CIAO DATE: 1/00

The Business History of the ‘Third Reich’ and the Responsibilities of the Historian: Gold, Insurance, ‘Aryanization’ and Forced Labor

Gerald D. Feldman

January 1999

University of California, Berkeley
Center for German and European Studies

 

Abstract

Historians are now being called upon by companies inside and outside Germany to investigate their roles in the National Socialist regime and their responsibility for the confiscation of Jewish assets and the exploitation of Jewish labor. These historical investigations have been triggered by law suits and threats of sanctions against these companies as well as government investigations and international conferences dealing with these issues. Prof. Feldman’s lecture will discuss why these developments are taking place now rather than at a time closer to the events, and explain the present situation. Most importantly, Prof. Feldman will analyze the unique situation into which historians have been placed in their efforts to enlighten the public and the authorities in dealing with these questions, serve the needs of their business clients, and fulfill their moral and professional obligations as historians.

 

 

I would like to begin this lecture with a personal anecdote about a recent encounter with a Berlin taxi driver. A few months ago, the U.S. State Department asked me to go to Prague to attend a seminar on insurance issues but neglected to tell me that the Berlin flights to Prague left from Tempelhof rather than Tegel. When I made this discovery at Tegel, I immediately hailed a taxi that raced me off to what had been—appropriately enough given my current work—the chief airport of the Third Reich. The driver was a pleasant, lively fellow with a great interest in history and a firm conviction that taxicab drivers and barbers are the two groups who truly know what the average person is thinking. After casually answering his inquiry as to what I was doing, he hastened to inform me that the people he spoke to these days were increasingly expressing a real animosity toward the Jews because they were making seemingly insatiable demands for compensation for events that occurred fifty and more years ago. Yet countless others had suffered too, the twelve million Germans driven from what is now Poland and the Czech Republic in 1945, for example, and many were suffering now in the former Communist countries and in the former Yugoslavia, not to mention Asia, Africa, etc. Why should the Jews make special claims, and why were they always making special claims? They acted as if they had a monopoly of suffering, whereas in reality they had an excess of aggressive lawyers and a worldwide network of organizations that looked after their interests. In the end, they were only interested in one thing: money.

The cunning of historical reason had thus struck again and given me something to think about on the way to Prague, especially since a number of persons had told me that they were fearing a new wave of anti-Semitism because of the class actions and other investigations going on in New York and elsewhere and the large sums of compensation being demanded. Also, there are reports of increased anti-Semitism in Switzerland because of the charges made against the Swiss in connection with their behavior during the Second World War. To be sure, none of these feelings and remarks about Jews are terribly new, but reactions to the current claims being made in connection with the material losses in the Holocaust require our attention and deserve reflection.

As someone who is professionally engaged in the historical investigation of these problems, I believe that such reflection must take its point of departure from the experience of material loss that was brutally, deliberately, and systematically imposed on the Jews by the National Socialist regime but in which substantial numbers of ordinary Germans also participated. Take, for example, the case of a jurist from Duisburg, whom for privacy reasons, I will call Dr. Jakob Rosenberg. Born in 1886, Rosenberg had set up a practice as a lawyer and notary in 1913. He had a flourishing practice, his clients coming mainly from industry and commerce, and he served as lawyer for the local DANAT and Dresdner Banks. By the early 1930s he was making as much as 35,000 RM from his notary practice alone.

In 1949, Rosenberg wrote to the American military authorities in Germany from Honduras, where he ran a small business, asking for compensation in a variety of categories. The first and most important was the loss of the profession from which he had been steadily driven since 1933. By 1938 his notarial fees had diminished to 7,775 RM, and he was not allowed to practice after 1938. His skills were not transferable to another country, and he asked 500,000 RM damages in this category. As was the case for so many German Jews who were slow to leave Germany for professional, personal, and emotional reasons, the Pogrom of November 9/10, 1938 and the Nazi measures were decisive in changing his mind. As Rosenberg narrated in his 1949 compensation claim: “On November 10, 1938, at the behest of the ruling government and Party, a few robbers forced their way into our house, willfully destroyed the furniture and especially every piece of glass and porcelain they could get their hands, pierced the pictures with sharp objects, etc. The damage caused to us thereby amounted to more than 5,000 RM, since a valuable porcelain collection was among the objects completely destroyed. According to paragraph 14 of the Decree of December 3, 1938, we had to deliver up all our gold, silver, pearl, and precious metal objects of value. We append the two lists of these items. The prices set down there naturally do not even remotely reflect the true worth and only served the purpose to put a cloak about the legally ordered thievery. Thus only a few years before I myself paid 5,000 RM for the pearl necklace listed as item 9 and, for as long as it was possible, insured the necklace in that amount with Lloyd’s of London. The value of the aforementioned objects exceeded the amount of not quite 900 RM paid out by the official receiving agency by more than 15,000 RM. We demand above all the return of the objects, insofar as they are still available, in place of the amount they are worth.”

He also claimed compensation for the repurchase of his very substantial life insurance policies and the alienation of his securities in order to pay the Reich Flight Tax, the Atonement Tax on assets imposed on Jews after November 9, and the various special local taxes levied on Jews. Rosenberg also decided to set a price on the expenditure of time, effort, and money in connection with the emigration of himself and his family and the despoliation accompanying it. As he recounted, “In the normal course of our lives, we would never have had the idea of emigrating, since as a lawyer I would have had no prospect of being able to practice the profession of law abroad. Therefore, all the expenditures connected with our emigration should be compensated. Because of the November action, allegedly demanded by the seething soul of the people, I was sent to Dachau in November 1938. At our release, the Camp Commandant made the following statement to us: ‘The purpose of “your”—he addressed us in the familiar form—being here was to force you to leave Germany as quickly as possible. This time you are coming out alive, but whoever comes here a second time should not count on ever returning alive.’ Because of this emigration forced on us by the threat of death, we were compelled head over heels to sell, or more accurately, to dump, in part even to give away everything that we did not absolutely need abroad, since we could not find enough purchasers. Thus we had to practically to give away our furniture, my legal library, and the extraordinarily valuable art history collection of my wife in order to get rid of them at all. Those who at that time dared to buy objects of any kind from Jews naturally did not pay the real prices they were worth by far but rather such prices that reflected our distressed situation and the oversupply. Also, the legislation at that time forced the payment of unnaturally low prices since it decreed that objects worth over 1,000 RM should only be sold with special permission. We were thus compelled, for example, to sell for less than 1,000 RM a genuine rug that covered the entire floor with a value of more than 4,000 RM. So it also went with the bedroom furniture which we had custom made out of fine woods. But also the furniture in the remaining rooms, lamps, etc. could only be sold for cash at unbelievably low prices. Thereby we suffered further damage amounting to at least 15,000 RM. For the procurement of visas, which we sought from all different kinds of countries, for the many trips to Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, etc. to gain passage on a ship, for the meetings with the Honduran Consul in Hamburg, for the ship tickets themselves including the freight costs for our goods, for the purchase of special items required in the tropics, such as clothes etc., namely, for ourselves and our two boys, who were then 11 and 14 years old, we had to make extraordinary expenditures which certainly exceed the amount of 12,000 RM. Compensation for this is also demanded.”

Finally, Rosenberg asked compensation for the 14,702 RM Reich Flight Tax he paid on March 29, 1939, the 3,550 RM he paid for the release of his household effects, the special emigration levy of 1,501.50 RM, and the 16,500 RM he paid for the Tax on Jewish Assets. Of the 24,128 RM remaining to him, Rosenberg was allowed to take away 1447.80 RM, that is, 6% by the Gold Discount Bank. He now asked for the return of the 22,680 RM thus discounted.

Unfortunately, I do not have any record of how much Rosenberg was compensated for all his claims. He appears to have applied under the compensation legislation of 1953, and he received 105.67 DM for his insurance policy of approximately 11,000 RM with Allianz, that is, the value of the insurance policy if it had come to term minus the premiums still to be paid and the amount already paid out. He and others like him were then given ten percent of the RM amount arrived at because of the currency reform. He probably received a settlement for his other claims according to various formulas devised to deal with lost professional opportunity and other material losses. One may be very certain he received nothing back in kind.

