Lawyers Writing History: The Politics of the Past of the United Restitution Organisation (URO) from 1948 to the 1980s

Abstract

This article explores the Geschichts- and Vergangenheitspolitik, or politics of the past, of the United Restitution Office/Organisation (URO) in the post-war years and asks how it impacted on the early historiography of the Holocaust. I demonstrate that the URO leadership took a conscious decision to publicly downplay the role of its organisation in German reparations to maximise its legal and political clout behind closed doors. While this strategy was beneficial for many of URO's clients, above all in the 1950s and 1960s, this self-marginalisation prevented the organisation from becoming a significant voice in the public debates about German moral guilt and its consequences in the 1970s and 1980s. One reason for this development was generational. The URO was an enterprise driven by a particular cohort of German-Jewish lawyers for whom it provided an opportunity to personally ‘come to terms’ with the interruptions of their pre-1933 careers and the persecution during the Third Reich. In the post-war period, their legal expertise as well as their intimate knowledge of the German language and customs allowed them to act as transnational citizen diplomats, successfully mediating between the different parties and interest groups, governments and non-governmental lobby groups. For most of these Jewish jurists, their practical experience with their German peers, politicians and the administrators of the German Wiedergutmachung led to an increasing scepticism and ultimately disappointment – despite the undisputedly impressive results that they obtained for their clients.

Introduction

German reparations and compensation payments after World War II have been the subject of historical and political scrutiny for decades. As one might expect, assessments differ widely. Critical observers have pointed to the shortcomings of the German Wiedergutmachung process, claiming that an often arbitrary and overly bureaucratic practice has denied many victims compensation or at least significantly delayed payments. ¹ Others, not least in Germany, regarded the restitution process, despite some shortcomings, as an overall success story and as a possible blueprint with global applicability. ²

Commonly underestimated in these debates is the role of those organisations and actors that were actively involved in the practical operations and transactions of the German indemnification programmes. We know much about the national and international politics of Wiedergutmachung in West Germany, Israel and the United States, but comparatively little about how the everyday need to fight for compensation impacted the politics of the past for those organisations who were entrusted by the survivors and their families to represent their interests vis-à-vis the German bureaucracy. ³ This article contributes to the latter issue. Based on original research and a scrutiny of the relevant secondary literature, it explores the Geschichts- and Vergangenheitspolitik, or the politics of the past and of history, of the United Restitution Office/Organisation (URO) in the post-war years and asks how it impacted the early historiography of the Holocaust.

Even though the URO, a legal aid organisation founded by German-Jewish émigré lawyers, was a very important actor in the field of restitution and compensation, the extent to which this organisation has not only disappeared from public view but has also been overlooked by historians is remarkable. The organisational history of the URO, one of the most important NGOs dealing with restitution, has so far been largely unexplored, with two exceptions: in 1989, Hans Günther Hockerts published the first comprehensive chapter on the URO (Anwälte der Verfolgten, or ‘Lawyers for the Persecuted’), which is still the best account of the organisation's early history. ⁴ For his article, Hockerts relied heavily on a short organisational history of the URO that was written by Norman Bentwich and published in 1968. Coming from an insider, this is still an indispensable document for all those interested in the internal URO procedures, yet it is, of course, a partisan account and as such it needs careful historical scrutiny. ⁵ Tobias Winstel, a former PhD student of Hockerts, also wrote about the URO and the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), founded in New York in 1948, yet he likewise concentrated on the immediate post-war years. ⁶ My article builds on these important studies, but it will go beyond them, not least by paying more attention to the global dimension of the URO's activities and its Geschichtspolitik.

The argument will be developed in four stages, covering the decades from the late 1940s to the 1980s. I begin by offering the necessary history of the origins of the URO, its daily operations in the context of ‘Jewish legal lobbying’ and its significance for the history of Wiedergutmachung. ⁷ A central question as to why – despite its considerable size and practical significance – the URO only plays a very subsidiary role in most histories of restitution guides this section of the article. This is then followed by three case studies on the URO's politics of the past that form the heart of this article. Taken together, they explain why practical relevance in restitution matters did not necessarily result in historical and political attention. I demonstrate that the URO leadership made a conscious decision to publicly downplay the role of its organisation in German restitution affairs in order to maximise its legal and political clout behind closed doors. While this strategy was beneficial for many clients of the URO – above all in the 1950s and 1960s – this self-marginalisation prevented the organisation from becoming a significant voice in the public debates about moral guilt and the German ‘coming to terms’ with the past in the 1970s and 1980s. One consequence of this development is that the work of the URO is thoroughly forgotten today, not only in Germany but also in other countries where significant numbers of survivors and their families had long-term working relationships with this organisation. Against such a backdrop, this article ends with a plea to write the history of restitution more than hitherto as an Erfahrungsgeschichte, which should give voice to the nuanced perspectives of those jurists who were professionally involved in Wiedergutmachung matters.

