Terezin Declaration: Holocaust Era Assets

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Deech]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to ensure that fellow signatories to the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets fulfil the obligations of the Declaration in relation to the restitution of wrongfully seized property.

[Baroness Deech]

My Lords, I start with a quote from Bazyler:

“Holocaust restitution is not about money. It is about victims. It is about individuals who have waited for over 60 years for something. Of course, it is not about perfect justice, but it is about waiting for some recognition to validate the misdeeds that have been perpetrated. . . Holocaust restitution is not only about the victims. It is also about those who victimized. It is about satisfying the need for a moral accounting regarding the horrific events of the second world war and some of the communist depradations thereafter”.

The trauma of human loss was so great that no discussion of material loss occurred for decades after the war. Only the Germans made reparations for about 50 years from 1945, to their credit. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist regimes, not only did walls fall, but doors were opened to memories, to archives, to litigation and legislation, to honest property titles supported by law, to negotiation and to the facing up to the unresolved issues of the past. There is unfinished business, and sadly those most affected, the survivors, are now in their 90s, and for decades have been frustrated in their relatively modest aims. I feel a personal responsibility for them and for those for whom it is too late, and I declare an interest as a descendant of those from whom property was taken, although I am uncertain about title and the possibilities of claim because I have no way to ascertain ownership and sale.

There has been a series of conferences on restitution, culminating in the conference that resulted in the Terezin declaration, the 2009 Prague conference on holocaust era assets. Adopted by 47 countries, including the UK, the declaration called for participating states to meet the social and medical needs of the half a million survivors, of whom half are on the poverty line; it called for the restitution of wrongful property seizures, forced sales and sales under duress in the Nazi period; it called for the identification and restitution of cultural property seized by the Nazis; and it called for open access to archival material, the preservation of memorials and for measures to combat anti-Semitism.

In 2010, there was a follow-up conference, which produced guidelines relating to best practice in property restitution, the most intractable problem. Solution would remove the cloud that hangs over the title to many properties in eastern Europe. The guidelines apply to communal and personal property and state that the compensation process should be accessible, simple, expeditious, avoid residency and other onerous requirements, and be of low cost. States should open their archives to assist in the proof of title, which should not be too onerous, while respecting the occupancy rights of those who are current residents in good faith. Poland, which attended the Terezin conference, did not sign up to the guidelines.

The achievements in this field, even before Terezin, are considerable. There have been settlements of the issues relating to dormant bank accounts in Switzerland, and to unclaimed insurance benefits. There have been payments to former slave labourers, and there has been some restoration of communal religious property. The Czech Government have established the European Shoah Legacy Institute in Prague to supervise follow-up.

Some countries which had formerly neglected the topic have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, legislation for the return of or compensation for stolen property—they are Turkey, Latvia, Hungary, and Lithuania. The UK, to its great credit, enacted the Holocaust (Stolen Art) Restitution Act 2009, and the significant contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Janner, in taking this forward must be recognised. The checking of the provenance of artworks which might have changed hands in the Nazi period is now routine. The UK has also appointed the first envoy for post-Holocaust issues, the distinguished diplomat Sir Andrew Burns. In addition, the Wiener Library in London hosts, from 2011, the International Tracing Service, a digital record of 17.5 million people of the Holocaust. All those involved are deeply grateful to the UK for this move.

The Government of Israel were previously reluctant to get involved, and many of the survivors there felt that to accept any tainted money, as they saw it, was immoral. But they have now set up a database of half a million pieces of stolen property called Project Heart. The list was compiled from European archives, and the plan is to move to legal and public action to stimulate the co-operation of countries that have not done the right thing so far.

However, problems remain. Too many states only allow claims for property taken in too narrow a time band, require current citizenship, or place impossible evidentiary burdens on claimants, when of course they must know that those who were killed or fled did not preserve title deeds. The pursuit of legal action inside a foreign country is prohibitively difficult, and the European Court of Human Rights too slow.

The worst offender, however, is Poland. It remains the only major country in the former Soviet bloc and now in Europe that has no law providing for restitution or compensation for private property stolen during the Holocaust. Poland was home to 3.3 million Jews before the war, of whom 90 per cent were destroyed, leaving behind their homes. On 13 occasions there has been Polish draft legislation, the most recent abandoned this year. Restitution had been made a condition of Polish entry to the EU, but was dropped at the last minute due to the country’s economic conditions. However, Poland is now one of the few European countries to have avoided the recession, and had a 4.3 per cent growth in GDP last year. This year Poland also abrogated the mechanism to facilitate the return of communal property seized by Nazi and communist decrees, before the work was finished.

We call on the UK Government to persuade Poland to participate in the 2012 conference on this topic, to disregard communist nationalisation of property seized by the Nazis, to assist in the creation and operation of a restitution mechanism, and to support the USA in its approaches to Poland.

The model restitution programme is that of Austria, which in 1938 forced Jewish property sales and forced Jews out of the professions. In 2001 Austria established a General Settlement Fund to resolve all remaining issues. The Austrian Government set up a three-person claims committee to receive claims, using relaxed standards of proof—for example, the 1938 property records, witness statements and birth certificates. The Austrians put $210 million into the fund, with extra for insurance claims. Claimants no longer had to take legal action at their own cost. The committee dealt with 20,000 claims relating to 240,000 individuals before closing its work. This model should be promoted by the UK Government for all outstanding eastern European issues. Archives need to be opened and an office has to help the elderly claimants with their research. I trust that this will be the UK’s programme when it attends the conference this year.

Sharansky said that the Holocaust was not only genocide but the greatest theft in history. Justice is in sight if the UK will use its good offices to ensure the implementation of the Terezin declaration.