The Ukrainian Union of Prisoners/Victims of Nazi Persecution and the Ukrainian Association of the Antifascist Resistance, have authorized the filing of a class action law suit in the Federal Court in New York, Eastern District, against a number of German corporations, which in the years of World War II, forcibly seized hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens and utilized them as forced/slave laborers. (Evgeny Guminsky, et al. v. BMW, Opel, etc., File No. CV 994671). Presently, the number of former forced/slave laborers that are still alive in Ukraine is nearly 300,000.

The law suit describes the utterly immense destruction inflicted on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in the years of German occupation. During their reign of terror, the German fascists burned and completely destroyed 714 cities and towns, as well as over 28 thousand villages, leaving more than 10 million Ukrainian citizens, a quarter of Ukrainian population, homeless. The Germans also destroyed and burned 60,000 industrial establishments, 200,000 commercial buildings, as well as 32,000 educational institutions. According to expert statistics, the monetary value of the total damage to the Ukrainian economy exceeded 285 billion rubles.

In order to satisfy the demand for human labor of the German war machine, the Nazis forcibly seized more than 2.4 million Ukrainian workers, transported them against their will from Ukraine to Germany, and forced them to work as slave laborers under inhuman conditions of the concentration camps and various hard labor camps. The class action complaint describes how one of the Plaintiffs, Evgeny Guminsky, who presently resides in Kiev, Ukraine, was forcibly taken from his native village of Vrublevka, Zhitomer Region, at the age of 17. For three days he traveled in a freight train designed for cattle, without any food or water. He was brought to the city of Gugenau and placed in a hard labor camp called "Rottenfeld". Every morning, he was awakened at 3 a.m. and forced to march for 3-4 kilometers to the designated work location under the escort of the SS guards and ferocious dogs. He was forced to work at the German factory of DAIMLER-BENZ, which produced heavy-duty trucks for the German war machine. His working day lasted for 16 hours. Every mishap brought on a beating by the guards with clubs. There were only two meager meals served to the slave laborers per day: soup made of water and swede in the morning, and a piece of bread at night. There were no days off. Evgeny Guminsky received no pay for his slave labor.

Plaintiff Matrena Rashina, presently living in Kharkov, Ukraine. She was forcibly taken from her native village of Bishkin, Ukraine to Bathausburg, Germany at the age of 16. She was forced into slave labor at the factory of the German corporation BASF, where every single day she had to load heavy white metal strips onto wagons. She received very small portions of food and was severely beaten for every mishap, and sometimes she was beaten for no reason at all.

Plaintiff Raisa Sevast’yanova presently resides in Simferopol, Ukraine. She was born in Crimea, Ukraine in1925, into a Jewish family. Her real name is Raisa Goldshlyak. When the War started, her neighbors took her to a small Ukrainian village and obtained for her Russian identification papers in the name of Valentina Rymanova, in order to save her from the Nazis. In 1942, Raisa was forcibly taken by the Nazis and brought to Berlin, and then transferred to Vienna. She was placed as a slave laborer into the factory of a German corporation SIEMENS. The labor camp where Raisa worked was surrounded by a double wall of barbed wire, and was guarded at all times by the SS guards and vicious dogs. She was awakened at 4 a.m. every morning; given a piece of bread with 20 grams of margarine; and then marched to work under military convoy. Every working day lasted for 12 endless hours without any breaks, during which she was standing at all times. Raisa was forced to work even when she was very sick. She received almost no compensation for her labor.

Other plaintiffs worked in similar inhuman conditions: Ivan Shuvalov worked for the German corporation OPEL; Alexander Boyko worked for the German corporation MANN; Nikolay Godun worked for VOLKSWAGEN; Fedor Lirskiy worked for KRUPP.

The complaint further alleges that the Defendant corporations conspired with the Nazi regime to profit from the use of forced/slave labor and since these acts were crimes against humanity, no statute of limitations should apply. The Plaintiffs are seeking compensation from these and other German corporations for the economic, physical and moral damage that they and all other forced/slave laborers of Ukraine were caused to suffer.

The class action law suit was filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by three legal firms: