Writing about the Holocaust as Scholars and Survivors: Early Holocaust Research and the Practices of Restitution and Reparations

Scholars analysing the Holocaust at Western European and US-American universities in the 1950s and 1960s mainly focussed on sources written by perpetrators. Historians’ knowledge about the process of destruction, by and large, stemmed from the perspective of those who had initiated the murder, not from the victims’, though victim testimonies had been collected shortly after the war, for example, by David Boder and various Jewish institutions in Displaced Persons (DP) camps. These sources, however, were then often forgotten during the Cold War. When victims began to file for restitution and reparations, the number of sources testifying to their persecution grew. However, Holocaust researchers of the first generation ¹ remained hesitant to use such records.

In this article, I will argue that there were three main reasons for this neglect, each of them connected to the question of how to approach the Holocaust as scholars and survivors: firstly, scholars of the first generation, many of whom were survivors of concentration camps like Henry Friedlander, or others who fled Europe due to persecution like Raul Hilberg, wanted first and foremost to understand ‘how this deed was done’. ² In their view, the perpetrator's perspective provided insights into the bureaucracy that set the Holocaust in motion. By dealing with the ‘machinery of destruction’, they aimed to depict the different steps taken to enact the mass murder, from the identification of targets to the concentration and destruction of the European Jews. ³ In so doing, they intended to portray themselves as objective scholars who, despite many accusations to the contrary, were able to scientifically study the history that they had personally been part of. They applied this as a mechanism for protecting their own research since some jurists, state officials, and even historians accused émigrés and survivors of not being able to write history in an objective manner. Secondly, these scholars were critical of the processes of restitution and reparations because, in their view, the crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its citizens were irredeemable. Thirdly, and in connection to this last point, focussing on perpetrator sources not only provided them with a bigger picture of what had happened during the Nazi period but it could also support the prosecution of such perpetrators. Therefore, I will argue that these scholars’ disinterest in restitution and reparations was not primarily due to a lack of access to sources produced in these procedures, but rather a conscious decision to study the Holocaust through the lens of primary sources produced by the perpetrators themselves. Their reasons for neglecting restitution and reparations were thus not only of a scholarly nature but also of a moral one. Analysing the first generation's valuation of restitution and reparations shows us what scholars and survivors saw as their obligation in assessing the Holocaust and its consequences. Furthermore, an analysis of the first generation's approach to restitution and reparation practices provides insight into the development of early Holocaust historiography. It shows what they perceived as their obligation as historians of the Holocaust as well as the difficulties they faced addressing the topic.

The perspective of early Holocaust scholars will be discussed using the examples of Raul Hilberg and Henry Friedlander, who were the first scholars to research the Holocaust and are considered pioneers of the field today. Hilberg, born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1926, was forced to emigrate to USA after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. After the war, Hilberg studied political science and history in New York City, where he wrote his dissertation, The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg spent most of his academic career at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington, where he became a professor of political science. Henry Friedlander, born in Berlin in 1930, was deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and later to several other concentration camps, amongst them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother was killed by the Nazis but his father survived. In 1947, he emigrated to USA and studied history at the University of Pennsylvania. After holding several short-term appointments at different universities, he became a professor of Jewish Studies at Brooklyn College in 1975. Neither scholar held a position at a high-ranking academic institution when they began their research, thus hinting at the minimal interest in the Holocaust during the 1960s and 1970s.

For their studies, Friedlander and Hilberg mainly used the Nuremberg records of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that took place in 1945–1946 which consisted of the trial records and the evidence collected by the Allies (Blue Series, 42 volumes). In addition, they relied on the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT), including the Doctors’ Trials and Judges’ Trials against influential German officials. ⁴ Both historians also played a role in the legal process of later trials against war criminals who had illegally entered in USA. Hilberg worked as a consultant for the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) for more than a decade and helped with the prosecution of Nazi criminals like Feodor Fedorenko, who had worked at the Treblinka extermination camp, and Serge Kowalchuk, who had been part of a Schutzmannschaft in Ukraine. ⁵ Friedlander also observed these cases and advised prospective judges on relevant historical and ethical questions. ⁶ Instead of working with sources that were produced during the practice of compensation, which was a major political process that supplied information about the Holocaust after the war, their research relied on the sources used in the trials of war criminals. Why did these eminent Holocaust scholars focus on post-war trials and leave out the practice of restitution almost entirely, even though the perspective of the victims had become an important focus by the 1980s?

