Saul Kagan, a founder and the longtime executive director of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, died Saturday at age 91. Together with then World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann, who later served as head of the new organization, Kagan helped to set up the Claims Conference in 1951. It became the main vehicle for negotiating with Germany and Austria over restitution and compensation payments for Holocaust survivors.
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder said Kagan had "devoted his life to providing a measure of reparations and justice to the survivors of the Holocaust. As executive vice-president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, he was the guiding spirit and wise, strategic force throughout over 60 years of successful negotiations that helped ease the physical plight of survivors across the globe. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Eleanor, Julia and Saul's entire extended family. May they be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem."
The decades-long relationship of the Claims Conference and the WJC was one of the underpinnings for the significant restitution landmarks of the post-war era, including the 1980 establishment of the Hardship Fund, which has issued one-time payments victims of Nazism, and the 1990 Article 2 pension program, which paid Nazi victims who had not received compensation from earlier agreements.
The Claims Conference credited Kagan with securing tens of billions of dollars in restitution payments during his 47 years at the helm of the organization. “Saul always made his work about the mission and never about himself,” the organization said in a statement. “He was the very embodiment of humility, decency, integrity and wisdom.”
Kagan was born in Vilnius, Lithuania. He fled the country in 1940 on a journey that took him to Vladivostok and Japan before reaching Hawaii. He eventually made his way to New York. His father survived the war in the Soviet Union, but his mother, brother and grandparents were killed by the Nazis.
Kagan found himself back in Europe before the war’s end as an intelligence officer in the US. Air Force. After the war Kagan, who spoke six languages, coordinated property restitution in Germany for the US Army. He was involved in the creation of US government military order No. 59, which allowed Holocaust survivors and victims’ families to file claims for property confiscated by the Nazis.
In 1952, Kagan played a key role in the landmark Luxembourg Agreements, when representatives of Israel, Germany and the newly created Claims Conference sat down to hammer out a reparations agreement for the crimes of Nazi Germany.
“There were no handshakes, there was no banter or anything else,” Kagan recalled in a video shown at a July 2012 event marking the 60th anniversary of the Claims Conference, according to the JTA. “We somehow had the feeling that we were not alone in this room. Somehow we felt that the spirits of those who couldn’t be there were there with us.”
