Berlin to Pay $3,000,000 to Jewish Groups for Heirless Property

The Government of West Berlin, after years of hard bargaining and false reports of accord, has agreed to make some $3,000,000 available to the Jewish “successor organizations,” and to the West Berlin Jewish Community, in an overall settlement of restitution claims for heirless property, it was announced here today.

The agreement provides for three distinct financial arrangements. An outright cash grant of $239,000 is to be given to the local Jewish Community. The American as well as the British and French “successor organizations”–the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization and the Jewish. Trust Corporation–will receive $2,140,000 but in a round about way; the municipal treasury has undertaken to pay the bills for this amount of Berlin industrial goods that will be shipped to the Jewish State through the Israel Purchasing Mission in Cologne. The value thereof shall be refunded to the successor organizations by the Israel Government, probably over a two-year period. Berlin has acknowledged a further basic obligation of $833,000 to the JRSO and JTC, but will deduct an as yet uncomputed amount because of certain technical counter-claims.

In return, the successor organizations cede to the City of Berlin the claims they have filed, on behalf of Jews who were killed together with their entire families, for the restitution in the three Western sectors of this city of real estate, houses, businesses, stocks and bonds, etc. The agreement also extends to communal property, but not to endowment property such as real estate formerly owned by B’nai B’rith. The City of Berlin, on its part, intends to recover the $3,000,000 by collecting from the Aryanizers, “who acquired the Jewish property during the Nazi regime and now wish to retain it.

The claims filed by the successor organizations, and covered by the present “global settlement,” are estimated to exceed $3,000,000 by a wide margin, but pressing each individual case in the courts is a laborious and costly business. Further, real estate is difficult to find buyers for in Berlin, an Island city behind the Iron Curtain.

Lump-sum settlements similar to the present one, but more generous in their financial provisions, were arrived at several years ago between the JRSO and four German states in the United States zone. The wearying negotiations for the present agreement, in which Dr. Nahum Goldmann participated on several occasions, were carried on and concluded, on behalf of all successor organizations, by Dr. George Weis and Benjamin Ferencz of the JRSO.