Quotes from famous books on the Reparations Racket

• The Seventh Million
• West German Reparations to Israel
• What Price Israel?
• The Warburgs: the story of a family
• The Jewish Paradox

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German Reparations & Restitution

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The Seventh Million

104 -- Talk of Reparations Even in 1942

It is uncertain who was the first to suggest that the Germans would have to pay reparations for the property they had expropriated from Jews and for the suffering they had caused. The idea seems to have been in the air from the time the war started, apparently sparked by the punitive reparations imposed on Germany at the end of World War I. Ben-Gurion received a memorandum on the subject as early as 1940. Berl Katznelson spoke of it publicly toward the end of that year. By December 1942, there was already a private organization in Tel Aviv called Justicia that offered to help Nazi victims draft compensation demands.

195 -- Germany Will Want to Negotiate to Pay Reparations

[Michael Amir wrote:] I don’t support establishing relations for their own sake. I assume that Germany, in order to atone for the crimes of Hitler’s regime, is interested in entering negotiations with us over a declaration that condemns the injustice done in the name of the German people to the Jewish people as a whole and that assesses the material and moral responsibility of the German people for the atrocities its leaders committed against the Jewish people. Germany will want, on the basis of this declaration, to conduct negotiations for comprehensive reparations.

196 -- Reparations Idea Examined Already in 1941

Jewish organizations in the United States had begun examining, as early as 1941, the legal and political ramifications of claiming reparations and compensation from Germany. At the end of the war, the leaders of the Jewish Agency also began giving the subject attention. They reviewed proposals, memorandums, and position papers they had received over the years from jurists and economists, most of them of German origin; some had specialized in the 1930s in the haavara agreements. A few wrote in German, and one introduced, while the war was going on, the conciliatory and irksome legal term Wiedergutmachung — literally, “to make good again,” to right the wrong, to rectify.

216 -- Rabble Rouser Begin Incites Crowd from Hotel Balcony

Menahem Begin, in the meantime, left the Knesset and made his way to the balcony of the Aviv Hotel overlooking Zion Square. Thousands had gathered there People had come from all over the country by chartered bus. They wore yellow Stars of David, like the ones Jews in the ghettos had been forced to wear; under the word Jude were the words “Remember what Amalek did unto thee.” Begin told them about the drowning of his father, adding: “They say that a new German government has arisen with whom we can talk, conduct negotiations, and sign an agreement. Before Hitler came to power, the German people voted for him. Twelve million Germans served in the Nazi army. there is not one German who has not murdered our fathers. Every German is a Nazi. Every German is a murderer. Adenauer is a murderer. . . All his assistants are murderers.
When he reached the halfway point in his speech, he suddenly waved a piece of paper, as if it had only then been handed to him. he had just been informed, he said, that the policemen stationed around the square were equipped with tear-gas grenades — made in Germany. He shrieked: “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!” He told the people to protest by not paying taxes and promised that the opponents of reparations would not be frightened even by the “torture chambers.” He termed the struggle “a war to the death.”

222, 223 -- Reparations Debate Continues — Where Will You Get 6 Million More Jews?

In March 1952, just days before the negotiations with Germany began, Yohanan Bader said: “Suppose they pay you for six million Jews, but when the reparations period is over, . . . where will you get six million more Jews so that you can get more money?” This comment completed the question that Arieh Ben-Eliezer had presented to Mapei a few months before, when it became known that Germany was going to pay Israel not in cash but in the form of goods. “Will these German products include soap produced from human bodies?” Ben-Eliezer asked. Haim Landau called out in Yiddish to Shmuel Dayan (Mapei): “A glik hot unz getrofen (lucky us!) — six million Jews were murdered and we can get some money.

