Knesset Sessions 242, 26.3.1951; 245, 2.4.1951
Speaker Nahum Nir-Rafalkes (Mapam): We now move on to Item 5 on the agenda, a debate pertaining to Germany. The foreign minister has the floor.
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett: Mr. Speaker, the government has submitted a protest to the United States government regarding mitigation of the sentences of the Nazi criminals by the American authorities in Germany. A statement on this step, taken by the foreign ministry on behalf of the government, was published in the press. This matter was also discussed in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. It expressed the wish that our protest note submitted to the United States would be reviewed thoroughly in the Knesset. I gladly respond to this wish with the following statement:
In its note to the United States ambassador in the matter of the pardon and mitigation of sentence of Nazi criminals in Germany, the foreign ministry has relied on the official report published by the United States high commissioner in Germany.
On the basis of that report’s contents, the government of Israel, on its own behalf and on behalf of the entire nation, expressed to the United States its profound pain regarding the high commissioner’s decision to approve the revocation and mitigation of the sentences imposed by the military tribunal in Nüremberg on a large number of the principal war criminals. The government has noted that these sentences were imposed following a trial for crimes unprecedented in human history, both in their scope and inhuman character alike. The victims of these horrors were men, women and children who were slaughtered simply because they were Jews, and the slaughter was carried out with calculated brutality that cannot be described in human language. There was hardly a family in this country that did not lose a relative in this terrible slaughter. The note determines that the Jewish people can only view this act of conciliation towards the worst of the German people as desecration of the memory of the holy martyrs.
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The note goes on to say that the bitterness aroused in the hearts of Israelis and among Jews throughout the world by this astonishing decision was further exacerbated by the reasoning published in that same report. In that document the high commissioner justified the leniency shown to the Nazi criminals with the most puzzling reasoning: “an unstable mental state resulting from nervousness,” “the fact that the guilty party did not bear the principal responsibility,” the guilty party’s age, and also the “limited participation in the criminal act.” The aforementioned are direct quotes from the published report. The high commissioner himself says of the “death squads” – those who murdered two million people with their own hands – that they committed acts of murder on such a vast scale that it is beyond the grasp of the human mind. Yet he still found grounds for numerous mitigations of sentence, reasoning that the acts committed by these criminals were “of a scope significantly less” than those of others.
The government of Israel note relies on one specific trial in which the accused were noted judges, public prosecutors and government officials. The high commissioner’s report states that they were all “anxious to ignore every principle of justice and law in order to advance the harshest political and racist principles.” In his report, the high commissioner admits that he “found it hard to find justification for leniency in any of these cases.” But still, “for reasons such as limited responsibility” he mitigated the sentences of some by half, ordered the release of others, and, for reasons of health, freed one who had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
As a particularly appalling instance, the note mentions the treatment of SS personnel and concentration camp staff. Included in this category were the murderers of Jews in the Auschwitz camp and the destroyers of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Here too grounds were found for the wholesale mitigation of sentences and detention orders – which at the outset were for long periods – for the time that the guilty parties had already served in prison, mitigation that meant immediate release.
With regard to the execution of hostages by firing squads, the high commissioner’s report states that many of these executions were carried out against hundreds of people who had no part whatsoever in attacks against German army personnel. In these cases too numerous sentences were mitigated, again because the criminals involved bore lesser responsibility than others. With regard to two of the most despicable in this group, which the military tribunal sentenced to life imprisonment, the high commissioner decided that as both were elderly and “are possibly afflicted with physical illnesses making a further medical examination desirable in order to determine whether they should be released on medical grounds,” such an examination should be carried out.
Of numerous other instances worthy of mention, the memorandum notes one further example from what is known as “The Ministries’ Trial” in which the defendants were senior officials who filled important roles in “the diplomatic implementation of a genocide program.” This is the case of one man, SS General
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Gottlob Berger, described in the report as Himmler’s close aide. The report states that he was active in a plan known as Operation Stubble in which children from the eastern territories were sent to arms industries’ training camps, and that he also took part in other extermination activities. The report states that according to the military tribunal’s verdict, there is no doubt that “this defendant is guilty of numerous criminal acts and cruelty” and that “his very collaboration with Himmler gravely incriminates him.” And yet his sentence was remitted from twenty-five to ten years, mainly because “towards the end of the war he actively intervened to save the lives of Allied officers and men and others who were held hostage prior to their execution.” The foreign ministry note highlights the significance of this mitigation of sentence: a despicable criminal who was an active participant in the slaughter of millions of Jews gained a substantial mitigation of his sentence because he realized that the Nazis had lost the war and therefore hastened to establish an alibi for himself.
