Germany and Jewish groups reached a final agreement on Thursday over compensation to the last survivors of the Holocaust, almost eight decades after the end of World War II.
Berlin will pay €1.3bn ($1.9bn), for home care for survivors – including 8500 Jews from Ukraine forced into exile by the Russian invasion – according to the agreement announced at a commemorative event attended by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
For the first time, Berlin also agreed to invest nearly €100m in Holocaust education for the next three years, after polls found that the majority of young people across Europe were largely ignorant of the Shoah.
Germany has been paying restitution and compensation to Holocaust survivors represented by the Jewish Claims Conference and the state of Israel since 1952. The Luxembourg Agreements that unlocked the payments marked the first time a state had agreed to provide perpetual compensation to individual victims of a genocide it had perpetrated. Since then, Germany has paid more than €80bn to survivors following regular negotiations with the Claims Conference.
At the event commemorating the anniversary of the agreement, Mr Scholz said that supporting education about what happened to the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany and its allies was gaining importance as fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors were around to tell their stories.
Read the article by Bojan Pancevski in The Australian.