Bonn Refuses to Pay Indemnification to Nazi Victims in Eight Lands

West Germany has categorically refused a request by eight European countries that it expand the scope of German indemnification legislation and thereby render eligible for compensation those Nazi victims who were neither citizens nor residents of Germany, and to whom individual or collective indemnification provisions do not now apply.

The governments of Britain. France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Greece pointed out last July that many of their nationals or residents had been harassed and persecuted on racial, religious or political grounds. They proposed that representatives from these eight countries and from the Federal Republic form an intergovernmental committee to examine ways and means of providing adequate compensation for victims of Nazism excluded from the benefits of current German indemnification laws.

This plan has been turned down by Bonn in separate but identical notes to the eight governments. Indigent and needy Nazi victims outside the purview of the present compensation framework must be aided by ‘ charitable measures,’ the German Government contends. It indicates willingness to participate in deliberations on such measures and to render assistance.

The outright German refusal has been greeted with angry remonstrances, particularly in Holland. In the press and in governmental quarters there, the question is raised why Dutch inmates of German concentration camps, or Dutch Jews stripped of their belongings by German state authorities, should be much worse off than other Nazi victims, simply because they were not residents of Germany on certain specified deadlines. Some 150, 000 Dutchmen are affected by this “rank discrimination, ” according to Netherlands diplomatic sources here.