| Bundesverband Informations-
und Beratungsstelle fuer NS-Verfolgte
Nazi Forced labour trial in Bonn
BONN, Sept 24 1997 (Reuter) - A lobby group accused the German
government on Wednesday of delaying compensation claims by 21 elderly Jewish
women for their unpaid work in Adolf Hitler's army of World War Two slaves. Bonn
was dragging its heels in the five-year civil suit in the hope the claimants
would die before it reached a verdict, the Cologne-based
Information and Advice Association for Nazi Victims said.
A final ruling could open the gates to a flood of compensation claims.
Lawyers in the case had expected a verdict at a hearing on Wednesday. But
the court decided on a postponement until November to clear up outstanding
issues. "The government appears to be protracting the case, dragging it
through all possible appeals until the last survivor is prevented from
pursuing compensation by old age or death," the group's president Lothar
Evers said in a statement.
Evers urged Bonn to honour a 1990 resolution in the lower house of
parliament, the Bundestag, to examine ways of creating a fund for Germany's
wartime slave labourers. He said instead of addressing the just claims of
Holocaust survivors, Bonn was hiring costly lawyers to obstruct them. And he
said the German government was also using delaying tactics to slow down U.S.
cases where former slave labourers were trying to claim compensation from
German firms Bayer AG <BAYG.F>, Hoechst AG <HFAG.F>, BASF AG <BASF.F> and
Mercedes-Benz AG <DAIG.F>.
The German government has recently come under increasing international
pressure to pay compensation to over a million former Nazi slave labourers
across eastern Europe, barred from such payments during the Cold War. Bonn
says it has already paid 100 billion marks ($55 billion) in compensation to
Holocaust victims, and is fighting several legal battles to avoid paying
more claims. In the current case, the government argues that all but one of
the women have already received some form of restitution under a federal
compensation law as victims of Nazi injustice, and this could exclude them
from further claims. But the plaintiffs say they are entitled to some
remuneration and pension payments for the work itself, and that the two
types of compensation are separate.
In a separate case that came before the same court on Wednesday, a group
of World War Two prisoners from what was the Royal Yugoslav Army tried to
sue Bonn for their unpaid work in Adolf Hitler's arms factories over 50
years ago.
A lawyer representing 20 Yugoslav citizens from the Serb province of
Vojvodina said that, since the collapse of former Yugoslavia, an
international treaty barring such reparation claims no longer applied to
them.
Bitte unterstuetzen Sie den Internationalen Appell:
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Ueberlebenden des Holocaust in Mittel- und Osteuropa!
Bitte lesen Sie auch:
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