Russians cry foul over funds from Germany to Nazi victims

MOSCOW, Feb. 8 (JTA) — Resentment is growing in the former Soviet Union over compensation being given to Jewish survivors of the Nazis. This resentment is at least partially responsible for a recent move by Russian legislators to ask Germany to allocate more funds to non-Jewish Nazi victims in Russia. The non-binding resolution approved last Friday by the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, says Germany’s decision to compensate only Jewish victims of Nazism is an “act of injustice toward Russian citizens of other nationalities who fought and suffered just as much” during World War II. The approval of the motion, proposed by a member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, came as ex-Nazi slave laborers living in the former Soviet Union are demanding speedy and fair compensation from Germany. At a one-day conference on the issue last month, participants from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus said former Nazi slave laborers should receive equal payments regardless of their nationality or ethnic background. While many Nazi victims living in the West have been receiving German compensation for decades, residents of the Soviet bloc were barred by the Soviet Union from requesting any money. Since the fall of communism in 1991, residents of Eastern Europe have begun receiving some funds, but at lower levels than in the West because of different standards of living. Many of the conference’s participants said they support the idea of a national German fund that they hope would iron out what they call inconsistencies in compensation. Nearly 6 million Soviet citizens — most of them Slavs — were enslaved in Germany during the war, according to the Fund for Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation, which was created by Germany in 1993 to compensate those in the former Soviet Union who had suffered under Nazism. Beneficiaries of the fund include thousands of Slavs who were forced to work in Germany during the war on the Soviet front, as well as Jewish survivors of ghettos and concentration camps, who make up about 1 percent of fund beneficiaries. Individual one-time payments from the $235 million fund range from $350 to $800. Six years after the establishment of the fund, however, some of the ex- slave laborers in the former Soviet Union have yet to receive any money. Some German companies, such as Siemens and Volkswagen, have already established private compensation programs, but many former slave laborers in the former Soviet Union say they never knew — or don’t remember — the name of the firm for whom they worked. Many were not aware of the names of the companies and remember only the name of the town where they were forced to live. Representatives of several German firms that used slave labor during the war were invited to attend the conference, but none showed up. The issue of compensation gained particular attention in the former Soviet Union after the Swiss Holocaust memorial fund began distributing one-time payments to Jewish survivors. That fund has already distributed money in several post-Soviet states such as Latvia, and is beginning to make payments in Belarus and Ukraine. Russian survivors are slated to receive their compensation later this year. The issue of compensating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust is frequently discussed in the country’s nationalist media. Recently, Zavtra, a leading nationalist newspaper in Moscow, said the money allocated by Swiss banks to compensate needy Jewish victims of the Holocaust undermines Russia, and last week, Sovietskaya Rossiya, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, published a reader’s letter suggesting that Germany should pay more to Slavic victims of Nazism than to Jewish ones because 20 million residents of the Soviet Union perished in World War II compared with 6 million Jews. Russian Jewish leaders have voiced their support for the idea of compensating non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. “People who were humiliated by fascism should receive a compensation from those countries who directly or indirectly participated in the persecutions,” said Vladimir Goussinsky, the president of the Russian Jewish Congress. “A country that lost dozens of millions of lives in World War II would look strange if it only considered compensation to a part of its population,” said Goussinsky, who also chairs the National Committee on Issues of Compensation and Restitution, the body created last year to oversee distribution in Russia of the money from the Swiss fund.