229, 230 -- Goldmann versus Adenauer

The reparations and compensation agreements with Germany were largely the fruit of Goldmann’s ability to impress Konrad Adenauer. ...
The fact that, after so many years and the innumerable meetings he had since held with Goldmann, the German chancellor still believed that the Jewish leader had tried to mislead him says something about the relations between them.
In another context, Adenauer noted in his memoirs that he knew better than to underestimate the ability of “Jewish banking circles” to bring his country harm. Goldmann, a tireless dissembler, exploited his image as one of “the elders of Zion,” sometimes to the point of making threats bordering on extortion. A file in his archives contains information on the Nazi backgrounds of key members of Adenauer’s government. Some in Bonn believed that Goldmann had the power to destroy them unless they could ensure his silence about their past.

425 -- Yad Vashem’s List — Less Than Three Million

By the fall of 1990 fewer than three million names were on file. Somewhere in the minutes of a board meeting one can find Nahum Goldmann’s contention that such a list should not even be started, since it could never contain a full six million names and so would give neo-Nazis cause to argue that six million were not murdered. Such an outcome would cause great embarrassment, the president of the World Jewish Congress warned the Yad Vashem board, since the six million figure served as the basis for the reparations and compensation agreements with Germany.

22 -- Economics of Cash Reparations

The most striking example of cash reparations in the nineteenth century resulted from the Franco-Prussian War, which ended in the defeat of the French. The Treaty of Frankfurt, signed on May 10, 1871, imposed upon her an indemnity of 5 billion francs, cession of territory, and German occupation of certain parts of France until the obligation was paid. It was to be paid within five years in gold, silver, and bills of exchange.
Although the sequestration of Alsace and Lorraine was most humiliating to France, and Bismarck’s demand for an indemnity of 5 billion francs appeared astronomical at the time, in other respects the Germans treated their defeated adversary with respect. The peace treaty, for instance, was not a document of capitulation, but a convention between two powers, “which indicated only a negotiated settlement between two equals.”

24, 25 -- The Treaty of Versailles

The Armistice of November 1918 imposed upon the German government an indemnity for all damages inflicted upon the civilian population in the victorious countries. The Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 which formally ended hostilities was a Diktatfrieden, based on onerous terms, if not impossible conditions.
Versailles required that Germany surrender her entire navy and most of the merchant marine, accept stringent limitations on the production of certain strategic goods, have her army reduced to 100,000 men, and pay “a war indemnity unheard of in the history of any country.” In addition, she was to cede territory with some million inhabitants, 40 per cent of her blast furnaces, 30 per cent of her steel mills, and 28 per cent of her rolling mills. The proposed reparations bill was so huge that, according to Lloyd George, “no civilized nation has ever been forced to shoulder anything comparable.” As a military power, Germany was to be reduced to the level of Greece and, as a naval power, to the level of Argentina.

59 -- Morgenthau Proposal: ‘Crudest Scheme Malevolent Planning Could Devise’

The most far-reaching proposal for the elimination of the war potential of German industry was developed by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the wartime Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. In the view of one observer, it was the “crudest reparation scheme malevolent planning could devise.” Morgenthau felt that so long as Germany had heavy industries there would never be peace in the world. To eliminate Germany as a potential aggressor, the Morgenthau proposal called for the complete destruction of the country’s metallurgical, chemical, and electrical industries within six months after the end of World War II. All factories were either to be blown up or dismantled and sent to the victorious countries as reparations; all coal mines were to be flooded and the entire Ruhr Valley turned into a “ghost territory.” The Ruhr was, in effect, to be “put out of business,” wiped out as an industrial area, regardless of what happened to millions of Germans. Subsequently this proposal was officially accepted in a somewhat modified form by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944. Shortly thereafter, however, both Churchill and Roosevelt repudiated the plan. Nevertheless, its basic principles dominated official thinking in Washington for almost six years after the defeat of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Government officials in both America and Great Britain continued to treat Germany in “moralizing categories” and the public-opinion makers remained fixed in the stereotypes established in the “hate the Germans” milieu of the two world wars.

81 -- Before the War Was Even Over: To Claim Or Not To Claim?

