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Held Reports on Jewish Demands at the Hague Reparations Talks

April 29, 1952
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“We will never accept the German offer that the reparations to Israel and other Jewish communities betied to the external debt talks now going on in London,” Adolph Held, chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee and member of the five-man praesidium of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, declared here in a speech outlining the background of the German-Jewish reparations talks at The Hague.

Addressing a meeting of the Workmen’s Circle, Mr. Held said that the Israeli and Conference delegations “did not come to the Germans hat-in-hand” but came at the invitation of the West German Chancellor, Dr. Konrad Adenauer. “We were not placing a price tag on the lives that had been lost. We could not. But we could, and did place a minimum price tag on the damage to property, on the loss of business establishments, jobs, educational opportunities, cultural institutions and on resettlement of refugees in Israel,” Mr. Held reported.

“It was becoming increasingly evident that the Communist opposition and campaign of vilification against the negotiations stems from the fact that the State of Israel has requested one-half billions of dollars from East Germany as its share in the settlement of refugees in Israel,” Mr. Held declared. “Despite the united front of the Communists and Neo-Nazis, the European labor movement, buttressed by the Social Democrats within Germany itself, has given full endorsement to the one billion dollar claim against West Germany by the State of Israel and the one-half billion dollar claim against West Germany by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims being made in the names of the heirless and survivors of Nazi persecution.”

Mr. Held revealed that he had held a series of conferences with leading European labor leaders including those of Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. He said that he found “the widest latitude of sympathy and support” for the claims against Germany. “It was encouraging,” he reported ” that the European labor movement had recognized the justice of the demands and without compromise supports them.”

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