Germany's Nazi regime started World War II, which imposed horrific human and material costs on Europe. Germans suffered, too, from military action, expulsion from their homes in eastern Europe, and inflation. Some six million Germans died, and some eighteen million Germans lost all or some of their property. Many Europeans thought such Germans got what they deserved, but Germans generally agreed that justice required a Lastenausgleich, that the material burdens of defeat be redistributed more or less equitably through capital levies on the undamaged and various forms of compensation and support for the “war-damaged.”

Working from research done between 1980 and 1985, Rüdiger Wenzel offers a study of the process by which the Lastenausgleich Legislation came to be promulgated. In doing so, he focuses tightly on the legislative processes that produced the Lastenausgleich Law and several collateral pieces of legislation.

The original logic of a Lastenausgleich was to impose massive levies (fifty percent or higher) on surviving capital assets in order to redistribute them to those who had lost their assets because of the war, thereby reestablishing at a lower level the prewar distribution of wealth among individual Germans. In practice, Germans would reject such a purely “quotal” distribution, mostly because so few assets were left that most formerly economically secure war-damaged would end up with too little wealth to reestablish a livelihood. Some favored instead a “social Lastenausgleich”: need-tested aid for war-damaged unable to work. Still others favored a “productive Lastenausgleich”: using available resources to reintegrate war-damaged into the West German economy independent of their prewar level of wealth.

Wenzel begins with West German efforts to pass Lastenausgleich legislation after 1948 currency reform destroyed the value of people's savings. Germans had wanted to combine currency reform and Lastenausgleich, but the Allies refused, instead charging the Germans to pass such legislation in six months. The Germans could only come up with a provisional bill in so short a time, and the Allies delayed a further eight months giving their (required) approval to this Emergency Aid Law. Wenzel emphasizes the Allies' concern with levies on property in West Germany owned by their citizens, ignoring evidence that a significant factor was also American perceptions of the Lastenausgleich as socialist.

The core of Wenzel's book is a detailed exposition of the process by which West Germans structured and promulgated the 1952 Lastenausgleich Law. After the new Adenauer government gave the Finance Ministry jurisdiction over Lastenausgleich legislation, fiscal concerns were going to dominate the drafting of the legislation. The Finance Ministry fought to limit the capital levies to what officials considered bearable for the economy and to limit diversion of other revenues to the Lastenausgleich. The war-damaged, though, saw the issue as one of justice, in which their moral and legal claims had to be recognized and met, even at the cost of considerable burdens on the undamaged and the economy. Wenzel traces the stages by which these competing demands were mediated into a bill that could secure a majority. For example, he discusses the “Unkeler Circle” of coalition party representatives, which negotiated behind the scenes, at an early stage, over key issues. He discusses the varying drafts of the Lastenausgleich bill that the Finance Ministry generated and the debates within the Bundestag's Lastenausgleich Committee that produced the bill that went to the floor. He explores the efforts of the organized war-damaged to force a more generous and more quotal Lastenausgleich. And he reviews the last-ditch political fight between the war-damaged and the Adenauer government that produced a law. That law mixed elements of a quotal, social, and productive Lastenausgleich.

Wenzel very much focuses on the process, at the expense of analysis. For example, when the normally pro-business Ludwig Erhard proposed a swinging levy on inventories in 1948, the business communities vehemently rejected it. He notes the rejection without discussing why Erhard made his proposal. (It was to assuage popular outrage at businesses that had secured windfall profits by hoarding inventories in expectation of the currency reform.) He gives some space to the motives of the SPD and the trade unions, but he does not analyze systematically the widely varying visions of past and future German society that drove the different participants in the struggle. For example, he does not explore the conflicts among different war-damaged groups (e.g., expellees and bomb-damaged) and within the groups (e.g., between formerly wealthy and formerly poor war-damaged). And he does not explore the larger context of compensation legislation and political stabilization in twentieth-century Germany.

Wenzel does make two useful contributions to the literature. He discusses in some detail the continued Allied insistence on sheltering from Lastenausgleich levies those of their citizens who held property in West Germany. He also illuminates the role of the Bundesrat in the passage of the Lastenausgleich Law.

Wenzel's book reflects the long gap between research and publication. His bibliography does include some works on the Lastenausgleich published after 1985, though he does not fully incorporate their findings. He does, however, ignore most of the recent works on the Lastenausgleich (e.g., by Paul Erker, Michael L. Hughes, and Carl-Jochen Müller). And while Wenzel writes clearly and presents in some detail the process of drafting and passing legislation, he could have provided a much broader degree of analysis of the Lastenausgleich and of the motives of the various participants.