The Independent,
London
Holocaust
slaves set to gain compensation By Adam LeBor in
Budapest Fear of a Swiss
banks-style public relations disaster for
German businesses is forcing firms that
used slave labour during the Third Reich
to compensate the former
workers. The recent
capitulation by Swiss banks, which, after
years of stonewalling, agreed this month
to set up a $1bn compensation fund, may
prompt German companies to follow suit,
thus deflecting the threat of lawsuits
from former slave labourers or their
descendants. Volkswagen has
announced it will set up its own
compensation fund for individual victims
and BMW is also ready to pay. Other major
companies such as Siemens are not
excluding the possibility of compensating
former slave labourers and may also pay
into a central fund. VW, whose slave
labourers during the war were often beaten
or worked to death, denies it has a legal
responsibility to compensate Holocaust
survivors. Instead, company officials say
they are making a humanitarian
gesture. They say companies
such as VW were
for ced
to use slave labour. | 2. "From a legal
position the crimes of the Nazis were a
state crime, and the issue of slave labour
compensation must be addressed to the
government, but this is a recognition of
our historical and moral
responsibilities," said Bernd Graef,
head of Volkswagen
archives. The record of German
big business and the German government on
compensating former slave labourers is
shameful, Jewish groups and some
historians say. Firms and the government
have stonewalled and opposed every move to
recognising their liability. It took a 12-year
campaign to achieve compensation for 21
women who worked in a munitions factory
near Auschwitz. One of the women
eventually received
£5,500. Former slave workers
for IG Farben, the chemical company that
owned the patent on Zyklon B, the gas used
in the death camps, are still campaigning
for compensation like that given by VW.
"The German government has never
acknowledged its obligation to give full
compensation for slave labour - it has
opposed survivors' claims at every turn
and defended these corporations against
legal liability," said Michael
Pinto-Duschinsky, a historian
researching the issue for the Holocaust
Education Trust. "The majority of
major German companies are to a large
extent the same ones who used slave labour
in the Third Reich." ![](../../std/dings/square.gif) |