Catholic Church lists Nazi-era laborers

BERLIN, April 9 (UPI) -- The Catholic Church issued a list of 5,900 forced laborers working at Church facilities in the Nazi era.

The German church has already paid roughly $2.5 million in compensation to 587 survivors, whom the Nazis forced to work as gardeners, gravediggers and hospital staff during World War II, according to Deutsche Welle Online.

The latest issue is the result of a study detailing the involvement of the church in the Nazis' forced-laborer scheme, which had several million Eastern Europeans forced to work in factories fueling the Third Reich's war machinery.

Most of the 5,900 people were civilians or prisoners of war from Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union.

The study's chief historian, Karl-Joseph Hummel, said only a limited number of Catholic facilities had used forced labor, adding the Catholic Church had failed to distance itself from the Nazi regime.

"It should have clearly said how its interpretation of loyalty, honor and the fatherland was not the same as the Nazis' view," he said in an interview on German public radio.

Cardinal Karl Lehmann, one of Germany's top Catholic officials, said the study was only one of many steps.

"It's a burden of history that our church will keep facing up to in the future," he said.