Posted on April 19, 2015
The Jewish newspaper, The Forward, has reported that in December of last year Matthias Hass, Germany’s Minister of Finance, sent a letter to the Jewish Claims Conference (CC), the private organization that administers and distributes the money paid by Germany as holocaust reparations.
In that letter, Hass reportedly stresses a “requirement” of Germany that the CC “compensate for the financial damage arising from the cases of fraud.” The word “fraud” here is not a reference to the holocaust itself (we are, after all, talking about the German government), but a financial scandal that came to light in 2009 when it was reported that the CC had paid out some $57 million in fraudulent claims to putative, would-be holocaust survivors.
The racket reportedly began as far back as 1993, and the fraudulent claims were processed and approved with the full knowledge of certain CC officials, a number of whom have since been convicted or have pled guilty.
But what isn’t clear is whether compensation has been made for the fraudulent compensation clams, if that’s not too mangled a way of putting it. Fifty-seven million dollars, of course, is a lot of money.
The full article can be accessed here. The Forward reports that the German Finance Ministry has not responded to inquiries on the matter (naturally!), but an official with the CC did confirm receipt of the letter.
At any rate, below is an article I wrote back in 2012 discussing the scandal as well as holocaust reparations in general and the history of the CC–how the organization got started as well as profiles of its leading officials and past statements attributed to them.
And directly beneath that is a related article I posted at the same time–on the question of whether Israel, under precisely the same legal framework imposed upon Germany following World War II, should now be obliged to pay reparations to the Palestinians.
Swindler’s List: A Brief Look at the Holocaust Reparations Racket
By Richard Edmondson
After the conclusion of World War II did the Germans pay reparations of some sort to the Jews?
A lot of people would probably assume that, yes, some sort of redress did occur, but that whatever it was, most likely was paid out in one, two, three, or perhaps four lump sum payments, and that the matter was over, settled, and done with, oh, say maybe five years after the war, or ten at most. Few people—or at any rate few who aren’t Jewish, or who don’t make a regular habit of reading the Jewish press—would guess that today, fully 67 years after the war, Germany continues to pay reparations to Jews, or that the benefits doled out keep going up every year, rather than down. But this is indeed the case.
In July of 2012 observances were held marking the 60th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement. The event took place in Washington D.C., with ceremonies held at the Israeli Embassy, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Hart Senate Office Building. So what, you may ask, is the Luxembourg Agreement?
Forcing the Germans to Pay Up
Formally known as the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany,Luxembourg is an agreement signed on September 10, 1952 following lengthy negotiations between an ad hoc committee of Jews representing various Jewish organizations, including the World Jewish Congress; officials from the new state of Israel; and representatives of the West German government, including the country’s then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The upshot of the accord was that West Germany was to make restitution, partly in the form of large payments to Israel, on behalf of Jews who had suffered during the Nazi era. The agreement is discussed at some length in an article by Mark Weber, who tells us the West Germans basically had little choice in the matter, and who also supplies us with a rather illuminating quote from Adenauer’s memoirs:
It was clear to me that, if the negotiations with the Jews failed, the negotiations at the London Debt Conference [which were going on at the same time] would also run aground, because Jewish banking circles would exert an influence upon the course of the London Debt Conference which should not be under-estimated. On the other hand it was self-evident that a failure of the London Debt Conference would bring about a failure of the negotiations with the Jews. If the German economy was to achieve a good credit standing and become strong again, the London Conference would have to be ended successfully. Only then would our economy develop in a way that would make the payments to Israel and the Jewish organizations possible. See 5.
More on the London Debt Conference can be found in a summary here, but basically it was an agreement on how German debts, mainly from the period between the two world wars, would be settled with a number of creditor nations, including the US, Britain, and France. Weber goes on to relate (emphases added):
Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Claims Conference, warned of a worldwide campaign against Germany if the Bonn officials did not meet the Zionist demands: “The non-violent reaction of the whole world, supported by wide circles of non-Jews, who have deep sympathy with the martyrdom of the Jewish people during the Nazi period, would be irresistible and completely justified.” See 6. The London Jewish Observerwas more blunt: “The whole material weight of world Jewry will be mobilized for an economic war against Germany, if Bonn’s offer of reparations remains unsatisfactory.” See 7.
