What Happened at Wassenaar?
As calls for reparations gain momentum, public attention has turned back to the 1952 German-Israeli Holocaust negotiations.
APRIL 18, 2023
Kasteel Oud Wassenaar is an imposing, elegant villa surrounded by high trees and manicured gardens, its expansive grounds steeped in silence. The building’s ornate red brick façade features horizontal white plinth stripes and is flanked by two circular corner towers. Built in the late 19th century as a country house, and later used as a royal hotel and diplomatic destination, the estate anchors one of the wealthiest municipalities in the Netherlands.
These days, the castle premises are mostly used for wedding parties: advertised as “a particularly romantic location” for nuptial celebrations, Kasteel Oud Wassenaar is known for its “majestic hall and authentic white salon,” as well as its “atmospheric hunting room and impressive ballroom.” The brides and grooms, and their guests, are encouraged to imagine they are “in fairy tale surroundings” as they walk through the marbled halls.
They likely have no idea that this is where Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart and his wife first resided, in the early stages of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, in 1940. Throughout the war, the Germans used the castle to accommodate diplomatic guests — among the first to arrive after the occupation began was Heinrich Himmler.
It was also at Wassenaar that the Germans were made to pay for their crimes. In 1952, representatives from the Federal Republic of Germany, Israel and an umbrella organization representing 23 Jewish groups — the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (now known as the Claims Conference) — met in this secluded, and back then carefully surveilled, villa. The aim of their encounter was to negotiate reparations for the Holocaust. The talks were supposed to last for about one month. They ended up lasting five times longer than that, resulting in a reparations agreement that is to this day held up as a significant precedent by other groups claiming reparations for mass crimes.
Kasteel Oud-Wassenaar © Digitaal Fotoarchief Gemeente Wassenaar, Fototechnische Dienst Politie Wassenaar, n. 02271
The negotiations were conducted in secret, under the watchful eyes of multiple intelligence services. Opposition to the negotiations was fierce, and it came from many different quarters. Germans who opposed reparations questioned why Germany should pay Jews if much of its own population was struggling to survive in cities that had been reduced to ruins, where food was running scarce. The few Jewish survivors who managed to return to their homes in Germany all too often found that they were still not welcome among their neighbors.
Members of the Arab League were aghast at the thought that Israel could be getting funds from Germany, and concerned that the payments would alter the balance of power in the Middle East. At the time, Israel had just claimed victory after the first Arab-Israeli War, which is remembered today in Israel as the War of Independence, and in the Arab world as the Nakba, literally the “catastrophe,” after which, according to the United Nations, some 750,000 Palestinians became refugees (the exact numbers are still contested). The fact that such a young, small and relatively poor state had managed to defeat a coalition of Arab countries sent shockwaves through the Arab world, and many worried that German funds and resources would end up strengthening Israel’s military might. They argued that Palestinians who had been expelled from their homes deserved reparations, too.
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Many Jews living in Israel and in the diaspora were sickened by the thought that there could be any talk of reparations for the Holocaust — “blood money,” as some put it. Before the negotiations began, an angry crowd gathered in front of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and threw rocks in protest against the idea of negotiating with the Germans.
The debate did not focus on the question of whether Germany should pay, but on how much. In what form should payments come? To whom should they be delivered? For how long must Germany pay?
When the talks began at Wassenaar in March 1952, both the Israeli and Claims Conference negotiators made clear that the measures they were there to negotiate could never repay any kind of moral debt to the victims. That debt was incommensurable, destined to remain eternal.
The negotiators spent months speaking to one another from across the elongated conference room on the first floor. The debate did not focus on the question of whether Germany should pay, but on how much. In what form should payments come? To whom should they be delivered? For how long must Germany pay?
The process of negotiating reparations in the aftermath of the Holocaust was an unprecedented undertaking. By 1952, reparations had long been a feature of post-conflict arrangements. Traditionally, reparations for war damage had been negotiated at the end of wars, between the victors, who would make demands, and the vanquished, who were left with no choice but to pay them. The reparations negotiated in Wassenaar were of a very different nature. First, because for the first time in history, these negotiations addressed repair in the aftermath of genocide. Second, the talks were not conducted exclusively between states: The Claims Conference, a nongovernmental organization, negotiated on behalf of a transnational group of Holocaust victims and survivors, alongside Israel and Germany. Third, there was no law or treaty obligating Germany to negotiate with Israel and the Claims Conference representatives. The path to the negotiating table had been long and difficult.
Protocol experts choreographed the talks in the most minute detail. It was important, they agreed, that the negotiators keep their distance. No physical contact was allowed between members of the delegations. There were no handshakes at the meeting. The physical remove augmented both the real and symbolic distance between the negotiators — it was important that it was maintained at all times.
