The 1952 Luxembourg Reparations Agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Israel, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) marked the first and most significant of a series of post-war West German initiatives which have resulted in total German government payments of an estimated $99 billion (about €68.8 billion) to Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi crimes and their heirs. While most agree that Germany will never be able to adequately compensate for Nazi atrocities, the compensation and restitution efforts of successive German governments have been widely commended. The governments of other Western European countries known to have collaborated with the Nazis also undertook compensation efforts in the years after the Second World War. However, with the possible exception of those in the Netherlands, these efforts are generally thought to have been less comprehensive than West Germany's. In the years following the war, these countries, whose economies had been devastated, tended to argue that Germany should assume responsibility to compensate for Nazi crimes. The communist governments of East Germany and Central and Eastern Europe offered minimal restitution and/or compensation, if any. The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) led to renewed efforts by Jewish organizations, Holocaust survivors, and the U.S. and Israeli governments to obtain compensation for survivors who had lived or continued to live in Central and Eastern Europe. Initial efforts focused largely on property restitution and compensating victims of forced and slave labor. Simultaneously, a series of class-action lawsuits against European companies were filed in U.S. courts on behalf of Jewish Holocaust survivors; these shed light on the fact that up to billions of dollars worth of assets seized by the Nazis from individual citizens and deposited in private and national banks throughout Western Europe had never been returned. In March 1997, the first class-action lawsuits focusing exclusively on the issue of unpaid Holocaust-era life insurance policies were filed in New York (the so-called "Cornell Class Action" against 16 European insurers). The mid-to-late 1990s' class-action lawsuits against Swiss, German, Austrian, Italian, and French companies brought widespread international attention to the issue of looted Holocaust-era assets, unpaid insurance policies, and dormant bank accounts. Given the immense significance and sensitivity of the issues, and the unprecedented nature of the legal cases before U.S. judges, the U.S. government sought to facilitate settlement of the lawsuits through a series of complex agreements involving national and state governments, class-action lawyers, private industry, and a variety of Jewish and other victims' groups. Most agree that U.S. Administration efforts to facilitate resolution of these claims by involving a range of interested parties, including national governments, victims, and private industry, played an important role both in securing support for, and impeding subsequent legal challenges to the government-negotiated settlements. The Clinton Administration took the lead in facilitating broad compensation agreements—each with insurance-related components—with German, Austrian, and French companies and their governments. The Clinton Administration was also involved in negotiating a settlement with Swiss banks, although some U.S. officials contended that a lack of Swiss government involvement weakened that agreement, and led to heightened international criticism of Switzerland. According to Stuart Eizenstat, the Clinton Administration's lead official in the negotiations, the damaging effects of a wave of international criticism of Switzerland arising from its perceived poor handling of the "Swiss bank affair" led the German, Austrian, and French governments to proactively seek to resolve pending lawsuits against companies in their countries and stem the possibility of future lawsuits. Each of these governments established broad settlement funds to compensate victims of forced and slave labor, looted assets, and insurance policy theft, among other crimes; each also reportedly viewed U.S. government approval of their compensation programs as a top priority. Official U.S. endorsement, it was believed, could ensure that future lawsuits or challenges to the settlements would have difficulty standing up in U.S. courts. Insurance markets in pre-World War II Europe were well developed with many policies going further than simply compensating for property damage or providing benefits to a family in the case of the policyholders' death. In addition to providing death benefits, these policies often acted as savings vehicles, similar in some ways to what are known as whole life insurance policies in the United States today. For example, life insurance policies were often purchased intending to provide for a son's education, or to provide for a dowry upon the marriage of a daughter. Such a policy might have run for 20 years, with the policyholder committing to make periodic payments and the insurance company committing to pay a certain sum, known generally as the "face value" of the policy, at the end of the 20 years, or in the case of the death of the policyholder. Such a policy generally would have cancellation provisions, that would allow a policyholder to obtain a "surrender value" prior to the policy's intended end, or, if a policyholder wished to keep the contract but not pay further premiums, it could be converted to "paid up" status which would result in a smaller face value at the end of the policy. In the run-up to, and during the conduct of, World War II, the Nazi government made a concerted effort to confiscate assets belonging to Jews in Germany and in various occupied countries. At first, these efforts were largely indirect, such as placing high taxes or fees on those emigrating, which necessitated the liquidation of many insurance policies. Later, the confiscation was more direct, with, for example, insurance companies being required to pay insurance proceeds from claims or the cash values directly to the government. Initial post-war efforts in Western Europe to honor unpaid insurance policies—primarily life insurance—belonging to Holocaust victims are widely considered to have been far less comprehensive than other compensation and restitution programs. Several of the countries home to companies known to have sold such policies, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, passed laws in the 1950s and 1960s attempting at least partially to honor these policies. However, a variety of factors led these efforts to fall short. These included uncertainty regarding the present value of the policies; difficulties with verification of policy ownership; disagreement over how to compensate the many Jews who were forced to either cash in their policies, or simply surrender them to the Nazis; and an insurance industry in dire economic straits. As has generally been the case with post-war settlement issues, German and Dutch companies are thought to have done more than others in addressing unpaid insurance policies after the war. In the late 1990s, German insurance giant Allianz went so far as to claim it had honored approximately 70% of its wartime policies sold in Germany—either before the war ended, or through its participation in other post-war compensation programs. Critics dispute Allianz's claim, arguing that policyholders were often grossly undercompensated, both during the war and with a greatly devalued currency in the war's aftermath. Other countries home to companies known to have sold insurance policies throughout the Nazi Reich, such as France and Belgium, did not administer any insurance-related compensation programs until the 1990s; and to this day, the Italian government appears to have involved itself in the matter minimally, if at all. Historians agree that of all Holocaust victims, Jews were most likely to have owned substantial life and other insurance policies. Efforts to honor unpaid insurance policies have focused almost exclusively on Jewish victims. The fact that many such Jews lived and purchased policies in Central and Eastern European countries—primarily Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia—which later became part of the Soviet Bloc, proved to be an additional and significant complicating factor in post-war efforts to have the policies honored. Many of the companies that sold insurance in these countries no longer exist; however, several Western European companies which accounted for a significant portion of the Central and Eastern European markets continue to operate today. Specifically, the Italian company Generali is known to have been active in Central and Eastern Europe. Generali and others have in the past argued that responsibility to honor these policies was transferred to state-run insurance entities by way of the state takeover and nationalization of the industry under communist rule. In 1997, in response to increasing claims against European insurance companies operating in the United States, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) formed a Working Group on Holocaust Insurance Claims to reach out to Holocaust victims and their heirs to better determine the scope of the problem, and to initiate a dialogue with European insurers about how to resolve the issue of unpaid claims. A series of often emotional and contentious meetings between Holocaust survivors and their heirs, insurance regulators, and insurance companies over the course of the next year resulted in a joint decision to form an independent international commission to resolve unpaid claims. In August 1998, the NAIC, six European insurers (Allianz, AXA, Basler, Generali, Winterhur, and Zurich), the Claims Conference, the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), and the State of Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing an international commission tasked both with identifying Holocaust victims who had purchased insurance policies from 1920-1945, and administering the repayment of these policies. Members of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC)—chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger—agreed that ICHEIC's claims process would adhere to the following principles: claimants would not be charged to file a claim; ICHEIC would evaluate claims based on relaxed standards of proof—given that a significant number of potential claimants did not possess policy documentation, claimants would not be required to name a specific insurance company or provide documentation of an insurance policy; and ICHEIC and participating insurance companies would conduct archival research in order to establish a database of potential policyholders against which to match submitted claims.