Finally, the note relates to the statement in the report according to which the high commissioner has already reduced the sentence of Ernst von Weizsäcker, Director General of the German Foreign Ministry, and taking into account time already served, thus ordered this man’s release. The foreign ministry notes that it was von Weizsäcker who gave the German foreign ministry’s official sanction to the transportation of French Jews to the death camps in Poland.
The note further states that only with regard to seven of all these criminals did the United States civil and military authorities in Germany uphold the death sentence. The acts of these seven are so horrific that there can be no possible grounds for any mitigation of sentence. Yet these sentences too, whose appeal was denied by the highest legal authorities of the United States, have yet to be implemented, and today they are the subject of a new appeal in the American courts.
Following that summary of the mitigations and pardons, the note goes on to an assessment of the direction in which the United States High Commission is acting in its occupation zone in Germany. It states that the Nüremberg Trials were an important juncture on the road towards a regimen of protecting human rights. They were founded on the principle that there are fundamental rules of human behavior which no country or government is entitled to break without paying the price, and that individuals found guilty of breaking them are personally responsible and cannot escape trial by claiming that they were following orders from above. The Nüremberg Trials were conducted while paying the most scrupulous attention to the defense of the accused and in accordance with the principles that are part and parcel of civilized humankind. They have erected a significant barrier against future war criminals and perpetrators of genocide running wild. Now comes the action of the American authorities in Germany which to a great extent turns the tables on this great achievement. Evidently, political considerations were advanced here ahead of legal and moral principles.
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A potential perpetrator of genocide will not be deterred from his evildoing by these mitigations of the Nüremberg sentences.
On the basis of all the aforementioned, the government of Israel has expressed its profound concern to the United States government regarding the virulent conciliation towards Germany revealed in this unjust and dangerous leniency towards the Nazi criminals.
MK Yitzhak Ben Aharon (Mapam): Members of the Knesset, we concur with the concern expressed by our government to the United States government regarding its responsiblity for the release of Nazi war criminals. It is hard to find words to express this protest. But we are puzzled by our government’s tardiness in sending this note. Some two months elapsed until it found the words to express the feelings of its citizens to that government which is now making itself an accessory to the renewal of Nazism and the return of the criminals to the political arena in Germany itself.
It is not difficult to guess what was behind the foreign minister’s vacillation and why several proposals on our part were needed until the government actually pronounced its grave concern. We cannot understand why this approach did not at least take the form of a clear protest, and why the government was satisfied with cold diplomatic language in this instance. One feels this cold and humiliating language even more so when it comes from a representative of the State of Israel.
The foreign minister’s astonishing composure and the dry diplomatic wording are inappropriate to our common pain, which undoubtedly fills the hearts of our foreign ministry people as well. One senses a most delicate consideration in part of the wording of the foreign minister’s statement and most particularly in its strange conclusion regarding the United States government. This evening we must discuss two matters together: the claim for reparations, or more precisely, restitution of what was plundered and stolen, and the claim for revocation of the release and return of the guilty parties either to prison or the gallows.
Even the reparation claim has come very late. At a meeting of the Zionist Executive Committee about a year ago, we were told that government and Jewish Agency representatives had had informal contact with the governments in West Germany for the purpose of examining the feasibility of compensation from these governments.
Even then we had the opportunity of warning against this approach to the problem. We knew that nothing more than being dishonored in the eyes of that murderous people could be achieved. We demanded then – and have demanded on various occasions since then in various state institutions, including the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee – that direct contact with the governments of Germany cease. Negotiation with the various local German governments and most certainly with the central government of West Germany is unthinkable; we most certainly should not have contact with them for they have
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been appointed, in accordance with the authority granted to them by the Western powers, to revive Nazism and its entire regime. In its first steps that regime has embarked on unfettered anti-Semitic incitement in Bavaria and other parts of Germany. How can you not be ashamed of speaking with them?
Members of the Knesset, not one of the victorious nations waived payment of reparations by Germany for the material damage and destruction caused by the Nazi war machine in Europe and throughout the world. The four occupying powers exacted from Germany materials and means of production to the value of hundreds of millions of dollars. Even today the Western occupying powers are taking from Germany some half-a-billion marks for occupation expenditures.
And we, who have taken the rehabilitation of the survivors of our people upon ourselves, have to stand in Washington like beggars at the gate and ask for grants and gifts, with all that that implies from the economic standpoint and from the standpoint of relinquishing our economic independence, waiving the same means that they themselves are taking from that same Germany and to which we, first and foremost, are due.