1. The importance of the URO for the history of German reparations after World War II

The United Restitution Office (from 1954: United Restitution Organisation ⁸ ) was a Jewish legal aid organisation, founded in London in 1947/48. The driving force behind it was the Council of Jews from Germany, the organisation of the German-Jewish refugees in the United Kingdom. ⁹ These origins shaped the policies and the legal work of the URO. Its leading personnel took their inspiration more from the German-Jewish legal tradition than from Jewish jurists of Eastern-European origin like Raphael Lemkin and the brothers Jacob and Nehemiah Robinson who, beginning in the interwar period, pondered how ethnic minorities could be better protected. These scholars emigrated to the United States in 1940 where they came to shape the emerging field of international human rights, including reparations. ¹⁰ The early writings of these transatlantic ‘European Jewish rights-defenders’ have, however, left little trace in the communications of the URO, despite the thematical and temporal parallels. ¹¹

The goal of the newly created URO was to establish and enforce the legal rights of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazi terror who meanwhile, because of the persecution, overwhelmingly lived outside of Germany. Financial support for this new organisation initially came from the British Foreign Office as well as Jewish organisations in the UK, the United States and Israel/Palestine (American Joint Distribution Committee, Jewish Agency for Palestine, Central Jewish Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation). All of these organisations donated between 30,000 and 50,000 Pounds Sterling per year. ¹² Norman Bentwich, the long-time URO chairman, former first Attorney General to the British Mandate in Palestine, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and next to Adolph Brotman one of only two British Jews in the URO's executive board, pointedly recalled: ‘The Jewish philanthropic bodies in Israel, USA and England provided the means, and the German Jews provided the brains.’ ¹³

The first URO offices opened in the capital cities of the Western Allies, in Israel, in the three Western Zones of Occupation in Germany as well as in West Berlin. As Benjamin Ferencz remembered, setting up offices in the Western zones of Germany proved difficult, as the US Military Governor, General Lucius D. Clay, initially refused to grant the necessary permission ‘since he felt that the JRSO [Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, D.S.] could do the job’. ¹⁴ The situation in Israel was even more complex, as a significant part of the population was initially reluctant to accept ‘blood money’ from a state that regarded itself as a direct successor of the Third Reich. ¹⁵ Here, the URO soon had to compete with the Miltam, a semi-official organisation that dealt with individual claims from Israeli citizens and was affiliated with Israel's Ministry of Finance. ¹⁶

Over the following two decades, the URO grew into the biggest non-governmental organisation of its kind. In the 1950s, it operated 29 bureaus in 15 countries, some of them located as far away as South America, Asia and Australia. According to its own accounts from the late 1960s, the URO in its prime employed about 1,200 staff (among them 223 registered lawyers), helping more than 250,000 people in about 370,000 cases. As Bentwich explained in a brochure, all lawyers working for the URO outside of Germany were Jewish refugees from Europe, whereas many of the staff in the URO offices in Germany were non-Jewish Germans, often refugees from other parts of Europe and/or with an anti-fascist record. It is not yet known how many legal cases the URO represented overall, yet even a conservative estimate must assume at least 350,000 clients and 500,000 cases until the organisation ceased operations in 2009. ¹⁷

In the years 1954 to 1957, when the URO was in financial crisis due to its rapid expansion, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, founded in 1951 (in the following: Claims Conference), provided more than two and a half million US Dollars to the URO. Beginning in 1957, the latter's income was substantial enough to pay for its operations from its own bank accounts. ¹⁸ Unlike the Claims Conference, however, the URO's aim was not to dispute the Federal Republic of Germany over the biggest possible lump sums for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including their relatives and descendants. Instead, it advised and procured specialist lawyers who then took on individual cases in restitution procedures, to be handled by the restitution offices [Wiedergutmachungsämter] in the different federal states, or to be settled by the regular German or Allied courts. ¹⁹ For this service, the URO charged comparatively modest fees (between 5% and 9% of the value of the claim), and its clients only had to pay this fee when they were successful. ²⁰ Not only did low fees guarantee that everyone eligible for application could make a claim through the URO, but it also countered widespread rumours that Jewish lawyers were out to make a fortune by exploiting the hopes of the victims without delivering on their promises. ²¹

With this policy and its activities, the URO was vital for several hundred thousand Jewish claimants over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, who in the meantime, lived dispersed all over the globe because of forced migration under the Third Reich. According to an early URO statistic from late 1956, only eight years into the organisation's existence, around 80,000 Jewish survivors had already instructed the URO to represent their cases. Most of the organisation's clients lived in Israel (30,873) and the United States (25,898), followed by Canada (5,581), Great Britain (4,307), France (4,111) and South America (2,380). In South Africa, by contrast, it represented only 354 clients. ²² For all these people and their families, the URO was, firstly, a point of contact that was within reach (via the local URO offices in the different countries), and it could also be approached in the local language, if need be. In fact, as Sheer Ganor has recently argued, Wiedergutmachung ‘constructed channels through which individuals and groups could access their memories to assess their previous lives’; it became a ‘meeting point between memory and bureaucracy’. ²³ The URO's work contributed decisively to this social aspect of German indemnification; it thus went far beyond the legal work on individual claims. However, the memories it helped to produce were often highly ambivalent – not only because they often related to traumatic events, but also because, according to many claimants, compensation agencies at times distorted the historical record. ‘The production of true statements’, Regula Ludi observed, ‘was constrained by institutional rules and the functional logic of reparations procedures’. ²⁴ To be successful, the lawyers of the URO had the difficult task of using the individual memories of their clients and turning them into justiciable ‘truths’.

