Last update - 00:00 10/06/2007
Haaretz probe: Germany bureaucracy delaying Nazi-era property claims
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent
The German authorities are much slower at processing property claims from the Nazi era than claims against East Germany's communist regime, a Haaretz probe reveals.
The German Federal Authority for Central Services and Pending Property Claims, known in German as the BADV, has almost completed processing all claims by German citizens from East Germany's communist regime which collapsed in 1990.
However, the German authorities have attended to less than 25 percent of the claims pertaining to property robbed by the Nazi regime, which mostly confiscated Jewish property.
German government officials said the delay was not a result of deliberate foot-dragging, adding that the process of treating the claims from the Nazi era would not be completed before 2015 - a quarter of a century after the first claims were filed.
Hillel Cherny from Jerusalem has been involved in legal proceedings for the past 15 years to reclaim the possessions of his grandfather, Hans Kroch. These included dozens of commercial companies, mainly in the city of Leipzig. All the possessions were robbed shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933.
Following East Germany's reunification with West Germany in 1990, Cherny and Kroch's other heirs sued for compensation. Some of these claims are still being processed. "In the first years, the Germans showed a lot of good will. But this diminished over the years. Today, I'm afraid, treatment has been reduced to a snail's pace," Cherny says.
The BADV has been processing claims since 2004 concerning property robbed by the Nazis. That year, the subject came under the BADV's jurisdiction. In addition, the BADV has been attending to the claims of Germans whose property had been taken by the Allies after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, and by communist East Germany.
The number of claims dating back to the Nazi era is 181,129. Claims relating to East Germany number 2,351,599. Out of the Nazi-era claims, the BADV have processed some 44,000 - less than 25 percent. By contrast, the BADV has processed 2,312,950 cases of claims from East Germany, or almost 99 percent.
These data do not include claims made before 2004. The BADV said there are delays because Nazi-era claims relate to events that took place 70 years ago, and most of the people involved are dead. "The complainants generally have very little documentation," the BADV said.