By Richard Edmondson
Germans must be wondering: when will it ever end? As I have documented previously, Germany has been paying reparations, both to alleged holocaust survivors as well as to the state of Israel, for the past 51 years, and over that period the payment amounts, rather than diminishing, have actually grown larger. Now it seems the Jewish Claims Conference, although mired in charges of fraud, has managed nonetheless to successfully put the squeeze on German taxpayers for another $800 million.
Germans must be wondering: when will it ever end? As I have documented previously, Germany has been paying reparations, both to alleged holocaust survivors as well as to the state of Israel, for the past 51 years, and over that period the payment amounts, rather than diminishing, have actually grown larger. Now it seems the Jewish Claims Conference, although mired in charges of fraud, has managed nonetheless to successfully put the squeeze on German taxpayers for another $800 million.
Germany Commits to Additional $800 million for Home Care for Holocaust Survivors
By JTA
NEW YORK (JTA) – The German government agreed to significantly expand its funding of home care for infirm Holocaust survivors and relax eligibility criteria for restitution programs to include Jews who spent time in so-called open ghettos.
The agreement, reached after negotiations in Israel with the Claims Conference, will result in approximately $800 million in new funding for home care for Holocaust survivors from 2014 to 2017.
This is in addition to $182 million for 2014 that already has been committed.
In 2015, the amount will rise by 45 percent, to approximately $266 million, and then to $273 million in 2016 and $280 million in 2017. Because the sums are set in euro, the actual amounts may change depending on currency fluctuations.
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Or in other words, an additional $84 million will be squeezed out of Germany in just one year alone—2014 to 2015—as a result of this new agreement. If you go and read the rest of the story, you will find that this represents “the largest year-over-year increase” since the home care program began in 2004. That of course is on top of the billions already paid going all the way back to the year 1952 when the reparations payments first started.
But there may be signs that some Germans are finally getting fed up. Or at least that’s one way of viewing the reception given to a group of Israelis attending a Beyonce concert in Berlin over the weekend. What happened at the concert venue is being reported by a number of Jewish media outlets. Here is a post from the Algemeiner:
Eight Israelis were met with jeers and anti-Semitic slurs at a Beyonce concert in Berlin, Israel Hayom reports.
According to the website, the group of eight Israelis arrived at Germany’s O2 stadium for the concert and managed to seat themselves in the first row, much to the chagrin of the local German fans.
According to Israel Hayom, the Germans yelled slurs and physically abused the Israelis.
“They yelled ‘dirty Jews’ and ‘go back to Israel,’ and pushed us to the ground,” one of the Israelis told Israel Hayom. “At one point when they saw we did not want to leave [the front row] some 50 people began to chant, ‘Go! Go!’”
The Jewish Daily Forward also has a report on the incident, which includes quotes from one of the Israelis present. Some of it sounds a bit exaggerated, perhaps so as to win sympathy for the eternally victimized Jews, but then again who’s to say?
Zerad said the Israelis had come to Berlin for a long weekend, which started with the Beyonce concert on May 23. Standing at the head of the line to enter the venue, Zerad said the Israelis were verbally attacked by a group of about 50 Germans who wanted to move ahead of them.
“Some of them noticed that we were speaking Hebrew,” Zerad told JTA. “One of them said, ‘You stink, you should go back to Israel.’ A girl said, ‘You guys smell so bad. Why didn’t he die in the Holocaust?’ ”
The young Germans began to shout at the Israelis to “go, go, go,” he said. They accused the Israelis of pushing, “which was not true because we were first in line. We had no need to push. We were there already.
“So they started pushing us; they said ‘You are Jewish, go back to Israel, we wish that the Holocaust would succeed so you all die,’” Zerad recalled. “One guy came up to me and said, ‘Don’t mess with my girls, I will hurt you,’ and things like that.”
A report on the incident at the Arutz Sheva website, also mentions opposition to a program, apparently begun just a few years ago, of placing holocaust monuments on city sidewalks.
The project entails the placing of the names residents on monuments on the sidewalks of streets where they lived before being deported by the Nazis to concentration camps. The project is several years old, and was undertaken with the full cooperation of the municipality and the Jewish community.
However, anti-Semites in the city have been doing their best to ruin the project. In recent weeks, many of the monuments constructed on the streets have been destroyed, as groups attempt to intimidate officials to drop the project.
So what are we looking at here? Random acts of anti-Semitism? Public disgust with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians? Or resentment over 51 years of being taken to the cleaners?
Maybe it’s all of the above.
See also:
Swindler’s List: A Brief Look at the Holocaust Reparations Racket
Holocaust Reparations Fraud Apparently Growing Bigger by the Day
Massive Fraud at Claims Conference Revealed to Top Officials a Decade Ago