It is possible, of course, to consider Rosenberg a lucky man. He and his family escaped with their lives. Such gold as he and his family members may have had in their teeth was not ripped from their dead or dying bodies and then sent, under the supervision of the extremely reliable and utterly incorruptible SS officer Bruno Melmer to Degussa for smelting and then transferred as part of gold bars to the Reichsbank, German banks, Swiss Banks, Austrian banks, and Turkish gold dealers to help pay for the German war effort. Rosenberg was a smart lawyer, he knew how to calculate, and probably made the most of his rights under the compensation laws.

The case is a useful one, however, for reminding us why Jewish claims have a special quality and what the claims really are all about. First, the Jews did not choose to single themselves out, they were singled out for the kind of persecution experienced by Rosenberg. Second, Rosenberg’s catalogue of claims reminds us of the full extent of this persecution in a material and spiritual sense, what it meant to have to leave for Honduras without means and to be torn away from a good life and a profession lived in honor, decency, and deserved comfort. Third, while only a fool could believe that a true cash value could be placed on the losses incurred by Rosenberg in material and spiritual terms, the effort to set such a value is most appropriate with respect to at least the material injuries visited upon victims. The perpetrators, let us be reminded, were neither primitive inhabitants of a forest nor medieval crusaders, whatever the fantasies they periodically entertained when they pranced about on horseback as Teutonic knights at Nazi public festivals. Rather, they were members of an industrialized society with a long if sometimes problematic tradition of recognizing property rights, an experienced administrative bureaucracy, and with effective policing agencies. The decision by public authorities to unleash vandalism, condone it, and then engage in organized bureaucratic thievery, and the decisions of others to participate in it were in crass violation of all the norms and values with which these public officials had been raised as well as the standards of most of the societies with which they maintained relations.

Without underestimating the importance of ideology, it is nevertheless essential to recognize that the regime and its representatives, along with the private persons who took advantage of the plight of the Jews, were out to steal and were very interested in money. Göring was quite explicit about his intention to mobilize Jewish assets for his Four Year Plan, just as he and the regime subsequently used those assets for the conduct of war to achieve grandiose conquests and designs. In the period of mass murder, it was they who dreamed up the idea of going well beyond the age-old practice of plundering the dead by utilizing the by-products of mass murder—gold teeth, hair, shoes, old clothes, etc.—as if it were the same as utilizing coal by-products or as if it were a question of implementing an ecological approach to mass murder. Therefore, it was and is by no means inappropriate for Jews then and now to ask for commensurable return of at least their material assets, indeed, for Roma and Sinti who were also singled out, and for forced laborers of all nationalities and ethnic groups to ask for compensation and restitution insofar as these have not been rendered already. Furthermore, it was and is also appropriate to make those claims against companies, German and non-German, insofar as they consciously participated in these acts of despoliation or implicated themselves in them and derived profit from them. Just as we have learned that large numbers of ordinary Germans and non-Germans were participants in the actual Holocaust, so we have now come to realize that business enterprises in Germany, but also in the occupied countries and in neutral states, were involved—often knowingly and willingly—in the financial and economic misdeeds of the National Socialist regime. During the past few years, these accounts have been called due, and there are no reasons to criticize those who have done so even if there are problems with and questions about the manner and style in which the claims have been raised.

A major problem recognized by everyone is that these are old accounts, and one is inevitably led to ask why this did not happen earlier and how one can explain the explosion of claims and court cases over fifty years after the event. Let me suggest a few answers. The most important and encompassing of these is the end of the Cold War, producing a critical mass of circumstances that makes the opening up of these issues possible. It is important to recognize that it was the Cold War that had first closed them. Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, the key personage in the American government dealing with these issues, has himself attributed the failure to recover much of the stolen goods and German assets from neutrals and others “perhaps, above all, to the great pre-occupation of policymakers after the war with the threat of communist subversion and aggression aimed at those very countries and Western Europe in general, and the effort to incorporate these neutrals into the Western family during the Cold War.” ₁   The Cold War and the primacy given to German and West European recovery not only put all the issues now being discussed on ice, but it also served as an effective barrier to dealing with them in ways which interacted with one another when it came to the question of the role of business in the National Socialist period.

