Holocaust survivors, families gain some justice

The international commission charged with resolving insurance claims filed by Holocaust survivors and their families wrapped up its work Tuesday, providing closure and a shred of justice to thousands who might not have expected either so many years after the greatest crime in history.

Almost 300 Washington residents and one Idahoan were among the 48,000 individuals who received a total $300 million from the companies that sold life insurance policies to European Jews subsequently exterminated by the Nazis.

The Office of the Washington Insurance Commissioner deserves some credit for the total $2.4 million state residents received, but more on that after recounting the experience of Spokane resident Vivian Lynch, whose grandparents were among those who perished.

It was Lynch who helped her mother, Erika Levy, fill out paperwork for the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims. And it was Lynch who pursued the claim — actually three — after her mother passed away in March 2003 at age 88. Erika and her husband, noted Spokane psychiatrist Sol Levy, had escaped Germany in 1938.

Her parents, Lynch says, had not pursued earlier claims for assets seized by the Nazis.”They were just glad to be here in the United States,” she says.

But the creation of the Holocaust Insurance Commission prompted reconsideration.

The claims — one each for Erika Levy’s mother, father and her father-in-law — were shots in the dark. Levy and Lynch had no records. Incredibly, Allianz Lebensversicherungs-AG did, notably a 1939 letter from Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt to someone, possibly Nazi authorities, regarding the premium on a policy owned by Leopold Niedermann, Erika Levy’s father.

The premium amount was the only clue as to the policy’s potential value, but there was no telling whether it was a monthly, quarterly or annual payment. Based on the letter and much skimpier evidence regarding two other policies, the commission granted Lynch an $8,000 settlement.

“That wasn’t really the point, other than to hold people accountable,” says Lynch, who last year visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

She found information about some family members in the museum archives. Leopold Niedermann and his wife, Emma, she discovered, were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There was no confirmation they perished there, or in another death camp. No matter. Their incarceration at Auschwitz had a final, ugly twist.

Dresdner Bank was reportedly favored by the SS, the paramilitary organization that did much of Adolf Hitler’s dirtiest work. It was Dresdner Bank that, apparently enthusiastically, financed and partly owned the construction company that built Auschwitz.

Allianz, the insurance company, now owns Dresdner.

In pursuit of her claims, Lynch says she was given significant support and assistance from the Washington Insurance Commission, and in particular Marvin Stern, who was director of the state Holocaust Survivors Assistance Office until last spring.

Stern so aggressively agitated for the survivors — he once called for an audit of the international commission — that in February 2005 Chairman Lawrence Eagleburger wrote a letter informing Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler that he had directed his staff to no longer respond to Stern’s questions.

Eagleburger, a secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, suggested somebody else be designated Washington’s contact with the international commission. To his great credit, Kreidler praised the work of Stern and said he would remain the state’s advocate.

Eagleburger backed down.

Kreidler predecessor Deborah Senn also had an important role in all of this. Her work with insurance regulators from other states led to the founding of the Holocaust insurance commission in 1997. Her only disappointment, she says, was the commission’s failure to insist the insurance companies publish the names of all known insurance policy purchasers.

Washington was among the states that protested that oversight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned state laws demanding disclosure of the names. Publication of those names might have alerted thousands of Holocaust families they had claims on long-forgotten insurance policies.

That was unfortunate, but it does not take away from the good work done in Olympia to right one of history’s gravest wrongs.