Though Germany Long Ago Satisfied Most Claims, Many Remain
By Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 25, 2007
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.
Some German officials had worried that making the records public would lead to a new flood of compensation claims against the government. But under pressure from researchers and Holocaust survivors, Germany last year agreed to open the archives, which are overseen by an 11-nation consortium and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Since then, the German government has tried to resolve another Holocaust-era dispute by agreeing to pay $140 million to former residents of Jewish ghettos who were forced by the Nazis to work for negligible wages.
Germany had passed a law in 2002 granting monthly pensions to the so-called ghetto workers. But of the 70,000 people who applied for the benefits, more than 85 percent were rejected, often because they lacked documentation of forced employment. (The program is separate from a $6 billion fund established in 2000 to compensate 1.7 million slave laborers conscripted by the Nazis and forced to work for no pay at all).
After prodding from the Jewish Claims Conference and Israeli and U.S. officials, the German government agreed in September to pay a one-time sum of $2,800 to about 50,000 people who had been denied the benefits. German officials described the payment as a "humanitarian gesture," insisting that it should not be seen as compensation for forced labor.
But critics, including some German lawmakers, accused the government of being stingy and still not doing enough. "It was very hard work to force the government to recognize this was a problem," said Renate Kuenast, a leader of the Green Party. Her party has sponsored legislation that would guarantee a minimum $200 monthly pension to ghetto workers, payable for life.
The German Finance Ministry, which oversees the program, declined requests for an interview.
One of the thorniest and longest-running disputes over Jewish property is playing out in Teltow, a Berlin suburb.
Until the 1930s, about 200 acres of farmland in the center of town were owned by Max and Albert Sabersky, prominent Jewish developers and businessmen. The Sabersky brothers had owned the land since 1872, but sold it after Hitler came to power in 1933. The heirs say the Sabersky brothers sold their land for half its market value; on top of that, a Nazi broker forced them to pay commissions reaching 50 percent.
After Teltow and the rest of East Germany broke with communism in 1990, the Saberskys' heirs filed claims to retrieve the property, arguing that the brothers had been forced to sell by the Nazis. By then, the land was home to about 1,500 people and worth an estimated $100 million.
The heirs won back a handful of acres. But German authorities denied the bulk of their claim, ruling in 1996 that the brothers hadn't sold the property under duress. As evidence, they cited a statement from a former Nazi official involved in the sales, who insisted that the Jewish family hadn't been persecuted.
The decision outraged the Sabersky heirs, including Sonnenthal, the former SEC lawyer. As the only descendants of Albert Sabersky, he and his sister stand to gain half the recovered property. They have appealed the decision through a maze of German courts in a fight that has stretched on for 16 years.
"Teltow has to be held accountable. It's a question of principle," said Sonnenthal, who moved to Germany in 2002 to fight his case full time. "They're simply attempting to profit from the crimes committed by the former Nazi administration."
After years of failed appeals, the Sonnenthals won a major decision from Germany's highest administrative court in 2003 that appeared to open the way for an overall settlement in favor of the heirs. But the city of Teltow has sought to block the transfer of several key parcels, reviving old arguments that the Sabersky brothers sold the property willingly. The case is scheduled to go back to court in December.
Richard Martin, a Teltow resident and member of a citizens' group that has challenged the Sonnenthals' claim, said he and his neighbors have been unfairly portrayed as Nazi sympathizers for fighting to keep the property in local hands.
"I have the feeling that we cannot know, really, what happened back then," said Martin, who stressed that he was speaking for himself and not on behalf of the citizens' group. "Mr. Sonnenthal says this property has been stolen from him. I cannot really deny that and say no, it hasn't been. But it is not a black-and-white case, either."
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