Luxembourg Agreement

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Menachem Begin speaks at a rally against the negotiations under the heading "Our honor should not be sold for money, our blood should not be paid for in goods - we will extinguish the shame!"

The Luxembourg Agreement (including reparations agreement called English. Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany , Ivrit : הסכם השילומים Heskem HaShilumim ) is an on 10. September 1952 closed agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany on the one hand and Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference ( JCC) on the other.

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The content of the agreement included payments, export goods and services with a total value of DM 3.5 billion to support the integration of destitute Jewish refugees, as well as the voluntary commitment of the Federal Republic of Germany to restore assets. This agreement was enforced by the Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ( CDU ) in the Bundestag with the votes of the SPD against parts of his government coalition . 3 billion were earmarked for the State of Israel, 450 million for displaced Jews living outside Israel and 50 million for those who no longer belonged to any Jewish denomination.

Negotiations on the London Debt Agreement ran almost simultaneously . The ratification of both treaties was the political prerequisite for lifting the occupation status and bringing about full sovereignty of the Federal Republic.

The agreements were recorded in writing in a formal "Agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel" and two so-called "protocols" .

A railcar from the Esslingen machine works , delivered as a result of the Luxembourg Agreement, in the old Jerusalem railway station

The preamble to the agreement recognized that Israel had incurred significant financial burdens to resettle uprooted destitute Jewish refugees from areas formerly dominated by Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany therefore guaranteed the State of Israel a global reimbursement of integration costs amounting to DM 3.0 billion (in today's purchasing power around EUR 7.67 billion), which could be accessed in the form of deliveries of goods and services within 14 years.

In the first protocol , the Federal Government reaffirmed its intention to initiate a legislative procedure for the restitution of property and individual compensation for the persecuted.

In a second protocol , the Federal Republic promised further services worth 450 million DM to Israel, which was to pass this money on to the associations united in the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany . This was intended to help needy Jewish persecuted persons outside the state of Israel, who should indirectly benefit from part of the stolen heirless property of victims of the Holocaust. The JCC should assess the "urgency of their needs" and use the amounts "for the support, integration and settlement of Jewish victims".

The federal government also promised to provide 50 million DM for those people who were considered Jews under the Nuremberg Laws and had been persecuted, but who did not profess the Mosaic faith . The JCC refused to take care of them.

The negotiations took place from March 1952 in Kasteel Oud-Wassenaar near The Hague ; the federal government commissioned the Frankfurt law professor Franz Böhm to lead the negotiations on the German side as head of the delegation. The signatures were made by Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (as incumbent Foreign Minister) and Foreign Minister Moshe Scharett on September 10, 1952 in the Luxembourg City Hall . On March 18, 1953, the German Bundestag voted with a narrow majority.

In total, payments and deliveries to the value of 3.5 billion DM (federal budget in the comparable year 1953: 27.85 billion DM) were agreed, in which “the individual compensation for physical and psychological damage should be included in the global payment to Israel it concerned the victims of Hitler living in Israel ”. The payments had to be processed over a period of 14 years and were to be made largely through the delivery of goods and raw materials. The payments were processed by the Israel Mission (1953–1965) established for this purpose in Cologne .

In Israel, the payments were as Schilumim known: This word was foreign minister Moshe Sharett borrowed from the Torah in 1950, the word should be both retribution or revenge payment mean as well as due to the root Shalom , the Peace and compensation stress. From the West German point of view, it was not a question of reparations or the satisfaction of an international legal claim of the State of Israel, but a compelling moral obligation of the entire German people, which was represented by the Federal Republic of Germany.

background

The Luxembourg Agreement was preceded by difficult and in part secret diplomatic negotiations. The young state of Israel had to take in numerous immigrants and was facing ruin, but shied away from entering into direct negotiations with German government agencies. The start of negotiations with the Federal Republic of Germany sparked bitter disputes in Israel that even led to street battles. The opposition under Menachem Begin , the Cherut and the left-wing socialist Mapam , accused the supporters of disregarding the dignity of the victims if the murderers wanted to buy themselves free of their guilt with " blood money ". As a result, there were letter bomb attacks against various German participants . The government of the young state under David Ben-Gurion urgently needed funding and saw no other way out. It was only when the Allies refused to make the Israeli demands on both German states on their behalf that Israel was forced to enter into direct negotiations.

