France is to compensate thousands of people who had a parent deported or killed in Nazi massacres during the World War Two occupation of France.
Some 8,000 people could each be eligible for a payment of €27,440 - the same sum paid out in 2000 to orphans of Holocaust victims deported from France, said Mr Pierre Mayaudon, head of the defence ministry's war veterans office.
"The concern is justice and fairness. Victims' associations wanted the compensation granted in 2000 to be widened to orphans of victims of Nazi massacres or people who were deported for reasons other than anti-Semitism," Mr Mayaudon said.
"If you had, for example, a Jewish person or a resistance figure who was deported for throwing a grenade at the Nazis, any orphan they left behind would not have been compensated under the previous accord," he said.
"There are an estimated 4,500 children of deportees, and once you add other categories like massacre orphans, we think there could be 7,000 to 8,000 people eligible," Mr Mayaudon added.
France, haunted by the ghosts of collaboration with the 1940-1944 occupation, has been rushing to compensate families of Jews deported from France since President Jacques Chirac said in 1995 that French nationals must shoulder some of the blame.
The new compensation package will be finalised in the months ahead. Those eligible will include people who were younger than 21 when they lost a mother or a father in massacres such as the notorious hanging by German troops of 99 civilians in the town of Tulle a few days after the D-Day landing of Allied troops.
Families of people killed in bombings or in the general course of the war will not be compensated.