Bonn Parliament Gets Recommendations Improving Indemnification Law

After 17 months of hearings and deliberations, the Bundestag Indemnification Committee has submitted to the full Bundestag a final version of the amendment to the Federal Indemnification Law.

The amendment actually constitutes a complete overhaul and rewrite of the 1953 Federal Indemnification Law, whose worst shortcomings and injustices it is designed to remedy. The Bundestag, which approved the amendment in a first reading last December, is expected to pass the new version in a second and third reading within the next fortnight.

In addition to the improvements that were contained in the original government draft of the amendment, the Indemnification Committee has inserted a number of provisions that will substantially benefit Nazi victims. In the future, all claims formally recognized by the proper indemnification agency become payable immediately, except for property and certain other claims above $2,400, in cases where the applicant is less than 60 years old. Even these claims will become due on April 1, 1957.

Jews of German citizenship or nationality who emigrated from Germany due to Nazi persecution, and who now return, will be entitled to an immediate lump-sum payment of $1,428, the same amount received by German PW’s who returned from the Soviet Union Half of the $1,428 will later be deducted from property indemnification claims.

The discriminatory 25 percent differential that has heretofore been applied against DP’s will be eliminated. For most categories of personal damage, those who had not been residents of Germany on certain specified deadlines before or after the war were until now given 25 percent less indemnification than present or former residents of Germany, unless the persecutee concerned was over 60 at the time of another deadline. In the future, all victims of Nazism–irrespective of present or former place of residence–will receive the same amount of compensation for concentration camp imprisonment and for damage to life, limb or health.

In transmitting its recommendations to the full Bundestag, the Indemnification Committee noted “with alarm and indignation” certain decisions by indemnification agencies and indemnification courts that amount to “cold sabotage” of the underlying indemnification concept. Decrying the legalistic hair-splitting practiced by many indemnification officials, the Bundestag Committee observed that “unless the intellect is supplemented by the heart in this respect, there can be no indemnification involving the real redressing of wrongs.”