The GDR did not respond to the request to settle a portion of the total claims amounting to 1.5 billion US dollars. Konrad Adenauer was ready to start bilateral talks and responded to the precondition of making a formal declaration of reparation . On September 27, 1951, he said in the German Bundestag :

“In the name of the German people, however, unspeakable crimes have been committed which oblige to moral and material reparation [...]. The Federal Government is ready to work with representatives of Judaism and the State of Israel, which has taken in so many homeless Jewish refugees, to bring about a solution to the material reparation problem, in order to facilitate the path to the spiritual cleansing of infinite suffering. "

Adenauer met Nahum Goldmann , President of the Jewish Claims Conference, in London on December 6, 1951 and declared his willingness to take on two thirds of the total claim for the Federal Republic, namely one billion dollars (then market value 4.2 billion DM). From March 1952, German diplomats negotiated with the Israeli delegations and the Jewish Claims Conference. At the same time, negotiations on the German pre-war and post-war debts took place in London. While the Israeli side emphasized the uniqueness and priority of reparations, the German delegation led by Hermann Josef Abs tried to include Israel's demands in the general agreement on German war debts. This attempt to mix and link the claims of Israel and the Jews in the world with the claims of other states also met with resistance in the German parliament.

When the treaty was ratified on March 4, 1953, there was only a narrow majority in the German Bundestag with 239 of 402 members. The SPD parliamentary group agreed unanimously, and numerous members of the CDU / CSU refused to give their consent, even though Konrad Adenauer described the treaty as necessary and an indispensable precondition for integration into the West for moral reasons . In addition to well-known financial politicians such as Fritz Schäffer (CSU), other politicians feared that the agreement would put a lasting strain on relations with the Arab states, since they were boycotting Israel economically .

Thomas Dehler , Minister of Justice from the FDP, and Franz Josef Strauss , MP of the CSU , spoke negatively in public . According to a survey by the Allensbach Institute , only eleven percent of the population approved the agreement unreservedly. A delegation from the Arab League under the leadership of the Lebanese Ahmed Danouk intervened in Bonn, and in particular the Egyptian Prime Minister Muhammad Nagib threatened to extend the economic sanctions imposed on Israel to the Federal Republic until shortly before ratification in the Bundestag in 1953. “After three hours of talks, State Secretary Hallstein visibly excitedly urged the delegation to leave the Federal Republic as quickly as possible.” The opinion of international lawyers that there was still a state of war between Israel and the Arab League states, and that the agreement consequently violated the duty of neutrality , the federal government did not follow suit.

The German party swore at a party congress in Goslar, a traditional German-Arab friendship against the plans; the formulation of common German-Arab interests used the former Grand Mufti al-Husseini , who called Adenauer a tool of world Jewry . Marion Gräfin Dönhoff , editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , wanted to postpone the agreement and avoid the conflict with the Arabs by demanding that money be given “after Israel and the Arab states have made peace”.

Indeed, free German arms deliveries helped the Israeli politician Ben-Gurion to sabotage the peace negotiations between his Prime Minister Moshe Sharet and Egypt's President Nasser and to overthrow Sharet.

Controversy

  • The Jewish Claims Conference was attacked on various occasions - most recently in 2000 with great severity by Norman Finkelstein  - for failing to pay out the money to the Jewish victims. To justify it, the JCC pointed out that this case was not about individual compensation payments, but global payments. It was covered in the sense of the agreement and by the wording if it met collective needs by allocating funds to hospitals or old people's homes and encouraged integration through payments to religious communities.
  • The payments were used to fund the delivery of infrastructure goods, including ships, railways and electric turbines, to Israel. This made Israel the largest buyer of German goods. The payments were therefore also a contribution to the German economic miracle and the basis for bilateral trade that is still flourishing today.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Without a handshake , Spiegel Online , September 17, 1952.
  2. ^ Yeshayahu Jelinek: Germany and Israel 1945–1965: A neurotic relationship . Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-486-59458-4 , p. 92 ( digitized version ).
  3. ^ Government declaration before the German Bundestag, September 27, 1951
  4. ^ Carlo Schmid : "Memories", Bern, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-442-11316-4 , p. 512ff.
  5. ^ Yeshayahu Jelinek: Germany and Israel 1945–1965: A neurotic relationship . Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004, p. 235 ff.
  6. ↑ Eckart Conze u. a .: The office and the past , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , p. 577.
  7. ^ On December 15, 1952. For the whole obstruction see Eckart Conze u. a .: The office and the past , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, p. 577 ff.
  8. ↑ Helmut Mejcher: The Arab East in the Twentieth Century . In: Ulrich Haarmann (Ed.): History of the Arab World , Beck, Munich 1994, p. 484.
  9. ^ German-Israeli relations. In: Israelnetz .de. May 31, 2019, accessed June 21, 2019 .