Secondly, the URO offered legal protection regardless of one's financial situation, responding to the problem of legitimate claims and their legal enforcement. Thirdly, it was a specialist organisation in the complicated and emerging field of restitution with links into West German politics and the judiciary. Leading experts of the URO shaped the policies and the legal framework of restitution, yet as this happened mostly behind the scenes, the URO kept a low profile in public. In a report from June 1957, it described its peculiar mission in the context of the early West German restitution legislation as follows: ‘The time has not yet come, and will perhaps never come, when this legal-political organisation can occupy itself solely with routine matters. In contrast to other legal aid societies URO's working basis is not one of old-established legislation, but one that had to be created specially and is partly in a state of constant growth and flux’. ²⁵

The URO also faced significant practical problems. ‘The URO is still pretty much of a mess and no quick panacea is possible’, despite ‘very substantial improvements in the past year and a half’, the URO's new director of operations, Benjamin Ferencz, remarked in July 1955. ²⁶ The frictions between the URO lawyers and their clients were also considerable. A URO report about its activities between 1954 and 1956 addresses this point by stating that

U.R.O. has to reckon with the psychological difficulties in the form of impatient clients. Illogical as it may appear, impatience grows with the rising trend of settled cases. Neighbours and friends have received their compensation: why not we? […] People with the experience of Auschwitz behind them, or the loss of property dating back to twenty years ago, are intractable pupils. The attempt of the U.R.O. lawyers to calm down clients is not made easier by the machinations of irresponsible and unqualified persons, who take it upon themselves to represent clients and promise them speedy success. ²⁷

Ferencz, who for a few years in the mid-1950 led the JRSO, the Claims Conference and the URO in personal union, likewise remembered that nearly all clients felt that they were getting ‘too little too late’, but that most of them nevertheless stuck with the URO as they lacked reliable alternatives. ²⁸

Financially speaking, the URO became a highly successful enterprise, which helped claim for its clients a total of more than 700 million US dollars by 1969 (which, at that time, amounted to roughly three billion German marks). Jewish refugees living in Israel received one-third of this amount. These payments, called Shilumim in Hebrew, helped many Jeckes make a living in Israel. ²⁹ The URO not only provided survivors with legal aid, but it also actively influenced the creation and implementation of restitution laws in West Germany. URO officials also engaged in background talks with government agencies, while directly trying to alter the jurisdiction in German courts. Of particular importance in this respect was a legal journal Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht (RzW, literally ‘Jurisdiction in Restitution Cases’), which the URO indirectly financed. This journal, edited by the German-Jewish lawyer Walter Schwarz, was published between 1949 and 1981 and quickly became an indispensable source of information for those jurists and legal experts practically involved in restitution affairs, who – despite their significant numbers in the post-war decades – remained somehow on the margins. The German jurist and critical Wiedergutmachung expert, Otto Küster, thus summed up the situation in 1967: ‘Das Wiedergutmachungsrecht liegt abseits, hat keine akademische Vertretung, wird überhaupt, einem Ghetto ähnich, von außen kaum betreten’. [The complex of reparation legislation is located off the beaten track, has no academic representation, is hardly ever entered from the outside, similar to a ghetto.] ³⁰

2. Shaping history: the URO and its politics of the past

In the following, I will provide three examples that demonstrate how the URO became actively involved in shaping the historiography of the Holocaust as well as the history of restitution and redress after 1945. I will argue that overall, we are confronted with a mixed picture: on the one hand, the URO was successful in influencing the early attempts to understand the complexities of the persecution of the European Jewry and the Holocaust – even if probably less than it would have wished for. On the other hand, its unwillingness to make public its role in the restitution procedures prevented the organisation from actively engaging in how the history of restitution has been written by historians since the 1970s. ³¹ In the long run, the largely hidden work of the URO contributed to what I see as a somehow distorted image of the actual drivers and actors on the Jewish side in the history of indemnification in Germany. The political side, represented by the Claims Conference, is usually in the spotlight, whereas the URO's day-to-day operations, which arguably had an even greater material effect for the survivors and their families, are commonly overlooked.

2.1 Expanding the understanding of the European dimensions of the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s

One of the success stories regarding the URO's politics of the past was that the organisation contributed to expanding knowledge about the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s. This was a vital task and decisive for the success of its operations. Among the German bureaucracy as well as in the courts, there was not only a widespread unwillingness to recognise the nature and the extent of the crimes committed under National Socialist rule (not least because of the complicity of many of those still in office, as is well known). ³² Furthermore, there was a lack of factual knowledge about key aspects and the nature of the Holocaust. ³³ Without such knowledge, decisions in restitution cases could not be adequate.