The issue of restitution and compensation for European Jewry was raised formally in the United States in the spring of 1940, when the American Jewish Committee appointed a Committee on Peace Studies under Professor Maurice R. Cohen. His charge was to conduct research on the promotion of “a more intelligent understanding of the Jewish situation and aid in the defense of the rights of Jews in the free forum of the world’s conscience, as well as to formulate the necessary plans for its execution.” In March 1941, the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress was established as a research agency in Jewish war and postwar problems, with Dr. Jacob Robinson in charge. In the same year, Dr. Nahum Goldmann broached this problem at an assembly of the World Jewish Congress in Baltimore.

82 -- In 1944 Jews Were ‘a Nation Without a State’ — Not Subject to International Law

In the fall of 1943, Dr. George Landauer, an influential German Zionist living in Palestine, wrote a memorandum in which he stressed that, after the victory, Jews as a nation should be allowed to press claims against Germany. He was aware that it would be extremely difficult for the victorious powers to recognize a collective demand, but since the Jews and Germans had special accounts to settle the claim had to be made. In fact, he elevated this objective to be the principle goal of the political activity of the Jewish Agency.
In support of Dr. Landauer’s work, Dr. Siegfried Moses, future comptroller of the State of Israel, published a small pamphlet on the subject early in 1944. In it he raised questions of restitution and compensation and made concrete proposals for their implementation. Dr. Moses emphasized that in 1944 the Jews were a nation without a state and thus not subject to international law. Yet, he argued, the Jews had a collective claim against Germany based on a moral justification rather than a legal one. He further insisted that the Jewish community of Palestine should be the creditor of that collective claim. Gillis and Knopf also argued that all the property of the so-called “absent persons” should not be allowed to revert to the successor government of Germany, but instead should go to help build up Palestine, in the form of a collective Jewish claim.

82, 83 -- Reparation Plan a ‘Done Deal’ Eight Years Before Luxembourg Treaty

To insure that Jewish refugees from Germany would have adequate representation in pressing their claims after the war, Dr. Moses was instrumental in setting up in December 1944 the Council for the Protection of Rights and Interests of Jews from Germany. The influence of his work on the terms of the Shilumim Agreement and on West German legislation providing individual compensation was of inestimable importance. Dr. Felix E. Shinnar, first head of the Israel mission in Cologne, said of Dr. Moses’ pamphlet that eight years before the Luxembourg Treaty it had already settled virtually all basic aspects of the German reparation (Wiedergutmachung). According to Shinnar, Dr. Moses’ analysis demonstrated the reality as well as the vision of what was possible, and this paved the way for the success of the Shilumim operation.

83 -- Nahum Goldmann ‘Demands’ Establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth

But regardless of the prevailing legal difficulties, most Western Jews felt that their claims against the successor government of the Third Reich would be based on legal as well as moral grounds. For example, the Swiss Jewish Community, in a memorandum in October 1944, stressed that the Germans would have to make restitution and pay individual as well as collective compensation. The formal inheritance laws were to be disregarded; all Jewish property with “absentee or missing owners” was to be claimed and the proceeds used for “collective Jewish reconstruction work.” At the War Emergency Conference of the World Jewish Conference, in November 1944, Dr. Goldmann demanded that all Jewish property be restored and that a Jewish commonwealth be established.

84 -- Chaim Weizmann Demands Restitution, Indemnification and Compensation

Once the war was over, and with the groundwork laid on the matter of restitution and compensation, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the future first president of Israel, sent a letter to the victorious powers on September 20, 1945. In the name of the Jewish Agency, he demanded restitution, indemnification, and compensation from Germany for the crimes against the Jews. His estimated value for the material losses was $8 billion. Dr. Weizmann requested that all buildings, art treasures and valuables of every kind be restored to their former owners or their heirs. All property for which no heirs could be traced was to be turned over to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, as the official representative of the Jews. Furthermore, since the majority of the survivors of the concentration camps were likely to go to Palestine, he presented a global Jewish claim against Germany, demanding funds to be used for the purpose of compensating the cost of resettling Jewish refugees in Palestine.

