Legislation backs Holocaust survivors' insurance claims
by Edwin Black

JTA News and Features

Revelations stemming from a voluminous archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, have reignited a grassroots campaign among Shoah survivors and others to recover on Nazi-era insurance claims against companies such as the Italian insurance giant Generali.

Following a series of disclosures that began last year in the Jewish media regarding corporate complicity and other related matters, survivor and second-generation groups have successfully lobbied Congress to seek to supersede agreements brokered by the State Department to settle insurance claims through the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, as well as a variety of Supreme Court rulings that have denied survivors the right to sue to recover on policy claims or share in the profits of the insurance companies.

The groups have used revelations about the unreleased Bad Arolsen records to prove that their insurance claims have been ignored. Key congressional leaders agree and have promised swift action.

The latest round of efforts began last fall, when representatives of survivor groups unsuccessfully demanded that ICHEIC and other authorities postpone the final disposition of claims pending further research in the International Tracing Service files at Bad Arolsen.

The International Tracing Service, or ITS, was established by the Allies after the war to help families trace Holocaust and war victims. The Allies had forwarded millions of captured documents to the facility in Bad Arolsen. The International Red Cross was given custody and control of the archives, which provided information on individuals only to survivors and their families. A typical request for information could take years to process.

In January, Holocaust survivors petitioned federal Judge George Daniels to reject what it characterized as an excessively hasty settlement with Generali because ICHEIC had failed to publish the names of all Jews the company had insured before World War II.

Daniels ultimately finalized the permanent settlement with a limited extension for claims based on discoveries that might emerge from the Bad Arolsen archive.

Having lost in court and convinced that established Jewish organizations would not aid them survivor groups urged Congress to link the campaign to open Bad Arolsen to a separate campaign to recover insurance claims and compel disclosure of the names of those insured.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) introduced the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act of 2007, which seeks to supersede international agreements brokered by the State Department to settle insurance claims through ICHEIC. The bill, which garnered enthusiastic support among both Democrats and Republicans, concludes that ICHEIC, which is due to soon terminate operations, "did not make sufficient effort to investigate" or compile the names of Holocaust-era insureds or the claims due to survivors.

In response, a representative for ICHEIC said the commission had accomplished its mission of identifying and settling unpaid Holocaust-era life insurance claims by processing more than 90,000 claims and distributing more than $306 million to more than 48,000 claimants.

Still, Ros-Lehtinen's bill would require insurers to disclose comprehensive lists of Jewish policyholders from the Nazi era. The legislation also would enable federal litigants to recovery money from insurers, thus overruling ICHEIC's final decision and several Supreme Court rulings that have denied survivors the right to sue or gain access to policyholder names.

The same day that Ros-Lehtinen's bill was introduced, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's subcommittee on Europe, convened a hearing aimed at pressuring the 11 governments that control the ITS to provide promptly the insurance information that has been unavailable for decades. The controlling governments are the United States, France, England, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Israel, Italy and Germany.

Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee sat grim-faced during the hearing, some holding back tears, amid testimony about the Bad Arolsen archives and their impact on survivors' decades-long efforts to recover their insurance claims.

Survivor David Schaecter of Miami, who admitted he was "emotionally overcome," spoke of impoverished survivors in South Florida who cannot afford housing or medicine because their insurance payouts were first denied by the insurance companies and then by ICHEIC.

"I am begging this Congress," he implored the committee members, "to please believe us. We have been wrongly stripped of our pride and property."

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, is responsible for a series of investigations revealing the contents of the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen.

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