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg as well as the subsequent military tribunals had, by 1949, already compiled a large amount of information about the Nazi atrocities, yet – for political, but also for procedural reasons – the state bureaucracy of the early Federal Republic only reticently recognised these findings. ³⁴ Against this background, the URO created its own research department, headed by Dr Bruno Fischer, which was particularly active in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ³⁵ The research department produced several collections that contained reprints and transcriptions of official German state documents from the period 1933–1945 on the persecution of the Jews in Europe and North Africa. ³⁶ With these collections, the URO attempted to convince the German bureaucracy and the courts that the Holocaust in these regions and states had been orchestrated by the Germans (either as the occupiers or as Allies), so that legal responsibility to address and to ‘make good’ according to § 43 of the Bundesgesetz zur Entschädigung für Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung (BEG) could be assumed by Germany. As Kurt May, the chairman of the URO and director of the German main office in Frankfurt, wrote in 1962, this was a pressing problem since the relevant jurisdiction in the different German federal states was inconsistent and thus prevented any kind of legal certainty for both the clients of the URO and for German bureaucracy. ³⁷ Many of the URO's clients who had been persecuted by the Nazis had therefore missed out on early Wiedergutmachung payments as they had lived outside the borders of the Third Reich in 1937. The URO's historical initiatives had thus very practical relevance for the scale of its operations and their chance to win compensation for their clients – in particular if they were able to convince the authorities that Nazi Germany had ‘instigated’ the persecution of Jews in officially independent Allied states like, for example, Romania, Bulgaria and (until 1944) Hungary. ³⁸

The URO had acquired the historical documents for these collections through different official and unofficial channels that are impossible to reconstruct today, given the lack of relevant archival material. Some came from state publications of the 1930s and 1940s, were copied in state archives or made available to the URO via the Allied governments or other Jewish organisations. Other documents seemed to have been collected by people with privileged access to the archives, as they were not yet as freely available as today. The URO confirmed only in vague terms that it had ‘painstakingly collected’ many of these documents. ³⁹ Its collections were first and foremost meant to serve the judiciary and the German ministries as well as Wiedergutmachungsämter, or restitution offices. They were not available to the wider public but were rather recommendations. As their circulation numbers are unknown, it is hard to assess their impact on the German judiciary. There is, however, some evidence that this enterprise was at least partly successful. In 1961, Kurt May emphasised in a letter that a representative in the German Ministry of Finance had publicly thanked the URO for ‘providing the Finance Ministry with such a huge amount of [historical] documents’. May was even confident enough to claim at the time that in West Germany ‘it would be difficult to find a judge willing to preside over a case of general historical importance without getting in touch with us’. ⁴⁰ One year later, he even proclaimed that because of the URO document collections ‘the truth about a dark chapter of German history prevailed also in the realm of Wiedergutmachung’. ⁴¹

With hindsight, this seems an unusually optimistic picture that does not necessarily fit the assessment of other contemporary observers. The SPD politician Adolf Arndt, for example, had only a few years earlier lamented that the German state bureaucracy would actually take pride in ‘savings’ it had managed in indemnification payments, and that there was no other area where similar economies were ‘achieved’. ⁴² It took until 1965 (BEG-Schlussgesetz) to clarify that all Jews who had been persecuted in South-eastern Europe between 6 April 1941 (the beginning of the Wehrmacht's Balkan campaign) and the final defeat of the Third Reich, and who meanwhile settled in Israel or a Western state, were in principle eligible to receive compensation payments. ⁴³ However, May's statements can serve as an indicator that there was some willingness on the German side to adopt arguments from the URO and to come to agreements that would facilitate restitution. This was also the view of Franz Calvelli-Adorno, Senatspräsident of the second chamber of the Oberlandesgericht [district court] in Frankfurt until his retirement in 1962 where he dealt with restitution cases. ⁴⁴ In a short article praising the URO's documentation work in the Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht journal, Calvelli-Adorno emphasised the high quality and alleged ‘impartiality’ of the URO's document collection. This work had decisively contributed to an ‘objective establishment of the truth’, he claimed. ⁴⁵ When commissioned by the journal editor, Walter Schwarz, to review these document collections, Calvelli-Adorno had insisted that his article should only be published after his retirement (1962), probably to avoid critical reactions from his colleagues and being accused of partisanship. ⁴⁶ This is another sign of how carefully even leading proponents of restitution avoided the spotlight.

