Editor MNH:

May 31, 2001: The following news blip appeared in the MNH: "Germany frees funds to pay surviving Nazi slave laborers." I quote: "After months of wrangling over a 4.6 billion fund sparked by US lawsuits against German companies, payouts are now expected to start next months to what could be more then 1 million forced and slave laborers, most in eastern Europe." The Frankfurter Allgemeine, the German 'New York Times' calls this pay out, what it is, extortion money. The German companies would not have paid had they not been afraid of being stripped of all their assets by means of class action suits. The main beneficiaries are the lawyers who split 52 million with the biggest share (6.3 million) going to Melvyn I.Weiss and Co. The "victims" are doled out from $7500, the highest amount to $2500, the lowest. Our judicial system has been turned into an extortion racket with lawyers functioning as extortioners.

Let me tell you about one of the "victims," Frank Walus. During the war years the Germans went to the Eastern European countries and asked for volunteers to work in Germany. Since the unemployment in these countries was high, the Germans did not have to go begging. Frank Walus, in spite the fact that he volunteered subsequently called himself a forced laborer. He was assigned to a farm in Kleinkoetz, a hop, skip and jump away from Muensterhausen were I was born. He, like all the other laborers was enrolled in the German national health insurance system, he was paid, was well housed, ate at the family table, and he was safe while at the same time the German farmers were bleeding and dying in Russia fighting the "evil empire." In l976, Frank Walus, now a US citizen, was accused by the United States Dept. of Justice of having been a member of the Gestapo and the SS. Twelve Jewish eyewitnesses testified that Walus had committed atrocities in two Polish cities. The Jewish judge Hoffmann dismissed as worthless Nazi records, the records of the German National Health Insurance which proved that Walus was in Germany during the time in question. He convicted Walus as charged. The verdict however did not stand. Eventually the case was dropped by the US government. Walus never got an apology, much less any compensation in spite the fact that the false accusation ruined his health and bankrupted him. Walus is dead now. He did not want to be buried in the United States. Walus was a victim, but not of the Germans.