The Central Council of the Jews in Germany has called upon the Bonn Federal Government to issue the implementation regulations that are indispensable if the Federal Indemnification Law for individual applicants is not to remain a dead letter.
At a conference of the Central Council’s board of directors it was described as intolerable that, eight months after its adoption by Parliament and six months after it entered into force, the law remains inoperative. The Bonn Ministry of Finance, has not yet issued a single regulation for carrying out this particular law. In consequence, indemnification payments in most states have sharply declined since the beginning of the year, although the law was designed to speed up payment and to enlarge the circle of those eligible.
An even sharper attack upon the Bonn Government’s procrastination in this matter was voiced by Professor Hermann Brill at a joint meeting of the Frankfurt Jewish Community and the Association of Social Democratic Victims of Nazism. In a resolution, the meeting demanded the immediate issuance of implementation regulations and, furthermore, certain improvements to the law itself.
Professor Brill, a German whom the Nazis imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp for ten years, served as State Secretary in Hesse and as a Bundestag deputy after the war. He estimated that the entire indemnification program would cost the German treasury no more than $500,000, 000. He urged that the sum be raised by a special levy upon those big industrial and agricultural enterprises which had employed 9,000,000 foreign slave laborers during the war.
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.
