Band 3, Heft 1 - Themed Issue: Restitution; Guest Editors: Borbála Klacsmann and Viktoriia Soloshenko

During World War II, Bosnia and Hercegovina was occupied by the Ustashe-led Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi collaborator par excellence . Ustashe, mostly Croats, Muslims-Bosniaks, and domestic Germans, overwhelmingly participated in the annihilation of more than 85 % of the Bosnian Jewish population during the Shoah. Beside the physical destruction of the community, these Nazi collaborators plundered Jewish assets in an estimated value of over one billion US dollars and robbed priceless cultural artifacts along with the communal archives. While witness accounts agree that looting of most movable property (books, artwork, and other valuables) was carried out in the first days of occupation by the Nazis themselves, the robbery of Jewish property (apartments, houses, businesses) as well as torture and killings of domestic Jews was committed by the Ustashe. What complicates the restitution in this country is the state and memory politics, but also the inexistence of a central registry of stolen items that could be claimed. Moreover, it is of the essence that the GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) within Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia region engage in conducting detailed provenance research of their respective collections.

The essay draws a panorama of the current state of the Holocaust compensation and provenance research in Germany. It discusses the German politic of “Wiedergutmachung”, the recent cases of restitution, the public debate about commemoration and the challenges when it comes to restituting objects robbed 80 years ago. On the one hand, Germany – especially with regards to restitution measures up to the 1960s – is used as a role model in the international discourse on restitution issues. On the other hand, there is also a history of critique accompanying the German “Widergutmachungspolitik”. The essay argues that future research should analytically separate the different levels of the history of compensation: the official German discourse and wording of commemoration politics, the history of actual payments, the research and remembrance done by institutions like universities or memorials, and the initiatives of survivor organizations and civil society. They follow their own agendas and often are contradictory.

The restitution of Jewish property in the multiethnic region of Northern Transylvania faced numerous challenges during the first post-Holocaust years as a result of the complicated wartime history, postwar demographics, legal status, interethnic dynamics, and occasional violence. Having the lowest rate of survival among all Jewish communities in Romania, most of the region’s Jews died during the deportation and did not return to their native places to claim their properties. This impacted the extent of restitution of individual private property. Some of the Aryanized property was restituted to the Jewish survivors or their heirs because the wartime beneficiaries fled the country or renounced posession since they were afraid of potential negative consequences. Part of the restitution took place through court litigation and this gives researchers a chance to assess the extent of Jewish success in obtaining restitution. The Supreme Court decisions in restitution cases show that the Jewish plaintiffs were completely successful in their litigation based on law 645/1945 that cancelled the transactions with property Aryanized during the Hungarian rule of Northern Transylvania. This was a much higher success rate, compared to the general share of success for Jewish litigation at the entire country level – around 66 %.

While the history of the Claims Conference has been documented, little is known about the meeting that established the organization over 70 years ago. This study examines the founding of the Claims Conference using its first record, the transcript of the meeting that took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, on October 25–26, 1951. Many historical accounts about the Claims Conference offer cursory descriptions of its inception without examining the full scope of the debate underlying its founding. A few attempts in recent years have addressed this gap but a need for a more comprehensive analysis remains. This study explores the inaugural meeting through the lens of the organizations that took part in the conference and demonstrates the important role they played in shaping the outcome of the conference. By examining the transcript of that meeting in greater detail, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the Claims Conference’s origin and of its subsequent history.

During the Second World War, several thousands of Jews from France were detained on German territory as prisoners of war. Although many endured racial discrimination, they survived. This article will deal with this exceptional as well as largely unknown micro-history through the thorny issue of the recognition of their status as racial victims in the aftermath. On their return to the bloodless France of 1945, these survivors who had remained on the bangs of the genocide faced great material and moral difficulties. Although they were excluded from the legislation governing war victims in both France and the FRG, some of them tried to assert their rights on the grounds of antisemitic discrimination at the end of the 1950s. Their perseverance in the face of an initially hostile German administration enabled some prisoners of foreign origin to obtain compensation under the BEG Act. However, this recognition was not only imperfect, but also incomplete: their comrades of French origin remained excluded from French compensation legislation.

Germany’s initial Wiedergutmachung process did little good for survivors of Nazi medical experiments who struggled with uniquely devastating circumstances. Unable to navigate the nascent post-war compensation bureaucracy, many were left with shockingly little financial assistance, or none at all. That was even the case for one of the victims, Haim Nahon, who had the leadership of the primary restitution agency personally fighting on his behalf. Despite the focus of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on communal relief and rehabilitation and not on individual compensation, Nahon’s plight was taken up by Benjamin Ferencz, Saul Kagan and other senior figures involved in Wiedergutmachung . Yet even their direct involvement in early compensation efforts, documented in this article in granular first-person accounts, could do little to help Nahon’s case. Nahon’s failed attempts to obtain “adequate” post-war compensation from Germany’s Ministry of Finance offer an unsettling case study of how willfully limited interpretations of the initial 1951 restitution fund had a lifelong cost for survivors of Nazi medical experiments.

A regime of extermination was imposed in the early months of captivity on the Jewish prisoners of the Vapniarka concentration camp in Transnistria, an area occupied by the Romanian authorities with support from their German allies, through the toxic grains distributed as food. More than half of the survivors remained either with paralysis or with some permanent after-effects. This article focuses on the postwar efforts to receive adequate compensation for the hundreds of Vapniarka survivors that were handicapped for the rest of their lives, and thus no longer able to work. These efforts were unique in the history of Holocaust compensations firstly because the victims did not fit within any of the existing restitution frameworks initially defined by the German state, and secondly because they organized themselves into a mutual aid group, an organization, to better lobby for their own interests. Over the years and the course of the various new Wiedergutmachung laws, the Vapniarka survivors encountered challenges to their claims denying them rightful compensations as Germany tried to place the blame at Romania’s door and Romania blaming exclusively Germany, not recognizing its own guilt. With the faithful support of a camp’s doctor, who kept detailed notes on the inmates’ symptoms and illnesses during captivity and after, the survivors, through the organization, started to receive modest compensations only in the late 1950s. Later, a German journalist working for Christian-Jewish reconciliation, set up an aid committee through which she raised private donations, and finally in the late 1960s, the remaining survivors started to receive a more just compensation for their sufferings. This is the first article outlining the trajectory of this story.

In the 1970s, the Romanian authorities put together a large collection of compensation claim files of Romanian citizens victims of Nazi persecution between 1939 and 1945. The Romanian Communists’ scope was for a hard-currency settlement with the Federal Republic of Germany. In doing so, the Romanians claimed that the Federal Republic of Germany would pay for persecutions for which the Romanian state had been responsible. The selective denial of the Holocaust was the Communist authorities’ approach to the topic after the end of the Second World War. Especially after 1948, they carefully avoided tackling the issue of country’s own involvement in the persecution of its citizens, externalizing the blame on Nazi Germany. Additionally, in the official narrative the focus was on anti-Fascist resistance and Communists’ martyrdom during the Holocaust and not on Jewish sufferings. By analyzing different claim files part of the larger Romanian collection to be found in the Arolsen Archives I argue that Romanians’ plan of getting Germany’s money–and indirectly recognition of Germany’s responsibility for the Romanian authorities’ wrongdoings during the Holocaust – would have solidified the externalization of blame at international level on the long run.