As Jews, Friedlander and Hilberg were accused early on of not being able to write about the Holocaust in an objective way, particularly by German colleagues. ⁷ Both responded by carefully studying the sources of perpetrators collected in war crime trials. In so doing, they could not be accused of researching the fate of their own people with an ulterior motive. To assess the influence of personal circumstances on their work, this article will examine the work and autobiographical reflections of these two protagonists. It intends to apply an intellectual history approach as well as analyse discourses on the Holocaust between the 1950s and 2000s.

As a pioneer of Holocaust Studies, Hilberg's work and biography have received extensive attention since his death in 2007. ⁸ In 2017, Olof Bortz published his analysis of Hilberg's magnum opus Destruction, which was originally published in 1961 as a revised and extended version of his 1955 dissertation. ⁹ Henry Friedlander, who died in 2012, has not received the same attention. One reason for this might be that Friedlander turned to the study of the Holocaust over a decade later than Hilberg and initially focussed on the question of how to teach the Holocaust. ¹⁰ In addition, Friedlander analysed the Nazi's mass murder of Sinti and Roma as an analogy to the racial persecution and extermination of the Jews. This interpretation was highly controversial during the 1990s. ¹¹

Given the different foci of Hilberg's and Friedlander's work, this article consists of three parts: firstly, I will analyse Hilberg's perception of the practices of restitution and reparations in connection with his account of the Holocaust in the 1961 version of his book; in the second part, I will examine Hilberg's critique of such practices in the 1985 and 2003 revised editions; and the third part, then, deals with Henry Friedlander's perspective on restitution and reparations. Since Friedlander filed for compensation several times between 1949 and 1993, part three discusses his personal experience and its influence on his approach to studying the Holocaust.

1. Through the eyes of the perpetrator: Interpreting the Holocaust and the problem of compensation

Hilberg dealt with the practices of restitution and reparations after the war in the first edition of Destruction, published in USA in 1961. Hilberg's book is amongst the first of the scholarly works on the Holocaust. Before him, only two other scholars had published comprehensive volumes about the murder of the Jews. Léon Poliakov, a French historian, wrote the first book on the Holocaust, Bréviaire de la haine, which appeared in 1951. It was only translated into English in 1979. ¹² Gerald Reitlinger, a scholar based in England, published his study, The Final Solution, in 1953. ¹³ Other survivors and scholars also wrote early accounts of the Nazi concentration camp system. ¹⁴ Hilberg's book, however, consisted of an analysis of a larger amount of source material, which many of his colleagues particularly praised in their reviews. ¹⁵ Nevertheless, the Holocaust was not a topic that received broad attention in academia or in the public, neither in USA nor in West Germany. ¹⁶

By interpreting the Holocaust as a bureaucratic process, Hilberg offered a new approach. While Reitlinger and Poliakov focussed on the roles that antisemitism and leading Nazi-personnel such as Hitler and Himmler played in the Holocaust, Hilberg described the bureaucratic machinery that set the Holocaust in motion – from the fiscal authorities who expropriated the Jews to the German Reichsbahn (railroads) that deported the victims to the concentration camps. According to Hilberg, there was not one order that led to the killing of the Jews. Instead, the perpetrators acted on ‘perceived imperatives’. ‘Everyone knew what had to be done, and no one was in doubt about directions or goals’. ¹⁷

Hilberg focussed on the antisemitic orders implemented by the Nazis starting in 1933, resulting in the ‘Aryanisation’ and expropriation of Jewish property and businesses, their expulsion, their concentration in ghettos, and ultimately their murder. However, the first edition also contained a chapter titled ‘Consequences’, which consisted of three subchapters on the post-war trials, on the emigration of Jews (‘Rescue’), and on the debates about restitution and reparations (‘Salvage’). In his introduction to ‘Salvage’, he asked whether there could be any form of compensation for the crimes committed against Jewry:

“If we were to survey the hurt inflicted by the Germans upon the Jews, we would have to consider the suffering and dying of the victims; we would have to measure the impact of their deaths on those who were closest to the victims, and we would have to think about the long-range effects of the entire destruction process upon Jewry as a whole. All this adds up to a vast, almost non-assessable loss. What, then, is to happen after such damage has been done? When ordinary justice prevails, there is an expectation of compensation for every wrong, and the bigger the injury, the greater the claim for payment. However, the post-war situation confronting the Jews was far from ordinary. They were caught up in the midst of a cold war, and neither side was dependent on their support. Much that the Jews wanted had to be gotten in Germany, and Germany itself was the battleground”. ¹⁸

Hilberg pointed out that such crimes could hardly be measured and that any form of compensation would require (high) payments. However, a justice system that would take into account the perspective of the victims would be difficult to establish since the victims were dependent on the different interests of the Allies, Jewish aid organisations, and the West German state. Given the political context, Hilberg saw a clear reason for the slow and limited compensation payments. West Germany's integration into the Western community of states was prioritised over Jewish claims. Thus, he criticised the German authorities for putting the victims at a disadvantage, and the Allies for tolerating these decisions based on their political goal of integration. With this observation, Hilberg was amongst the first witnesses and scholars to analyse the politics of restitution and reparations.

Hilberg described the Jewish call for restitution and reparations as a ‘salvage operation in which recovery is inversely proportional to the depth of the loss. In a sense, the perpetrators were asked to pay for the incompleteness of their jobs. Yet even this bill was not paid in full’. ¹⁹ This quote highlights Hilberg's main position on restitution and reparations: firstly, he doubted the practice of compensation because of moral concerns. Compensation in the literal sense was impossible. He despised the notion that the Germans could simply pay off the crimes they had committed. ²⁰ Secondly, and in connection to the first, he criticised the course taken by the German politicians, who had agreed to compensation but tried to limit the persons who could file for restitution or reparations. For example, according to the Territorialitätsprinzip (territorial principle), victims who had not lived in Germany during the war were not eligible since their own countries were allegedly responsible for their persecution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, West Germany concluded agreements with Western European states like Greece, Italy, France, and Great Britain, who agreed to compensate the victims themselves. ²¹ Hilberg accused German politicians of navigating a course between the demands of the Allies and a desire to return as little as possible. As Constantin Goschler has shown, the debates about compensation payments ranged thematically from diplomatic considerations – reacting to demands by foreign aid organisations and neighbouring states – to financial reservations. ²² These efforts hardly represented the extent of Nazi crimes, Hilberg argued, since certain victim groups had zero or only limited access to compensation, for example, those from foreign countries. ²³

Hilberg used laws implemented in regard to compensation questions and various agreements as the main sources for his analysis. In addition, he relied on newspaper reports, especially from Der Aufbau, a crucial newspaper founded by German Jewish émigrés in New York, which often gave accounts of shortcomings in the practice. Another factor in Hilberg's disapproval of the enforcement of restitution was that:

the restitution laws had been designed for the upper middle class. They covered the kind of property that was substantial enough to be preserved in identifiable form. For those who had never possessed such assets, there was yet no remedy. The masses of the poorer Jews who had lost their relatives, their health, their liberty, and their economic prospects could not make use of the restitution laws. ²⁴

For Hilberg, this exclusion or at least the disadvantage for poorer Jews was a major injustice entailed in the entire practice, which he continued to criticise in all his editions. Jews from lower social classes often did not have land or valuable property that could be restored to help them build a new life after the war. As we will see in the case of Friedlander, those without property were able to file for reparations, but it often took years for them to finally receive their money.

Furthermore, Hilberg pointed to the complicated process of persuading the German public of the necessity and legitimacy of reparations. Many Germans opposed the early restitution practices implemented by the Allies. This was not only because they rejected the practice as such but because they perceived it as a result of ‘Siegerjustiz’ (victor's justice) and thus as a punishment by the Allies. As Constantin Goschler and Jürgen Lillteicher have demonstrated, many German citizens formed lobby groups to fight the practice because they perceived the claims against them or their fellow citizens as unjustified; they claimed to have purchased the property in question legally. Moreover, in the journal Restitution, those who had bought or received Jewish property during the Nazi period exchanged arguments which could be used in their favour. For example, they recommended depicting their purchase as a charitable action – a way to provide the Jewish owners with a last chance to emigrate. ²⁵ Attempts to mitigate the laws implemented by the Allies were also made by politicians in the West German parliament, the Bundestag. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), who received 11.9% of the votes in the 1949 election, proposed a resolution to withdraw the existing laws by the end of that year, which politicians of other parties, such as the Bavaria Party (BP), also supported. ²⁶ The politician Alfred Steger, member of the Landtag (state parliament) of Rhineland-Palatinate, likened the practice of restitution to Aryanisation. In this sense, many politicians demanded compensation for those who had to restore property. ²⁷

In the 1961 edition of Destruction, Hilberg also criticised the non-existence of reparations for forced labour – a topic that was avoided in legislation as well as in academia up until the end of the 1980s. ²⁸ Hilberg also condemned Austria's position: as an ‘occupied nation’, it had portrayed itself as a victim and only paid ‘a few crumbs’. ²⁹ In fact, Austria demanded compensation payments from Germany, which Germany rejected. ³⁰ As a native of Vienna, Hilberg opposed Austria's position, which naturally affected his own chances of receiving reparations. Hilberg's criticism was particularly strong because he had already researched the Holocaust, whereas the extent of damage and harm caused by the Nazis in Europe was hardly known in German society in the 1950s and 1960s. Due to his knowledge of the violence and the massacres in the East, he was able to see the pitfalls of restitution and reparations. Regarding the limitations of the practice, he concluded that the payments were not sufficient enough for Jewish victims to build new lives. ³¹ With his account, he portrayed himself not only as a scholar but also as a moral voice.

Hilberg was one of the first researchers to deal with the historical process of reparations and restitution. In 22 pages, the discussion made up only one chapter of his book, but he did provide a broad picture of the practices of restitution and reparations in the occupied zones. However, reviewers of Hilberg's book barely registered his analysis. This shows that interest in these practices were limited. Almost 30 reviews were published between 1961 and 1965, many of which praised Hilberg's book as a ‘powerful document of Nazi condemnation’. ³² Robert Kempner, deputy prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials and later a lawyer in reparations cases – including Friedlander's – spoke highly of it. ³³ However, after the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, the perception of Hilberg's book changed. Like Arendt, Hilberg was attacked for belittling the Jewish resistance against Nazi politics and for overrating the collaboration of Jewish councils with the Nazis, for example, by providing them with deportation lists. Many critics argued that his estimation resulted from the sources he had used, which reflected the perpetrator's perspective. ³⁴ In bringing attention to the thesis of collaboration, scholars accused him of having written a ‘blueprint for racists everywhere’. ³⁵ Jewish organisations like the Council of Jews from Germany published a statement distancing themselves from Arendt's and Hilberg's books. ³⁶ Prominent scholars like Gershom Scholem and institutions like Yad Vashem vehemently opposed the thesis of collaboration. The controversy over Arendt's and Hilberg's assertions of collaboration received most of the attention in the scientific community.

2. Becoming a moral authority: Hilberg's account in the revised editions

In 1985, Hilberg's work was reissued due to increased public and academic interests in studies on the Holocaust: colleges and universities offered courses on the Holocaust, chairs were established, and studies were published. ³⁷ Moreover, a German-language edition had appeared three years earlier. One reason for this increased interest is to be found in the popularity of the Holocaust television series broadcasted in USA in 1978 and in West Germany in 1979. ³⁸ Hilberg also pointed to the fact that a younger generation's interest stemmed from the war in Vietnam, since they started to ask why politicians were tolerating a war in which human rights were being violated. ³⁹ As Peter Novick described in The Holocaust in American Life, the public's interest in the Holocaust resulted from solidarity with Israel's defence against its Arab neighbour states and functioned as a painful reminder in times of growing antisemitism. At the same time, Novick explained that American politicians exploited the memory of the Holocaust in order to attract voters and underline political claims. ⁴⁰

Hilberg changed parts of his book but hardly revised the chapter on restitution and reparations. This shows that the focus of his revisions rested on his analysis of the Holocaust itself. Furthermore, the new compensation agreements obviously did not affect his interpretation of restitution and reparation practices. While other scholars of that time, like Lucy Dawidowicz, argued for including the perspective of the victims as well, ⁴¹ Hilberg did not follow the general trend in historiography that urged for a bottom-up approach. ⁴² Historians in USA and Germany had begun to demand that the subaltern, not only those in a position of power, be included in historiography. This shift also affected scholars of the Holocaust who wanted to strengthen the perspective of the victims in their studies.

