United Restitution Organization

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The United Restitution Organization ( URO ) is an international organization under private law that offers legal assistance and support to those affected when filing an application for the restitution of their property confiscated during the Nazi era and compensation for damage suffered.

history

Since the occupation forces in Germany to a single procedure for the restitution could agree, in 1947 was the American Zone , the Military Government Law no. 59 passed, which two years later in the British Zone , the French zone and the Western sectors of Berlin was taken. With the German Treaty of 1952, the now sovereign Federal Republic of Germany was obliged to pass a corresponding federal law, which was only achieved shortly before the end of the 1953 legislative period due to the resistance of German civil society and its politicians to this “annoying, compulsory exercise prescribed by the victors”. The Federal Compensation Act had to be improved in the next legislative period.

Benjamin Ferencz (1947)
Norman Bentwich (1950)

URO was founded in 1948 under British law in London and has its headquarters there. The initiator was the Council of Jews from Germany. Their sphere of activity was initially limited to the British zone in Germany. Secretary in London was Kurt Alexander, who went to New York City and set up a branch there; he was followed by Hans Reichmann and Fritz Goldschmidt until 1964 . In Great Britain, Leo Baeck , who supported the project, was able to win crown attorney Norman Bentwich as chairman of the URO's supervisory board . The URO set up offices in the countries to which European survivors of the Holocaust emigrated after 1945, as well as in Germany and Austria. As a clientele, support should be given in particular to people who did not have the linguistic or financial means to file a claim for reparation before the German authorities and, if necessary, the courts. The URO also wanted to ensure and ensure that only those legal advisers should represent the interests of the victims who had not actively or approvingly supported the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era, so the majority of German lawyers came for legal advice to the victims of the National Socialism out of the question. The organization was supposed to finance itself with success bonuses from the reparation cases and received donations as start-up support from the Jewish Agency for Palestine , the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Central British Fund for relief and rehabilitation . When the Jewish Claims Conference was founded in 1951, it took over the pre-financing of the URO, for which the Federal Republic of Germany had to provide funds. The actual business, however, was denied from success bonuses for reparation cases, whereby the fees of the URO lawyers amounted to six to ten percent. There were also social tariffs for Israel emigrants and there were also disputes because clients felt that the URO had taken advantage of them.

Since individual German courts questioned the URO legal advisors' power of representation for formal reasons, the British High Commissioner had to issue an ordinance in 1951 whereby special organizations could be authorized to represent and provide legal advice to those involved in the reimbursement procedure. The URO was subsequently the only organization that received this approval. In the American Zone, a Legal Aid Department was established at the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization under the direction of Benjamin Ferencz . When Ferencz returned to the USA in 1957, Kurt May (1896–1992) took over the Frankfurt office. Both organizations worked closely together and in 1955 merged their activities in the Frankfurt Central Office of the URO. In the Federal Republic of Germany branches were set up in Berlin, Munich, Cologne and Hanover. The URO also supported its clients with claims against the Republic of Austria .

The number of clients and claims represented increased enormously, from 65,000 / 121,000 in 1955 to 300,000 clients (claimants) with 450,000 claims in the 1960s. When it was most heavily used in the early 1960s, URO had 29 offices in 15 states and employed over a thousand people, including more than 200 lawyers. Half of the staff working abroad and half in Germany were mainly recruited from former refugees from National Socialist Germany.

Since the applicants often found themselves in need of evidence and the German authorities and courts did nothing to help the applicants, the URO set up a historical and documentary research center. This clarified in special investigations to what extent the ghettoization in the European countries was "caused" by the anti-Semitic politics of the German Reich. Such a German “cause” was a prerequisite for compensation under Section 43 of the Federal Compensation Act. The formulation of the law thus indirectly provided a historical relief for the regimes collaborating with the National Socialists, such as the Vichy government in occupied France or Romania, which was allied with the German Reich . During the URO's investigations into M-Aktion , she was able to locate the files on the furniture that had been deported to Germany. In the face of massive official and judicial opposition, the URO lawyers were able to obtain compensation for the non-German Jews who were imprisoned in the Shanghai ghetto . In response to a URO complaint, the Federal Court of Justice only included the Jews who had fled from western Poland to eastern Poland in its compensation legislation in 1962. The URO financed the only journal in this field of jurisprudence on reparations (RzW) .

