Dan Michman
a policy-planning institution closely allied to the World Jewish Congress
(it would be integrated into the WJC in 1947), which was established in
1940, prepared plans for the post-war struggle to reclaim Jewish prop-
erty throughout Europe,!* as did some other organizations.!* This even
served as a cause for the legal definition of the Jews as a nation or col-
lectivity — in order to be able to reclaim Jewish property on behalf of the
Jewish abstract collective in places and cases where no individual Jew
had survived. After the war, a Jewish Restitution Successor Organization
(JRSO) was established in 1948 to tackle the topic and it composed doc-
uments that are still very helpful; so too did the United Restitution
Organization (URO), an organization which provided legal aid to Jew-
ish victims of Nazi persecution who were unable to secure legal counsel
to obtain compensation vis-a-vis the labyrinth of laws and procedures.
After the reestablishment of German statehood in 1949 in the form of
two Germanys, agreements (under the terms of Generalbereinigung and
Wiedergutmachung) were negotiated between West Germany (German
Federal Republic) and several states.’ The most well-known agreement
was the one between West-Germany and Israel and West-Germany and
the rest of the Jewish world to compensate the Jews and the Jewish peo-
ple for losses during the Nazi period (this agreement was called in Ger-
man Wiedergutmachung, but in Hebrew Shilumim, which has a double
meaning: payments and — in Biblical Hebrew — recompense allied with
vengeance). These agreements were based on calculations resulting from
a series of scholarly studies and expert estimations. However, it later
turned out that some of these calculations were insufficient, and that cer-
of a Central Jewish Information Office aligned with the Amsterdam-based Com-
mittee for Special Jewish Affairs (Comité voor Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen),
which monitored developments in Germany, including economic issues; see
Barkow, Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library, pp. 57-63.
13 One such publication was by Robinson, Indemnification and Reparations. For the
Institute of Jewish Affairs and its goals see Kubowitzki, Unity in Dispersion; Shafir,
Nahum Goldmann and Germany after World War II, p. 208; Cohen, Dr. Jacob
Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the Elusive Jewish Voice in Nurem-
berg.
14 Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World, p. 12.
15 Ibidem, p. 15.
16 For instance with the Netherlands, on April 8, 1960 (Germany agreed to pay a total
sum of 280 million DM).
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