Former Forced Laborers Laud Austrian Fund

Austria officially finished paying out nearly $350 million Monday in restitution to former slave and forced laborers who were compelled to work in the country during World War II when it was controlled by Nazi Germany.

The Austrian Reconciliation Fund, which is separate from accounts set up to compensate Jews whose relatives were killed or whose property was expropriated under the Nazis, made payments to 132,000 former slave or forced laborers or their families over the last five years.

Both Germany and Austria set up compensation funds after the United States helped negotiate an end to lawsuits against the countries related to their actions in World War II. The Austrian one, which was funded by the federal government as well as businesses, made payments to about 12% of the estimated 1 million civilian laborers who were forcibly transported to Austrian territory during the war.

The fund’s rapid payout and its effort to create a historical record from survivors has been a quiet success for the Alpine country, which has been embroiled in protracted litigation over wartime treatment of Jews and their property.

A woman identified only as Marija Ivanovna N., a former laborer who received compensation under the payout, wrote a statement of appreciation to the fund. “You have prolonged my life: Such terrible things should never be allowed to happen again,” she wrote.

Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel praised the fund’s efficiency and called the payments a “gesture of respect and solidarity” for the laborers, many of whom had been forgotten or were persecuted in their home countries after the war.

Slave laborers were drawn from groups such as Jews, Roma and others the Nazis classified as subhuman. Forced laborers, who got nominal pay, were people from regions occupied by the Nazis: Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Slovenia and Hungary.

Schuessel added that because the Austrian fund invested its money even as it made payments, money remained for other projects related to the Holocaust.

The fund has created a medical and humanitarian program that helps survivors of slave and forced labor camps afford medical care and equipment such as wheelchairs.

Some of the remaining funds will be used to create an archive about the laborers. The fund will also finance programs at Hartheim Castle, built in the 16th century and taken over by the Nazis in 1939.

The structure was first used as a “euthanasia” center for physically and mentally handicapped children; a gas chamber and crematorium were added later.

The extent to which slave and forced labor was used in Austria is sometimes forgotten amid the focus on concentration and death camps, which also existed there.

The fund’s directors acknowledged that the payments were token, but said they were meant to show respect for what the laborers had endured.

“It wasn’t exactly forgotten, it’s that no one wanted to talk about it.... Even the slave laborers and their home governments didn’t want to talk about it, because those people were seen as traitors in their home country,” said Ludwig Steiner, chairman of the reconciliation fund’s board of trustees.

Germany and Austria, which were early allies in the war, turned to forced labor to fill their need for manpower in factories, mines and farms while their own men were at the front. An estimated 4 million workers were sent to Germany and 1 million to Austria, according to the Austrian fund and scholars.

The Austrian fund offered different levels of compensation: Slave laborers received about $9,000, forced laborers in industry got about $3,000, and those in agriculture were paid about $1,700. Many payments went to laborers, but some went to their families if the laborer had died in the last five years.

“The slave labor stuff has been easy in contrast to the property claims,” said Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor who is a member of the board of trustees that administers a parallel fund in Germany. It distributes money to former forced and slave laborers and oversees disbursements in property claims.

“In a sense it’s a tribute to Teutonic efficiency -- I say that with some irony -- but they did keep very detailed records, so it was possible to locate surnames and to know where they had worked and where the workers had come from,” he said, adding that the same was true in Austria.

Germany will close its books on the labor cases in about six months, having paid about a million claims.

But it is the archival records of those who were forced to work under degrading, squalid conditions that may be the funds’ most enduring legacy.

In testimony for the Austrian fund, a worker from the former Czechoslovakia identified only as Jan R. wrote of his time at a camp.

“The first two days after arrival we received no food at all, then a small piece of bread ... that you could fit in the palm of your hand,” he said. “We slept with our clothes on.... Any absence from the workplace, no matter how necessary, could mean death.”

Rubin is a Times staff writer, Penz a special correspondent.