berlin (ap) | The billionaire heir of a Nazi-era arms supplier has paid $6.5 million into a fund for Nazi-era forced laborers, a move that a senior German Jewish official said this week was long overdue.
Friedrich Christian Flick had maintained that as an individual he was not obligated to pay into the fund set up by the government and industry — a stance that prompted intense criticism from Jewish groups and others. The $6.6 billion fund started payments in 2001.
However, a statement last week from the foundation that runs the fund said Flick had made a contribution that will allow it “to provide extra humanitarian payments to needy surviving slave laborers.”
Locals were not appeased. “This change of heart should have come much earlier,” Michael Fuerst, the head of the Jewish community in the state of Lower Saxony, told German online newspaper the Netzeitung in comments published this week. “With his earlier refusal, he has caused severe damage to the German culture of remembrance.”
Flick had pointed to his own charitable foundation meant to combat racism and neo-Nazism in eastern Germany as a clear refutation of his family’s Nazi past.
His grandfather, Friedrich Flick, lost his fortune after the war when he was sentenced to seven years in prison for crimes that included the use of slave labor in his factories and the confiscation of Jewish property. Released in 1950, he was able to rebuild his business before his death in 1972.
The controversy over payments was revived last year when an exhibit of Flick’s contemporary art collection went on display in Berlin, leading to criticism that the heir was trying to whitewash his family name.
The Flick exhibit — including works by Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik — drew crowds to the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin.