Compensation for forced labor in Nazi Germany 'arrived too late'

This June, the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) marks the 25th anniversary of initiating compensation payments to victims of forced labor during the Nazi era. The agreement, signed in late 1999, aimed to provide redress to over a million individuals displaced for labor, a process that began more than half a century after the Holocaust.

The total compensation fund amounted to $5.1 billion, with the German federal government and 6,500 German companies, many involved in the forced labor system, each contributing half. Payments were disbursed between 2001 and 2007 to 1.66 million former forced laborers and their legal successors across approximately 100 countries.

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Hardly any sectors of society did not benefit from it (forced labor). The figure was totally insufficient to compensate for the damage caused and the exploitation suffered.

Andrea Despot, the current director of EVZ, has been critical of the timing of these payments, suggesting they should have occurred much earlier. She noted that "hardly any sectors of society did not benefit from it (forced labor)," and stated that "the figure was totally insufficient to compensate for the damage caused and the exploitation suffered."

While some German companies voluntarily paid compensation in the 1950s to 1980s, these often excluded victims from Eastern Europe. A 1953 law provided compensation for political, racial, or religious persecution but excluded forced labor victims. Estimates suggest that between 1933 and 1945, over 13 million people within the German Reich and an additional 13 million in occupied territories were subjected to forced labor under inhumane conditions, a scale of suffering that only gained significant public attention in the late 1990s.

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From morning to night, people had to work extracting coal for the Nazis. They barely had anything to eat and slept in a small chamber with sixty other people. Every morning, between 10 and 15 of us were dead.