West Germany’s history of reparations for Israel and shutting up the anti-fascists By Jan Ralske

BY DR. VACY VLAZNA 

By Jan Ralske

Germany buried Anti- Fascism and celebrated an Israel weaponized by the very same factories that served Hitler, who was the decisive force behind the emigration of European Jews to Palestine. The fact that the Germans are just as responsible for the Nakba as they are for the Holocaust is something they refuse to recognize to this very day.
September 9th is traditionally “OdF”–Day (Opfer der Faschismus/Victims of Fascism-Day) in Germany, or rather it was traditionally a memorial day for the victims of Nazi Germany in the GDR/East Germany. For West Germany the task of sorting out the blame and categorizing the victims was a more complicated task, since so many supporters of Hitler’s Reich, both big and small, went
merrily on their way to successful careers in the FRG/West Germany.Former symbol of the VVN

The “Victims-of-Fascism Memorial Day” was started nationwide in Germany right after WWII by a group of former prisoners, refugees, and politicians called the VVN – “Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes/ Union of Persons Persecuted by the Nazi Regime” (yes, the Germans like long names for their organizations). Over 100,000 former political prisoners of all confessions and political parties marched on the first ODF-Day in 1945, and for the next three years the commemoration was a huge affair with guests from abroad and massive crowds in the Lustgarten of East Berlin.

This changed rather suddenly with the heating up of the cold war, and the subsequent founding of the FRG (West Germany) and GDR (East Germany) in 1948/49. The West quickly came up with a less left-wing, more Aryan substitute for the VVN in the form of WehrmachtOfficier Graf von Stauffenberg and his upper-class circle of Johnny- come-latelys, who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the final year of the Third Reich.Memorial to German Colonel von Stauffenberg and the other participants in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Berlin

On September 12, 1952, the West Germans built a special monument/memorial site for Graf Von Stauffenberg and what they considered the “German Resistance” at the former Plötzensee Prison, which also served as the film set for Tom Cruise in “Valkyrie”. What is good enough for Hollywood turned out to be good enough for the new West German Republic: a military man as the hero.

West Germany in the fifties began to resemble the USA in the fifties, with its own especially virulent form of “McCarthyism”, which saw the abolishment of the German Communist Party, blacklists, and reactionary propaganda on a huge scale. In regards to rituals of recent German history, the West Germans even ordered the police to remove “leftie” VVN-members from the “official” ceremonies, also confiscating the commemorative wreathes that the organization had dared to placed at the new Plötzensee memorial site (photo available HERE).

You have to imagine the audacity: the VVN consisted of people whose families had been eradicated, who were imprisoned and tortured by a regime whose former members were now prohibiting these victims from taking part in memorial services!

The VVN was quickly becoming a “Union of Persons Persecuted by the Adenauer Regime”: to avoid matters getting out of hand, on October 20, 1959 West Germany sought to officially ban the VVN all together as an “enemy of the constitution” (“Verfassungsfeind”) in West Berlin. The trial began on November 29, 1962 but ended in a tumultuous scene when August Baumgarte exposed the presiding judge, Dr. Fritz Werner, as a hard-core Nazi , with an early 1933 membership in the NSDAPi. The trial was abruptly postponed and interestingly enough, never re-convened.

A day after this year’s 67th ODF-day marks the 60th anniversary the West German/Israel “Luxemburg Treaty” in 1952, better known as the “Wiedergutmachung” (Compensation/Reparations) Treaty: West Germany agreed to pay Israel 3.5 billion German Marks, although most of this sum was in goods, making it more a subsidy for German industry than anything else.

Germany was occupied by the Allies at the time, and the British were strongly opposed to the reparations treaty. The British, of course, had their own interests in mind: as the administrators of Palestine until 1948 they feared the German reparations would stimulate emigration to the newly formed State of Israel, and aggravate attempts to pacify the volatile region. Their fears turned out to be very valid, but the USA lobby triumphed and they pressed the West German government to reach agreement for reparations to Israel.Chancellor Konrad Adenauer

Israel never referred to these payments as “Compensation/Reparations” but simply as “payments”. This was in part due to the furious controversy the agreement caused within Israel, where Menachem Begin (Likud’s first Prime Minister) called the German Chancellor Adenauer a “murderer”, and described the West German payments as scandalous blood money.Wanted poster offering rewards for the capture of Irgun terrorists: 1. Menahem Begin

On March 27,1952 the Israeli underground organization “Irgun” even sent letter bombs addressed to Adenauer and the German delegation, in Luxemburg, responsible for negotiationsii. The packages were discovered in time, but a German official trying to defuse one package was killediii. A member of Begin’s Irgun, Jakob Farshtej, was arrested in Paris but allowed to return to Israel, where he later served in Begin’s government.