It seems adequate to deduce that the URO partly succeeded in promising legal certainty against the German acknowledgement of legal responsibility for the Holocaust, not only in the Third Reich but also in German-occupied territories, which provided the basis for subsequent and extended compensation payments. This strategy became even more important in the second ‘wave’ of Holocaust restitution cases from the 1990s, which then also involved corporations and banks in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. ⁴⁷ Still, the impact of these URO document collections on debates and discourses among historians and even more so in the wider public remained extremely limited, partly because they revealed their significance only to those able to understand the context of their production. For other readers, they must have appeared as collections of historical sources that offered little (explicit) narrative. Yet the limited impact of these document collections on the wider discussions of the Nazi past was also the fault of the professional historians and specialist journalists. In Germany, the new discipline of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history, was initially more concerned with the perpetrators of Nazi violence than with its victims, particularly if these victims had been non-Germans. ⁴⁸ As Nicolas Berg has forcefully argued, Jewish scholars were systematically marginalised or excluded from professional discussions altogether. ⁴⁹ The European and global dimension of the Holocaust, stressed by the URO and URO-sponsored authors like the young Israeli Max Münz in the late 1950s, would only become an important topic for historical research decades later. ⁵⁰ Regular contacts between URO leaders and the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History seemed to have been established only in the late-1960s, when a new generation of historians like Hans Buchheim and Martin Broszat came to institutional power. ⁵¹

Yet one can also question whether the URO and other successor organisations had chosen the right strategy by carefully avoiding an open fight for their goals and not becoming visible public actors. In a social and political climate that was in general hostile to restitution and redress payments, ⁵² the URO concentrated on influencing key figures in German politics and in the bureaucracy. There were good reasons for such a political strategy, but this came at a cost. In favouring a dialogue of experts, usually behind closed doors, the URO not only demonstrated a lack of faith in the possible mentality change of the German population (since lack of faith was widespread among all social strata), but it also underestimated the power of the public sphere to shape politics. When a few years later a new generation of Germans started to question the public consensus of denial and concealment of the immediate post-war years, the URO missed out on these possible allies. Consequently, when the moral tone of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse intensified, this development remained somehow disconnected to the earlier efforts and legal battles of the 1950s and 1960s. ⁵³ This strategy also contributed to confining the survivors of the Holocaust exclusively to the roles of victims of Nazi terror; their post-war biographies with their traumas, but also their hard-won successes, remained on the margins of public consciousness in the Federal Republic. The German-Jewish post-war community in the diaspora stood isolated from debates within Germany and were disconnected from the emerging Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse in their former homeland. ⁵⁴

2.2 The URO and the historiography of indemnification: a missed opportunity?

The fact that the history of the URO is not yet widely known is thus no coincidence but a direct consequence of the organisation's own handling of its past and its policy of not addressing the wider public in Germany, Britain or the United States. This decision was initially more accidental than deliberate. Matters of the day took precedent over image control, and rightly so given the tasks and challenges the URO faced. Tens of thousands of claimants waited for compensation payments and possibly ‘justice’, often impatiently; history could wait. URO's clients in the 1950s and 1960s would certainly not have appreciated colourful brochures trumpeting the organisation's successes, as would later become fashionable in the business world and common for non-governmental organisations.

Indicative of the early tendency to concentrate on the legal present and not its place in historiography is what Hermann Müller, the outgoing director of URO's New York Office, wrote in a booklet, produced for the annual meeting of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe in 1964. His address was entitled ‘That were the years that were’: The Past in Review. Regarding the public acceptance of the restitution laws and practices implemented in Germany after 1945, Müller's views were highly pessimistic: ‘It is an undeniable fact that a large segment of the German populace has not yet, or at least not sufficiently, grasped the meaning of the indemnification program. This lack of understanding has become more and more evident in the course of the last few months during the debates and discussions on the forthcoming final amendments to the indemnification and restitution laws’. ⁵⁵

Against this backdrop, one possible reaction from the URO would have been to intensify its public relations in Germany and beyond, and to publicly fight for – to paraphrase Müller's words – the ‘correct’ meaning of the indemnification efforts. But this did not happen, or at least not openly. Even regarding its own operations and their consequences, URO representatives did not say or write much in and for the public. Hermann Müller, in that address from 1964, had very little to say on URO's operations and their significance. He pointed out that the URO's ‘research work and its publications have greatly benefitted the general public. This aspect of URO's work went far beyond the original purpose for which URO was founded namely to aid needy Jewish victims in the prosecution of their individual claims’. ⁵⁶ However, he did not explain further how precisely the public had ‘greatly benefitted’ and where the URO's work mattered beyond the handling of individual claims.

This is not to say that the URO just let things happen. Behind the scenes, the URO and the Claims Conference closely followed public debates in the field and intervened when they deemed it necessary, for instance, in the early 1960s, when Hannah Arendt published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, based on her reporting for The New Yorker, and Raul Hilberg published his seminal study The Destruction of the European Jews. ⁵⁷ In both cases, the representatives of the URO were alarmed, as they believed that the discussion of Jewish agency, and in particular the role of the Judenräte and Jewish agency during the Holocaust, would provide the opponents of restitution payments with new ammunition. ⁵⁸ The cumbersome ‘victory’ – that the West German governments had ultimately accepted German responsibility for the Holocaust in formerly German-occupied European and North African territories – was at risk, or so the URO leaders believed.

To prevent this from happening, Kurt May wrote to Hannah Arendt on 4 April 1963, explaining the historical work of the URO and offering to send the URO's collections of documents. He hoped that, after reading these documents, Arendt would correct some of the factual errors in her forthcoming book regarding the persecution and murder of the Jews in Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania that the URO had spotted in her articles for the New Yorker. ⁵⁹ More important to May, however, was to prevent a positive reception of the book in Germany, which he believed would be dangerous for the Jewish cause. He wrote to Arendt with a mixture of adulation and moral pressure, appealing to her responsibility as a Jew:

Ihr Name, sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Arendt, bedeutet für die deutsche Öffentlichkeit wesentlich mehr als die Namen dieser hier fremden Historiker [Taylor and Hoggan, D.S.]. ⁶⁰ Man wird sich hier mit großer Genugtuung auf das Buch einer jüdischen Autorin berufen, wenn es sich um die Beurteilung der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgungsmaßnahmen gegen Juden im Ausland handelt. Mit Ihrem Buch würde geradezu eine neue Geschichtslegende eingeleitet, nicht nur zum Schaden Deutschlands! ⁶¹ [Your name, dear Dr Arendt, means much more to the German public than the names of those historians (Taylor and Hoggan, D.S.) who are foreign here. One will refer here with great satisfaction to the book of a Jewish author when it comes to judging the National Socialist measures of persecution against Jews abroad. Your book would virtually introduce a new historical legend, not only to the detriment of Germany!]

In the following years, the URO and its representatives, Kurt May in Frankfurt, Norman Bentwich and Hans Reichman in London and Hans Tramer in Tel Aviv, engaged in a veritable transnational campaign against what they regarded as Arendt's dangerous misinterpretation of history. They even planned the production of an ‘Anti-Arendt brochure’ in German and English, the former to be distributed to leading newspapers and media outlets in Germany and Switzerland. ⁶² It was as much a fight about factual correctness as it was about the prerogative of historical interpretation among Jews in the United States and Western Europe, as a sardonic remark by Robert W. Kempner, the former assistant US chief counsel at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, makes plain. In a letter to Reichmann from 18 May 1963, he sarcastically wrote: ‘“Gut” wird die Sache erst, wenn sich die Deutsche Soldatenzeitung dieser Vertreterin [of the Jewish cause, i.e. Arendt, D.S.] annimmt. Vielleicht würde ein Kuss von dieser Seite das Beste sein’. [Things will only become ‘good’ if the Deutsche Soldatenzeitung takes on this representative of the Jewish cause. Perhaps a kiss from this side would be the best!] ⁶³ He even recommended an investigation into the impact of Arendt's admiration for Martin Heidegger, the ‘former Freiburg professor of philosophy’ and well-known antisemite, on her Eichmann book. ⁶⁴ That Arendt had long since and unmistakeably distanced herself from Heidegger did not seem to matter in this poisoned atmosphere.

2.3 The controversy with the Lawyer Walter Schwarz in the 1970s and 1980s

A final example allows for another glimpse behind the scenes. In the URO files in the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem (CAHJP), there are no less than 10 folders of correspondence and documents that the URO exchanged with Walter Schwarz, the long-time editor of Rechtsprechung zum Wiedergutmachungsrecht. Schwarz was also the editor of the seven volumes of Die Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts durch die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, co-edited with the West German Federal Ministry of Finance and only completed long after Schwarz's death in 1988. ⁶⁵ With these volumes, Schwarz attempted to produce nothing less than ‘the historical fountain of knowledge for future generations’, as he wrote in his autobiography in 1981. He rightly anticipated that the ‘reality of Wiedergutmachung’ that constituted of laws, regulations and legal verdicts would soon become an incomprehensible pile of documents, a ‘jungle’ that only the diminishing number of legal practitioners involved in restitution cases would be able to find their way through. ‘Archaeological expeditions with doctoral students’, he assumed, would then be the only way to rediscover this strange territory, sunken into oblivion. ⁶⁶

As expected, the URO closely followed the development of Schwarz's book project with the German government. In fact, Kurt May and Schwarz had been corresponding about legal, political and Jewish matters ever since the 1950s. Their relationship was close but complicated. Undoubtedly, Schwarz – who was not part of the URO, but a lawyer working on his own account – was extremely valuable for the organisation for three reasons: first, as one the best legal experts in all things restitution and as the editor of the journal; second, as a sympathetic partner of the URO with whom delicate issues could be discussed in semi-private; and third, as a possible bridge-builder to the German authorities since Schwarz cultivated extremely good relations with many members of the German judiciary and civil servants in the ministries.

