Subject: Press Release
Nazi pensions
NDR/PANORAMA Kuno Haberbusch
January 30, 1997
Press
Release
Billions of Marks from German taxpayers are being paid to Nazi war criminals and are called "victim" pensions. A spokesman for the German Ministry of Labor confirmed that additional assistance money is being spent on war criminals but claimed that nothing could be changed because of constitutional reasons. The chairman of Germanys Jewish Community, Ignaz Bubis, was shocked. He had never thought that "such people" were getting additional financial payments from the German government. The PANORAMA report, by Volker Steinhoff and John Goetz, will air on Thursday, January 30, 1997 at 9PM on the ARD German television network.
The Nazi war criminals receive in addition to their regular pensions "victim" pensions, according to the German "Social Compensation And Assistance To War Victims" law (Bundesversorgungsgesetz -- BVG). Last year alone, from Federal and Lander budgets, almost 13 billion Marks was currently paid to over 1.1 million "victim" pensioners. To qualify for the "victim" pension, one must have been injured as a result of war service. Because no one is excluded from the BVG, each war criminal who applies is granted a "victim" pension if they can simply prove a war injury.
PANORAMA found out that world-wide that numerous Nazi war criminals, who today receive monthly payments between 100 and several thousand Marks from German tax payers. The well-respected German military historian Gerhard Schreiber estimates the number of war criminals receiving these extra payments from the German government at 50,000. Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden, from Ochtendung near Koblenz, is one of the "victims." According to a German federal court, Lehnigk-Emden killed 15 unarmed women and children in Caiazzo near Naples in Italy in October 1943. Because Lehnigk-Emden was later injured (shot in the leg) while trying to escape from an allied POW camp and suffers a mild handicap, he receives an additional "victim" pension.
Another current recipient of victim pensions is the former SS Hauptsturm-fuhrer Wilhelm Mohnke. Mohnke, who was a close confidant of Adolf Hitler and commandant of the "Fuhrerbunker" in Berlin during Hitler's last days. According to the US Department of Justice "there is very substantial evidence pointing to Wilhelm Mohnke's personal involvement in the perpetration of Nazi war crimes" -- for his role in the massacre of 72 American POWs in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge.
War criminals, that live outside of the borders of Germany, also receive additional monthly "victim" payments from Germany. One of those is the former Auschwitz lieutenant Thies Christophersen. Christophersen is also one of Germany's leading neo-Nazis, whose book "The Auschwitz Lie" is considered to be "the bible of the Holocaust revisionist movement," according to PANORAMA. Christophersen lived in Denmark until 1995 and had his "victim" pensions forwarded there. The payments to Christophersen were recently put on hold, as he is a fugitive and the German pension authorities do not know where to send his money.