Reparations and restitution have long been a marginal subject of historical research, even in the Federal Republic of Germany. Until the early 1990s, legal, diplomatic and institutional history dominated the field. Early studies provided important information on how the Federal Republic dealt with the legacies of Nazi crimes and the general awareness of the Holocaust in the post-war era.
1
Not least because its authors had only limited access to the archives, they often reflected the official perspective of indemnification, most prominently documented in the multi-volume collection on West German reparations that had been edited since the 1970s by the German–Jewish legal expert Walter Schwarz in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Finance.
2
This only began to change in the late 1980s, when research perspectives shifted against the backdrop of resurging restitution claims and a new sensitivity for survivors’ traumatisation. Historical studies broached new subjects such as the daily practices of compensation administrations. Research also inquired encounters between claimants and defendants in restitution courts.
3
The global character of Holocaust litigation stimulated interest in the transnational dimensions of reparations.
4
These new research perspectives dovetailed the period's dedication to transitional justice, apologies and reparatory politics.
5
Beginning in the early 2000s, students of reparations for Holocaust victims increasingly gained access to hitherto restricted source material.
6
Recently declassified records, such as individual compensation files, allowed for new insights into the daily handling of claims and the difficulties claimants had in navigating the intricacies of restitution and compensation legislation.
7
Documenting the recollections of persecuted individuals as well as their grappling with abuses and traumas, these records also turned out to be important sources for the history of Nazi persecution as well as Holocaust memory.
8
This coalesced with new trends in the historiography of the Holocaust. In the first volume of his monumental survey, which appeared in 1997, Saul Friedländer pioneered an integrated history of the Jewish genocide by avoiding a narrow focus on either perpetrators or victims and transcending previous antagonism between intentionalist and functionalist approaches.
9
Unlike earlier Holocaust studies, Friedländer heavily relied on ego-documents produced during the years of persecution and extermination to explore a broad variety of responses from victims, neighbours, beneficiaries and participants in acts of violence. Emotionally raw and without the temporal distance that allows for extensive reflection like in many later recollections, Friedländer used first-hand eyewitness accounts to document the shock and horror Jewish victims and uninvolved civilians experienced in the wake of unimaginable atrocities.
10
With the rise of integrated history and victim-centred perspectives, the files of reparations and restitution procedures gained new significance as records documenting the experience of survivors. Like all statements originating in institutional and bureaucratic procedures, however, the files do not give unmitigated access to the individual histories of the survivors but are structured by the rules and requirements of the administration of claims and, therefore, point to the imbalance of power between officials and claimants. All these factors contribute to how claimants organise their recollections which thus impacts the resulting representations of the Holocaust. These characteristics, however, do not principally distinguish these sources from the records of criminal trials, a category of documents that have long dominated Holocaust historiography.
11
Unlike the reparations archives, the significance of court proceedings and their records have long been recognised and are well established in the historiography of the Holocaust. On the one hand, beginning with the first trials against perpetrators, the evidence collected and collated by prosecutors has constituted an important body of records available to students of the Holocaust. Older research often heavily relied on the vast collection of Nazi records that the advancing Allies in 1944/45 had confiscated in Germany and placed at the disposal of the International Military Tribunal and the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Serving the indictment of Germany's top war criminals, ‘documentation generated by perpetrators’ provided rich source material for the investigation of the Holocaust.
12
As Anna Corsten demonstrates in her contribution to this special issue, pioneer Holocaust historians such as Raul Hilberg and Henry Friedlander prioritised this type of archival material over testimonies from victims and eyewitnesses. Their reliance on court records emphasised the bureaucratic organisation and execution of extermination policies and favoured interpretations of the Holocaust as an ‘administrative massacre’ (Hannah Arendt).
13
Similarly, perpetrator history benefited from interrogation protocols which opened up new avenues for questioning the agency and mental disposition of executioners, the men and women engaging in the daily routine of murder and violence.
14
On the other hand, criminal trials not only provided source material but also shaped representations of the Holocaust including underlying interpretations.
15
The Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg clearly pursued a didactic and, to some extent, propagandistic end. Robert Kempner is frequently quoted with the bon mot that the IMT was ‘the greatest history seminar ever held’.
16
Its actual significance for the memory and the awareness of the Holocaust, however, is controversial. Historians such as Donald Bloxham blamed the trial for distorting and even obfuscating the memory of Jewish suffering.
17
Devin Pendas concluded that the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s ‘helped to fragment, rather than conceptually organize, the Holocaust’ by isolating it from German history.
18
Without denying misrepresentations, legal scholar Lawrence Douglas came to a more positive assessment of Nuremberg and considered it an exercise ‘in collective pedagogy’.
19
Until the 1970s, there was also a strong interdependence between historiography and criminal trials in Germany. With the demand for expert opinions, court cases stimulated historical research. According to Dieter Pohl, a whole generation of German historians who specialised in Nazi crimes provided their expertise for prosecutors at some point or other in their careers, most prominently the staff researchers at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (IfZ). Beginning in the late 1950s, criminal trials became a driving force of Holocaust historiography, with the result that ‘today's German Holocaust historians have to acknowledge that they stand on the shoulders of the prosecutors’ work of the 1960s and 1970s’.
