This excerpt adapted from Prof. Goldman's new book, Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother, originally appeared in the Nov. 30, 2018 edition of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal. It is available from Amazon and Potomac Books.
In the late 1950s, four decades before the better-known and more all- encompassing German slave labor reparations cases of the late 1990s, a legal brief authored by the Conference on Jewish War Material Claims arrived at the Krupp Corporation. The document included the following allegations: “The firm of Krupp [had] exploited the prisoners’ labor without ever paying them for it, nor did it ever attempt to compensate its forced laborers for the injuries to life, health, freedom, and honor which were sustained,” and demanded that the company provide a financial settlement.
In response, the corporation’s representatives were adamant that any discussions of settlement that they might agree to participate in could not involve possible payments to the heirs of those already deceased, nor would they consider making any charitable contributions on their behalf. Furthermore, perhaps fearing that it could involve tens of millions of dollars in additional payouts, the company took the position that a Conference on Jewish war claims was not empowered to negotiate on behalf of potential gentile, as opposed to Jewish, plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs’ pro bono counsel in the negotiations, Benjamin B. Ferencz, who had been the youngest of the Nuremberg lead prosecutors, was appalled by these pre-negotiation restrictions. Ferencz was particularly eager that formerly subjugated Jews and gentiles should remain unified whenever possible and detested the suggestion that the discussions be limited to only certain former slaves. However, sadly concluding that Krupp would never make payments to non-Jewish victims based on a claim asserted by a Jewish organization, Ferencz agreed to the demands.
Krupp had been quite generous when providing retroactive compensation to his former German employees. In 1953, once he had felt secure at the head of his family business again, he sold off some of his land in order to make good on back payments owed to the company’s pensioners, and Ferencz believed a quick settlement could be reached by requesting a relatively modest sum.
Unfortunately, the very thought of compensation to non-German forced laborers, even in such a minimal amount, was abhorrent to Krupp, and negotiations between his designated agents and the plaintiffs’ Jewish lawyers proved fierce and unpleasant. “Each session was marred by recriminations, accusations of bad faith,” and even with what Ferencz later described as “anti-Semitic remarks” from the corporation’s representatives.
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