Parliamentary Efforts to Obtain Compensation in the 1980s
Starting in the mid-1980s, numerous local and regional initiatives interested in the politics of history concerned themselves not only with the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution but also with the “forgotten victims”; their goal was to reinforce the compensation claims of forced laborers, Sinti and Roma, people who were forcibly sterilized, Jehovah’s Witnesses, conscientious objectors, “antisocial elements,” and homosexuals by collecting information about the history of these victim groups. Because their story had been placed under social taboo and hence was little researched by professional historians, a public information campaign, it was thought, would substantiate their demands for compensation. Most notably, the factions of the Greens in the European Parliament and in the Bundestag seized on these suggestions: in 1984, the Greens in the Bundestag brought forward a motion to establish a national-level compensation fund for Nazi forced laborers, to be financed by German industry. The motion was rejected, but it was reintroduced after a resolution of the European Parliament on January 16, 1986, calling for “all the German companies that had employed slave laborers [...] to set up a fund for compensation payments to the victims of forced labor.”[1] A similarly worded motion, introduced on April 6, 1987,[2] also was defeated by the parliamentary majority in the Bundestag. As a result, on June 6, 1989, the Greens brought forward a draft law and two motions in the Bundestag, providing for compensation of former forced laborers through a federal foundation.[3] On September 14, 1989, the SPD introduced its own motion with the same goal; moreover, it provided for a way to offset the disadvantages that potential claimants would have under existing pension law.[4]
The parliamentary initiatives, though they brought about no fundamental change of course in the FRG’s compensation policy, did make it possible to hold two public hearings before the Bundestag’s Committee on Domestic Affairs: On June 24, 1987, these hearings involved discussion of “Reparations and Compensation for National Socialist Injustices”; on December 14, 1989, the topic was “Compensation for Nazi Forced Labor,” and here, for the first time, “forgotten” victims of Nazism or their representatives also had a chance to speak.[5] While the first hearings resulted at least in provision of “hardship funds” at the federal and state levels for seriously disadvantaged groups of victims such as the Sinti and Roma or people who had undergone forcible sterilization, the question of compensation for Nazi forced laborers remained open.
In retrospect, these political endeavors are to be understood as the first parliamentary steps toward passing the Law on the Creation of a “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” Foundation a good 10 years later.
(GK/PEH; transl. KL)