The entire question was ideologized and heavily concentrated on the issue of whether or not big business was responsible for Hitler’s coming to power. The position taken in the Communist camp as well as in many left-wing circles in the West is well known. The National Socialist regime and other fascist regimes were perceived as the agents of the capitalist class and thus directly responsible both for the existence of such regimes and the crimes they committed. While such a position might have led one to expect the production of a vast literature based upon the rich available archival sources in the former Soviet Union and the GDR, the opposite was the case. The Marxist-Leninist interpretation was assumed to be true, but actual research was very limited, in part because even scholars in the Communist camp never got full access to the materials in their own archives and also because other questions, above all ideological ones and working class party history, received priority Also, very few Communist historians had any understanding of economics of any kind and certainly not of capitalist economics.

In the West, there was a genuine debate over the role of big business in bringing the National Socialists to power, but the question thus put and the Cold War situation made banks and industrial concerns very reluctant to open their archives. While they nevertheless increasingly did so for the period prior to 1933, which actually ended up helping rather than hurting their case, they remained reluctant to do so for the National Socialist period. In fact, insofar as they concerned themselves with history the generations of managers dominating German business until very recently took the understandable and, as has now been shown, historically correct position that they did not bring Hitler to power—which is not to say that many of them did not contribute mightily to undermining the Weimar Republic. Furthermore, in many cases they sought to present themselves as victims of National Socialism, which allegedly forced them to do all kinds of things they did not want to do and would never have done otherwise. To the extent that they may have opposed one or another National Socialist policy, some even fancied themselves as resisters. At the same time, the attention of western historians was also riveted on the issue of who brought Hitler to power, a question that was easier to deal with because of the available archival sources. It is a measure of the neglect of the financial and economic history of the National Socialist regime and the Second World War that 75% of the U.S. National Archive material dealing with Nazi gold was declassified by 1982, 90% by 1989, and 10% since then. Thus, there was a great deal of material available for over a decade to which historians paid next to no attention.

In any case, when viewed from this perspective one can well understand the importance of the collapse of the USSR and the fall of the Wall for both historical research and the opening up of these issues. They dealt a deathblow to the ideological debate since the economic devastation left behind by Communism and the crimes committed in its name make it extremely difficult to pose it as a moral and political alternative to Capitalism. The dichotomy capitalism-communism simply is no longer interesting and plays very little role in the current discussion, which also has the added advantage of not being plagued by the old debate about whether big business brought Hitler to power and by the old claim that it was a victim of the Nazis. Big Business did not bring Hitler to power, and however one may wish to describe its role between 1933-1945 it would be absurd, given what we now know, to describe it as a victim. At the same time, the collapse of Communism has served to open the archives, especially in the former East Block countries and above all in the old GDR. Not only are huge quantities of previously unexamined documentation on the Nazi period now available in the former archives of the GDR but, despite many difficulties and high costs, the invaluable materials on banks, insurance companies, Nazi Trustee Organizations, the SS, and other institutions and organizations located in the Moscow Special Archive can now be seen and exploited as well. In short, the collapse of Communism created the potential for an avalanche of documentation.

Nevertheless the shots that triggered the avalanche were fired in the West—with the Swiss—not the East, although even here it was the collapse of Communism that paved the way. First of all, the Jewish survivors behind the Iron Curtain, who had been denied all compensation and restitution, could now at long last get some genuine consideration, and the efforts to do something about such Jewish claims began as the GDR itself began to crumble away. Second, there was a general recognition that time was of the essence, since one was dealing with the last generation of victims, many of whom lived in poverty and neglect. Third—and this is a point of immense importance although I confess it needs more exploration than this simple assertion would suggest—there was a desperate sense on the part of the Jewish community, particularly in the United States, that memory had to be preserved and, no less significantly, that justice had to be done before it was too late. As is well known, the World Jewish Congress played a crucial role in getting the ball rolling with its demand that the Swiss deal with their nameless and unclaimed accounts. But the contribution made by the Swiss themselves, their incredibly clumsy response to the situation and their extreme vulnerability because of their role as a conduit of Nazi gold throughout the war, was of no small importance. That vulnerability, by the way, was extraordinary since Swiss banking institutions took seventy percent of the 630 million dollars—in 1945 dollars—worth of gold stolen by the Germans after the outbreak of the war, most of it after 1942. Whatever the case, the avalanche was set loose thanks to the dynamics of the American judicial and political systems along with the influence exerted by the media. I will return to this subject later, since it has very important consequences for the role played by historians like myself in these matters, but first I think it important briefly to sketch the conditions under which the new historical work of persons like myself has developed. It was a measure of the extraordinary and sensational role of the Swiss in the Second World War that the Germans were virtually neglected and ignored at the so-called Nazi Gold Conference in London in December 1997, although their part in the war was in a process of rapid rediscovery by that time thanks to the class action suit issued against Allianz and a number of Swiss and Italian insurance companies in the spring of 1997. The attention visited upon the Swiss was understandable. The Swiss, who had the only convertible currency among the combatants, played an absolutely crucial role in the German war economy, and the Germans were extremely important to the Swiss economy as well. This was why some Swiss insurance executives were making a desperate effort to continue doing business with the Reichsbank and their German counterparts even in the early months of 1945.

