Germany negotiates reparations for Eastern European survivors

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 (JTA) — A Jewish delegation negotiating Holocaust reparations in Bonn this week urged Germany to pay long overdue compensation to Eastern European survivors. How Germany would respond to mounting international pressure to reach an agreement remained unclear, although the head of the Jewish delegation said Tuesday he had received assurances of support from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “We are very optimistic,” Israel Singer, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress and leader of the delegation representing the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said in Bonn on Tuesday. “We have great hopes that these talks will indeed serve to deal with those people who are aging rapidly.” The delegation, made up of Holocaust survivors and officials from the United States, Israel and Eastern Europe, was scheduled to hold talks Tuesday and Wednesday with German Chancellery Minister Friedrich Bohl and with Finance Ministry officials. The negotiations mark the most concerted effort to date to seek justice for the so-called “double victims” of World War II — individuals who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and then, because they were living under Communist regimes, never received reparations. Germany has paid more than $54 billion in compensation to Holocaust survivors since World War II. However, those living in Soviet bloc countries were unable to apply for compensation during the Cold War, and Communist East Germany refused to make any payments. The Claims Conference and other Jewish groups are now demanding that those survivors, estimated to number between 15,000 and 40,000, be deemed eligible for compensation. Germany has come under increasing pressure to reach an agreement amid revelations that it is paying pensions to thousands of SS and Nazi police veterans living in Eastern Europe and outside of Germany while refusing to compensate Eastern European Holocaust survivors. Last year alone, Germany paid 1.1 million veterans and dependents of Nazi Germany’s armed forces so-called disability pensions totaling nearly $8 billion, according to recently published figures. The recipients included tens of thousands of suspected war criminals. “World public opinion has been moved on this question, particularly in view of the irony that the murderers — the very jailers of some of these people — are receiving pensions while the victims are denied,” said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the WJC. Germany began allocating some money to Eastern European victims after the collapse of communism. But Jewish groups have complained that the one-time lump payments of up to several hundred dollars amount to only a fraction of payments to Western victims. Bonn, for its part, says the payments went far in the poor economies of the former Eastern bloc. In addition to seeking justice for elderly and destitute Eastern European survivors, the delegation is hoping to secure an agreement on less restrictive criteria under which Holocaust survivors would be eligible to receive reparations. In order to receive payments today, an individual must have spent at least six months in a concentration camp or 18 months in a ghetto and have an annual income of less than $14,000. Officials would not specify what the revised criteria might entail. In advance of this week’s negotiations in Bonn, Washington made sure its position on the matter was clear. President Clinton brought the issue up with Kohl during a visit here this spring. And earlier this month, 82 senators signed onto a letter urging Germany to make immediate payments to Eastern European survivors. A resolution attached to the foreign operations bill in the House also calls for immediate payments. “We find it distressing that your government has refused to provide any meaningful compensation to this forgotten group of Holocaust survivors,” states the senators’ letter to Kohl, which was circulated by Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), whose father, the late Sen. Thomas Dodd, was a leading prosecutor at the postwar Nuremberg trials. “We hope you will address this matter with the utmost speed so these remaining survivors of mankind’s darkest hours are able to live out their final years with some measure of comfort and dignity,” the letter said. The American Jewish Committee, which also has been outspoken on the issue, placed the letter in ads in American and international newspapers last week as part of a public campaign to pressure Germany into agreeing to a quick settlement. “This is an opportunity for the government of Germany to continue in the tradition that it has followed in other matters of reparations over the years, where their record of facing the history of that era has in many ways demonstrated a desire to move ahead and to do what’s right,” said Jason Isaacson, director of the AJCommittee’s office of governmental and international affairs. For his part, the WJC’s Steinberg said, “It’s now or never. “Frankly we’re talking about an aged population which simply can’t wait for mechanisms to be established for further negotiations,” he said. “Something has to be done.”