Individual Reparations Claims and Holocaust Research: The Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945

Reflecting on the multifaceted relationship between reparations to victims of National Socialism and historiography, one might distinguish between three different modes of interplay between the two: the history of reparations; ‘history’ in the pursuit of reparations; and finally, the reparations to victims of National Socialism as history. So far, the research has mainly concentrated on the first of these three approaches. Since the end of the 1950s, a substantial number of studies – mainly in German, but also in English and Hebrew – have been published on different forms of German reparations to victims of National Socialism. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War, interest in the implications and the history of reparations grew. ¹ To what extent this research of the history of reparations was or is considered part of Holocaust historiography is an intriguing question that still awaits debate. Looking at the academic conference programme of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, for example, we learn that since 1968, only a handful of events organised by the institute have been devoted to the topic of Holocaust reparations and restitution. ² Even in major academic journals that are dedicated to the study of the Holocaust, such as Yad Vashem Studies and Holocaust and Genocide, the topic is hardly featured, and the subject is rarely taught in universities or schools.

This chapter will seek to redress this imbalance by moving the focus from the history of reparations to explore ‘history’ in reparations. It will look at the involvement of historians and historical research in the practice of reparations, asking the question about the significance of individual compensation claims as a source for historical research. The role historians played as expert witnesses in trials against Nazi perpetrators is well documented. ³ This work not only made source material available for research; it also augmented public awareness and shaped the historiography and the commemoration of the Holocaust. Still largely under-explored is the involvement of historians and the role historical research played in the process of claiming individual indemnification after the Holocaust. More often than not, historians served as expert witnesses and consultants to the German authorities in reparations cases; they also offered advice to claimants and their representatives. The historical information collected, mainly by stakeholder organisations, not only helped individuals file compensation claims, it also became significant historical documentation that forced the West German government to revise its understanding of fundamental concepts such as what constitutes a ‘victim of National Socialism’ and the nature and scope of what should be considered as ‘Nazi persecution’. Such works promoted new interpretations of terms such as ‘deportation’, ‘Ghetto’, and ‘concentration camp’, and expanded the scope of Germany's responsibility for the victimisation primarily of Jews in places such as North Africa, Romania, Siberia, and even Shanghai. ⁴

Taking a bird's-eye view, it seems that historical work in the context of the trials against Nazi perpetrators underscored the question of historical responsibility. In the case of similar work within the framework of individual compensation claims, in addition to the question of the post-war German state's accountability, such research was much more perceptive of the suffering and voices of the victims. Two main narratives dominated the involvement of historical research in the early work on reparations: one saw indemnification within the framework of the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors while the other sought to make the process of claiming compensation part of a new commemoration culture at the heart of which was the victims’ experience of Nazi oppression. The latter, less common narrative, will be discussed in this chapter.

The stacks of material and the amount of information collected as part of the individual reparations processes from the time that it commenced in the late 1940s are vast. It is estimated that in the German archives alone, there are around 5 million compensation claim files. Additional material can be found around the globe in places where victims of National Socialism lodged their claims, as well as with the organisations and the individuals, mainly lawyers, who helped them. Because of data protection regulations, most of this data is still not fully available to researchers. But even if we were to access this body of documentation, we would first need to figure out what is the historical significance of these claims and how we can use such claims as sources for historical research. Will these documents provide new insights on the Holocaust? Could they perhaps open up new avenues that enable us to explore the lives of survivors and their families? What might we learn from these files about the compensating society? This is not the first time that such questions have been raised. By looking at the work of a group of historians using compensation claim files as a historical source in Berlin at the end of 1950s, the following chapter will provide unique insight into the compound interplay between individual indemnification claims and historical research. The discussion will be divided into several sections. The first two sections will provide background information, leading to a more detailed exploration, in the final sections, of the Berlin research project and the challenges it faced when looking at reparations claims as sources for historical research. This discussion will reveal the lasting impact of a forgotten historical project on the ways in which we study the Holocaust, comprising a first attempt of examining the historiographical significance of what is still the largest untapped archive of the Holocaust.

1. When reparations claims became ‘history’

Early in November 1957, Joachim Lipschitz, West Berlin's Social Democratic Senator for internal affairs from 1955 until his untimely death in 1961, visited Israel with one of his officials. ⁵ With around 900 employees, Lipschitz oversaw one of the largest compensation agencies in Germany. ⁶ He was one of several German state officials who travelled to Israel and other Jewish centres around the world in order to meet the people who dealt with reparations and to discuss with them the legal matters and procedures involved in processing personal indemnification claims. Himself a victim of National Socialism, Lipschitz enjoyed an almost legendary status amongst various groups of victims as well as Jewish organisations and Israeli State officials because of his unconditional support of Wiedergutmachung. Claimants and their representatives used to contact Lipschitz with all kinds of requests and, more often than not, he would personally intervene in their favour, urging the compensation officers to bring claims to a swift and positive completion. ⁷

