Before the Nazis sent them off to their deaths, Alfred and Meta Meyerstein did their best to provide for their 18-year-old son, Ralph, who had managed to escape Germany for safety in England.
In the 1920s, Alfred Meyerstein had taken out two life insurance policies with Allianz, then and now Germany’s largest insurer. His wife wrote to their son in 1939 to make sure he knew they were keeping up on payments for the policies.
But more than a half-century later, Ralph Meyerstein, now 81 and living in Baltimore County, Md., has yet to see a penny of the insurance money, despite persistent efforts to collect.
“They want for all of us to die, and they bury the claims with us,” Meyerstein said.
His hopes for a settlement rest with a private, voluntary international commission created in 1999 by U.S. regulators, European insurers and Jewish groups. The panel’s goal is to resolve claims and see that survivors receive any proceeds due from insurance policies.
But records and interviews show that the agency so far has fallen far short of that goal.
Fewer than 1 percent of the 77,800 claims submitted to the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims have led to settlements.
Although the agency has spent $40 million on administrative expenses, its efforts as of last fall had resulted in just 758 settlement offers and about $12million in claims payments, according to its records.
Even some of those who worked to create the claims commission now consider it an abysmal failure.
“This is a scandal, the way the survivors have been handled. It’s a disgrace,” said Deborah Senn, a former insurance commissioner in Washington state and a key player in establishing the international agency.
The panel’s poor track record, critics say, is due in large part to stonewalling by European insurance companies. Though the companies have agreed to participate in the process, they have not been willing to open their files and release comprehensive lists of people who held policies from 1930 to 1945.
Such lists are important because many heirs were children during the Jewish Holocaust and do not know whether their parents had insurance. With access to insurance company files, the heirs or their descendents could find out if they are owed money.
“The whole issue of names is enormous,” said Bobby Brown, the Israeli representative on the commission.
But representatives of the European insurance companies have fought the release of names, citing privacy laws, the costs of researching and compiling lists, and other concerns.
The commission’s failure to resolve the impasse over the lists of names and other key issues has proved especially embarrassing to its chairman, former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
In November, Eagleburger was castigated by a congressional committee about the sluggish pace of claims payments. At a recent commission meeting in Washington, he became so frustrated by internal feuding that he abruptly quit. Eagleburger, 71, was persuaded the next day to rescind his resignation from his $350,000-a-year post as chairman, after he was promised broader decision-making authority.
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Eagleburger, who served under four presidents and was named secretary of state in 1992, did not respond last week to requests for an interview. However, he acknowledged to the congressional committee in November that his commission’s work has “taken too long and it’s cost too much,” blaming the problems largely on the insurance companies.
Because of the problems, Eagleburger recently extended the deadline for survivors and heirs to file claims through the commission from Feb. 15 to Sept. 30.
The commission has been dogged by problems almost from the start.
It was created in 1998, when European insurers were facing mounting pressure to resolve long-standing claims from the Holocaust era. Several of the companies had been hit with class-action lawsuits, and state insurance regulators were threatening sanctions against their subsidiaries in the United States.
The international commission was established as a streamlined process for settling unpaid claims outside of the court system. It was to use more-relaxed standards of proof to determine whether claimants are eligible for payment.
Members include representatives of five big European insurance companies and the Dutch Insurance Association, as well as Jewish groups and U.S. and international insurance regulatory agencies.
The companies on the commission are Allianz, based in Germany; Assicurazioni Generali of Italy; AXA of France; and Winterthur and Zurich, both of Switzerland. Dutch firms are represented by the Dutch Insurance Association.
“The goal is to pay the claims of survivors who have held these policies for decades,” Senn said. “That goal has clearly not been accomplished, given the paltry numbers. [The commission] has not delivered on its promises.”
Senn puts the blame mostly on “incredible resistance and stonewalling” by the European insurance companies.
Critics say that resistance can be seen in such cases as that of Arthur Falk, a resident of Boca Raton, Fla., who testified before a congressional panel in November about his dealings with Winterthur, which so far has paid only one claim through the commission.
Falk told of helping his mother, Elsa, hide a large roll of German marks and carry it into Switzerland in 1936 to buy insurance through a Winterthur agent. She died in a death camp in 1941.
A point of contention
Winterthur has refused to pay Falk, and he sued the insurer in a Florida court after the claim he filed through the commission was denied.
The company’s position is that Falk’s mother paid only one year’s premium and that her policy expired before her death, said Ulrich Thalmann, a Winterthur executive in Zurich.
Thalmann also noted that it was illegal under German law in the 1930s for citizens to transport money out of the country as Falk said his mother had done. Asked why Winterthur’s agent in Switzerland accepted the money, he replied: “The agent would not have to comply with German law. It applied to the person who has transported the money.”
Thalmann said his company was trying to settle claims, using the liberal standards of proof in the commission’s process. But of 5,000 claims sent through the commission to Winterthur, he said, only 70 specifically have identified the company.
Similarly, representatives of the other European insurance companies insist that they are making every effort to settle all valid claims.
Joerg E. Allgaeuer, a spokesman for Allianz in Munich, said most claims had been dealt with — especially in Germany — so it was to be expected that few would remain to be settled.
“Practically all claims have been paid out in the 1950s and 1960s in [West German government] compensation proceedings,” he said.
Of 15,000 claims the commission has sent to Allianz, six have led to settlements, records show.
When asked about that, Allgaeuer said: “All I can really say is we’re paying every valid claim. We’re doing our best-faith effort.”
He added that the overwhelming majority of the 15,000 claims sent to his company did not even identify Allianz specifically and were more in the nature of inquiries than claims.
Allgaeuer also pointed out that Allianz was a major contributor to the German Foundation Initiative, a $4.6 billion fund set up by German industry and government to settle forced and slave labor, insurance and other remaining claims from the Holocaust era.
About $220 million from that fund has been set aside for insurance claims. Money that is not paid to satisfy claims is supposed to be used for humanitarian purposes that benefit Holocaust survivors and heirs.
Daniel Kadden, an advocate and consultant for Jewish Holocaust survivor organizations, scoffs at the contention that Allianz and other insurers are making a good-faith effort to settle legitimate claims.
German companies have not produced proof for their broad assertion that most Holocaust survivors and heirs received postwar restitution for their insurance policies, he said.
“We have very good reason to believe a significant number, if not most, of the policies sold by German companies to victims of the Holocaust remain unpaid to the rightful owners of the policies today,” Kadden said.
Kadden, who lives in Olympia, Wash., has worked on the issue for several years and headed that state’s efforts to deal with Holocaust-era claims under Senn. He said such insurance companies as Allianz routinely cooperated with the Nazis, helping them confiscate the proceeds of policies owned by Jews.
Jews fleeing Germany before the war or destined for death camps often were forced under duress to surrender policies for their cash values, Kadden said. The money would be paid into a Nazi-controlled “blocked account” and not available to the family.
He speculates that is most likely what happened to the life insurance policies that Ralph Meyerstein’s father held.
Letter from mother
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Meyerstein said he knew his father had been keeping up with payments on the policies because of a letter from his mother dated Aug. 4, 1939. “Allianz ist in Ordnung,” she wrote–advising her son that everything was “in order” with the Allianz life insurance policies in case something were to happen to them.
Meyerstein last heard from his parents in a letter dated Nov. 9, 1941, one he did not receive in England until the following April. His parents told him they were being forced to leave their home in Dusseldorf and would write again when they got resettled. He learned later from the Red Cross that they had been sent to Minsk, and presumably wound up in a death camp.
Meyerstein said he tried to find out about the status of the Allianz policies a few years after the war ended.
Allianz came up with two policy numbers in his father’s name but informed him that paperwork associated with them was destroyed in a postwar fire in Berlin. He also was told that the policies must have been cashed in or lapsed because his father’s name did not appear on a record of policyholders as of December 1941.
But as Meyerstein put it: “How can you pay premiums when you’ve been sent away?”
Meyerstein agreed to accept a small restitution payment under a German government program in 1961, which amounted to about $800. But he said that was for lost and stolen goods and furnishings and did not cover the life insurance policies.
In August, Allianz sent him a letter and cited that postwar restitution payment as a reason for denying the claim filed through the commission.
Meyerstein said he later got a note from Eagleburger promising to review his case after his congressman, Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), wrote to the panel on his behalf.