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"I was stunned by what I saw there."

The impact of that tour in the early 1960s never left Quackenbush, who as California's insurance commissioner once again finds himself confronting the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Two weeks ago, Quackenbush was appointed to head an interstate task force charged with examining records of European firms that allegedly reneged on insurance money owed to survivors.

"Nothing is forgiven," the 43-year-old said last week in a phone interview from his Sacramento office. "These companies…had walked away from the victims."

Quackenbush has sent a staff member to Italy to begin the work required to dig through insurance firm archives and try to figure out who is owed what. His office is also retaining consultants, accountants and archival researchers in Europe.

Appointed by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Quackenbush and the task force will create an international commission to oversee inspections of insurance firm archives. The task force will also set up an 800 number and Web site to aid survivors seeking information and will build a single international database.

The commission will work with survivors and their heirs who believe they have life insurance or property insurance claims. It will also search archives for policy numbers and names of policyholders in order to seek out survivors and their heirs.

Right now, the state's Department of Insurance is paying for the project. But under current plans, Quackenbush said, the insurance companies will soon be footing the bill.

He also is certain that the commission will succeed. "The companies don't want this type of controversy to continue," he said.

Even the Italian-based Generali, which stonewalled Quackenbush for months, decided last month to allow inspection of its archives.

Cooperation doesn't come from any sudden moral awakening. The nation's 55 insurance commissioners can prevent the firms from doing business in their states or territories. The commissioners also have the ability to make the firms look bad in the public's eye.

"You have to be pretty cold-hearted in this effort…They're not happy with me right now."

For Quackenbush, his early experience in Germany has made the current endeavor a very personal one.

His mother, who grew up in Germany during the war, married his father, a career military man in the U.S. Air Force. Their family was stationed in Germany from 1961 to 1965 when Quackenbush was in elementary school.

Quackenbush isn't surprised that his mother wanted to take her 9-year-old son to Dachau.

"We've always had a strong sense of history in the family," he said.

As they walked among the ruins of Dachau, Quackenbush recalls asking his mother a question.

"Mom, why didn't you do anything about this?"

By the time the killing started, she told him, no one could stop it.

When her son expressed pride that America was so much better, she told him about the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States during the war.

"That made a profound impression upon me," he said.

Over the years, Quackenbush said, he developed a desire to do something about the past.

His current involvement came by coincidence, however.

In September, an attorney representing survivors in a class-action suit against the insurance firms came to a meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The attorney began telling of the decades-long excuses for non-payment — the lack of death certificates for concentration camp victims, for example.

"A lot of us were initially skeptical," Quackenbush said.

The association held hearings and a "very clear pattern of obfuscation" came out from survivors.

"You get pretty angry."

Quackenbush has organized hearings across California, including in San Francisco, to listen to Holocaust survivors and their heirs who suspect they're owed money.

This isn't the first time that Quackenbush has been involved with the Jewish community. He has twice visited Israel on trips organized by Jewish groups.

As a state assemblyman from the Cupertino area, he traveled to Israel in 1991 on a trip sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council. Last year, he returned on an Israel American Public Affairs Committee tour.

Quackenbush, a Republican who became the state's insurance commissioner in 1994, is up for re-election this year.

According to a story that ran last week in the San Francisco Chronicle, the latest Field Poll shows Quackenbush leading all challengers combined by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Quackenbush isn't concerned that any rivals might accuse him of using the Holocaust compensation issue to promote himself.

"When you get into an election, everything you do they say you do for political reasons. It's a very positive issue. I doubt if they'd try to use something like this against me."