During his Israel visit, Lipschitz was invited to meet a group of attorneys who specialised in compensation claims from Germany. ⁸ The gathering was chaired by Dr Siegfried Moses, who was Israel's State Controller and an expert on the topic. Before the end of the war, Siegfried had already published a book on Jewish claims against Germany which formulated the legal basis for Jewish reparations claims after the Holocaust. ⁹ Lipschitz's talk, entitled ‘Praktische und Rechtsfragen der deutschen Wiedergutmachung’, [The Practical and Legal Issues with German Reparations], was not only designed to provide insight into the work of the compensation authorities in Berlin, it also aimed to rebuke allegations of the premeditated procrastination of claims, the insensitive treatment of claimants, as well as the alleged lack of basic knowledge about, and apathy towards victims of National Socialism. Lipschitz opened his presentation by admitting that the legal and administrative challenges facing the compensation agencies were immense, calling for all parties involved in the process to work closely together in order to manage the enormous task in hand. To demonstrate the efforts of the Berlin office to improve their working relationship with claimants and their representatives, Lipschitz revealed that Berlin was the first compensation agency in Germany that did not employ former members of the Nazi party. He then appealed to his audience to convey this information to their clients, who, according to Lipschitz, were inclined to associate unsuccessful claims with the fact that former Nazis were working in the compensation offices. ¹⁰ Lipschitz then noted that although more than 20% of the employees in the Berlin office were themselves victims of Nazi persecution, this was no assurance for the quality of their work or even a guarantee for a sympathetic attitude towards the claimants. According to him, the best caseworkers were younger people who also seemed to ‘possess the right conviction’ to the task at hand. ¹¹ Many of them first learn about the history of the Third Reich and its atrocities from the files, Lipschitz reported. When a document ‘factually states how many family members have perished in Auschwitz’, Lipschitz noted, ‘even a hard-nosed official cannot remain indifferent’. ¹² We also learn that junior staff members were sent to watch the ‘Anne Frank’ play, which was staged in Germany in 1956, making a deep impression on the two million people who saw it. ¹³ Lipschitz explains that experiencing such performances is much more effective than reading books or attending lectures, although he also mentions that ‘extensive literature (for example, Reitlinger and Adler) is available to the employees’. ¹⁴ These historical studies, he proclaimed, were supposed to complement the individual stories found in the claims.

At the end of his talk, Lipschitz conveyed that the Berlin Interior Ministry now supports a group of young historians who are to investigate the Nazi ‘extermination [Vernichtung] of the labour movement, the persecution [Verfolgung] of Jews, churches and artists [Künstler]’. ¹⁵ This research, he added, would be carried out using the files of the Berlin compensation agency. Lipschitz explained that the decision to support such research demonstrates that Berlin did not consider its reparations task annulled once its 600 million-mark funds were distributed. He concluded his speech by stating that it was no less important ‘to bring a portion of the Jewish people back to our culture’, constituting that ‘the ideal or spiritual reparation’ [die ideelle Wiedergutmachung] is ‘to rebuild human forms’ [menschliche Formen wieder aufzubauen]’. ¹⁶

2. Reparations as a matter of the heart and the mind

The group of historians Lipschitz referred to in his Tel Aviv talk was the Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945 (the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945) that officially initiated its work in October 1956. Funded by the Berlin city lottery, with overheads covered by the Lipschitz Ministry of Internal Affairs, this research unit was to conduct a broad-based study of persecution and resistance in Berlin during the Nazi period with the aim of presenting an authoritative report on the subject for the general public. Using extensive documentary evidence, including official files from former Nazi and Berlin agencies, files from the compensation office and interviews with survivors, the project was supposed to focus on ‘the fate of the victims of Nazi policy and the efforts of individual groups to offer resistance’. ¹⁷

It is not entirely clear when Lipschitz decided to call into being the Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945. For Lipschitz, Wiedergutmachung was not simply a pragmatic attempt to redress the wrongdoings of the past: in an article from 1956, Lipschitz bluntly admitted, ‘one cannot make up for murder; one cannot utterly heal maltreatment and mutilation; one cannot rebuild destroyed existences, demolished careers, smashed lifeworks; one cannot simply go back in time to 30 January 1933 [when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany] when night fell over hundreds of thousands of people and then over millions with the beginning of the war in 1939’. ¹⁸ Wiedergutmachung, he then postulated, should be a matter of the heart for the whole nation. In his view, ‘it would have to be a claim of the obligator part [Verpflichteten], not the entitled persons [Berechtigten]’. ¹⁹ National Socialism, Lipschitz observed, ‘has laid deep trenches across Germany, pitting German against German, and has dug a deep ditch around Germany’. ²⁰ Thus, from this standpoint, reparations were not merely about rebuilding broken lives, they were also part of a political project, the aim of which was the reintegration of Germany into the family of nations. In Lipschitz's words, reparations were about the ‘restoration of the good name of a people’. ²¹ There is evidence to suggest that for Lipschitz, the work of the Forschungsgruppe was part of this project. As one of the members of the research group once commented: ‘I believe that Senator Lipschitz would like to show with this work that the resistance to the National Socialist system was far greater than previously assumed in the general public. That ultimately all resistance was futile […], seems to him to be less important than the fact that there were people who, despite almost a total lack of prospects, dared for reasons of conscience, to oppose an overpowering regime’. ²²

