,836 43 3,879

Brazil

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

847 462 1,309

Bulgaria

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Total:

362 61 3 426

Canada

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Total:

7,538 6,929 9 5 14,481

Chagos Islands (United Kingdom)

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Statistics on Payments by Country

Recipients 71 27 12 110 1 1

19 19

213

Country

Payment made by …

Chile

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

117 24 141

China

International Organization for Migration Total:

2 2

Columbia

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

29 3 32

Costa Rica

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

25 1 26

Croatia

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

2,507 152 2,659

Cuba

International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Total:

1 1 2

Cyprus

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

2 1 3

Czech Republic

Czech partner organization International Organization for Migration Ukrainian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

75,780 15 4 3 2 75,804

Denmark

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

802 184 986

Dominican Republic

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

2 2

Dutch Antilles (Netherlands)

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

1 1

Ecuador

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

20 20

214

Recipients

Statistics on Payments by Country

Country

Payment made by …

Estonia

Belarusian partner organization Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization International Organization for Migration Total:

9,240 49 5 1 9,295

Faroe Islands (Denmark)

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Finland

International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Total:

155 11 5 5 176

France

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Total:

5,770 2,704 1 8,475

French-Polynesia (France)

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Georgia

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

Germany

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

6,097 3,341 258 66 1 9,763

Greece

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Total:

1,819 178 1 1,998

Guatemala

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

Hungary

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization Total:

Statistics on Payments by Country

Recipients

225 99 20 344

8 8 14,420 617 2 1 15,040

215

Country

Payment made by …

Iceland

Ukrainian partner organization Total:

1 1

India

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

1 1

Indonesia

International Organization for Migration Total:

2 2

Ireland

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

5 4 9

Israel

Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

78,526 97 83 37 1 78,744

Italy

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization Total:

3,241 150 2 2 3,395

Ivory Coast

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

1 1 2

Japan

Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

2 1 3

Kazakhstan

Ukrainian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Russian partner organization Total:

2,153 770 730 3,653

Kyrgyzstan

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

217 90 38 345

216

Recipients

Statistics on Payments by Country

Country

Payment made by …

Latvia

Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

13,691 3 2 2 13,698

Lebanon

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Lithuania

Russian partner organization International Organization for Migration Ukrainian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Total:

13,334 3 2 1 13,340

Luxembourg

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

141 8 149

Macedonia

International Organization for Migration Total:

37 37

Malaysia

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Malta

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Mexico

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

65 5 70

Moldova

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Total:

Monaco

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

4 1 5

Morocco

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Nepal

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Statistics on Payments by Country

Recipients

1,656 7 2 1,665

217

Country

Payment made by …

Netherlands

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Czech partner organization Total:

3,529 970 1 4,500

New Caledonia (France)

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

New Zealand

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Total:

133 37 1 171

Norway

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

1,307 58 1 1,366

Pakistan

International Organization for Migration Total:

1 1

Panama

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

3 3

Paraguay

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

8 2 10

Peru

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

16 16 32

Philippines

International Organization for Migration Total:

2 2

Poland

Polish partner organization International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Ukrainian partner organization Czech partner organization Total:

483,902 100 17 3 2 1 484,025

Portugal

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

5 2 7

218

Recipients

Statistics on Payments by Country

Country

Payment made by …

Puerto Rico (USA)

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

Romania

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

5,043 1,256 6,299

Russia

Russian partner organization Ukrainian partner organization Belarusian partner organization International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

226,736 917 25 4 3 227,685

Serbia und Montenegro

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

8,472 130 2 8,604

Slovakia

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

808 749 1,557

Slovenia

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Czech partner organization Total:

10,833 18 1 10,852

Spain

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

118 27 2 147

South Africa

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

88 42 130

Sweden

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

1,159 834 1,993

Switzerland

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Czech partner organization Total:

252 130 2 384

Statistics on Payments by Country

Recipients 1 1

219

Country

Payment made by …

Tajikistan

Ukrainian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Russian partner organization Total:

Thailand

International Organization for Migration Total:

Tunisia

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

12 12

Turkey

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Total:

18 1 19

Turkmenistan

Ukrainian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Russian partner organization Total:

37 16 11 64

Ukraine

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Belarusian partner organization Total:

465,033 619 9 8 3 465,672

United Kingdom

International Organization for Migration Jewish Claims Conference Russian partner organization Total:

2,747 884 2 3,633

Uruguay

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

140 9 149

USA

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Total:

