The Luxembourg Agreement 1952

The Luxembourg Agreement of 10 September 1952 was the first reparations agreement between a perpetrator state and the representatives of its victims’ community. The agreement committed the Federal Republic of Germany to pay three billion Deutschmarks to the State of Israel and 450 million Deutschmarks to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference) for the benefit of survivors outside Israel. It was signed in the City Hall of Luxembourg by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, and came into force on 27 March 1953 after ratification by the West German Bundestag. The agreement established the financial, moral and political precedent of state reparations for mass atrocity that has shaped the post-war reckoning with the Holocaust and substantially every subsequent post-atrocity reparations framework.

The negotiations

The negotiations were conducted between September 1951 and September 1952, principally by Adenauer’s representative Franz Böhm and the Israeli ambassador to the negotiations Felix Shinnar, with Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress representing the Claims Conference. The talks were held at Wassenaar in the Netherlands and at Luxembourg, with the venues deliberately chosen outside Germany and Israel to avoid the political difficulty of either delegation visiting the other’s territory.

The negotiations were controversial in both countries. In Israel, the Knesset debate of January 1952 on whether to negotiate with West Germany at all produced one of the most turbulent parliamentary sessions in Israeli history, with violent protests outside the Knesset led by Menachem Begin and substantial division within Mapai itself. The decision to proceed was carried by a vote of 61 to 50. In West Germany, Adenauer faced opposition within his own coalition, with substantial elements of the CDU and the FDP arguing that Germany could not afford the payments and that the Soviet zone should bear an equal share. The Bundestag ratified the agreement in March 1953 by a vote of 239 to 35.

Adenauer’s personal conviction that Germany had a moral obligation to make reparations was the principal political force behind the agreement. His speech to the Bundestag of 27 September 1951, in which he had publicly acknowledged German responsibility for “unspeakable crimes” against the Jewish people and committed his government to make reparations, was the political precondition for the negotiations and is widely cited as one of the foundational speeches of post-war German political life.

The terms

The financial terms committed West Germany to pay three billion Deutschmarks to Israel over twelve to fourteen years and 450 million Deutschmarks to the Claims Conference. The Israeli payments were made principally in goods rather than cash: West German industrial products, including ships, machinery, vehicles, chemicals and steel, that contributed substantially to the building of the Israeli economy in the 1950s and 1960s. The Claims Conference funds were used to provide direct payments to individual survivors outside Israel and to support Jewish communal reconstruction in Europe and elsewhere.

The payment commitments were met in full by 1965. The total in current values exceeds tens of billions of euros. The agreement was followed by separate domestic German legislation establishing individual compensation programmes (the Federal Supplementary Law of 1953 and the Federal Restitution Law of 1957), addressed in the page on the Wiedergutmachung programme. The combination of the Luxembourg Agreement and the subsequent individual compensation laws is what is generally meant by “Wiedergutmachung”.

The wider significance

The Luxembourg Agreement was the first formal acknowledgement by a state that it bore financial and moral responsibility for the Holocaust. It established several precedents that subsequent reparations frameworks have built upon: the principle that successor states bear responsibility for the crimes of their predecessor regimes; the principle that the representatives of victim communities, including states that did not exist at the time of the crimes (Israel was founded in 1948, after most of the Holocaust victims had been killed), can negotiate reparations; the principle that financial reparations and moral acknowledgement are complementary rather than substitutable; and the principle that reparations agreements are a legitimate instrument of foreign policy between perpetrator and victim states.

The agreement provided material support for Holocaust survivors at a critical period when many were living in difficult circumstances in displaced persons camps, in newly-arrived refugee status in Israel, or in marginal economic positions in Western countries. The funds substantially supported the absorption of Holocaust survivors by the new state of Israel and the rebuilding of survivor lives in the diaspora. The continuing payment of pensions to surviving Holocaust victims under the subsequent legislation, with around 200,000 living recipients in 2025, traces directly to the framework the Luxembourg Agreement established.

See also

Sources

  • Nicholas Balabkins, West German Reparations to Israel, Rutgers University Press, 1971 (the standard scholarly account of the negotiations and implementation)
  • Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, Deutschland und Israel 1945-1965: Ein neurotisches Verhältnis, Oldenbourg, 2004
  • Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945, Wallstein, 2005
  • Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993 (chapters on the agreement and the Knesset debate)
  • Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, Columbia University Press, 2002
  • Konrad Adenauer, address to the Bundestag, 27 September 1951, in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages
  • Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, https://www.claimscon.org