Goldman and the other Jews who participated in the negotiations collectively came to be known as The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or simply the Claims Conference (CC). As a result of the agreement, the CC was installed, not only as the representative of world Jewry, but also essentially almost as an arbiter, procuring payments from West Germany on the basis of claims filed by individual Holocaust survivors. And here it should be strongly emphasized that German funds have gone out not just to the Jewish state, but also to Jewish individuals as well. According to one source, more than $60 billion has been paid out in the past 60 years to some 500,000 purported Holocaust survivors living in 87 different countries.
The claims process works like this: the money is handed over by Germany to the CC, which in turn will allocate it into different funds that it oversees, with each fund earmarked for a specific purpose. There is, for instance, an Article 2 Fund, which provides lifetime pensions for anyone held in a concentration camp, ghetto, or who worked on a forced labor battalion. Also eligible for an Article 2 pension would be those who were only “forced to go into hiding,” as Wikipedia puts it. And then we have a Hardship Fund, which provides one-time payments for those Jews who emigrated to the West from Soviet-bloc countries, and a Holocaust Victims Compensation Fund, providing one-time payments to emigrants from the former Soviet Union itself. The compensation amounts have increased over the years. Currently the Article 2 pensions are set at 300 euros a month, while payments from the Hardship Fund are 2,556 euros each, and the Holocaust Victims Compensation Fund 1,900 euros each.
In addition there is also a Central and Eastern European Fund, which, like Article 2, allocates monthly pensions, only these specifically are provided for Jewish survivors who, rather than emigrating to the West, remained in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. These pensions are currently set at 260 euros per month, however, as of Jan. 1, 2013, they will increase to 300 euros a month, making them equal to the Article 2 pensions.
Different funds have different eligibility requirements. For instance, a person may qualify for the Hardship Fund if he/she underwent i) deprivation of liberty; ii) flight from the Nazi regime; iii) “restriction of liberty” as defined under BEG, a German restitution law passed in the 1950s; iv) restriction of movement such as having to observe a curfew, as well as compulsory registration with limitation of residence, or wearing the star of David; or if they v) resided in Leningrad at some time between September 1941 and January 1944, or fled from there during the same period. According to the Claims Conference website, the CC has approved 355,146 claimants and paid out $971 million under the Hardship Fund. Figures are also available for certain of the other funds: under the Article 2 fund, for instance, 85,608 applicants have been approved with a total payout of $3.3 billion; and for the Central and Eastern European Fund—24,307 applicants and $479 million . No figures seem to be available for the Holocaust Victim Compensation Fund, or for a new fund, known as the Orphans Fund, set up as of January 1 this year, The latter offers a one-time payment of 1,900 euros to those born 1928 or later who “were orphaned due to Nazi persecution” with both parents having been killed.
As mentioned above, the Israeli government has also been a recipient of huge piles of money (and goods) at the expense of German taxpayers (in fact, between largess from the taxpayers of Germany, as well as those in the U.S., the Zionist state is doing rather superbly for itself), and here again Weber provides some quotes that are quite instructive. One of these is from Goldman’s autobiography:
What the Luxembourg Agreement meant to Israel is for the historians of the young state to determine. That the goods Israel received from Germany were a decisive economic factor in its development is beyond doubt. I do not know what economic dangers might have threatened Israel at critical moments if it had not been for German supplies. Railways and telephones, dock installations and irrigation plants, whole areas of industry and agriculture, would not be where they are today without the reparations from Germany. And hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims of Nazism have received considerable sums under the law of restitution. See 11.
The second quote is also from Goldman, though taken from a 1976 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur:
Without the German reparations, the State of Israel would not have the half of its present infrastructure: every train in Israel is German, the ships are German, as well as the electricity, a large part of the industry … without mentioning the individual pensions paid to the survivors … In certain years, the amount of money received by Israel from Germany exceeds the total amount of money collected from international Jewry-two or three times as much. See 12.
