Lawyers Seek Higher Payout for Nazi ‘Slaves’

Emboldened by a scholarly report that German industry earned the current equivalent of nearly $100 billion on the backs of Nazi-era slave laborers, lawyers for the victims demanded Monday that the state and leading companies significantly boost their compensation offer of about $3.7 billion.

On the eve of negotiations scheduled to resume today in Bonn, U.S. and German lawyers made clear that they would consider nothing less than “double-digit billions” as an adequate sum to be distributed among survivors, who they believe number as many as 2.3 million. The compensation fund is to be financed jointly by the government of Germany and dozens of companies that are among the country’s wealthiest and most successful.

Otto Lambsdorff, the official representing the German government in the talks, confirmed that Berlin had boosted its offer from 2 billion marks to 3 billion marks and called on German industry to increase its offer of 4 billion marks. Seven billion marks would be worth about $3.7 billion.

“The government has moved. It has raised its offer by 1 billion marks,” Lambsdorff told German Radio.

But at a news briefing, U.S. lawyer Edward Fagan said that even the promise of a 50% increase in the government’s contribution meant the total would fall far short of the victims’ demand for at least $12.5 billion.

“We are still far apart,” Fagan told journalists here.

Fagan’s colleague in representing the survivors, Munich lawyer Michael Witti, said the victims would consider “10 billion marks plus a large chunk on top of that.”

The lawyers cited a recent study by the Foundation for 20th Century Social History at the University of Bremen that found German firms saved 16.23 billion marks by using slave laborers when paid workers were sent to the front during World War II. That sum is worth 180.5 billion marks today, the researchers stated, or about $96 billion.

Lambsdorff has warned that the protracted negotiations are at risk of collapse and that German businesses might be confronted with U.S. trade sanctions unless a compromise is reached soon. Along with German President Johannes Rau, he has urged other German companies to join 16 already committed to the compensation fund.

Berlin’s weekly Welt am Sonntag reported that two dozen more firms are contemplating joining such giants as Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank, DaimlerChrysler, BASF and Siemens but have held back to see what their obligations would be. Such firms as the film manufacturer Agfa, which made ignition devices during the war, and the clothing company Hugo Boss, which stitched Wehrmacht uniforms with slave labor, have hinted that they want to make restitution.

The conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last week estimated the number of German firms that used Nazi-era slave laborers to be more than 400.

The German government estimates that about 700,000 of the 12 million laborers conscripted from concentration camps during World War II are still living and eligible for compensation. Fagan and others representing the victims, however, put the number of potential claimants as high as 2.3 million.

Both sides in the negotiations have been urging a settlement by the end of the year to provide justice and financial relief for victims who are now mostly in their 80s.