France compensates resistance orphans

France is to compensate the children of second world war resistance members killed for opposing the German occupation, the government announced at the weekend.

The payments will be made to between 5,000 and 8,000 people whose parents were "victims of Nazi barbarity", including those killed in massacres, those rounded up and shot by collaborating officials, and those deported to concentration camps for their resistance activities.

The compensation is identical to that granted three years ago to 12,600 Jewish orphans whose parents were deported and killed in extermination camps during the 1940-44 occupation.

Of the more than 76,000 French Jews sent to German camps during the war by the collaborationist Vichy regime, only 2,500 survived.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister, said that "in the interests of justice and fairness", the payment was being extended to other "orphans of victims of Nazi barbarity".

The announcement follows a campaign by children of non-Jewish victims of the regime, who argued that it was wrong that they should not also be compensated for their loss.

France was slow to accept state responsibility for the atrocities facilitated by its officials during occupation. The former president François Mitterrand, who was a civil servant for the collaborationist government, insisted for most of his 14 years as president that delving into the history of the Vichy administration would pose a threaten to civil order.

Until the 1980s school textbooks glossed over the role played by France in the death of Jews.

Jacques Chirac, Mitterrand's successor, was the first president to face up to France's war guilt, publicly condemning Vichy as a criminal regime and calling for reparations.

Admitting France's "criminal" complicity in the deportations, he said in 1995: "These dark hours have sullied our history forever and are an insult to our past and traditions."

To be eligible for compensation, applicants must have lost one or both parents when they were children during the second world war.

Recipients will be offered the choice of either a €27,400 (£19,300) lump sum or monthly payments of €457 for life, the office for war veterans said.

The money will be distributed as soon as officials have established how many people should receive it.

The children of resistance fighters killed in active combat with the Germans will not be eligible because they already receive war pensions, nor will money be paid to the children of civilians killed by bomb attacks.

Those whose parents were rounded up and shot by German troops will receive payment.

So will the surviving children of victims of some the most notorious massacres committed by the Germans in France, such as the murder of 99 residents of Tulle, a town in central France, who were hanged three days after allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6 1944.

"There were many massacres after the D-day landings, because resistance fighters were attacking German forces and the Germans exacted revenge," said Pierre Mayaudon, director of the office for war veterans.