20
According to a more recent study on the role of historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, this had the ambivalent effect that the reports by historians ‘were framed by prosecutors and designed to achieve successful legal outcomes’.
21
While interconnections between criminal trials, historiography and public Holocaust awareness have long been a topic of historical investigation and reflection, this is not the case with reparations. This appears, in part, to be a consequence of marginal public interest in the politics and practice of restitution. Apart from key events such as the 1952 Luxembourg agreement (which fuelled emotions in Israel and Germany alike), the German debates of the 1980s about the ‘forgotten victims’ or the more recent Holocaust litigation of the 1990s, the topic of restitution usually failed to capture public attention.
22
Along with the German public's general disinterest in the topic, reparations have not been a major theme of historical investigation because keeping the issue out of the spotlight was a deliberate tactic on the part of Jewish organisations involved in indemnification proceedings. Daniel Siemens’ contribution to this special issue demonstrates this precisely through his examination of the United Restitution Organisation (URO). Historians were occasionally asked to serve as experts in restitution and compensation cases, yet historical research has so far not yet addressed the question of the interdependencies between Holocaust studies and reparations practices.
23
Only now are the pioneering attempts made in the early 1950s to use reparations files for historical analysis being recognised, as Gideon Reuveni's article shows. By and large, however, the impact of reparations and restitution on historiography, memory and awareness of the Holocaust remains largely unexplored, even at a time when almost all proceedings have been completed.
24
This is even more remarkable given the lively contemporary debates on other claims to redress historical wrongs, especially the fact that reparations have become an important entry point into conversations about the unfinished tasks of decolonisation.
25
Against this backdrop, the six contributors to this special issue address the following questions. (1) How did restitution and reparations practices impact the historiography and our understanding of the Holocaust? What previously unknown documents and historical facts did they produce? What research questions did they stimulate? (2) How do historians use the documentary evidence collected by restitution and reparations agencies for the purposes of Holocaust scholarship, and what methodological challenges do they face when working with such collections? (3) Are there specific events that contributed to new knowledge of the Holocaust or promoted a key shift in the interpretation of events, such as the controversies over the ‘forgotten victims’ in the Federal Republic of Germany or the international restitution campaigns of the 1990s? (4) What has been the role of historians in specific reparations and restitution procedures, not only regarding the Nazi past, but more broadly? In exploring these questions from various angles, the authors propose new and original ways to address the relationship between reparations and Holocaust historiography and to contribute to the contemporary history of law and legal practices.
26
The first two articles focus on the practice of property restitution in the 1950s and 1960s, its social dynamics and historiographical consequences. Iris Nachum questions the significance of a set of records that usually do not figure in the historiography of the Holocaust. By focussing her attention on the West German ‘Equalisation of Burdens Law’, the legislation designed to alleviate economic hardship suffered by the millions of German expellees from Central and Eastern Europe, she argues that analysing the allocation of benefits to this category of claimants generates new knowledge of the Holocaust. The cases that are concerned with property that expellees had acquired during the Nazi period by means of ‘Aryanisation’ provide particular information on the dispossession of Jews in these parts of Europe and, at the same time, reveal how the authorities responsible for the implementation of the Equalisation of Burdens Law responded to claims involving Aryanised assets. Nachum highlights the new problems these procedures raised for the authorities but also discusses how a reconstruction of these problems challenges the current historiography of Aryanisation. She thereby reveals how property issues in the post-war period functioned as a prism to frame the entangled history of these emotionally fraught legacies of the recent past.
Eva Balz reads the decisions of the Oberstes Rückerstattungsgericht für Berlin (Supreme Restitution Court for Berlin) as historical sources and argues that their analysis contributes to a better understanding of how early interpretations of the Holocaust developed. At the time, a selection of decisions was published in order to justify the court's work on the controversial topic of restitution in the eyes of the general public, but even more so to be of practical use for judges, lawyers and claimants. Balz highlights that the decisions entailed distinct narratives about the Third Reich that above all stressed the importance of authoritative political structures and identified state agencies and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) as main actors. The accounts given in the decisions were partly based on analyses of historical records that were performed either by the judges themselves or by historians working for the IfZ. Referring to the inherent logic of legal discourse on restitution, Balz suggests that, on a broader societal level, the decisions contributed to the dissemination of state-centred ideas about the Holocaust which impacted the priorities of early historiography. Her contribution also draws attention to the complicated genesis of these verdicts. Situating the emergence of the decisions in the context of the implementation of very recent restitution laws, the intensifying Cold War in Berlin and an emerging German as well as Allied Vergangenheitspolitik, she demonstrates that the court's preference to promulgate state-focussed historical concepts, to a large extent, resulted from practical considerations, not least the judges’ desire to lessen their significant workloads and to protect themselves from the interference of political actors.