Even though the entire Israeli delegation spoke German fluently, most of them as their mother tongue, English was the official language of the negotiations. On the second day of the talks, the deputy head of the Israeli delegation, Felix Shinnar, and his German homologue, Otto Küster, realized that they both came from Stuttgart, and that they had attended the same high school and studied with the same teachers. And yet at Wassenaar the two men sat on opposite sides of the negotiating table. Had Hitler not come to power and German democracy not crumbled, things would have been dramatically different for them both.
In the final agreement, Germany committed to paying Israel a total of 3 billion German marks over 12 years (amounting to about $7 billion today). The amount to be transferred was based on the estimated sum required for “the purpose of expanding opportunities for the settlement and rehabilitation of Jewish refugees,” according to the treaty text. Germany also agreed to provide the Claims Conference with support for the “relief, rehabilitation and resettlement of Jewish victims of National-Socialist persecution.” The agreement allocated an additional 450 million German marks to be paid to the Claims Conference for disbursement to individual survivors. The agreement stipulated that reparations to Israel were to be paid as goods in kind, namely in the form of commodities and services including ferrous and nonferrous metals, as well as steel, chemical and agricultural products. Writer Amos Oz later recalled the first time he stepped on a train sent from Germany to Israel as part of the reparations agreement. For the whole duration of the journey from Tel Aviv to Haifa he listened to the sound of the rails and all he could think of were the “frightening echoes of the wheels rattling the carriages of the German murder trains.”
On the frosty morning of September 10, 1952, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett met in Luxembourg for the official signature ceremony. It would have been customary to see the two statesmen shake hands for the press and mark that historic day with somber words. But neither of these things happened. The two could not agree on the text of a possible joint declaration, and the prospect of holding two separate speeches did not work either — each disliked the other’s suggestions about how that moment should be captured in words.
In the end, they signed the agreement in silence.
Since 1952, Germany has distributed over 77.8 billion euros to compensate for crimes perpetrated at the time of the Nazi dictatorship, in what is the world’s largest reparations program ever implemented. Last year alone, the Claims Conference distributed direct compensation to over 260,000 Holocaust survivors across 83 countries. Germany and Israel gradually became solid partners — an alliance that is nothing short of “a miracle,” as former Chancellor Angela Merkel once put it.
Over the past several years, as calls for reparations around the world have gained momentum, public attention has turned back to what happened at Wassenaar. The memory of the 1952 negotiations gradually seeped into the work of novelists and documentary filmmakers, as well as the work of politicians and scholars. Chris Kraus’ novel The Bastard Factory is partly set in “the Oud-Wassenaar country house hotel, with its Burgundian pomp,” and so is Brigitte Glaser’s 2017 novel Bühlerhöhe, which conjures the history of a German Jewish woman who migrated to mandatory Palestine and ended up working for the Mossad, tasked with protecting Adenauer, the German chancellor, from an assassination attempt while he retreats to (what really was) his favorite inn in the Black Forest region to spend the summer holidays of 1952. The documentary “Reckonings,” released last year, expounds “the riveting, untold story” of the secret negotiations in Wassenaar and their aftermath. A series of recent scholarly conferences, among others in Amsterdam (which I organized), Tel Aviv and Berlin, have addressed the history and legacy of those negotiations. And while seven decades ago the negotiations were fiercely and vocally opposed by then-German Minister of Finance Fritz Schäffer, last year the German Ministry of Finance pitched 2022 as a “Remembrance Year” and launched a series of initiatives aimed at preserving relevant historical documents related to the German Holocaust reparations program.
The Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, gradually passed successive laws enlarging the scope of who could be considered eligible for reparation, restitution and compensation, crafting a reparations scheme that former UN Special Rapporteur Pablo de Greiff has deemed “the historical referent for most reparations programs” to this day.
If anything, de Greiff’s description slightly understates the outsize role that Wassenaar has come to play as a precedent. Germany’s program is frequently cited as an example for how reparations ought to be negotiated and apportioned, and the country is praised as a model for how atonement and reconciliation should be practiced.
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Wherever discussion of reparations comes up in other parts of the globe, mentions of Wassenaar and the subsequent compensation programs it propelled are never far off. Cambodian officials working at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC) referred to the German experience when discussing reparations. German funding and German experts assisted the work of the Victims Support Section of the ECCC. In 2015, German Ambassador to Cambodia Joachim Baron von Marschall explained that German support for Cambodian victims stemmed “out of a sense of solidarity and a sense of shared history.” In a report on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the Organization for African Unity notes that German reparations are “pertinent” to its endeavor. And, among various other cases, the final report of the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in its “argument for reparation” section, mentions that German reparations after World War II and the Holocaust made up “the most extensive and costly reparations programme ever borne.”
