Claims Conference history

As a result of negotiations with the Claims Conference since 1952, the German government has paid more than $90 billion in indemnification to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis.

The Righteous Gentiles program, known as the Hassidei Umot Haolam program, was created in 1963 to aid non-Jews, now in need of financial assistance, who risked their own lives to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Beginning in 1975, the Claims Conference negotiated for proper compensation to survivors who were refugees from Soviet bloc countries, including trying to obtain an extension of the BEG filing deadline, but to no avail.

Another $6 billion paid by the Claims Conference in additional programs created since 1980.

These negotiations included talks with Erich Honecker in 1987 about the obligation of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to Holocaust victims.

Kagan was instrumental in negotiating with the government of the newly unified Germany in 1990 to allow Jewish owners and heirs to file claims for properties that had lain inaccessible in East Germany for decades.

In 1998, the Claims Conference secured the establishment of a parallel fund for Holocaust survivors living in former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, The Central and Eastern European Fund.

Under the plan of allocation for the settlement, written by Special Master Judah Gribetz and adopted by the Court on November 22, 2000, the Claims Conference was responsible for applications and payments to eligible Jewish survivors and certain heirs around the world.

In 2001, after several smaller agreements over the decades, Austrian government and industry agreed to a $500 million compensation and restitution agreement for the country’s Jewish survivors, brokered at the United States State Department in the last few days of the Clinton Administration.

In 2002, the German government agreed to recognize previously unrecognized camps and work battalions in Romania and other places for purposes of eligibility for the Article 2 and CEE Fund payments, thus increasing the number of potentially eligible applicants.

In 2003, the Claims Conference negotiated an increase in Article 2 and CEE Fund payments linked to the BEG cost of living index and the inclusion of additional non-recognized camps in Hungary.

In 2004, the Claims Conference negotiated the inclusion of previously unrecognized camps in Bulgaria and the payment of persons over age 18 who lived illegally under false identity or with false papers and who meet all other eligibility criteria of the funds.

In 2007, the Claims Conference attained significant liberalizations to income criteria for eligibility for Article 2 payments.

In 2010, the German government agreed to a special review of applications from survivors who were in a concentration camp for less than six months.

In 2013, the Claims Conference negotiated an increase in the income limit for applicants from $16,000 to $25,000 as of July 1, 2013.

The German government also agreed to include survivors of certain “open ghettos” in the program as of January 1, 2014.