Six Million Dead and One Paragraph

Editor's note:

Recently, a German diplomat was expressing his concern that the remilitarization of his country would bring it exactly to where it was in 1933. The diplomat said many shared his fear and that was why Berlin would insist on remaining in such organizations as NATO and the European Union. The rationale was that being with other Europeans and Westerners might restrain Germany from launching another world war.

Part of that fear stems from a simple fact: German society never renounced Hitler or Nazism. The German elite went through the motions in the late 1940s and 1950s to assuage public opinion -- particularly in the United States. But there was no serious denazification program. Indeed, the opposite was the case: The first German government was far more than sympathetic to Hitler; it contained a huge number of those who worked in his regime during World War II.

The rehabilitation of post-war Germany was conducted by none other than the State of Israel. The new Jewish state was negotiating with West Germany on a so-called reparations package for Israel and the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, however, needed Bonn to make a gesture that showed remorse for the killing of the six million. In September 1951, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer finally agreed to address the Jewish demand. In a speech to the West German parliament, Adenauer devoted one paragraph to the Final Solution. The text was drafted in consultation with Ben-Gurion and Sharett.

The government of the Federal Republic and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism. The overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them. During the National Socialist time, there were many among the German people who showed their readiness to help their Jewish fellow citizens at their own peril -- for religious reasons, from distress of conscience, out of shame at the disgrace of the German name. But unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity, both with regard to the individual harm done to the Jews and with regard to the Jewish property for which no legitimate individual claimants still exist.

The only thing Adenauer actually admitted was that the Germans knew of Hitler's Final Solution. But he claimed that the "overwhelming majority" were against the extermination and had nothing to do with it, and in many cases even helped the Jews. As the chancellor saw it, attributing the Holocaust to Germany was a mistake. For the rest of his 14 years as chancellor, he would defend his appointment of SS and other Nazis to senior posts in the government. After Adenauer's speech, the members of the Bundestag did not try to correct their leader. They stood for three minutes in silence.

Excerpt from "In Jewish Blood: The Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963

Chapter: Robbing the Victims. Page 450

The reparations agreement in the 1950s did exactly the same as Haavara 20 years earlier. The reparations accord made Israel into an apologist for West Germany. This was a new Germany, Ben-Gurion insisted, and those who thought differently would be dealt with. Sharett, now foreign minister, said the Israeli people would be forced to accept Germany. “We have to educate this people, that earned a state, to be a state-like people and not a Galut people,” Sharett said. “They must know that they have a country on earth, and on this same earth there is a country called Germany. This can’t be prevented, either by eliminating the state or transferring this country to another planet. This truth must be brutally rammed into the heads of these people.”

The campaign by Ben-Gurion and Sharett to rehabilitate Germany and whitewash its Nazi past was taken abroad. They recruited Zionist publications to absolve Germans of the Holocaust. The message was that reparations were legitimate. The reality was the opposite. In the 1950s, West Germany was more supportive of the Nazis than under Hitler. They dominated government, police and even schools. Many Germans flaunted their Nazi past while others were scared to express criticism. Nazis comprised more than half of the deputies in the first post-war parliament, touted as the first free election in Germany since 1933.

Immediately after his election in 1949, Adenauer packed the nation’s civil service with Nazis. At the Interior Ministry, they comprised 50 percent of department and branch heads. At the Federal Criminal Office, assigned to prosecute Nazi war crimes cases, Nazis made up 75 percent of the unit. Gerhard Schroder, a former Nazi Party member, helped appoint his former party colleagues to control 15 out of the 17 top branches in the office. At the Justice Ministry, 90 out of the top 170 attorneys at the ministry were either Nazi or SA members. They dominated the ministry between 1949 and 1973.

More than 60 years after the war, a German Cabinet minister concluded that the Nazi presence had blocked prosecution of Hitler’s killers. It also explained why anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination were allowed to resurface immediately after the war.

The Nazi government of Adenauer had devastating consequences for Israel. Germans played a major role in the development of Egypt’s security and intelligence communities. The Germans trained the Egyptian military on the use of combined air-armored operations, meant to overwhelm a much larger enemy force. The Germans knew Egypt’s enemy. They had been able to study their Israeli counterparts through joint training and weapons programs. German officers were briefed on Israel’s military doctrine, land and air capabilities and response scenarios. Some of these officers were accessible to if not in cooperation with German trainers who worked in Egypt.

In the early 1950s, there were at least 50 German military trainers in Egypt, encouraged by the Bonn government. To avoid detection, many of the ex-Nazi officers converted to Islam and adopted Arabic names. They included Lt. Gen. Artur Schmitt, who fought with Rommel in North Africa and after the war was recruited by the Arab League. Schmitt claimed that blitzkrieg could destroy Israel within two weeks. Gerhard Mertins, a former officer of the Waffen-SS, trained Egyptian paratroopers. The Germans commanded ample salaries, half of them sent to Swiss bank accounts.

After nearly a decade of training, the Egyptians were ready to demonstrate their prowess in German tactics. In February 1960, Egypt deployed a massive armored force that raced through the demilitarized Sinai Peninsula toward the southern border with Israel. Ben-Gurion and his military were taken by surprise. They shouldn’t have been. Back in late 1957, Ben-Gurion, responding to the capture of an Israeli squad in Syria, ordered the end of infiltration into surrounding Arab countries. Military intelligence chief Chaim Herzog learned of the Egyptian incursion of Sinai from a CIA officer at a cocktail party at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.

From Feb. 22 through Feb. 24, 1960, the Egyptians, employing radio silence, moved their 2nd Infantry Division and 4th Armored Division into Sinai. Three days later, six out Egypt’s 10 infantry brigades and all three armored brigades were in position. Ben-Gurion was paralyzed with fright and rebuffed appeals to send air force planes into Sinai to monitor the Egyptian advance. By that time, the Egyptians had deployed 500 main battle tanks near the Israeli border.

Facing the Egyptian force were about 20-30 Israeli tanks. Ben-Gurion’s favorite general, Yitzhak Rabin, wrote to air force commander Ezer Weizmann, “We’ve been caught with our pants down.”

Again, Ben-Gurion, who censored Israeli newspapers from reporting the Egyptian deployment, refused to mobilize the reserves or send reconnaissance flights over Sinai. In the end, the Egyptians did not attack.

Below: a woman kisses Adenauer's hand at a Dutch university.