NEW YORK — The United States and Germany announced last Friday that the German government has agreed to compensate an estimated 240 Americans who were imprisoned by the Nazis during the war.
While the amount of money the victims will receive was not announced, lawyers for the victims say they have been told the average settlement will be about $100,000, which would make the total value of the settlement about $24 million.
The State Department recently sent letters to those individuals whose claims were approved — and Germany has promised it will make payments before the end of the year.
The compensation stems from the 1995 victory of Hugo Princz, an American citizen who survived detention in a concentration camp for some 36 months. Decades later, he won the right to sue the German government for its failure to provide him with reparations, said Steven Perles, the Washington attorney who was at the forefront of the claims.
Germany had denied reparations to Princz because, unlike most European Jewish survivors, he was not a “stateless refugee.”
The alternative means of getting reparations was through bilateral agreements in which Germany would compensate Western nations for harm to their citizens.
However, the United States, unlike many Western European states, never made compensation claims for its citizens, including American soldiers, who were held in concentration camps.
Until the Princz case, under U.S. law, a private individual was barred from suing Germany, a sovereign government, for compensation.
The U.S. government, through its Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, determined who is eligible for compensation from Germany.
In some instances, the reparations criteria are more liberal than those under which European-born Jews receive compensation from Germany.
The Americans, including Jewish and non-Jewish Nazi victims, will receive a lump-sum payment of slightly under $10,000 for each month of incarceration in a concentration camp, plus a special additional payment for permanent disability, Perles said.
The American survivors would receive between $15,000 to $250,000 each; the compensation is expected to cost Germany $15 million to $25 million.
Perles criticized Germany’s method of handling the payments.
“The Germans are going to take at least six months to pay. That’s absurd,” he said Friday. “They shouldn’t have to make people wait. This delay works an extraordinary hardship on survivors.”
Those survivors include POWs who were Jewish as well as Americans who were trapped in Europe during the war and interned because they were Jews or otherwise considered undesirable.
More than 1,360 claims were filed for the German compensation.
One survivor who was not deemed eligible by the U.S. government was an American who, as a teenager in Hungary, helped three Jews escape.
This “righteous gentile,” said Perles, was shot in the arm and permanently disabled.
However, he was ineligible because he was incarcerated in a Gestapo prison, not a concentration camp.
Princz, now living in Highland Park, N.J., was the son of a naturalized American citizen when he and his family were captured in Slovakia in 1942. He lost his parents, three sisters and three brothers in the Holocaust.
He and 10 other Americans divided $2.1 million from the 1995 German settlement.