The Flick group of companies, a West German industrial conglomerate, said today it has paid five million Marks, the equivalent of $2 million, to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany to compensate surviving Jewish slave laborers used by one of its subsidiaries, Dynamit-Nobel, during World War II.
This was confirmed in New York today by Saul Kagan, executive director of the Claims Conference, who said it culminated nearly 20 years of efforts on behalf of the claimants. There are an estimated 1,000-1,300 surviving slave laborers who were used by Dynamit-Nobel.
The one-time payment was approved by Deutsche Bank, West Germany’s largest bank, which acquired the Flick group last month for $2 billion. It was described as a “humanitarian” gesture. The bank’s board chairman, Wilhelm Christian had said earlier that the bank was under no legal obligation to pay compensation to former slave laborers.
PLEASED WITH THE RESPONSE
Rabbi Israel Miller, president of the Claims Conference, said in a statement today, “We are pleased with the prompt response by Deutsche Bank and we formally acknowledge the decision of Dynamit-Nobel to finally provide a small payment to Jewish slave laborers who toiled for Dynamit-Nobel during the war.”
The Flick group, founded by the late Friedrich Flick and sold to Deutsche Bank by his son, Friedrich Karl, denied it had utilized slave labor during the Nazi era, though it did profit from the acquisition of Jewish companies “aryanized” by the Third Reich. The group was dismantled after the war but made a rapid comeback during which it became parent company of Dynamit-Nobel.
The latter ran munitions and explosives factories near such concentration camps as Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Gross Rosen, utilizing camp inmates, mostly women, under dangerous and brutal conditions.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which yesterday accused Deutsche Bank of having benefitted from slave labor, expressed satisfaction today with the Flick group’s agreement to pay what it called “a symbolic sum” to the slave labor survivors. It applauded the Claims Conference for its efforts “in pursuing this moral issue” but expressed “deep disappointment” that the Deutsche Bank refused to acknowledge its obligation as a moral one.
OUTRAGE CONTINUES OVER SLUR
Werner Nachmann, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, also expressed satisfaction with Flick’s payment. But the German Jewish community remains outraged by the anti-Semitic slur of Hermann Fellner, a ranking member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), who said this week he saw no legal or moral obligation to pay compensation to Jewish slave labor survivors.
Fellner, whose party is the Bavarian wing of Chancellor Helmut Kahl’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), suggested that the claim for compensation “creates the impression that Jews are quick to show up whenever money jingles in German cashboxes.”
Fellner, a rightwinger who has often accused the government of being “over-sensitive” to Israel, has refused to retract his remarks despite admonitions from members of his own party. Israel’s Ambassador to Bonn, Yitzhak Ben Ari, said “Fellner should be ashamed of himself for having stooped to use expressions familiar from the worst days of the Nazi era.”
Heinz Galinsky, chairman of the West Berlin Jewish community, called on Chancellor Kohl today to take a clear stand on the issue. He said he was shocked to learn that Fellner is only 35 — born five years after the end of the war and the collapse of the Third Reich.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
