GERMANY AGREES TO PAY PENSIONS TO 66,000 HOLOCAUST VICTIMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

By Daily Mail Reporter

December 6, 2011

Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims from around the world after a year of tough negotiations.

The survivors who will benefit are mostly those who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos or forced to live in hiding for fear of death.

ED: I distinctly remember German friends who spoke of the starvation they endured during the latter days of WWII as well. I wonder if they qualify for reparations!

The agreement was made between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government. 

Greg Schneider, the conference's executive vice president said it was "not about money ~ it's about Germany's acknowledgement of these peoples' suffering."

He added: 'They're finally getting recognition of the horrors they endured as children.'

ED: What of the children of Dresden? The children of Bolshevik Russia? The children of Armenia? The gypsy children of the camps? Those suffering today in Palestine or Darfur…. The victims of imperialist genocidal policies around the globe? Do they get any recognition?

Of the new beneficiaries, 5,000 live in the U.S.

But part of the agreement does not immediately cover survivors who were young Jewish children born in 1938 or later.

'We will continue to press for greater liberalisations to ensure that no Holocaust survivor is deprived of the recognition that each deserves,' Stuart Eizenstat, special negotiator for the conference, said.

'That's why we continue to negotiate.'

ED: Yawns.

Evil: The survivors who will benefit are mostly those who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos or forced to live in hiding for fear of death due to the horrific policies of Adolf Hitler

ED: Yawns again.

Germany will now pay reparation pensions to a total of 66,000 people who survived Nazi death camps and ghettos, or had to hide or live under a false identity.

Mr Schneider said the humanitarian deal was reached because of a broadening of the criteria for payment to Holocaust survivors.

ED: I reiterate? What of the survivors of other Holocausts or is it that, because they are not Jewish, their agonies do not rate?

Under the new rules, from January 1, any Jew who spent at least 12 months in a ghetto, in hiding or living under a false identity, is eligible for a monthly pension of 300 euro (£256) a month.

For countries in the former Soviet bloc, that amount is 260 euro (£222).

Until now, the minimum time requirement for living under such duress was 18 months.

Julius Berman, chairman of the Claims Conference, which provides services and reparations to victims of the Holocaust around the world, said conference officials 'have long emphasized to the German government that they cannot quantify the suffering of a Holocaust survivor who lived in the hell of a ghetto'.

ED: Those ghettos were NOT German inventions. They were part of the isolationist policies enforced by the rabbis to keep their flocks from melding with the non Jews. Rather like Israel is trying to do, isolate its people from the rest of the world. You can bet that the wealthiest of Jews did NOT live in the ghetto, those were reserved for the everyday Jew who toiled like everyone else.

The Germans established more than 1,000 ghettos for Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated the Final Solution ~ a plan to murder all European Jews.

Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years, before residents were either shot in mass graves or deported to death camps.

More than 400,000 lived in Poland's Warsaw ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of others were squeezed into similar enclaves in eastern European cities like Vilnius, Lodz, Minsk and Odessa - starved and often battling deadly illnesses while forced to work.

Agreement: Germany will now pay reparation pensions to a total of 66,000 people who survived Nazi death camps and ghettos, or had to hide or live under a false identity. Pictured is German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Germany also has agreed to offer pensions to those who are 75 or older and spent three months in ghettos like the one operated in Budapest, Hungary, from November 1944 to January 1945.

That provision is expected to affect about 4,500 survivors next year and 3,500 more once they are 75.

New Yorkers Otto Herman, 81, and his sister Erzsebet Benedek, 78, were forced into the Budapest ghetto in October 1944, when he was 14 and she was 11.

They were freed when the Russian army arrived in January 1945, but they lost most of their family during the war.

The siblings, who now live in neighbouring apartments in Brooklyn's Williamsburg area, said the pensions would help them financially, but could not compensate for their harrowing wartime experiences.

'It is not enough,' Mr Herman said. 'I will never forget ... Sometimes I don't want to speak because of the memory.'

ED: Jaw cracking yawn.

To reach the new accord, Mr Schneider traveled to Berlin each month.

'It was not easy to negotiate this ~ it took a year of hard-fought negotiations with the Germans, with many meetings and lots of documentation,' he said.