House of Commons Hansard Debates for 12 Nov 1996 (pt 34)

Mr. Garel-Jones: Certainly not.

Mr. Marshall: My right hon. Friend may not be ashamed of it, but most people would be.

Mr. Garel-Jones: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Marshall: No. I have given way once, and my right hon. Friend declared his interest. I will not give way again.

Another country with a record of shame is Austria. In 1955, Austria was given a pile of paintings and other works of art and instructed to return them, or to try to find the rightful owners. Only in the past few days have the Austrians held an auction of those paintings. They squirrelled them away in the Mauerbach monastery from 1955 until 1996. Only when the catalogue of that auction was published did a lady in Israel see it and say, "Those are two paintings that were in our home in Vienna before the war."

For years and years, that lady assumed that the paintings had disappeared. For years and years, she would have loved to have them in her own house. Instead, they were in a monastery in Austria where she had no access to them. No wonder the Austrian Chancellor has apologised--but the Austrians should do more than apologise: they ought to be willing to make reparations to those who would otherwise have benefited.

Let me now talk about Germany. I recently met constituents who were slave labourers during the last war. The only hope that people had of surviving the death camps was to work in the factories of Nazi Germany. They were exploited; they received no pay and little food. The prisoners knew that, if they ever faltered in their work, they were liable to be killed the next day. They knew that if their health gave way, their lives would give way as well. They were literally working to survive. All those prisoners had suffered a loss of close relatives.

The other day, I met a constituent who was a slave labourer for just over two years. During that time, he was in five camps and had to march from Auschwitz to Austria. No one needed a map to see the way ahead because it was littered with bodies. Every time someone faltered on that march, German soldiers killed that person.

That was the reality of being a slave labourer in Germany from 1939 to 1945, but there was one thing that slave labourers did not receive. No one paid any insurance for them, so everyone who worked in Germany from 1939 to 1945 is entitled to a pension, except people who worked as slave labourers. That is iniquitous in the extreme and I call on the German Government to right that wrong. All they need to do is to impute insurance contributions for the time that people worked as slave labourers so that they may receive a pension. One of the people who got in touch with me had worked in a camp for 56 months as a slave labourer. Surely, any decent person would say that that lady was entitled to a pension, as well as substantial compensation for what she had to go through.

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Victims of the holocaust include not only people who lived in the camps and survived, but all the children who came to England in 1938 and in 1939 through the Kinder transport system, who said goodbye to their parents in Berlin, never to see them again, and who were the only members of their family to come to Britain and to survive.

I am told by one of my friends, who is an expert on the matter, that those people are entitled to a pension, provided that they had a child before 30 November 1949. This constituent of mine secured a pension for someone who had a baby on 30 November 1949. If that child had been born on 1 December 1949, no pension would have been paid. That is bureaucratic madness and unkindness to an extreme Germanic extent.

I call on the German Government to fulfil their debt of honour to all the people who suffered under the Hitler regime, so that slave labourers and people who had to come to Britain to secure their future life and freedom are compensated by Germany. No money or financial payment can be enough to compensate them, but at least the German people should compensate them as much as they can.

10.32 pm

Mr. Greville Janner (Leicester, West): I thank the hon. Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall), who is my local Member of Parliament, my pair and my friend, for many personal kindnesses in rough times and for securing the debate.

On Monday, I will travel to Switzerland with the right hon. Member for Wirral, West (Mr. Hunt) at the invitation of the Swiss Foreign Minister to discuss with him and others many of the matters that have been raised by the hon. Member for Hendon, South. I shall take a copy of his speech because it is important that the Swiss Government and people should understand the depth of feeling among hon. Members on both sides of the House.

I ask the Minister to do only these things. First, will he express the Government's feelings about the 1946 agreement? The Swiss sent 40,000 mainly Jewish people back from the Swiss border to their death, but accepted readily enough the gold from their teeth, which was melted into bars and sent to Switzerland by Germany. Under the agreement, the Swiss kept some $220 million of gold, providing only $60 million to the Tripartite Gold Commission. They should now make amends and renegotiate the agreement. I hope that that is the Government's view and that they will say so.

