Today’s word of the day is reparation. Reparation is a ten letter word.
Reparation in one line is; the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.
Reparations are payments made to compensate for harm or loss, and have been used throughout history to compensate for war, slavery, barbaric mass murder of civilians, genocide and other forms of discrimination.
There are several systems in international law relating to the concept of reparation for the harm suffered by the victims of grave violations of human rights and International Humanitarian Law.
Forms of reparation include: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Calculating the scale of reparations for the Palestinians after 76 years of constant persecution by ethnic cleanse genocide will challenge the ICC.
How for example do you value reparations for the residents of Lydda who were attacked in their homes that were then stolen along with all their possessions. Reparations must factor in the 76 years that followed. Then consider some 520 similar towns and villages were seized in this same wave of terrorist attacks.
How do you value reparations for the property the Palestinians lost 76 years ago adjusted for the annual loss compounding over 76 years. How do you value those lives lost to terrorism that was then, and remains now, undeniably illegal. Those lives that would have been spent pursuing their human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in their Mediterranean homes that were instead spent incarcerated in a prison refugee camp; suffering constant deadly persecution for 76 years.
One possibility the ICC will consider has precedent. The last comparable genocide by a comparable Nazi ideology.
The German genocide of WW2 that targeted Roma, Homosexuals, Slavs, Communists, Socialists, anti fascists, the disabled with special needs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish, Serbs, and others including Jews, who were the only group from the Nazi genocide to monetize their misfortune by the hundreds of Billions.
Germany has paid reparations to Jewish genocide survivors and their heirs since shortly after World War II. These reparations include:
Individual settlements: Payments to compensate victims of Nazi persecution
Restitution of assets: Compensation for assets wrongfully seized during the Holocaust
Financial contributions: Payments to victims' funds and survivors' pensions
Home care services: Funding for home care programs
Hardship Fund: One-time payments to recipients of the Hardship Fund
The German government has made reparations to a brand of genocide victims called ‘Holocaust survivors’ through a series of laws and programs. The Claims Conference negotiates with the German government on behalf of the designated Holocaust survivors. The German government has also returned Nazi-looted objects to survivors and their heirs. The German government has worked to create a culture of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in which laws exist to criminalize what is called ‘Holocaust Denial’.
Prior to WW2, Holocaust was a Greek word meaning “sacrifice by fire” that applied to victims of misfortune affected primarily by fire. Post WW2, with the advent of Holocaust denial law, the word Holocaust was monetized in law. A new Industry was born.
The Claims Conference has been pursuing reparations from the German government since 1951, when it was founded by a coalition of Jewish organizations, and has secured more than $90 billion in payments.
Germany started making reparations payments to Jewish survivors in the 1950s, and continues making payments to this day.
In 1951 the claiming process began when Israeli authorities made a claim to the four powers occupying post-war Germany regarding compensation and reimbursement based on the fact that Israel had absorbed and resettled 500,000 Holocaust survivors.
They calculated that since absorption had cost 3,000 dollars per person (equivalent to $35,200 in 2023), they were owed 1.5 billion dollars (equivalent to $17.6 billion in 2023) by Germany.
The calculation of this sum, $3,000, reflects the costs the Israeli Government faced seizing the homes from their former Palestinian owners to house the new immigrants. Many of the survivors who arrived in the new State of Israel were offered homes seized from Palestinian owners in 1948. That occupation and seizure cost money. Why shouldn’t the Germans pay.
The Israeli negotiators calculated that six billion dollars worth of Jewish property had been pillaged by the Nazis. The number of 6 with many zeroes after it was trending in forensic accounting at that time.
Negotiations leading to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany began in March 1952, between representatives of the government of the Federal Republic, the government of the State of Israel, and representatives of the World Jewish Congress. These discussions led to a bitter controversy in Israel, as the coalition government, headed by David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, argued the case for reparations based on recovering as much Jewish property as possible "so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well".
His populist narrative was well received by the majority in the new state of Israel that had very little by way of economy and even less by way of prospects for attracting development loans from abroad. Ben Gurion knew that developing a viable economy in their new illegally seized, illegal state, would cost many Billions. A burden that should not fall exclusively to American Zionist donors. The reparations claims began with attaching a value to each of the new immigrants, for ‘absorption and rehabilitation of the Holocaust survivors'
The Claims Conference had the task of negotiating with the German government a program of indemnification for the material damages to Jewish individuals and to the Jewish people caused by Germany through the Death Camp persecutions.
The Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany was signed on September 10, 1952, and entered in force on March 27, 1953. According to the Agreement, West Germany was to pay Israel for the costs of "resettling so great a number of uprooted and destitute Jewish refugees" after the war, and to compensate individual Jews, via the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for losses in Jewish livelihood and property resulting from Nazi persecution
The agreement was signed in September 1952. West Germany paid Israel a sum of 3 billion marks (around 714 million USD according to 1953–1955 conversion rates) over the next fourteen years; 450 million marks were paid to the World Jewish Congress.
The payments were made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family. The money was invested in the country's infrastructure and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state.
Israel at the time faced a deep economic crisis and was heavily dependent on donations by foreign Jews. The reparations, along with donations from wealthy American Zionist supporters would turn Israel into an economically viable country.
The reparations were paid directly to the headquarters of the Israeli purchase delegation in Cologne, which received the money from the German government in annual installments. The delegation then bought goods and shipped them to Israel, receiving its orders from a Tel Aviv-based company that had been set up to decide what to purchase and for whom.
The bulk of the reparations money went into purchasing equipment and raw materials for companies that were owned by the government, the Jewish Agency, and the Histadrut labor union. The Histadrut is Israel's national trade union center, founded in 1920 in Haifa to represent the interests of Jewish workers.
Much of that money went into purchasing equipment for about 1,300 industrial plants; two-thirds of this money was given to 36 factories, most of them owned by the Histadrut. At the same time, hundreds of other plants, mostly privately owned ones, received minimal assistance with reparations money.
As a result of the funding the Histadrut became the second largest employer in the country next to the government itself via its many cooperative enterprises. Along with the government the Histadrut owned most of the economy.
The Histadrut, through its economic arm, "Society of Workers” owned and operated enterprises including ; the country's largest industrial conglomerates, the country's largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, and the country's largest shipping company, ZIM Integrated Shipping Services. The Israeli services sector was completely dominated by the Histadrut and government, and the Histadrut also largely dominated public transport, agriculture, and insurance industries.
It owned Clalit Health Services, Israel's largest health insurance and medical services fund. Clalit was the only health fund in the country to accept members without discriminating on age or medical situation, but with the condition that beneficiaries of health cover must also be members of the Histadrut labor union. As such, many Israelis were dependent on Histadrut membership for their health insurance. In the mid-1980s, an estimated 70% of the Israeli population was insured by Clalit.
From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded around one-third of investment in Israel's electrical system, helping it to triple its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in Israel Railways, which obtained German-made rolling stock, tracks, and signaling equipment with reparations money.
The reparations were also used to purchase German-made machinery for developing the water supply, oil drilling, mining equipment for use in extracting copper from the Timna Valley mines, and heavy equipment for agriculture and construction such as combines, tractors, bulldozers for demolition, and trucks.
About 30% of the reparations money went into buying fuel, while 17% was used to purchase ships for the Israeli merchant fleet; comprising some fifty ships including two passenger liners. By 1961, these vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant marine.
The claiming business widened its purview in the 1990s when Jewish lawyers began claims for property stolen in Eastern Europe. Various Zionist groups began investigating what happened to money deposited in Swiss banks by Jews outside of Switzerland who were later murdered in the death camps. At the same time they investigated what happened to funds deposited by Nazis in Swiss banks.
Individual companies, mostly based in Germany, faced pressure by lawyers representing survivor groups, for compensation for their experience as forced laborers. Companies involved in the forced labour claims for reparations include Deutsche Bank, Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, and Opel.
In response, early in 1999, the German government proclaimed the establishment of a fund with money from these companies to help ‘needy Holocaust survivors’. A similar fund was set up by the Swiss, as was a Hungarian fund; for the compensation of survivors described as ‘Holocaust victims and their heirs’.
At the close of the 1990s, meetings began to decide reparations against insurance companies that had insured Jews before the war, who were later murdered by the Nazis. These companies include Allianz, AXA, Assicurazioni Generali, Zürich Financial Services Group, Winterthur, and Baloise Insurance Group.
I was not surprised to see the AXA named in this context after they fraudulently defended, deflected and denied my legitimate Insurance cover in England in 2014.
In 2009, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz announced that he would demand a further amount, up to $1 billion, in reparations on behalf of some 30,000 Israeli forced labor survivors.
The claims didn’t stop there. The Holocaust Industry turned the tragedy of the Jews who died by Nazi persecution into a monetized business that went on to fund a multi billion dollar Industry.
