161 [18] The Reparations Agreement with Germany General Debate and Decision Knesset Sessions 38-401, 7-9.1.1952 Speaker Yosef Sprinzak: The prime minister has the floor. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: Mr. Speaker, Members of the Knesset, as members of the first Knesset will recall, on January 6, 1951 the government of Israel submitted a note to the governments of the United States, the USSR, Britain and France regarding payment of compensation and restitution of plundered property to Jews by Germany. The note mentioned the payment and restitution owing to individuals and noted that meeting all these personal claims in no way concludes the German people’s grave obligation vis-à-vis the Jewish people for the plunder of the property and confiscation of assets of Jews throughout Europe, those Jews who were slaughtered without leaving heirs. Accordingly, on March 12, 1951 the government submitted a second note to the four allied powers. From a formal standpoint this claim is unprecedented in the annals of international relations. In the note the government of Israel demanded that reparations amounting to $1.5 billion be imposed upon Germany, both West and East, this sum covering only part of the plundered Jewish property. This claim was submitted out of the conviction that the entire German people, residing in West Germany and East Germany alike, were equally responsible for the killing and plunder perpetrated against the Jewish people in Europe. In the note the government made it clear that this responsibility was imposed upon both sectors of present day Germany. It also noted that the State of Israel, in its capacity as the sovereign embodiment of the Jewish people, was both entitled and duty-bound to demand satisfaction for the rights and property of the millions of victims, who were slaughtered and burnt in crematoria and gas chambers while 1 The debate, in which 30 out of the 120 Knesset members participated, lasted for three days. DOI 10.1515/9783110255386.161, , published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 162 Knesset, 7.1.1952 their property was confiscated, stolen and plundered only because they belonged to the Jewish people. Determining the reparations was based upon two basic assumptions: a. Our duty to restore, to the greatest possible extent, the plundered property of Jews without heirs, and to take it from the murderers and those who came after them, in East Germany and West Germany alike, so that the murderer will not also take possession. b. Our obligation, aided by Jewish communities throughout the world, to assimilate Holocaust survivors and absorb them in Israel and to utilize the restored property for this purpose. The note stated that this claim is unprecedented since during the Holocaust the State of Israel did not exist and did not fight with its own army against Nazi Germany, although thousands of its sons and daughters volunteered for Jewish units in the framework of the British Army, first and foremost in the battalions of the Jewish Brigade which took part in defeating the Hitler regime. It was also noted that there is no precedent for the acts of slaughter and plunder of such tremendous magnitude perpetrated against the Jews of Europe by the German people under Hitler’s rule. More than six million Jews were put to death by torture, starvation, killing, and mass asphyxiation. Many were burnt and buried alive. No mercy was shown to the aged, women and children. Babies were torn from their mothers’ arms and cast into the furnaces. Before the mass and systematic murder and during and after it, came the plunder which was also of vast, unprecedented scope. According to the most conservative estimate, during the period of Hitler’s rule the Germans plundered Jewish property in Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries valued at some $6 billion. There are some estimates that reach even larger figures. A crime of such magnitude cannot be forgiven by means of any material compensation. Any compensation whatsoever, great as it may be, cannot be commensurate with the loss of human life or forgive the suffering and anguish of men and women, children, the elderly and infants. Yet the German people, even after the defeat of Hitler’s regime, continue to enjoy, in the West and East alike, the fruits of the slaughter and the looting, the robbery and the plunder of the murdered Jews. The government of Israel views itself as duty-bound to demand that the German people restore the plundered Jewish property; on the one hand, to restore that property of the surviving claimants and heirs, and on the other to restore the vast property that has no heirs to the State of Israel – committed to welfare of the Holocaust survivors and which so far has absorbed the vast majority of them. Even before the establishment of the state, the Yishuv of Palestine played a decisive role in the absorption of German refugees who started to arrive following the outbreak of Nazi persecution in 1933. During the war the soldiers of the Knesset, 7.1.1952 163 Jewish Brigade were the first to encounter the survivors in the detention and death camps in Germany and Central European countries, and to raise their spirits by bringing them the message of our resourceful and fighting homeland.2 Upon its establishment, the State of Israel opened its gates to all displaced persons and survivors of the countries in which the killing took place, and in the last two or three years, hundreds of thousands of survivors have reached a safe haven in independent Israel. The majority of the survivors brought only their lives to Israel, for all their property had been plundered. A tremendous task has been imposed upon the government of Israel, a task which is also unprecedented in contemporary history and perhaps even throughout past generations: the rapid absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came with only the clothes on their backs into a young, poor country under Arab siege. The burden that this mass, impoverished immigration has imposed upon the state is beyond its capabilities and the Jews of the free world have assumed their duty to participate in this vast enterprise. Nevertheless, the burden upon the state is still great. Thus, not only does it have a moral right – even though this right has no formal precedent in the annals of international relations – but also a sacred duty to do everything within its power to restore at least a great part of the plunder to its rightful owners, so that the Nazi murderers’ heirs in West and East Germany would not also become the heirs of the murdered Jews. The government of Israel specified the sum of $1.5 billion as its claim from both sectors of Germany – although the plundered property’s value was several times higher according to authoritative, expert estimates – because it is the minimal sum required for the absorption of half a million immigrants from countries that were under Nazi rule. Payment of these reparations to the State of Israel does not absolve the German governments in the West and East from the responsibility imposed upon them to pay everything due for their plundered property to individual Jews living here with us or to their legitimate heirs. These reparations will be claimed by the representatives of world Jewry. As I mentioned, the note was sent to the four occupying powers: The United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, and the claim was directed at both parts of present-day Germany, West and East. So far we have received no response from the Soviet Union, and the same goes for East Germany. We have received an official reply from the other three powers in almost identical wording. The replies were sent on July 5, 1951, some four months after the note was submitted. In its note to Israel’s ambassador in Washington, the American administration writes that the government of Israel is surely aware that the despicable crime against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime in the planned extermination and plundering of the Jews of Europe has appalled the American people and its government. The government of Israel must surely also be aware that from the 2 See document no. 7, note no. 3, on the Jewish Brigade. 164 Knesset, 7.1.1952 beginning of the conquest of Germany, it has been the American administration’s firm policy to bring to justice all those responsible for the planning and implementation of the crime and to rectify, as far as possible, the wrongdoing committed against the victims of Nazi persecution. The note goes on to say that the United States government gave shelter to thousands of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution during the war, and at the end of the war it enacted special laws in order to open its gates to many of those who survived, penniless and bereft, because of the war and Nazi oppression. Together with Britain and France, it also made substantial contributions to refugee organizations and for refugees who had settled in Israel through the International Refugee Organization [IRO]. Although the Jewish victims of the Nazis, the American government adds, were not represented at the Paris Compensation Conference, a sum of $25 million confiscated from German deposits in neutral countries was allocated to the rehabilitation of Nazi victims, and it was then acknowledged that the majority of those victims were Jews; thus it was decided that 90 percent of that sum and also all the unclaimed property of Jewish victims in those countries would be earmarked for the benefit of the Jewish victims.