Related Story: Ford Law Suit 09/06/1998.

     HAMBURG, Germany - Over twenty thousand Polish survivors of German slave-labor have come forward to sue the German government following the Bulldog Newspaper's on-going breaking news stories about the Ford Motor Co. and other Nazi German government operated slave-labor factories during WWII.
     The plaintiffs, former Nazi slave laborers and concentration camp prisoners, are expected to bring their lawsuit to Bonn on Thursday, according to the Hamburg-based magazine Der Spiegel news magazine.
     Liz Brown of NBC Dateline contacted the Bulldog Newspaper last week about the Bulldog's feature stories on victims and the survivors of Nazi slave labor concentration camps. The story was carried on the NBC television special on the "The Last Days" which aired Sunday.
     Der Spiegel speculated the lawsuit would increase pressure on the German government, which earlier this year joined with major German industrial firms to establish a fund to compensate former Nazi slave laborers.
     News agencies in Europe have been publishing Bulldog Newspaper feature stories about Nazi slave-labor practices. For example the well known Internet-Cafe der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftungis currently posting a recent Bulldong feature story in its "Awangsarbeit" [forced labor] section.
     The fund is aimed at resolving lawsuits previously reported in these Bulldog newspaper columns. Suits such as those filed in the U.S. by survivors of Ford Werke A.G. slave labor are currently pending in New York courts.
     Those class-actions are seeking monetary damages from other German firms such as Siemens and Volkswagen who also used slave labor to supply war materiel for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich between 1933-45.
     Polish citizens who were used as forced labor by the Nazis during World War II will be receiving compensation after several weeks of negotiations. Several of them have filed suits in U.S. courts against the firms which they worked for and the German government has pledged to start paying up as of September this year. Polish citizens have never taken such claims for compensation to an American court before.
     They concern more than 20, mostly German companies, such as Bayer, BASF, BMW, Bosch, Continental, Degussa and Degussa Corp., Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Ford Motor Corp., Daimler Benz, Diehl Stiftung, General Motors (its German branch Adam Opel), Heinkel, Hoechst, Philipp Holzmann, Krupp, Hoechst-Krupp, Man, Mannesman, Siemens, Steyr-Daimler-Puch, Volkswagen and Wurttemberische Metallwarenfabrik.
     American law allows citizens of other countries to file suits under the Alien Tort Claims Act. Lawyers from Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll are representing the 10 Poles and their suit has been added to that of several U.S. citizens demanding similar compensation, which began in a New Jersey court last year. The Poles' complaint details their treatment and gives evidence that the above-mentioned firms used Poles as forced labor during the Nazi years. The class-action complaint filed in New Jersey concerns all cases similar to that of the plaintiffs, that is, those of the half a million other forced laborers.