Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany
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The Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany was signed on September 10, 1952.[1] and entered in force on March 27, 1953.[2] According to the Agreement, West Germany was to pay Israel for the slave labor and persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and to compensate for Jewish property that was stolen by the Nazis.
According to the website of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the so-called Claims Conference, "In response to calls from Jewish organizations and the State of Israel, in September 1951 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany addressed his Parliament: `… unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity … The Federal Government are prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel … to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.'
"One month after Adenauer’s speech, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the Jewish Agency {For Israel] and president of the World Jewish Congress, convened a meeting in New York City of 23 major Jewish national and international organizations. The participants made clear that these talks were to be limited to discussion of material claims, and thus the organization that emerged from the meeting was called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — the Claims Conference. The Board of Directors of the new Conference consisted of groups that took part in its formation, with each member agency designating two members to the Board.
"The Claims Conference had the task of negotiating with the German government a program of indemnification for the material damages to Jewish individuals and to the Jewish people caused by Germany through the Holocaust."
In 1951, Israeli authorities made a claim to the four powers occupying post-war Germany regarding compensation and reimbursement, based on the fact that Israel had absorbed and resettled 500,000 Holocaust survivors. They calculated that since absorption had cost 3,000 dollars a person, they were owed 1.5 billion dollars by Germany. They also figured that six billion dollars worth of Jewish property had been pillaged by the Nazis, but stressed that the Germans could never make up for what they did with any type of material recompense. Negotiations leading to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany began in March 1952, and were conducted between representatives of the government of the Federal Republic, the government of the State of Israel, and representatives of the World Jewish Congress, headed by Dr. Goldmann. These discussions led to a bitter controversy in Israel, with the coalition government, headed by David Ben-Gurion, claimed that reparations were necessary to restore what was stolen from the victims of the Holocaust. Opposition to the Agreement came from both the right (the Herut Party and the General Zionists) and the left (the Mapam Party) of the political spectrum: both sides argued that accepting reparation payments was the equivalent of forgiving the Nazis for their crimes.
The final debate over reparations, held in the Knesset in January 1952, was accompanied by a violent demonstration against the Agreement, led by Menachem Begin. Nevertheless, an agreement was signed in September of that year, and West Germany paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks over the next fourteen years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress. The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family. The money was invested in the country's infrastructure and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state.
Yad Vashem noted that "in the 1990s, Jews began making claims for property stolen in Eastern Europe. Various groups also began investigating what happened to money deposited in Swiss banks by Jews outside of Switzerland who were later murdered in the Holocaust, and what happened to money deposited by various Nazis in Swiss banks. In addition, individual companies (many of them based in Germany) began to be pressured by survivor groups to compensate former forced laborers . Among them are Deutsche Bank AG, Siemens AG, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), Volkswagen AG, and Adam Opel GmbH. In response, early in 1999, the German government proclaimed the establishment of a fund with monies from these companies to help needy Holocaust survivors. A similar fund was set up by the Swiss, as was a Hungarian fund for compensation of Holocaust victims and their heirs. At the close of the 1990s, discussions of compensation by insurance companies that had insured Jews before the war and who were later murdered by the Nazis were held. These companies include Alliance, AXA, Assicurazioni Generali, Zürich Financial Services Group, Winterhur, and Baloise Insurance Group. With the help of information about Holocaust victims made available by Yad Vashem, an international commission under former US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, has been trying to uncover the names of those who had been insured and died in the Holocaust.The World Jewish Restitution Organization was created to organize these efforts. On behalf of US citizens, the US Foreign Claims Settlement Commission reached agreements with the German government in 1998 and 1999 to compensate Holocaust victims who immigrated to the US after the war."
[edit] References
- ^ USHMM: Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel, USHMM photograph #11019. URL last accessed 2006-12-13
- ^ Honig, F.: The Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, American Journal of International Law 48(4), October 1954. URL last accessed 2006-12-13.
[edit] Further reading
- Beker, Avi. 1970. Unmasking National Myths: Europeans Challenge Their History. Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress.
- Bower, Tom, 1997. Nazi Gold: The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions from Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors, . New York: Harper Collins.
- Carpozi, George, 1999. Nazi Gold: The Real Story of How the World Plundered Jewish Treasures. Far Hills: New Horizon.
- Levine, Itamar, 1997. The Fate of Jewish Stolen Properties: the Cases of Austria and the Netherlands. Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress.
- Nahum Goldmann. 1970. Staatsmann ohne Staat (Statesman Without a State, autobiography). Köln: Kiepenheuer-Witsch.
- Nahum Goldmann. 1969. The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann;: Sixty Years of Jewish Life. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
- Nahum Goldmann. 1978. The Jewish Paradox. Grosset & Dunlap.
- Nahum Goldmann. 1982. Mein Leben als deutscher Jude (My Life as a German Jew). München: Langen-Müller.
- Sayer, Ian and Douglas Botting. 1984. Nazi Gold: The Story of the World's Greatest Robbery and Its Aftermath. London.
- Shafir, Shlomo. 1999. Ambiguous Relations : The American Jewish Community And Germany Since 1945. Detroit : Wayne State University Press.
- Vincent, Isabel. 1997. Hitler's Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice. New York: Morrow.
- Ziegler, Jean. 1997. The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead: How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine. New York: Harcourt Brace.
- Zweig, Ronald W. 1987. German Reparations And The Jewish World : A History Of The Claims Conference. Boulder: Westview Press.
[edit] External links
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/reparations.html German Holocaust Reparations
- http://www.claimscon.org/ Website of the Claims Conference
- http://www.yadvashem.org/ Website of Yad Vashem
