The Star Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, USA, 1999.09.14
2 judges rule out Nazi-slave reparation
By Robert Rudolph STAFF WRITER
Efforts to compel the Ford Motor Co. and two major German companies to pay billions of dollars in reparations on behalf of millions of people who were forced into slave labor by the Nazis during World War II were rejected yesterday in separate decisions by two federal judges in New Jersey.
The dual decisions marked the first significant rulings in the nation responding to such claims, which have been lodged against more than 30 German-based firms accused of reaping huge profits from slave labor during the war. Numerous related suits filed in the past two years are still pending in courts in New Jersey, New York and elsewhere around the country.
The rulings issued yesterday in federal court in Newark involved class-action claims against Ford and its German subsidiary, Ford Werke AG; the giant electrical engineering firm Siemens AG; and Degussa AG, the multinational chemical and precious-metals company that produced the notorious Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi gas chambers.
Both decisions concluded that past treaties between the U.S. and German governments barred individual lawsuits seeking reparations for wartime grievances.
Although expressing sympathy for the slave-labor victims, U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise said the claims for reparations were subsumed by 55 years of political and diplomatic history aimed at setting right the wrongs committed by Germany during the war.
''Every human instinct," Debevoise said, "yearns to remediate in some way the immeasurable wrongs inflicted upon so many millions of people by Nazi Germany so many years ago -- wrongs in which corporate Germany unquestionably participated."
At the same time, Debevoise said the court lacked the power to overrule a half-century of negotiations between the United States and its allies and Germany, and said such matters are best handled on a diplomatic basis.
''For a court now, in the light of the diplomatic history of the last 55 years, to structure a reparations scheme would be to express the ultimate lack of respect for the executive branch, which conducted negotiations on behalf of the United States and for the Senate, which ratified the various treaties which emanated from these negotiations," the judge decided.
Debevoise -- whose ruling stemmed from the Degussa and Siemens cases -- held that full compensation would be impossible, and that wrongs were inflicted not only on the persons forced to participate in the slave labor forces, but by many other people in other countries.
U.S. District Judge Joseph Greenaway, who ruled in the Ford case, held that claims against the auto manufacturer were similarly barred because of previous treaties.
''Courts," Greenaway held, "may not pass judgment upon the political negotiations of the executive branch and the international community."
The rulings, taken together, could signal a death blow to remaining litigation, filed on behalf of millions of victims around the world. Experts, however, predict that appeals could last years, and the matter ultimately may have to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
This summer, at least 16 German firms privately offered to settle claims brought by the slave-labor victims, but those offers were rejected by attorneys as insufficient.
A foundation set up to resolve the claims had proposed establishment of a $1.7 billion fund to be supported in part by some of Germany's largest firms, including Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler-Chrysler.
Melvyn Weiss, one of the lead attorneys representing the slave-labor victims, said they were seeking between $20 billion and $40 billion in total reparations. Weiss had been senior counsel in negotiating an earlier settlement with Swiss banks to resolve $1.25 billion in claims brought by Holocaust survivors who accused the banks of failing to return stolen assets after the war.
Weiss said he was disappointed with yesterday's court actions, but that if other legal efforts to resolve the matter prove unsuccessful, attorneys will push for political action, including the threat of trade embargoes and product boycotts.
Historians believe more than 7 million people were coerced into working in German plants under Adolf Hitler's regime. The German firms, however, have long maintained it was the Nazi regime that was responsible for forcing people into slave labor and that the firms merely supervised the workers.
One concentration camp survivor now living in New Jersey who was forced to participate in slave labor -- and who is awaiting a decision in a related case -- said he was "disappointed and upset" by yesterday's rulings.
Jerry Blumenfeld, 70, of Forked River, who ran a dry-cleaning company in Irvington after emigrating to this country after the war, said he is still bitter about the role German firms played in the war. Blumenfeld said he was forced to work for the arms manufacturer Krupp.
''Hitler alone didn't kill all those people," Blumenfeld said, charging that the companies that used the slave laborers from the camps were equally responsible.
In his 78-page ruling, Debevoise detailed the rationale behind his decision to dismiss the claims. "In effect," he wrote, "plaintiffs are inviting this court to try its hand at refashioning the reparations agreements which the United States and other World War II combatants . . . forged in a crucible of a devastated post-war Europe."
''This," Debevoise continued, "is a task which the court does not have the judicial power to perform."
