Compensation Claims

The German Finance Ministry said that it had received several thousand claims, after the government in Berlin appropriated 100 million euros ($147 million) and agreed to pay 2,000 euros apiece to ghetto survivors who have not been compensated before.

Ministry spokesman Torsten Albig said the government would investigate complaints that the application form was misleading and that it contained a trick question which caused many applicants disqualifying themselves, DPA news agency reported.

The compensation is reserved for people who in the past could not claim forced-labor pensions from Germany because they had worked for money in the ghettoes, which were zones set up only for Jews by the Nazis in eastern European cities during World War II.

"Confusing applications"

Holocaust survivor organizations in Israel have said that many eligible candidates misunderstood the application form and mistakenly ticked a box reading: "I was forced to do the work."

Chen Yurista, the director of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in Tel Aviv, told DPA that some ghetto survivors felt they had no choice but to volunteer for work, as they otherwise faced death. They therefore felt that they were coerced.

Yurista said his organization had received numerous phone calls from confused applicants, who were then told that the lump compensation sums are reserved for voluntary work.

Albig, on the other hand, said nobody's application had been turned down in the processing that the Finance Ministry has done so far. He stressed that if the box appeared to have been incorrectly ticked, officials would contact the applicant.

Forms could be rewritten

He also said that German and Israeli officials were discussing how to reword the application form to make the question clearer.

"Obviously, the fund qualification rules aren't meant to imply that people were living in the ghetto voluntarily," Albig told DPA. "They were all there by compulsion and that in itself was a dreadful crime."

Ghetto survivors have lamented that only few were able to obtain normal German old-age pensions based on their employment history during the war. After intense diplomatic pressure and a public outcry, the German government announced the fund last September.

DPA reported that around 50,000 ghetto survivors around the world are believed to be eligible for the compensation, with half of them living in Israel.