Outrage at Nazi Labor Camp Compensation
August 2, 2004
After four years of mulling over claims by the families of Jewish slave laborers who worked in Nazi death camps before and during World War II, and 59 years after the camps were liberated by advancing allied troops, the German government has agreed to pay €6,800 ($8172) each in compensation. The sum has caused outrage among relatives, survivors and campaigners as it is much less than the €7,669.38 German law had set for individual payment.
Millions of people, many of them Jewish, were ordered by the Nazis to work in labor camps. Ever since the end of WWII, Jewish groups have been campaigning for compensation for survivors of these work camps, which have become synonymous with the atrocities of the Nazis.
The compensation was agreed in principle by the German government in 2000 but subsequent bureaucratic stalling and bundles of red tape has meant that it has taken since then to finalize the amount to be paid to each survivor. The total sum earmarked for the use of compensation was €4.9 billion which would come from "The Foundation: Remembrance, Responsibility and Future," the organization funded by the German government and German businesses that profited from slave labor.
Running out of time
The number of surviving former slave laborers eligible for compensation under the government scheme totaled half a million in 1999. Those who have died since, have passed the eligibility to their surviving relatives.
The Foundation stated in June this year that it wanted to complete the final compensation payments by mid-2005 as more survivors reached the end of their days. "Many victims are now in their seventies and eighties," said board of trustees chairman Dieter Kastrup at the time.
So far, some €3 billion ($3.6 billion) have been distributed to victims by partner organizations such as the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Most of the 1.6 million recipients concerned live in Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic.