Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational

The Stockholm International Forum and the First Decade of the International Task Force

Larissa Allwork

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472587152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational provides a key study of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe and the Nazi-era past in the world arena. It uses a range of primary documentation from the restitution conferences, speeches and presentations made at the Stockholm International Forum of 2000 (SIF 2000), a global event and an attempt to mark a defining moment in the inter-cultural construction of the political and institutional memory of the Holocaust in the USA, Europe and Israel. Containing oral history interviews with delegates to the conference and contemporary press reports, this book explores the inter-relationships between global and national Holocaust remembrances. The causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan' intellectual context for understanding the SIF 2000 are discussed in great detail. Larissa Allwork examines this seminal moment in efforts to globally promote the important, if ever controversial, topics of Holocaust remembrance, worldwide Genocide prevention and the commemoration of the Nazi past. Providing a balanced assessment of the Stockholm Project, this book is an important study for those interested in the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Third Reich, as well as the recent global direction in memory studies.

1

‘Money ought not to be the last memory of the Holocaust’: The International and Transnational Historical Context for the SIF 2000

While bearing in mind the importance of the reaction against Maastricht and the return of genocide to the European continent as important circumstances shaping the institutional convening of the SIF 2000, this chapter will delineate three factors which help to historically explain why the subjects of Holocaust education, remembrance and research were the central focus of the SIF 2000. The first factor relates to the cumulative impact of the Holocaust and Nazi-era restitution campaigns of the 1990s and the belief articulated by Eizenstat ‘that money ought not to be the last memory of the Holocaust, or of the slave and forced labor issues, but a sense of coming to terms with responsibility’.¹ The second examines fears raised among liberal politicians about the rise of the radical right in Europe and the continuing problems posed by right-wing extremists and forms of Holocaust denial. Finally, the third section proposes that while the emphasis on international co-operation in Holocaust commemoration and pedagogy advocated at the SIF 2000 and forwarded by the ITF may have been radically new in terms of the sheer scale of government involvement, in other respects these developments were vitally facilitated by international and transnational patterns in Holocaust education and memorialization in the years directly preceding the SIF 2000.

Restitution in the 1990s

This section will outline the key developments and debates surrounding Holocaust restitution in the 1990s and the way in which these contributed to the political environment that facilitated the convening of the SIF 2000. For, as Heidemarie Uhl has observed: ‘The debates on the restitution of property stolen during the Nazi period rank among the principal transnational emblems of a European process of wrestling with the past and coming to terms with it.’² The restitution campaigns of the 1990s, also included negotiations for the compensation of foreign workers who were pressed into service as forced and slave labour in Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories.³ They also made nations conscious of the fact that they had an obligation to take responsibility for historical injustices committed during the Second World War as well as a duty to mitigate the effects of national backlash against restitution campaigns by educating their respective publics about the Third Reich and its collaborators’ atrocity crimes. Some of those involved in the restitution processes such as Eizenstat and commentators like Yisrael Gutman increasingly began to feel that the last word about the Holocaust and Nazi-era atrocities should not be about money but rather the respectful and appropriate memorialization of the victims of the Third Reich and its collaborators. This awareness facilitated international political support for Persson’s launch of the ITF in 1998 and the subsequent convening of the SIF 2000.

The movement for Holocaust restitution in the 1990s did not occur in a political and economic vacuum. As cultural studies scholar Barkan has noted:

Beginning at the end of World War II, and quickening since the end of the Cold War, questions of morality and justice are receiving growing attention as political questions. As such, the need for restitution to past victims has become a major part of national politics and international diplomacy.⁴

Post-Second World War political dynamics such as the growth of civil rights movements and decolonization meant that far from being an isolated instance of reparative justice, the political and grass-roots pressure for Holocaust restitution in the 1990s needs to be perceived within a broader global context of social movements for post-facto justice for victims of state-sanctioned atrocities including war crimes, genocide and colonialism. For example, in relation to the Second World War, these developments have included the US Congress’s passing of the Civil Liberties Act (1988) which facilitated the compensation of Japanese Americans who had been interned by the US government in the wake of Pearl Harbor, as well as renewed pressure on Japan to make amends for its war-time atrocities, including the treatment of ‘Comfort Women’, or those East Asian (primarily Korean) and sometimes European women who were coerced into organized brothels for the Japanese military between 1931 and 1945.⁵

Equally, scholars such as Marrus and Barkan have also noted the historical importance of West Germany’s 1953 ratification of a reparations deal with Israel via the Jewish umbrella organization, the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference).⁶ Demonstrating the legal, diplomatic, state-led and ‘top-down’ nature of reparations negotiations in the 1950s,⁷ reaching this agreement was nonetheless not without its public controversies, least of all in Israel. The right wing led by Menachem Begin accused the Mapai government headed by David Ben Gurion of dealing in German ‘blood money’, while opponents of Begin described his mass street demonstrations as ‘fascist’.⁸ This dispute reached a crescendo during an Israeli Knesset session in January 1952, when street protests became so violent that the safety of Knesset representatives was jeopardized.⁹

However, the result of the eventual settlement in 1953 was that over a period of approximately 50 years the German government paid over 100 billion Deutschmarks to Jewish and some non-Jewish victims of the Third Reich.¹⁰ Equally, owing to pressure emanating from the US government and American Jewish groups, Austria issued seven restitution laws to deal with property seized from Jews between 1946 and 1949,¹¹ while a Swiss law of 1962 ordered that the country’s banks audit their dormant accounts and restitute assets to owners and heirs within the next decade. In relation to the 1953 German case, Marrus has observed:

