German fund done paying laborers

A German fund set up to compensate forced laborers during the Holocaust has completed paying victims.

The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation, set up in 2000, paid $5.8 billion to 1.7 million people, mostly non-Jews who were forced to work in concentration camps and participate in sadistic medical experiments, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported..

The German government and German corporations that utilized forced labor during World War II contributed equally to the fund, which will see its remaining money go toward reconciliation projects.

Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Bayer and Deutsche Bank were among the companies that made tax-deducible donations to the fund in exchange for receiving protection from any future legal proceedings related to their use of slave labor.

�The money has been paid and everything has run its course without a problem,� Otto Graf Lambsdorff, the fund�s vice chair told German radio.

http://www.naic.org/Releases/2007_docs/icheic_book_2007.pdf
NAIC ANNOUNCES PUBLICATION OF FINAL REPORT ON HOLOCAUST ERA INSURANCE CLAIMS COMMISSION

Introduction: Mission Drives Commission –
Find Claimants And Pay Them

For 60 years following the end of World War II, thousands of Holocaust era insurance policies had gone unpaid or unclaimed. George Sachs’ story illustrates how and why. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Mr. Sachs lived there with his parents and older brother until 1939. A neighbor falsely accused them of hoarding food and denounced them to the Gestapo. Mr. Sachs’ parents were taken into custody. His father was found drowned in the river Moldau two months after his arrest, with bruises indicating torture; his mother was released from Pankrac prison in Prague one month later. The family was not permitted to investigate his father’s death. Mr. Sachs remembers their fruitless efforts to secure payment on his father’s life insurance in 1939, submitting the policy and the death certificate. Mr. Sachs was sent to a concentration camp with a small suitcase of clothes and no other possessions.

Imprisoned first in Theresienstadt, then Zossen and subsequently Schnarchenreuth, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust; his mother died in 1942 and his older brother was killed in Theresienstadt in late 1944. At the time of liberation, all he owned were the tattered rags on his back and a threadbare blanket.

A young adult when the war started, Mr. Sachs knew a little about his parents’ financial affairs. But without documents, at war’s end, he had only his memories, and thus no means to prove what was rightfully his. He moved to the United States, built a new life for himself, but never forgot his father’s efforts to provide for the family. On a trip to Europe in 1990, he tried without success to settle his father’s unpaid policy directly with RAS, his father’s insurer. In 1998, he tried filing a claim with the Holocaust Claims Processing Office, established by New York state.

The U.S. regulators viewed Mr. Sachs and claimants like him as the reason for creating the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC). Their stories of personal tragedy and frustrated attempts to recover their assets illustrated the need for an exhaustive review, and a fair and just resolution of outstanding claims. Renewed interest in the pre-war European insurance market and the fate of Holocaust era life insurance policies was sparked by the end of the Cold War in 1989. This event allowed access to records and people in Eastern Europe, and the increased declassification of war-time intelligence documents in U.S. archives. Previously undocumented stories could be verified, and people who had been precluded from filing insurance
claims could seek restitution. In response, the German government revisited past compensation programs and made restitution and indemnification for suffering sustained at the hands of the Nazi regime available to residents of the former Eastern Bloc.

Recognizing that litigation was a costly, time-consuming and often inadequate means of settling claims, U.S. insurance regulators via the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) sought to find an alternative means.1 By conducting interviews, studying the past, and organizing
hearings across the country, the NAIC (through its U.S. insurance regulator members) sought to better
understand the issues raised by potential claimants, identify the companies most likely affected, and work with those companies to arrive at a means of resolving claims outside the courts.

These efforts led to the creation of ICHEIC through a memorandum of understanding signed in 1998 by U.S. insurance regulators, six insurance companies, the Claims Conference, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, and the state of Israel. Through this commission, stakeholders and representatives agreed on a process to identify and ultimately settle valid and previously uncompensated Holocaust era insurance claims at no cost to claimants.

Final Report here:

http://www.naic.org/Releases/2007_docs/icheic_book_2007.pdf

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