37,657 11,008 112 26 1 48,804

220

Recipients 23 9 8 40 1 1

Statistics on Payments by Country

Country

Payment made by …

Recipients

Uzbekistan

Ukrainian partner organization Russian partner organization Belarusian partner organization Jewish Claims Conference Total:

464 125 68 1 658

Venezuela

Jewish Claims Conference International Organization for Migration Total:

170 70 240

Vietnam

Russian partner organization Total:

1 1

Zambia

International Organization for Migration Total:

2 2

Zimbabwe

Jewish Claims Conference Total:

4 4

Information not available

Jewish Claims Conference Czech partner organization International Organization for Migration Russian partner organization Total:

Total (98 countries)

all partner organizations

485 104 13 13 615 1,665,690

Notes: − Data in this table as per December 31, 2006. − The information is based on the recipient addresses submitted by the partner organizations.

Statistics on Payments by Country

221

4. Statistics on Payments Within the Ceiling for “Other Personal Injury” Within this ceiling, entitled beneficiaries received basic awards (EUR 4,243.72 per person) and supplementary payments (EUR 2,450.00 per person). The basic award was paid to victims and legal heirs of victims. The supplementary payments were granted to survivors only. Partner Organi- No. of EBs zation for the Basic Award (PO)

No. of EBs for the Suppl. Payment

Total Basic

Total Suppl. Total Payments Payments

All figures in millions of euros

Poland

1,530

1,131

6.49

2.77

9.26

Ukraine

1,327

1,233

5.63

3.02

8.65

Russia including Russia Latvia Lithuania

265

243

1.12

0.60

1.72

126 129 10

114 119 10

0.53 0.54 0.04

0.28 0.29 0.02

0.81 0.83 0.06

Belarus

338

318

1.43

0.77

2.20

Czech Republic

194

134

0.82

0.33

1.15

IOM

1,754

1,500

7.33

3.66

10.99

JCC

2,718

2,506

11.44

6.00

17.44

All POs

8,126

7,065

35.37

17.74

53.11

EB = Entitled beneficiary

Notes: – Basic awards were forfeited in cases where an entitlement had been established but the beneficiary died prior to receiving payment and no legal heirs could be found. In cases where the intended recipient died prior to receiving the supplementary payment, no search for legal heirs was undertaken and the payment was forfeited. All unused funds were classified as residual funds and channeled to humanitarian projects to benefit Nazi-era victims. – The money left over after paying compensation for “other personal injury” and reserved for entitlements approved in or after January 2005 but not paid out was distributed to partner organizations to finance humanitarian projects to benefit Nazi-era victims. The same applied to funds that went unused because the intended recipient had died.

222

Statistics on Payments Within the Ceiling for “Other Personal Injury”

5. Statistics on the Payments for Property Claims by Country

Countries

Number of Entitled Beneficiaries

Budget in millions of euros

Poland

7,314

Approx. 43.2

Czech Republic

4,440

Approx. 17.1

Slovenia

2,414

Approx. 8.2

USA/Canada

479

Rest of Central/Eastern Europe

411

Western Europe

375

Israel

226

Other countries

116

Total:

Statistics on the Payments for Property Claims

15,781

Approx. 20.5

Approx. 89

223

6. Statistics on Compensation for Holocaust-Era Life Insurance Policies I. ICHEIC Total (Source: ICHEIC ) 1. Number of Claims

Number

Total Claims Including—named claims –– unnamed claims 2. Compensation payment

91,558 31,447 60,111 Number

Payments (US$ m)*

(a)

For named claims, total:

14,186

238.27

(b)

Individual humanitarian payments of US $ 1,000 each

31,284

31.28

(c)

Humanitarian payments for companies that no longer exist or were nationalized

2,874

30.54

II. German Insurance Market (Source: GDV ) 1. Number of Claims

Number

Total Claims Including – named claims – unnamed claims

2. Compensation payments Individual payments:**

19,421 3,189 16,232 Number

7,870

Payments (US$ m*) 102.16

Notes: * Payment figures are given in US dollars because the ICHEIC issued nearly all payments in dollars. ** The 7,870 claims sometimes refer to several persons (for example, if several heirs are involved) and in some cases to several policies. The 7,870 claims thus resulted in payments to 8,664 persons for 11,399 policies. Further information: − All claimants born in Germany before May of 1945 received a minimum compensation of US $ 4,000. − All other claimants (heirs) received a minimum compensation of US $ 3,000. − Average compensation per policy was US $ 8,962.

