AVENTURA, Fla.

— When David Schaecter was a child in

Slovakia in the 1930s, he counted more than 100 people in
his extended family. By the end of World War II, he alone
survived. The rest had been killed in Nazi concentration
camps or by roving SS death squads.
Schaecter lost not only his family, but all they owned,
including life insurance covering his murdered relatives.
And as time runs out on aging Holocaust survivors, some
are trying to recover insurance policies that were not
honored by Nazi-era companies, which could be worth at
least $25 billion altogether in today’s dollars, according to
the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA.
The survivors want to take insurance companies to court
in the U.S. to recover the money, but it would take an act
of Congress to allow it.
For nearly two decades, the foundation members have
tried and failed to gain access to U.S. courts.
“This is an insult to humanity,” said Schaecter, 90,
president of the organization and a survivor of the
Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. “I think
they are trying to sweep it under the carpet. The fact is, we
are a dying breed. There are so few of us left.”
As another season of high holy days concludes for Jews
with Yom Kippur on Wednesday, the Holocaust survivors
group is optimistic that a recent hearing before the U.S.
Senate Judiciary Committee on the stolen insurance issue
may lead to change.
They gathered this week at Mo’s Bagels and Deli in the
Miami suburb of Aventura to talk it over.
“This is our last hope,” said David Mermelstein, also 90,
who leads a Miami-Dade chapter of the group. “How can a
Holocaust survivor be a second-class citizen under
American law?”
The answer is complicated.
The Nazis under Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” killed an
estimated 6 million Jews and others deemed undesirable
by the German government, including gypsies,
homosexuals and the disabled. It began slowly once Hitler
rose to power, with Jews prevented from certain jobs and
schools, and then the 1938 attack by Nazi gangs on Jewish
homes, stores and synagogues known as Kristallnacht, the
“night of broken glass.”
Since the war’s end, the German government has paid
hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations to Holocaust
survivors and other victims of the Third Reich. The
International Commission on Holocaust Era Claims,
formed in the 1990s with U.S. backing, has paid out $305
million on these issues, plus $200 million in humanitarian
aid.
Germany, and insurance companies such as Munich-based
Allianz SE and Italy’s Assicurazioni Generali, say the
commission’s actions should provide finality — “legal
peace,” in the terminology of the deal — on the insurance
claims.
They also say they will repay verifiable claims, but
verification is difficult given the passage of time and the
wartime destruction of so many records. The companies
have demanded original paperwork, such as death
certificates, that were simply not available after the war.
The insurers had close Nazi ties. A former Allianz
chairman in 1933 became Hitler’s economics minister. The
company today is one of the world’s largest insurers, and
insists it will not shy away from the past.
“While we cannot undo any aspect of our company’s
history, we can learn from it and work to make sure the
horrors of the Holocaust are never again repeated,” Anja
Rechenberg, Allianz’s corporate responsibility
spokesperson, said in an email. “To this day, Allianz
continues to pay any verifiably unsettled claims.”
Mermelstein recalls as a child his parents having a plaque
in their house labeled “Generali”, the name of the Italian
insurer with which they had a policy. He also recalls an
insurance agent coming around to collect the premiums.
“Of course we have no documents for obvious reasons,” he
said.
Trieste-based Generali said it’s committed to paying
claims whenever possible.
“Generali’s long-standing commitment to resolving claims
of victims of the Holocaust and their heirs is well
established and unequivocally remains in place today,” the
company said in an email.
In Congress, bills have been filed over the years to allow
American Holocaust survivors access to the U.S. courts.
None have passed, and other Jewish groups have opposed
them. These groups, including the Anti-Defamation
League and American Jewish Committee, have decided
instead to support the claims arrangement created in the
1990s.
In addition to permitting lawsuits against insurance
companies, many of the bills would have required the
companies to disclose lists of policies held by Jews before
World War II.
The survivors say given the efficiency and meticulous
record-keeping of the Third Reich, it’s hard to believe such
lists don’t exist.
“If you know German bureaucracy, there isn’t a ‘T’ that
hasn’t been crossed. They kept a real strict record,’ said
Vera Karliner, whose husband Herb was on the ship
named the St. Louis that was full of Jewish refugees but
was turned away from the U.S. in 1939. Herb Karliner,
now 93, survived the Holocaust.
As the aging Holocaust survivors await congressional
action on their long-ago stolen insurance policies, many
are in frail health, in need of assistance for things like
prescription drugs and medical needs. All of them say they
simply want justice.
Their lawyer, Sam Dubbin, says it’s time for lawmakers to
do something.
“Because the current law is a result of court decisions
based on misleading and unprecedented executive branch
positions, only Congress can provide the necessary remedy
— legislation to require the companies to publish policy
information and to provide a clear right of action for
claimants in U.S. courts,” Dubbin said.

Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Miamicurt

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insurance/2019/10/08/ece1a714-ea0e-11e9-a329-7378fbfa1b63_story.html