Germany to pay Kindertransport refugees 拢2,245 compensation
The German government is to pay those who fled the Nazis as children - an estimated 1,000 people who are still alive today.
Monday 17 December 2018 13:43, UK
Germany has agreed to pay survivors who fled Nazi Germany as children 鈧�2,500 (拢2,245) each, negotiators fighting for compensation have said.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany said the country would make a one-off payment to those still living from the 10,000 who fled in Kindertransport efforts ahead of the Second World War.
This year marks 80 years since the beginning of the transport of the children - primarily Jews, many of who never saw their parents again.
They were moved to Britain from Nazi Germany and elsewhere in the continent. There are an estimated 1,000 people still alive today, half of whom still live in the UK.
Claims conference negotiator Greg Schneider said the payment was seen as a "symbolic recognition of their suffering".
He said: "In almost all the cases the parents who remained were killed in concentration camps in the Holocaust and they have tremendous psychological issues."
The children arrived in the UK after the Nazis' anti-Jewish pogrom in November 1938, known as Kristallnacht - or the Night of Broken Glass.
The British government had agreed to allow an unspecified number of Jewish children into the UK as refugees from Germany or territories it had annexed.
About half were placed with foster families and the rest stayed in hostels, schools or farms.
Last month, as Britain marked the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, it was revealed that Clement Attlee had taken in a Jewish child refugee. The refugee, now 90, met the former prime minister's granddaughter for the first time.
Mr Schneider said in addition to those who stayed in Britain, many children eventually resettled in the US, Canada, Australia, Israel and beyond.
Survivors today are aged at least in their 80s.
"This money is acknowledgement that this was a traumatic, horrible thing that happened to them," said Mr Schneider.
The negotiators said some survivors had received small payments in the 1950s but that this would not stop them from receiving the new payment.
The German government has paid more than $80bn (£63.4bn) since 1952 to individuals over suffering and losses resulting from Nazi rule.