It never ends.

Germany is to double the amount of money it gives to Jewish Holocaust survivors for elderly home care, bringing the total to €110 million next year, as a wave of former victims reaches very old age.

A spokesman for the Finance Ministry confirmed to The Local on Tuesday that the ministry had decided “as a humanitarian gesture” to provide the extra money to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the New York-based organisation that distributes compensation money for Holocaust survivors.

Even with many Holocaust survivors dying each year, the need for home care – in which an elderly person is looked after by a carer at their own house rather than moving into a nursing home – would keep rising until 2014, the claims conference said, according to the Associated Press. After that, the number of survivors dying will outnumber those becoming frail enough to need care.

The funding boost for 2011 is expected to raise the number of needy survivors receiving subsidised care to about 70,000 from the present 58,000 worldwide.

The claims conference was rocked last month by the revelation that current and former employees were involved in a long-running fraud in which $42 million of money meant for survivors was siphoned off via phony claims. Some 17 people were arrested in connection with the scheme.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20101207-31653.html