Interpretive Guide to the United Restitution Organization Claims Files

Welcome to the Interpretive Guide to the United Restitution Organization Claims Files

This website is a guide developed by the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives (formerly the Canadian Jewish Congress CC National Archives) to help people understand Holocaust indemnification claims documents such as those found in the files of the United Restitution Organization. The United Restitution Organization (URO) was founded in 1948 to provide legal aid to Holocaust survivors who sought restitution or compensation from the German government after World War II. The closed North American case files of the URO are now located in archives in Montreal, Quebec and Washington, DC. They are a rich source of information about the experiences of Holocaust survivors both during and after the war.

Who would find this site useful?

There are three main groups we had in mind in developing this guide.

How to use this site

A good place to begin is with the history page, which contains a brief overview of the Holocaust indemnification process as well as the history of the URO. The guide is by far the most extensive section of the site. It begins with an overview of the different indemnification claim types handed by the URO. From this overview you will find links to images of archival documents along with interlinked English translations where applicable. If you are an archivist, researcher, Holocaust survivor, or heir of a survivor, you can use these images and translations to help you interpret the URO case files to which you have access. Further help in this regard can be gleaned from the extensive glossary of German terms and abbreviations found in the files. If you do not already have the URO case files you need you will find more information about how to gain access to them from our access page. Finally, for information about making a Holocaust indemnification claim, or to learn more about the Holocaust and Holocaust indemnification, please see our links and references page.

This website works best with Internet Explorer 6 or Mozilla/Firefox. It has been designed for a screen resolution between 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768.

Credits

Funding for the construction of this site was provided by The Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Contact points

For additional questions concerning this site, please contact the Canadian Jewish Archives staff by email at archives@cjarchives.ca or by telephone at 514-931-7531, ext. 271.