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 Posted Tuesday, January 16, 2001


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Clinton Working on Holocaust Amends

By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press Writer

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Clinton administration is working right up to the last minute on an international campaign that has dramatically changed the way the world has dealt with the Holocaust.

ClintonHistory still will say Adolf Hitler's forces in the 1930s and 1940s slaughtered 6 million Jews and 5 million others, enslaved 12 million and plundered Europe in one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.

But an addendum written in the past several years also will show private organizations and governments worked in the late 1990s to "bring some measure of justice" to more than a million survivors, says Stuart Eizenstat, the top U.S. envoy on the Holocaust.

Compensation programs valued at billions of dollars have been negotiated in the past several years and may begin paying money this spring.

As part of the process, President Clinton, on Tuesday was to receive a report detailing U.S. failure to make sure victims got back properties such as gold, jewelry and art looted by Nazi forces.

"It's a searching self-analysis," Eizenstat said. "It pulls no punches."

On Wednesday, Eizenstat wants to finish negotiating an Austrian plan to compensate for stolen Jewish property and on Thursday France's plan to pay for bank accounts confiscated during the wartime collaborationist Vichy regime.

All are part of an unprecedented half-decade campaign to re-examine what happened in the Holocaust -- and recalculate what's still owed its aging victims.

"It proved there's no statute of limitations on the violation of human rights," Eizenstat said in an interview. The Clinton administration ends Saturday -- and administration officials are urging President-elect Bush to continue with Holocaust restitution.

Though a number of restitution programs were started right after the war they have since been judged to have left out categories of victims and categories Holocaust abuses.

For instance, Central and Eastern European Christians soon are to receive compensation for having been used as forced laborers, in the first program of any substantial size to address the suffering of Hitler's non-Jewish victims.

Tuesday's report to Clinton will say the U.S. government did "a remarkably good job" in trying to return property that Nazis plundered from Europe and that later came under American control. But it says some victims were nonetheless "shortchanged," said Kenneth Klothen, executive director of the panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

Among problems, he said was that the U.S. adopted the international legal standard that war booty should be returned to countries from which it was stolen, and things didn't always ultimately end up in the hands of individual victims.

The report echoes a preliminary report last year which said that although U.S. military forces in Europe "generally behaved in a commendable way," an "egregious" exception was the suspected taking of some looted items by five U.S. generals for the European residences and offices they used during the postwar occupation.

Klothen said further study has not uncovered what became of that property, including rugs, silverware and other valuables. Tuesday's report recommends follow-up action on that and other findings.

The new round scrutiny and demand for additional compensation was made possible partly by the end of the Cold War and release of long-secret documents.

The United States took a lead in the effort -- which sometimes strained relations with European allies -- as did the World Jewish Congress, Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and U.S. lawyers who assembled class action survivors' suits.

The campaign was unwelcome in many quarters. It was the lawsuits that forced the issue. Settlements were made in return for legal peace -- the U.S. government promised to discourage its courts from entertaining future lawsuits.

Swiss banks agreed to compensate for keeping assets of slain Jews, German and Austrian governments and businesses to compensate for having used forced and slave labor, and some European insurers for withholding payment on policies of those who died in the Holocaust

Some 20 nations have set up commissions to study Holocaust issues.

© Copyright 2001 Associated Press.

 

Just a few of the related items on this website:

Madeleine Albright's pa 'took war loot to America' complains Austrian family
Madeleine Albright's outspoken demands for return of Jewish war loot
The Great Shakedown continues: Greed without end: "Why us!"
180 Millionen Franken auf Schweizer Banken eingefroren
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Shakedown news: Nestlé makes Holocaust settlement | WJC says even innocent US firms must Cough Up ("donate")
National Post: Show survivors the money
Upstream: Finkelstein and More: An Ongoing Debate | In interview, he accuses Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders worldwide of a vast shakedown | Basler Zeitung: Ist Kritik an «Auschwitz-Geschäftemacherei» statthaft? | See too: Gabriel Schoenfeld: "Holocaust Reparations -- A Growing Scandal," in Commentary Magazine, Sept. 2000 | [and German translation in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sept.13, 2000: "Der Skandal um die Holocaust-Entschädigungen wird immer größer"]
Who Gets the Holocaust Restitution funds? | Industry news: Another Holocaust conference in Stockholm |
New York Times: Holocaust Lawyer Fagan Faces Litany of Complaints | ABCtv: Fagan "neglected clients"
The great "slave labour" shakedown of innocent German firms runs into a snag: many refuse to cough up
Nestlé makes Holocaust settlement
WJC says even innocent firms must Cough Up ("donate")
Finkelstein accuses Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders worldwide of a vast shakedown
Finkelstein index
Origins of anti-Semitism index
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