However, both men also disagreed, and their initial trust finally gave way to mutual suspicion and hostility. As early as 1961, Schwarz wrote in a personal letter to May in which he stated that it was unfortunate that only few people in Germany knew about the URO's historical departments and its valuable work. ⁶⁷ May did not fully agree, but a year later conceded in a letter to Schwarz that he could not think of a better person than Schwarz himself to write the history of Wiedergutmachung from a Jewish perspective one day. ⁶⁸ Soon, however, the director of the URO accused Schwarz of selling Jewish interests out to the Germans by promoting too positive a view of the achievements of the restitution legislation and practice. When Schwarz was made a consultant to the United Nations on indemnification matters in the mid-1980s, the URO and the Claims Conference were concerned, as they feared he could praise the German efforts and achievements in restitution and reparations matters, which would in turn weaken their own position in current and future disputes. ⁶⁹ Schwarz, by contrast, was deeply disappointed with what he regarded as the URO's unwillingness to leave a ‘self-chosen ghetto’ and its reluctance to become part of the official German narrative of restitution as an overall success story – a view embraced by Schwarz, who regarded it as a ‘lasting achievement of the Germans in the Federal Republic’ and ‘of historic rank’. ⁷⁰

Things were a bit more complicated, however. In 1969, Kurt May admitted in a confidential letter to the pioneering Holocaust researcher and jurist Jacob Robinson, the author of a controversial book in which he harshly criticised Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann's personality and mental disposition, ⁷¹ that Schwarz – a Zionist since his youth – had indeed first approached the Claims Conference via Nahum Goldmann, the president of the Jewish World Congress, for financial support to realise his ambitious series about the history of German reparations, but to no avail. He had not even received a proper answer, May knew. Only because of this rejection had he started looking for other partners to help him realise the project that was so dear to him. ⁷²

There were other reasons why the Jewish organisations did not engage with this project. Kurt May addressed two of them in a ‘highly confidential’ letter to Schwarz in July 1969. The first reason had to do with inner-Jewish rivalries and mistrust, as May explained. He argued that the brothers Nehemiah and Jacob Robinson, both originally from Lithuania, in previous years had demonstrated a strong resentment against all Jews from Germany and for this reason alone would strongly resent the idea of a history of Wiedergutmachung written and financed by the Federal Republic. In fact, he explained, they had claimed for themselves a kind of monopoly on any writing about the history of indemnification. ⁷³ However, with Nehemiah's death and Jacob's age at 75 in 1969, the issue no longer seemed to constitute a real problem, May explained. The second reason he gave was more pressing. In his eyes, there was simply a lack of qualified people in and around the Claims Conference who, by the late 1960s, would still possess the ‘knowledge, the experience and above all the industriousness’ to take on such a job. May regarded Saul Kagan as a possible candidate from an intellectual point of view, yet he noted that Kagan would be busy with his successful banking business. Ernst Katzenstein from the Claims Conference would be well-informed but overworked and could at most serve as a consultant. Nahum Goldmann would not be a suited at all, May believed. ⁷⁴ He would have never made these arguments public, of course, yet they shed light on the complex combination of factors that prevented what Schwarz initially had in mind, namely a combination of German and Jewish experts working on a joint book project under his editorship.

The relationship between May and Schwarz deteriorated further in the 1970s and 1980s, when it became clear that Schwarz would rely – partly out of necessity, partly because of increasing ideological differences – more on the German authorities than on his Jewish networks. The longer Schwarz was working on the history of restitution and indemnification, the more he seemed to side with the official German position. For example, in a letter to Kurt May from 27 December 1976, he wrote about what he had (allegedly) found out while working in the National Archives in the USA:

Ich werde eine Legende zerstören: die RE [Restitution, D.S.] ist nicht, wie so oft gesagt wird, von der US-Militärregierung den Deutschen aufgezwungen worden, sondern sie war eine deutsche Idee, die der Zustimmung der US bedurfte. Die jüdischen Organisationen hängten sich alsbald hinein. Sie erpressten solche Forderungen, dass die Deutschen sie nicht mehr akzeptieren konnten. In der Entschädigung war es ähnlich. Hier allerdings brachten die US gewisse Pläne mit. ⁷⁵ [I will destroy a legend: The restitution was not, as is so often said, forced on the Germans by the U.S. military government, but it was a German idea that required U.S. approval. The Jewish organisations soon joined in. They extorted such demands that the Germans could no longer accept them. It was similar in compensation matters. Here, however, the US had certain plans.]

In his letter, Schwarz did not offer any evidence for this bold claim, which even seemed to play into antisemitic stereotypes. His friend Otto Küster, writing in his eulogy for Schwarz, briefly mentioned that the latter was indeed convinced that the pioneering restitution law in the U.S. American zone of occupation must be understood as the result of – in Schwarz’ words – a ‘genuine constructive collaboration between the victors and the vanquished’. Schwarz even claimed in the early 1980s that ‘an American who still speaks of coercion today’ would deny ‘the most precious thing that his nation brought into world history with its birth: a living democracy’. ⁷⁶ What Schwarz will have regarded as intellectual honesty, May and others interpreted as a sign of anti-Americanism and ingratitude in the face of the Western Allies’ early commitment to request the Germans to return Jewish property and pay indemnification.

