Deal Reached on Allocation of Funds for Nazi Laborers

Clearing the last major obstacle to compensating aging victims of Nazi-era forced and slave labor, negotiators agreed Thursday on how to divide a $5-billion German fund with hopes of starting payments by year’s end.

Under the deal, about 240,000 slave laborers--those who were put to work in concentration camps and had been expected to die doing their jobs--would receive as much as $7,500 each. More than 1 million forced laborers, who worked in factories outside camps, each would get as much as $2,500.

“We have taken a huge step forward today,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat, the U.S. envoy to the talks. “This brings this process a substantial step closer to completion.”

All sides agreed in December on the size of the fund, to be paid into equally by the German government and industry. But negotiators had been wrangling over how to divide the money among various groups.

Noah Flug, 75, an Auschwitz survivor who heads an umbrella organization of Holocaust survivor groups in Israel and was one of the negotiators, said two-thirds of the people who would have been eligible for money have died.

Since World War II, Germany has paid about $60 billion under other compensation programs for Nazi-era wrongs. But many people eligible for the labor compensation are non-Jews from Eastern Europe who were prevented from receiving the earlier money because they lived behind the Iron Curtain.

Claims also were stymied for decades by industry’s insistence that the workers were forced on them by the Nazi regime, while the government maintained that it was not responsible because the laborers toiled for private companies.

The Nazis used slave laborers in concentration camps as another means of killing, expecting the victims to die because of the extreme work conditions. Forced laborers were brought to Germany from Eastern Europe to keep German industry running during the war.

The agreement would allocate just over $4 billion to compensate slave and forced labor victims and $500 million to cover claims for property, bank accounts and insurance policies stolen by the Nazis as well as “humanitarian cases.”