Whatever the shortcomings of these agreements, and there were plenty, these were hardly seen at the time, and nor should they be seen now, as involving mere token payments, based on an evasion of responsibility. Rather, the sums involved were huge, unprecedented, based on innovative legal principles, and often considered by the Americans who viewed the West Germans as their Cold War protégés, as pressing against the limits of what their new ally would be able to pay.¹²

Despite the legal innovation of the German case and its importance as a historical precedent for NATO enlargement, reparative justice and restitution for victims of Nazism in Western Europe during the Cold War was also insufficient, setting the stage for the negotiations of the 1990s. This was because, as Eizenstat has observed, these settlements deferred payments to forced and slave labourers, while Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the disabled and Jehovah’s Witnesses were inadequately compensated, and Austrian legislation was characterized by loopholes, unsympathetic administrators and short time frames for the processing of Jewish property claims.¹³ Equally, although Swiss banks had found 10 million Swiss Francs in approximately 1,000 inactive Jewish bank accounts in the decade between 1964 and 1973, approximately 7,000 claims had been processed and rejected.¹⁴ This was partly because Swiss banking rules were often saturated with bureaucratic intransigence. As a consequence, relatives of Holocaust victims were often required to fulfil emotionally wrenching and impossible criteria such as producing documentation like death certificates if they wanted to access the accounts of their relatives.¹⁵ For example, when Romanian survivor and post-war US citizen Greta Beer was searching for the Swiss bank account of her father, Siegfried Deligdisch, one Swiss bank requested precise ‘details of her father’s death, whether by violence or natural causes, even asking if he died with a gun to his head’.¹⁶ Given these limitations, it was only with the increasing presence of the American class action legal process; the accelerated globalization of mergers and acquisitions within the banking economy; as well as post-Cold War political shifts which encouraged revitalized confrontations with the Nazi past that these issues would once again be addressed in the decade directly preceding the SIF 2000.

If there were serious issues surrounding the effectiveness of reparation and restitution in the West following the settlements of the 1950s and 1960s, compensation and restitution for Jewish victims of Nazi crimes in the Soviet bloc were even more acutely hampered by the political and institutional context of the Cold War. By the late 1940s, leaders in the Soviet Union had decided that social cohesion in the USSR and its empire would be better aided by an inclusive narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ as opposed to the specific suffering of Jews under Nazism, a tragedy which raised the contentious issue of local collaboration with the Third Reich in states such as Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belorussia.¹⁷ The result of this communist ideological landscape in the Eastern bloc was that Soviet Jews rarely received public recognition or compensation for their losses engendered during the Second World War.

For example, in relation to East Germany, scholars such as Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey Herf and Bill Niven have shown that communists initially refused the necessity of Jewish compensation altogether, while a dual set of categories was established which discriminated against Jewish material claims.¹⁸ Communists were ‘Fighters Against Fascism’ whereas Jews were classified as ‘Victims of Fascism’. Even Jewish members of the resistance were not always given the status of ‘Fighter’.¹⁹ East German scholar Helmut Eschwege has also uncovered evidence of East German Jews in the 1950s who attempted to recover property that had been seized by the Nazis. They were informed that because they were categorized as ‘passive’ and non-political as opposed to ‘antifascists’, they were disqualified from individual reimbursement. In these instances, property stolen by the Nazis was either taken over by the East German Soviet state or distributed to non-Jewish residents. The result of this was that many East German Jews attempted to escape to West Germany which held the possibility of material payments for losses suffered.²⁰ Although East German Jews as ‘Victims of Fascism’ were entitled to higher pensions, early retirement, housing and educational benefits, and by the 1980s, East Germany supported the renovation of synagogues and the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries, these minuscule gains were considered insufficient for the assets that Jewish communities had forcibly relinquished to the Nazi and communist regimes.²¹

Despite complaints from some American Jewish individuals and organizations about Soviet policies towards its Jewish populations during the Cold War, it was not until the 1990s and while working as a member of the United States Mission to the EU under the auspices of the Clinton administration (1993–2001) that Eizenstat was given the mandate ‘to encourage the return of property confiscated from religious communities by the Nazis and then nationalized by Eastern European communist governments’.²² Eizenstat’s remit coincided with the broader restitution battles being played out as post-Soviet states attempted to deal with the immediate legacies of communism which included the distribution of property that had been nationalized under the Soviet system.²³ Most radically, this took the form of a voucher system in Czechoslovakia whereby citizens could utilize coupons to bid for the tenure of certain government companies. Other countries such as Poland used a lottery method to distribute government businesses, while ‘Hungary offered victims vouchers pegged to the old value of the properties, which could then be used to buy any state property that was put up for auction.’²⁴ Mixing restitution with privatization these policies often strengthened the middle classes and sought to facilitate the move towards Western capitalist social and economic systems. Furthermore, the Roman Catholic Church received compensation, particularly extensive property restitution in Poland where the church had become synonymous with solidarity, anti-communist resistance and Polish national identity in the immediate post-Cold War period.²⁵

As evidenced by these examples, post-communist governments initially focused their attention on restitution that strengthened both national cohesion and the transition to capitalism.²⁶ However, in these states there was also the question of restitution to minority groups which had suffered serious human rights violations and forcibly lost communal and indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1  ‘Money ought not to be the last memory of the Holocaust’: The International and Transnational Historical Context for the SIF 2000
• 2  Connecting with the World? The ITF and the Organization and Media Reception of the SIF 2000
• 3  The Global Legacies of the SIF 2000: The Subsequent Stockholm Conferences and the ITF (2000–8)
• 4  Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational: The ITF British/Lithuanian ‘Liaison Project’
• 5  Interpreting the SIF 2000: The Limits of the ‘New Cosmopolitan’ Global Theory
• Conclusion: From the ITF to IHRA
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright