Germany to pay £1 billion in compensation to Holocaust survivors next year
The body that handles claims for compensation and restitution says extra funds will be available for survivors fleeing the war in Ukraine
Michael Daventry is Jewish News’s foreign and broadcast editor
Germany said it will pay a further £1 billion next year to Holocaust survivors on the anniversary of a deal struck 70 years ago for Jewish victims of the Nazis.
The eighth decade of the Luxembourg Agreement, which laid the groundwork for compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors who had lost everything, was marked on Thursday by German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
He said the agreement had been a milestone and foundation on which the Israeli-German partnership was built over the past seven decades.
“This agreement could not relieve the heavy guilt that Germans had brought upon themselves,” Scholz said in Berlin.
“The Luxembourg Agreement was rather an attempt to take moral responsibility for the failure of morality.
“The attempt to ensure that inhumanity did not have the last word, but humanity.
“And it was the attempt to counter the material damage and the unprecedented robbery of the Jewish community.”
The Claims Conference, the organisation which handles claims on behalf of Jews who suffered under the Nazis, said a further $1.2 billion (£1.04 billion) would be paid by Germany in 2023.
That brings the overall amount of compensation paid to over £70 billion.
The organisation’s vice president Greg Schneider said: “As visionary as those original negotiators were, they could not have possibly imagined the long-term and deep consequences of the Holocaust on survivors.
“No one possibly imagined that 70 years later there would still be elderly Holocaust survivors who were so impoverished, who were so needy, who were still suffering the dire consequences.”
This year’s figure will include €12 million in emergency humanitarian payments to 8,500 Ukrainian Holocaust survivors and €170 million for a Holocaust hardship fund from which tens of thousands of Survivors around the world will benefit.
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