By appropriating the words Holocaust, and Genocide to represent the debt all Germans, and indeed, the rest of the world as well, owed the Jewish Holocaust victims of Nazi genocide, The Holocaust Industry became a lucrative business model that financed the Zionist State.
Claims for reparations of this type can be a tricky business.
A decade ago, the Claims Conference was rocked by a fraud scandal, when insiders of the New York-based group including Holocaust Claims Conference Director Semen Domnitser, were charged with massive fraud, stealing some $50 million from the fund.
In 2010 the US Attorney's Office announced an indictment against 11 employees of the Claims Conference and several other individuals for fraud and embezzlement of over $42 million from the Claims Conference.
In 2013 Former Holocaust Claims Conference Director Semen Domnitser, 55, of Brooklyn, New York, was sentenced to eight Years in Prison for $57.3 Million Fraud on the Organization. In addition to his prison term, Domnitser was sentenced to three years of supervised release. He was ordered to forfeit $59,230 and pay restitution in the amount of $57.3 million.
Since 2010, a total of 31 individuals have been charged with participating in the scheme to defraud the Article 2 Fund and Hardship Fund programs. Twenty-eight defendants pled guilty and three, Domnitser, Luba Kramrish, 58, of Toronto, Canada, and Oksana Romalis, 43, of Brooklyn, New York, were convicted after trial.
Kramrish was sentenced in 2013, to 37 months in prison. Romalis was sentenced to 46 months' imprisonment. She began serving her sentence in April 2014. In 2017 she failed in her appeal to have the judgment overturned on the grounds that she was sleeping with her trial counsel, Harvey Slovis.
In 2024 the German government paid more than $1.4 billion to Holocaust survivors in the latest compensation for atrocities and persecution inflicted by the Nazis.
Reparations for atrocities and persecution is a multi billion dollar business with no statute of limitations. Genocide is not subject to a statute of limitations in the United States or under international law. This means that judicial proceedings can be initiated against perpetrators of genocide at any time.
The New Orleans War Museum Holocaust exhibit says six Million Jews died in the German genocide that is referred to as The Holocaust. However there is almost no mention of any other Holocausted victims of the Nazi genocide, although there were perhaps ‘three times more non military deaths of non Jews,’ murdered by the Nazis. According to the Holocaust memorial webpage.
Of the 9.5m Jews in Europe before the war, 6m were murdered. A precise count so accurately recorded that to question its accuracy by even one millionth is a criminal offense in 17 jurisdictions.
The overall civilian death toll attributed to the Nazis, including Gypsies, disabled people, gays, prisoners, bystanders to combat, Jehovahs Witnesses and drug addicts, was perhaps three times greater than Jews. Researching the reparations these people received is challenging. I found nothing on the Interweb. Perhaps they did not get holocausted, or theirs was a different genocide experience that did not meet the qualification criteria for reparations.
Here is a reminder of some of the 18 million other victims of atrocities and persecution inflicted by the Nazis, who were not Jewish who did not succeed with any reparations claim.
Homosexuals.
Nazi principles of race, gender and eugenics dictated prejudice against homosexuality. Repression against gay men, lesbians and trans people commenced within days of Hitler becoming Chancellor. Significant numbers of gay men were arrested with an estimated 50,000 receiving severe jail sentences in brutal conditions. An estimated 10-15,000 men who were accused of homosexuality were deported to concentration camps. Most died in the camps, often from exhaustion. Many were castrated and some subjected to gruesome medical experiments.. Historians generally agree that the Nazis murdered some five thousand gay men within Germany itself. When considering the numbers from Germany’s once thriving gay community whose lives were decimated by Nazi tyranny, I would say half a million is a realistic number. How would we value reparations owed to the gay community of Germany for the atrocities and persecution inflicted by the Nazis.
Anti Nazi Political affiliation.
Hitler’s forces killed at a minimum one million civilians because of their political affiliation; most of those socialists and communists. Anti fascists were a significant and largely uncounted number genocided by the Nazis. On assuming power in 1933 the first people the Nazis targeted for arrest and imprisonment were political opponents, primarily communists, trade unionists and social democrats.
