a On the “foreign policy aspect of compensation,” Féaux de la Croix writes in 1985: “Compensation frequently has been termed the price paid to American Jews for letting their president admit the Federal Republic to partnership in the community of the Western nations. In the same breath, it has been called the prerequisite for the willingness of the world’s Jews to accept the German economy and its goods as participants in international trade. Such utterances, often marked by a clearly anti-Semitic tendency, were certainly greatly exaggerated in their absoluteness. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that there was a kernel of truth behind them.”
(Féaux de la Croix, Ernst: “Vom Unrecht zur Entschädigung: Der Weg des Entschädigungsrechts.” In: Ernst Féaux de la Croix / Helmut Rumpf: Der Werdegang des Entschädigungsrechts unter national- und völkerrechtlichem und politologischem Aspekt (= Die Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts durch die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bundesminister der Finanzen in collaboration with Walter Schwarz, eds., Vol. 3) (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp. 1–118, here p. 10. (Transl. KL))
b In 1961 Hans Gurski, a top official in the Federal Ministry of Finance, reasoned that it had been the goal of the London Debt Agreement to contibute toward the development of a “thriving international community”; to allow the Federal Republic to participate in it, he said, it was necessary to guarantee the FRG a “secure standard of living and social accountability domestically.” Demands made by Nazi forced laborers, he said, whether addressed to the state or to private enterprises, had, for one thing, prevented the emergence of this “thriving international community” and, for another, caused the disappearance of the preconditions for “the Federal Republic to be able to participate in the defense efforts of the free world, and later on in aid to developing countries.”
(Hans Gurski: “Kriegsforderungen.” In: Außenwirtschaftsdienst des Betriebsberaters, January 1961, p. 14, cited in Ulrich Herbert: “Nicht entschädigungsfähig? Die Wiedergutmachungsansprüche der Ausländer.” In: Ludolf Herbst / Constantin Goschler, eds.: Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), pp. 273–302, here p. 284. (Transl. KL))
c “Féaux de la Croix in particular obviously interpreted reparations as a series of hostile attacks on the ‘citadel’ of the Federal Ministry of Finance. He was concerned not with victims to whom grave harm had been done, but with ‘compensation offensives’ and ‘boundless demands.’ The citadel had to be defended by a few indefatigable fighters against these ‘compensation offensives’ of the reparations lobby.”
(Susanna Schrafstetter: “Verfolgung und Wiedergutmachung. Karl M. Hettlage: Mitarbeiter von Albert Speer und Staatssekretär im Bundesfinanzministerium.” In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 56 (2008), No. 3, pp. 431–466, here p. 457. (Transl. KL))
The need to compensate the victims of Nazism within the scope of war reparations was uncontested among the nations that won World War II. Thus the Potsdam Agreement of August 2, 1945, deliberately expressed the concept of reparations very largely as recompense for “losses and sufferings.” The Potsdam Agreement fostered the view later expressed repeatedly by the West Germans: that compensation claims resulting from acts of war and occupation should be asserted only by one nation against another, not by individuals against the former enemy nation. The Paris Reparations Agreement of January 14, 1946, which regulated the distribution of the so-called “Western estate” (Westmasse),also was interpreted by the participating countries as “covering all their claims and those of their nationals against the former German government or its agencies.”[1] This focus on an understanding of compensation as a matter between states and not as settlement of the claims of individual injured parties against individual alleged wrongdoers (that is, companies or persons) shaped the arguments regarding compensation of the Nazis’ victims in the decades that followed.
After 1948, the Cold War defined the political situation. The efforts of the Federal Republic of Germany to become part of the Western systems of alliance were decisive for the settlement of the compensation question. In both political and administrative terms, this issue was closely linked with rearmament, which was intended to lead to integration into the Western confederation of states. Ernst Féaux de la Croix, an official in the Reich Ministry of Justice who before 1945 was responsible for defining the legal status of “foreign peoples” (Fremdvölkische), was in charge of compensation matters in the first two Adenauer cabinets, and in the third he was appointed head of all the war reparations departments in the Federal Ministry of Finance, to which the Office of Defense Costs and Office of Defense Finance were added.
It was the United States in particular that exerted pressure on the Adenauer government a , to induce it to pay compensation to Israel and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). In the Luxembourg Agreement of September 10, 1952, the FRG finally pledged to pay reparations to Israel in the amount of 3 billion DM—mostly in the form of shipments of goods—and to pay the Claims Conference 450 million DM: funds that also benefited former Nazi forced laborers, among others. Moreover, through the simultaneous ratification of the Hague Protocol No. 1, the Claims Conference gained an influence over West Germany’s national compensation legislation, which profited most notably the Jewish victims of Nazism from Eastern Europe who had emigrated to the West.
With the London Debt Agreement of February 27, 1953, b which regulated the settlement of the external debts of the German Reich, the FRG obtained “a kind of protective shield to guard against claims for reparations, including compensation demands.”[2] c Article 5 of the agreement stated that consideration of claims by countries which were at war with Germany would be “deferred until the final settlement of the problem of reparation.”[3] Thus a direct connection was created between the concluding of a peace treaty and the settlement of the compensation issues. This led to a state of uncertainty that lasted until German unification in 1990. In the Federal Supplementary Law of 1953 and Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1956, however, compensation settlements were stipulated for victims who lived inside the 1937 borders of the German Reich at the time of their persecution.
On September 12, 1990, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (Vertrag über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland, or Two Plus Four Agreement) was signed between the FRG and the GDR on the one hand and the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition (USA, France, Great Britain, Soviet Union) on the other. Admittedly, the agreement contains no explicit statements about the reparations to be paid by reunited Germany as a consequence of World War II, but it presents a “final settlement of the problem of reparation” in terms of an equivalent for a peace treaty: Article 5 of the London Debt Agreement, in the prevailing legal doctrine, henceforth was “no longer an obstacle to individual claims by forced laborers.”[4] Consequently, former Nazi slave laborers sought individual compensation benefits by filing class action lawsuits against German companies in U.S. courts in the 1990s. These conflicts ultimately resulted in the launching of the German Economy Foundation Initiative.
(GK; transl. KL)
