A case brought against IBM for providing technical support to the Nazis' persecution of racial minorities could further delay the compensation of victims of the Nazi slave labor system, a German business spokesman warned today.
Before paying out agreed compensation, German firms want guaranteed protection against future claims on behalf of the victims of Nazism in US courts.
In an interview in the German business daily Handelsblatt, spokesman Wolfgang Gibowski said that this guarantee also applies to the parent companies of firms with German subsidiaries.
IBM's German subsidiary is moreover a participant in a fund set up to compensate victims of the Nazis' forced labor system, Mr Gibowski pointed out.
"We see this development with great concern, and regret the danger of new delays in payments to increasingly aged people," he told the newspaper.
German firms and the German government agreed in the middle of last year, after months of difficult negotiations, to set up a fund of 10 billion marks (five billion euros, dollars) to compensate the victims of the Nazi forced labor system.
Former Nazi slave laborers filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New York on Friday against IBM over its supply of punch-card machines to Germany under Adolf Hitler.
"Hitler could not have so quickly and efficiently identified and rounded up Jews and other minorities, used them as slave laborers and ultimately exterminated them, without IBM's assistance," the victims' lawyer Michael Hausfeld said.
AFP