Two more years are needed for completion of the Bavarian indemnification program, Dr. Philip Auerbach, provincial Commissioner for Restitution, reported here today to the Bavarian Parliament.
Dr. Auerbach, who also holds the position of Commissioner for Persecutees, said that of a total of 170,000 applications filed with his office, more than 10,000 have been settled and some 30,000 are in the process. He blamed the slow progress of the program on the difficulties involved in investigating each claim, asserting that “obviously entire forgery centers are busy forging documents” for false claims.
The Parliament authorized the hiring of 18 additional workers in Dr. Auerbach’s department to speed up settlement of claims and passed a budget of 4,300,000 deutschemarks for it. The Commissioner also reported that the emigration of Jews from Bavaria was practically complete and that only 18,000 Jews remained in the province of the 126,000 who were in Bavarian camps and cities at the postwar peak.
Dr. Auerbach announced that an attempt to get the Federal Government to assume a portion of the indemnification burden has been rejected by Bonn Finance Minister Fritz Schaeffer. The Commissioner asked that 10 percent of the “equalization of burdens” fund should be set aside for the payment of indemnification to victims of racial persecution.
Minister Schaeffer’s reply was that the indemnification problem must be met by the provincial governments and not the Federal Government. The “equalization” fund was established to repay German “volksdeutsche” refugess expelled from other European countries for some of the losses they suffered as a result of the Nazi war.
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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.