The role of Swiss banks and bank accounts had long been suspect and subject to criticism, and the evidence of the way in which they had treated Jewish clients and their heirs who had tried to get their money back seemed to confirm every suspicion. Most sensational and serious, however, was the gold issue which most certainly was a piece of unfinished business about which mountains of material could be found in the United States archives. What reemerged, although it was well known in 1945, was that the National Socialist regime had been bankrupt for years and had paid for its most vital raw materials with gold it had stolen from central banks in occupied Europe, the so-called central bank gold, and so-called non-monetary gold it had taken from Jews and other victims of the regime, namely, Raubgold. While the most sensational form of Raubgold came from the teeth of the murdered, most of the stolen gold probably came from the gold which, along with other valuables and precious metals, Jews were forced to surrender after 1938-1939. Raubgold probably constitutes only a small portion of what was taken from the Jews during the Nazi years. Nevertheless, gold inevitably attracts attention more than other objects because it is gold and because it is so deplorably connected to the Holocaust. Be that as it may, the Swiss question and the gold issue led to the creation of a variety of commissions in the United States and in Germany, the Interagency Commission headed by Eizenstat, the Independent Committee of Distinguished Persons headed by Paul Volcker, and the Swiss Independent Historians Commission headed by Jean-Francois Bergier The matters to be investigated also multiplied, spreading to insurance, art, war industries, and the treatment of refugees. At the same time, more and more countries came under investigation for their dealings with National Socialist Germany: Turkey, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, to name just a few. Most significantly, more and more archives were opened. The United States centralized its records dealing with the financial and economic issues of the Second World War, while all Swiss firms and government agencies are obligated to open their records to the Bergier Commission.

In Germany, of course, the government records were by and large already open and were being increasingly exploited. The situation of private company archives, however, was different, but Germans, unlike the Swiss, did have a record of dealing more openly with their past. The shining example of this was the Deutsche Bank, which long before there was any compulsion to do so, engaged a team of historians, including myself, to write the history of the bank in honor of its 125th anniversary and gave us complete and free access to all its available records. The volume published in 1995 in German has set, I believe, a new standard for such works.

In this connection, however, let me make two comments with respect to recent criticisms that we failed to deal with the Raubgold question and did not address some other issues that have now come to the center of the stage. First, the book was never intended to be the last word in the study of the Deutsche Bank’s history, but rather a point of departure for further investigations. Second, the gold issue did not come up in the book because neither Harold James, who wrote the relevant chapter, nor any of us were fully aware of the significance of the issue. When it was discovered this year that the Deutsche Bank along with the Dresdner and the private banking house of Sponholz had been dealing in what has now been determined to be Raubgold and a successful search was made for further documentation, a special historical commission, of which I am member, was asked to write a report, which can now be found on the Beck Verlag web site, to deal with this issue as well as to pursue the investigation of the Deutsche Bank’s role in the Third Reich more intensely with respect to aryanization and other matters. The material in that report has been cited very prominently in the third class action suit made against the Deutsche Bank in early November of this year. But even if we already had the documents found in 1998 before 1995, it is highly doubtful that we would have understood the significance of the gold noted in the balances. In fact, from the perspective of the history of the bank, the balances themselves are the most important aspects of those documents. Furthermore, however awful the conclusions we draw about the gold in question and about the probable knowledge of the relevant directors concerning the origins of the gold, the aryanizations in which the Deutsche Bank participated and which are now under investigation surely constitute a more significant and serious aspect of the bank’s participation in the crimes of the regime than the gold transactions which have received so much attention.

