JUSTICE - No. 66

12 No. 66 JUSTICE civilians, both its own citizens and those of the countries it occupied, agreed to compensate survivors. In September 1951, the first post-war German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer accepted responsibility in his words for the“unspeakable crimes that have been committed in the name of the German people.” One month after Adenauer’s speech, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, convened a meeting in NewYork City of 23 major Jewish organizations, and speaking for the collective Jewish world, created the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany — the Claims Conference. Beginning at The Hague in March 1952, negotiations commenced between Germany, led by Chancellor Adenauer, and the young State of Israel, led by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and parallel negotiations between the German government and the Claims Conference. In a historic agreement in Luxembourg on September 10, 1952, the Claims Conference and the West German federal government signed two protocols. One called for German laws that would compensate Nazi victims directly. One of the first post-war international agreement by the new German state was with Israel and a Jewish NGO and became embedded in domestic German law. The second protocol provided the Claims Conference with 450 million DM for the relief, rehabilitation, and resettlement of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. These negotiations were so controversial that they took place under the cloak of secrecy. Menachem Begin and his Herut Party led violent demonstrations outside the Knesset with a banner that read: “Our honor cannot be sold for money…our blood shall not be atoned by goods. We shall wipe out the disgrace.”After three days of emotional debate, the results of the vote were very close: only 61 of the 120 members voted in favor. Letter bombs were sent to the delegations. Nor was it easy on the German side. The major reason the agreement passed was the unswerving resolve of Chancellor Adenauer. His own finance minister, Fritz Schäffer, was opposed and some of his party members voted against it in the Bundestag, while others abstained. It passed because every member of the Social Democrats supported it. The first major German Holocaust compensation program under the German Federal Indemnification Laws, the BEG ( Bundesentschädigungsgesetz ), provided life-time pensions to a subset of survivors. It is critical to understand that today, in 2020, there remain around 350,000 Holocaust survivors around the world, of whom at least 50% are poor or near poor. At least 95% of the 44,000 survivors in the former Soviet Union in central and eastern Europe are poor; 35%-40% of the 150,000 survivors in Israel are poor; as are around 30% of the 55,000 survivors in the United States. Germany has paid over $80 billion since the 1950s. Almost all the major programs the Claims Conference has negotiated with Germany only support survivors in economic need. Over the years, a total of around 700,000 survivors have received some form of payment from the German government (one-time payment or pension), and about 250,000 survivors will either receive a one-time payment or pension in 2021. The mission of Claims Conference negotiations with Germany over the decades has been to expand the number of survivors eligible for payment, as we tracked Germany’s post-war history – a history of which post- war Germany can be proud. In 1980, for example, the original role of the Claims Conference expanded, with the creation of the Hardship Fund to provide direct one- time payments to Nazi victims who had received no prior compensation. This primarily benefited persons who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Over the past 40 years, approximately 525,000 Jewish Nazi victims benefited from such Hardship Fund payments, many from the former Soviet Union who had suffered both under Nazism and Communism and thus, according to a term that I coined, were“double victims.” Beginning in 2009, I became the chief negotiator for the Claims Conference along with Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, and a negotiating team of survivors from the UK, Poland, Israel, and the U.S., brilliantly managed by Greg Schneider, executive vice president, counsel Karen Heilig, and Rudy Mahlo in the Berlin office. Since then, we have obtained over $9 billion of additional benefits, especially allocated for home care and increased pensions and one-time payments to additional Holocaust survivors. In our September 2020 negotiations, we secured over 650 million euros for a supplemental Hardship Fund payment to the poorest survivors. Following the collapse of the Berlin wall and the reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, the U.S. government supported the Claims Conference demand for the compensation of Holocaust survivors. This was incorporated into Article 2 of the Implementation Agreement to the German Reunification Treaty of 1990, in which the German government was prepared to enter into agreements with the Claims Conference to provide payments to survivors who had thus far received no or only minimal compensation. After sixteen months of difficult negotiations, the Article 2 Fund was established