Demonstrating Reconciliation: State and Society in West German Foreign Policy toward Israel, 1952-1965 (review)

On 12 March 1951 the Israeli government sent a letter to the four occupying powers in Germany demanding restitution from Germany: $1 billion from West Germany, $500 million from Communist East Germany.

The Western powers immediately responded by recommending direct talks between Israel and theWest German government. The Soviet answer did not come until a year later: On 24 March 1952, two weeks after Iosif Stalin had put forward in his famous note a proposal for a peace treaty of a united Germany, he made clear that no talks about restitution could occur before a peace treaty with Germany was signed. Because no peace treaty came about, no restitution was forthcoming from East Germany.

First contacts between Israel and West Germany were made in Paris on 19 April 1951. A year later, talks officially started in the Dutch town of Wassenaar because the Israelis refused to tread on German soil. Despite massive right-wing protests in Israel against the talks, a historic agreement was signed in Luxembourg on 10 September 1952 by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett: West Germany agreed to pay $3.45 billion.

At that time Israel had been on the brink of starvation and desperately needed the money from Bonn to survive. Austria seized the opportunity, by offering a 100-million Schilling credit so long as Israel would recognize Austria's infamous "victim thesis." Accordingly, Moshe Sharett declared in Paris in August 1952: "Israel will not demand reparation from Austria. Israel accepts the supposition that Germany is responsible for acts committed against Austrian Jews since they took place only after the Anschluss" in 1938. On this point, see Rolf Steininger, Berichte aus Israel (Munich: Olzog Verlag, 2004), Vol. 2, p. 29.

Even though the money was regarded as "blood money" (Blutgeld), as Austria's representative to Israel put it, it was the lifeline for Israel and the beginning of a special relationship between Israel and West Germany. The first phase of this relationship lasted until 1965. Only then were formal diplomatic relations established. Hannfried von Hindenburg deals with this first phase.

The facts are well known. Adenauer was under no substantial pressure from domestic public opinion to compensate the Jews and Israel, but he felt a moral obligation to do so. Realpolitik came into play, as he confided to his foreign policy advisers: "We will not get our feet on the ground in America, if we don't enter into some kind of relationship with the Jews that is perceptible to the world and particularly perceptible to the Americans" (p. 47). The meeting between Shimon Peres of the Israeli Defense Ministry and West German Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss in late 1957 marked the beginning of top-secret military cooperation: over the next seven years Israel received a large amount of weaponry from West Germany—up to several hundred million Deutschmarks' worth—for free. When the secret was uncovered in early 1965, everything changed: no more weapons but money instead—and diplomatic relations.

Up to that point Bonn had denied Israel diplomatic ties out of fear that the Arab countries would in return recognize Communist East Germany.West Germany's relations with Israel were a part of Bonn's reunification policy.

Von Hindenburg asks why Bonn's policy toward diplomatic relations with Israel changed so dramatically in early 1965. His answer: West German society had changed, and domestic elites ("such as students, professors, trade unions, religious groups, writers, the media and others") had come up with a new concept "that ranked the aim of reconciliation with Israel higher than the goal of a united Germany" (p. 3). Von Hindenburg calls this new concept "societal intervention," and it meant no more "pragmatism and national interest" but only "moral obligation" as "awareness of historical guilt grew significantly" (p. 3).

In two long chapters leading up to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard's decision in March 1965 to set...