During a period when opposition to National Socialism was still considered treason by large portions of the German population, any public engagement with the question of German resistance had significant political implications. ²³ But, Lipschitz was no less keen to unveil all kinds of expressions of humanity and anti-Nazi sentiments during the Third Reich. He believed that in revealing to the public those who upheld their humanity, ‘one would be able to move beyond simplistic divisions of identifying people as either perpetrators or victims which would demonstrate that even the most brutal dictatorship could not demolish Menschlichkeit (humaneness)’. ²⁴ Inspired by Kurt R. Grossmann's 1957 anthology Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (The Unsung Heroes: People in Germany's Dark Days), Lipschitz, in conjunction with the Jewish community of Berlin, launched an initiative to honour those who ‘in Germany's darkest days’ helped victims of Nazi persecution. He also set up a special fund managed by the compensation authorities to financially support so-called ‘silent heroes’, who were now living in deprived circumstances.

The Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 and the Silent Heroes initiative were separate, yet related endeavours. Both seemed to emerge from the same political agenda that strove to save the stories of the victims of National Socialism as well as those who had the courage to help them from falling into oblivion. ²⁵ By the mid-1960s, 1864 non-Jewish Berliners were nominated for the honour. A special committee reviewed the applications according to a set of 14 different criteria. Between 1958 and 1966, the Berlin Senate awarded 760 people the Silent Hero honour in public ceremonies for the indispensable aid they provided to Jews during the Nazi period. ²⁶ Nonetheless, the initiative was short lived. It did not seem to have achieved broad media coverage, and more importantly, none of the other federal states followed suit. The passing of Joachim Lipschitz in December 1961 was another misfortune that hampered the honouring initiative. But in the end, the general public's indifference and the politicians’ lack of interest buried the initiative. ²⁷ Indeed, it seemed that post-war Germans were not ready to admit the uncomfortable truth that individual agency under the Nazi dictatorship had been a possibility.

3. Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945

In mid-1956, Lipschitz approached the historian Hans Herzfeld (1892–1982), asking for his assistance to put together and oversee the work of the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945. Herzfeld belonged to an older generation of historians who had already been established scholars before 1933. After finishing his Habilitation (post-doctoral qualification) in 1923, he worked as a Privatdozent (lecturer) at the University of Halle, making a name for himself mainly as an expert on the history of World War I. When National Socialism came to power, Herzfeld's academic career came to an end, although he managed to keep his position as late as 1938. Similar to Lipschitz, who had a Jewish father, Herzfeld was forced to leave the university and was deprived of his title and the right to teach because he had a Jewish grandfather. He was arrested several times but was not deported from Germany. Living ‘off the grid’, he survived the war in the city of Freiburg on the edge of the Black Forest. ²⁸ After 1945, Herzfeld was able to resume his academic career as one of the few ‘unbelastete’ (untainted) German historians, those who remained uncompromised by the burden of the Nazi era. He was first appointed adjunct professor of modern history at the University of Freiburg and in 1950; he then became a full professor at the newly established Free University in West Berlin, where he taught until his retirement in 1960. Herzfeld wrote books on the history of the Weimar Republic, World War I, and the making of the modern world, helping to institutionalise ‘contemporary history’ as a historical discipline in post-war West-German universities. He was also the decisive force behind the establishment of the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at the Free University of Berlin as well as several other important academic initiatives including the Historische Kommission zu Berlin (The Historical Commission in Berlin), which he headed from 1959 until 1978. It is likely that Joachim Lipschitz became aware of Herzfeld as an initiator of important academic institutions and due to his personal history, he found him suitable to lead a research group on resistance in Berlin.