This, of course, is a historian’s perspective, but that it is a perspective that of late has taken on considerable public importance. Until fairly recently, historians like myself with an interest in economic and business history have formed a small and somewhat isolated group in the profession. Historians, like most intellectuals, have often tended to take a somewhat dim view of the object of our interests, namely business, which they have treated either with intellectual disdain or as is the case of the many leftist-minded persons in the profession, with deep and profound suspicion. An odd thing has happened during the past couple of years, however, in that large companies in Germany and certain governments, for example Switzerland, have commissioned historians like myself to study the history of various financial and industrial enterprises for the purpose of discovering and uncovering their past during the National Socialist period. This is a revolutionary development, both for firms and for historians. Previously, industrial firms commissioned historians to write celebratory volumes on the occasion of some major anniversary, and very often the most important aspect of the volumes thus produced were the pictures. At the same time, serious historians had a difficult time getting firms to open their archives even about matters pertaining to the nineteenth century and certainly about the National Socialist period. Now, however, one firm after the other is opening its archives to historians and supplying them with substantial resources and assistance in dredging up the details of their history during the National Socialist period.

The reasons for this are well known. Many of these companies are being sued in the United States for failing to live up to their obligations to their Jewish customers and clients, for participating in the systematic robbery of the Jews by the National Socialist regime, for being implicated in some of the worst crimes of the regime by dealing with the SS and employing slave labor, and by refusing to compensate the victims of National Socialism or by compensating them inadequately for their stolen assets and suffering. Such firms have been compelled to hire high-priced lawyers to defend themselves and auditing firms to go through their records. Others await being sued. Their problems, of course, are not simply legal, but also political and moral. They fear that American regulatory agencies will take away their right to do business in the United States, that they will lose customers through boycotts and bad publicity, and that the morale of their employees, both German and American, will suffer. They also fear the media, which often reports on new findings in archives and elsewhere in ways that are very damaging.

They thus turn to historians for a number of reasons. The present leaders of business enterprises often themselves do not know the history of their firms in this period because it has never been investigated. They are thus often ill equipped to defend themselves against charges in courts and in the media, especially the latter. They need to recover their history, and they need to do so in a hurry. At the same time, they recognize that much of the information that circulates in the media lacks historical context and thus takes on a sensational quality. They have a choice between having information appear in the media as a series of hammer blows on their heads or having the entire story, however unpleasant, come out in a sober and contextualized manner. They need professional help and this can only come from historians who understand something about economics and business and who know the history of the period and the conditions under which the firms operated between 1933 and 1945. To be sure, the managers of these firms could stonewall, count on their lawyers, dig in their heels, and try to hold out until the entire problem blows away. But this would be a very questionable procedure in the present atmosphere. Also, and this needs to be recognized, the present generation of managers in the German business world are a different generation from those who were implicated and their immediate successors. The boards of directors of today’s big enterprises are well-educated, intelligent persons with a deeper understanding of German history than that of their predecessors. They are far less burdened by the past personally and more ready to confront what happened. Insofar as they are not made unduly nervous by their understandably nervous legal departments, they themselves have an interest in the history. I have found those with whom I have dealt to be honorable, honest, and concerned about doing the right thing.

Needless to say, it is very flattering for historians to be needed for a change and nice to be paid, not to be sure, the way lawyers, auditors, and consultants are paid, but still paid better than they are for writing peer reviews about their colleagues. These are unfamiliar circumstances to which one can get used, although they carry with it the dangers, already evident, of criticism from colleagues who are either envious or “holier than thou” and attacks in the press for being subject to the lure of money and better working conditions than usual There are, however, more serious problems. The first of these is that the historians’ work can have serious immediate consequences. This is not only a matter of having our work cited in lawsuits against the companies whose history we are writing. Much of the present discussion about compensation to victims of National Socialism has to do with moral rather than legal liability, that is, the price that should be paid for involvement with the Nazi regime in processes that contributed to everything from the impoverishment and physical exploitation of the Jews to their murder. Here the historian is at least in some way called upon to play the judge, not in the sense of determining directly the price to be paid, but rather in the sense of providing a judgment about what actually was done and was known by these companies that will inform some jury—whether it is public opinion or government officials or the courts, or the firms themselves—the foundation on which the extent of the damages to be paid is to be determined. At the same time, the firms also live in the understandable hope that once the history is out and the compensation determined, they can, so to speak, put it all behind them and have something of a mastered past with which they can confront the public once again. It reminds one of the woman who put an ad in the paper looking for a husband in which she declared: “I will marry no man with an unmastered past.”