190 -- How Much to Date?

The Shilumim obligation has been discharged in full. Nominally it ran for fourteen years, but actually the DM 3.45 billion was paid in twelve years. Individual compensation payments still continue and, according to some estimates, by 1975 the total cost of the Luxembourg Treaty will have been DM 46 billion and by 2000 over DM 62 billion. By the end of 1966, DM 23.2 billion had been transferred abroad and DM 8.1 billion paid to German residents for material damages.

274, 281 -- (Appendix A) World Jewish Congress ‘Suggestions’

The World Jewish Congress summarizes in the following points some of those measures which the German Government should be obliged to carry out in fulfillment of the rightful claims of the Jews.

5. Restitution

The measures promulgated by the Allied authorities in Germany since the end of the war to restore to the rightful owners or their successors properties and assets confiscated and otherwise wrongfully appropriated by reason of the oppressive enactments of the Third Reich directed against Jews have either not yet been fully carried out or have proved defective by reason of inadequate procedure. ...

There is danger that the existing laxity on the part of German authorities and the pressure exercised upon them by groups directly involved are likely to result in a serious curtailment of the implementation of the restitution measures in existence if and when Allied control is suspended or relaxed.

It is essential, therefore, that restitution remains a matter of Allied concern within the terms of any revised Occupation Statute. It is urged also that, in any new instrument between the Allied Powers and the German Federal Republic, the German Government should undertake to respect and to implement the restitution legislation enacted by the Allied Powers and that the procedure for implementation should be speeded up and improved in order that the properties of the victims of Nazi persecution should be restored to the legitimate owners, without delay and without undue cost to them.

6. Compensation

Legislation designed to restore to the true owners the properties of victims of Nazi persecution covers an important part of the economic losses suffered by them. Such legislation cannot, by virtue of its limited nature, make good the damage and injury by way of loss of life, health, liberty and possessions no longer recoverable. These losses, so far as their material consequences are concerned, must be made good by adequate measures for payment of compensation. ...

It is submitted, therefore, that under any revised Occupation Statute the matter of compensation should be reserved to Allied control, and that any new instrument between the Allied Powers and the German Federal Republic should contain a provision obliging the German Government to adopt for the whole of Western Germany a General Claims Law of compensation for the victims of Nazi persecution irrespective of their presence in Germany or not, and without relation to the date of such residence.

7. Position of absentees

In consequence of the persecutory acts of the Nazi Government there are in Germany today only about 25,000 Jews, compared with 580,00 in 1933. The problems of restitution and compensation must, therefore, be considered largely from the viewpoint of owners of property and claimants now living in foreign countries. It has to be emphasized that as far as restitutable property is concerned, “foreign” ownership did not come about by someone abroad acquiring property in Germany, with full knowledge of the risks involved. It was the result of the forced emigration of the owners who at the time of acquisition were residents of Germany and were, in most cases, citizens thereof. It is now submitted that any new settlement with Germany would be incomplete, if, in respect to restitution, no guarantees were included therein to guard against the possibility of discriminatory treatment by German authorities to the disadvantage of the absent owners of these assets, whether as regards taxes or other levies or the holding and administering of such property. ...

Compensation payments also, if made in local currency, would be of little advantage to beneficiaries living abroad, unless there is adequate machinery to enable them to use these payments in the country of their present residence. ...

It is submitted, therefore, that the German Republic should be obliged to facilitate such transfers within reasonable limits.

8. Collective Jewish claims against Germany

Even if the before-mentioned measures of individual restitution or compensation were to be fully implemented, only a comparatively small number of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution — those who resided or had property in Germany or happened to be liberated on German soil — would receive partial indemnification; but not more than a fraction of the losses inflicted upon the Jewish people by the Germans during the era of Nazi domination of the European Continent would thus be made good. No one can bring back to life the six million Jewish men, women and children who were starved, tortured, shot or gassed to death by orders of the Third Reich. ...

