Those claims, written more than two years ago, suddenly received intense attention this month, and led to incorrect allegations that the payments were specifically for veterans of the SS, a force closely tied to the Nazi Party that committed a disproportionate share of German war crimes.

The German government says that there are no SS veterans among the recipients in Belgium — the claim’s authors have not cited any evidence — and that there are no known war criminals among those getting the payments.

In reality, under the German legislation that governs the payments, called the Law on the Care of the Victims of the War, SS veterans are less likely than former soldiers in the regular army to qualify. The law prohibits payments to anyone who committed war crimes or crimes against humanity, and it states that where there is evidence of SS membership, claimants must be subjected to a “particularly intensive review” into whether they acted “against the principles of humanity.”

The German government said that such reviews had been carried out in the 1990s and that payments were found to have been directed to some war criminals, 99 of which were then stopped. In total, 2,033 people living outside of Germany are still receiving the payments, the government said.

But Frank Seberechts, a Belgian historian and former research director of a national archive specializing in the Flemish political movement, questioned “the strength and the feasibility of the reviews.”

“The German government did not always have a clear view of who exactly participated in war crimes,” said Mr. Seberechts, author of a book on Belgian collaboration. “In fact, many Belgians who did collaborate militarily did also participate in war crimes, but were never convicted of them.”

He cited a postwar trial in which some Belgians who served as concentration camp guards participated in a massacre of prisoners in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia, on the Baltic Sea. “They were just convicted of military collaboration,” he said, not war crimes or crimes against humanity, because the Belgian judicial apparatus was not equipped to handle such cases immediately after the war.