We can only speculate as to why Herzfeld agreed to advise a research group located within the Berlin ministry of interior, and we do not know if the university would have considered supporting research on such a loaded topic. ²⁹ It seems likely that incorporating the research group as an integral unit of the ministry administration allowed access to procedures and documents that would have otherwise been denied to outsiders. It might also have been a matter of control. In making the research group part of his administration, Lipschitz emphasised that this work was not a research for research's sake and should be made accessible to wider audiences beyond the ivory towers of academia. Looking at the documentation on the research group's work, one cannot escape the impression of in-built tension between Lipschitz's expectations for a rapid and impactful outcome and the ambitious scholarly objectives the project set for itself to: (a) identify all available sources; (b) evaluate the material; and (c) compile relevant documents for scientifically sound publications. It is no wonder that shortly after the work began, it was quickly established that it would be unrealistic to finish the project within the 2-year deadline initially set for this venture. ³⁰

What is certain is that Herzfeld recognised the pioneering nature of the project, depicting it as dealing with one of the most burning issues of recent German history. He was particularly captivated by Lipschitz's suggestion that the compensation claim files comprised a highly revealing source for the study of persecution and resistance under National Socialism. ³¹ Conscious of the cutting-edge nature of the undertaking, Herzfeld proposed dividing the research into four study areas, inviting four promising young scholars to work on the project. In this context, ‘young’ meant that these men did not have an incriminating Nazi past. The only woman working on the project was the stenographer. It is also noteworthy that none of the researchers were of Jewish origin. In their first progress report, it was stated that the project comprised the first attempt by ‘non-Jewish Germans to provide an in-depth study of Jewish fate under National Socialism’. ³² From this report, we also learn that all members of the group were well aware of the political significance of their work.

4. Individual compensation claims as historical documents

Born in 1920, Friedrich Zipfel was the oldest of the four group members, and the only one to have served as a soldier during World War II. After his release from a prisoner-of-war camp, Zipfel studied history and geography, first at the University of Göttingen and then, from 1949, at the Free University of Berlin. In 1952, he received his doctorate degree with a thesis on the public criticism of German Emperor Wilhelm II. ³³ Zipfel was appointed head of the project and was assigned to work on the topic of Churches and Resistance.

Hellmut Seier (1929–2019) was a student of Hans Herzfeld's. He joined the project after earning his doctorate in 1956, with his study on the state's idea of the historian Heinrich von Sybel. Seier's focus area was on acts of opposition amongst the middle classes. Another prominent member of the project was Hans-Joachim Reichhardt (1925–2012) who later became the director of The Landesarchiv Berlin from 1979 to 1990. Reichhardt was assigned to study working-class opposition to the Nazi regime. But perhaps the most well-known member of the research group was Wolfgang Scheffler (1929–2008) who was a student of the Jewish historian Ernst Fraenkel; Scheffler wrote his PhD on parliamentarian remuneration in Germany and England at the Free University in Berlin. Most likely due to the influence of his teacher, Scheffler's work in the project was on the persecution of Jews in Berlin, which led to him becoming one of the founding fathers of Holocaust studies in Germany. ³⁴ Later, in 1957, Dr Wilhelm Falk joined the project; so far, I have failed to find any information about him. ³⁵ Once established, the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 moved into its fully equipped offices in the administration building of the Berlin Ministry of Interior in Fehrbelliner Platz 1. In order to be able to work with the records of the compensation office and other official documents, all members of the group were asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

The fact that none of the group members had previous research experience in topics even remotely related to the theme of the project further illustrates the ground-breaking nature of this undertaking. The group approached The Wiener Library in London, which had begun documenting the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s, to help with their undertaking. ³⁶ Wolfgang Scheffler travelled to London and was in regular contact with the library staff as well as with Alfred Wiener himself, as were some of the other members of the group who had met him when he visited Berlin. The Berlin compensation office also gave The Wiener Library a 12,000-mark grant as an incentive for supporting the work of the Berlin research group. ³⁷ Through the Wiener Library and the compensation department at the German embassy in London, the Forschungsgruppe established close contact with some members of the German-Jewish émigré community in London, some of whom were interviewed by members of the group.

In his 1958 visit to London, Scheffler delivered a talk in the United Restitution Organization (URO) office at 188/189 Finchley Road, in which he presented the project and discussed some of the challenges it faced. ³⁸ He began with some reflections on the interrelationship between resistance and persecution. After 1933, there was no resolved, uniformed resistance movement that opposed the regime, Scheffler noted. According to him, the support of the majority of Germans, combined with the lack of organised resistance, gave the Nazi regime the freedom to do whatever they pleased, making persecution and ultimately extermination a mere matter of choice and timing. This also meant that all acts of opposition by small groups and individuals were diffused undertakings. From the point of view of the project, this situation posed the question of how to depict and explain German resistance to National Socialism as a historical phenomenon. It also raised an even more fundamental question of how the project should delineate what resistance is. Should one consider hiding a Jewish person during the war an act of opposition, or was it the humanitarian duty of an individual to do so? Scheffler noted that in the context of reparations, the German legislature adopted the latter approach despite the fact that during the war, even basic humane gestures towards Jews could result in capital punishment. This approach created contentious circumstances in which Jews who survived the war in hiding were entitled to receive compensation, while their helpers were not. For their compensation claim applications, Jewish survivors needed the testimonies of their helpers as evidence of their living conditions under National Socialism, and many of them sought to locate their rescuers. One can imagine how disappointed the former helpers were once they realised that despite the risks they had taken to help Jews, the law did not recognise them as victims of National Socialism and they found that they were not eligible to claim recompense despite the sacrifices they had made. ³⁹