224

Statistics on Compensation for Holocaust-Era Life Insurance Policies

Members of the Board of Trustees

Delegated by

Trustee

Period

Chairman

Dr. Dieter Kastrup Dr. Michael Jansen

2000 to 2008 since 2008

Dep. Chairman

Dr. Otto Graf Lambsdorff N.N.

2000 to 2008 since 2008

Foundation Initiative of German Industry (4 seats)

Dr. Klaus Kohler Herbert Hansmeyer Dr. Manfred Gentz Hans-Joachim Neubürger Georg Krupp Dr. Jörg Freiherr Frank von Fürstenwerth Dr. Karl-Ludwig Kley Dr. Hans-Joachim Körber Ernst Baumann

2000 to 2004 2000 to 2004 2000 to 2008 2000 to 2008 2004 to 2008

Bernd Reuter, MP (SPD ) Dr. Dieter Wiefelspütz, MP (SPD ) Dietmar Nietan, (SPD )

2000 to 2004 2000 to 2008 2004 to 2006; since 2008

Bundestag (5 seats)

Volker Beck, MP (Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen) Wolfgang Bosbach, MP (CDU /CSU ) Ingo Wellenreuther, MP (CDU /CSU ) Ulla Jelpke, MP (PDS/DIE LINKE )

since 2004 since 2008 since 2008 since 2008

Dr. Max Stadler, MP (FDP )

since 2000 2000 to 2006 since 2006 2000 to 2002; since 2006 since 2000

Bundesrat (2 seats)

Hans Kaiser Dr. Diether Posser Wolfgang Gibowski Erik Bettermann Dr. Thomas Freund

2000 to 2005 2000 to 2005 since 2005 2005 to 2008 since 2008

Federal Ministry of Finance (1 seat)

Rainer Türmer

since 2000

Foreign Office (1 seat)

Dr. Gerd Westdickenberg Dr. Thomas Läufer Dr. Georg Witschel

2000 to 2004 2004 to 2006 since 2006

Members of the Board of Trustees

225

Delegated by

Trustee

Period

JCC (1 seat)

Dr. Karl Brozik (†) Dr. Israel Singer Noah Flug

2000 to 2004 2004 to 2006 since 2006

Israel (1 seat)

Meron Hacohen Roman Polonsky Arie Zuckerman

2000 to 2003 2003 to 2005 since 2006

USA (1 seat)

James D. Bindenagel Randolph Bell Edward O’Donnell J. Christian Kennedy

2000 to 2002 2000 to 2003 2003 to 2006 since 2006

Russian Federation (1 seat)

Ludmila Narusova Alexander P. Potshinok

2000 to 2002 since 2002

Ukraine

Igor Lushnikov Olexander Ivankiv

2000 to 2008 since 2008

Republic Belarus

Dr. Vladimir Adamushko

since 2000

Czech Republik (1 seat)

Dr. Jíři Šitler

since 2000

Republic of Poland (1 seat)

Bartosz Jalowiecki Professor Dr. Jerzy Su¥ek Professor Dr. Mariusz Muszynski Professor Dr. Jerzy Kranz

2000 to 2002 2002 to 2006 2006 to 2008 since 2008

Plaintiffs’ Attorney, USA

Professor Dr. Burt Neuborne Dorothea Rosen

2000 to 2008 since 2008

UNHCR (1 seat)

Gerald Walzer Stefan Berglund Dr. Gottfried Köfner

2000 to 2003 2003 to 2006 since 2007

IOM (1 seat)

Brunson McKinley Dr. Norbert Wühler

2000 to 2008 since 2008

Federal Information and Counseling Association for Victims of the Nazi Regime (1 seat)

Lothar Evers Michael Teupen

2000 to 2004 since 2004

Comments: The Board of Trustees has 27 seats, including one seat for the Chairman. The seat reserved for one Sinti and Roma representative has remained vacant to date. The list therefore only includes the names and periods of service for 26 members of the Board of Trustees.

