Life Insurance Claims of Victims of National Socialist Persecution
The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), Washington and London, initiated a procedure to compensate life insurance policies to victims of Nazi persecution. In order to provide documental evidence for claims, an international research project was started.
From 2000 to 2003, Facts & Files organized local teams of researchers to evaluate files at several European archives for the ICHEIC. Focusing on files concerning the confiscation of property and the persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazis, they searched for documents with information on life insurance policies.
The data obtained was used for both documenting the claims and the publication of a list of names in the internet to stimulate the application claim process. About 600,000 files in more than 50 archives across 11 countries were researched.
Documents with relevant information were scanned or copied and carefully recorded into a database. Altogether, information was collected on about 77,000 insurance policies of about 55,000 policyholders.
As many families had lost all papers regarding their policies, a lot of claims were only processed with the aid of the results of this research.