In the spirit of Joachim Lipschitz, the project developed a much more inclusive and malleable definition of resistance to include any form of agency by a group or an individual that went against Nazi ideology and aimed to change existing conditions, even in the smallest sphere of influence, or pave the way to a new political order. ⁴⁰ For its time, this was a novel if not a bold approach to the notion of ‘German resistance’. In the 1950s, resistance was still predominantly associated with the political or military attempts to overthrow the Nazi regime by small groups of people. ⁴¹ In looking at opposition to National Socialism beyond politics, the culturalist approach adopted by the project significantly expanded the circle of people, and the types of action that could be considered resistance. Based on such a bottom-up approach, Scheffler claimed, for example, that acts of opposition were more common amongst deprived sections of German society, suggesting that the frustration over the legislator approach regarding people who helped during the war could have political implications. ⁴²

For our purposes, Scheffler's subsequent comments on working with files from the compensation office are even more intriguing. These records were expected to provide illuminating insights into the work and the ways in which resistance groups were formed. According to Scheffler, from the beginning of the project the group primarily worked with compensation files. During their first year, members of the group went through around 4200 case files. We also learn that ‘as indispensable and valuable as these records are for the research project, they [were] in most cases without great substance’. ⁴³ The main reason for this was the compensation legislation at the time, according to which a person was eligible to receive indemnification only when he or she was incarcerated due to opposition activities. Scheffler explained that most claims fixated on the period of imprisonment and its implications, rather than on the events and experiences that took place beforehand. He reports that the group found definite references to resistance activities by non-Jewish claimants but only in a small number of records. That said, the compensation claims records appeared to help the project identify and locate individuals who were involved in opposition activities. Long before oral history became an established historical method, the Forschungsgruppe put together a questionnaire and conducted interviews – mainly with those claimants still living in Berlin – in order to enhance the information found in the compensation claim files.

From the progress reports of the project, we learn that the challenges the group faced not only revolved around the question of what information could be extracted from compensation claim files; given the volume of the records at hand, a more fundamental question was how to process such an enormous number of documents. Since the compensation case files were arranged alphabetically and according to the different types of claims, in order to make use of the material, the four researchers needed to find ways of clustering the material according to the project's research questions and four areas of study. It became clear that without the active assistance of the compensation authorities, the research group would not be able to cope with the vast number of files held by the compensation office in a reasonable time frame.

A brainstorming meeting took place with representatives from the Berlin compensation agency in October 1957, the aim of which was to establish ways to rationalise the search and thus make it more efficient for research purposes. ⁴⁴ One suggestion that was put forward by the research group was to create a ‘wish list’ or a catalogue of themes that were of interest to the project and which would be distributed amongst the case officers handling the compensation claims. ⁴⁵ The research group was also made aware of a card catalogue that contained brief descriptions of around 100,000 claims that had been concluded. The officials offered access to this collection suggesting that it would provide a good overview of past cases and help accelerate their search. In addition, the representatives of the compensation office revealed that they had collected many primary documents that could be made available to the project as well. It was also suggested that the research group could interview former victims of Nazi persecution who were working for the Berlin compensation office at that time. A prominent example was Helene Jacobs, who joined a group, led by lawyer Franz Herbert Kaufmann, who had hidden Jews and aided them in escaping the country. ⁴⁶ Jacobs was also asked to serve as the liaison to the project and to introduce them to other co-workers in the compensation office with similar experiences.

The compensation office's readiness to support the research project was not only a matter of courtesy or simply compliance with a directive from above; ⁴⁷ having four professional historians at their disposal was as convenient and beneficial for their work as it was for the research group. Members of the Forschungsgruppe provided advice on various matters and helped with the search for documents required for processing compensation claims. We have evidence of requests for an expert opinion in matters related to the project. For example, the Forschungsgruppe were asked by a compensation court in the city of Detmold to investigate the alleged ties of a claimant by the name of Paul Huperz to resistance groups – especially the ‘White Rose’ in Munich – and to some people who were convicted by the Nazis for high treason. Writing a three-page report on the case, Friedrich Zipfel concluded that based on the available evidence, one could neither confirm nor refute the statement provided by the claimant. ⁴⁸

Given the personal connections the Forschungsgruppe established with different victims, they were even asked to provide support in specific compensation cases. In one of his accounts, Zipfel describes his correspondence with Astrid Gräfin von Hardenberg. She was the daughter of Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg who was involved on the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler after which he was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Zipfel refers to letters from Gräfin von Hardenberg in which she describes the deprived material circumstances of some of the survivors and family members of the 20 July group and pleads for state assistance. ⁴⁹ He then forwarded her request to the responsible authorities, adding that the history of the 20 July 1944 group and the sacrifice its members made is well documented, making Gräfin von Hardenberg's case worthy of support.

