The German government is said to have agreed in principle to pay compensation to East European survivors of the Holocaust.

A report in a Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung says that Bonn will make three payments a year into a special fund, which is to be administered by the American-based Jewish Claims Conference.

The Conference which has been negotiating for weeks with Bonn over the deal will then pay monthly pensions to twenty-thousand East European survivors of the Holocaust, most of whom are living in Russia and Ukraine.

The German government has declined to comment on the report.

Over the past fifty years, Bonn has paid about a hundred billion Deutsche marks, just over fifty billion dollars, to Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution living in the West.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
 

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