German Judge Awards Back Pay to WWII Slave Laborer

In a closely watched decision that could open the door to a great number of new claims from people forced by the Nazis to work as slaves during World War II, a court in Bonn said Wednesday that Germany is liable for the back wages of a Polish-born Jewish woman forced to work at a munitions plant near Auschwitz.

At the same time, the court rejected the claims for back wages filed by 21 other former slave laborers, saying they had already received other forms of compensation from Germany.

The woman named in the decision, Rywka Merin, was forced to work for 55 weeks at the Weichsel Metall Union company, which from 1943 to 1945 made fuses for artillery shells at a factory near Auschwitz in Poland, the Nazis’ most notorious death camp. She received no pay amid cruel conditions.

Judge Heinz Sonnenberger awarded her a single payment of about $8,500 in back wages, plus interest dating to 1992, the year her suit was filed. He based the amount on the standard German weekly wage in the early 1940s.

Reached at her home in suburban Tel Aviv, the 76-year-old Merin said the verdict left her with mixed emotions.

“It is impossible to speak of satisfaction with memories such as ours,” said Merin, the only one of seven siblings to survive the war. “The money is inadequate, and the course of the whole trial was wrong. But these are Germans, and one knows what to expect. It is a shame that not everyone received [compensation].”

If Merin does receive her money, it will mark the first time that Germany has made a direct payment of back wages to any of its millions of former slave laborers.

“The ruling is a success for this plaintiff, and for all other victims in Eastern Europe, because the judgment says that all persons who have not yet been compensated may sue,” said Burkhard Hess, a professor of law at Tuebingen University in southern Germany. Hess specializes in the labyrinthine legal problems stemming from Germany’s wartime use of slave labor.

Hess said that although Wednesday’s ruling could set an important precedent--if it survives expected appeals--it is impossible to estimate how many people might now file claims.

“We have no exact information on the numbers, because this was during the war, and no figures were collected,” he said, adding that most of the people affected live in the former Eastern Bloc, where they had been unable to receive retribution payments from Germany during previous programs to compensate victims of the Nazis.

No one can say with any certainty how many people the Nazis enslaved during World War II, but estimates run as high as 12 million. They included prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates and press-ganged civilians from occupied countries.

The slaves were forced to work at munitions plants, civil factories and on German farms where the men and boys had been drafted into the military.

Although the German government already has paid out compensation packages totaling about $55 billion to victims of the Nazis, most of these payments were made through bilateral agreements with foreign governments or with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a nongovernmental body created in the early 1950s to negotiate on behalf of stateless people.

The payments were to compensate such wrongs as bodily injury and deprivation of freedom; they did not include money to any individuals for back wages.

The German government said it will appeal Wednesday’s ruling.

The German academic who has been representing the 22 former slave laborers said that he too wanted to appeal.

“The court said that all the other plaintiffs had already received compensation, but that’s not true, and I know it’s not true,” said Klaus von Muenchhausen in a telephone interview. “The court never gave us a chance to see the documentation or contest it.”

Von Muenchhausen, whose Jewish mother died at Auschwitz, met the former slave laborers by chance 12 years ago while he was on vacation in Israel. He attended an Auschwitz Day ceremony in Tel Aviv, and there bumped into 21 women who still referred to themselves as “Union Girls,” after the firm where they had helped manufacture artillery fuses. There also was a man who had worked at Union.

Von Muenchhausen was so touched by their stories that, back home in Bremen, he turned his house into an archive documenting their lives, and everything else he could get his hands on having to do with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s vast ranks of slave laborers.

The Union Girls typically worked 12-hour shifts, receiving a single bowl of watery soup per day. They were marched back and forth from factory to concentration camp, and regularly had to watch as co-workers deemed no longer fit to work were selected to be gassed.

One plaintiff in the suit, Sara Ehrenhalt, told Reuters in an interview earlier this fall that as an incentive to work hard, a German officer promised her that she would be given a bigger dose of poison gas when her turn came to be killed.

“You won’t have to spend [so] long in the [death chamber] with your thoughts,” Ehrenhalt recalled him saying. “You’ll get more gas.”

Von Muenchhausen first got in touch with the company he believes to be the legal successor to Weichsel Metall Union, a firm called Union Froendenberg, which started making bicycle accessories after the war. He proposed that the company do something for the former slave laborers as a public relations gesture.

For some months, he and the company exchanged letters, but eventually Union Froendenberg turned him down, writing: “Compensation must be a burden of the public. Union cannot play the role of the guilty one.”

Von Muenchhausen’s 22 plaintiffs then filed suit against the German federal government, as the successor state to Hitler’s Third Reich. The government defended itself with arguments that it had already made extensive compensation payments and that applicable statutes of limitations had expired.

However, Judge Sonnenberger was persuaded that the German compensation never reached certain residents of the Eastern Bloc, such as Merin. Since compensation arrangements were usually made through bilateral agreements, payments to victims who lived under the Soviet umbrella during the Cold War posed particular problems. In some cases, bilateral relations were so poor that the Bonn government couldn’t negotiate payment packages. In others, it did send money, only to see it vanish in Communist bureaucracies.

Wednesday’s ruling at least partially addresses this situation. Sonnenberger found that Merin had never been compensated because she had lived in Poland before it received any money from Bonn, then moved to Israel after what was then West Germany had stopped accepting applicants for its compensation package.

Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.