The Holocaust deniers claim: “Jewish organisations fabricated or exaggerated the Holocaust in order to extract reparations from Germany and other states. The reparations payments to Israel and to individual claimants since 1952 have totalled tens of billions of dollars; the financial motive for keeping the Holocaust narrative alive is enormous.”
The reparations are real. Germany has paid approximately 80 to 90 billion dollars in various forms of reparation to the State of Israel, to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference), and to individual survivors and heirs since the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952. Various other states (notably Switzerland, France, Austria, the Netherlands and a number of corporate entities) have made parallel payments since the 1990s. The figures are not in dispute. The denier claim does not concern the existence of the payments but the order of causation: it argues that the Holocaust narrative produced the payments, with the implicit suggestion that the narrative was constructed in order to produce the payments. The order of causation is the wrong way round. The Holocaust occurred; its existence was documented in the German archive captured by the Allies in 1945 and in the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1949; the reparations were a long-deferred political and legal recognition of what had occurred, beginning in 1952 and continuing for the past seventy years. The narrative did not generate the killing; the killing generated the narrative, which generated, eventually, the reparations.
The reparations chronology
The German payment of reparations to Israel was contested in West Germany itself. Konrad Adenauer’s decision to negotiate the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 was opposed by the parliamentary opposition (the SPD initially, the FDP throughout) and by majority German public opinion, which was reluctant to accept either the moral case for payment or the practical financial commitment. Adenauer pushed the agreement through the Bundestag with substantial cross-party support but against considerable resistance, on the explicit grounds that the German state had a moral obligation to make some material recognition of what had been done in its name. The agreement provided 3 billion Deutsche Marks to Israel and 450 million Deutsche Marks to the Claims Conference, paid over twelve years from 1953. The agreement did not pretend to be reparation in the full sense; it was an acknowledgement of moral obligation paired with a practical contribution to the absorption of survivors in the new state.
The 1956 Federal Indemnification Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz) and its subsequent amendments established a framework for individual claims by victims of Nazi persecution, paid by the West German government. Approximately 4.4 million individual claims were processed between 1956 and the early 2000s, with payments to surviving victims and to the heirs of those who had not survived. The Article 2 Fund of 1992, the Hardship Fund, and the Central and Eastern European Fund of 1998 extended payments to survivors who had been excluded from the original 1950s framework (notably those who had lived in the Soviet bloc and so had been politically inaccessible). The payments to individual survivors continue to the present day; the Claims Conference, founded in 1952 by Nahum Goldmann, has been the principal institutional vehicle for the negotiations.
The non-German reparations
The Swiss banks settlement of 1998 paid 1.25 billion dollars to Holocaust survivors and heirs after the discovery of dormant Jewish accounts and looted gold transactions. The settlement followed the Volcker Commission inquiry into Swiss banking practice during the war. The French banks settlement of 2001 paid 387 million dollars. The Austrian settlement of 2001 paid 210 million Euros. The Israeli banks settlement of 2005 paid heirs of Jewish account-holders whose assets had been transferred to Palestine before the war. The German corporate settlements of 1999 to 2001 (the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, with contributions from Volkswagen, Siemens, IG Farben successors, Deutsche Bank, Allianz and others) paid approximately 5.2 billion dollars to former forced labourers. The Polish state and various other governments have made smaller settlements.
The payments are a substantial transfer of resources. None of them was made in the absence of legal proceedings, factual investigation and adversarial negotiation. In the Swiss case, the bank disclosures were forced by Senator D’Amato’s hearings in 1996 and the subsequent Volcker investigation. In the German corporate cases, the negotiations took years, were resisted vigorously by the firms involved, and were settled only after legal pressure from US class actions threatened the firms’ commercial position in the United States. The reparations were not paid because the recipients persuaded the payers of an invented narrative; they were paid because the legal and factual record made them, eventually, unavoidable.
The accusation of fabrication
The deniers’ accusation that Jewish organisations fabricated the Holocaust for reparations is, like the parallel accusation that they fabricated it for Israel, a conspiracy theory in historical clothing. The accusation requires the listener to believe that the captured German archive, the Nuremberg trial record, the demographic accounting, the perpetrator testimony, the survivor testimony, the photographic and film record, and the modern scholarship are all the products of a coordinated fabrication conducted across decades and continents by Jewish organisations for financial gain. The accusation makes no contact with the actual chronology, in which the documentary evidence of the killing existed in 1945 to 1946 (in the German files captured by the Allies, in the trials, in the contemporaneous published reports), well before any organised reparations claim had been formulated. The fabrication theory has the events in the wrong order.
The accusation is also a recurring antisemitic trope in close to its classical form: that Jews invent grievances for material gain. The trope long predates the Holocaust; it is part of the antisemitic tradition that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sought to codify. The redirecting of the trope at Holocaust memory itself is a particularly exact instance of the antisemitic imagination at work: the dead are turned into a fraud, the survivors into liars, the documentation into fabrication, and the political and financial response into evidence of a continuing manipulation.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it converts a moral and legal recognition of an actual catastrophe into a financial conspiracy. The moral recognition, after seven years of documentary investigation between 1945 and 1952, that the German state had an obligation to its murdered citizens and their heirs is treated as the goal that the killing was invented to serve. The accusation is that Jews are running a long-running financial scheme on the back of fabricated dead. To accept the accusation is to accept the antisemitic premise that the Jewish dead are a commercial proposition rather than victims of a documented crime. There is no good-faith engagement with the documentary record that arrives at this conclusion.
What is the chronology of the documentation versus the chronology of the reparations? Who pushed back against the German reparations payments and on what grounds? Who initiated the Swiss banks investigation, and on what evidence?
See also
- The Luxembourg Agreement 1952
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Swiss Banks and the Volcker Commission
- The Nuremberg Trials
- IG Farben
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Sources
- Luxembourg Agreement, 10 September 1952, between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel, with the parallel agreement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany
- Federal Indemnification Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz), Federal Republic of Germany, 29 June 1956, and subsequent amendments
- Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, “Annual Reports”, https://www.claimscon.org
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, PublicAffairs, 2003, the standard account of the 1990s reparations negotiations
- Independent Committee of Eminent Persons (the Volcker Commission), Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks, 1999
- Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft”), Final Reports of the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme, Berlin, various years
- Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, Wallstein, 2005
- Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference, second edition, Frank Cass, 2001
- Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, 2000, with the specific criticism of the management of post-1990s reparations (a separate scholarly question from the existence of the Holocaust)
- Nicholas Balabkins, West German Reparations to Israel, Rutgers University Press, 1971
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Postwar Reparations” and “The Aftermath of the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org