Insurance Chief to Push Nazi-Era Cases

California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush vowed Monday to help recover unpaid insurance claims for about 20,000 California residents who are Holocaust survivors or the children of individuals who were among the 6 million murdered during World War II-era genocide.

“The people who lived through the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust can never be compensated for what they suffered. However, we can help Holocaust survivors recover what is rightfully theirs by forcing insurance companies to settle claims for life and property insurance,” Quackenbush said at a hearing at the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Quackenbush, as a member of a National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners task force, is holding hearings to investigate allegations that Holocaust victims and their heirs have been robbed of benefits on policies that were paid for in good faith.

The hearings are taking place at the same time that a national class-action lawsuit based on the same allegations is being pressed in New York federal court against 16 European insurance companies. “In many instances,” according to the suit, filed in March, “proceeds from the insurance policies of the victims of Nazi persecution were used to finance and extend the war or otherwise enrich Nazi war criminals.”

Some of the plaintiffs in that case and several other elderly Jewish people testified at the hearing, describing how they have tried in vain to collect on the policies for more than 50 years. Several of them held up copies of the policies, photos of their dead parents and even ledger books of family financial records.

For example, Fred Jackson, a Czechoslovakian survivor of Dachau, described how after he was liberated at the end of war he returned to his “ransacked” home and found documents that his father had kept in the basement of their home, including records of payments made to the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali. His father, Joseph Jakubovic, who was murdered in Auschwitz, made the last premium payment in November 1939.

Jackson said he made his first claim shortly after World War II ended but was told, in essence, that it was premature because of the postwar chaos. He immigrated to the United States in 1949 and made his first claim here. He said the company responded that all Czech accounts had been turned over to the Communist government, which had nationalized the firm.

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However, Jackson has records showing that payments were made to the company’s headquarters in Trieste, Italy. New York attorney Edward D. Fagan, one of the lead lawyers in the federal suit, sat with Jackson as he told his story and handed his client’s documents to Quackenbush, prompting the commissioner to simply shake his head, in apparent disgust.

Continuing his labyrinthian tale of woe, Jackson said the Czech government told him that all funds had been transferred to Generali’s branch office in Hungary. Then, he said, Hungarian officials told him he had to apply to the company’s headquarters in Italy. Finally, in October 1994, Generali informed Jackson by letter that he would have to apply to Czech officials. In an even tone, Jackson said that a lawyer to whom he paid a $2,000 retainer in Trieste simply vanished.

Jackson, who for many years owned Freddy’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue, said: “My father was a wealthy builder. . . . This may be enormous.” He estimates that 52 years of interest on the $18,000 in premiums his father paid may exceed $1 million.

George Solt of West Hollywood briefly described what had happened to his wife, Maria Solt. He said her father, Jakob Fekete, purchased a life insurance policy from Generali’s branch office in Budapest, Hungary, where he was murdered by a Hungarian Nazi in 1945. Solt said that after his wife’s mother died in 1978, she tried to collect on the policy but was denied. Solt’s lawyer, Rene Siemens, held up pictures of Solt’s dead in-laws as he testified.

Testimony also was offered by attorneys, including Siemens, who said sarcastically that Generali had “miraculously” discovered his client Ivan Solti’s policy after saying for 50 years that it could not be found. The policy was attached to a dismissal motion filed in New York by the company’s lawyers saying that since the policy was worth only $1,000 when it was written in 1929 it failed to meet the minimum amount necessary--$75,000--to file a federal suit.

Siemens’ law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, working with Bet Tedzek Legal Services of Los Angeles, has set up a nationwide help line (800) 899-4341, for information about the case and claims.

Generali sent William Waffle of a Washington public relations firm to the hearing. He distributed a statement saying that Generali had been injured by Nazi, Fascist and Soviet-dominated regimes. “For its part, Generali is sensitive to the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust. Since Generali’s founding in 1831 by a group of Jewish merchants in what is now Italy . . . the company has had a long affiliation with the Jewish people. . . . It founded the Migal insurance company in 1930s Jewish Palestine. . . . Generali is today the leading insurer in the Jewish state.” In June, Generali announced that it would establish a $12-million philanthropic fund to be administered by an independent committee in Israel in honor of Generali policyholders who perished in the Holocaust.

New York attorney Richard A. Williamson, who represents Allianz AG, the German firm that is the corporate parent of three defendant companies in the suit, said in a prepared statement that his client had done nothing wrong, set up a help line, retained accounting firm Arthur Andersen to review files and hired respected UC Berkeley historian Gerald D. Feldman to study the firm’s corporate history, including the way insurance policies were dealt with during the Nazi era and afterward.

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Philip Roberto of the Proposition 103 Enforcement Project, a consumer advocacy group, said the conduct of the companies had been deplorable. “Some even went so far as to market life insurance policies to Jews in Belgium and other occupied nations, knowing full well that these people would later be killed, and paid out on the policies to the Third Reich,” said Roberto, the group’s research director.

Roberto urged Quackenbush to force the American subsidiaries of European insurance companies to honor claims--with interest. He also called on Quackenbush to publicly identify California companies who are subsidiaries of European companies that have refused to honor the claims and to use his position as a member of the state earthquake authority to prohibit placement of any reinsurance business for the authority with any of these companies.

After the hearing, Quackenbush said in an interview that “these are legitimate ideas that will have their place as time unfolds.” He said his department, which licenses all insurance companies that do business in California, is able to wield influence because a number of foreign insurance firms do business in California through subsidiaries.

Quackenbush noted that he had traveled earlier this year to Israel with state Treasurer Matt Fong. In mid-October, Fong said he had stopped investing billions in state funds in Swiss banks until they offer more information about deposits withheld from Jewish holocaust victims and their survivors.

Another hearing on the insurance policies is scheduled for Jan. 13 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles. Quackenbush said company representatives would be invited to testify at the hearing and if they declined the invitations they would be subpoenaed.

“This is a very high priority of our department,” Quackenbush said.