Goldman of course played a key role in negotiating the Luxembourg Agreement, so maybe he’s only overly-touting his own achievements. But at this point Weber also supplies us with a quote from Jewish historian Walter Laqueur:
The ships laden with German capital goods began to call at Haifa regularly and unfailingly, becoming an important — ultimately a decisive — factor in the building up of the country. Today [1965] the Israeli fleet is almost entirely “made in Germany,” as are its modern railway equipment, the big steel foundry near Acre, and many other enterprises. During the 50’s and early 60’s about one-third of investment goods imported into Israel came from Germany … In addition to all this, many individual Israelis received restitution privately. See 13.
Weber then adds his own comment:
It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the program: the five power plants built and installed by West Germany between 1953 and 1956 quadrupled Israel’s electric-power-generating capacity. West Germans laid 280 kilometers of giant pipelines (2.25 and 2.5 meters in diameter) for the irrigation of the Negev (which certainly helped to “make the desert bloom”). The Zionist state acquired 65 German- built ships, including four passenger vessels. See 14.
Massive Fraud and Exorbitant Salaries
Over the years the CC has been touched by controversies and scandals, but perhaps nothing like what erupted in late 2009, when it was discovered that colossal amounts of money had been paid out in fraudulent claims made by alleged “survivors” of German war crimes. One Jewish news service referred to it as “massive fraud,” an episode that potentially could “sully the whole Jewish effort to recoup compensation for Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis.”
In a story posted in July, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that so far about $4.3 million has been recovered from the fraud, and that an additional $3.3 million is scheduled to be returned in installment payments. Well that’s nice. But out of a total of how much? In other words, how much has been bilked altogether? No one seems to know for sure, but it is at least $57 million, and perhaps higher. Even the directors of the CC don’t seem to know.
“Never in the six-decade history of the organization had theft of this scale ever been discovered,” reported the JTA (emphasis added).
What is certain is that the operation involved CC employees and that the money looted came out of the Article 2 and Hardship Funds. Apparently a group of “corrupt Russian-speaking employees of the Claims Conference” (as the JTA refers to them) hired “recruiters” to go around the Russian-speaking community in New York and sign up all comers for Holocaust reparations payments. Whether the applicants were even old enough to have been survivors mattered little as long as they were close enough to pass. Forged or altered documents such as birth certificates, passports, and other identifying materials, were submitted, along with the fraudulent applications, while employee accomplices within the CC gave quick approval to the claims. Some of these employees received as much as $1000 per applicant—while the recruiters of course got a cut too.
So far 31 people have been arrested in the case, and the first sentence was handed down a year ago—to one of the recruiters, Polina Anoshina, who enlisted 30 people for the scheme. Her efforts resulted in the pay out of about $105,000 in fraudulent claims, of which she herself netted approximately $9,000. Her lawyer called her “a very small part of a very large wheel.”
Also interesting to note is that estimates of the total amount stolen have gone steadily upward with the passage of time. In December of 2009, roughly a month after the irregularities were discovered, the figure was put at $5 million. By February of 2010 this had risen to $7 million, and in November of 2010 to $42 million. Today, as I said, the number stands at $57 million, although officials acknowledge it could rise even higher. All of this, keep in mind, has been paid for by the German taxpayers.
But as I say, this isn’t the only controversy the CC has found itself in. The issue of survivor claims was also examined in the 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry, by Norman Finkelstein, who discusses how the number of Holocaust survivors has been exaggerated, and who also takes to task the World Jewish Congress for its legal campaign to extort reparations payments from Swiss banks.
And then came the 2006 revelations about exorbitant salaries and lavish expense accounts enjoyed by CC employees, including its then-President Israel Singer. It was a discovery that came at a time when the CC was under heavy fire for giving large sums of money to Jewish organizations while providing only minimal assistance to presumably genuine Holocaust survivors.
IRS reports show that there are 100 employees of the Claims Conference who enjoy salaries of close to 6.9 million dollars. Add to this the lavish spending of money which could otherwise be used to save Holocaust survivors from becoming destitute: The heads of the Claims Conference enjoy many benefits, including first class travel around the world, deluxe hotel accommodation and dining at fancy restaurants.
