Bureaucratic obstructionism and legalistic hairsplitting, which reflect ill will and deep-seated hostility toward Nazi victims, are thwarting indemnification for individual claimants throughout West Germany and West Berlin, it is charged with increasing bitterness by the organizations and experts most concerned with the complex problem.
The Federal Indemnification Law, adopted by Parliament nine months ago, still remains a dead letter because not one of the necessary implementation regulations has been issued. Actual payments have dropped substantially below the level of last year.
Even existing state indemnification legislation is being foiled and hamstrung at every turn. In Bavaria, for instance, the law provides that compensation for illegal incarceration must be paid to those concentration camp inmates who, on a given date in 1947, were legal residents of Bavarian cities or of Bavarian DP camps. After five years, it suddenly occurred to the Bavarian Ministry of Finance to issue a directive that DP’s, who were legal residents of German cities in 1947, are barred from the benefits of the law.
The law provides certain compensation for a “particularly heavy transfer loss” suffered by German Jews due to forced emigration. The Stuttgart Superior Court, in turning down a Jew seeking this compensation, came to the conclusion that, as long as the applicant had retained 10 percent of his property, no “particularly heavy loss” had occurred.
The Hesse Government recently filed an appeal against an award, by a lower court, of “illegal-detention” damages of one dollar a day to a Jewish woman who had been dragged from her home in Germany at ten minutes’ notice and shut up in a Polish ghetto. The woman is not entitled to compensation because imprisonment in the ghetto did not constitute “incarceration,” declares the Government’s legal brief.
In Wiesbaden, a former Jewish agent for steel mills, who continued selling steel until the November pogroms of 1938 put him out of business, was deprived of compensation by a local Indemnification Chamber on the pretext that there was no Nazi law specifically barring Jews from acting as agents for steel mills.
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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.