These crimes have created a responsibility on the part of the German people, which the German Government must discharge on a collective basis, as a measure of indemnification to the Jewish people. The German Federal Republic should, therefore, assume an obligation in an instrument of agreement with the Allied Powers, to indemnify the Jewish people by material compensation in goods, services or otherwise, ...

This task will continue for years to come ands will require very considerable funds. Justice demands that this burden be shared by Germany and the Federal republic be made to assume a clear and unequivocal obligation to this effect.

241 - Israel Should Compensate Arabs From German Reparations Fund

No nation has ever been under a greater moral obligation to alleviate the plight of refugees than the State of Israel. Not only did Israel’s political acts create that plight for the Arabs of Palestine, but the international rationale for the very existence of Israel was the world’s desire to save refugees. Who, then, if not Israel must fully honor the right of displaced persons to return home in peace? And, just as clearly, full compensation must be granted to those Arab refugees whose return is not feasible. A United Nations Commission should supervise the assessment of their sequestered Palestine properties and enable these refugees to find permanent reintegration in Arab lands. If need be, Israel should finance that restitution out of the reparation funds she is receiving from Germany.

25 -- Warburg Progress

But the real progress of M. M. Warburg & Co. during the middle years of the nineteenth century is best illustrated by their participation, through the good offices of the Rothschild firm, in the French loan that Rothschilds issued for the payment of reparations imposed on her by Bismarck after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. This, according to Edward Rosenbaum, was a landmark “in the international movement of merchandise, precious metals. commercial and financial bills and all sorts of foreign investments.”

73 -- Jews Do Not Live By Bread Alone

The institutions I am concerned with have been trying to encourage a new awareness on the cultural level. The most important of them, the Memorial Foundation, has been able to draw upon sizable amounts in connection with German reparations. The Claims Conference and the Memorial Foundation have made contributions to the creation of Jewish schools and community centers, something like the French maisons des jeunes and maisons de la culture, which have big attendances everywhere. After the war our aim was to rebuild the cultural and religious life of the Jewish people. Adenauer supported us. Some German ministers wanted the reparations money to be spent only on the victims of Nazism and on philanthropic works. Adenauer told the supporters of that argument: ‘The Bible says that man does not live by bread alone. we must help to revive Jewish cultural life; it is no less important than feeding the poor.’ So it is thanks to that money that we were able to put up buildings and then to establish scholarship funds for Jewish writers and scholars working on Jewish subjects, as well as creating departments of Judaism in the great universities and so on.

122, 123 -- Reparations Termed ‘An Extraordinary Innovation’

Apart from my encounter with the survivors of the concentration camps after the liberation, I only returned officially to Germany in order to meet Chancellor Adenauer and open negotiations about reparations. These reparations constitute an extraordinary innovation in terms of international law. Until then, when a country lost a war it paid damages to the victor, but it was a matter between states, between governments. Now for the first time a nation was to give reparations either to ordinary individuals or to Israel, which did not legally exist at the time of Hitler’s crimes. All the same I must admit that the idea did not come from me.
During the war the WJC had created an Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York (its headquarters are now in London). The directors were two great Lithuanian Jewish jurists, Jacob and Nehemiah Robinson. Thanks to them, the Institute worked out two completely revolutionary ideas: the Nuremberg tribunal and German reparations.
The importance of the tribunal which sat at Nuremberg has not been reckoned at its true worth. According to international law it was in fact impossible to punish soldiers who had been obeying orders. It was Jacob Robinson who had this extravagant, sensational idea. When he began to canvas it among the jurists of the American Supreme Court they took him for a fool. ‘What did these Nazi officers do that was so unprecedented?’ they asked. ‘You can imagine Hitler standing trial, or maybe even Goering, but these are simple soldiers who carried out their orders and behaved as loyal soldiers.’ We therefore had the utmost trouble in persuading the Allies; the British were fairly opposed, the French barely interested, and although they took part later they did not play any great part. The success came from Robinson managing to convince the Supreme Court judge, Robert Jackson. The Institute’s other idea was that Nazi Germany ought to pay after its defeat. That still required belief in the defeat, at a time when it seemed likely that the war in Europe was lost for the Allies, but like Churchill and de Gaulle I kept my faith. I never doubted for a moment, because I knew that Hitler would never manage to moderate himself and that his excesses would draw the Allies into the conflict. According to the Institute’s conclusions, the German reparations would first have to be paid to people who had lost their belongings through the Nazis. Further, if, as we hoped, the Jewish state was created, the Germans would pay compensation to enable the survivors to settle there. The first time this idea was expressed was during the war, in the course of a conference in Baltimore.
Once the Nuremberg trials were over, this reparations problem received further consideration. Several Jewish leaders then attempted to establish relations with Adenauer, but their proposals were often ridiculous. One organization suggested a payment of twenty million Deutschmarks — and at the conclusion of the agreement I obtained, the Germans will have paid out a total of eighty billion!
Our ‘contacts’ were Walter Hallstein, then an under-secretary of state, and later president of the EEC, and the diplomat Herbert Blankenhorn, director of the political department of the German Foreign Ministry and Adenauer’s right-hand man. These two have remained close friends of mine.

