It has been nearly 80 years since Allied soldiers liberated European concentration camps, revealing the unimaginable atrocities we know as the Holocaust. As this generation of Holocaust survivors wanes, now down to 240,000, what has been accomplished and why do we continue to negotiate with Germany?
In 1951, Germany’s first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, courageously did what no nation defeated in war had ever done: accepted responsibility for the wrongs committed by the Nazi regime — wrongs he called “unspeakable crimes against Jews.” Equally unique, 23 Jewish organizations from around the world came together a year later and formed the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), which was given the responsibility to negotiate with Germany on behalf of Holocaust survivors.
Since then, Germany has provided over $90 billion in compensation and is an exemplar of coming to terms with the past. It is a stronger, more vibrant, more tolerant democracy for having done so. While no amount of compensation can make survivors whole for what they and their families lost, we have a moral responsibility to provide a greater measure of dignity to survivors in their declining years than they suffered in their youth at the hands of the Nazis.
Since 2009, I have been the lead negotiator for the Claims Conference. Because we are dealing with German public funds, the negotiations are tough and anything but routine. Through these ongoing negotiations, we have dramatically expanded the universe of Jewish Holocaust survivors eligible for compensation and social services by liberalizing criteria for programs and increasing payments. We have liberalized eligibility for programs and services for those who endured concentration camps, those who went into hiding to save their lives, those forced into ghettos and similar places of incarceration, those who lived under false identity, those whose liberty or movement was restricted, and those who fled the Nazi regime in certain circumstances. We also negotiated special one-time payments for those who were child survivors and those who were on the Kindertransports, forced to leave their parents behind.
The most recent negotiations took place in Berlin just a few weeks ago. The total amount achieved for social welfare services and direct compensation for Holocaust survivors came to approximately $1.4 billion for 2024. Critically needed home care, food, and medical and welfare services, which keep over 100,000 elderly, poor survivors in their own homes, will see an additional $105.2 million. A special annual payment to the poorest of the poor will impact more than 128,000 Holocaust survivors living worldwide.
With all of these expansions and liberalizations of funds, programs and services, there remains one thing we must still deliver: Holocaust education. Survivors rightly fear the world is not only forgetting the Holocaust, they worry that without their first-hand testimony, the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost. They see the murder of more than 6 million Jews — roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population at the onset of World War II — being denied or distorted. They see how antisemitism, the fundamental underpinning of the racist, Nazi ideology, is now rising.
This fear is not unwarranted. Recent surveys from the Claims Conference of six countries, including the United States, found about 31 percent of Americans severely undercount the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Nearly half of those surveyed cannot name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos that existed in Europe during the Holocaust. And almost 60 percent of young Americans aged 18 to 39, cannot identify Auschwitz.
Without robust Holocaust education programming, the facts and lessons of the Holocaust will be lost. Survivors know what happens when intolerance goes unchecked, when minorities are stigmatized and persecuted, when the rule of law and democracy are cast aside, and when average people are silent in the face of discrimination. They know from personal experience the consequences of ignorance and complacency. They have seen how bigoted thoughts quickly become hurtful words that turn into irrevocable violence.
We cannot start down that path again. We must be accountable to the facts of what happened during the Holocaust. Millions of Jews and others were murdered. Entire families and communities were summarily killed. Those who survived were left with nothing; their businesses, homes, bank accounts and personal possessions were confiscated, and their bodies were abused. For those who are still with us today, they endured all of this while they were only children.
We must remain steadfast in supporting services and payments for survivors. But we must also focus on Holocaust education that will simultaneously keep the testimony of millions of Jewish souls alive while educating future generations, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, to ensure that atrocities like the Holocaust never happen again. This is what we hope to achieve when we sit down each year to negotiate with the German government.
What Holocaust survivors lost is incalculable. There is no way to replace a mother’s kiss or a father’s hug. No dollar amount can be exchanged for shared laughter among brothers and sisters. But we can provide health care for the scars of suffering. We can provide food and economic support so survivors can live out their remaining days with the dignity stolen from them decades ago. And we can provide for education to ensure that the history of the Holocaust lives on.
We will continue to negotiate to ensure every survivor is provided for in their final years. But for Holocaust education, society as a whole must join in this commitment. Only together, all of us as a global society, can we ensure that future generations are able to study and understand the lessons of the Holocaust to make the world a better place tomorrow.
This must be our collective accomplishment if we are to succeed. Only then can we say, “never again.”
Stuart E. Eizenstat helped negotiate the 1978 Inspectors General Act as President Carter’s chief White House domestic policy adviser; he is the author of “President Carter: The White House Years.” He also held several senior positions in the Clinton administration