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Pupils raise cash for Nazi slaves
KIEV, Ukraine -- A group of German schoolchildren has donated nearly $15,000 to Ukrainians who had been forced to work as Nazi slave labourers in their hometown during World War II. The youngsters, who are pupils in Gersthofen, raised the money by writing in their own time to private German donors after studying about the war and its atrocities. But the group of 27 students, aged between 16 and 18, had to resort to the lawcourts to overcome local bureaucracy in trying to track down the Ukrainians. Authorities in Gersthofen refused the students access to the city archives, and only a court decision allowed the children to continue their project, their history teacher Bernhard Lehmann said. The pupils sent the compensation to the surviving 16 slave workers, on Monday. Each former victim received about $900 each. The Gersthofen archives revealed that about 90 Nazi labourers from Russia, Ukraine and Poland had been forced to work during the war. But any further information was only forthcoming from the Ukrainian Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation Fund, which listed 60 Ukrainians as having been forced to take up tools. "We want ... to ask you for forgiveness for everything that you had to bear," the students said in their letter to the former Nazi slaves. A quarter of Ukraine's population died during the Nazi occupation and in battles between German forces and the Red Army. Two million more were sent to concentration camps or became "Ostarbeiters," Hitler's main slave labour source. Experts say about 610,000 former Nazi victims, now elderly, live in
Ukraine and about 540,000 of them are currently registered by Ukrainian
authorities as eligible for German government compensation.
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© 2002 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. |