It is difficult to establish what role, if any, the research group played in the work of the ‘Silent Heroes’ initiative that was officially launched at the end of 1958 just as the resistance project was beginning to dissolve. It is interesting to note that in his otherwise meticulous study of the ‘Silent Heroes’ initiative, Dennis Riffel never made reference to the Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945. We also learn from Riffel's study that the Berlin compensation office was assigned the task of researching and verifying the applications for obtaining ‘Silent Hero’ status. It is thus feasible that members of the research group were in some way involved in this process. There are good reasons to surmise that at least for Lipschitz, the work of the research group was supposed to set the scholarly foundations for the honouring initiative that followed. We have evidence that suggests how the research group helped identify people who were eventually given the ‘Silent Hero’ honour.

In his London talk, Wolfgang Scheffler presented some case studies illustrating how an agency was an option even after the beginning of the war when Nazi control over the population was tightened. One case in point is that of Otto Weidt, the owner of a broom and brush workshop for the blind and deaf. Today, Weidt's story is well known, and there is a museum commemorating his work in Berlin. ⁵⁰ Many of Weidt's employees were Jewish at a time when Jews were not permitted to work for ‘Aryan’ firms. During the war, he protected his workers from deportation and helped some of them hide. Otto Weidt died in 1947, but according to Scheffler, his wife was recognised as a victim of National Socialism and received a modest monthly allowance of 50 marks from the Berlin compensation office. Scheffler did not mention the ‘Silent Heroes’ in the talk he delivered in May 1958. At that time, the initiative was already identifying candidates for the first honouring ceremony that would take place on 9 November of that year. Scheffler cited the supporting evidence in Weidt's claim file from Inge Deutschkron, who, at the time, was a young journalist and a strong advocate for Otto and Else Weidt. ⁵¹ Between 1941 and 1943, Deutschkron worked for Weidt, and it was thanks to his help that she managed to evade deportation. For the Weidt compensation claim, Deutschkron gave the following statement: ‘I, Inge Deutschkron, recognised victim of fascism, registered with the compensation office under No. 50471, hereby confirm that husband and wife Otto and Else Weidt have helped persecuted Jews in an exemplary fashion’. ⁵² Else Weidt was also awarded a ‘Silent Hero’ honour, and it might well be the case that the research group's work assisted in helping her obtain this recognition.

This was just one of many case studies that the research group collected during the 3 years of its existence. According to Scheffler, over 6000 Jews had been living in hiding in Berlin during the war. Based on the available evidence, it is difficult to establish how many of these case projects managed to recover. Nonetheless, Scheffler gives us an indication of how the research group intended to use the compensation office files to retrieve and give voice to the stories of unknown victims of National Socialism and those who sought to help them.

5. The end of the Forschungsgruppe Berliner Widerstand 1933–1945

The 2-year funding for the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 was due to expire in October 1958. At the end of 1957, Lipschitz indicated that he expected the work to finish within the set time frame and that it would be difficult to acquire further funding to extend the project. It seems that for him, the ultimate aim of the project was to produce a publication that, beyond which, he felt no impetus to undertake further scholarly research on the topic. Yet, as indicated previously, members of the project clearly stated that they would need more time in order to process the sources and produce a significant publication on such a compound and sensitive topic. From the project's progress reports, we learn that a large publication in the form of a book had been planned. The envisaged publication was to comprise 600 pages of narrative text, 200 pages with references, and additional 700 pages of original documents. This final part was to complement and expand the narrative section and to contain official Nazi documents, together with testimonies of the victims and of those who helped them and opposed the regime. The research group placed much significance on the publication of the source material edition, depicting it as challenging as writing a monograph since it required careful selection of the most substantial and reliable documents and critical commentary on the sources. This was an ambitious undertaking to achieve in just 2 years. While the Forschungsgruppe reassured the authorities that they had no intention of unduly extending the project, they also indicated that ‘scholarly research of this kind requires meticulous preparation and close attention to detail, before it can come to completion’. ⁵³ Towards the end of 1957, Zipfel estimated that the book manuscript would be complete for publication in late in 1960.