As Germans begin to reckon with the crimes of their nation’s colonial empire, they are also confronted with the uncomfortable question of why reparations were paid for the Jewish genocide but not for the colonial genocidal violence that preceded it.
In his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the Wassenaar experience is directly relevant to the push for reparations for slavery in the United States: “In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us,” he writes. The philosopher Susan Neiman makes a similar point in her book Learning from the Germans, drawing parallels between the current U.S. debate on reparations and the debate that played out in Germany in the early 1950s.
Yet this renewed attention has also meant that the negotiations of 1952, and the reparations program they produced, have come under increasing attack. As Germans begin to reckon with the crimes of their nation’s colonial empire, they are also confronted with the uncomfortable question of why reparations were paid for the Jewish genocide but not for the colonial genocidal violence that preceded it.
Between 1904 and 1908, in German South West Africa — today’s Namibia, which back then was under German colonial rule — German officials massacred tens of thousands of Herero and thousands of Nama people. In 2021, Germany officially recognized that violence as genocide. Berlin asked “Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness,” and offered to pay 1.1 billion euros to finance reconstruction and development projects. The move was met with outrage from representatives of the Ovaherero and Nama communities because they had not been included in the negotiations. All along the way, the Germans had carefully avoided using the word “reparations” when describing their potential payment.
In the summer of 2021, Vekuii Rukoro, the late Paramount Chief of the Herero People and former Namibian deputy minister of justice, expressed his indignation at the German offer in an interview with the Namibian Sun. Seeming to address Germany directly, he asked, “How come you sat down with the Jewish groups? Twenty-three of them?!” He pointed out that the negotiations had “created the precedent to sit with nonstate, nonsovereign entities,” and questioned why this had not occurred with the Ovaherero and Nama people. The explanation, Rukoro reasoned, was “because they were white Europeans, and we are black Africans,” he said. “Your attitude is pure racism.”
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The Wassenaar negotiations were not conducted with the goal of setting a precedent for how other states and victimized groups could pursue justice. The delegates were constrained by the time and sensitivity of their task, by the budgets available to them and by the political climate of that time.
The historical record offers a sobering corrective to romanticized imaginations of the negotiations. In the Dutch National Archives, documents attest to the mysterious explosive letter bombs sent to the negotiators from anonymous detractors. Official records and handwritten notes kept by the negotiators themselves serve as reminders of the difficult task they had in front of them: “Many sharp words” were exchanged around that negotiating table in Wassenaar, Küster, the deputy head of the German delegation, scribbled in his diary. “The whole thing is quite weird,” the Israeli head negotiator wrote in a letter to his wife at the end of March. “There is no way of knowing what will result from this,” he added, “and we still have a lot of difficulties to overcome.”
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Despite all the difficulties, over the course of six months representatives of Germany, Israel and the Claims Conference came to an agreement. Five days before its signing, Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, wrote to the Israeli Embassy in the United States, in anticipation of how the event would be portrayed in the press for the broader public. He hoped to prevent “a typical diaspora reaction of regret and protest,” pointing instead to “the historical significance of the first such agreement.”
For Germany, it was in many ways more convenient to pay reparations to Israel and to the Claims Conference than to pursue the difficult task of denazifying its own ranks. As the negotiations were ongoing, many of the bureaucrats who had held prestigious positions in Hitler’s Germany were safely working at their desks.
And while the presence of the Claims Conference at the negotiating table was an unprecedented and critical development, not all Holocaust survivors felt represented by its delegates — by “the Americans,” as the Israeli negotiator sometimes referred to them. Critics also emphasize just how difficult and degrading it has been for survivors to go through the process of applying for compensation — a process ridden with bureaucratic hurdles that inevitably require engaging and reactivating lingering traumatic memories.
Today, those who idealize the Wassenaar negotiations do so at their own peril.
The omissions of the final text of the agreement reveal as much as what it overtly states. “Whereas unspeakable crimes were perpetrated against the Jewish people during the National-Socialist régime of terror … ” reads the very first sentence. The Holocaust stayed “unspeakable.” The identity of those who perpetrated the “unspeakable crimes” remained conspicuously hidden, shielded by the fortress of the passive voice.
But it is also true that the negotiations of 1952 were one of the most striking political and legal developments of the 20th century. They paved the way for the realization that victims of crimes against humanity deserve reparation, however partial the repayment may be.
Today, those who idealize the Wassenaar negotiations do so at their own peril. Any group advocating for reparations that takes those negotiations as inspiration should keep in mind just how contested they were back then, and have been since; how victims and survivors did not necessarily feel that their voices were being heard; and just how difficult — in fact, almost impossible — it was to hold the negotiations at all.