Regulations to Benefit “expellee” Jews Sought in Germany

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has protested to the Bonn Ministry of Finance against the long delay in promulgating an implementation regulation that would make it possible to pay a small measure of compensation to Nazi victims from Silesia, East and West Prussia, Danzig and the Sudeten. Most German-speaking Jews who survived the Nazi regime were expelled from those areas after the war, together with the German population. They are sometimes known as “double persecutees.”

To indemnify Germans who lost their possessions at the time, the so-called “Equalization of Financial Birdens Law” was adopted almost three years ago. Although scores of implementation regulations to it have since been put into effect, none was issued with regard to Article 359. This particular clause bars expelled Germans from receiving indemnification for property they had originally looted from Jews, or acquired by profiteering from other Nazi terror measures; it also holds out the expectation of compensation to Jews from “expellee areas,” who suffered injury and economic damage there due to Nazi persecution.

Both provision have remained a dead letter because of German failure to drat the requisite implementation regulation, even though the Bonn Government under-took. in its 1952 pack with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims, to furnish such compensation.

In the same general connection, a controversy has developed about the status of Jewish “expellees” and refugees from Eastern Europe, notably from Czechoslovakia, whose mother tongue is German and who used to live within the German cultural orbit. The major Jewish weekly in Germany, the “Allgemeine Wochenzeitung” in this city, has charge that there are Jews being discriminated against and excluded from benefits which accrue to German expellees and refugees, but this has been denied by Dr. Theodor Oberlaender, the former high-ranking Nazi who is now Minister for Expellees in the Bonn Government.

Nonetheless, cases are known in which West German governmental offices denied expellee status to qualified Jews by pointing to recent legal definitions stipulating that recognized expellees must be of “German descent” and interpreting this clause as excluding Jews.