The German people has been given a distorted picture of Bonn indemnification payments in an official report, the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden charged today.
An editorial in the Jewish organ takes Issue with the fact that the official government Bulletin reported recently that by the end of the current fiscal year victims of Nazism will have been paid 7,000,000,000 deutsche marks, “one-fifth of this year’s total Federal budget.”
The distortion lies in the fact that the seven billion mark total, (approximately $1,750,000,000) was paid out over a total of several years, not in this fiscal year as implied, the editorial points out. In addition, the sum includes funds paid out by the various states as well as the Federal Government. An additional distortion is created by the government’s failure to point out that indemnification payments to victims of the Nazis make up but a fraction of the Hitler war costs to the German people, the newspaper underlines.
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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.