Yet, historians are neither judges nor psychiatrists and being called upon to assume such roles can create some very serious problems. For one thing, the firms often expect from historians something they would never expect from either judges or psychiatrists, namely speed. Historians write books or articles, not the kind of reports one expects from a department head, and as we all know, research can be very slow and tedious. So are the problems of interpretation. Nazi Germany was a totalitarian state, and people neither wrote nor spoke freely. Understanding what was really going on thus requires considerable effort. Furthermore, the problems of dealing critically with the sources do not cease with the end of the regime, since denazification did not produce a great desire to tell the truth either. The questions of historians are seldom addressed to the kind of charges that are presented in courts and the answers they provide are not designed to answer with a simple ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty.’ While historians produce judgements that are based on the evidence at hand and subject to revision, but they do not produce decisions because their primary purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence but rather to historicize, to evoke an understanding of human behavior in its context. The questions historians ask are conditioned by this quest. Needless to say, they also should be conditioned by moral sensibility and by ethical values. Explaining and describing the rapacity of Hermann Göring and the Trustee Organization for the East has nothing whatever to do with sympathizing with them and trying to produce “understanding” for their behavior but only understanding of their mentality. This does, however, require a certain distance at times or at least a suspension of disgust. It does not help very much to moralize about the cooperation of businessmen in Göring’s Four Year Plan, and what is relevant is to figure out the degrees to which they went along out of enthusiasm, out of necessity, and out of what they conceived to be their professional responsibilities. No answer will be exactly right, and probably the actors themselves could not give a clear answer.

The psychiatric metaphor also has limited use and is misleading. Companies are not patients, and understanding the behavior of a company and its officials in the National Socialist period does not explain their behavior today. While business people may collectively and individually learn something from the behavior of their predecessors and gain a better understanding about the dangers that enterprises face in various political contexts, we are not dealing with a past of their making. What then is our obligation to these firms as clients? The most obvious ones are the same as our obligations to the public at large, namely, to function as professional historians should function, be as independent as possible, tell the truth in the way we would tell the truth about anything else, and be true to ourselves in the way we produce our work without concerning ourselves about how the firms, the public, the victims, or anyone else will feel about our findings.

This said, we cannot make believe that we are in an ivory tower, and that we are not performing a public function in a public context. It is naïve to think we can function in total indifference to various charges made against the firms and concerns in the media, in the courts, and by public bodies. The American legal and political system is rather strange to Europeans, and it is little consolation to the firms and concerns under attack that the President of the United States has received even worse treatment. The class action suit is unknown here in Germany, and the adversarial system employed in American civil law makes it possible for lawyers to make broad charges, insinuate all kinds of misbehavior, and present very shallow and even implausible arguments. Their purpose is open up every conceivable and area to discovery and force the opponent to disgorge information that will improve the plaintiff’s case. A major goal is to get the defendant to settle even on unfavorable terms rather than engage in a protracted and very expensive lawsuits.

Similarly, American banking and insurance commissioners, most of whom are elected rather than appointed, as in Europe, are inevitably concerned to satisfy their constituencies, which is not to say that a significant number of them are not genuinely enraged by the history of persecution and injustice recounted in their hearings as well as truly desirous of an equitable settlement of outstanding issues. Prominent politicians, like Senator D’Amato, who had a large Jewish constituency, have also played an important role. American politics is very theatrical, and the theatrical atmosphere surrounding these hearings and speeches as well as the court proceedings and even the big international conferences organized by the British Foreign Office and the State Department can be intimidating and frightening and sometimes downright irritating. Finally, there are the media, which produce a flood of articles and reports that are frequently ill digested, sometimes downright false, and often decontextualized. These intimidating conditions have produced much of the resentment and some of the anti-Semitic sentiment I mentioned earlier.