The above is found in a December 2006 story posted at the Israeli website Ynet, entitled “Where Did the Shoah Money Go?”. The story informs us the CC’s management expenses were reaching “tens of millions of dollars each year” while at the same time individual survivors such as “N”—quoted in the story—were in desperate need of additional funds. “I live in an Amidar apartment, spend thousands of shekels on medication and I have nothing to eat,” said “N.” “I telephoned organizations who are supposed to help Holocaust victims and the Claims Conference and asked for some help from, but they waved me off.”
The story found that the CC was distributing some $90 million a year, but that a substantial amount of this was going to Jewish organizations rather than individuals in need. “In reality, not enough money actually reaches the survivors.” The Israeli Hasidic group Gur Hasidim and the Jewish Agency are identified as receiving CC funding, along with “an American ambulance organization” and “certain hospitals in Israel,” but apparently these were only a small number of the total.
At the time the scandal broke, Israel Singer, in addition to heading the CC, was also serving as secretary general of the World Jewish Congress. In January of that year Eliot Spitzer, then New York State Attorney General, issued a damning report on how money was being handled by the WJC, including apparent financial irregularities “amounting to millions of dollars,” according to Ynet. These included the “circular transfers” of some $1.2 million from the accounts of the WJC in New York to a bank account in Geneva, then on to an account in England, and finally ending up in an account held by a private company called Solar.
Spitzer revealed the use of money by Singer for personal purposes. In his report, he describes, for example, how Singer managed to accumulate more than 450,000 points on his credit cards. Singer held several credit cards, including the exclusive black card of American Express, “Centurion”, which is restricted to only the rich and famous. This magnificent card gives its holder unlimited credit and the cost of holding such a card is thousands of dollars a year. In total, according to Spitzer’s assessment, Singer withdrew in cash approximately USD 671,000 to disburse on overseas trips (see WJC response below).
For example, in 2003, he submitted to the WJC, expense accounts amounting to USD 431,129 and in 2004, in the amount of USD 261,294. A breakdown of Singer’s movements show that he flew to almost the entire world, sometimes together with his wife. For example, for two tickets to Germany, he paid (at the expense of the WJC, of course) USD 24,000. On the same day in September 2003, he paid an additional USD 1,000 for another flight. Six days later, his flight to Europe cost USD 12,000 and a week later, he paid EL AL USD 8,500. This was all paid by the WJC.
The total of all Singer’s flights in 2003 was approximately USD 232,000 and the cost of his hotel accommodation amounted to approximately USD 173,000. In 2004, he really cut back and the cost of his flights and accommodation came to approximately USD 200,000.
Singer lives in New York, but this did not inhibit him from staying at deluxe hotels in the Big Apple, on which he spent in 2003 approximately USD 60,000 of WJC funds. In that year, he also stayed in deluxe hotels in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, London – as well as in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In addition, he withdrew more than USD 134,000 in cash from the WJC account in New York and claimed before the Attorney General that he used the money for travel purposes.
Apparently Singer’s travel expenses were paid for by the WJC rather than the CC, at least if we go by the statement of CC spokesperson Renana Levin:
“According to the procedures of the Claims Conference, the role of the President of the Claims Conference is to deal with foreign policy and he does not deal with internal financial affairs of the organization,” Levin said. “I want to stress that the Claims Conference did not finance any of the travels made by Israel Singer on its behalf.”
Levin was also asked why the CC was paying out so much money to Jewish organizations rather than individual survivors:
“The Claims Conference allocates budgets for organizations and institutions who provide social services to Jews persecuted by the Nazis. The organization also allocates funds to organizations and institutions which work in education, documentation and research of the Holocaust.
“Over the years, money was allocated to “Bet Yaacov” and the seminar of Hasidut Gur to train educators to teach the Holocaust to Haredi communities.
