The International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims has been widely criticized as being ineffectual. In more than four years of operation, it has offered $38.2 million - or just short of the $40 million it had spent on expenses as of 18 months ago - to 3,006 claimants.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Holocaust List Is Unsealed by Insurers

By Joseph B Treaster

WASHINGTON, April 28 - After years of delay, German insurance companies are making public the names of 363,232 victims of the Holocaust who were covered by life insurance policies but whose records were previously sealed, an international insurance commission said today.

As a result, for the first time, relatives of the victims - many now living in New York, Florida and California - will have evidence of life insurance coverage and be able to file claims for benefits that could be worth tens of millions dollars.

David Irving comments: IT will inevitably come as something of a shock to WW2 statisticians that there were 550,000 German Jews (see last paragraphs of this story) even if Austrians are included.    The figures which I had had obtained from the Federal Statistial Office when writing my Goebbels biography indicated a figure about half as great, and two-thirds of these are known to have successfully emigrated by the time that war broke out in 1939    I would welcome input from my readers on this point, if I am wrong. [Write me] Related file: Our Auschwitz dossier ---   Alan Heath (Poland) comments: THE problem for Allianz is not just with German and Austrian clients. It is and was a multinational with obligations in other countries. Whereas I note the words pre war it depends on where the border is going to be drawn and perhaps it would be more worthwhile looking at Germany's borders at the end of 1941. Allianz would have seemed to have had a very good sales force in Lodz for example and many of their clients there were Jewish. Claims made by Jewish victims of the National Socialists in Lodz were never honoured (to the best of my knowledge). At least they are coming clean now and that is to their credit. Alan Heath

But the actual value of the policies is clouded by assertions from the German companies that many of the beneficiaries received payment through general restitution programs in the 1950's and 1960's.

American experts on the Holocaust, insurance experts and lawyers for Holocaust victims hailed the publication of the names but said the names of hundreds of thousands of other Holocaust-era policyholders across Europe remained concealed in insurance company files.

European insurers that sold billions of dollars worth of coverage as World War II approached and routinely refused to pay claims after the war have fought the publication of policyholders' names, often citing privacy laws.

Critics say the insurers want to continue to avoid paying claims and to avoid documenting the magnitude of their unpaid claims. But Sabia Schwarzer, a spokeswoman for the Allianz Group, Germany's largest life insurer and a contributor of customers' names to the new list, said Allianz had not been "trying to hide, conceal or avoid this issue."

Last week, the European insurers argued before the Supreme Court that a California law requiring disclosure of the owners of 10 million life insurance policies sold in Europe from 1920 to 1945 was unconstitutional, accusing the state of improperly engaging in foreign affairs, a prerogative of the federal government.

The German companies are making the more than 360,000 names available as a result of a $5.1 billion agreement in 2000 between the United States and Germany on a range of Holocaust issues. After two more years of negotiations, the German companies agreed last fall to disclose the names and to provide $100 million to pay claims and $175 million for payments to Jewish charities through the International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims. Andrew Frank, a spokesman in New York for German industry, said the German insurers did not expect the value of the claims to reach $100 million but saw the entire gesture "as largely humanitarian."

Ms. Schwarzer said the German Financial Supervisory Authority had waived the privacy restriction on the policyholders list as part of the accord between the two governments because doing so "served a legitimate public purpose." The United States has pledged to try to obtain immunity for the German insurers in the event of future lawsuits in American courts.

The commission, formed by American insurance regulators, Jewish groups and half a dozen European insurers, with the goal of swiftly paying claims to Holocaust victims and shielding the insurers from lawsuits, has been widely criticized as being ineffectual. In more than four years of operation, it has offered $38.2 million - or just short of the $40 million it had spent on expenses as of 18 months ago - to 3,006 claimants.

The commission has also failed to block lawsuits. Eight new ones were filed this month against Assicurazioni Generali, a large Italian insurer and member of the commission, joining a dozen pending lawsuits.

Dale Franklin, a spokesman, said the commission had achieved one of its primary goals in getting the German insurance companies to publish the policyholders list. The commission previously published the names of 59,000 policyholders on its Web site, www.icheic.org. The names were mainly obtained from public records.

As a condition of permitting the more than 360,000 names to be published, the companies insisted that their names be kept confidential. But Mr. Franklin acknowledged that Germany's two largest life insurers, Allianz and Victoria zu Berlin, were among those disclosing names.

Mr. Franklin said the list was developed by comparing the names of more than 550,000 German Jews with eight million insurance policies sold in Germany before World War II.

The new names are to be available on the commission's Web site on Wednesday. Families will have until the end of September to file claims. But insurance experts said that deadline meant that some families would probably not file.

"It's going to take time for the information to get out," said Deborah Senn, a former insurance commissioner in Washington. "I can't think of a reason in the world for any deadline at all on this."