Israel to Ask Germany for $1.4 Billion for WWII Forced Labor

As seen at TheMediaLine.org.

The Israeli Finance Minister plans to ask the German government for a payment of $1.4 billion as compensation for forced Jewish labor in ghetto factories during the Second World War.

The request will be made by Minister of Finance, Yuval Steinitz, at a meeting scheduled for early 2010.

The German government will be asked to implement the decision by the German High Court.

In 2002 survivors who worked in the ghettos and their descendents successfully appealed to the German High Court, which ruled that in addition to Germany’s agreement to pay compensation for forced labor in camps, it must equally compensate forced labor in Jewish ghettos.

“The claim of Israel now is that Germany did not implement the decision of the German High Court,” Dr. Roni Stauber, a senior research fellow and the director of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Racism and Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, told The Media Line.             

“There was one agreement at the end of 1952,” he said. “This was an agreement between Israel and Germany which was called a global compensation, which resulted in Germany giving about $715 million to Israel, who received this money for all the refugees that came to Israel after the Holocaust.”

“Simultaneously the Germans began giving money to survivors besides the agreement with Israel,” Stauber explained. “There were two agreements, one with Israel in which the state was given money to care for the refugees in Israel and one with the Claims Conference against Germany to give money to individuals [outside Israel].”

“The thing now is that the Germans have enacted new legislation to compensate people that worked during the war in concentration camps as well,” he said referring to why ghetto labor compensation had only recently become an issue.

Survivors and their descendants have called for compensation for the forced labor of Jews in German factories, which were established in the ghettos during the war and which used both Jews and other workers paid very low wages.

The compensation agreement in 1952 only applies to Jewish property confiscated by Germany for which there were no living claimants after the war. The money was given to Israel as a state, with the idea that as the new homeland for some 75% of the war’s survivors, and as an economically struggling nascent state, it was reasonable for Israel to be the recipient.