NEW YORK — Volkswagen has set a nearly $12 million “humanitarian relief” fund to compensate surviving slave laborers at its war-era factories, the company announced last Friday.
Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres and former Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky will likely help oversee the fund. The first payments could be made this year, VW spokesman Klaus Kocks said.
The announcement came after a VW board meeting last Friday in Frankfurt. In July, the company reached an agreement in principle with German scholar Klaus von Muenchhausen to compensate slave laborers.
“Volkswagen has decided to create a private fund, which will give this circle of people, regardless of their heritage and nationality, the promised support quickly and directly,” the company announced.
VW, Europe’s largest carmaker, previously had refused to pay compensation. The decision marks the first time a major German firm has agreed to such payments.
It is believed that 1,000 to 2,000 out of the 15,000 to 20,000 VW slave laborers are still alive. About 10 percent of those workers were Jews.
Kocks emphasized that VW was not legally obligated to provide compensation because Germany had already paid extensive post-war reparations, adding that the fund was a gesture that recognized VW’s moral responsibility.
Since 1988, VW asserts, it has provided $14.8 million for humanitarian projects in the home countries of former slaves.
Last month, two separate class-action lawsuits over slave labor were filed in U.S. federal court against Volkswagen and other German industrial companies. One of the class-action lawyers, Melvyn Weiss, assailed the other class-action lawyer, Ed Fagan, for trying to pre-empt the Weiss suit.
In turn, both were castigated by von Muenchhausen, who questioned why suits were filed two months after the VW agreement was announced. Saying he had received no assistance from Jewish organizations or from the lawyers, von Muenchhausen accused them of filing the lawsuits to make money for themselves.
But Weiss called the VW fund “minuscule, shocking and insulting.”
Last Friday, Weiss also filed a suit in federal court in Newark, N.J., against German steelmaker Krupp-Hoesch, accusing the firm of profiting from slave labor. The suit seeks an unspecified damages for survivors and the heirs of an estimated 100,000 slave laborers.
Von Muenchhausen, who represents about 150 Auschwitz survivors in Israel, said the VW fund “is a good start and a fine sum of money…even though it has come 50 years too late.”
Von Muenchhausen, who first won in German courts the right to sue VW, had threatened to take VW to court unless a settlement was reached by July 31.
The settlement came with the support of Gerhard Schroeder, the governor of Lower Saxony, which owns 20 percent of VW. Schroeder is running against Chancellor Helmut Kohl in this month’s German federal elections.