According to the benevolent and critical opinion of Walter Schwarz , a lawyer who also deals with reparation issues but does not work in the URO, the bureaucracy in the large organization URO has not got out of hand in its day-to-day work, while on the political level it has been “that of the Federal Republicans enforced by former National Socialists Bureaucracy had to laboriously wrestle every change in the law in favor of the victims ”.

Board members

Fonts (selection)

  • Federal indemnification law = (Bundesentschaedigungsgesetz - BEG) by Germany (West) . 1956
  • M-Action: France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, 1940–1944 . 1958
  • Documents on methods of persecuting Jews abroad. Submitted by the United Restitution Organization . Frankfurt am Main 1959 DNB
  • Persecution of Jews in Hungary. Document collection of the United Restitution Organization . 1959
  • Persecution of Jews in Romania and other south-east European countries during World War II . 1959
  • Documents: on the responsibility of the Reich for the Jewish measures in occupied and unoccupied France, especially in Algeria, Morocco, Tunis . 1959
  • Persecution of Jews in France . 1959
  • Persecution of Jews in Italy, the Italian-Occupied Territories and North Africa: Document Collection . 1962
  • Concerning the concept of the concentration camp as a place of detention within the meaning of Paragraph 31 Paragraph 2, Paragraph 42 Paragraph 2 BEG . 1967
  • Case files of the United Restitution Organization - Los Angeles office case files by United Restitution Organization .
    Consists of approximately 2,166 inactive case files of Jewish Holocaust survivors who claimed restitution for suffering and damage resulting from persecution by the Nazis during the period 1933 to 1945. The cases contain information on life in Nazi occupied areas, conditions in concentration camps, and experiences of displaced persons and survivors during and following the Holocaust. Among the documents are sworn affidavits of witnesses, testimonies of the survivors (claimants), and indemnity claims against the German government.

literature

  • Norman Bentwich: The United Restitution Organization, 1948-1968. The work of restitution and compensation for victims of Nazi oppression . London, Vallentine, Mitchell 1968
  • Hans Günter Hockerts : Lawyers for the persecuted. The United Restitution Organization. In: Ludolf Herbst , Constantin Goschler (ed.): Reparation in the Federal Republic of Germany (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history special volume). Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-54721-6 , pp. 249-271. ( This article online , PDF; 2.9 MB)
  • Christian Pross: Reparation: the guerrilla war against the victims . Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-610-08502-9 .
  • Encyclopaedia Judaica : United Restitution Organization (URO) , Keter, Jerusalem 1971, vol. 15, col. 1567f
  • Constantin Goschler : Guilt and Debt. The policy of reparation for victims of Nazi persecution since 1945. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-868-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William G. Netherland , foreword to Christian Pross: reparation: the guerrilla war against the victims , 1988, p. 9f
  2. ↑ a b c Encyclopaedia Judaica: United Restitution Organization (URO) , Volume 15, Sp. 1567f
  3. ↑ Christian Pross: reparation: the guerrilla war against the victims , 1988, p. 111
  4. ^ A b Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 261
  5. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 253
  6. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 256
  7. ↑ Kurt May at Worldcat
  8. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 260
  9. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 262
  10. ↑ Christian Pross: reparation: the guerrilla war against the victims , 1988, p. 125
  11. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts: Lawyers of the persecuted , 1989, p. 264
  12. ^ Christian Pross: reparation: the guerrilla war against the victims , 1988, p. 23