226

Members of the Board of Trustees

Members of the Foundation’s Board of Directors August 2000 to December 2002 Dr. Michael Jansen (Chairman)

Dr. Hans Otto Bräutigam

Avi Primor

December 2002 to September 2003 Dr. Michael Jansen (Chairman)

Johannes Bauch

Avi Primor

September 2003 to June 2004 Dr. Michael Jansen (Chairman)

Günter Saathoff

Dr. Ulrich Bopp

Günter Saathoff

Dr. Ulrich Bopp

Günter Saathoff

Dr. Martin Salm

June 2004 to June 2006 Dr. Hans Otto Bräutigam (Chairman) June 2006 to June 2007 Dr. Michael Jansen (Chairman) July 2007 to June 2013 Dr. Martin Salm (Chairman)

Günter Saathoff

Members of the Board of Directors

227

Partner organizations and other organizations until 2007 Organization

Chief Executive/ Chairperson/ Managing Director

Period

JCC

Dr. Karl Brozik (†) Moshe H. Jahoda Georg Heuberger

2000 to 8/2004 9/2004 to 3/2006 since 4/2006

Poland

Bartosz Jalowiecki Dr. Witold Krochmal Professor Dr. Jerzy Su¥ek Professor Dr. Mariusz Muszynski

2000 to 8/2001 8/2001 to 10/2001 10/2001 to 1/2006 since 1/2006

Russian Federation

Alexandr M. Sasonov Natalja A. Malyscheva Andrej I. Vojkov

10/2000 to early 2001 5/2001 to 7/2003 since 7/2003

Ukraine

Igor M. Lushnikov

since 2000

Republic Belarus

Valentin Gerasimov

since 2000

Czech Republik

Dr. Tomáš Kafka Herbert Werner Dr. Tomáš Jelínek

2000 to 10/2005 2000 to 12/2006 since 11/2005

IOM

Dirk de Winter Dr. Norbert Wühler

2000 to 2004 since 2005

ICHEIC

Lawrence S. Eagleburger

1998 to 2007

Property Claims Commission

Dr. Pierre A. Karrer

5/2001 to 12/2005

Comment: The work of the partner organizations finished by decision of the Board of Trustees in 2007.

228

Partner organizations and other organizations

The Authors

SABINE BRANDES, born 1968, journalist, Israel correspondent primarily for German-language newspapers including the Jüdische Allgemeine and Neue Westfälische Zeitung. JURI DURKOT, born 1965, freelance journalist, writer and translator in Ukraine. He was a press spokesman at the Ukrainian embassy in Germany from 1995 to 2000. KAI HENNIG, born 1961, diplomat, was from November 2000 to June 2007 press spokesman for the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and the Foundation’s officer for the compensation of unpaid life insurance policies from the Nazi period. DR. MICHAEL JANSEN, born 1941, diplomat and retired State Secretary, headed the Board of Directors of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” from September 2000 to June 2004 and from June 2006 to June 2007. Since September 2008 the Chairman of its Board of Trustees.

PROF. DR. LUTZ NIETHAMMER, born 1939, Professor emeritus for modern and contemporary history at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He served from November 1998 to April 2000 as academic advisor to the Federal Chancellery during the international negotiations on compensation for former forced laborers. GÜNTER SAATHOFF, born 1954, was General Commissioner for the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” for cooperation with the partner organizations and has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2003. The payment programs were under his authority. ALEXANDER SOSNOVSKI, born 1955, journalist, Germany correspondent for a number of Russian newspapers. He also reports on Russia for the German media. VERA VON WOLFFERSDORFF, born 1969, Journalist for various publications, including the Jüdische Allgemeine.

GABRIELE LESSER, born 1960, journalist, since 1995 Warsaw correspondent for many German-language newspapers, including the taz, the Badische Zeitung and the Standard.

The Authors

229

Photography Credits

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Photography Credits

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© Wallstein Publishing Ltd, Germany www.wallstein-verlag.de © Foundation “Remembrance, Resonsibility and Future,” Berlin, Germany © of the English version: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2009 Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Set by Wallstein Publishing using the Garamond and Frutiger fonts Cover design: Susanne Gerhards, Germany Lithography: Schwab Scantechnik, Germany Printed by Friedrich Pustet, Germany ISBN 13: 978-0-230-61264-8 ISBN 10: 0-230-61264-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [Gemeinsame Verantwortung und moralische Pflicht. English] A mutual responsibility and a moral obligation : the final report on Germany's compensation programs for forced labor and other personal injuries / edited by Michael Jansen and Günter Saathoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-61264-8 1. Forced labor—Germany—History—20th century. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Conscript labor—Germany. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Reparations. 4. Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft.” I. Jansen, Michael, 1941- II. Saathoff, Günter. III. Title: Gemeinsame Verantwortung und moralische Pflicht. HD4875.G3G46 2009 940.54'05—dc22 2008044750 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.