Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference (review)

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has played a central role in the multifaceted and prolonged process of rebuilding the Jewish world after the Holocaust. The Claims Conference was created in 1951 to represent both the interests of diaspora Jewish communities and of individual Holocaust survivors when Israel negotiated global reparations from West Germany. This task was successfully completed eleven months later when the Luxembourg Agreement set out the terms of German reparations to the Jewish state, indemnification payments to individual Holocaust survivors, and a payment to diaspora Jewish organizations to fund welfare work amongst survivors, as well as the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in Europe. Originally made up of the leading Jewish communal organizations across the world, the Conference had been created as an umbrella body to conduct the negotiations. However, with the successful completion of the talks with Germany, the organizations resolved to maintain the Conference structure in order to supervise the allocation of German payments during the twelve-year period (to 1966) in which the funds were to become available.

The Jewish world owes a large debt of gratitude to the Conference leadership for this willingness to remain engaged with the reparations, indemnification, and restitution process. In the years that followed, the Conference was able to have the terms of the Luxembourg agreement extended in time and vastly expanded in scope. The story of the negotiations and of the first phase of the Conference’s work has been told elsewhere, and is only briefly referred to in the work reviewed. Since those works were published, however, the German government agreed to open up the negotiations on at least three occasions, and the Conference took upon itself not only the task of negotiating and formulating policy but also of managing new, large-scale indemnification programs and directing allocations to individual survivors. This has transformed the Claims Conference into a very different organization since 1980, and it is this phase of its existence that Marilyn Henry has set out to narrate.

The transformation of the Conference began with the creation of the “Hardship Fund” in 1980, designed to allow indemnification payments to Jews recently emigrated from the communist bloc of eastern European countries. The reunification of East and West Germany made possible the restitution of Jewish-owned properties in East Berlin and elsewhere, and the Claims Conference took over the role of a “successor organization” in cases where no owners or their heirs could be traced. Article two of the German reunification documents also established a new indemnification fund to cover survivors who had not previously been eligible under the agreements signed in 1952. The successful campaigns against the Swiss banks, the wartime exploiters of slave labor in German industry, and the insurance industry were not initiated by the Claims Conference, but the many years of historical, legal, and political expertise embodied in the Conference was drawn upon by the small and overlapping world of New York-based Jewish organizations—especially the World Jewish Congress under the leadership of Edgar Bronfman and Israel Singer—that led these efforts.

The successes of these late attempts to correct specific historical wrongs drew huge public attention and were presented as victories of historic proportion. In fact, however, they have restored to the Jewish world just 5–7 percent of the sums previously negotiated by the Claims Conference over the years through quiet and nonconfrontational diplomacy. In her attempt to place the entire reparations, restitution, and indemnification process into perspective, Henry justifiably makes scant mention of Bronfman and the Congress while restoring the Conference to center stage.

The events described in the book under review are complex and, although Henry is a skilled author, the account is sometimes confusing as the narrative goes back and forth in time. However, the major drawback of the book is the lack of any real analysis of the transformation of this unprecedented organization. Henry does point out that by taking upon itself the task...