LESS THAN SLAVES: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation

by Benjamin B. Ferencz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1979

At a time when insurance claims run in the millions, the revelation that a survivor of a Nazi slave-labor camp run by German industrialists received at most just over $1000 compensation is overwhelming. We should be more surprised, however, that the survivors received anything at all. Such, in sum, is the melancholy impression one receives from this well-documented account of slave-labor conditions during World War II and the painstaking, protracted postwar negotiations by the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) on behalf of the victims with each of the giants of German industry: I. G. Farben, Krupp, AEG and Telefunken, Siemens, and Rheinmetall, to name just a few. Ferencz, a lawyer who worked with the prosecution at Nuremburg, later joined the JRSO as director-general in order to extract some financial compensation for the few identifiable survivors--almost all of them destitute--who produced synthetic rubber and armaments for Farben and Krupp under the shadow of Auschwitz smokestacks and for other companies which drew forced labor from Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Dachau, and Mauthausen. He describes the workers' plight as that of less than slaves, for slaves--like machinery--are generally well maintained to insure maximum service; concentration camp inmates, however, were worked to death, if possible, for slave labor was just another method of annihilation. Although convicted at Nuremburg of war crimes (regardless of their ""total war""/ SS-insistence defense), Krupp and others were released from Landsberg Prison in 1951 in a sweeping gesture of clemency by John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. They went on to rebuild postwar Germany and amass larger fortunes than before--the while limiting or even denying settlement claims, on the basis that not only were they not responsible for the conduct and consequences of the forced-labor program, but they had even saved lives, for to work in a camp staved off certain death. Granting compensation, in short, meant the admission of guilt. JRSO had no choice, then, but to settle all claims against a single company at one time; the money was placed in a common fund as a humanitarian gesture--in exchange for promises of no subsequent litigation. The fact that Frederich Flick, a onetime financial supporter of the SS who died in 1972, left his son assets worth over one billion dollars and paid not one cent to his concentration-camp inmates is a follow-up story which bears telling. Reparations payments by the West German government to Israel for Holocaust survivors has been covered in Balabkins, West German Reparations to Israel (1971); Ferencz, on the other hand, compiles an important dossier on the private role of German big business in Nazi Germany.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harvard Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION