Hardship fund: Tens of thousands of East Germans left empty-handed

The so-called hardship fund has only paid off for a few pensioners in East Germany. The Left Party has now drawn a sobering conclusion after the Hardship Fund Foundation was wound up at the end of 2025.

"The fund is not a success story. It only supported those who only received a pension at basic security level. Tens of thousands of East Germans were left empty-handed, even though they had worked and paid contributions all their lives," explained Susanne Schaper, head of the Left Party parliamentary group in Saxony.

The Left sees a "disregard for East German lifetime achievements"

"All federal governments since 1990 have withheld part of their pensions. This is a disregard for East German lifetime achievement that will now go down in the history books," said Schaper. In Saxony, all parties represented in the state parliament apart from the CDU were in favor of joining the hardship fund. The CDU had repeatedly made it clear that pensions are federal law.

The federal government set up the foundation in 2023 to alleviate hardship cases resulting from the East-West pension transition. The fund was aimed at certain occupational and personal groups from the East-West pension transition, ethnic German repatriates and Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They were able to apply for a one-off compensation payment of 2,500 euros, although some federal states were able to double this amount.

Many of the applications were rejected

The federal government had made 500 million euros available for this purpose. An application with a deadline of December 31, 2024 had to be submitted for the benefit. By mid-2025, almost all applications had been processed, with around 95,000 rejected.

Leipzig Left Party member of parliament Sören Pellmann and a colleague have now asked the federal government once again about the balance sheet. According to this, the foundation made a one-off payment to 57,100 people by December 4, 2025. The total expenditure amounted to just under 163 million euros. As of this date, almost 425 million euros were available from the budget, which will now flow back to the federal government and the participating states.

Jewish contingent refugees (38,498 payments) and ethnic German repatriates (15,863) received the majority of the payments. East German pensioners received 2,739 one-off payments. 730 went to people from Saxony. The largest group of these were women who were divorced during the GDR era, followed by former employees of the Reichsbahn, the health and social services and the postal service.