Reckonings

When the British army liberated Bergen-Belsen

I was amongst the dead. I was a skeleton.

So they dumped me on the truck

to be taken care of.

And in the last minute,

one of the officers passed by,

he pulled my leg that was hanging out,

took my pulse.

And he said, “That skeleton is still alive.”

At the end of the war,

the whole camp was full of corpses.

The Nazis, they didn't know who was alive, who was dead.

If they thought that you were alive, they'd shoot you.

My mother, she hid me with a corpse.

As she covered me up she said, "You're not going to move."

"And you're going to breathe into the floor," she said.

My job was to get into the camps as quickly as they were liberated.

I had peered into hell.

They unlocked the gates

and then they took pictures of us.

I have a pretty good picture with my number showing.

The survivors,

they'd walked away with only a tattoo on their arm,

everything they had owned was gone

including their families.

Where was the money to come from?

To heal them,

to house them,

to allow them to begin their new lives.

The needs of the survivors were as great as they were urgent.

This was the declaration that my grandfather

delivered in the German Parliament, the Bundestag.

He declared that he was willing

to enter into negotiations for reparations.

Two states who go to war,

the state that wins exacts reparations

from the state that loses.

Reparations have existed since time immemorial.

But the idea of compensation to individuals was unprecedented.

How is Germany going to pay for this?

We had bombed the hell out of Germany.

In 1952, the German population was the same population that committed

that what happened during the war.

When I went to school in the 1950s

the Holocaust

was practically never mentioned.

We don’t want German money!

For the Israelis,

it was really a dramatic change to begin a conversation

with representatives of Germany.

It was for them like negotiating with the devil.

Blood money.

I always called it blood money.

There was this bomb being sent to the German Chancellor.

And there were other bombs being sent to the delegations in Wassenaar.

There was a terrorist group which was out to kill me and kill all the others

who dares to sit with the Germans

to talk about how much they owe for my parents.

- I don't know what happened to my parents and my sister.

And every night when I go to sleep, I say

Muti, Papa. Where are you? Where are you?

Where is my family? Why am I alone?

I don't have anybody.

I'm still a child.

One Jewish negotiator said he felt the souls

of six million Jews in the room with him that day.

At Weimar, all citizens were ordered to visit the concentration camp.

They were forced to see with their own eyes

crimes whose existence they had indignantly denied.

They tell you now that they knew nothing of what was going on,

or could do anything even if they knew.

- The Germans had for 12 years been indoctrinated

that the Jews were a danger to their existence.

They didn't really understand why they had to pay compensation.

- One has to see that everybody, even those who had been

on the other side against the Nazis,

they were not willing to deal with the crimes.

Everybody was rejecting the notion of collective guilt.

People were still living in ruins

the country had to be rebuilt.

They just thought it was a war

that was bad for all sides.

But the fact that the Germans had inflicted

so much pain on the Jewish people

probably wasn’t on their minds.

- The Allies conducted a number of polls amongst the Germans.

Who did they consider to be the main victims of the war?

Jews always ranked at the bottom.

They were so preoccupied with building up their lives.

Only 11% of the German population

supported compensation talks.

In the name of the German people

unspeakable crimes have been committed

calling for moral

and material compensation.

My grandfather was convinced

early on in his term of office as Chancellor,

that it was crucial to build a bridge

with Israel and the Jewish community.

The Federal Government is prepared

together with representatives of world Jewry

and the State of Israel

which has taken in so many homeless Jewish refugees

to bring about a solution of the material compensation problem.

He said that, of course, this compensation, this reparation

is also, in a way, accepting German guilt.

Adenauer had a deep understanding

that we had committed terrbile injustice.

I think he knew from a moral

and political understanding

that he had to

engage with

the Jewish community.

- In 1949, West Germany became a new sovereign nation,

the Federal Republic of Germany, with Konrad Adenauer as its Chancellor.

East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from the West.

As the first Chancellor, he had the task of rebuilding West Germany as a democracy,

regaining membership among the civilized nations of the world,

and restoring the good name of Germany.

He was a devout Catholic

and had been opposed to Nazism.

His family had paid a severe price for their opposition.

In 1917, he was elected the Mayor of Cologne

Cologne was one of the centers of Jewish life in Germany.

He had Jewish friends.

And this is something that the Nazis didn't like at all.

He despised the Nazis right from the start

and it was no secret.

He was removed from office.

These are the German newsreel pictures

put out following the attempt on the Fuhrer’s life.

Conjecture runs high...

My grandfather wasn't involved in the plot on Hitler’s life,

but he was arrested at five o'clock in the morning,

then taken to an internment center in Cologne.

He was able to escape with the help of a friend.

Soon after, they came here to Rhöndorf

to question his wife,

to tell them where he was hiding.

She refused, and she was arrested

and taken to Gestapo headquarters.

They also threatened to arrest

her two daughters as well.

So she betrayed my grandfather

and gave up his hiding place.

Of course my grandfather forgave her

but she never recovered from this.

She took sleeping pills and cut her wrists.

She was saved,

but the poisoning she suffered

couldn't be treated adequately.

She died three years later in 1948.

Of course this was a hard blow for my grandfather.

Knowing that people in Germany did not

recognize the importance of this subject,

I think he let his decisions be guided

by his inner conviction that

this is necessary,

not just for his own moral responsibility

but for the whole German people.

Adenauer faced fierce opposition to the idea of paying reparations,

even within his own cabinet.

The biggest threat to Adenauer's plans was finance minister, Fritz Schäffer.

Schäffer thought that maybe the German Federal Republic is not capable

of bearing that financial burden.

I mean, I wouldn't call him an anti-Semite, but he thought that

if Israel needs money,

Israel should address maybe the United States or others for credit.

And he had a very important position in the German cabinet.

He has the right to veto.

So it was very important for Adenauer to overcome that.

The speech by Adenauer,

it was received by the world as a very brave speech.

But not in Israel.

- We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine

to be called the state of Israel.

Like Adenauer, Ben-Gurion was building a new nation out of the ashes.

The two leaders actually had a great deal in common.

Both men were unique combinations of moralists and realists.

The lesson Ben-Gurion took from the Holocaust was

that we the Jews need to protect themselves.

No one saved the Jews.

They can't wait for other nations to protect them.

And if the Jews want to save themselves,

they need weapons.

For weapons, you need money.

And no one's going to give it to us.

This evening, the invasion.

Arab armies are pouring in.

Their tanks have already crossed the borders

and the frontier settlements have helped the first onslaught

of the fighting forces of the organized Arab armies.

The Israel War of Independence was the longest

and the most dire

in the history of the Jewish state.

About 85% Gross National Product

was devoted to finance this war.

In the midst of the war, Israel opened it's gates

for a wave of mass Jewish immigrations.

About 700 thousand Jewish immigrants came to Israel,