BERLIN — Germany signed a historic deal Monday to pay 10 billion marks ($4.8 billion) to nearly a million Nazi slaves and forced laborers in what is likely to be the last great payout for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Representatives from Germany, the United States, eastern Europe and Israel signed the agreement along with a battery of high-powered U.S. attorneys, whose lawsuits against German companies prompted the deal.
"With this agreement, we can close a last open chapter of the past," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told reporters.
"More than 50 years after the end of World War II and the Nazi dictatorship, we are making a long-awaited humanitarian gesture to all former Nazi forced laborers."
"It underlines that we are conscious of the German past and will remain so," said Schroeder, whose own father died in World War II fighting when he was a baby. "It is a long-term sign of our historical and moral responsibility."
In 1944, Germany used 10 million foreign civilians and prisoners of war as laborers in some of the country's largest companies, in small firms and even within church organizations.
"This agreement does not end moral responsibility for the Holocaust," chief U.S. negotiator Stuart Eizenstat said at the signing ceremony. "Nothing can erase the memory of those who died, or the culture and potential achievements lost or the suffering of those who survived."
"At the same time, this historic agreement does help to close a chapter for those who have waited so long for some measure of justice," he said.
Under the deal signed Monday, the German government and German industry will both pay 5 million marks into the compensation fund, although the more than 3,100 firms that have contributed have come up with just 3.2 billion marks so far.
Schroeder called on more German firms to contribute and said he was confident that in the end they wouldraise the funds.
Germany has already paid $60 billion in reparations since World War II, a sum Eizenstat said was equivalent to 100 billion current dollars.
Some eastern European officials complained that the latest deal, signed in the present-day foreign ministry where the Nazis stored gold from Holocaust victims, was not enough.
"Everyone is not satisfied. Everyone wanted more," Russian representative Anatoly Ivanov told Reuters.
Eastern and central Europe, which suffered the war's greatest manpower and material losses, has only received about one percent of past compensation, said Bartosz Jalowiecki, head of the Polish agency administering the German compensation.
In a separate declaration, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic complained they were not always included in decision-making on reaching the deal.
"In Washington they said, if you don't like it we're going to sign anyway. They forced us to accept it," Markiyan Demidov, head of Ukraine's Union of Victims, said in an interview. "The amounts are a joke, an insult from Germany."
About 900,000 people will receive payments under the deal reached after 18 months of often acrimonious negotiations.
Slave laborers — who were to be worked to death but some of whom survived — will get up to 15,000 marks. Forced laborers, who toiled under somewhat less punishing conditions, will receive about 5,000 marks.
Although the end of communism opened the way for eastern European victims to receive direct compensation, it was threats from class-action lawsuits — there are now 55 in U.S. federal courts — that sparked action 55 years after the end of the war.
"We also must be frank: It was American lawyers and the lawsuits they brought in U.S. courts who placed the long-forgotten wrongs by German companies during the Nazi era on the international agenda," Eizenstat said.
The lawyers will earn 100 million marks for their efforts.
German firms were especially concerned to protect themselves against future lawsuits, and a second agreement signed between by the United States and Germany Monday aimed to provide those protections.