Amends to the Jews

For what Chancellor Adenauer called unspeakable crimes committed in the name of the German people," West Germany's Bundestag last week voted world Jewry $822 million in reparations. It was ten years after Hitler's SS began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, eight years after the murder of the last of 6,000,000 European Jews; in West Germany only 20,000 of the pre-Hitler Jewish population of 600,000 survives. Some Jews objected to the reparations on the grounds that money could never repay lives, and that Germans should not be allowed to purchase an easing of their conscience. But the important thing about the reparations is that they are a payment voluntarily made by the German government, not imposed upon it.

The vote (238 to 34, with 86 abstaining) was unique: for the first time in Bonn's history the opposition Social Democrats supported a major proposal by Adenauer's conservative Christian Democratic government (in fact, the Social Democrats did more to ensure the bill's passage than Adenauer's own coalition, which was responsible for most of the abstentions). Under the agreement, austerity-pinched Israel will receive $715 million in goods during the next 12 to 14 years; the remaining $107 million will go to Jewish refugee organizations. The first shipment of textiles, leather goods, optical equipment, farm machinery and building supplies starts for Israel April 1.

Things in the Middle East being what they are, amends to the Israelis had to be matched by overtures to the Arabs. Half an hour after the vote, the Bonn government announced resumption of economic talks with Egypt, and added that a team of German engineers had just arrived in Cairo to survey the possibility of building the world's largest power and irrigation dam on the Nile. Vital statistics: a dam. 42 miles long, to cost $286 million and to take 10 to 15 years to build, which would increase Egypt's arable land by 40%, help solve its water problem for 200 years.

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