Germany: 25 years since Nazi forced labor compensation began

Germany's Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) Foundation is this month marking 25 years since it first paid compensation to the last survivors forced to work under the Nazi regime.

But some have argued that those payments should have begun much sooner after the end of World War II in 1945, and should have been much larger. According to the EVZ, €4.4 billion ($5.1 billion) were paid to 1.66 million former forced laborers and their legal successors in around 100 countries between 2001 and 2007, when the final payments were made.

Some 26 million people are believed to have been forced to work for the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, around half of them in occupied Europe outside Germany's borders during World War II. Historical studies have found that if the full amount of slave labor performed during the Nazi era were to be compensated, the original fund would have had to comprise between 180 billion and 220 billion deutschmarks (€90 billion–€112 billion).

"If you ask me personally: Was it a large fund? No, of course not, measured against the injustice," said EVZ head Andrea Despot. "There were around 26 million people who worked in factories, in agriculture, in churches, in private homes, in companies. There was barely a section of society that didn't profit from it. One could say that it was not nearly enough to compensate the damage and the exploitation that happened."

Breaking the silence about forced labor in Nazi Germany

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The EVZ Foundation was established in July 2000, both as a way to compensate forced laborers and as a foundation to promote and finance projects that foster human rights, democratic values and the interests of survivors of the Nazi regime.

The organization was given a fund of 10.1 billion deutschmarks. Half was paid by the federal government, and the other half by an organization of around 6,500 German companies, called the German Business Foundation Initiative, many of which, though not all, were businesses that had used forced labor.

Compensation for Nazi-era slaves mere 'symbolism'

Though West Germany did introduce compensation measures, such as the 1953 Federal Compensation Act for those persecuted for political, racist or religious reasons, those attempts excluded forced laborers. From the 1950s to the 1980s, following public pressure, some large West German companies voluntarily paid out millions of deutschmarks in compensation to forced laborers, though not to people in Eastern Europe.

The debate in the 1990s was tortuous, with many German companies initially refusing to contribute to the fund and refusing to accept responsibility for the forced labor. "In the end, it was basically just numerical symbolism," said Constantin Goschler, a historian at the Ruhr University Bochum who in 2012 published a comprehensive collection of studies on the compensation for Nazi-era forced laborers.

"The people representing the claimants were saying: We need at least a double-figure number [of billions] and those paying were saying: We want a number that's at most double figures," he added. "And so in the end 10 billion DM came out. It had nothing to do with the size of the damage, it was pure negotiation psychology."

Class-action suits, especially from Jewish groups

Legal pressure also played a significant role, as more and more victims groups, particularly in the US, began to discover the power of the class-action lawsuit.

Many Polish people were forced to work by the occupying Nazi regime during the war Image: picture alliance

"It wasn't a purely moral or ethical decision — that was part of it, but not only," Despot told DW. "After decades of demands from survivors, there was international pressure, especially from the USA and also from Jewish organizations, who were preparing class action lawsuits."

These threats finally led Germany to enter into negotiations with the US to establish legal clarity for the future.

Why did compensation take so long?

Goschler said there was one overarching reason why the German state took over half a century to offer compensation to the former forced laborers.

"The first reason was the Cold War," he told DW. "During the Cold War , there was a principle in effect: We don't send any money behind the Iron Curtain." That meant that West Germany simply refused to send any money to its eastern neighbors, notably Poland.

Another factor, Goschler said, was that former forced laborers in Eastern Europe were often treated with suspicion, and so had few people on their side at home.

"Forced laborers — and many of them were women — in the former Soviet Union were considered collaborators who had worked for the Nazi war economy, and when they returned home after the war, they were mistrusted, they were sent to screening and filtration camps, they lived a pretty miserable life," he said.

In fact, Goschler argued, when Germany did final…