What reparations could ever make amends for the six million Jews wiped out by Hitler's Germany? "Dollars for the gas chamber—impossible!" cried the Ruhr's Westdeutsche Neue Presse. The Germans, cold and businesslike, did not want to dwell on these past horrors. The Jews, an official delegation from Israel, did not want the Germans to consider their unpayable debt paid. So no one talked about the wasted bodies, parchment-white, stacked high in Nazi extermination camps. Yet that was what the negotiations were really about last week, in a suburb of The Hague.
Specifically, the talks involved reparations for resettling in Israel 500,000 Jews...