The following three contributions analyse the interrelationship between reparations practices, law and historiography in a medium- and long-term perspective. The focus of Anna Corsten's article is the impact of reparations practices on academic historiography. She examines the ways in which historians viewed and used restitution and compensation cases as part of their academic writings and investigates how that changed between the 1950s and 2000s. Internationally leading historians of the Holocaust such as Raul Hilberg and Henry Friedlander engaged with key criminal trials for their work but rarely considered the complex nature of the material produced by reparations and restitution procedures. This is surprising as both Friedlander and Hilberg were survivors, and at least Friedlander had filed for reparations himself. Their remarkable omission indicates how these historians perceived these proceedings. Hilberg mainly used press reports to depict restitution and reparations practices. Like Friedlander, he also looked at the legal decisions made by the authorities. Corsten's article analyses why these historians were reluctant to use the documents and files these proceedings produced. They both judged compensation proceedings from a moral and very personal standpoint. Their highly critical assessment of reparations and restitution practices, and specifically of the outcome of individual proceedings, shaped the way in which they wrote Holocaust history to a much higher degree than has generally been acknowledged. Overall, the article provides important insights into the question of why academic historiography had abandoned sources produced in these processes for many decades.
Daniel Siemens examines the politics of the past of the URO, a Jewish legal aid organisation that was founded in London in 1947/48 by German exile jurists. Originally called United Restitution Office, this organisation quickly grew into a major player in restitution matters, operating no less than 29 bureaus in 15 countries by the end of the 1950s. Based on three case studies, Siemens demonstrates how the URO became actively involved in early research on the Holocaust and in the history of restitution and redress. Although the URO was successful in influencing early attempts to understand the complexities of the persecution of the European Jewry and the Holocaust, its unwillingness to make its role public in restitution procedures prevented the organisation from actively engaging in how the history of restitution would be written by historians from the 1970s onwards. In a social and political climate that had long been hostile to restitution and redress payments, the URO concentrated on influencing key figures in German politics and in the bureaucracy. In favouring a dialogue of experts, usually behind closed doors, the URO not only demonstrated their lack of faith in a possible change in the German public's mentality, but it also underestimated the power of the public sphere in shaping politics. In the long run, this strategic decision by the URO contributed to a 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 had a significant effect on the survivors and their families, are commonly overlooked.
Gideon Reuveni is likewise interested in the interplay between individual compensation claims and historical research. His case study of the Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945 (Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945) reveals how a pioneering group of young German historians used compensation claims files as a historical source material as early as the second half of the 1950s. Funded by the Berlin city lottery, with overheads covered by the Berlin Ministry of the Interior, the task of this research group was to conduct a significant study of persecution and resistance in Berlin during the Nazi period and to draft an authoritative report on the subject for the general public. In terms of its approach and methods, the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 was ahead of its time. If only for a brief period, their initial idea of using the experience of individual victims as a starting point for the depiction of Nazi persecution and the opposition against it made compensation claims files a valuable historical source. Some of its researchers such as Wolfgang Scheffler subsequently became pioneers of West German Holocaust historiography. An analysis of this group's activities and their ultimate failure provides a better understanding of the challenges of working with personal compensation claims as historical documents and contributes to reassessing the place of German reparations in Holocaust studies and Holocaust memory.
Finally, the article by Bianca Gaudenzi illustrates the role played by cultural restitution in bringing about the first substantial changes in the political and public awareness of Italy's anti-Jewish persecutions after the end of the Cold War. The focus of her contribution is the interplay of restitution campaigns and historiographical advances since the 1980s. Post-war Italy was an exceptional case in turning the restitution of national collections into a moment of cathartic rebirth while largely ignoring the fascists’ persecution of Italian Jewry and their colonial subjects. The article demonstrates that the conflation of international and domestic factors proved crucial in pushing Italy as well as several other countries to start an (albeit partial) confrontation with their antisemitic past. Restitution constituted only a piece of this puzzle, but a crucial one, as it afforded the opportunity to document the involvement of many Italians in the persecution of their fellow citizens and to highlight the state's responsibilities for the deportations. Internationally, it provided a platform for voicing some of the most explicit admissions of accountability which had, until that point, found little if any space in the domestic realm. Therefore, restitution, in many cases a transnational endeavour, became one of the most visible ways for the Jewish communities in Italy to exercise their political weight on a national level and to push the Italian state and society to publicly recognise and partially address the wrongs of the past, which, slowly but surely, also had an impact on national historiography.
Overall, the six contributions in this issue highlight that legal procedures dealing with the Nazi persecution of Jews and the historiography of the Holocaust are closely intertwined, not only considering the well-studied International Military Tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo and their successor trials,
27
but also regarding the hundreds of thousands of restitution and compensation procedures in the post-war decades. Earlier generations of historians were often unable to make good use of the numerous files created through these restitution proceedings, largely due to strict data protection laws, organisational constraints and the sheer volume of these documents. However, they were already aware that these documents represented a very significant archive. We hope that the explorations in this special issue encourage new interest in these important historical documents and in the entanglement of reparations and Holocaust awareness, and that they stimulate both original research on the Holocaust as well as critical examinations of its historiography.
28
