Nazi Arms Supplier's Heir Pays Reparations

[KG_Panzerschreck]

BERLIN - The billionaire grandson of a Nazi arms supplier has paid $6.5 million into a fund for former slave laborers after years of pressure, a move that a senior German Jewish official said Tuesday was long overdue.
Friedrich Christian Flick had maintained that as an individual he was not obligated to pay into the fund set up by the government and industry — a stance that prompted intense criticism from Jewish groups and others. The $6.6 billion fund started payments in 2001.
However, the foundation that runs the fund said last week that Flick had made a contribution that will allow it "to provide extra humanitarian payments to needy surviving slave laborers."
Flick had been criticized for not putting money into a fund set up by German companies and the government to pay reparations to victims of Nazi-era slave labor, instead choosing to set up his own fund meant to fight racism and neo-Nazism in eastern Germany.
"This change of heart should have come much earlier," Michael Fuerst, the head of the Jewish community in the state of Lower Saxony, told German online newspaper the Netzeitung in comments published Tuesday. "With his earlier refusal, he has caused severe damage to the German culture of remembrance."
Flick's grandfather, Friedrich Flick, lost his fortune after the war when he was sentenced to seven years in prison for crimes that included the use of slave labor in his factories and the confiscation of Jewish property.
Released early in 1950, he rebuilt his business in West Germany before his 1972 death.
The younger Flick — a regular in European celebrity magazines, with an accompanying playboy image — sold his shares in the family conglomerate for $60 million after his grandfather's death and then built up his riches through investments. The Flick group was later sold to Deutsche Bank for $2.5 billion.
The controversy over payments was revived last year when an exhibit of Flick's contemporary art collection went on display in Berlin, leading to criticism that the heir was trying to whitewash his family name.
The Flick exhibit — including works by Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik — drew crowds to the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum in Berlin