German officials and lawyers representing Nazi-era forced labourers appeared to have made progress in compensation talks, but German press comment beforehand was pessimistic about a settlement.

An editorial in Die Welt focused on problems that have bedevilled the negotiations since Gerhard Schroeder came to power in Germany a little over a year ago.

One was the seriousness of a victim's suffering - working conditions in a munitions factory in Hamburg differed vastly from those on a farm in the Black Forest, it said.

Then there was the number of survivors - estimates ranged from 500,000 up to two million.

Finally, the article said, the negotiators could not agree even on the purpose of the compensation.

Legal obligations

To the victims' lawyers, the payments should be a legally-backed reflection of each person's lost earnings and pension rights.

The companies involved, however, rejected the notion of retrospective legal obligations and regarded any payments as a "gesture of reconciliation".

Another problem was the number of companies that should pay, with between 500 and 2,000 firms estimated to have used Nazi slave labour, according to Die Welt.

This theme was picked up by the Munich Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which had harsh words for those that had declined to join the group that had already pledged DM4 billion (2.1 billion US dollars) for the compensation fund.

Taking the upper estimate as fact, a Sueddeutsche editorial said that only one per cent of the 2,000 companies that grew rich on forced labour had agreed to pay up, and called for the spotlight to be turned on the majority, who were staying in the shadows for fear of sharing the opprobrium of the few who had accepted their responsibility.

"Self-publicising" lawyers

The article added, however, that the victims were being done a disservice by their "self-publicizing" lawyers, a criticism endorsed by the weekly Die Zeit.

If the amount of money on the table is to increase, more companies need to be persuaded to pay up, but attacks on those that have admitted their guilt rather than on those that are keeping quiet are a strange way of achieving that goal, it said.

In the German capital, the Berliner Morgenpost returned to the problem of knowing how many companies had used slave labour .

Noting that even one of the victims' lawyers had admitted that there was no definitive list, the newspaper contacted ten companies on one partial list and found that many were themselves unaware of the extent of their involvement in Nazi-era persecution.