New research highlights the Dutch role in Holocaust reparations negotiations
Historian Lorena De Vita unravels impact of local and global security issues of 1952
In 1952, now 70 years ago, Wassenaar was the scene of a historic breakthrough. Working allegedly in secret, representatives of the victims and perpetrators negotiated reparations in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The result was the so-called Luxembourg Agreement. Signed on 10 September 1952 after five months of negotiations in the Netherlands, the agreement changed the meaning and practice of reparations forever. Until today, the role that the Netherlands played in these negotiations has largely been forgotten. New research by Lorena De Vita (History of International Relations) shows why Wassenaar was chosen as the location of the negotiations, and exposes the local and global intrigues in which the Dutch authorities became embroiled as the negotiations went on.
Safe haven in the Netherlands
But why exactly did these negotiations between Germany, Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference take place in the Netherlands? De Vita’s research shows that the meeting was opposed by many in several parts of the world, ranging from Europe to the Middle East and beyond. The negotiators therefore sought a safe and, in their words, ‘neutral’ location. They found it in Wassenaar, partly because the Dutch authorities were willing to go to great lengths to allow the talks to continue safely and in secret, despite fierce protests.
Research article in BMGN
In the article ‘Dutch Hospitality: The 1952 German-Jewish-Israeli Negotiations amid Post-Holocaust and Post-Imperial Tensions’ recently published in the scientific journal ‘Low Countries Historical Review’ (BMGN), Lorena De Vita elaborates on her research.
“In an article that at times reads like an intriguing spy story, Lorena De Vita explains why the meeting was held in the Netherlands and why the Dutch police and intelligence services were so crucial to its success. We leave it to the reader to judge how decisive some small details in this Dutch story were for the further course of European history,” BMGN’s editor Marnix Beyen writes.
Secret archives and a letter bomb
On the basis of previously unexamined archival sources, some of which are still classified as secret, De Vita was able to reconstruct how complex it was for the Dutch authorities to ensure the security arrangements around those difficult negotiations. That strict safety measures were necessary became clear within a week after the start of the talks: a letter bomb addressed to the German delegation was intercepted just in time by the Dutch police. “The newspapers reported just briefly on this at that time,” says De Vita, “and the episode soon landed in the dustbin of history.”
Securing the safety of the site and the negotiators involved not only local police forces, but also border police, intelligence services, diplomats and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As De Vita realised while reading the archival documentation: “There was cooperation and information exchange between the Dutch and the Israeli authorities, but also with German, British, French, Swiss and Belgian security services. This was an extraordinary counterterrorism operation for that time.”
With such fierce and widespread opposition, it was crucial for the Dutch authorities to keep a discreet eye on the negotiations they were secretly hosting.
For her research, De Vita also interviewed the only surviving negotiator of the Jewish Claims Conference delegation at the time, the now 102-year-old lawyer Benjamin Ferencz. He is the last surviving prosecutor of the SS-Einsatzgruppen trials at Nuremberg after World War II. During the course of the research, De Vita also gained access to numerous official and personal archives.
Ground breaking negotiations
In the Oud Wassenaar Castle, representatives of the State of Israel, the Jewish Claims Conference, and the Federal Republic of Germany came together, for the first time, between March and September 1952. The agreement they reached was ground-breaking, De Vita explains: “Until then, reparations had been negotiated in the aftermath of wars between two parties: the victors that demanded them, and the vanquished, which were left with no other choice but to pay them. But the 1952 negotiations, for the first time, dealt with reparations in the aftermath of genocide and crimes against humanity.” There was no legal mechanism in 1952 that forced Germany to sit at the negotiating table with Israeli and Claims Conference representatives in the aftermath of the Holocaust. What was also ground-breaking was to see two states and a societal organisation negotiate at the same table. “Those negotiations, and the agreement that followed, made history.”
Fierce resistance
“But there was also fierce resistance to the negotiations in many parts of the world”, De Vita explains. In Germany, many residents could not see why they should pay reparations to Israel or the Claims Conference at a time in which their cities were still in ruins, and food was scarce. Within the Jewish community – in Israel, Europe and beyond – many people were shocked at the idea of negotiating material compensation with the perpetrators of the Holocaust and sitting at the same table with the Germans. And in the Arab Middle East, there was widespread worry about the prospect of Israel potentially gaining more power thanks to the German support, via the reparations programme. De Vita: “With such fierce and widespread opposition, it was crucial for the Dutch authorities to keep a discreet eye on the negotiations they were secretly hosting.”
Conference about the 70th anniversary
Supported by a KNAW Early Career Partnership, on 22 and 23 March, Lorena De Vita organised an international and interdisciplinary conference on the historical context and significance of the Wassenaar negotiations in 1952. The conference linked perspectives from history, law and international relations. Former MA student Anouschka Witte wrote this report about the conference (in Dutch) on Historici.nl and, together with her colleagues Dearbhla Reid and Bryony Harris, this report in English on H-Soz-Kult (Clio-Online).
Dr. Lorena De Vita is Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations. In 2020 she published ‘Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations 1949-1969’. She is currently leading a five-year research project titled ‘Holocaust Diplomacy: The Global Politics of Memory and Forgetting’, funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Together with Prof. Constantin Goschler (Ruhr-University-Bochum she is the editor of: Wassenaar 1952: Reinventing Reparations (forthcoming with Routledge).