Around the same time, Hilberg eagerly supported the prosecution of war criminals. His engagement on this front can be contrasted with his scepticism and criticism of the practice of compensation. Why did he participate in the former but avoid the latter? As with restitution and reparations policies, Hilberg had criticised the Nuremberg trials and others for not punishing ‘the machinery’ but rather only blaming a small minority of ‘big Nazis’ like Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler. ⁴³ In particular, he emphasised that ‘long before the investigations and trials in Germany and other countries were over, many of the men who had staffed the machinery of destruction were resuming their careers’. ⁴⁴ Having studied the crimes of the ‘men of the machinery’, he was able to assess their misdeeds. Later on, in the trials against these men, he was able to contribute to the process. This was not possible in restitution and reparations cases, in which jurists and civil servants, many of whom had been part of the Nazi bureaucracy, remained the main decision-makers until the 1980s. While he was similarly critical of the effects of the post-war trials and compensation practices, he remained one-sided in his focus on war crime trial documents at a point in time when the interest in restitution cases had grown immensely. In an ethical sense, Hilberg did not believe in the possibility of redemption, whereas the punishment of the perpetrators at least symbolised their guilt.

Hilberg took up the issue of restitution and reparations again in the third edition of Destruction, published in 2003. He briefly mentioned new agreements between Germany and the Claims Conference: in 1980, a fund for emigrants from the Soviet Union was established. In 1990, as a result of Article 2 of the Implementation Agreement to the German Unification Treaty, victims could receive compensation if they had been imprisoned or forced to work in labour battalions at the front and if they still lived in a former communist country. ⁴⁵ In 1998, a fund followed that allowed all victims who remained in the former communist bloc to obtain compensation. These funds encouraged immigration from Eastern Europe to Germany, which began to have an impact on Jewish communities in Germany by the late 1980s. ⁴⁶

In addition, after the end of the Cold War, claims from former forced labourers against successful enterprises grew. ⁴⁷ New scholarly interest amongst a younger generation of historians had brought new insights into the extent of forced labour, showing that forced labourers were systematically brought into the Reich to work in industries that were essential to the war effort and also to work for other companies while living under inhumane conditions. ⁴⁸ The politics of restitution and reparations were widely discussed amongst scholars and in the public sphere during the 1990s and early 2000s. ⁴⁹ ‘All told, these improvements, hedged as they were, provided some relief, particularly for those who were poor and who had received very little or nothing at all. Yet closure was not achieved. The loss had not been “made good again”’, ⁵⁰ Hilberg concluded.

In light of these developments, Hilberg added 15 pages filled with new records that focussed on the scandal of Swiss banks and their role in and after World War II. While one amongst many, the lawsuit against the Swiss banks was particularly decisive, as it received major public attention in the 1990s and offered a successful strategy for victims to file for compensation. Jewish organisations welcomed the new interest in compensation practices, but Hilberg remained sceptical about the debate, as did other scholars. In 2000, Norman Finkelstein published his book The Holocaust Industry. He argued that American Jewish organisations exploited the memory of the Holocaust for political and financial gains. The dispute about the unclaimed bank accounts which Holocaust victims had possessed in Switzerland was only one of many examples Finkelstein gave to substantiate his allegations. ⁵¹ Jewish organisations, politicians, and journalists accused Swiss banks of having kept money from the victims and given it to the state after their accounts had not been accessed for 60 years. Finkelstein argued that Jewish agencies, especially the Claims Conference, had enriched themselves with the compensation they received on behalf of the victims. While many survivors were poor and could hardly pay their healthcare bills, organisations invested in research, memorials, and their own salaries, Finkelstein claimed. ⁵² This caused a major dispute amongst scholars. Jewish organisations in particular criticised Finkelstein for his position because it was welcomed in antisemitic circles. Hilberg, however, supported Finkelstein. In several interviews, newspaper articles, and reviews, he implied that the restitution claims exceeded what had actually been on the Jewish accounts. ⁵³ In addition, he doubted that those to whom the money had belonged (or their descendants) received it in the end. Only the richer Jews, Hilberg added, had owned bank accounts in Switzerland, and these had already been reclaimed after the end of the war. ⁵⁴ Hilberg's siding with Finkelstein was acknowledged by journalists and scholars but was not commented on to any great extent.

