Latvian Legionnaires Day commemorating the 15th (1st Latvian) and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian), Riga, Latvia, March 16, 2017 -- image via X
By Ulrich Schneider (International Federation of Resistance Fighters – Association of Antifascists), Junge Welt, 29 January 2025. Translated by Helmut-Harry Loewen.
For decades, it was not seen as a big deal that the Federal Republic of Germany paid war victim pensions to several thousand war criminals and Nazi collaborators. In the 1990s, journalists revealed payments to Latvian SS volunteers. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation, the initiative “Frag den Staat” (“Ask the State”) and the magazine Stern took up the topic again and made public this historical-political scandal in the run-up to January 27. They concluded that Germany is still paying pensions to former members of the Waffen SS abroad and therefore possibly also to suspected war criminals.
Specifically, more than 30 foreign perpetrators are believed to be receiving German war pensions abroad. As the relevant offices have no official records of who may have been in the SS, the number could be higher. Until 2023, the basis for the payments was the Federal Pension Act of 1950, which promised people who had been involved in the fascist policy of war and extermination an entitlement to benefits.
This also applied to foreign collaborators, such as auxiliaries in concentration camps, but especially volunteers in the foreign units of the Waffen SS and units of the Wehrmacht. Anyone who had fought for the Nazi regime and its plans for world domination would at least receive money from Germany if they were already excluded from pension provision in their own country.
Until the 1980s, such payments mainly concerned collaborators from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It became a bigger problem in the early 1990s when, with the end of the Eastern Bloc, former SS volunteers from the Baltic states in particular applied for these “war victim pensions” and were granted them. When such consequences of the outdated pension regulations became known, journalists also began to ask questions. The NDR magazine “Panorama” revealed the payments to Latvian SS volunteers. Although the German government always emphasized that it did not have a complete overview of the payments to foreign collaborators, historians assume that around 600 million German marks [417 million USD in today’s dollars] were spent annually at the time to support collaborators.
In fact, a public debate developed after the media reports, which was accompanied by the then emerging dispute about the compensation for forced laborers that had been outstanding for decades. In order to restore political calm on this flank, the then Bundestag passed an amendment to the “war victims' pension” ["Kriegsopferrente"] in 1998. Those who had committed crimes against the “principles of humanity” would be exempt from pension payments.
As good as this sounded at the time, however, the problem remained that such crimes had to be proven and attributed individually and previous payments remained unaffected. Instead of establishing a clear regulation that, for example, membership of units of the Waffen SS or guard teams in concentration camps automatically meant that pensions would be canceled, this was only considered a “point of reference” ["Anhaltspunkt"] for an assessment by the pension offices. According to research at the time, payments could have been stopped for 70,000 people. In fact, not even 100 of those pensions were canceled.
Pension offices and the federal government hoped for a “biological solution” ["biologische Lösung"], as these pensions were linked to individuals. But antifascist associations in Belgium, for example, asked the parliament how many Nazi collaborators were receiving German “war victim pensions” in connection with the proposal by a traditional association of Latvian SS members for a memorial in Zedelgem, Belgium. Although the number was manageable, the public debate stirred up a lot of political dust in Belgium.
Germany's treatment of the Nazi collaborators while at the same time refusing to accept the claims of the victims — one need only recall the decades-long blockage of the legitimate claims of the Greek victims of the Nazi occupation — makes it clear once again that pious homilies, such as those held on the 80th anniversary of the liberation from fascism and war, go hand in hand with support for collaborators and the refusal to help the victims who are so reverently commemorated, even by the government still in office.
Originally published as: "Weiter Rente für Kriegsverbrecher. BRD zahlt nach wie vor für Nazikollaborateure der Waffen-SS." Von Ulrich Schneider, junge Welt, 29.01.2025
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