Settlement of Bavarian indemnification and compensation claims will take “at least another five years,” a spokesman of the Bavarian Ministry of Finance admitted in parliament here in connection with budget deliberations.
Only 25,000 of 130,000 claims have been acted upon to date, he explained, and while it was hoped to step up the settlement rate to 1,500 a month eventually, no more than 850 are now being processed. A week earlier the head of the Bavarian State Agency for Indemnification, Max Troberg, had given the present monthly figure of settlements as 715, and the number of claims as 145,000.
In the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, on the other hand, about 48 percent of the 71,000 claims filed by 39,000 claimants have been settled through the payment of 56,000,000 marks to individual claimants and 9,400,000 marks to the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization. Of claims from persons residing within Germany, many of them non-Jewish anti-Nazis, 60 percent have been met.
Of cases which involve persons who have emigrated, almost all of them former German Jews, only 20 percent have been satisfied. Displaced persons, including Jews from Eastern Europe, have been compensated only in a small proportion of cases, although they are entitled to “damages” of a little more than the equivalent of a dollar for each day spent in concentration camps.
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