[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 68 (Wednesday, May 21, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1004-E1005]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          PENSIONS TO FORMER NAZIS WHILE SURVIVORS GET NOTHING

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                         HON. GARY L. ACKERMAN

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 21, 1997

  Mr. ACKERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take this opportunity to bring 
to the attention of

[[Page E1005]]

my colleagues a painful reminder of WWII and the Nazi Holocaust in 
Europe. Several months ago, it came to light that the German Government 
was paying military pensions to former Nazi Waffen S.S. soldiers living 
in the United States and elsewhere, while scores of Jewish survivors in 
Eastern Europe and even some in the United States have never received 
any compensation for the horrors that they endured. I have spoken out 
on this subject numerous times, but I wanted to commend my colleagues 
to an ad placed by the American Jewish Committee in the New York Times 
on May 7, 1997, which clearly outlines this horrible and tragically 
ironic state of affairs.
  At the beginning of the ad, two pictures are displayed: One is of an 
elderly Jewish man who was a survivor of a Nazi ghetto in Eastern 
Europe, the other is of a man with arm raised in a Hitler salute, who 
was a soldier of the Waffen S.S. from Latvia. The headline asks: 
``Guess Which One Receives a War Victims Pension from the German 
Government?''
  The text of the ad follows:

       If you guessed the survivor, you're wrong, sad to say. 
     While Holocaust survivors in other parts of the world are 
     eligible to receive German pensions, Holocaust survivors in 
     Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have never 
     received a pension of any kind from Bonn. Inexplicably, the 
     German government has simply drawn the line at providing such 
     direct assistance to this group of survivors. Not so, 
     however, for many of the survivors' former tormentors. 
     Believe it or not, the German government provides generous 
     monthly pensions to Nazi war veterans whose injuries or even 
     mild, chronic ailments qualify them for ``war victims 
     pensions.'' In the U.S. alone, there are 3,377 pensions sent 
     each month to veterans of the armies of the Third Reich or 
     their dependents! After the fall of communism, many Waffen 
     S.S. veterans in the Baltic states and elsewhere in Eastern 
     Europe discovered they, too, were eligible and are now 
     receiving such pensions from Germany, while their victims are 
     not. Today, an estimated 15,000-20,000 Jewish survivors of 
     ghettos and concentration camps live in Eastern Europe and 
     the former Soviet Union. They are old, many are in poor 
     health and financially destitute. Surely, they deserve some 
     help and comfort in the last years of their lives. Join our 
     call to the German government to correct this grievous wrong. 
     Bring justice to the real victims of the Holocaust.

     

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