Holocaust Survivors, Heirs Fight On for Compensation

Though Germany Long Ago Satisfied Most Claims, Many Remain

TELTOW, Germany -- Six decades after the end of World War II, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs are still struggling to receive compensation or the return of looted property from Germany.

More than 76,000 claims filed by Jewish families and other Nazi-era victims who had owned property in the former East Germany remain unresolved. About 60,000 Jews who applied for special pensions payable to people the Nazis forced to work for subsistence wages in ghettos were turned down. And owners of stolen artwork complain that efforts to find their collections have been stonewalled by German museums, despite a 1999 pledge to clear up the issue.

As time passes, aging Holocaust survivors and their heirs say they have become increasingly frustrated. In most cases, they blame a slow-moving and inflexible German bureaucracy for delays. While acknowledging that Germany already has gone to great lengths to atone for the crimes of the Third Reich, claimants said they have encountered a waning desire among some Germans to go any further.

"We have had the door slammed in our face and our history denied," said Peter Y. Sonnenthal, 53, a U.S. citizen and former attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Along with his sister, he has been fighting a legal battle since 1991 to reclaim hundreds of parcels of property that they say their Jewish ancestors sold under duress in the upscale Berlin suburb of Teltow.

Germany long ago satisfied the vast majority of claims pending from the war. Over the past half-century, it has spent an estimated $100 billion, adjusted for inflation, to compensate Jews and other victims of Nazism. Now it is dealing with a new wave of property claims filed in the early 1990s after the collapse of the communist East German government, which had generally refused to compensate Jewish losses from the Third Reich.

On Oct. 1, Germany agreed to pay an extra $250 million in pensions over the next 10 years to Jews who were incarcerated in concentration camps or Nazi prisons. And last year, the German government agreed to pay $50 million to cover nursing care and other medical costs for elderly Holocaust survivors.

Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based institution set up in 1951 to negotiate restitution payments, said the German government had shown a strong overall commitment to Holocaust victims over the years. But he noted that the number of survivors is dwindling steadily and many are impoverished.

"The needs are tremendous," he said. "Generally, the negotiations are conducted in a positive spirit and there have been many achievements. However, we feel there's still more to do and there's a very limited amount of time."

Every so often, another hidden chapter of Germany's dark history resurfaces, complicating efforts to turn the page.

Last month, the family that owns nearly 50 percent of luxury automaker BMW agreed to a probe into whether it had profited from forced labor during the Third Reich. The move was prompted by a public television documentary that featured testimony from former prisoners at a family-owned battery factory in Hanover.

The Quandt family, which had personal ties to top Nazi leaders, including propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged that it had kept silent about the slave-labor issue for decades. "We recognize that, in our history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 have not been sufficiently cleared up," the family said in a statement.

Until recently, the German government had resisted international efforts to open a massive Nazi-era archive to historians and the public. The International Tracing Service, a warehouse in central Germany containing 50 million records about concentration camps and victims of the Third Reich, has tightly restricted access to the documents for decades.