News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: German Reparations

Date: May 29, 2001

"German Parliament Clears Nazi Payments

By Geir Moulson Associated Press Writer Wednesday, May 30, 2001; 11:06 a.m. EDT BERLIN –– The German parliament voted Wednesday to free payments from a $4.6 billion fund for surviving Nazi-era slave laborers, finally providing a measure of justice to the victims.

After two years of negotiations, parliament unlocked the government-industry fund by passing a motion that says the dismissal of a series of U.S. lawsuits seeking compensation from German companies constitutes "legal peace."

More than 1 million aging survivors of Nazi labor, most of them in Eastern Europe, are expected to benefit from the closure what Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called "the last great open chapter of our historical responsibility." Some 300,000 applications already have been approved.

Fund officials say payments from the fund should start reaching survivors in mid-June. Former slave laborers will receive one-time payments of up to $6,700.

Schroeder voiced relief that payments were at last about to start.

"I want to start with a word which I think reflects the relief we all feel today," he said in opening parliament's debate on the topic. "That word is: finally."

Germany has paid some $60 billion in restitution for suffering at the hands of the Nazis, but slave labor had always fallen between the cracks. German companies long denied responsibility for using slave labor, arguing they had been pressured by the Nazis.

Schroeder pledged shortly after his 1998 election – the year before the government returned to the revived German capital of Berlin – to compensate the victims.

"Compensation in the true sense of the word is hardly possible," Schroeder said. But the fund "sends a signal that Germany is fully conscious of the terrible crimes of its past, and will remain so."

Under pressure from U.S. lawsuits, German industry agreed with the government on the fund's financing in December 1999. An accord last July that laid out conditions for industry's protection from lawsuits was signed by Germany, the United States, East European countries, Israel and lawyers representing survivors.

But compensation was held up by legal wrangles over dismissal of the suits and industry's slowness in raising its half of the fund.

"It has been a long, tough, arduous and sad road," said Volker Beck of the Greens Party, who sits on the fund's board and has long criticized industry for its slowness in raising its half of the fund while thousands of elderly Nazi labor victims died.

© Copyright 2001 The Associated Press "