31 January 2007
In what is one of the final restitution battles for Shoah victims, a US district court in New York is to hold a hearing on objections raised by six Holocaust survivors seeking to block a class action settlement by the Italian insurance company Generali. If Generali's settlement for Shoah survivors and their heirs is approved, it will close the book for thousands of people who claim they might be beneficiaries. If the court stops it, others may pursue larger compensation packages, although with no guarantee of success.
One of the plaintiffs, Alex Moskovic, argues that the long-closed archive of Red Cross' International Tracing Service in the German town of Bad Arolsen may contain evidence of his family's insurance policies to support his claims. Last May, an 11-nation committee overseeing the archive, run by the agreed to open the vast collection of files to research. That decision requires ratification, however, and may take years before coming into force. For years, Generali refused to pay claims for pre-war insurance policies for which it said it no longer carried liability, he said.
Robert Swift, a Philadelphia lawyer who negotiated the class-action settlement with Generali, says there is no reason to believe insurance documents are stored at Bad Arolsen. "We really don't think there's going to be any information in there with regard to policies issued by Generali," he told AP. "It wasn't the nature of those archives. It's basically operational documents that were maintained at the concentration camps." Reto Meister, director of the International Tracing Service, said the archive has "no collection of documents that we received from private European insurance companies." However, he said, copies of insurance policies could exist in the files of individuals, but they would have to be searched name by name. The index registers the names of 17.5 million people murdered or persecuted by Hitler's regime.
The Nazis seized insurance policies along with the assets of Jews and other oppressed groups and cashed in many of them. After the war, insurance companies rejected claims by survivors or their heirs who lacked proof of valid outstanding policies. Meister said the Bad Arolsen archive has arrest records that list people whose property and assets were confiscated, but the lists give no details of what was seized. Insurance companies argue policyholders were compensated when Germany negotiated restitution payments with the World Jewish Congress in the 1950s and say their own assets supporting Holocaust-era policies were confiscated by communist governments in Eastern Europe.
Ten years ago, Holocaust survivors filed a class action suit against the big European insurers that have affiliates in the United States, claiming the companies wrongly withheld payment on policies on which they earned bountiful profits. The lawsuit was put on hold in 1998 when the companies agreed to create the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims to deal with unpaid claims and find a formula to put a value on policies issued as early as 1920. Headed by Lawrence Eagleburger, a former US secretary of State, the commission received more than 91,000 claims before its March 2004, deadline. More than half of them were thrown out. Of the rest, the commission's website says it paid US$ 234 million to nearly 16,800 people as of October. Some 27,000 others were told their claims could not immediately be validated, but were given US$ 1,000 each from a "humanitarian fund." Among the latter group was Moskovic, who said he accepted a US$ 1,000 check in 2004 on the understanding that Generali was continuing to research his claim. But he heard no more from the international commission or the company.
