Israelpolitik

German–Israeli relations, 1949–69

Lorena De Vita

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526147806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

The rapprochement between Germany and Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust is one of the most striking political developments of the twentieth century. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to it as a 'miracle'. But how did this 'miracle' come about? In this book, Lorena De Vita traces the contradictions and dilemmas that shaped the making of German–Israeli relations at the outset of the global Cold War. Examining well known events like the Suez Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, and the Six-Day War, the book adopts a 'pericentric' perspective on the Cold War era, drawing attention to the actions and experiences of minor players within the confrontation and highlighting the consequences of their political calculations. Israelpolitik takes two of the most interesting dimensions of the Cold War – the German problem and the Middle East conflict – and weaves them together, providing a bipolar history of German-Israeli relations in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing upon sources from both sides of the Iron Curtain and of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the book offers new insights not only into the early history of German–Israeli relations, but also into the dynamics of the Cold War competition between the two German states, as each attempted to strengthen its position in the Middle East and in the international arena while struggling with the legacy of the Nazi past.

Part I

Critical choices, 1949–55

1

Discussions

In April 1950, Kurt Mendelsohn travelled back from his adoptive country, Israel, to his native country, Germany. By that point, he had long ceased to define himself as German, although he still had some difficulties with his Hebrew.¹ He was born into a middle-class Jewish family, in Breslau, in 1902 – a city that by the time of Mendelsohn’s journey did not regard itself as German anymore, either, as it was by then known as Wrocław, having been ceded to Poland at the end of the Second World War. As an economist coming of age in a Weimar Republic devoured by a severe financial crisis, Mendelsohn had been an active member of the Republic’s leftist union, the Zentralverband der Angestellten, and published his own economic manifesto in 1932, titled: Capitalist Economic Chaos or Socialist Planning?² He also worked with his wife to translate into German a book, originally subtitled A Marxist in Palestine, in which the Belgian former Foreign Minister Émile Vandervelde expounded the potential that that piece of land offered to the Jewish people.³ Mendelsohn, a socialist economist with fervent Zionist convictions and a doctorate from Heidelberg University, managed to escape Nazi Germany shortly after Hitler’s ascent to power. In 1933, he relocated with his wife and son to the Netherlands, where he co-founded Het Werkdrop, a centre organising training courses for Jewish refugees.⁴ He kept being involved in the Zionist cause, most notably drafting a fieldwork-based study for the League of Nations on the possible land transfer and population resettlement measures that could be implemented in the near future in British Palestine, to which he emigrated, with his wife, son and adoptive daughter, in 1938.⁵ There, Mendelsohn worked for the economic department of the Jewish Agency for ten years, moving to the Ministry of Finance soon after the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. Of his family members who remained in Europe, none survived the Holocaust.

By 1950, Mendelsohn had become the Director of the Customs and VAT Division at the Ministry of Finance, and he was on his way to Germany because Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett and Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan had picked him for a delicate and complex mission: that of exploring the possibility of starting a direct dialogue between the Israeli and the German governments on the question of Holocaust reparations.⁶ At the time of Mendelsohn’s travels, many in Israel opposed the idea of having economic, political or social contacts with Germany – let alone of accepting any kind of material restitution or compensation for the horrors committed by the Nazis against the Jews. While his mission was not secret (indeed, several newspapers found out about his activities and reported them), it was not to be widely advertised, either, and Mendelsohn tried to keep a low profile throughout his time in Germany.

At that time, Israel’s official policy towards Germany was one of economic and political boycott. Formally, Israel declared that it was in a state of war against it on the very same day of its foundation, on 14 May 1948. And yet, in its day-to-day life the Israeli Foreign Ministry was pushed to grant one exception after the other, as commercial exchanges between the two countries, covertly, multiplied. The trade included goods as diverse as citrus fruits (from Israel to Germany) and MAN trucks (from Germany to Israel), and it was driven mainly by the German-Jewish population of Israel (the ‘Yekkes’) that still had personal and professional contacts with people in Germany, in spite of the official anti-German stance declared by the Israeli authorities. The Israeli consulate in Munich was among the first to have been established abroad, on the insistence of the Jewish Agency’s Chaim Hoffmann (later Yaḥil), to assist Jewish displaced persons and facilitate their emigration from Germany.⁷ Accredited to the American, British and French authorities, the Munich Consulate received precise indications from Jerusalem to avoid any sort of contact or interaction with the German authorities. But the opposition to dealing with Germany was not shared by everyone in the Israeli establishment, nor in Israeli society.

