Bitter Reckoning by Dan Porat

Author:Dan Porat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

[  CHAPTER SEVEN  ]

THE FIRST DOUBTS ABOUT THE KAPO TRIALS

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the Jungster verdict in late November 1951, a well-dressed man, age seventy-four, sat in an SAS airliner en route from Karachi to Copenhagen with his wife, thirty years younger, beside him. As the plane descended for a fueling stopover at Lod International Airport outside Tel Aviv, the woman became visibly nervous, while the man struggled to maintain his composure.

The aircraft touched down and taxied to the airport terminal. Passengers disembarked and proceeded to the transit area. The two sat down in the terminal’s coffee shop and ordered breakfast. A few workers, immigrants from Germany, spotted the man and congregated around him. The man finished his coffee, and the coffee shop owner approached and asked him if he would be kind enough to sign the airport’s VIP book. The man agreed and inscribed his name—Hjalmar Schacht.1

Twenty years earlier, in the early 1930s, Schacht had ensured the support of the heads of Germany’s industrial sector for the Nazi Party and its rising political star, Adolf Hitler. In return for his help, Hitler appointed Schacht to head the Reichsbank and later nominated him as the Reich’s finance minister. At the end of the war, the Allied forces put him among the defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg alongside people like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Alfred Rosenberg. That court narrowly acquitted Schacht, but a Stuttgart denazification court sentenced him to eight years’ imprisonment, only to have a higher court overturn the verdict.2

Under ordinary circumstances Schacht never would have set foot in Israel. But he had mistakenly booked a flight that stopped over there. Three journalists—from the dailies Maariv and Davar and from the United Press news agency—who were awaiting the arrival of the chairperson of the Dead Sea Works, Lord Glenconner, noticed the commotion in the airport coffee shop and spotted Schacht. Heading over to his table, they conducted an impromptu news conference. Did West Germany plan to pay reparations to the Jewish state, and was it capable of doing so? one journalist asked. Ever since it had been revealed earlier that year that representatives of Israel and West Germany had been holding secret negotiations on possible reparation payments, the issue had created a deep divide in Israeli society. The former head of the German economy responded diplomatically, “Germany will pay if it is able to do so.” He added, “From what I see in the airport and according to what I read in the newspapers, you are progressing greatly and I believe that this country will continue to develop.”3

The plane finished refueling, Schacht reboarded, and the plane took off and disappeared into the sky. But that afternoon Maariv broke a story with the headline “Dr. Schacht, Hitler’s Adviser, Visited Israel.” And in Jerusalem, Knesset member Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, of the opposition, interrupted the session to demand that the government explain how one of the architects of Hitler’s rise in Germany had “arrived today in Lod without being arrested under the

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