At the heart of this book is a weird but powerful complementarity—German resources for Israeli-Jewish legitimacy.
By 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany had rebounded economically, but was still legally occupied by the Allies. It was given only “Observer status” in the United Nations, and that only in 1952. The heavy presence of Nazis, SS, and Wehrmacht veterans in various arms of the government made it difficult for the West to accept German remilitarization or the state’s integration into NATO.
Led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic of Germany was subject to two conflicting political imperatives. Externally, his government needed acceptance as a legitimate member of the world community and a partner in NATO’s mission to contain Soviet power. Domestically, however, political pressures were intense to end the denazification campaign designed to give the FRG the international legitimacy it needed. The German public resented what had been years of accusations, investigations, and trials. It was a humiliating process. Besides, it also threatened the integrity of key branches of the government that relied heavily on men who had served as officers in Hitler’s army, in the SS, or were prominent alumni of various Nazi organizations.
Israel, on the other hand, was in an economic crisis. Israelis were living on a diet substantially worse in caloric and protein content than that available in Germany. The new state was desperately seeking to absorb the mass immigration of resource-less Jews from displaced persons camps and from Middle Eastern and North African countries and needed financial and material support to expand its industrial base, train and arm its military, and satisfy consumer demands for food and housing. However, although the Jewish state lacked Germany’s economic capacity, it had a superabundance of legitimacy when it came to the question, crucial for Germany, of whether the Federal Republic had denazified sufficiently to be treated, by the West, as a full member of the international community. Taken to represent the victims of the Final Solution, only Israel, the State of the Jews, could, by accepting aid from Germany, give its regime the receipts required by the Western world in general, and the United States in particular, to “kasher” (make kosher) the new Germany.
It is this complementarity that is the basis for the solution to a psychological and political puzzle. How, asks Daniel Marwecki, in light of the Holocaust and its recency, can the intimate relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel be explained? The answer is a trade: Germany provided crucial economic and then military support for building the Israeli state. In return, Israel “whitewashed” Germany as sufficiently denazified for Israel and, therefore, for the civilized world, to treat the FRG as having accomplished its consolidation as the “new Germany” and as having become a legitimate candidate for inclusion within the Western alliance.
Marwecki’s argument is determinedly state-centric. How Israeli and German individuals processed the relationship between the two governments and how their attitudes changed over time are topics that do occasionally intrude. However, the argument of the book is primarily focused on what governing elites in the two states needed from one another in very practical material and political terms and what they did for one another, often regardless of how they or their publics actually felt about what was being said or done.
The most spectacular and most important marker of this relationship was the Luxembourg Agreement. Negotiated over a period of months, it was signed in 1952, just seven years after the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Babi-Yar, and Dachau, when numbered tattoos on the arms of passengers in Israeli buses were an everyday sight. That agreement laid the basis for German financial and material “reparations” payments to Israel and to individual Jewish survivors, payments that have amounted to more than $82 billion.
Both the teeth-grinding and materially satisfying aspects of the deal were quickly apparent. The negotiations leading to the agreement were made possible by Adenauer’s recitation, in a speech before the German Parliament, of an excruciatingly evasive paragraph agreed to with exquisite attention to detail by Israel’s Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Without apologizing for the slaughter of six million Jews, or explicitly acknowledging the legal or moral guilt of either the German people or the wartime German leadership, Adenauer announced that during the National Socialist time, “unspeakable crimes” had been committed “in the name of the German people” and that, although “the overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes and did not participate in them,” the new Germany was prepared to offer Israel and Jewish survivors a measure of indemnification.
For Israeli Jews, whose passports, because of the intensity of feeling against Germans, were marked as invalid for travel to that country, this was thin gruel. What Adenauer apparently found so painful was not what was done to the Jews, or what was done by Germans, but that the crimes that were committed insulted his nation by having been done “in the name of the German people.” Unsurprisingly, news of the reparations agreement triggered outrage in Israel, including a violent attack on the Israeli parliament, led by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin. However, the amount of money on offer was enough, and the needs of the young Israeli state sufficiently acute, that the Ben-Gurion government accepted the paragraph’s phrasing as satisfying their demand that Germany had turned a moral corner.
As Marwecki shows, this deal, based on Germany providing the wherewithal for the Israeli state to consolidate itself and Israel providing moral cover for German integration into the Western alliance and acceptance of the Federal Republic as a legitimate actor on the international stage, turned into much more than the reparations agreement. Seldom noted, but emphasized here, are the material benefits that German industries and shipyards enjoyed from the payments they received for providing goods, ships, and arms to Israel. Indeed, although France’s role as Israel’s chief arms supplier in the mid to late 1950s is well-known, as is the cornucopia of arms provided to Israel by the United States ever since the 1967 war, Marwecki brings to light the crucial role Germany played in providing weapons and training to the Israeli military between 1956 and 1967. In particular, it was Germany that financed Israel’s nuclear weapons program and provided ships for its navy, including submarines specially designed to be capable of firing nuclear-tipped missiles.
Marwecki shows how Germany, after the United States, became Israel’s most important ally, even as German governments grew increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s repeated demand, justified with incessant Holocaust invocations, for special treatment from Bonn. Nevertheless, the relationship burgeoned. According to Marwecki, this was in part because Israel’s blitzkrieg victories over the Arabs encouraged many Germans with sympathies and loyalties connecting them to the Third Reich to engage in a “double-move” (224)—first Germanizing Jews—as strong, disciplined, and victorious warriors, and second by Nazifying Arabs—as bloodthirsty existential enemies of the new Jews/Germans. The lasting importance of Israel’s relationship with Germany was also manifested during the Eichmann trial, personally choreographed by Ben-Gurion to focus on Hitler and the Nazis, not on Germans or the German army.
Tensions did arise over Germany’s attempt to prevent Arab recognition of East Germany by delaying official diplomatic relations with Israel until 1965, by Germany naming a decorated ex-Wehrmacht Colonel as its first ambassador to Israel, and as a result of German support for European initiatives, especially after the Lebanon War in 1982, to promote a Palestinian state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, these sources of tension never interfered with the reparations payments and faded in the 1990s, when German reunification and the Oslo peace process gave German governments the ability to work both sides of the street. While supporting, or at least never criticizing, Israeli stonewalling and subversion of the Oslo process through extensive West Bank settlement and maddening demands on Palestinians, Germany financed a host of socioeconomic projects for Palestinians in the occupied territories. Indeed, as Marwecki shows, the Oslo framework was so comfortable for Germany that, no matter how clear it is that Oslo has failed and that no negotiated two-state solution is any longer attainable, German governments still act and speak as if the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is still underway, with the two-state solution as its goal.
The book surprises the reader when it engages, briefly, with the turn Germany took after President Reagan’s controversial visit to Bitburg in 1979. There, where he laid a wreath, are buried, among other WWII casualties, the remains of SS Stormtroopers. For reasons not clearly explained by the author, Germany then turned away from whitewashing toward a public and explicit embrace of memory as the key to the German nation’s redemption—to be the people, via museums, memorials, curricula, and cultural production, that never ceases to remember its past sins and, in that way, shows its worth to the world and to itself.
But that excursion is a sideline. The book’s focus is, as noted, not on German society and culture, but on the hardnosed political, military, and economic uses to which both Germany and Israel put their unlikely relationship. The extent to which somewhat crass and even cynical arrangements made possible, without necessarily intending to, a genuine social, cultural, and psychological transformation in attitudes of Germans and Jews toward one another is a question worth asking; not least for what answers to that question might teach us about the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations and about the potential for Germans to accept their portion of historic responsibility for the catastrophe Israeli state creation visited upon Palestinians.
