West Germany’s restitution agreements passed with only bare majority support and stayed unpopular

Evidence

Only 106 of the 208 members of the governing coalition in the Bundestag voted for the restitution agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. Even into the mid-1950s, Aryanizers' (those who had bought Jewish property) and members of the governing coalition in the federal and state parliaments were still up in arms against the reimbursement law enacted by the American military government in 1947, which declared that ascertainable property which had changed hands while its owners were under pressure of persecution was to be returned to its former owners in exchange for the selling price. (Aryanizers who had been forced to sell their property back to its owners, and who persisted in pursuing their claims, were themselves compensated at public expense in 1969 as victims of restitution’.) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1998

Categorization

• QUESTION: The 1969 detail that Aryanizers who resisted restitution were themselves compensated as ‘victims of restitution’ is almost surreal — worth chasing how this legal category was justified and how widespread such claims were.
• BMF: The Aryanizer recast as ‘victim of restitution’ — the perpetrator of persecution compensated by the state while the actual victims were grudgingly repaid — evokes the inverted moral universe of White Noise’s toxic-event satire, where the fear of death and commodified victimhood are distributed by the same system that produced the harm.
• XREF: connects to: West German restitution was unpopular and minimally supported in parliament — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 492