Some 7,500 Holocaust survivors will receive compensation from Germany as a result of a new agreement.
The agreement signed this month between Germany and the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany expands the eligibility criteria to two groups of survivors who until now have not received any compensation from the German government.
Payments are expected to be made after Jan. 1, 1999.
One group is made up of survivors who were denied compensation because their annual income exceeded $16,000 for a single person, or $21,000 for a married couple. But for 4,500 survivors, who meet this criteria when their Social Security income is excluded, compensation now will be available.
The new agreement excludes Social Security from income tabulations.
The other group includes survivors who spent the war years in camps that were not included in the original compensation agreement.
Survivors who were incarcerated in special camps for Jews located in Austria, in forced labor camps on the Austro-Hungarian border or in forced military labor battalions for Hungarian Jews on the Ukrainian front will now also be able to receive compensation.
An estimated 3,000 survivors fall into this category.
The German government will spend $25 million a year on the pensions for these 7,500 survivors
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