Wiedergutmachung

Historian Tony Judt writes about Wiedergutmachung: In making this agreement Konrad Adenauer ran some domestic political risk: in December 1951, just 5 percent of West Germans surveyed admitted feeling 'guilty' towards Jews.

It applies the "Federal Compensation Laws" and took these responsibilities over from the Verwaltungsamt für innere Restitutionen, which, in its charter, states: Individuals who were persecuted for political, racial, religious or ideological reasons by the wartime German regime are eligible for money from the German government under the terms of the Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1953 and 1956.

This includes Jews who were interned in camps or ghettos, were obliged to wear the star badge, or who lived in hiding.Only people who were directly victimised are eligible for Wiedergutmachung, and not, for example, offspring born after the war or grandchildren.

According to a report commissioned by the German government on the "Fate of Jewish Clothiers in the Nazi Dictatorship": "For those who applied, the euphemistic-sounding terms "compensation" and "reparations" often meant a bitter fight which sometimes lasted for decades and over generations, and whose result was uncertain.

[4] Unlike the Nuremberg trials in which Fritz Sauckel received a death sentence for his organization of mass forced labor, Wiedergutmachung aimed to compensate the "victims of Nazi persecution" while presenting mass forced labor as a normal part of war rather than a crime.