The intellectual development of both men, Schwarz and May, at a more advanced age was characteristic for two different paths of German-Jewish relations in the post-war decades. Schwarz was an idealist who regarded the whole process of restitution and redress after 1945 as a German ‘catharsis’, a great moral purification from Nazi evil. ⁷⁷ He ultimately made his peace with the Federal Republic and felt deeply honoured when the German president Richard von Weizsäcker thanked him personally in a letter from 1986 for his services to German-Jewish reconciliation and its contribution to the reconstruction of a democratic legal system in West Germany. ⁷⁸ Wiedergutmachung, Schwarz replied in an extremely polite letter, was the ‘fortune of my lifetime’ – a possibility to develop his talents and to use them in a meaningful way. In his own view, Schwarz had resisted ‘the temptation of using the comfortable one-way street’ as ‘the self-declared angels of revenge’ had done it – a sideswipe at Jewish legal organisations such as the Claims Conference and the URO, whom he accused of at times pursuing a one-sided pressure-group politics. ⁷⁹ He was unhappy, for example, that these organisations advocated for an extensive interpretation of the criteria for ‘belonging to the German cultural and linguistic sphere’, as defined in the BEG from 1956, which worked as a ‘backdoor’ for many persecuted Jews who had lived outside the Third Reich in 1937 to finally get access to Wiedergutmachung payments. ⁸⁰

May, by contrast, became increasingly sceptical, not only of the trustworthiness of West German democracy but also of trends in the ‘Western world’ more generally, in particular from the 1970s. ⁸¹ He did not share the abstract and ultimately naïve idealism of his counterpart and agreed with Ferencz who proposed an alternative reading to Schwarz's idea of ‘catharsis’ by seeing it better as ‘justice imposed over general German opposition’. ⁸² For May, the divide between West German society and the Jews was not overcome but rather deepened during his time as director of the URO in Frankfurt. As a person, he was compassionate, diligent, hard-working and reliable, a man of compromise and mediation who avoided open confrontation and the spotlight of the media. ⁸³ With these qualities, he was the right man to take part in the complicated negotiations between Jewish organisations and the German governments in the 1950s and 1960s; but he was less suited to fight for the URO's place in the historiography of the Holocaust.

3. Conclusion: URO's Vergangenheitspolitik and its limits

This article has demonstrated that it is not only the organisational history of the URO that requires a more detailed account; its politics of the past and its active contribution to Holocaust research also deserves greater recognition. The article suggested three distinct periods in the URO's Vergangenheitspolitik: the first period covered the 1950s in which the URO was pro-active and played a leading role in the political implementation of the Wiedergutmachung legislation. It also disseminated detailed knowledge about the Holocaust to serve the interests of its clients. In the second period, ranging from the late-1950s to the early-1970s, the URO became more cautious, partly because its leaders thought that it was not advisable to risk what had been so far politically achieved and partly because it had to balance the diverse interests of Jewish groups in Germany, Israel and the United States. This was followed by a third period beginning in the 1970s in which the URO was largely passive – not in its daily operations for its clients, but in questioning whether and how it should actively shape political and social debates about restitution and indemnification. When the first official and academic studies about the history of restitution emerged from the late 1960s, the URO deliberately kept its distance. Consequently, its role in today's histories of restitution and indemnification is still underexplored.

It goes without saying that the URO lawyers, by the standards of their profession, had to act in the best interests of their clients and had to adopt their strategies to adjust to varying political and legal circumstances. However, these standards alone do not fully explain the attitudes and changing politics of the URO leadership over the three periods, as outlined above. One additional reason was generational. The URO was an enterprise driven by a particular cohort of German-Jewish lawyers for whom it provided an opportunity to personally ‘come to terms’ with the interruptions of their pre-1933 careers and their own persecution during the Third Reich. ⁸⁴ In the post-war period, their legal expertise as well as their intimate knowledge of the German language and customs allowed them to act as transnational citizen diplomats, successfully mediating between the different parties and interest groups, governments and non-governmental organisations. ⁸⁵ This was a unique constellation that could not and did not last. For most of these Jewish jurists, their practical experience with their German peers, politicians and the administrators of the German Wiedergutmachung lead to an increasing scepticism and ultimately disappointment – despite the undisputedly impressive results that they obtained for their clients. They did not join in on the self-congratulatory tone that began to dominate the official German discourse on Wiedergutmachung as early as the 1960s, and they actively side-lined the Jewish jurist Walter Schwarz who believed in the catharsis of reparations and compensation legislation. The dream of a renewed German-Jewish symbiosis, so important for the identity of the liberal German Jews until well into the first years of the Nazi dictatorship, ⁸⁶ was over and could not be revived, even among those who had returned to live in West Germany for professional or personal reasons. This sense of an ending contributed to the URO's lack of ambition to write itself in the new German – but also international – reparation narrative, along with more practical factors like the lack of properly qualified successors within the organisation. These lawyers were the last of their kind, and they knew it. Against this background, it seems even more vital to analyse and to tell the history of this organisation in the twenty-first century, not least as a lesson that social and political relevance and one's place in history do not necessarily match.