In fact, some believed that it was necessary, and indeed right, that Germany transfer heirless Jewish property to Jewish institutions; that it give back the goods confiscated from those German Jewish citizens who had managed to relocate to other countries, including Israel; and that it was simply not right that Israel – such a young state, and one that had just emerged victorious from a protracted and very damaging war against all of its neighbours – would also need to sustain, on its own, the costly expenses needed for resettling and integrating Holocaust survivors, many of whom were in need of serious medical assistance and would never be able to work again. Some, in other words, were of the opinion that Germany should pay reparations to Israel.

The idea that Germany should pay some kind of compensation to the Jewish state had been formulated at a time in which Israel had not even been founded. The question dated back to when the Second World War and the attempted extermination of the Jewish people were still underway and it was impossible to assess the exact amount of reparations that Germany would be required to pay – though it was clear that some form of compensation would be demanded, and that it was important not to lose sight of the matter.⁸ In 1944, jurists Siegfried Moses and Bernard Joseph (later Dov Yosef) suggested that (what was then) Palestine should be the recipient of compensation from Germany. While the ideas put forward by the two jurists diverged on many aspects, the concept that a future Jewish state could be considered a rightful recipient of German reparations was groundbreaking, for it foresaw not only the defeat of Germany and the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, but also the possibility that reparations could be paid to an entity, a state, which did not yet exist at a time in which the war was waged.⁹ Moses and Joseph’s idea was carried forward, and Palestine had a central position in the official memorandum that Chaim Weizmann, on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, presented to the four wartime Allies on 20 September 1945. In it, the future president of the State of Israel asked for reparation, rehabilitation and indemnification following the ‘special war’ waged by Germany against the Jewish people. He suggested that part of the reparations extracted from Germany by the Allies be allotted to Palestine and the Jewish Agency to support the rehabilitation and resettlement of those survivors who chose Palestine as their new home.¹⁰ But Weizmann’s memorandum did not achieve any concrete results, mainly because it reached the Allies at a time in which the divides among them ran deep, as would be reflected, ultimately, in the division of Germany into two states in March and October 1949: the FRG in the West, and the GDR in the East.

The creation of the two German states in Europe, which followed shortly after the Israeli declaration of independence and the Israeli victory in the first Arab–Israeli war, gave new impetus to the Israeli quest for reparations from Germany. Although victorious, Israel had come out of the war greatly debilitated, its economic resources heavily drained. All of Israel’s neighbours had declared war against it just a few hours after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency and first Prime Minister of Israel, announced its very foundation on 14 May 1948. The war effort left the Israeli economy in disarray. The situation was further complicated by the huge waves of mass immigration that characterised much of the first years of Israel’s existence. While in the run-up to the declaration of independence the immigrants were arriving in large numbers from Europe, either to escape Nazi persecution or after the liberation of the concentration camps, the end of the first Arab–Israeli war was followed by the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries and their resettlement in Israel. Many of them had been forced to leave all of their possessions behind in order to be allowed to leave their countries of origins, where the Jewish minorities were being subjected to increasing forms of discrimination from the Arab governments. The Israeli authorities, struggling to provide housing and work to the new immigrants, implemented a strict austerity programme that included the rationing of basic goods and services. At the same time, the government’s decision to increase the money supply led to severe inflation and to the blossoming of the black-market economy.¹¹

By 1950 Israel was undergoing a severe economic crisis. In contrast, by that point West Germany had been receiving Marshall Plan aid funds for two years and, in 1949, the West German authorities had appealed to the Western Allied powers with the request that they formally end the state of war with Germany. Although France, the United Kingdom and the United States all formally rebuffed the West German request, viewed from Israel, Germany’s economic and political prospects seemed to be rapidly and steadily improving. With Israel’s delicate economic situation at the forefront of his worries, Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan looked for a solution that would avert a major crisis that threatened the newly founded Jewish state and, in February 1950, he proposed that an Israeli representative be sent to Germany. His task would be to assess whether, and how much, the Germans were able and willing to pay in restitutions to the Jewish state. Foreign Minister Sharett supported the move, stressing the urgency of establishing a direct dialogue with the Germans soon, for political and economic reasons. He tried to reassure his colleagues by explaining that this would neither mean, nor lead to, the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany. Yet even so, some of the Cabinet members were extremely hesitant at the thought of a direct exchange between German and Israeli officials. Agriculture Minister Dov Yosef, the unpopular mastermind of the Israeli rationing programme, tried to look for ways to avoid, as much as possible, the prospect of dealing with the Germans. Although he agreed, in principle, to the idea of ‘extractin...