“Republican” veterans of the Spanish Civil War were killed in both the White Terror in Spain, by Nazi elements, as well as wherever they were captured by the Germans. More than 2,000 died in one single extermination camp, Mauthausen. They were the remnants of the approximately fifteen thousand Civil War veterans deported by Vichy French authorities to Nazi Germany of whom only 837 survived World War II. The hunt for “republican” veterans of the Spanish Civil War saw as many as 226,000 Spanish republicans captured and imprisoned in France alone. When Spanish Civil War veterans were captured by the Nazis, as a matter of policy they were not sent to POW camps, as with other combatants, but directly to concentration camps.
The Polish.
The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior. Following the military victory over Poland in September 1939, the Germans launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture. To reduce the Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters. In the spring of 1940, the German occupation authorities launched AB-Aktion, a plan to systematically eliminate Poles considered to be members of the “leader class.” Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labour. Hundreds of thousands were also imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. It is estimated that the Nazis killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians during World War Two.
The Roma.
The Nazis discriminated against and murdered Roma, Sinti and other people they labeled “Gypsies.” Beginning in 1933, Nazi German authorities persecuted many Romani in Germany. They subjected this group to a variety of discriminatory measures including internment in “gypsy camps” and forced sterilization. It is estimated that at between 250,000 and 500,000 European Roma were killed during World War II. The Roma memorial in Berlin, located near the Brandenberg gates, commemorates 500,000 dead.
Special Needs and the disabled.
At the beginning of World War II, individuals with mental or physical disabilities were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the “T-4" or "euthanasia," program. The T-4 program became the model for the mass murder of Jews, Roma, and others in camps equipped with gas chambers that the Nazis would open starting in 1941. The program, killing bed ridden special needs people, also served as a training ground for SS members who manned these camps.
The T4 programme arose from Nazi Party policy of "racial hygiene”. The belief that German people needed to be cleansed of racial enemies, which included anyone confined to a mental health facility and people with simple physical disabilities.
The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4.
A chosen few German physicians were authorized to select patients "deemed incurably sick” and then administer to them a "mercy death”. In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note” which authorized the killing.
The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945. The number of special needs people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries, occupied Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.
About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. Jesus understood the value of strengthening the Christian gene pool. All of the dead who were Christian would be welcome in Heaven for eternity, free from their special needs pain. Hence this was designated as a mercy killing in accordance with Christian compassion rather than a breech of the sixth commandment.
The German eugenics movement had momentum even before the Nazis came to power. With many advocating killing those whose lives were "unworthy of life”. Darwinism was interpreted by them as justification of the demand for "beneficial" genes and eradication of the "harmful" ones. A variant on Survival of the fittest benefitting the national gene pool.
The argument went that the best young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best genes. The genes of those who did not fight, the worst genes, then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration.
The advocacy of eugenics in Germany gained ground after 1930, when the Depression, caused in part by the punishing reparations Germany had to pay for WW1, was used to excuse cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding, leading to Hitler identifying the final solution for the most vulnerable. About 300,000 lives lost with no compensation.
I first learned about Genocide, the Holocaust and Anti semitism as specifically Jewish events. Thats what our school taught us. As if no other Genocide had ever happened. As if the Holocaust was a word reserved for one exclusive event in which one race suffered exclusively for which one race warranted annual remembrance and hundreds of billions in reparations. It wasn’t a holocaust it was The Holocaust.
In a profound irony, the outcome of this reparations program rewarding victims of The Holocaust has funded a new batch of Nazis committing the worst genocide since the last band of Nazis slaughtered women and children mercilessly without regard for International law.
The genocide of Palestine, the holocaust visited on Gaza that has been consumed by fire, was perpetrated by Zionists in Israel and abroad.
In accordance with International Law, contrived in part by the Jewish victims of the last Genocide, a series of laws and programs must now prepare the the perpetrators to meet the costs of reparations to include:
Restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Individual settlements: Payments to compensate victims of Zionist persecution. Including the costs of rehousing while their homes are rebuilt.
Restitution of assets: Compensation for assets wrongfully seized during the Zionist Holocaust. Including a realistic financial valuation for every year of every life lost.
Financial contributions: Payments to victims' funds and survivors' pensions to assist survivors whose trauma will never allow for a normal productive life.
And the only guarantee of non-repetition possible. That follows the same lines as the Nazi guarantee in April of 1945 that was formalized in law at Nuremberg.
You cant have it both ways. Unless you are a chosen one. In which case you can do whatever you want whenever to whomever you choose, whenever. While there is no rule of law then Israel has the right to exist.
To continue genociding until there is no one left to genocide, or until the Planet returns to a rule of law. Whichever comes first.
