Deutsche Bank’s recent admission that it dealt with Nazi gold may add momentum to establish a central compensation fund in Germany for Holocaust survivors.
The admission came with the release last month of an independent commission’s report detailing the bank’s wartime role.
The bank, which has been in restitution negotiations with the World Jewish Congress for about a year, said the report “reaffirmed its moral responsibility for the darkest chapter in its history and deeply regrets any injustices.”
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said the talks have intensified since the report was released on July 31.
“We are in the process of finding a just solution,” he said.
Discussion of expanding German compensation to Holocaust survivors, which is expected to be taken up by the next German Parliament, comes as Swiss banks and Jewish groups are deadlocked in negotiations over settling Holocaust-era claims against Swiss companies.
Some Germans are proposing a general compensation fund for survivors underwritten by German companies that benefitted from slave labor and German banks that profited from the personal assets of Holocaust victims.
The candidate leading in the polls for chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, has said he would support the fund, as has the Green Party, a possible coalition partner if the Social Democrats win the Sept. 27 election.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, one of whose vice presidents is German Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis, recently called on German companies to set up a compensation fund for Holocaust survivors.
During the past decade, several German companies have commissioned historians to research their firm’s involvement in the Third Reich. But the Deutsche Bank report is one of the clearest statements to date on how much German corporate leaders knew about the Holocaust.
The report on the bank’s gold transactions during World War II was more specific than expected, said Hanno Loewy, director of the Frankfurt-based Fritz Bauer Institute, which is dedicated to Holocaust research and education.
“This should bring more pressure on other companies” researching their activities during the war, he said.
The report “should serve as a model for other companies, which now will have to ask what responsibility their company has for the looting of Jewish victims and slave laborers,” said Christopher Kopper, a history professor at the University of Goettingen.
Kopper, the son of a former director of Deutsche Bank, has written extensively on the role of German banks during World War II.
The report, prepared by an international commission of five historians, said it could find no direct evidence that the directors of Deutsche Bank knew the origins of the gold bought from the central government bank, the Reichsbank. But the report said that influential board member Hermann Abs “had wide-ranging contacts” and it is likely that “he, and perhaps other board members, were aware of the existence of victim gold.
“They might have known that the gold had originally been (and, it can be added, legitimately remained) the property of the victims of Nazi Germany, in the occupied countries but also in the concentration and death camps of the most inhuman and evil regime of human history,” it added.
The report said evidence from ledgers of the Reichsbank and from the precious metals company Degussa, which helped smelt the gold the Nazis took from their victims, helped them establish a direct link between gold sold by the Reichsbank and coins, jewelry, gold bars and dental gold the Nazis confiscated at concentration camps and ghettos.
Kopper said the report only covers a fraction of Deutsche Bank’s activities during the war. He said much of the gold the bank bought from the Reichsbank did not come from victims at concentration camps and ghettos but from central banks in Nazi-occupied countries, such as Czechoslovakia, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
In March, Deutsche Bank donated approximately $3 million in proceeds from the sale of gold bars that belonged to the bank after the war to the World Jewish Restitution Organization for the benefit of Holocaust survivors and the March of the Living Foundation.
The bank’s report is available on the Internet at www.beck.de
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