European insurance companies, including several major Swiss firms, failed to pay out on life insurance policies held by Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, generating substantial profits from policies for which no claims were ever made or whose legitimate claims were denied. The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), established in 1998 under the chairmanship of former United States Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, conducted the principal post-war investigation and settlement of these claims. ICHEIC paid approximately $300 million in claims and an additional $200 million in humanitarian funds before concluding its operations in 2007.
The pre-war Jewish insurance market
European Jews held substantial life insurance policies in the 1930s and 1940s, principally with German, Austrian, Italian, French and Swiss insurers. Generali (Italian, with substantial Central European operations), Allianz (German), Winterthur (Swiss), Basler Lebens (Swiss), Zurich (Swiss), AXA (French) and several others were the principal companies. Life insurance had been substantially popular in Central European Jewish communities as a savings instrument and as financial protection for families; many policies had been taken out in the 1920s and 1930s on terms that anticipated normal life expectancy and were therefore substantial assets at the time of the persecution.
The Nazi regime moved during the 1930s and 1940s to confiscate Jewish-held insurance policies. The Eleventh Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law of November 1941 declared that the property of deported Jews fell to the Reich; in practice, the insurers paid out on Jewish-held policies to the Reich rather than to the policy holders or their heirs. The total volume of Jewish-held insurance policies that were absorbed by the Reich in this way is estimated at substantial multiples of what was eventually paid by ICHEIC.
The post-war non-payment
The post-war pattern, which the ICHEIC investigation documented, was that surviving heirs who attempted to recover Jewish-held insurance policies were defeated by procedural obstacles substantially similar to those used by Swiss banks on dormant accounts. Insurers required documentation of death (unavailable for those killed in camps without death certificates), original policy documents (lost or destroyed), and proof of relationship (often impossible to provide for those whose entire families and family records had been destroyed). Statutes of limitations were applied. In some cases the insurers simply asserted that the policies had been paid to the Reich and were therefore beyond the heirs’ reach.
The pattern produced, over the post-war decades, the retention by the European insurance industry of substantial profits from policies for which no claims had been made or whose legitimate claims had been denied. The Swiss Bergier Commission, the German parallel investigations and the American class action discovery in the late 1990s documented the pattern in substantial detail.
The American litigation, 1997 to 1998
Class action lawsuits were filed in United States federal courts in 1997 and 1998 against the major European insurance companies on behalf of surviving Jewish policy holders and their heirs. The lawsuits were brought principally in California, where the State Insurance Commissioner had established a Holocaust Era Insurance Registry that compelled disclosure of policy data, and in New York. The combination of the litigation, the political pressure from California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, and the wider Holocaust restitution movement of the late 1990s produced negotiations that established ICHEIC.
The ICHEIC, 1998 to 2007
ICHEIC was established in August 1998 as a non-governmental body with representatives from six major European insurance companies (Generali, Allianz, AXA, Winterthur, Basler Lebens, Zurich), the State of Israel, the World Jewish Restitution Organisation, the Claims Conference, and a number of state insurance regulators (principally American). It was chaired by Lawrence Eagleburger, former United States Secretary of State and a respected figure with no previous involvement in the Holocaust restitution movement.
ICHEIC’s principal achievements were three. First, it persuaded the participating insurance companies to publish lists of approximately 519,000 policy holders who appeared in their archives as having held policies in countries from which Jews were deported. The publication of the lists was the substantial breakthrough: many heirs who had not known of the existence of policies were able, for the first time, to identify them and submit claims. Second, it processed claims through a simplified procedure that did not require the original documentation that had defeated heirs in the post-war decades. Third, it operated a humanitarian fund that made payments to surviving Holocaust victims in cases where direct policy-holder identification was not possible but where the broader pattern made payment appropriate.
By the time it concluded its work in 2007, ICHEIC had received around 90,000 claims, approved around 48,000 of them and made payments totalling approximately $306 million to claimants in around 75 countries. Additional humanitarian fund payments of approximately $200 million were made to general Holocaust survivor populations through the Claims Conference and other partners. The total of approximately $500 million was substantially below estimates of the actual unpaid policy values (some estimates place the unpaid total at over $1 billion, although the contested basis of the estimates makes a definitive figure impossible).
The continuing question
The ICHEIC settlement was, on the available evidence, a partial settlement that addressed a substantial fraction but not the totality of the unpaid Jewish-held insurance policies. The exclusion of policies from countries that had not been included in the ICHEIC framework (principally the former Soviet Union), the exclusion of policies from companies that had not participated in ICHEIC, and the substantial difficulty of documenting policies for which the original records had been destroyed, together left a residual problem that has not been further addressed at scale. Periodic litigation in American state courts since 2007 has produced occasional further payments but has not produced a comprehensive successor to ICHEIC.
See also
- Allianz and the Insurance Companies
- Swiss Banks and the Volcker Commission
- The Swiss National Bank and Looted Gold
- Switzerland
Sources
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice, Public Affairs, 2003 (chapters on the insurance negotiations)
- International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, Final Report, March 2007
- Edna Friedberg, “Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims”, in USHMM Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Sidney Zabludoff, Movements of Nazi Gold: Uncovering the Trail, Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1997 (with subsequent extensions to insurance research)
- California Department of Insurance, Holocaust Era Insurance Registry records, 1999-2007
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, ICHEIC humanitarian fund administration documents, https://www.claimscon.org