Source: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nf/0,1518,45820,00.html
Accessed 12 October 1999

German companies offer six billion marks ($3.3 billion) as compensation to Nazi-era slave laborers, igniting a storm of denunciation. "We see no way to continue these negotiations," said Mel Urbach, general counsel of the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities.

As a former finance minister and chairman of the Liberal Party (FDP), Count Otto Lambsdorff, the appointed German envoy to the international negotiations, is hardly known as a critic of German business interests. But his sarcasm was unmistakable as he noted that German industry is "well known to be comprised of more than 35 companies." That's how many companies are currently contributing to the "Memory, Responsibility, Future" fund set up to compensate those the Nazis forced to work in factories and concentration camps. Lambsdorff added that "nearly all" German companies used forced labor during World War II.

Originally, there were only 16 contributing companies, but incentives for joining the fund are two-fold. First, the Finance Ministry confirmed on Tuesday that companies will be able to write off about half of whatever amount is eventually settled on as "operating costs"; German taxpayers will pick up that half. Second, participation in the fund is to all but guarantee immunity from future law suits related to the companies' activities in the Nazi era.

These conditions help explain the fury with which lawyers and international organizations representing slave laborers greeted the offer Lambsdorff put forward in the name of the companies on Thursday. "I told the German delegation that they have done more harm to the German government and German people than they can ever imagine," said US lawyer Mel Weiss. Despite the statement from the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities proclaiming further negotiations pointless, Weiss insisted that his team "will not walk away from the negotiating table."

The gap across that table has always been enormous. US lawyers estimate that there are 2.3 million surviving former slave laborers due compensation. A historian appointed by the German government places the figure at approximately 900,000. And while the German companies have upped their original offer of three billion marks to six billion, US lawyers are insisting on a total exceeding 20 billion.

An initiative of Jewish, Polish, US and German organizations has been highlighting the anguish of slave laborers with three full-page ads running in the "New York Times". One is aimed at "Bayer's Biggest Headache" and focuses on medical experiments conducted by Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, for I.G. Farben, the huge conglomerate broken up after the war into several pieces, including Bayer (click here to see the ad). Another is aimed at Mercedes-Benz (here) and the third at Ford (here) - a Ford spokesperson in Michigan has said that the company will be looking into the activities of its German subsidiary during the war.

On Friday, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder defended the German companies' offer in Berlin as "dignified" and commented that it was perfectly normal for lawyers defending the interests of their clients to criticize and initial offer. Those clients might have taken comfort in Schröder's words if Lambsdorff hadn't presented the offer as if it were not only the first but the last. Nevertheless, negotiations are scheduled to resume in Bonn in November.

SPIEGEL ONLINE has posed this question to its readers: "Six billion marks as compensation for Nazi slave laborers. Is Germany's image damaged by this offer?" Click here to see the current results of the poll.