U.S. state insurance officials searching for survivors’ claims

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 (JTA) — Amid efforts to recover Jewish assets deposited in Swiss banks, pressure is mounting on European insurance companies to make good on unpaid policies from the Holocaust era. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has been holding a series of hearings across the United States to seek out Holocaust survivors and the heirs of victims who have not received payouts from insurance policies held during World War II. A special task force of the association has held hearings in Skokie, Ill., Miami and Los Angeles and plans further hearings in Seattle, New York and Philadelphia.
Claimants are looking for assistance from state insurance commissioners, who have regulatory power over the American affiliates and subsidiaries of the targeted European insurance companies. Earlier this year, a group of Holocaust victims and their families sued seven European insurance companies, alleging they withheld, concealed or converted the proceeds of policies sold before 1946. The plaintiffs charge that “in many instances, proceeds from the insurance policies of the victims of Nazi persecution were used to finance and extend the war or otherwise enrich Nazi war criminals.” The experiences of many of the claimants parallel those of depositors trying to collect on dormant Swiss bank accounts, but the sums at stake may be much larger. Lawyers for the survivors estimate that the class-action lawsuit, now pending in New York federal court, could affect 10,000 claimants and involve billions of dollars in damages. “We’re only at the beginning of the effort on insurance companies,” said Israel Miller, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which has been pressing the issue with the insurers. “The fact that the state insurance commissioners are interested enough to have set up this working committee, and that they are holding these hearings to exert pressure upon the American affiliates of these companies, is of tremendous importance to us,” he said. The insurance companies, which include firms such as the Allianz AG Group of Germany and Assicurazioni Generali of Italy, have maintained that in many cases records were lost or destroyed during the war. They have also said that benefits of policies confiscated by the Nazis were paid to Germany, and therefore nothing more is owed. Eager to avoid the controversy that has enveloped Swiss banks, some of the companies have taken steps to address the issue. Italy’s Generali is in the process of establishing a $12 million philanthropic fund in Israel in memory of the company’s policy holders who perished in the Holocaust. Allianz, meanwhile, has set up a help line and retained an American accounting firm to review its files — though it insists it did nothing wrong. The moves, however, fall short of meeting the demands of the Claims Conference and of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which have asked the insurance companies to: * appoint a committee of “eminent persons,” modeled after a commission currently probing Swiss banks, to fully and objectively examine the companies’ archives and records; * immediately pay dormant insurance policies; and * create a humanitarian fund similar to the one set up by Swiss banks, that would benefit Holocaust survivors in general. “We hope that we will be able to exert the same kind of moral pressure upon the insurance companies that has been exerted on the Swiss banks and Swiss government in terms of looted gold and dormant accounts,” Miller said. (JTA correspondent Tom Tugend in Los Angeles contributed to this report.)