West Germany's Holocaust payoff to Israel and world Jewry

by Mark Weber

The passions and propaganda of wartime normally diminish with the passage of time. A striking exception is the Holocaust campaign, which seems to grow more pervasive and intense as the years go by. Certainly the most lucrative expression of this seemingly endless campaign has been West Germangs massive and historically unparalleled reparations payoff to Israel and world Jewry for the alleged collective sins of the German people during the Hitler era. Since 1953, West Germany has paid out more than $35 billion in reparations to the Zionist state and to millions of individual "victims of National Socialism."

How did this remarkable program get started? How lucrative has it been? What does it suggest about the "six million" figure? And what are its social and political implications?
Bowing to pressure

In September 1945, shortly after the end of the Second World War, Jewish leader Chaim Weizmann submitted a memorandum on behalf of the Zionist Jewish Agency to the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France "demanding" (in the words of the Encydopaedia Judaica) "reparations, restitution and indemnification due to the Jewish people from Germany" The western Allies lost no time in responding favorably to Weizmann's demands.See 1. The American government was particularly eager to have the Germans pay up.See 2. As a result, the German government set up by the western Allies at Bonn in 1949 never had any real choice but to acknowledge the alleged collective guilt of the German people during the Hitler era and pay what was demanded. More