Germany will compensate Kindertransport survivors $2,800 each
Germany has agreed to compensate those who fled Nazi Germany as children on the so-called Kindertransport with a one-time payment of approximately $2,800 each. The new agreement, negotiated by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany with the German government, comes 80 years after the first rescue transports of children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland to England. The British government had agreed to take a contingent of children under the age to 17 after the anti-Jewish pogrom of Nov. 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, made it more clear than ever that Jews in those countries were not safe. More than 10,000 Jewish children and youths were rescued. Many saw their parents for the last time as they said goodbye at train stations in the German Reich. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the last transport from Germany left on Sept. 1, 1939, the day World War II began. The last transport from the Netherlands left for Britain on May 14, 1940,