Despite Lipschitz's warnings, he managed to obtain further funds from the Berlin lottery, which extended the project until autumn 1959, as requested. In a meeting that took place at the end of that year, Zipfel reported that the first manuscript drafts were complete and almost ready to be submitted to senator Lipschitz. ⁵⁴ I have not found any evidence for this submission, and we know that no comprehensive publication in the anticipated format was produced by the research project. Wilhelm Falk was the only group member that continued working in the Berlin Ministry of the Interior after the project officially ended. He represented, so to speak, the project that was no more. Under this capacity, he kept an eye on the publication grants – the sum of 23,707 marks was still waiting to be spent. This is why Hans Herzfeld, who was now the director of the Historische Kommission zu Berlin, wrote to Falk on 4 July 1963 asking for 10,000 marks to fund the upcoming publication of Friedrich Zipfel's study on ‘the Churches and the Third Reich’. ⁵⁵ From a memorandum that Falk wrote immediately after receiving Herzfeld's letter, we learn that following Zipfel's book, two further publications were being planned: a collection of essays provisionally titled Widerstand und Verfolgung in Berlin (Resistance and Persecution in Berlin) with contributions on the labour movement from Reichhardt, from Seier on the middle classes, from Zipfel on Nazi detention practices as well as a monograph by Wolfgang Scheffler titled Widerstand und Verfolgung des Judentums in Berlin (Resistance and Persecution of the Jews in Berlin), the latter of which was also supposed to be submitted as his Habilitation qualification. Zipfel published his book on the Churches and the Third Reich in 1965. Although the book does not focus only on Berlin, in Herzfeld's preface and Zipfel's introduction, the study is presented as a publication of the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945. It is also interesting to note that despite a lengthy document section, Zipfel does not cite any material from the compensation office.

As for the other two titles, neither of them ever saw the light of day, at least not in the format suggested by Falk. Hans Joachim Reichhardt, together with Hermann Graml, Hans Mommsen, and Ernst Wolf, published a study on the resistance in the labour movement in a 1966 collection of essays on opposition to Hitler. ⁵⁶ He did not give credit to the Forschungsgruppe, although at least one part of the study, on the socialist underground group Neu Beginnen (New Beginning), was based on materials from the compensation office. ⁵⁷ On Hellmut Seier's publication list, we find just one article from 1959 on the phenomenon of ‘inner emigration’ that was linked to the project. ⁵⁸ It is a fascinating essay on what was a contentious concept at the time and would later become a topic for intensive research. ⁵⁹ Otherwise, Seier did not publish on related topics, but specialised mainly on 19th-century German history.

As for Wolfgang Scheffler, he went on to publish several important works on different aspects of the Holocaust, but the title Falk mentions in his memorandum as his upcoming Habilitation was not one of them. In 1960, Scheffler published a 120-page book entitled, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Persecutions of Jews under the Third Reich). ⁶⁰ Conceptualised as a textbook to help teach the topic, it provided a concise overview of the Nazi's anti-Jewish policies and included a number of illustrations and key-documents. Although Forschungsgruppe did not issue or fund the publication, Scheffler writes in his introduction that most of the source material for his book was collected while he was working for the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945. One of the documents we find in the original version of Scheffler's book was an anonymised version of Inge Deutschkron's testimony for Else Weidt's compensation claim, cited as originating from the project's document collection. Scheffler's textbook is one of the first popular overviews of the topic in Germany, and by 1966, it had seen six editions. But what is even more striking about Scheffler's publication is that he chose to conclude his narrative with a chapter on reparations, arguing that only when people come to grasp the full extent of Jewish persecution would they realise that in proportion to the destruction, the German payments are only a modest contribution towards genuine Wiedergutmachung. ⁶¹ From a historiographical point of view, Scheffler suggested that redress, be it for individuals, or as reparations to Jews as a collective, is an integral part of the study of the Holocaust. A similar approach was taken by Raul Hilberg, who closed his 1961 magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews with a chapter called ‘Salvage’ in which he discussed early restitution and indemnification legislation. ⁶²

6. Individual Indemnification Claims and Holocaust Research

The Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 was officially dissolved in 1959. The establishment of the Historische Kommission zu Berlin that year led to hopes that the research project would be able to continue in a smaller format as part of the new commission. Efforts were made to get support for two positions that were to be located in The Landesarchiv Berlin. ⁶³ But, they were unable to procure funding. In the meantime, each member of the group was on to pursue his own academic career. Zipfel returned to work in the Friedrich Meinecke Institute where he became a professor of contemporary history in 1971. During the 1960s, he curated the first permanent exhibition in the memorial and educational centre on Stauffenbergstraße, which eventually became the German Resistance Memorial Centre. ⁶⁴ Hellmut Seier was the only member of the group who left Berlin, going first to Frankfurt and then to Marburg where he became a professor of modern history. Hans Joachim Reichhardt started working for The Landesarchiv Berlin, becoming the archive director from 1979 to 1990. Finally, for Wolfgang Scheffler, his work for the project was probably the most decisive in shaping his academic path. In 1961, Scheffler used the contacts he made during his time with the research group to become part of the German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as an observer. Later in the 1960s, he served as an expert witness in a number of trials against former Nazis. He was an active member of the Columbus Centre at the University of Sussex and taught at the Otto Suhr Institute, Berlin. But, it was not until 1986 that he was awarded a professorship at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin.

The Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 did not yield a major publication on the topic. Moreover, despite the impact, the project seemed to have on the thinking and scholarship of the group's members, this research became a passing episode in their working careers, and to a large extent, disappeared into oblivion. Thus, for example, in an overview article from 1965 on the meaning of resistance to National Socialism for contemporary history, Friedrich Zipfel completely ignored the work of the Forschungsgruppe that he managed. For Joachim Lipschitz, the project was nothing more than a small mosaic stone in his effort to rebuild a different kind of Germany based on an anti-Nazi ethos. ⁶⁵ Members of the research group, however, seem to share the same view regarding the political significance and educational value of the project. Yet, they were more reserved when it came to the inclination to celebrate those rare occasions of opposition to the Nazi state as a model for the new Germany. In his 1965 paper, Zipfel argued that the resistance in Germany was more of a reaction rather than an action, stating that the overwhelming majority of Germans did not belong to the ‘other Germany’ but were Mitläufer (followers and bystanders). According to Zipfel, it is this phenomenon that ‘requires clarification – not with an uplifted index finger, but according to strict historical scholarly standards’. ⁶⁶

In a sense, the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 exemplifies the fuzzy interplay between scholarship and funding bodies, particularly when such undertakings are motivated by a strong political agenda with expectations of what we today call ‘research with an impact’. In such cases, there is often a sense of urgency when it comes to delivering the research results. While it is generally difficult to measure research impact in the humanities, we can only speculate as to whether the work of the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 made any difference. To be sure, the project yielded no significant publication. Yet, the work of the research group was in many ways a precursor for other enterprises such as the Silent Heroes initiative and to a certain degree the German Resistance Memorial Centre, further consolidating the importance of ‘contemporary history’ in German post-war society. Former members of the group became prominent historians in their own right and continued to study and teach related topics. In this way, they helped to create a new generation of German historians and teachers who would learn about the Holocaust and explore National Socialism from the perspective of its victims.

One thing is for sure, in terms of its approach and method, the Forschungsgruppe was ahead of its time. The initial idea of using individual victim's experiences as a starting point for the depiction of Nazi persecution and opposition to it, rendered, if only for a brief period, the compensation claim files a valuable historical resource. For Joachim Lipschitz, such sources were to become part of a new commemoration culture at the heart of which stood the experiences of victims of Nazi oppression. Lipschitz was not the only person who recognised the documentary potential of the compensation claim files. In Israel, Nachman Blumental (1902–1983), a prominent early historian of the Holocaust, came up with a similar proposal for the newly founded Israel Holocaust commemoration authority, Yad Vashem, which had just started to build its archival collection. ⁶⁷ In a memorandum from March 1954 that was submitted to Ben-Zion Dinur, the Minister of Education and founding director of Yad Vashem, Blumental reported on a visit he made to the offices of an organisation called ‘The League for the Protection of Jewish Property in the Diaspora’ in Tel Aviv. He wrote:

I realized that there were over thirty thousand files of former Nazi prisoners, claiming compensation from the Bonn government. To verify the evidence used as a basis for a claim – claimants add two people's testimony that were with them under the Nazi occupation. These testimonies – though not all – have historical value. Furthermore, in some cases, claim files include official documents from the time of the Nazi rule, which are of great significance to research. Nazi prisoners managed to keep these documents and bring them to Israel. Alas, now the documents are being sent back to Germany as supporting evidence for compensation claims.

In my opinion, steps must be taken immediately to prevent these documents from leaving Israel without photocopying them. Also, perhaps we can keep the documents in Israel and send copies to Germany. In addition, it is necessary to go through the testimonies and make, at least from the more important ones, copies for our archive. I also learned that apart from the organization I visited, there are four other institutions dealing with compensation claims that likewise hold valuable material. ⁶⁸

Blumental's recommendation was noted, but no further action was taken. Given the stormy political debates and the strong resentments against the 1952 reparations agreement between Israel and West Germany, deploying personal compensation for the work of Yad Vashem seemed a precarious undertaking. Since the 1950s, scholars, educators, and Holocaust memorial institutions found other ways of obtaining documents and testimonies required for their work. Although short-lived, the Research Group Resistance in Berlin 1933–1945 still stands alone with its systematic attempt to use compensation claim files as sources for historical study. More importantly, the methodological and theoretical challenges this group of historians wrestled with, particularly when dealing with the compensation claim files as historical documents, are more omnipresent today than they were in the late 1950s.