125 -- Israel is German!

Without the German reparations that started coming through during its first ten years as a state, Israel would not have half of its present infrastructure: all the trains in Israel are German, the ships are German, and the same goes for electrical installations and a great deal of Israel’s industry ... and that is setting aside the individual pensions paid to survivors. Israel today received hundreds of millions of dollars in German currency each year. When Pinhas Sapir made a great speech in my defence to the WJC, he said: ‘Goldmann has brought Israel eight billion dollars.’ In some years the sums of money received by Israel from Germany have been as much as double or treble the contribution made by collections from international Jewry. Nowadays, there is no longer any opposition to the principle — even some members of Herut draw reparations.

135, 136 Many Israelis’ Living Provided By German Payments

Before leaving this reparations question, it is worth recalling that even today the Germans spend one billion two hundred million marks under that heading. The public thinks that the greater proportion goes to the State of Israel, but it’s the other way round: Israel has officially received the equivalent of three billion marks, although the real value is higher because the prices of the products concerned were fixed at a time when the world rates were at rock bottom. But the individual Jewish victims have received twenty times as much. Obviously, because hundreds of thousands of survivors have settled in Israel, a considerable fraction of these individual payments reverts indirectly to the state: there are thousands of Israelis whose living is provided by the German payments.

136 Adenauer Asked to Pay East Germany’s Share

Still, the negotiations are not over yet: the Russians have never replied to our requests, and there has been no reaction from East Germany. Of all the Communist states, the GDR is certainly the most hostile to Israel, and its press is ferocious. Eventually this led to my telling Adenauer: ‘You claim that you represent the whole of Germany and you do not recognize the GDR. In that case, be consistent and pay its share!’ After months of negotiations he accepted, and now a Jew from Leipzig receives the same pension as a Jew from Frankfurt. We have therefore lost our main ground for asking East Germany for individual reparations. Only the GFR could ask for its contribution to be repaid, but that is its own business. Of course there is the question of communal assets nationalized by the GDR, but it must be admitted that the returns are paid to the Jewish community. This has three thousand members and a satisfactory budget, which explains why I have never been very active about East Germany. Nevertheless, a state which wanted to be respected all over the world might make a gesture by helping the thousands of victims of Nazism who have not received their full entitlement of reparations. As a matter of fact I have been told through a mutual friend that Erich Honecker, the Secretary General of the East German Communist Party, would like to meet me. I would be happy to meet him, but I have heard nothing from him as yet, and I am doubtful whether he has the will to do anything worthwhile. Yet in my opinion a gesture of that sort would be of far greater benefit morally to the GDR than financially to the East-German-born Jewish victims of Nazism.