Germany OKs Funds for Nazi Slave Laborers

BERLIN —  German lawmakers gave the final go-ahead Wednesday for $4.5 billion in payments to the last uncompensated Nazi victims, an estimated 1.2 million survivors of slave labor who will begin getting their long-overdue reparations within two weeks.

With an overwhelming vote of approval, the lower house of Parliament proclaimed that “legal peace” had been secured for German industries and hailed the closing of “the darkest chapter of our history.”

But the lawmakers and politicians who struggled for years to make token amends with those enslaved in Nazi death camps and factories appealed to fellow citizens to keep in mind that neither money nor time could ever correct the brutal Third Reich abuses.

“With this we give a sign that will make clear to the world that Germany is conscious of the terrible crimes of its past and will remain so,” Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told deputies as they gathered for the final vote to release the payments.

Otto Lambsdorff, the government’s chief negotiator in the talks that began three years ago and stumbled over numerous financial and legal obstacles, also cautioned fellow Germans against confusing compensation with justice.

“We have sought to bring about financial closure of this darkest chapter of our history,” he told the lawmakers. “But this is financial closure. There can never be moral closure.”

Even as members of Parliament were voting, another reminder of the Nazi horrors was unfolding in Munich, where an 89-year-old former concentration camp guard was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a Jewish prisoner at Theresienstadt in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Prosecutors won the maximum penalty against Anton Malloth, despite his age and affliction with cancer, as a show of respect for the Nazi’s victims and a warning to Germany’s resurgent neo-Nazis.

The reparations voice vote by the Bundestag, or lower house, authorizes release of a fund amassed from pledges and contributions by more than 6,350 German companies and the federal government. The fund aims to provide at least symbolic relief to survivors from among the estimated 10 million prisoners forced to work for the Nazi regime.

Berlin officials estimate that only about 1.2 million eligible recipients are living. Most are in Eastern Europe, where the Cold War prevented them from receiving compensation during earlier reparation programs in which Germany paid more than $60 billion.

About 300,000 applications for the slave labor reparations have been approved. Payments should begin by mid-June to survivors in Poland and the Czech Republic, where screening and preparations have been expedited, fund administrators told reporters.

Those who were imprisoned in camps or ghettos are due payments of about $6,700 apiece. Survivors of forced labor--those who were pressed into working for Nazi industries but were allowed to go home at night--will be eligible for about $2,100.

Coming 56 years after the mistreatment ended, the sums seem meager. But many of those eligible are living in poverty in formerly Communist countries, where the money can provide a more dignified survival.

On the eve of the vote, a spokesman for the German industries that are obliged to pay half the $4.5-billion fund--and that months ago insisted the money had already been collected--disclosed that nearly 40% of industry’s share was not yet on deposit. But Wolfgang Gibowski said the shortfall would be corrected within a few days and would cause no delay in the payments.

There also has been controversy about the millions of dollars in accrued interest on those funds that were deposited last year, before last-minute legal challenges in U.S. courts further delayed the start of payments. Some industries have urged Gibowski and Lambsdorff to return the interest to the donors, while the government and other activists say the extra money should go to the victims.

Parliament’s proclamation also includes an order to the business contributors to deposit the remainder of their obligations without delay.

“This historic vote fulfills Germany’s obligation to Holocaust survivors, who have been waiting some 60 years for their small measure of justice,” said Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Jewish Claims Conference, which will be making payments to the first 10,000 of about 160,000 Jewish victims within the next few weeks. “We are racing the clock to get payments to survivors in their lifetimes.”

Victims of the Nazi terror who ended up in Western countries after World War II were compensated years ago for their suffering. But only after the fall of the Iron Curtain were survivors in the former Communist world allowed to apply for reparations.

Then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was compelled to agree to limited compensation to Jewish victims in Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s, but he balked at another wide-ranging program to aid former slave and forced laborers. It was only after U.S. lawsuits were filed against companies such as Volkswagen and insurer Allianz that industries began collaborating with the government to bring an end to the costly individual claims by creating a blanket compensation program.

After defeating Kohl in 1998, Schroeder pledged to address the slave laborers’ grievances and shepherded the quest for a compensation program through its many delays and standoffs.

The last and most distressing delay came in March, when U.S. District Judge Shirley Wohl Kram refused to dismiss lawsuits against German companies, saying she was unconvinced that the industries were prepared to fund the payments.

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the lawsuits this month, allowing German industries to proclaim that they were satisfied with U.S. assurances of “legal peace” and leading to the Bundestag’s endorsement.