Church Admits It Used Nazi Forced Labor

Germany’s Protestant church formally acknowledged Wednesday that it used forced laborers during the Third Reich and pledged to pay into a compensation fund for Nazi victims.

The admission came after revelations that during World War II, Berlin church parishes set up a forced labor camp from which they took mainly Central and Eastern European workers for tasks such as grave-digging.

“The Evangelical [Protestant] Church and its Social Services Agency employed forced laborers,” church council President Manfred Kock said in a statement. “This was complicity in a regime based on force and removed from the rule of law. We accept this guilt.”

The church--and its social services division--said it will pay nearly $5 million into a fund for surviving victims around the world. The fund is being jointly financed by the German government and industry.

The Evangelical Church and the Roman Catholic Church are the two main denominations in Germany. Both were subject to serious oppression under Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Both churches have acknowledged individual cases of local parish leaders drawing on the vast number of forced laborers drafted to aid the Nazi war effort.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church said that, while individual cases had come to light where it may have employed forced laborers, it currently has no plans to contribute to the compensation fund.

As part of Hitler’s crackdown on the Christian churches, leading clergy critical of the regime were arrested and in some cases died in concentration camps.