Claims Conference
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, represents the world's Jews in negotiating for reparations for claimed victims of National Socialist Germany and their heirs. The Claims Conference administers compensation funds, recovers unclaimed Jewish property, and allocates funds to institutions that provide social welfare services to claimed Holocaust survivors and preserve claimed memories and lessons.
The organization has been criticized even by Jews, for reasons such as high salaries for the management and stated failures to compensate the claimed Holocaust survivors despite being very wealthy, incompetence, impropriety and cover-ups as well as the absence of an independent review board, bureaucratization and a domination by a small clique.
On November 9, 2010, the US Attorney's Office announced an indictment against 11 employees of the Claims Conference and several other individuals for fraud and embezzlement of over $42 million. The conspirators allegedly took out ads in Russian-language newspapers for people who were of a plausible age to have lived through World War II and coached them using their detailed knowledge of the history of the Holocaust to make fraudulent claims in exchange for kickbacks. In 2013, an 8-year jail sentence was handed down to a director.