You are dependent not only upon the goodwill of the United States government but also upon that of the Bonn government. We can read in the papers today that the “poor” government of West Germany – after the United States government has invested a quarter of a billion dollars in its rehabilitation – is on the verge of bankruptcy. That same Germany gorged itself immediately after its defeat and during it while we tramped starving and exhausted through the cities of Germany and on its roads; it gorged while the victorious nations, including France and England in the West and the masses in the Soviet Union and Poland, bled as they beheld the terrible destruction of the labor of generations. At the same time this Germany was living well, and what it did not produce itself it received from the Americans and the British.
I stand astonished in face of our naïve, non-political approach in this matter.
With all due respect, it is unthinkable that our political representatives be satisfied with an expression of feelings and a cry of pain. The question today is a political one of the highest order, and we must be fully aware where the real front of the denial of our rights and claims is; we must know who is denying us and why we are being denied, and we must draw conclusions from this situation. We cannot sit still when the government’s policy is leading us into this dark alley.
The British press tells us that we have missed the boat. We have missed the boat, they say, since in 1945, 1946 and 1947 British policy granted us time to formulate our claim, to form the country’s representation in order to submit our claim before the world. Then, after the Nazi slaughter, we were faced with the necessity of defending ourselves from an attempt at destruction by British policy here in this country. We missed the boat because in 1947, 1948 and 1949 we did not manage to submit the claim, for we were engaged in a life-or-death war with the puppets of British foreign policy that were equipped, armed and thrown against
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us. We missed the boat – they did not! They did not miss anything, neither the obtaining of compensation nor the revival of the Nazi beast. They did not miss forgetting the sacrifice of the Jewish people and its state, the only historical heir of the destruction of this people. They hasten to make peace with West Germany.
They hasten to re-establish the Nazi machine. They hasten to restore independence to the Nazis. They have no time. And we have missed the boat…
It seems to me – in any event, this is our feeling – that nobody can fail to be shocked by the extent to which our official foreign policy has lost, even in this matter, the ability to maneuver and the freedom of independence in our affairs.
One cannot fail to be shocked by the degree of accommodation in the formulation of our claims, and the weakness of our appearance before the deciding bodies on these questions of vital importance. Can you not see even today to what extent your stance on our rights has compromised us?
We feel that under no circumstances is the State of Israel entitled to enter negotiations with German political representatives. We think that as long as our elementary right for compensation has not been satisfied, the State of Israel cannot continue to conduct proper relations with these powers in whose hands and at whose discretion reside our participation in reparations payments. It is these powers who prevent imposition of peace, who are granting independence and all other benefits to the German people. And I say, the plunder and robbery accumulated there is several times greater in its value than any grant we might receive as a charity gift from the United States government, and for this gift of charity you will be compelled to waive the validity of our rightful claim.
We cannot but discern a worsening of our international political situation as a consequence of the impact made by the State of Israel’s attitude towards the world’s progressive elements, including the socialist ones headed by the Soviet Union. The potentially disastrous political consequences have been revealed precisely on this grave occasion. I believe that you also already know that you are at the beck and call of the Western powers and totally dependent on their goodwill. You have knowingly waived fostering friendly relations and mutual aid with the progressive socialist world and thus prevented the state from availing itself of its assistance. (MK Yona Kesse (Mapai): Why didn’t the Soviets give us compensation sooner? Do they have to wait until we submit a claim?) I think that they do not have to be any hastier than the government of Israel’s foreign minister, hastier than the representatives of the Jewish people.
I am hearing for the first time that we expect a foreign nation to voice our claim and our cry while the official representatives of the people keep silent. (From the Mapai benches: Let the Soviets pay!) It is the custom of the Mapai members to reach the boiling point whenever the name of the USSR is mentioned in a positive light. Why all this sensitivity and excitement? I feel no psychological or ideological difficulty when I demand my part from the occupying powers, including the USSR, and I do not understand this particular sensitivity you display when you
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are facing the fact that the powers from which you seek aid are defending the murderers of our people, identifying with them and preventing us – and you know that this is the naked truth – from obtaining reparations. They were even the first and foremost factor in preventing the reparations arrangement and ensuring our rights in the final accounting with the Germans. Why cover up this shameful fact for which the American representatives in Germany are responsible? Your conduct throughout this affair – the belated submission of the claim, your manner of speech, how the claim is presented, the political obfuscation of the significance
are facing the fact that the powers from which you seek aid are defending the murderers of our people, identifying with them and preventing us – and you know that this is the naked truth – from obtaining reparations. They were even the first and foremost factor in preventing the reparations arrangement and ensuring our rights in the final accounting with the Germans. Why cover up this shameful fact for which the American representatives in Germany are responsible? Your conduct throughout this affair – the belated submission of the claim, your manner of speech, how the claim is presented, the political obfuscation of the significance