Secondly, I hope that the Government will express the view that, while awaiting the results of the commissions that they have rightly set up, the Swiss--as a Government and a people--should make a substantial gesture to help the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

Thirdly, the Tripartite Gold Commission--the United Kingdom, the United States and France--has almost finished its work. It is about to distribute the last tranche to Albania. It will then have a residue. Some 5.5 tonnes of gold will remain in the Bank of England. I ask the Government to say that they will not agree to the distribution of that residue unless and until the origins of that gold have been researched and investigated. It is stolen gold, robbed from individuals; robbed from the bodies of the dead. I am sure that the Government will agree with hon. Members on both sides of the House that in so far as it is individuals' gold, that proportion should

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be returned--if not to the individuals who lost it, at least to their families and successors, who are still living in need and poverty as a result of the Nazi looting and the Nazi holocaust.

10.35 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Dr. Liam Fox): I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) for raising this subject. If I am unable to reply to all the points raised in the debate, I shall write to hon. Members.

The series of events that my hon. Friend has called to our minds is one of the darkest episodes in the history of the European continent. The question of compensation for survivors of the holocaust is one that it is right for us to review regularly, although as the German Government stated in 1988:

"No matter how large the sum, no amount of money will ever suffice to compensate for National Socialist persecution. In this, the Federal Republic of Germany, its Western allies and responsible independent organisations have always concurred."

A provision of the treaty that effected the transition of the federal republic from occupied territory to sovereign state in 1952 required the new state to make restitution. Later the same year, following a conference on Jewish material claims against Germany, an agreement was signed in Luxembourg under which Germany agreed to pay DM3 billion to the state of Israel and DM450 million to various Jewish organisations that had been represented at the conference. The payment to the state of Israel was in recognition of the huge financial burden that that young nation had assumed in accepting so many victims of Nazi persecution in Europe.

Since then, the German authorities, at federal and state level, have continued to make available substantial sums to individual victims of Nazism. Such payments have been made both in single sums and in continuing pensions. The most recent figures issued by the German Government show that up to May 1996 they had disbursed DM97 billion for those purposes and that their continuing pension obligations were likely to bring that total up to DM124 billion. About 80 per cent. of the pension payments have been made to people outside Germany. In the case of the United Kingdom, under a bilateral agreement concluded in 1964, lump-sum payments were made to more than 1,000 people then living in the UK who had been held in concentration camps or comparable places. These averaged about £1,000 at 1965-66 prices--about £10,000 at today's prices.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South drew attention to the residue of the monetary gold pool held by the Tripartite Gold Commission in the UK and the USA and to the proposal by the World Jewish Restitution Organisation that this gold should be made available to compensate individual victims of Nazism, instead of being distributed to the Governments whose monetary gold was looted by the Nazis during the second world war. There are formidable legal and practical difficulties in the way of that proposal and with the permission of the House I would like briefly to outline the background.

Under the Paris agreement on reparations of 1946, the western allies agreed that gold and other valuables recovered from the Nazis should be allocated in two separate ways. Monetary gold--gold that had been looted

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or improperly removed from the gold reserves of occupied countries--was, as far as possible, to be returned to those countries. The Tripartite Gold Commission was set up for that purpose by the British, French and United States Governments. Non-monetary gold, together with a sum of $25 million in cash, was to be used to assist in the resettlement of persons displaced at the end of the war who could not be returned to their homes. That was done.

Countries that had had their reserves of monetary gold looted by the Nazis were invited to lodge claims with the Tripartite Gold Commission. Ten countries did so: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Yugoslavia. The commission then adjudicated the claims in bilateral negotiations with each claimant country, and with help from financial experts.

Monetary gold recovered by the allies after the war, with a cash contribution of 250 million Swiss francs from the Government of Switzerland, amounted to about 60 per cent. of the adjudicated and agreed claims. Most of the gold was distributed to claimant countries in the years immediately after the war, but in some cases distribution was delayed by counter-claims, two of which were taken to the International Court of Justice. Albania received its principal share of the gold pool only last month.

As has correctly been stated during the debate, a residue remains, which has been kept by the commission, because of the technical and practical difficulties of exactly dividing quantities of monetary gold. The legal position now is that the British, French and United States Governments, and the commission on their behalf, have a clear legal obligation to distribute the remaining gold to participant countries. Agreement would be required of the parties to the 1946 Paris agreement, and of the claimant countries themselves, if the residue were not to be distributed to claimant countries. There are also practical difficulties, one of which is that two of the recipient countries--Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia--have ceased to exist in their previous forms.

The Government are, however, extremely sympathetic to the idea of benefiting individual victims of Nazism in the final distribution of the gold pool, if a method can found of doing so that has a reasonable prospect of success. Therefore, we are consulting the French and US Governments about the matter. We are in close touch with the World Jewish Restitution Organisation and with the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner) about how that might be achieved, and about how individual victims of Nazism who might benefit from such an arrangement could be identified.