Indemnification to Nazi Victims Residing Outside Germany is Planned

The Bundestag Indemnification Committee which is dealing with the problem of amending the Federal Indemnification Law for Nazi victims, will recommend that all victims of Nazism–irrespective of their present or former place of residence–should receive the same amount of compensation for concentration camp imprisonment and for damage to life and health, it was learned here today.

For these categories of personal damage, those who were not residents of Germany on certain specified deadlines before or after the war were heretofore given 25 percent less indemnification than present or former residents of Germany, unless the persecutee concerned was older than sixty. Thus, the indemnification law provided $35.70 for each month of concentration camp custody, but all Nazi victims failing to meet the residence requirements had to take a cut of about nine dollars.

It is learned from a well-informed source that the Indemnification Committee has voted to eliminate this discriminatory differential. Once the text suggested by the committee is enacted into law, each Nazi victim who previously received the cut-rate compensation becomes entitled to payment of the 25 percent increment. In the case of former prisoners of the Nazis, this means nine dollars multiplied by the number of months spent in Nazi concentration camps or jails. The widows and orphans of Jews killed by the Nazis, but who fail to meet the residence requirements, will also have their annuities or pensions augmented.

As for Jews crippled as a result of persecution, and whose Nazi-inflicted disability has been formally certified by a German indemnification agency, not all those failing to meet residence requirements will be granted the 25 percent increase. Israel nationals are excluded from these particular benefits under the terms of letters exchanged at Luxembourg in September, 1952 between Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett. The Government of Israel recognized then that, considering the West German undertaking to pay reparations in recompense for the expenditures incurred by Israel in the resettlement of Jewish refugees, indemnification provisions of this type should apply to Israel national only with respect to deprivation of liberty and to widows’ or orphans’ pensions.

The Bundestag Indemnification Committee’s final report to the Bundestag plenum will be drafted within the next fortnight. The second and third reading of the long-awaited Amendment, which constitutes a complete overhauling and rewrite of the 1953 Federal Indemnification Law, is scheduled shortly thereafter.