Germany agrees to payments for those evacuated during Nazi era

GERMANY HAS agreed to payments for survivors, primarily Jews, who were evacuated from Nazi Germany as children.

The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany said the government had agreed to payments of 2,500 euros (£2,250) to those still alive from among the 10,000 people who fled on the so-called Kindertransport.

This year is the 80th anniversary of beginning of the transport of the children to Britain from Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

About 1,000 survivors are thought to be alive today, with about half living in Britain, and the payment is seen as a “symbolic recognition of their suffering,” Claims Conference negotiator Greg Schneider said.

“In almost all the cases the parents who remained were killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust and they have tremendous psychological issues,” Mr Schneider said.

Following the Nazis’ anti-Jewish pogrom in November 1938 known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, the British government agreed to allow an unspecified number of Jewish children as refugees from Nazi Germany or territories it had annexed.

Jewish groups inside Nazi Germany planned the transport, and the first party arrived in Harwich on December 2, 1938, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The last transport from Germany left September 1, 1939 – the day the Second World War broke out with the Nazi invasion of Poland – and the final transport from continental Europe left the Netherlands on May 14, 1940, the same day Dutch forces surrendered to the Nazis.