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Germany
Slave-labor compensation
Church begins payments
A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Germany announced in October that the first compensation payments for survivors who were forced to work for the Church under a Nazi slave-labor program during World War II would be made immediately.
According to Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz, head of the German bishops’ conference, the first recipients will be a Polish farmhand and a woman forced to work in a Catholic hospital. The 1,000 survivors of the Church’s 10,000 forced wartime laborers will receive 5,000 German marks ($2,215) each. Most of the forced laborers came from neighboring Poland, Nazi Germany’s first military conquest in the war.
The Church is paying compensation directly to victims rather than participate in a 10-billion mark fund set up by the government and German industry for former slaves.
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