As the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, a recent report has shed light on a long-standing issue in Germany, where the government is still paying out war victim pensions, including to former SS members, despite a law intended to prevent this. According to the German magazine “Stern” and the online platform “Frag den Staat”, a total of 8,305 individuals, including 7,648 in Germany and 657 abroad, received war victim pensions in December 2023, at a cost of around five million euros annually to the German state.
The report highlights that even former Waffen-SS soldiers in foreign countries are receiving these pensions, with the “Stern” citing at least four clear cases. The authorities responsible for war victim pensions have confirmed the payments.
Historian and NS expert Stefan Klemp estimates that this is just the tip of the iceberg, with around five percent of all war victim pension recipients being war criminals. Klemp criticizes the 1998 law, which aimed to exclude individuals who committed crimes against the “principles of humanity” from receiving war victim pensions, as a “smokescreen” that has not been effectively implemented in practice.
The former Bundestag member and president of the German-Israeli Society, Volker Beck, also sees the payments to Nazi perpetrators as a failure of Germany. “Nobody has taken it seriously to end this” Beck told the “Stern”. The German government refused to provide information on the recipients of these pensions, citing a lack of data on pension recipients from the statutory pension insurance.
Left Party Bundestag member Jan Korte calls this a “bad excuse” and claims that all German governments, regardless of their color, have lacked the political will to take serious action against the perpetrators of Nazi crimes for decades, despite repeated Sunday sermons and the constant repetition of the lie of the great post-war effort to come to terms with the crimes of National Socialism.