Saul Kagan

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/world/europe/saul-kagan-who-won-h...

Saul Kagan, Who Won Holocaust Restitution, Is Dead at 91

Saul Kagan, right, in 1958, with Nahum Goldmann, the first president of a Jewish group created to seek reparations for victims of the Nazis. By PAUL VITELLO Published: November 14, 2013 Saul Kagan, a former refugee who for decades led the Jewish service organization that was primarily responsible for securing more than $70 billion in restitution for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, died on Nov. 8 in Manhattan. He was 91. World Twitter Logo. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors His death was confirmed by his daughter, Julia Kagan.

Mr. Kagan, who arrived in the United States in 1940 and lost his mother and a brother to the Nazis, was the founding director of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was created in 1951 to represent the World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith and other Jewish groups in an unprecedented legal action: demanding reparations from “the successor state of the Third Reich,” as they referred to West Germany, for the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews.

The accords Mr. Kagan signed over the next half-century would require the governments of West Germany and Austria and a phalanx of corporate profiteers to indemnify Holocaust survivors for the homes, businesses, furniture, art and other property taken from them in the Nazi years; to pay pensions, relief stipends and old-age benefits that would have been owed them had they not been persecuted; and to compensate hundreds of thousands of former Nazi prisoners (Jewish and non-Jewish) who had worked as slaves for German industrial giants like I. G. Farben and Krupp.

About 600,000 survivors received payments.

In a separate agreement, West Germany paid about $15 billion to the newly established state of Israel for the resettling there of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees after the war.

Mr. Kagan and other conference officials had to fight for every concession, colleagues said. The West Germans, eager to regain standing in world opinion, entered into talks willingly. But they were reluctant at first to acknowledge the scope of Nazi crimes. The first agreement they signed, in 1952, compensated only Jews who could prove that they were current or former German citizens.

But with a diplomatic approach that colleagues described as polite but relentless, Mr. Kagan eventually persuaded West Germany to acknowledge its debt to survivors in every European country formerly occupied by the Nazis; Austria to acknowledge its collaboration in Nazi persecution and agree to pay compensation; Swiss banks to concede that they had pocketed the assets of Holocaust victims and make amends; and German conglomerates to compensate those who had been slave laborers.

When Soviet Jews began emigrating to the West in the 1970s, new agreements were made to accommodate them. When East and West Germany reunited in 1990, Mr. Kagan insisted on establishing additional compensation to reflect the East Germans’ share in Jewish persecution.

In the process, Holocaust scholars say, Mr. Kagan effectively mapped the landscape of Nazi looting and property crime in a way that paralleled the chronicle of capital crimes documented in the Nuremberg trials.

Mr. Kagan was virtually unknown to the general public as he wrangled with foreign governments. But Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy Treasury secretary and special adviser to President Bill Clinton for Holocaust issues in the 1990s, said, “It is no exaggeration to say that for 50 years Saul Kagan was the heart, mind and soul of the search for justice for survivors of the Holocaust.”

From 1998 to 2000, Mr. Eizenstat, acting on claims begun years before by Mr. Kagan, helped reach settlements with the Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse as well as with I. G. Farben, Krupp and other German corporations, among them Daimler-Benz, Siemens and Volkswagen. The agreements yielded a combined $6 billion in compensation.

“All of these efforts had never been done before,” Mr. Eizenstat said.

Mr. Kagan described his achievement as only “a small measure of justice.”

“A thousand years of history, destroyed in 12 years,” were beyond compensation, he said.

At the first meetings between Jewish leaders and German officials in 1952, “there were no handshakes, there was no banter or anything else,” Mr. Kagan said in an interview videotaped last year for the 60th anniversary of the claims conference.

“We somehow had the feeling that we were not alone in this room,” he said. “Somehow we felt that the spirits of those who couldn’t be there were there with us.”

Saul Kagan was born on July 20, 1922, in Vilna, a city claimed by both Lithuania and Poland between the two world wars, occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 — the year he left — and invaded by Germany in 1941. He settled in New York with relatives. His father, Solomon, the administrator of Vilna’s Jewish hospital, was in the Soviet Union when the German Army arrived; he survived the war in the Soviet Union. His mother, Leah, and his brother, Emanuel, disappeared during the Nazi occupation.

Mr. Kagan joined the United States Army in 1942 and became an intelligence officer in a unit that landed at Normandy and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He had risen to colonel by war’s end.

Fluent in German, Polish, French and English, he was named chief of financial intelligence for the United States postwar military government in Berlin and was there introduced to German banking, war financing and the confiscation of Jewish property. He was appointed executive director of the newly formed claims conference in 1952. After retiring in 1998, he remained involved in compensation negotiations into his last years.

Besides his daughter, Julia, Mr. Kagan is survived by his wife, Eleanor Spear, and two stepchildren, Jonathan and Emily Lobatto. His first wife, Elizabeth Koblenzer, died in 1967. A son, David, died several years ago.

The claims conference became a source of scandal in 2009, when the authorities uncovered a $57 million kickback scheme dating to 1993. A dozen employees were convicted of helping Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants file fraudulent compensation claims, expediting their approval and sharing in the benefits. Mr. Kagan was not implicated in the scheme, but investigators said that he and other conference officials had ignored warnings about the fraud from an anonymous whistle-blower in 2001.

Mr. Kagan was also embroiled in legal problems in the late 1970s, after taking his only hiatus from the claims conference to become president of the American Bank and Trust Company in New York. In 1979, he and two other bank officers were convicted of bank fraud in connection with loans that had allegedly benefited a bank director.

Before they were sentenced, however, the State Court of Appeals overturned their convictions in a sharply worded 6-to-1 decision that rebuked the prosecutors, accusing them of bringing charges “for which there was no basis.”

Mr. Kagan had by then returned to the claims conference, where, a spokesman said, “No one ever doubted Saul’s integrity.”

Deborah Dwork, a history professor and director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., called Mr. Kagan an overlooked hero of postwar Jewish history.

“He was relentless and modest,” she said, drawing a contrast with Simon Wiesenthal, the self-described “Nazi hunter” who claimed a role in capturing Adolf Eichmann.

Mr. Kagan was the more historically important figure, she said. “The word ‘hunting’ just happens to excite the public imagination more than the word ‘negotiating,’ ” she added.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 14, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the name of a German industrial giant that had used slave labor during the Nazi era. It is Krupp, not Krups, another German company. And an earlier version of this correction erroneously referred to Krupp as having used Nazis as slaves. It used prisoners as slave laborers.