In this 2020 photo, survivors walk beneath a gate that says “Work makes you free” after a wreath-laying ceremony at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz memorial during the ceremony. 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland.
Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
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Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
In this 2020 photo, survivors walk beneath a gate that says “Work makes you free” after a wreath-laying ceremony at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz memorial during the ceremony. 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland.
Janek Skarzynski/AFP via Getty Images
The German government will pay more than $1.4 billion next year to Holocaust survivors, the latest compensation for atrocities and mistreatment perpetrated by the Nazis.
Nearly $890 million will go to home care services — an increasingly important aspect of the restitution effort, as Nazi victims age, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust ended.
The payments stem from annual negotiations between the German Federal Ministry of Finance and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization representing Holocaust survivors also known as the Conference of Claims. The funds are aims to help survivors live with dignity, decades after they have suffered abuse and lost loved ones and property.
“Every year these negotiations become more and more important as this last generation of Holocaust survivors ages and their needs grow,” said Greg Schneider, executive vice president of Conference of Claims, said in a statement. press release about the deal.
Funds include direct payments and hardship funds
As of September 2022, an estimated 280,000 Holocaust survivors are living in countries around the world, Conference of Claims speak.
The amounts for 2024 include $535 million in direct payments to survivors, ranging from a monthly pension to a one-time annual payment of 1,250 euros ($1,365) per person.
Expected compensation payment for 2024 eclipses more 1.2 billion USD Germany agrees to pay in 2023.
The amount of compensation has increased sharply since 2015, Germans government noteswhen the annual package was valued at around 510 million euros (about $557 million, at today’s exchange rates).
Part of the reason for the recent increase lies in the pandemic. Since the onset of COVID-19, Germany has been making one-time annual hardship payments to eligible survivors. Those package payments are expected to stop in December, but the government has agreed to keep the program running until at least 2027.
“The survivors receive the [hardship] payments are largely comprised of Jews from the former Soviet Union, who are not in camps or ghettos and are not eligible for pension schemes,” according to the Conference of Claims. Jews were killed by these units, which operated primarily by shooting hundreds and thousands of Jews at once and burying them in mass graves.”
Germany has been paying reparations and reparations for decades
Like Notes of the American Holocaust Memorial Museum, 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, along with millions of civilians and soldiers from the former Soviet Union, and Poles, Serbs or Roma minorities. The Nazis also staged mass murders of disabled people and homosexuals.
The Conference of Claims has pursued restitutions from the German government since 1951, when it was founded by a coalition of Jewish organizations and has received more than $90 billion in payments.
A decade ago, the Conference of Claims was rocked by a fraud scandal in which New York-based team members accused of stealing money and made thousands of bogus claims. Justice Department officials say it was the Complaints Conference that brought the FBI’s attention to the scam in 2009.