Like Finkelstein, Hilberg criticised how the settlement between the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the Swiss banks came about, characterising the $1.25 billion to be paid by the Swiss banks as basically a trick played by the judge, Edward Korman, who was allegedly biased, in favour of the Jewish victims’ claims. ⁵⁵ While other scholars also pointed to the fact that Korman sympathised with the victims’ claims, ⁵⁶ Hilberg criticised the judge's method of reaching an agreement, as he did not think it relied on the facts provided by the sources. In addition, he opposed the notion that arranging a deal was the appropriate solution for compensation requests.

To underline his argument, Hilberg gave an abbreviated account of the negotiations between the parties. He implied that the claim of $1.25 billion was not correct and that some bank accounts might not belong to Holocaust victims. ⁵⁷ However, there were important sources that he did not mention, for example, the Eizenstat report, which proved that there was a larger number of unclaimed bank accounts than Swiss banks had suggested. Recent research by Michael Marrus claims that Judge Korman might have followed a certain agenda with the deal, but that Eizenstat's role as well as the findings of the Bergier commission were equally important. ⁵⁸ While it is true, as Hilberg criticised, that the wrongdoings of the banks have not been fully assessed, many contemporaries viewed the settlement as a ‘triumph of American jurisprudence’. ⁵⁹ That the victims received a high payment was a symbol of wider awareness of the Holocaust, but it also showed that the handling of this time period had become a political issue not only for Germany but also for other countries and aid organisations. In this context, misusing the Holocaust for financial and political reasons remained Hilberg's biggest concern. In the end, he again emphasised that no side was correctly represented in the practice of compensation.

Other lawsuits against insurance companies and companies that had profited from forced labour followed in the 1990s. It was equally difficult to come to an agreement in these cases, Hilberg argued. ‘Germany and Austria alike were seeking only Rechtssicherheit, or “legal peace”, and throughout this process’, Hilberg wrote, ‘their only question was: When will it end? Is this all?’ ⁶⁰ He emphasised that German and Austrian enterprises and politicians still refused to deal with their own responsibility during World War II, and thus revealed that they did not act out of moral principle but for political and economic reasons, just as they had in the 1950s. What changed in the 1990s was that more activists, politicians, and scholars demanded that these institutions own up to their past. While the position taken by the companies might not come as a surprise, Hilberg perceived it as confirmation that the Holocaust could not be correctly represented in compensation proceedings.

While Hilberg maintained his criticism of Germany and Austria, he also turned against Jewish organisations that were fighting for compensation, in particular the Claims Conference. In his view, only they themselves benefited from these claims, not the poorer victims. The conflict between Hilberg and Jewish organisations, like the Council of Jews from Germany and WJC, was not new, since different organisations had harshly criticised Hilberg for his focus on sources produced by the perpetrators as well as for his collaboration thesis. ⁶¹ When Finkelstein was denied tenure at De Paul University in Chicago by the promotions and tenure board, voting four to three, because his work allegedly did not meet scholarly standards, Hilberg once again sided with him, emphasising his ‘enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him’. ⁶² Hilberg agreed with Finkelstein that the topic of the Holocaust was initially ‘censored’ in USA and later only instrumentalised in order to exploit it financially.

What Hilberg appreciated in Finkelstein was that he acted out of ethical concerns, speaking what both regarded as ‘the truth’ in spite of the harm this caused to his career. Hilberg himself had done the same more than 30 years before, accepting his status as an outsider, according to his own portrayal. Given several rejections by prestigious publishing houses like Columbia and Princeton University Press as well as the vehement criticism of his book in the 1960s, the scholar felt that his efforts were met with disinterest in the broader academic community. In contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when Hilberg's work was hardly acknowledged in West Germany, he was perceived as an authentic voice amongst many journalists and social scientists two decades later, who wanted to bring attention to his work. This development resulted from growing interest in the Holocaust. ⁶³

