East German Jews Get Last Chance for Property
Jews who owned property in what would become East Germany have a last chance to receive compensation for it.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published on its website a list of Jews who owned property in eastern Germany before the beginning of the Nazi era. The list, which contains thousands of entries, includes the owner’s name, street address and city.
The Late Applicants Fund will accept applications through Dec. 31, 2014.
The German government recognized the Claims Conference as the legal successor of Jews or Jewish communities and organizations to property owned by them in the former East Germany that were left unclaimed after Dec. 31, 1992.
The Claims Conference sold the properties for some $2.9 billion and has paid out some $800 million to legal heirs who have proved their claims. It has allocated another $1 billion mostly to help needy Holocaust survivors, using money coming from properties whose owners died without heirs.
Germany has paid the equivalent of more than $70 billion to survivors and programs to help survivors.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO