WEST GERMAN REPARATIONS AGREEMENT

Accord with Israel following World War II.

In September 1945 Chaim Weizmann, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, asked the governments that occupied Germany at the end of World War II—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France—to secure financial compensation for the Jewish people.

On 10 September 1952 the government of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) agreed to pay 3.45 billion German marks ($845 million) in the form of goods to Israel, in installments between 1953 and 1966. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany was to allocate 450 million marks ($110 million). Thirty percent of the funds were allocated for the purchase of oil in the United Kingdom and 70 percent for goods bought directly by the Israeli government. These funds played an important role in the development of Israel's economy in the 1950s.

The agreement was the result of an Israeli claim for US$1 billion in compensation from West Germany (and a claim for $500 million from East Germany, which was never submitted because the powers occupying Germany refused to deal with the claim) to cover the cost of absorbing 500,000 victims of Nazi persecution, estimated at US$3,000 each.

The signing of the agreement led to serious political divisions in Israel; riots broke out on 7 to 9 January 1952 in Jerusalem outside the Knesset. The government favored a pragmatic policy toward Germany that would bring much-needed foreign currency to Israel; the opposition, led by Menachem Begin, was ideologically opposed to reconciliation with Germany.

see alsogermany and the middle east; weizmann, chaim.

Bibliography

Brecher, Michael. Decisions in Israel's Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.

Deutschkron, Inge. Bonn and Jerusalem: The Strange Coalition. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1970.

Patinkin, Don. The Israeli Economy in the First Decade. Jerusalem: The Maurice Falk Project for Economic Research in Israel, 1959.

paul rivlin