Guerrilla war for ghetto pensions (daily newspaper Junge Welt)

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It was the lawsuit of a Polish Jew that led to the 1997 judgment and got the ball rolling. The Federal Social Court ruled that those persecuted by the Nazi regime who had worked in a ghetto were entitled to a pension under German law. 2002 – 57 years after the liberation of Europe from fascism! – the Bundestag decided for the first time to grant all survivors of the Nazi settlements a pension retroactively until the time of the judgment, i.e. until 1997. That was a very late success.

But being right does not mean that those affected will receive their pensions. Around 90 percent of pension applications were rejected in the first few years. The difficult to understand legal language, bureaucratic hurdles and political unwillingness were an unbelievable imposition for those affected, who had to prove their ghetto work after 57 years in court. The victims suffered from a mostly restrictive judicial practice when they complained against their rejected decisions. The federal and state governments failed as supervisory authorities. Because they knew about the inadequacies of the law, but for a long time they refused to change anything. In 2008 there were 6,100 approved and 65,000 rejected applications.

The historian Stephan Lehnstaedt worked on the ghetto pension cases as a scientific expert. He vividly describes absurd situations: »I have read several hundred judgments (…) And in all of these judgments I have not come across a single one where the plaintiff would actually have been heard; on the contrary, I saw many judgments where the plaintiff’s lawyer said : Please, we can hear it – and where it was said very explicitly: No, we don’t want that. In one particularly noteworthy case, a plaintiff actually traveled from Israel at his own expense, so he was sitting in front of the conference room. The lawyer said: My client is sitting outside, let’s invite him in – and they said: No, it is not necessary, we will not listen to him. That is an almost negligent ignorance, it is, I believe, also incomprehensible on a human level. ”It is not just an“ almost negligent ignorance ”. I see it as an expression of political conviction and a lack of awareness of injustice. But there were also judges who honored their profession.

The judge Jan-Robert von Renesse, who ended the restrictive handling in 2006 – around 60 percent of the applications were recognized afterwards – was transferred in spring 2010. In June 2009, the Federal Social Court made decisive changes to the interpretation of the law. The previously restrictive approach, according to which a pension is only paid for voluntary work, was found to be no longer permissible. On June 5, 2014, the Bundestag passed an amendment to the law. This means that pension benefits have been provided for employment in a ghetto since 1997, regardless of when the application for it was made and how it had previously been decided.

In the current deliberations on the federal budget for 2021, I asked the Ministry of Labor how the number of applications for ghetto pensions had developed. I was horrified that the responsible German pension insurance had only recorded the applications from 2012. In 2012, 83,100 applications were submitted. Of these, 32,000 were not approved. That is a rejection rate of 38 percent. Last year, the rejection rate rose to 39.5 percent. Every year there are up to 4,000 pending applications. Without knowing every single case, I have the impression that the bureaucracy is still playing for time. Of the applications approved in 2019, ghetto pensions were paid to 31,214 people. So less than half only get their ghetto pension.

I remember the case of the concentration camp guard Margot Pietzner, who had been in prison in Bautzen and sued for compensation after the annexation of the GDR. She received DM 64,350 in compensation. The approval was granted within 14 days.

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