Porozumienie luksemburskie z 10 września 1952 roku
The Luxembourg Agreement of 10 September 1952

Summary/Abstract: After the Second World War, the issue of compensation for Nazi crimes against Jews remained unresolved. The State of Israel, established on May 14, 1948, was struggling with a massive influx of refugees and urgently needed resources for their settlement and integration. The Federal Republic of Germany, founded on May 23, 1949, addressed the issue of material reparations by signing an agreement on September 10, 1952, with the State of Israel and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany—a joint institution representing various Jewish organizations. Owing the name to the place of its conclusion, this act is known as the Luxembourg Agreement. For the Federal Republic of Germany, the payments agreed upon to be made to Israel imposed a relatively moderate burden on the national budget. For Israel, however, they enabled the achievement of a very significant goal—the construction of the material foundations of the state. Germany, in turn, pursued a symbolic objective of vital importance: to distance the country from its recent Nazi past and, as a result, to facilitate its integration with the West. This convergence of entirely different but nonetheless corresponding interests, which the two countries were compelled to realize, explains how Israel—which had received numerous survivors and relatives of victims of the German state’s policies from 1933 to 1945—and West Germany—which had incorporated into its institutions some former Nazi officials and their collaborators—were able to establish such concrete relations at such an early stage. The agreement primarily concerned payments to the State of Israel, but it also laid the groundwork for future individual compensation. The Federal Republic of Germany undertook to pay Israel three billion German marks. Approximately two-thirds of this amount was delivered in the form of goods and services, mainly capital goods. Around one-third was paid in cash, in foreign currency, to enable Israel to purchase crude oil. To the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, West Germany committed to pay 450 million German marks to partially meet the individual needs of those affected by the Holocaust.

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