“The allocation to the ‘March of the Living’ amutah is defined by the Conference as an Israeli allocation, because all the participants, who come from all over the world, visit Israel at the end of the trip. In addition, the Conference funds scholarships of youth with limited means to participate in the March.”
So German reparations money is being allocated to “teach the Holocaust” to Haredi Jews? Do Haredi Jews need to learn something additional about the Holocaust that isn’t already taught in public schools? Perhaps. The March of the Living, according to Wikipedia, is “an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust.” The two week event, which includes a march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, ostensibly benefits the students by “strengthening their sense of Jewish identity.” The Wikipedia article adds:
After spending a week in Poland visiting other sites of Nazi Germany’s persecution and former sites of Jewish life and culture, many of the participants in the March also travel on to Israel where they observe Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Remembrance Day) and celebrate Yom Haatzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day).
CC grants to the March of the Living began in 1998, and by 2007 had totaled more than $7.4 million, while the “education program’s” annual budget stood at $4.2 million in 2005. One would perhaps not be too surprised, then, that, like the CC and WJC, the MOL has found itself under scrutiny for financial improprieties as well.
In April of 2007, the Jewish Week reported that the MOL paid $709,000 to Curtis Hoxter, a Manhattan public relations consultant, for work that neither he nor the MOL were able to adequately explain.
March of the Living employed Hoxter from 2003 through 2005 at the urging of Israeli Finance Minister Avraham Hirchson, who founded the organization. Hirchson is currently on leave from his cabinet post due to a police investigation into allegations that he embezzled millions of dollars in funds from a union confederation and a health care fund.
The story identified Hoxter as “a close and longtime associate of Claims Conference President Israel Singer,” and thus maybe not surprisingly the MOL was also found to have been getting funding from the WJC—specifically $657,000 between 2001 and 2003.
Furthermore, the outlays were not reported on the WJC’s tax forms, the report stated.
The CC seems at this point to have gone into damage control mode, announcing it would conduct an “in-depth audit” of the MOL, but significantly the audit was to cover only those “procedures of March of the Living that are currently in place,” meaning the year 2007. Specifically excluded from the focus were to be any improprieties that may have taken place from 2003-2005, the period Hoxter was employed. But then, apparently responding to criticism, the CC reversed course and announced that it would examine the earlier years in question after all—however, by 2009 the audit still had not been completed.
Singer Takes a Bow
Singer served as secretary general of the WJC from 1986-2001, but stepped down from this position following allegations of financial irregularities, even though, as Ynet notes, there were no criminal findings. And while he resigned his position as top executive officer, he did not leave the WJC altogether. Far from it. Instead he became the chairman of the organization’s Governing Board “after it was made clear that he would not deal with financial affairs.” So why was Singer allowed to remain in a leadership position, even though he had been suspected of financial mismanagement? The answer seems to be that he got results.
A 2003 article entitled “Restitution: The Second Round,” is quite telling on this count. The article is posted at the website of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and includes lengthy excerpts of an interview with Singer. The words “The Second Round” refer to efforts by international Jewish organizations, beginning in the early 1990s, to extract additional restitution monies on behalf of purported Holocaust survivors. The feeling seems to have been that while the Luxembourg Agreement was nice, more penance was needed, and it shouldn’t be just Germany alone; other countries should be forced to pay up as well. These additional countries included Norway, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland; also the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and so the former East bloc countries were targeted too. Throughout the interview, Singer goes skipping from country to country, describing his mostly successful efforts at pressuring governments, as well as private banks, into coughing up reparations payments.
On Norway:
“In that year we chose Norway as our first target among the occupied countries. When we started complaining about the Norwegian government’s behavior, Michael Melchior, the country’s chief rabbi, told us more about what had happened during the rule of the Quisling government and after the war.
“We could also have fixed the Netherlands as our first target. We wanted, however, to start with a nation where we were reasonably sure we would win. We thus chose Norway not for moral or justice reasons, but strategic ones. It was a guilty country with a small number of Jews.
“As far as money was concerned, the problem there was easily manageable. Norway is rich and has abundant oil reserves. Whatever payment the Norwegians were to make to the Jewish community or to individuals would not affect their well-being. Paying out some money to Holocaust survivors would not mean individual Norwegians would have to make sacrifices. On the other hand, the result would be limited as it would not really change the lives of the Jews who received the funds….
