BERLIN — In a week when demonstrators from Greece to Spain drew parallels between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s drive for austerity and the brutality of the Nazis, a symbolic act recognizing the commitment that a postwar, peaceful Germany has made to many of those who survived Hitler’s atrocities largely went unnoticed.

Germany’s postwar reparations program has become such a matter of fact that many Germans are not even aware that their country, after paying $89 billion in compensation mostly to Jewish victims of Nazi crimes over six decades, still meets regularly to revise and expand the guidelines for qualification. The aim is to reach as many of the tens of thousands of elderly survivors who have never received any form of support.

In prominent places among the government buildings in the heart of a reunified Berlin, Germans have placed new memorials honoring the Jewish, gay, and Sinti and Roma victims. But the reparations program, which was created when Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, and Israel signed the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952, receives far less attention.

By starting the program, West Germany, for the first time, assumed responsibility for compensating Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. Stuart E. Eizenstat, a special negotiator for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, praised it as historically unique at a gathering here last week for its 60th anniversary.