The place and time of the ceremony had been kept secret until the last minute. On September 10, 1952, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israel’s Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett signed the reparations agreement between Germany and Israel in Luxembourg City Hall. The reason: riots were feared. So that nothing leaked out, only a few members of the press were informed at short notice.
“What should our murdered grandparents cost per piece?” demonstrators in Israel had called out, and the future Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave speeches against the negotiations. Several Arab states threatened sanctions against the young Federal Republic. And critics in Germany itself pointed to the high costs that the country, destroyed in the war, could not shoulder.
The agreement stipulated that the Federal Republic would pay or deliver around three billion DM to Israel by 1964/66. In addition, 450 million DM went to the Jewish Claims Conference, which represented compensation claims by Jewish victims against Germany. Individual claims based on persecution under National Socialism were not affected. The agreement was a first step towards reconciliation between Jews and Germans after the Holocaust.
But there was little to gain in the short term. Nevertheless, as Konrad Adenauer saw it, the Federal Republic, as the democratic legal successor to the Third Reich, had to enter into dialogue with the newly founded Jewish state. The millionfold murder could not be changed, but a sign had to be set.
The foreseeable political quarrels did not prevent Adenauer from pushing ahead with the agreement – the Christian Democrat, who was deposed as mayor of Cologne by the Nazis in 1933, felt that an agreement with Israel was a personal obligation. Almost a year before the ceremony, on September 27, 1951, he had made a government statement to the Bundestag in Bonn, in which he struck a solemn tone: “The federal government and with it the vast majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering aware of what was brought about by the Jews in Germany and in the occupied territories during the National Socialist period.”
The chancellor expressly committed himself to “moral and material reparations”. And he added: “Both with regard to the individual damages that Jews suffered, as well as the Jewish property for which there are no longer any individual beneficiaries”.
Almost all parties represented in the Bundestag followed the reading of the text with demonstrative solemnity: “The House of Representatives is listening to Adenauer’s declaration with deep seriousness and silent devotion,” reported the “Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland” in a special edition. According to the parliamentary stenographers, only an interjection disturbed the serious atmosphere; he came from the ranks of the KPD faction. At the end of the government statement, the deputies stood up and applauded – but not all of them: “Lively applause throughout the house except for the KPD and on the extreme right,” noted the Bundestag minutes soberly.
In his government statement, Konrad Adenauer said that “the vast majority of the German people” were aware of the immeasurable suffering that National Socialism had brought to the Jews in Germany and Europe. Accordingly, looking back a decade and a half later, he expressed himself in his memoirs: “The German people have fully recognized their obligation to make reparations.”
However, there is much to suggest that the Chancellor was too positive in this regard. In any case, opinion polls from the early days of German-Israeli contacts paint a different picture. According to the earliest representative survey on the subject, conducted by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy in August 1949, 60 percent of respondents fully or partially agreed that “the Jews” were unpopular because of their “business acumen.” 53 percent attributed anti-Semitism to “peculiarities of Jewish ethnic groups”. Overall, shortly before the first federal election, the southern German pollsters came to 38 percent with openly or latently anti-Semitic thinking; another 15 percent said they were undecided.
The results of US pollsters in the Federal Republic of Germany at the end of 1949 pointed in a similar direction. According to them, 28 percent of West Germans believed that a Jew whose parents and grandparents were born in Germany and had lived here was not a “real German”.
In connection with Adenauer’s offer of material reparations, the attitude of the population changed significantly – and negatively at that. The Allensbach Institute measured signs of a clear increase in anti-Semitic attitudes during the protracted negotiations on what would later become the Luxembourg Agreement: 38 percent of those surveyed previously agreed to latent or open anti-Semitic statements, this figure has now risen to 52 percent; that was a change well beyond statistical fuzziness.
When asked whether anti-Semitism had decreased in Germany since 1945, only 24 percent of those asked said yes – in 1949 it was 32 percent. According to the results, 44 percent of Germans and even 48 percent of men called reparations “superfluous”. Before the negotiations with Israel were politically on the agenda, i.e. became concrete, “only” 31 percent had held this view.
At the same time, the US interviewers working in parallel determined that 32 percent of West Germans spoke out against support for persecuted Jews; at least one fifth of those questioned agreed with the statement that “the Jews” were themselves responsible for what had happened to them in the Third Reich.
“If you look at the survey results from the founding years of the Federal Republic,” says Thomas Petersen from the Institute for Public Opinion, it becomes clear that “radical anti-Semitism was only the position of a minority at that time, too.” But among “a sizeable segment of the population, across the political spectrum, there was a kind of vague anti-Semitism.”
In the reporting of reputable newspapers on the German-Israeli negotiations, skeptical tones were increasingly mixed during the negotiations without becoming specifically anti-Semitic. However, headlines such as “Another 500 million” or “Vienna should also pay” certainly lacked the objectivity that had previously been determined.
At the end of 1952, i.e. after Adenauer and Sharett had signed it, US pollsters once again examined the extent of right-wing extremist and nationalist attitudes in West German society. The authors of the report of January 12, 1953 were “not surprised” that every second respondent rejected the Luxembourg reparations agreement; only a good one in four welcomed it, almost as many did not comment.
Despite such worrying numbers, Adenauer and the federal government stayed their course; the reparations agreement was passed and implemented. “It is important to recognize the almost spectacular precedent character of this agreement from the point of view of the time,” says the historian Michael Borchard. The current archive director of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation has lived in Israel for many years and has written a book about the relationship between the founding chancellor and Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion.
“On the Israeli side, the distrust was huge, which Adenauer instinctively grasped and even in his administration took meticulous care to ensure that the things agreed in Luxembourg were actually implemented down to the last detail,” Borchard summarizes the further development. This finally made it possible to establish diplomatic relations in 1965. But relations remained fragile, as shown by decades of tactics on the German side with regard to the 1972 Olympic assassination attempt.
You can also find “World History” on Facebook. We are happy about a like.