“Everyone was aware that among Ukrainians and Lithuanians there were many anti-Semites. Norway however had maintained its gentle image, despite severe discrimination against its surviving Jews after the Holocaust.”
The East bloc:
“When I became secretary-general in 1985, I visited Hungary and then other eastern European countries, including Russia. The WJC had initiated negotiations with these countries in order to let the Jews there freely emigrate. In the process we also met government-appointed Jewish leaders who opposed these efforts. The old Jews I saw in the synagogues – some of them literally starving – were afraid to talk to us. During the Holocaust these people had either been in concentration camps, slave labor camps, or in hiding. They did not receive any restitution from Germany. Many of them have since died.
“In the mid-eighties I spoke to the East German Prime Minister Erich Honecker. I asked him to accept joint responsibility for what Germany had done to the Jews in the Holocaust. At first he refused. Thereafter, he began negotiating with us, eyeing a kind of most favored nation status with the U.S. similar to the one already enjoyed by Romania. He offered an initial hundred million dollar payment…
“After the fall of communism, the eastern European countries wanted to be acceptable to the West. They dealt with many problems except one: their obligation to restitute the property stolen from millions of Jews. The financial side of our claims was important, yet secondary to the historical one. There were so many scandals attached to the restitution process in these countries that would cause much publicity.
“In 1992 the WJC and the Jewish Agency – together with seven other Jewish organizations – created the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO). Its aim was to negotiate on Jewish war claims with eastern European countries; they were not part of the Claims Conference’s mandate which was specifically limited to Germany and Austria. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote the WJRO a letter naming it Israel’s representative in these negotiations.”
Of course for all of these endeavors to be successful, the idea of Jewish victimization had to be reinforced and heavily promoted. Singer claimed new historical research showed that “27,600 trainloads of Jewish property” were stolen by the Germans. “No one was reimbursed for these thefts, but the principle of theft was established,” he insisted.
On Austria:
“Among Israeli Prime Ministers, Binyamin Netanyahu was probably the best partner we had. Earlier, in the 1980s, when he was Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, he had participated in the unmasking of the war past of former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim [who was at that time president of Austria]. Since Ehud Barak also supported us, we have had almost continuous backing from Israeli prime ministers…
“Things started moving in many countries. To our surprise, in 1997 the British Government called a conference in London on looted gold. Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who was extremely anti-Israel, initiated this conference because he considered it part of ‘a foreign policy with a moral face.’ His behavior followed a classic pattern: one is anti-Israel and then tries to compensate for that by being good for Diaspora Jews. French President Jacques Chirac’s attitude is another typical example of such behavior.
“After so many years, news was emerging on Jewish properties in Poland and restitution issues re-surfaced in Germany. From my personal viewpoint, the CEF agreement with the Germans is the most significant moral victory. This body, the Central European Foundation of Repair to European Jews, now makes life pensions available to 92,000 East European Jews. The Austrians suddenly were willing to make new payments because it was bad publicity for them when we made agreements with the Germans at the same time stressing how horribly the Austrians behaved.
Sweden:
“Over the years, an enormous momentum built up. The Swedes, for instance, were trying to make various settlements with us and ultimately took the initiative for the January 2000 Stockholm Conference on Holocaust Education. We had now finally reached critical mass. The restitution process became uncontrollable and rather chaotic. Several countries tried to make private deals by approaching various Jewish organizations and making donations to them.
But Singer’s biggest triumph may have been in Switzerland, where he managed to squeeze some $1. 25 billion out of certain of the nation’s banks:
“The historical research which accompanied the restitution process informed the world of many injustices about which even Jewish leaders knew very little. They had been studied somewhat in the past, but had since been forgotten. This led to the U.S. investigations of the stolen gold the Germans sent to neutral countries in 1997. Simultaneously we became aware of the issue of heirless property in Eastern Europe. We also familiarized ourselves with the subject of the dormant Swiss bank accounts as well as the insurance policies which had not been paid. The revelations in one country impacted on another and vice versa.”…
“Some people had been well aware – long before the WJC – of the dormant Swiss accounts and the banks’ resistance to help heirs reclaim money due to them. Paul Erdman – an author who had many other grievances against the Swiss banks – wrote a novel called The Swiss Account. It was only around 1994 that we discovered that there was much official documentation available on the heirless and other accounts.
