(MintPress) – For a third straight year, Holocaust survivors protested the Allianz Golf Championship in Boca Raton Florida demanding the German insurance firm pay more than $2 billion owed to survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.
Allianz, like several other European companies, was supportive of the Nazi regime responsible for the death of more than 6 million European Jews and millions of other ethnic minorities.
The German government has upheld its agreement to pay more than $89 billion to the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. For more than 60 years, Germany has paid annual compensation to those who were starved, imprisoned and tortured during WWII. Every year more victims are added to the list.
However, companies like Allianz have not been held fully accountable for their roles in aiding the Nazi regime. The financial services firm has acknowledged its connection to the German Third Reich but has paid only a fraction of the money it rightfully owes survivors.
Kurt Schmitt, director general of Allianz until 1933, was Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935. Allianz even insured Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp where approximately 1.1 million innocent civilians were executed.
As part of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, Allianz paid more than $306 million to 48,000 claimants by 2006. Survivors claim that the company still owes $2 billion more from insurance policies purchased by Eastern European Jews before the Holocaust.
“Not only haven’t I seen any money, this is already 70 years,” said David Schaecter. Like most survivors of the Holocaust, Schaecter is among a dwindling group of aged survivors. With each passing year, the window for finding compensation and a modicum justice narrows as survivors pass away.
Schaecter’s family was sent to the Auschwitz death camp when he was 11. His family had an Allianz insurance policy worth $1,500 in the 1930s.
The average age of Holocaust survivors is 79 and nearly a quarter of survivors are now 85 years or older. In the U.S. many elderly survivors live on a fixed income.
“A few thousand Holocaust survivors are in need. They have to live out their lives in misery,” said Jack Rubin,an 84 year old survivor from Boyton Beach. “We got a certain amount from the Claims Conference, but it’s not enough.”