The West German Government has paid out the equivalent of $1,500,000,000 in the five years since it initiated its restitution program, according to Finance Ministry officials here. They include in the overall restitution picture the reparations paid to Israel under the terms of the Luxemburg Pact and restitution to non-Jewish victims of the Nazis as well as Jewish claimants.
On this overall basis, the Finance Ministry estimates that the restitution-reparations programs will eventually cost Germany $6,000,000,000, though they concede that hard and fast figures cannot be gathered until the deadline for filing claims is passed, this March 31. Other estimates of the cost of the restitution program range down to a low of $3,000,000,000 and a high of $5,000,000,000.
Dr. Georg Blessin, chief of the Ministry’s restitution division, estimated a total of about 18,000,000,000 deutschemarks ($4,290,000,000), (In Vienna yesterday, Bonn Finance Minister Franz Etzel gave the same estimate to a press conference. Herr Etzel also called “fantastic” an earlier estimate by Justice Minister Pritz Schaeffer that restitution to Jews alone would amount to the equivalent of $6,000,000,000.)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
