White House ignores Holocaust survivors' right to restitution

On an issue that defines a moral nation, the Bush administration fails where so many other governments are succeeding. At the urging of the United States, governments and institutions worldwide have been conducting unpleasant research, facing long-suppressed facts and restituting assets belonging to Holocaust survivors. The test for the United States is now, as mediators attempt to conclude a three-year dispute before a federal district court hearing in Miami in a matter of days. As is now well-recognized, Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities involved theft on a breathtaking scale. Over the past decade, German, French, Austrian and Swiss firms and governments have paid $8 billion to victims. Relying on its own moral leadership, the United States urged other countries to create commissions to do the same; 17 nations did so. Our own government's response came in 1998 when, by statute that was demonstrably bipartisan, Congress created the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U.S. The commission, which I chaired, reported its unanimous analysis of those assets that had come under U.S. control during and after World War II. Thus it is dismaying that the Bush administration has been fighting hard against the interests of Holocaust survivors in the most recent struggle for restitution. In the matter of the Hungarian Gold Train, the United States refuses to compensate thousands of Holocaust survivors whose property was misused by the U.S. government itself. [more ]