This entry contains information applicable to United States law only. Compensation for an injury; redress for a wrong inflicted.
The losing countries in a war often must pay damages to the victors for the economic harm that the losing countries inflicted during wartime. These damages are commonly called military reparations. The term reparation may also be applied to other situations where one party must pay for damages inflicted upon another party.
In the twentieth century, military reparations have been extracted from Germany twice. After Germany's defeat in World War I, the Allies conducted a peace conference in Paris at which they drafted the Treaty of Versailles (225 Consol. T. S. 188 [June 28, 1919]) which was extremely harsh toward Germany. Germany was compelled to deliver to the Allies one-eighth of its livestock and provide ships, railroad cars, locomotives, and other materials to replace those it had destroyed during the war. Germany also had to provide France with large quantities of coal as reparations.
The treaty required Germany to pay large yearly sums of money to the Allies, but it did not set the total amount due. A reparations commission, which was created to determine the amount, decided in 1921 to set total cash reparations at about $33 billion.
Efforts to collect the reparations failed, primarily because the German economy was in dire straits in the 1920s. U.S. financier Charles G. Dawes presided over a committee of experts to deal with this problem. In 1924 the Allies and Germany adopted the Dawes Plan, which reorganized the German national bank, placed stringent economic controls on Germany, and provided for loans to Germany, all to improve the German economy so that the country could make reparations. In 1929 Germany renegotiated its reparations requirements with the Allies. A committee headed by U.S. representative Owen D. Young reduced the amount Germany owed and ended foreign controls over the German economy. Even this reduced amount of reparations was not paid. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he repudiated the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations provisions.
In the twentieth century, the term reparation has come to imply fault. However, in some circumstances nations may pay for damages inflicted by their armed forces without admitting fault or legal liability, by offering compensation ex gratia, which is Latin for "out of grace." Such payments are usually made for humanitarian or political reasons.
For example, the United States paid Switzerland $4 million for the accidental bombing of the town of Schaffhausen during World War II and paid Japan $2 million in the mid-1950s after an atomic bomb test that the United States conducted in the Pacific showered a Japanese fishing boat and its crew with radiation.
The U.S. government has granted reparations to the Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II as a result of Executive Order No. 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942. The order led to the incarceration of approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry; 77,000 were U.S. citizens and the rest legal and illegal resident aliens. The president was reacting to wartime hysteria that gripped the West Coast immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Rumors about treasonous Japanese residents either communicating vital war secrets to the Japanese government or actively aiding the enemy abounded as U.S. citizens began to fear a Japanese invasion of the mainland. Though these rumors proved false, Japanese Americans suffered because of their nationality. Those interned were forced to sell their homes, furnishings, and businesses at low, distressed prices because they were only allowed to take what they could carry. Families were uprooted and spent time in relocation camps, the last of which did not close until 1946, six months after the end of the war.
During the war Japanese Americans sought restoration of their rights through the courts, but to no avail. In 1942 Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was convicted for failing to report for relocation. In 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193, 89 L. Ed. 194, upheld the constitutionality of the relocation orders.
For forty years Japanese Americans sought reparations for their wartime imprisonment and loss of property. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (50 App. U.S.C.A. § 1989b) amounted to an apology from the U.S. government for the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. The act established a $1.25 billion trust fund to pay reparations. Each of the approximately sixty thousand surviving internees received $20,000 tax free.
Reparations are also awarded to some crime victims. Several states have enacted the Uniform Crime Victims Reparation Act, which awards reparations to persons who have been victims of crimes involving physical violence. Reparations may be granted for medical and hospital costs not covered by medical insurance, lost wages, and other costs associated with a crime.
In addition, some federal statutes provide for reparations for violations of law. For example, persons suffering losses because of violations of the Commodity Futures Trading Act (7 U.S.C.A. § 18) may use the act to seek reparation against the violator.
See: Japanese American evacuation cases; victims of crime.
