Nations' Whitaker Report classified the massacres as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, and therefore one of the earliest cases of genocide in the 20th century. In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He pointed out that international law requiring reparation did not exist in 1907, but he undertook to take the Herero petition back to the German government. On 16 August 2004, at the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide, a member of the German government, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's Federal Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation, officially apologised and expressed grief about the genocide, declaring in a speech that: She ruled out paying special compensations, but promised continued economic aid for Namibia which in 2004 amounted to $14M a year. This number has been significantly increased since then, with the budget for the years 2016–17 allocating a sum total of €138M in monetary support payments. The Trotha family travelled to Omaruru in October 2007 by invitation of the royal Herero chiefs and publicly apologised for the actions of their relative. Wolf-Thilo von Trotha said, Negotiations and agreement The Herero filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2001 demanding reparations from the German government and Deutsche Bank, which financed the German government and companies in Southern Africa. With a complaint filed with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in January 2017, descendants of the Herero and Nama people sued Germany for damages in the United States. The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 U.S. law often invoked in human rights cases. Their proposed class-action lawsuit sought unspecified sums for thousands of descendants of the victims, for the "incalculable damages" that were caused. Germany seeks to rely on its state immunity as implemented in US law as the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, arguing that, as a sovereign nation, it cannot be sued in US courts in relation to its acts outside the United States. In March 2019, the judge dismissed the claims due to the exceptions to sovereign immunity being too narrow for the case. In September 2020, the Second Circuit stated that the claimants did not prove that money used to buy property in New York could be