Jewish Claims Conference

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The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany , also Claims Conference and Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) , is an amalgamation of Jewish organizations. Since it was founded in 1951, it has represented claims for compensation for Jewish victims of National Socialism and Holocaust survivors. The organization is based in New York City and maintains in Frankfurt , Vienna and Tel Aviv representative .

activity

After a speech by Konrad Adenauer in the German Bundestag in September 1951, in which he described the willingness of the federal government for compensation for crimes committed by the Germans to Jews declared appointed Nahum Goldmann , president of the World Jewish Congress , a conference of 23 Jewish organizations in New York . The participants agreed on a form of organization that should bundle the various material requirements. This was another negotiating partner in the government talks between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel on reparation issues . While the State of Israel made claims by Israeli citizens, the Jewish Claims Conference represented the interests of Jews living outside Israel or their heirs, especially in the United States.

Luxembourg Agreement

The talks held in Wassenaar near The Hague about compensation payments to Jewish Nazi victims led to the conclusion of the Luxembourg Agreement on September 10, 1952 . In it, the Federal Republic of Germany undertook to create statutory compensation regulations and to pay a total of 3.5 billion marks to Israel and the JCC over the next few years in compensation for persecution, slave labor and stolen Jewish property. The vote in the Bundestag in the spring of 1953, which was necessary for validity, only resulted in a narrow majority. Several journalists and employees of the Foreign Office, such as Werner Otto von Hentig , tried to prevent the agreement on compensation payments.

In close partnership with Israel, the Jewish Claims Conference has since received payments from Germany, Austria , other countries and industrial companies. JCC used it to finance programs to support Nazi victims.

Eastward expansion

In the course of the German reunification process , the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR were confronted with new claims, because the GDR, like other Eastern Bloc countries, saw themselves as a victim of National Socialism , not as a legacy of his legacy and therefore rejected Jewish claims for compensation. On the occasion of the reception of Rabbi Israel Miller, then President of the Jewish Claims Conference, by State Council Chairman Erich Honecker in June 1987, the JCC formulated claims on the territory of the GDR. But it was not until September 1990, after the end of the dictatorship, that the GDR established the possibility of retransmission for the victims of the Nazi tyranny as part of the reparation policy . The law regulating unresolved property issues , which was originally designed to redress GDR injustices, was applied accordingly to victims of Nazi persecution. The Jewish Claims Conference was set up in Section 2 (1) of the Property Act as a substitute beneficiary for cases in which the Jewish beneficiaries have not submitted an application for reparation.

In 2005, the Karstadt Group was defeated by the Berlin Administrative Court and the Federal Administrative Court of the JCC in the legal dispute over several properties in Berlin-Mitte that had belonged to the Wertheim Group before the industrial reform in the Soviet Zone . Karstadt had sued against a decision from the State Office to regulate open property issues, according to which the land should be transferred to the JCC. The JCC had asserted the related claims instead of the Wertheim heirs. The authority saw the JCC as the legitimate legal successor to the Wertheim family, who had sold their shares in the group in 1938 because of their Nazi persecution. The Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (BADV) - successor to the "Federal Office open for regulating property issues" (BAROV) - spoke in August 2006, the JCC, which involved the heirs of success, and the ownership of the Lenne Triangle on Potsdamer Platz to .

Further claims are made in Poland , the Czech Republic and Slovakia .

Through contract negotiations on the JCC's pension program, the conference achieved in autumn 2007 that a further 250 million euros would be transferred from the Federal Ministry of Finance over ten years , with the number of recipients expanding from 73,000 to 79,000 people. The claims of other groups remain unsatisfied: persons from military labor battalions and non-German concentration camps; People detained for less than six months; People who stayed in so-called “open ghettos”; People who exceed certain income limits; as well as people in Western Europe who have so far received little compensation.

criticism

The organization is particularly criticized by the American political scientist Norman Finkelstein . He said the JCC had artificially inflated the number of possible survivors; The support from the JCC is aimed primarily at Jews in Israel and the USA, especially Eastern European Jews are being fobbed off with unhelpful alibi programs; Restitution claims were often filed prematurely or without a legal basis, and the heirs who were still alive would only benefit from marginal compensation, if at all ( Die Holocaust-Industrie , 2000). The JCC has rejected this criticism.

In the course of 2008/2009, in the course of the Israeli documentary The Payment Morale by Guy Meroz and Orna Vilnai Federbusch, more and more critical voices were heard, calling for greater transparency on the part of the JCC and pointing out the inadequate compensation for Nazi victims in Eastern Europe.

In May 2017, residents of the Groß Gaglow district of Cottbus defended themselves against claims of the conference regarding their properties with a rally. Jews were expelled from there in 1935.

Cases of fraud

In 2010 it became known that after two years of investigative work, the New York federal prosecutor had a total of 17 suspects arrested, including six members of the Claims Conference, who are accused of having paid out large-scale funds from the German federal government to unauthorized persons. There are more than 5,500 cases of unfounded victim recognition and a total of $ 42 million in compensation payments. The employees are accused of having participated in the manipulation of numerous CVs, which was what made the embezzlement possible. The incident became known after JCC employees noticed that “within a short time two alleged Nazi persecuted persons had made claims for compensation with similar biographies”. The JCC management then started an internal investigation and switched on the public prosecutor's office and the FBI Federal Police . As a result, in 2013 an eight-year prison sentence was pronounced against the director of the Article 2 Fund, Semen Domnitser , in New York .

Member organizations

See also

literature

  • Norman G. Finkelstein : Die Holocaust-Industrie Piper, Munich 2001 ISBN 3-492-04316-X (criticism of JCC).
  • Rolf Surmann (Ed.): The Finkelstein Alibi. “Holocaust Industry” and Tätergesellschaft Papyrossa, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89438-217-1 (Arguments per JCC. Wording of the protocol agreement JCC-BRD of September 1952).
  • Claims Conference: Luxembourg Agreement. 50 years of compensation for Nazi injustice Ed. Karl Brozik & Konrad Matschke. Societäts, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-7973-0900-7 .
  • Marilyn Henry: Confronting the Perpetrators. A History of the Claims Conference (Engl.) Middlesex: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2006 ISBN 0-85303-628-4 (Paperback: other ISBN) Ext. Presentation by the author: Structure 11/2006 pp. 6–11.
  • Ronald W. Zweig: German reparations and the Jewish world. A history of the claims conference (engl.) 2nd ed. Cass, London & Portland 2001, ISBN 0-7146-5152-4 (1st ed. 1987).
  • Angelika Timm : Is it all for nothing? Negotiations between the CC and the GDR about “reparation” and compensation. Helle Panke, Berlin 1996 (series: Hefte zur DDR-Geschichte, 32 ).
  • Andreas Mink: Working up. Compensation for forced labor . Never again "Munich". In: Aufbau 3/2007, pp. 20–23 (reference to a further, longer elaboration: Not another “ Munich ”. The Czech Delegation in the German slave labor negotiations of 1998–2001 as experienced by a German reporter for a Jewish paper in New York. )
  • Jürgen Lillteicher : Claims Conference. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 1: A-Cl. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02501-2 , pp. 511-514.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ § 1 Paragraph 6 Property Act
  2. ↑ § 2 Property Act
  3. ↑ BVerwG, decision of October 13, 2005 - 7 B 47.05 - (ECLI: DE: BVerwG: 2005: 131005B7B47.05.0); Expropriation by law for the confiscation of assets of war criminals and Nazi activists of February 8, 1949 in connection with the publication of the so-called "List 3"
  4. ↑ Karstadt loses to Wertheim heirs . In: FAZ No. 54 . March 5, 2005.
  5. ↑ KarstadtQuelle reaches an agreement with Wertheim heirs - WiWo, March 30, 2007
  6. ↑ JCC: In Breakthrough, Claims Conference Secures $ 250 Million from Germany for Additional 6,000 Holocaust Survivors Worldwide ( Memento of the original dated August 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.claimscon.org
  7. ↑ The Seventh Million - The Situation of Holocaust Survivors in Israel Jüdische Zeitung, April 2008 ( Memento from June 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Jüdische Zeitung , January 2009  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.jzeit.de  
  9. ^ Daniel Schauff: Cottbusers defend themselves against Jewish demands. Retrieved July 18, 2018 .
  10. ↑ RTT News , November 2010
  11. ↑ Deutsche Welle November 10, 2010  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.dw-world.de  
  12. ↑ World November 10, 2010
  13. ↑ [1]