05 February 2007
The German government reportedly plans to pay compensation to Holocaust survivors who worked in Jewish ghettos set up by the Nazis. The weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" reports that the government was making a second attempt to pay damages to surviving ghetto workers, who, unlike slave laborers compensated since 2000, generally earned a small – albeit often negligible – wage. In 2002, the German parliament passed a law to grant these survivors a small pension, but the drive proved unsuccessful due to bureaucratic complications in processing the claims. In view of this, German chancellor Angela Merkel has now instructed the Finance Ministry to settle the claims in a non-bureaucratic manner, and set up a fund based on the model used for the slave labor victims, the magazine said. A spokesman for the Finance Ministry said only that talks were underway with the Jewish Claims Conference in New York about how many of the victims had yet to be compensated. "Talks are still at an early stage," he told the "Reuters" news agency. The magazine said there was still disagreement about the sums involved in the compensation. While the Finance Ministry was considering a sum of around 10 million euros (US$ 13.02 million), the Jewish Claims Conference was seeking up to 100 million euros.
