As noted by Russkaya Germaniya, back in 2013, German Foreign Minister and Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted on the need for Germany to pay compensation to former Soviet prisoners of war. But at that time, citing a lack of concrete data on the number of potential recipients, his initiative was not supported by his coalition colleagues from the CDU/CSU. Only now have the differences been resolved.
“The sum of 10 million euros has been adjusted in the supplementary budget for 2015,” announced Hans-Ulrich Krüger, deputy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag Budget Committee. “After the victims of the Holocaust, former Soviet prisoners of war are the second largest group of Nazi victims. Paying them compensation will be a kind of symbolic reparation for all the injustices committed against them by the Nazi regime.”
“The minister considers this a good initiative by the Bundestag,” said Steinmeier’s press secretary Martin Schäfer. The Greens and the Left also supported the decision to pay. “This is a late but important recognition of the Federal Republic’s historical responsibility for that chapter of Nazi extermination policy,” said Green parliamentarians Volker Beck and Sven-Christian Kindler. According to them, “the decision to pay compensation will be a powerful signal of friendship between the German people and the peoples of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.” “Finally, the CDU/CSU also acknowledges the moral debt of the FRG to pay symbolic compensation to the victims, of whom so few remain,” said Left Party domestic policy expert Jan Korte.
As reported, now, 70 years after the end of World War II, out of 5.3 million Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Third Reich between 1941 and 1945, about 4,000 people remain alive. For all the suffering they endured in captivity, each of them will receive 2,500 euros as compensation.
For comparison: according to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the average monthly salary in Germany in 2014 was 2,904.75 euros, and in 2015 it was planned to be 2,916.58 euros.