The Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, EVZ) is the German federal foundation established by the Foundation Act of 2 August 2000 to make reparations payments to surviving former Nazi slave and forced labourers and to support continuing educational and memorial work. It was capitalised with ten billion Deutschmarks (approximately five billion euros), contributed equally by the German federal government and by a consortium of approximately 6,500 German corporations through the Foundation Initiative of German Industry. It is the principal vehicle for German corporate Holocaust reparations and the largest single corporate human rights settlement in history.
The establishment
The Foundation was established as the negotiated outcome of the late-1990s American class action litigation against German corporations that had used slave and forced labour during the Second World War. The lawsuits had been brought in United States federal courts on behalf of surviving labourers and their heirs; the German government and the German corporate associations recognised that protracted litigation would produce substantial reputational damage and uncertain financial outcomes. Negotiations involving the United States government (principally Stuart Eizenstat as the chief American negotiator), the German government, the State of Israel, the Claims Conference, the Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian governments, and the plaintiffs’ representatives produced the Foundation Act and an associated agreement under which the United States government undertook to provide “legal peace” by intervening in pending and future class actions to argue that the Foundation’s payments were the appropriate remedy.
The Foundation Act named the Foundation’s three purposes in its title: Erinnerung (remembrance), Verantwortung (responsibility) and Zukunft (future). The first was the documentation of the wartime forced and slave labour. The second was the acknowledgement of German government and corporate responsibility. The third was the use of the Foundation’s continuing capital, after the completion of the individual payments, for educational and memorial work that would help prevent recurrence.
The payment programme, 2001 to 2007
The payment programme operated through partner organisations in the principal countries of the surviving labourers. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany distributed payments to Jewish survivors. National foundations in Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus distributed payments to non-Jewish survivors in those countries (where the largest populations of surviving forced and slave labourers lived). The International Organisation for Migration distributed payments to survivors in countries without dedicated partner organisations.
The payment categories were three. Slave labourers (those who had worked in concentration camps under conditions designed to kill, including the camp prisoners assigned to corporate slave-labour operations such as the I.G. Farben Buna-Werke at Auschwitz, the Krupp installations and similar) received the standard category-A payment of 7,500 euros. Forced labourers (civilians deported from occupied countries to Germany for work, who had worked under coercive conditions but in less extreme settings than the camps) received the standard category-B payment of 2,500 euros. Other categories addressed less common cases (those who had worked in the agricultural sector, those who had been imprisoned in non-camp settings, etc).
By the conclusion of the payment programme on 30 September 2006 (with final payments completed in 2007), the Foundation had made payments to approximately 1,665,000 individuals in approximately 100 countries. The total disbursed in payments was approximately 4.4 billion euros. The substantial majority of recipients were in Central and Eastern European countries that had been occupied during the war.
The continuing work, 2007 onwards
After the completion of the individual payments, the Foundation has continued as a permanent institution funded by the residual capital and by additional contributions from the German government and from the corporate Foundation Initiative. Its current programme is principally educational and memorial, conducted under three thematic streams. The “Confronting the Past” stream funds historical research on Nazi forced labour, the documentation of concentration camp histories, the maintenance of memorial sites in Central and Eastern Europe, and the continuing recovery of victim names and biographies. The “Acting for Human Rights” stream funds civil society organisations in countries affected by Nazi persecution, with substantial emphasis on minority rights, anti-discrimination work, and the protection of vulnerable populations. The “Engaging for the Victims of Nazism” stream funds direct social support for ageing Holocaust survivors and other Nazi-era victims, principally in Central and Eastern Europe where Holocaust survivors live in the most economically vulnerable conditions.
The Foundation operates on an annual budget of approximately 8 to 10 million euros, drawn from the residual capital and from continuing government and industry contributions. Its publications, conferences and research programmes have produced a substantial body of scholarly and educational work since 2007. The Foundation is, in 2026, the principal institutional vehicle for the continuing German engagement with the corporate dimension of the wartime past.
The wider significance
The EVZ Foundation represented the most significant single act of corporate Holocaust reparations and the largest corporate human rights settlement in history. It established several precedents that have shaped subsequent post-atrocity reparations frameworks: the principle that the corporate sector bears a direct (not merely indirect) responsibility for crimes committed in its operations; the principle that the surviving victims, however few and however aged, are owed direct payment rather than only state-to-state transfers; the principle that the documentation work necessary to identify recipients is itself part of the reparations work and produces continuing historical value; and the principle that a financial settlement alone is insufficient and must be paired with continuing educational and memorial commitment.
The Foundation’s continuing work, more than two decades after the original settlement, demonstrates the model of corporate-government partnership in post-atrocity reckoning that the substantial scholarly literature on transitional justice has identified as one of the principal innovations of the 1990s and 2000s reckoning with the wartime past.
See also
- Krupp
- The Luxembourg Agreement 1952
- The Wiedergutmachung Programme
- German Corporate Reparations
- The Swiss National Bank and Looted Gold
Sources
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice, Public Affairs, 2003
- Constantin Goschler (ed), Compensation in Practice: The Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich, Berghahn, 2017
- Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (EVZ) annual reports, https://www.stiftung-evz.de
- Foundation Act establishing the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, 2 August 2000
- Berthold Beitz Foundation Initiative of German Industry, settlement and capitalisation documents, 2000
- Lutz Niethammer, Vom “Massenstaub” zur “Stiftung”: Über die Verfolgung des Erinnerungsanspruchs ehemaliger NS-Zwangsarbeiter, in Mittelweg 36, vol 9, 2000