• English Site
• > SPIEGEL Blog
• > German Politics

Ghosts of the Cold War

Reparations for East Germany's Victims?

A new bill drafted by Germany's grand coalition recommends a pension to help citizens who suffered under East Germany's Communist regime. Minimum requirement: six months in jail.

Reparations for Jewish families who suffered under the Nazi regime are an old topic in Europe, but now German politicians have hammered out a bill to pay reparations to victims of the East German dictatorship.

Parliamentary members announced a proposal on Tuesday to pay a monthly pension to German citizens who can prove they were oppressed by the Communist regime. The bill was drafted by members of both sides of Germany's ruling grand coalition -- conservative Christian Democrats as well as left-wing Social Democrats.

"Oppressed," in this case, has a strict definition: Citizens who spent at least 6 months in jail in East Germany are eligible for the €250 ($192) "victims' pension," provided they earn under about €1,000 per month (or €1,300 euros if married). The government estimates about 16,000 Germans will be eligible.

CDU member Arnold Vaatz, who has pushed for the pension for 10 years, told the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung the proposal was "outstanding."

But a commentator in the Berliner Zeitung argued that six months in jail was too strict a condition, because the East German government had methods short of jail that could ruin citizens they considered unfriendly. "Frau S. from Oschatz (for example) now receives a pension of €650 per month," the paper wrote. "Because she wasn't in the FDJ (a Communist youth group) … and state officials declared 'that a socialist upbringing was not provided at home,' they blocked her education and career" -- which affects her income today, the paper argued. "Thousands of others who were persecuted by the ruling party and the secret police" will also not get the proposed pension, the paper said.

Last month members of Germany's opposition Left Party -- a successor to East Germany's ruling party, the SED -- drafted a very different law to rehabilitate "victims of the Cold War," or members of communist outfits in West Germany who were "criminalized" during the Cold War's most divisive period, between 1951 and 1968. Both proposals face a vote before the German parliament, but the Left Party's bill lacks support in the grand coalition.

msm