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Stuart E. Eizenstat, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State for Holocaust Issues Statement released by the Department of the Treasury, June 12, 2000

Today, we are on the verge of a historic agreement. Otto Graf Lambsdorff and Dr. Manfred Gentz will recommend approval of the agreement we have reached on the issue of legal peace for German companies. The creation and funding of the German Foundation, the wide consensus of all the victims groups and plaintiffs' attorneys, along with the Statement of Interest, Executive Agreement, Final Act and the existing legal hurdles create a high probability that all pending and future cases will be dismissed and enduring legal peace will be achieved.

The legal closure agreement will remove a major hurdle to the establishment of the German Foundation. The German Government and German industry have agreed to a 10-billion deutchmarks capped fund for the resolution of slave and forced labor claims and for all other wrongs committed by German industry arising out of the Nazi era. I want to thank President Clinton and Chancellor Schroeder for their leadership. We have also agreed upon the precise allocation of 10 billion DM to the various types of claims and for a Future Fund.

We have one more significant step before we meet again with all the parties to sign a final act. That next step is for the German Parliament to pass the legislation to establish the necessary foundation, an action that members felt they could not take without an effective mechanism for legal peace.

The German Foundation, to be set in German law and based on the U.S. commitment in an Executive Agreement to file statements of interest in support of dismissal, will be part of a half-century U.S. effort to bring justice for Holocaust and other victims of the Nazi era.

Our goal is for the German Foundation to be the exclusive remedy and forum for the resolution of all claims against German companies arising out of World War II.

This exclusive role for the foundation serves the foreign policy interests of the United States. The alternative to this mechanism would be years of litigation that would last beyond the life-span of the large majority of survivors.

There will be many winners as a result of our agreement:

• The victims, because more than 1 million people can soon benefit from the foundation -- otherwise, only a few thousand victims could ever hope to benefit from litigation in U.S. courts that, even if successful, would take years to achieve;
• The German companies, because they have taken a major step to ensure that they will not have to pay twice for the same set of facts; and,
• German-American relations.

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