Ghetto Labour Pensions: Holocaust Survivors and Their Struggle for Compensation in the 21st Century
Ghetto Labour Pensions: Holocaust Survivors and Their Struggle for Compensation in the 21st Century

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses disbursement according to the German ghetto pension law, which since 2002 enables Holocaust survivors to receive payments for work during the Second World War except for slave labour. Yet due to the bureaucratic apparatus and due to the ignorance and unwillingness of the German pension funds, money was rarely paid out to claimants. The failure of justice is even worse: It took years to pass through all instances, and it was for the most part not possible to get a fair trial. German parliamentarians did not succeed with – and actually did not really pursue – an effort to treat Holocaust survivors not according to the Nazi category of “Jews”, but as the workers which they really were at the time. A self-referential system of pension funds and courts prohibited the alteration of out-dated views on Holocaust and ghettos, thus only from 2009 onwards allowing some sort of justice for former ghetto workers.

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