The post-war reckoning with what the Nazi regime had taken from the Jews of Europe began before the war ended. The Allied powers had agreed at the Bermuda Conference of 1943 and the Paris Conference of 1944 that the property of murdered and dispossessed Jewish communities would be a subject of post-war restitution. The Allied Reparations Commission of 1945 had begun the institutional work. The substantial documented programmes of compensation and restitution that followed have run for eighty years and are still running.
The principal documented programmes
The Luxembourg Agreement of 10 September 1952 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel established the first major post-war compensation framework. West Germany undertook to pay around three billion Deutsche Mark to Israel over twelve years and a further 450 million to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference), which represented diaspora Jewish communities. The agreement was the work of Konrad Adenauer for West Germany and Nahum Goldmann and Moshe Sharett for the Jewish side. It was politically difficult on both sides. Adenauer faced opposition in the Bundestag and inside his own party; Goldmann faced opposition in the Israeli Knesset and substantial protest on the streets of Tel Aviv from the Begin-led Herut party.
The West German Wiedergutmachung programme that followed paid individual compensation to surviving victims under the Federal Compensation Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, BEG) of 1953 and the Federal Restitution Law (Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz, BRüG) of 1957. By the time the principal programme closed in the late 1960s, around 4.4 million claims had been processed and around DM 102 billion paid out across the West German programmes as a whole. The historiography on the programme is divided. Some historians treat it as the most substantial post-war reparations programme of the twentieth century. Others note the substantial categories of claimant who were excluded: those whose suffering had been at the hands of Axis allies rather than Germany directly, those without the documentation the West German bureaucracy required, those who had emigrated to countries (particularly the Soviet bloc) with which West Germany had no diplomatic relations.
The Swiss banking and insurance settlements of the 1990s addressed a separate cluster of claims. Surviving Jewish account-holders and the heirs of murdered ones had been unable to recover deposits held in Swiss banks at the outbreak of war. The Volcker Commission, established in 1996 under the chairmanship of the former US Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, audited the Swiss banks and found around 53,000 dormant accounts of Holocaust-era origin. The 1998 settlement between the Swiss banks and the World Jewish Restitution Organisation paid out 1.25 billion US dollars. The Swiss insurance settlement of 2002 paid an additional substantial sum in respect of unpaid life insurance policies.
The Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Stiftung EVZ), established in Germany in 2000 with funding from the German federal government and from the major German industrial firms that had used slave labour during the war, paid around 4.4 billion euros in compensation to surviving slave labourers and forced labourers across the world. The Foundation closed its compensation programme in 2007 and continues as a research and education institution.
What the programmes did not cover
The substantial documented programmes were the visible part of the post-war reckoning. The unpaid part was larger. The looted art that has not been returned (the Gurlitt collection in Munich, the work of the Washington Principles of 1998, the contested cases that continue to be litigated in 2026) is one large category. The bank deposits in non-Swiss European banks that were never recovered are another. The real estate of murdered Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe, expropriated first by the Nazi regime and then again by the post-war communist governments, is a third. The Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and other central European restitution processes of the 1990s and 2000s addressed only a small fraction of the documented losses.
The pages in this cluster address each of the principal documented programmes in turn, plus the wider question of what the reparations process has and has not done.