West Germany’s Parliament has agreed, in principle, to pay new reparations to Jewish victims of Nazism. These reparations would be the last payment to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But the proposed additional payments have become entangled with efforts to discuss restoration of the pension rights of Hitler-era civil servant never cleared by the de-Nazification courts.
That linkage is considered “unfortunate” by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was reportedly described by a spokesman as wanting “to do everything possible to avoid coupling the fate of victims and their oppressors.”
Before Christmas, the Christian Democratic opposition in Parliament gained backing for a plan to pay $255 million in new reparations but only in exchange for debate on the fate of other groups affected by the Nazi era. The debate, scheduled for March 31, would discuss possible benefits for Gypsies and others who did not get any reparations but also to former career military officers, members of the SS elite guard and Nazi civil servants.
Schmidt, who said he wanted the full backing of all West German parties for what he called at last material gesture” to Jewish victims, originally sought to have the $255 million included in the 1980 budget. He received assurances from Helmut Kohl, head of the Christian Democratic Union, and from Philip Jenninger, manager of the parliamentary group of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, that the two parties would cooperate but the leaders were voted down by their parliamentary groups.
The result was an agreement in principle to include the reparations for Jews in a supplementary budget for 1980 but in conjunction with a discussion of pensions for Germans not cleared by de-Nazification courts.
The agreement calls for making $139 million available to Jewish victims in 1980, with additional grants of $58 million in each of the two following years. Of this total, $23 million would go to the Jewish community in West Germany and the balance to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which is headed by Dr. Nahum Goldmann.
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.