The announcement of the treaty nevertheless had the effect of a bomb explosion in Germany. Bundestag members on the left and the right were furious, for very opposite reasons, and it was only with the help of the opposition SPD (Social Democrats) that Adenauer pushed the treaty through with a tiny majority, against the resistance of his own Christian Democratic colleagues. Public surveys at the time showed that only 11% of the West German population favored the payments to Israel.

The West German politicos hoped to gain some moral ground on an otherwise truly dark and dirty German and personal history. In fact, only a very small percentage of the funds ever went to the victims of the Nazi’s terror regime. Israel was virtually bankrupt at the time, and part of the deal was free “made-in-Germany” weaponry.

Israel also used the funds to prop up its economy. The “payments” would become a decisive part of Israel’s income, comprising as much as 87.5% of the state‘s income in 1956iv. For the West Germans, the agreement proved to be a boost for their own weapons industry which was in complete disarray after WWII.A German guide: rules and directives in order to make a claim before the Luxembourg Agreement

How can you sell weapons during a military occupation, with no army of its own (yet) and without being a member of a military alliance? (Germany was first admitted to NATO in 1955, under massive protest of the general public, who were still rather war-weary.)

The West Germans did have better success using the Luxemburg Treaty with Israel as a political weapon against the East German government. They demanded that the GDR ante up a third of the promised funds. The East Germans refused.

The GDR had a different procedure for reparations and the state defined itself as the “new” and better Germany: many of their leading politicians had spent years in the Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Anti-fascism was emphasized as a national doctrine. In addition, the GDR, along with most states of the Eastern Europe at the time, regarded Zionism as a form of racism, and supported the U.N. resolution defining Zionism as such on November 10, 1975.

It paid no reparations to the State of Israel but used assets of the former Nazi government for direct special payments to victims of that regime, in form of housing and extra pension bonuses. Other resources and assets were transferred to publicly owned industries or as used to pay large reparations to the Soviet Union and Poland, countries that were amongst the most severely destroyed by Hitler’s war.

With the end of the GDR in 1990 all this unfinished business of East Germany’s “Sonderweg” (other path) in its relationship to Israel and Fascism had to be mopped up. On April 12, 1990, shortly before its final dissolution, the last Volkskammer (Senate) of the GDR publicly apologized for the GDR’s “unfriendly” policies toward Israel and for approving the U.N. resolution of 1975. Now they were finally ready to be accepted as “real” Germans.

Germany changed “ODF day” to January 27, and re-named it “Holocaust Remembrance Day”, via treaty with Israel in 1996. Two birds killed with one very heavy stone: Germany buried Anti- Fascism and celebrated an Israel weaponized by the very same factories that served Hitler, who was the decisive force behind the emigration of European Jews to Palestine. The fact that the Germans are just as responsible for the Nakba as they are for the Holocaust is something they refuse to recognize to this very day.





i VVN Niedersachsen /http://niedersachsen.vvn-bda.de/selbst.php?kapitel=3 (Link not working! 2014)

ii Die Welt, Mar. 23,2012 (http://www.welt.de/channels- extern/ipad3_welthd/a_welt_ipad3/kultur_a_ipad3/article13939725/Bombe-gegen-Adenauer-und-die- Wiedergutmachung.html)

iii Haaretz, June 13,2006 /Barkat (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/memoir-begin-played- central-role-in-attempt-to-kill-adenauer-1.190115)

iv Wikipedia „Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between_Israel_and_West_Germany#cite_note- barkat-6 )

§§§: ODF Day/Exhibit (in German):

http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Projekte/2005/Tafeln_Odf-Tag-screen.pdf