The Claims Conference and the Historic Jewish Efforts for Holocaust-Related Compensation and Restitution

Abstract

The Claims Conference Programme for Former Slave and Forced Laborers began in 2000, after German Government and industry agreed to a DM 10 billion fund to compensate surviving former laborers under the Nazis. This Chapter focuses on the Claims Conference's effort to secure a measure of compensation for serious personal suffering experienced by Holocaust survivors. The Claims Conference intensively seeks the return and restitution of Jewish-owned property and assets confiscated or destroyed under the Nazis. The Claims Conference distinguishes between compensation, symbolic payments to acknowledge persecution and suffering, and restitution, the return of assets or payment for them. The historic international Jewish efforts at negotiating symbolic compensation and restitution for Jewish victims of Nazism have attempted the impossible task of reconciling the greatest moral challenge of our times with the base element of money. Yet throughout, the Claims Conference has always insisted that the process is about more than money. Keywords: Claims Conference; Holocaust survivors; Jewish victims; Nazism; Slave Labor Programme