Source: http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/100899nazi-compensation.html
Accessed 12 October 1999

October 8, 1999

German Companies Offer $3.3 Billion in Slave-Labor Suit

ASHINGTON -- Germany's largest companies and the German government offered $3.3 billion Thursday in compensation to Nazi-era slave laborers -- several thousand dollars each for the dwindling number of surviving victims.

But lawyers and representatives for the hundreds of thousands who would benefit rejected the offer at a tense meeting at the State Department here. One called it "an enormous disappointment."

The negotiations, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat as a mediator, may drag on for weeks or months. But Thursday was the first time that a broad swath of German industry -- including Deutsche Bank, DaimlerChrysler, Hoechst, Siemens and Vokswagen -- has ever offered significant payments to the men and women who are still alive, more than a half-century after they had been forced to become factory workers or farmers for the German war machine.

Sixteen companies have been named in suits here and entered the talks determined not to be swept into the recriminations and battling that scarred Switzerland and its financial industry in the suits there. Although the Swiss government refused to join its banks in direct compensation to victims of the Nazis whose assets were "lost" in Swiss banks, Germany has offered to pay roughly a third of the total settlement offered to the slave laborers.

The companies, by making a substantial opening offer, are also hoping to appear far more willing than the Swiss banks were to acknowledge financial responsibility. "We believe that the companies are standing up to their moral responsibility," a spokesman for the companies, Wolfgang Gibowski, said Thursday.

On the other side of the negotiating table, though, Jewish groups and representatives gf other forced laborers appear sharply divided. Some advocate immediate talks and a quick settlement. Others, led by Mel Weiss, a flamboyant lawyer in the class-action suits in the American courts, called the offer insulting, noting that it amounts to a few hundred dollars for each victim, in 1940s dollars.

The general counsel of the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities, Mel Urbach, called the offer a "fraction of what would be honorable" and a "pittance when compared to the wealth and economic success of these German companies."

"At this point, at least, we see no way to continue these negotiations," Urbach said, adding that his group will continue its fight in court.

The German companies say a quick settlement is essential if the survivors are to benefit. With each week of haggling, additional survivors die. "This financial assistance will be very significant for the hundreds of thousands of people who live in difficult economic circumstances," the companies said in a statement that was clearly intended to promote talks on their terms.

There are three categories of Nazi-era victims who would ultimately receive the money. The first is composed of former slave laborers, mostly concentration-camp victims who worked for the companies while in the camps. Eizenstat said Thursday that 230,000 were thought to be alive. Each would receive $5,500, assuming that the estimate on survivors is correct and that all seek payments.

The second category consists of forced laborers, who were deported from their countries and sent to Germany, where they lived in ghettos or in unguarded camps. Estimates of the number of survivors range upward from 475,000. They would receive approximately $1,950 each.

Thirdly, some money would be for people who lost bank accounts and other property, as well for survivors not in the other categories.