In a written reply to a parliamentary question by Left-wing MP Andrej Hunko, Angela Merkel’s government admitted that it was still paying out over €100,000 (£71,000) a year in pensions to survivors and relatives of troops from the so-called Blue Division, in whose ranks Spanish volunteers fought on the Eastern Front.
So?
Mr Hunko, of The Left (Die Linke) party, said it was “a scandal that 70 years after the war, Germany is still paying more than €100,000 a year to Nazi collaborators”.
He added: “At that time, those people volunteered to join the German fascists to fight on their side in the war of extermination in eastern Europe. For me it is incomprehensible that the German government should stick to those payments when so many victims of the war are still waiting today for their rightful compensation.”
The United States stopped paying the last of the Confederate war pensions in the 1980s. Russia still pays Soviet pensions to those who manned the Gulag. Germany is still paying pensions to those who shot people trying to get over the Berlin Wall.
I recall that when Ilse Koch, chief of the women guards at Buchenwald I think, was released from prison after 20 years for war crimes, the first thing she did was claim her war widow pension.
Cheek of the century. But she was entitled to it.
Ilse Koch served 20 years for war crimes in I think Buchenwald.
On release, she claimed a war widow pension. Cheek of the century.
It is a cheek of the repentant Communists to be lecturing others on supporting vile regimes.
We should stop paying former East German apparatchiks and we need some de-DDRing as with the de-Nazification.
The Spanish Blue Shirts were no worse than the people they fought against.