Wiedergutmachung (literally “making good again”, more idiomatically “reparation” or “redress”) is the German term for the comprehensive programme of reparations paid by West Germany to Holocaust victims and their heirs from the 1950s onwards. The programme combined the inter-state payments under the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 with substantial domestic German legislation establishing individual compensation, restitution of property and ongoing pension payments. By 2026 the total Wiedergutmachung payments have exceeded eighty billion euros, distributed to over 800,000 individual recipients in approximately seventy countries; the programme continues, with ongoing pension payments to surviving Holocaust victims and to ageing camp survivors administered by the Claims Conference under continuing German legislation.
The legislative framework
The Wiedergutmachung programme was constructed in stages between 1947 and 1965 and has been continuously expanded since. The principal pieces of legislation were the Federal Supplementary Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution (Bundesergänzungsgesetz) of 1953, the Federal Compensation Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, BEG) of 1956, the BEG-Final Law of 1965 (which closed most of the original application categories), and the substantial subsequent supplementary legislation that has progressively extended the programme to victim categories not originally covered.
The original BEG framework provided for compensation of documented losses in five categories: loss of life (payments to heirs of those killed), loss of liberty (payments per month of imprisonment, deportation or hiding), loss of health (pensions for those whose health had been permanently damaged by the persecution), loss of property (restitution payments for confiscated assets), and loss of livelihood (pensions and lump sums for those whose careers and earning capacity had been destroyed). Documentation requirements were substantial and were one of the principal practical difficulties of the programme: many survivors had no surviving documentary record of their pre-war lives, and the requirement to prove specific losses produced sustained difficulties in the administration of the programme.
The administration
The administration was conducted by the West German Länder under federal legislation and supervision. Applications were processed by Länder authorities and were appealable through the West German administrative court system. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference), established in 1951 by major Jewish organisations to negotiate with the West German government, became the principal representative organisation for survivors outside Germany and Israel and processed substantial volumes of applications on behalf of survivors.
By the close of the original BEG application period in 1965, around 4.4 million applications had been filed, of which around 4.2 million had been processed and around 2.2 million had received some payment. The total paid by 1965 was approximately 38 billion Deutschmarks. The programme was substantially modified after 1965 by the BEG-Final Law and by subsequent legislation, including the Hardship Fund of 1980 (which addressed survivors who had not been eligible under the original criteria, principally those from Eastern European Jewish communities), the Article 2 Fund of 1992 (negotiated after German reunification, addressing survivors from East Germany and other countries), and the Central and Eastern European Fund of 1998.
The exclusions and the partial extensions
The Wiedergutmachung programme was, from the beginning, criticised for the categories of victim it did not adequately address. Roma and Sinti victims were substantially excluded from the original BEG framework on the basis that their persecution had been treated by the West German authorities, in the early post-war period, as criminal-justice action against “asocials” rather than as racial persecution. The exclusion was partially addressed by the 1979 Hardship Fund and substantially addressed by the 1995 federal recognition that the Roma and Sinti had been victims of racial persecution; but the exclusion produced substantial loss of evidence and dwindling of the surviving population by the time the corrections were made.
Homosexual men persecuted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code were largely excluded from the original BEG framework on the basis that Paragraph 175 had not been a Nazi-specific provision (it predated the regime and continued in modified form in West German law until 1969). The exclusion was partially addressed by the 2000 Foundation EVZ programme but was not fully addressed until the 2017 federal law that formally pardoned the Paragraph 175 convictions and authorised compensation; by then most of the surviving victims were dead.
Forced labourers from Eastern Europe (principally Polish and Soviet civilian deportees) were substantially excluded from the original framework on the basis that the Cold War made arrangements with their home countries impractical. The exclusion was substantially addressed by the 2000 Foundation EVZ programme that paid the surviving forced and slave labourers directly. The Eastern European Jewish populations excluded from the original BEG by the same Cold War logic were addressed by the Article 2 and Central and Eastern European Funds of the 1990s.
The continuing payments
The Wiedergutmachung programme continues in 2026. Around 200,000 surviving Holocaust victims worldwide are receiving continuing pension payments under the various programmes, principally administered through the Claims Conference. The German federal government has continued to fund the programme; recent legislative additions have included pension payments to survivors of the Leningrad siege and to the children of survivors who had been hidden during the war. The Claims Conference’s annual report records the current number of recipients and the geographical distribution; the substantial concentration is in Israel, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Western Europe.
The programme is, by general consensus of the literature, the most extensive reparations programme any state has conducted with the victims of its own crimes. The substantial criticisms of the programme — the exclusions, the documentation requirements, the administrative inflexibility, the failure to address certain victim categories until decades after the fact — coexist with the recognition that the substantial scale of the programme has, over the seventy years of its operation, materially supported the survivor generation through to its old age.
See also
- Roma and Sinti
- The Luxembourg Agreement 1952
- The Foundation Remembrance Responsibility and Future
- Swiss Insurance Companies and Unpaid Policies
- The Swiss National Bank and Looted Gold
Sources
- Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, Wallstein, 2005 (the standard scholarly history)
- Christian Pross, Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998
- Norbert Frei, José Brunner and Constantin Goschler (eds), Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung: Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel, Wallstein, 2009
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, annual reports, https://www.claimscon.org
- Federal Supplementary Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution (Bundesergänzungsgesetz), 18 September 1953
- Federal Compensation Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz), 29 June 1956
- BEG-Final Law (Bundesentschädigungs-Schlussgesetz), 14 September 1965