Germany agrees compensation for Kindertransport refugees
BERLIN: Th e German government said Monday it has agreed to an one-off payment to survivors of the Kindertransport programme, which brought Jewish children persecuted in Nazi Germany to safety in Britain.
Around 10,000 young lives were saved from the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s regime by the relief action that began in December 1938 and ended in May 1940.
The announcement, hailed as ‘historic’ by the Claims Conference negotiators representing Jewish victims, came 80 years after the first Kindertransport left for Britain.
A fund will be made available from Jan 1, 2019, and the Claims Conference will begin processing the eligible applications for the compensation amounting to 2,500 euros (US$2,800) per person.
“This one-time payment pays tribute to the special destiny of these children. They have had to leave their families in peacetime, in many cases, never to see each other again,” said German Finance Ministry spokesman Martin Chaudhuri.
Stuart Eizenstat, who represented the Claims Conference in the negotiations, said that “after having to endure a life forever severed from their parents and families, no one can ever profess to make them whole; they are receiving a small measure of justice.”
After the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) pogroms across Nazi Germany on Nov 9, 1938, a group of Protestant, Jewish and Quaker leaders appealed to then British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to allow in unaccompanied Jewish children.
A rescue effort mobilised swiftly, and the first Kindertransport arrived at Harwich on Dec 2, 1938, carrying 196 children from a Berlin Jewish orphanage which had been torched by the Nazis on Kristallnacht.