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| Negotiators from the Claims Conference (L) met with German government officials in July of last year to discuss a proposal for German to pay out even more in reparations to alleged holocaust survivors |
By Richard Edmondson
In a number of previous posts I have discussed the massive fraud at the Claims Conference, the Jewish organization that presides over moneys paid out by Germany in the form of reparations to supposed holocaust survivors. The scheme involved a group of CC employees who hired “recruiters” to go into the Russian-speaking Jewish community in New York where they would sign up people to file fraudulent reparations claims. Fake documents would be submitted, the CC employees would knowingly approve the fraudulent applications, Germany would pay out the funds, the money would be split by all parties concerned—and no one would be the wiser. That’s kind of how it worked, and the amount paid out by Germany has totaled at least $57 million.
The official story has always been that the deception went on for about 16 years, dating back to the early nineties, but that somehow it wasn’t detected by top CC officials until 2009. Improbable, you might say. Indeed. And here is what I wrote about it in one of my previous posts:
In a number of previous posts I have discussed the massive fraud at the Claims Conference, the Jewish organization that presides over moneys paid out by Germany in the form of reparations to supposed holocaust survivors. The scheme involved a group of CC employees who hired “recruiters” to go into the Russian-speaking Jewish community in New York where they would sign up people to file fraudulent reparations claims. Fake documents would be submitted, the CC employees would knowingly approve the fraudulent applications, Germany would pay out the funds, the money would be split by all parties concerned—and no one would be the wiser. That’s kind of how it worked, and the amount paid out by Germany has totaled at least $57 million.
The official story has always been that the deception went on for about 16 years, dating back to the early nineties, but that somehow it wasn’t detected by top CC officials until 2009. Improbable, you might say. Indeed. And here is what I wrote about it in one of my previous posts:
The disclosures of massive fraud at the Claims Conference has been a public relations nightmare for what has been often referred to as “the Holocaust industry.” So far, no one who held a top leadership position at the Claims Conference has been charged. Yet how is it possible that fraud of this magnitude could go on for 16 years with the organization’s president or some other top executive leader not getting wise to it?
Now, lo and behold, the Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that top officials at the CC were alerted to the shenanigans in 2001—more than eight years before the fraud reputedly was discovered and made public. You can read the full story here, but below are a few highlights:
The fraud scheme, which went on for 15 years and diverted $57 million to unqualified recipients, was first described in a detailed letter sent to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in June 2001, the Forward has learned. But the organization’s most senior officials, who were shown the letter, apparently accepted the explanations of the fraud scheme’s ringleader even though a preliminary investigation of the letter’s charges supported its allegations.
Semen Domnitser, the scheme’s ringleader, was convicted with two others May 8 on federal fraud charges in connection with the elaborate scheme, which involved recruiting individuals to apply for compensation as Holocaust survivors using falsified and, in some cases, forged documents. Claims Conference employees in on the scheme then approved the applications, enabling the claimants to receive restitution payments from the German government while the Claims Conference staffers took a cut.
Altogether, 31 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on fraud charges in connection with the case, including Domnitser and his two co-defendants.
During Domnitser’s recent trial, Greg Schneider, executive director of the Claims Conference, testified about his “shock and disbelief” when he learned in 2009 of the wide-ranging fraud committed by his own employees.
But the letter, which was cited in the trial and subsequently obtained by the Forward, was sent to the Claims Conference almost a decade earlier and seen by Schneider at the time.
The article goes on to inform us that the letter was unsigned, though “was most likely written by an insider” since the writer was able to cite information, such as specific case numbers, that could only have been known by an employee working inside the organization. So why didn’t Schneider look into the allegations at the time? Why did he wait eight years before contacting the FBI and making the theft public? We don’t really know, and Schneider apparently isn’t talking:
Schneider, who was the Claims Conference’s chief operating officer in 2001, declined to respond on the record to inquiries from the Forward about why the organization’s top managers decided not to pursue the allegations brought to their attention then. So did Gideon Taylor, who was then the group’s executive director. But in a statement to the Forward, Claims Conference spokeswoman Hillary Kessler-Godin emphasized that the organization had thoroughly reviewed how the fraud “was committed, who was involved, and ways in which it can be avoided in the future.”
“Fortunately, the fraud case is now over,” Kessler-Godin added. “All the participants in the fraud have now been found guilty and we consider this matter closed.”
All the participants have been found guilty? That perhaps remains to be seen, though doubtless the CC would very much like to “consider this matter closed.” Thirty-one people have either pled guilty or been convicted in the case. Most of these, with the exception of Domnitser, were low ranking individuals. The latter, described above as the “ringleader” in the story, was a mid-level employee who oversaw two of the numerous funds the CC has jurisdiction over. Interestingly, it seems Domnitser was even named by the anonymous letter writer in 2001.
But top Claims Conference officials decided not to inquire further into the claims of fraud after Domnitser denounced his accusers as “anonymous liars” and offered varied justifications for having approved the applications, including one case that he acknowledged had contained false claims. None of the steps the letter writers urged for verifying their allegations was pursued.
The fraud continued until 2009 when Karen Heilig, a senior Claims Conference official, discovered two highly dubious applications within a few weeks. The Claims Conference then hired the law firm Proskauer Rose to investigate further, and a few weeks later contacted the FBI.
Federal investigators would later discover a fraud about 15 years long, perpetrated by almost a dozen current and former Claims Conference employees with the help of many more runners and recruiters in the Russian-speaking community. Using forged documents and fake persecution stories, Claims Conference workers submitted and approved about 5,000 fraudulent claims totaling about $57 million from funds set up by the German government, primarily to care for the neediest Holocaust survivors.
Notice the part about fake persecution stories. The article goes on to mention one applicant who filed two applications over a three-year period, describing her wartime experiences in manners that contradicted each other. But apparently both applications were approved.
I can only comment here that if the present leaders of Germany had an ounce of self-respect or national pride they would refuse to pay out another dime. But honestly, I don’t think we’re going to see that happen.
River to Sea
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