Thus it is hard to imagine that the present quest for justice for the Holocaust victims would have gotten off the ground without the pressures generated in New York and Washington. This does not mean, however, that historians can stand idly by in silent gratitude for the work-creation program thereby created. In my own case at least, the more I pursue my own work, the more I come to the conclusion that the historian cannot simply evade the public discourse and that one has to run the risk of being accused either of being too friendly to the corporations now in trouble or too friendly to their accusers simply has to be run. The briefs in some class actions sometimes make me feel that our worst history students have decided to take up law. It is absurd to argue, for example, that the 7,500 stores destroyed during the so-called Night of Broken Glass were aryanized because they were denied insurance for fire and theft when it was precisely because they belonged to Jews that they were denied such insurance. It is nonsense to accuse the banks of being responsible for slave labor because they sat on the supervisory boards of companies that employed slave labor. Indeed, the confusion of the roles of supervisory board members and members of boards of directors shows up time and again in the class actions. It is bad practice to take documents of American officials in 1945 who are struggling to understand what went on in the Third Reich and are making judgements on the basis of their most recent discoveries and treat those findings as matters of fact. Similarly, the moving testimony of Holocaust survivors at public hearings deserves our sympathetic understanding, but it does not always constitute evidence for the claims being made. Lastly, we have a responsibility to correct misinformation in the press and media, which can often be very irritating because the press and media should aid rather than hinder historical understanding. It is annoying, for example, to have America’s leading newspaper report as a matter of fact the claim that a new document has been found which shows collusion between a company and the Gestapo in the confiscation of a Jewish asset when it turns out that the document was not new, and was not found in an archive by the people who claimed to have found it but rather published by the company itself in its own anniversary publication as an illustration of the injustice done to Jews.

Under present circumstances, it is difficult to see when and how all of the issues of restitution and compensation will ever come to an end, and here too the historian must take some public responsibility. I have often been asked what I think a satisfactory solution would be and even what I think a fair compensation would be. In general, I share the position of my colleague Christopher Kopper—I think it is also the position of Undersecretary Eizenstat and leading figures in the German government—that the companies or perhaps groups of companies involved should come to some kind of settlement on issues of restitution in negotiation with the leading Jewish organizations. Such settlements must be based on their appreciation not simply of justifiable outstanding claims, which should of course be compensated directly, but also of what human justice and common sense would require through an informed historical appreciation of the roles their companies played in the Third Reich. The International Commission headed by Lawrence Eagleburger, which has been established to deal with insurance questions is a model for such efforts. If for no other reason, this should be done because it is the only way to alleviate the sufferings of the victims while they are still alive, which they most likely will not be if the court cases drag on.

At the same time, such settlements must be final if they are to have moral force. This means, however, that no settlement will be just if it simply addresses itself to actions for which a company may or may not be legally liable. Here historians have a major responsibility and must be extremely careful in their research and in the presentation of their findings. We cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that members of the Deutsche Bank Board of Directors, above all Hermann Josef Abs, absolutely knew that he was dealing in Raubgold, but our historical evidence leads us to believe this was the case, and we have a responsibility to say so. For the time being, I cannot prove that directors of Allianz knew of their insurance contracts with SS and Wehrmacht agencies in connection with the ghetto of Lodz and the concentration camp factories but the weight of the evidence strongly points in that direction. I also can show, however, that it was unsafe not to deal with the government in the Third Reich and that safety did lay in not wanting to know. What price shall we set for knowledge and for not wanting to know? That certainly is not my business as a historian but rather the business of those who asked me and my colleagues to write their history and of those who negotiate with them.

In conclusion, let me simply say that these are not one-time issues. The problem of the social responsibility of business has become very actual, and there are and will be other issues, environmental ones for example, where historians will be called upon to examine the record, determine motives, and place behavior in an historical context. We do this in dealing with governments, and there is no reason why we should shy away from doing it with respect to enterprises. This is, I believe, a business we should be in, but this means we must also become very clear about our own social responsibility. This includes a respect and understanding for private interests and an informed concern for their relationship to the public interest.

 

---

Endnotes

Note 1: Stuart Eizenstat, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs, On-the-record briefing... June 2, 1998, p.7.  Back.