Were the Tietz Family Ever Compensated by the German State
(Crossposted with permission from Healing Minnesota Stories web log)
Part of an ongoing series exploring reparations
By Vic Rosenthal and Scott Russell
Jewish men in the Radom ghetto March, 1941. They were forced to habiliment white armbands with a blue Star of David to mark them as outsiders.Photo: Brenner/Wikimedia Commons
Sarah (not her real name) was a teenager in Radom, Poland when Germany invaded her country in September, 1939, the showtime of World War II.
Now a U.S. citizen in her 90s, she remembers living in extreme poverty and constant hunger in the Radom ghetto. Many men were taken abroad and never seen over again. Sarah was forced into slave labor, her brother taken away. She and her female parent were sent on a death march to Auschwitz and later Bergen Belsen.
"More than five years in ghettos with poverty and starvation and two expiry marches, but I survived," she said. "I don't know how."
Germany started making reparations payments to Holocaust survivors back in the 1950s, and continues making payments today. Some 400,000 Jews who survived the Naziswere withal alive in 2019. That year, Germany paid $564 million to theClaims Conference, which handles the payments.
Screen grab from Claims Briefing webpage.
In Federal republic of germany, the reparations program is called theWiedergutmachung (literally "making the good again"), co-ordinate to the 2006 book "The Handbook of Reparations. In Israel, it's simply calledShilumim (the payments). The book called Deutschland'due south attempt "the largest, almost comprehensive reparations program always implemented."
Germany'due south reparations work went beyond money; it included a commitment to ongoing truth telling and outlawing the Nazi Political party.
Sarah asked her real proper noun not be used. Her story gives a small window into reparation's complexities. For many, the money helped them out of poverty. For Sarah, the money offered was minimal; the decision to have it anything but direct forward.
She was a Polish denizen, not German. High german reparations didn't cover her family's stolen Polish property. When somewhen offered reparations for her forced labor, she refused at first. The payment was minimal, the weather demeaning; they wanted to run into her U.S. revenue enhancement returns.
"I worked as a slave laborer for five years, 8 months, and 2 weeks and all they were providing was a few yard dollars," she said.
Sarah finally accepted the funds effectually 2004 to aid one of her grandchildren with college expenses.
"I didn't accept the money every bit reparations simply rather as compensation for my labor," she said. "I didn't want annihilation from the German authorities."
Nuremberg Trials: Hermann Göring (left),Photo U.Southward. government
Even earlier Globe War II concluded, discussions were underway to hold Tertiary Reich leaders accountable for concentration camp horrors and the murder of millions. There was no international forum for accountability; the United Nations and Globe Court had yet to be created.
The United States, Russia, Great Britain, and France together prosecuted the worst offenders in what came to be chosen theNuremberg Trials , a series of xiii trials that ran from 1945-1949. (An international tribunal conducted the outset trial, a U.Southward. armed forces court conducted the others.)
These trials' extensive testimony brought the Nazi'due south utter cruelty into the light of day. Information technology was a form of truth telling and public education, though not on par with more contempo truth and reconciliation efforts.
The trialsresulted in many decease sentences, including Nazi leaderHermann Göring. Other defendants received prison sentences for a variety of crimes. Prosecutors convicted doctors whocommitted war atrocities. Theyconvicted industrial leaders for using forced labor and war profiteering.
Just months afterward World War II ended, Jewish leaderspressed for reparations. The West German government negotiated with them and the new Country of Israel and proposed a reparations plan.
Accepting reparationswas hotly contested in Israel. In the Knesset, Menachem Begin and the Herut Political party opposed the payments, considering them "blood money." In a 61-50 vote, Israel agreed to negotiated with Westward Germany on reparations.
U.S. Army staffers organize Nuremberg Trial testify. Photo: U.S. federal authorities.
Under the agreement, West Germanywould pay $100 million for individual reparations administered by the Claims Conference, paid over 14 years, co-ordinate to the Jewish Virtual Library. Israel would receive $745 million: 30 pct to buy United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland crude oil and 70 percent to buy metals, steel, and other products from Germany.
After the initial agreement, reparations piece of work expanded. For instance, in 1988, Federal republic of germany approved money so Holocaust survivors would get $290 a month for the residue of their lives.
In the 1990s, "Jews beganmaking claims for property stolen in Eastern Europe," according to the Shoah Resources Heart. "Various groups too began investigating what happened to money deposited in Swiss banks by Jews exterior of Switzerland who were later murdered in the Holocaust, and what happened to money deposited by various Nazis in Swiss banks."
Survivor groups also pressed claims against companies that profited from wartime forced labor, including Deutsche Banking concern, Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, and Opel, the Center said. In early 1999, the German government announced a programme to help Holocaust survivors, funded past these companies.
Last yr, the German governmentcommitted $662 million to Holocaust survivors struggling because of the pandemic, persecution, and their age.
As office of reparations, Germany has gone to smashing lengths to make sure its citizens won't e'er forget what happened. Information technology'southwardestablished memorials and landmarks across the country marking where Jewish people were rounded up or synagogues destroyed.
At that place's theHolocaust Memorial most Berlin'due south Brandenburg Gate, theBuchenwald Memorial, the site of a concentration camp near Weimar, and theTopf and Sons building in Erfurt, which made the crematorium ovens for concentration camps, the only memorial to highlight civilian collaboration in the Holocaust.
The "'Dejudaization Institute' Memorial" in Eisenach. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In 1994, 8Protestant regional churches erected theDejudaization Establish Memorial.
The memorial remembers the churches' responsibleness forpromoting anti semitism during the Nazi regime, and the "Institute for the Written report and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life" they founded.
In English language, the inscription means "We went astray," a quote from a 1947 Protestant confession of guilt, Wikipedia said. The memorial's cutting-out spaces symbolize efforts at the time to eliminate references to Judaism from the Christian Bible and Protestant hymnals.
Germany has no memorials to Nazis.
Most of Sarah's family perished during the war. Her mother, male parent and brother survived. Her mother died in Germany soon subsequently the war. After time in displaced persons camps, her begetter and brother emigrated to the United States in 1949; Sarah and her husband joined them in 1950.
Equally a Holocaust survivor, she has reflected on reparations for the descendants of sometime slaves and their families. Again, she focuses more on compensation than reparations. She believes the U.South. government has a lot to do to "tell the truth" about slavery, Jim Crow, and all of the indignities suffered past Blackness people and Native Americans.
For her, truth telling or acknowledgement is even more than important than the money. But, she adds, it's something that all individuals accept to make up one's mind for themselves.
In 2020, the Minnesota Quango of Church's Lathvoted unanimously to launch a multi-year effort at truth telling, education and repair with Indigenous and African American communities. The goals include building relationships, creating an accurate, common narrative of our history, and bringing almost systemic change. This weblog series is in service of that work.
Source: http://www.mnchurches.org/blog/2021/02/18/holocaust-survivors-receive-german-reparations-day
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