“Allen Dulles had been the American consul during the War in the Swiss capital Bern, where he spied on money transfers from Germany to Switzerland. Later, in his autobiography he mentioned a project initiated in 1944, called ‘Safehaven.’ It was part of economic warfare against the Axis and aimed at blocking the transfer of German assets to neutral countries.
“When Dulles became the head of the CIA in 1953, he attempted to blot out all information about this project. When we started investigating we learned about Safehaven’s existence from the autobiography he wrote many years later. We could access a multitude of documents concerning it under the Freedom of Information Act.”
A visit today to the official Swiss Banks Settlement website, shows that claims filed are subdivided into certain classes. For instance, persons could qualify for payments under the “Refugee Class” if they “were denied entry into or expelled from Switzerland, or admitted into Switzerland but abused or mistreated.” There is also a “Slave Labor Class I” that applies to “those claimants who performed slave labor for German and other companies which may have transacted their profits through Swiss entities.” The website also informs us that the claimants were not limited to Jews, but also included Roma, Jehovah’s Witness, homosexual, or disabled claimants.
This targeting of Swiss banks is also discussed by Norman Finkelstein in his book The Holocaust Industry. In an article here, Finkelstein calls the case against Switzerland “dubious at best,” yet as he relates, a number of US political leaders threw their weight behind the effort to force the Swiss to pay up:
The Swiss stood accused of directly and indirectly profiting from the Nazi persecution of Jews. Acting at Israel’s behest, the World Jewish Restitution Organization mobilized officials at the federal, state and local levels in the United States to press Switzerland for Holocaust compensation. A senior official in the Clinton administration, Stuart Eizenstat, conscripted twelve federal agencies for this initiative. A major international conference was convened in London. The House and Senate banking committees held multiple hearings. Class action lawsuits against Switzerland were filed in American courts. State and local legislatures across the United States implemented economic boycotts.
If the Holocaust reparations game has become in essence a racket, the U.S. very much plays the role of enforcer. And this cuts across both Democrats and Republicans. In the article at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Singer talks about how Bill Clinton and then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato were recruited to the cause:
“Thereafter, things started changing mainly because we managed to get two major players involved. On the same day, we went to the Republican Senator of New York, Alfonse D’Amato and President Clinton. Their relationship was extremely unpleasant because as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, D’Amato was investigating Clinton on the Whitewater affair.
“Both sought re-election, yet had severe problems: the President was under investigation and D’Amato was not showing visible success. Clinton – despite his extreme dislike of D’Amato – was willing to collaborate with him on the restitution issue. D’Amato who has a huge Jewish constituency, said that the Jewish case was a just one and there weren’t many Swiss voters in the United States anyhow.”
Singer doubts whether the Bush administration would have been similarly forthcoming, as it is so strongly supportive of Israel. “You always see that administrations will back you on relatively marginal issues if they cannot do so on central ones. The reverse is also true because once they are supportive on critically important matters, they don’t have to bother much about other ones. The one exception was the struggle for Soviet Jewry where all administrations have been supportive of the Jews, even if they were lukewarm on Israel.”
Singer took an old woman to see D’Amato. She told him her father had an account in Switzerland and she was turned away when she had gone to inquire about it in 1946. They had wanted her father’s death certificate from Auschwitz. D’Amato then related the story on television.
“We first approached Clinton through Hillary. When she heard we were working with D’Amato, she said, ‘It’s like Haman and Mordechai working together.’ She knew her Bible better than the Jews and she could have thus been seen as Queen Esther. The President said, ‘You have my full presidential support.'”
As Finkelstein noted (see above), class action lawsuits were filed in U.S. courts. The question of cou