For Hilberg, the practice of reparations and restitution was morally problematic, failed to provide compensation for the poorer victims, and was used to absolve Germany and collaborating nations of their guilt. While, as a scholar, Hilberg wanted to show the totality of the genocide, the practices of restitution and reparations aimed at reaching a judgment in specific cases. In his view, there was no victory for the victims, only for the perpetrators, who could whitewash the crimes they had committed. Thus, in his 2001 book Sources of Holocaust Research, when describing different kinds of sources, their characteristics and how to use them, Hilberg mentioned materials from restitution proceedings only once, situating them in the part on ‘testimony’ and pointing out how dangerous they were if not used systematically. ⁶⁴

Hilberg had always perceived his scholarly work as a moral obligation, starting with his master's thesis on the Holocaust in 1950. In his autobiography, he criticised older colleagues like Hans Rosenberg and Franz Neumann, who were his teachers at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, for shying away from the Holocaust in their academic work. However, their reluctance was typical of the scholarly attitude in the first decades after the end of the War. ⁶⁵ Thus, Hilberg depicted himself as a lone warrior fighting to inform the world about the crimes that had been committed. In an article published in 1988, he admitted that ‘in my quest, I also felt alone, a reaction faintly similar to that of survivors whose preoccupation with their experiences was not welcomed or understood’. ⁶⁶ The philosopher John K. Roth wrote about Hilberg's private and scholarly dedication to studying the Holocaust: ‘In my judgment, it is this moral anger that accounts for Hilberg's impassioned/dispassionate scholarly commitment to study the Holocaust. His outraged sense of justice, moreover, beats within the heart of his ethics’. ⁶⁷ Moral anger was what drove him to give the most detailed account of the Holocaust possible and to prevent its denial or misuse for political gain. When public and scholarly interest in the Holocaust grew in the 1980s, Hilberg was not only perceived as a pioneer due to his scholarly work but also because he had been a moral voice, keeping the memory of the crimes alive for decades.

3. Observing the politics of compensation as scholar and survivor: The case of Henry Friedlander

Hilberg's colleague, Henry Friedlander, experienced directly what Hilberg criticised in the practice of reparations. Friedlander filed for compensation several times: the first time, he requested support after he was liberated from the concentration camp Wöbbelin in May 1945. He was 15 years old. The aid measures he received intended to help the victims in building a new life by providing them with clothes, a place to stay, and furniture. Four years later, when Friedlander was already living in USA, he received the sum of 6150 DM in compensation for his 41-month imprisonment in different concentration camps under the Haftentschädigungsgesetz (Law of Compensation for Detention). ⁶⁸ Friedlander's father, Fritz Friedlander, had filed for compensation in the name of his son. He justified his request with the fact that his son had not only been deprived of freedom but had also worked as a forced labourer. For the latter, he did not receive compensation, because the necessity of compensation for forced labour was not recognised in the practice of reparations, as Hilberg later criticised.

As Hilberg emphasised, victimhood took many forms. People were robbed of their freedom, families, jobs, and property during the Nazi dictatorship. Thus, several different claims for compensation and restitution existed. After the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (BEG) passed in 1956, Friedlander filed for reparations for the delay in his education and received 10,000 DM. ⁶⁹ It took the authorities three years to decide that Friedlander was eligible for the payment. In between, the authorities in Berlin, Wiesbaden (Hesse), Lüneburg, and Hanover (Lower Saxony) discussed whose jurisdiction the case belonged to, since Friedlander had lived in Berlin before he was deported and in Hesse and Lower Saxony after 1945. Later, in 1965, under the supplement to the BEG (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz-Schlussgesetz), Friedlander filed for compensation for the murder of his mother. ⁷⁰ However, the Entschädigungsbehörde (Compensation Authority) in Hanover never reacted to this claim. Eleven years later, the consulate general in New York wrote to Hanover on behalf of Friedlander and requested that they contact him directly. This time, the Compensation Authority answered within a month, telling Friedlander to contact the authorities in Berlin since his mother had lived there. ⁷¹ Friedlander's file does not contain further documents showing whether he ever received compensation for this claim. However, it demonstrates the insensitivity of the German authorities, who were not interested in the individual fate of the victims but stuck to bureaucratic procedures. Many victims have described how hurtful this process was. ⁷² In 1950, Friedlander's father, who had remained in Germany and remarried, also filed for restitution of his property, including stocks, gold, jewellery, and equipment from his medical practice. In 1962, 12 years after his death in 1954, his second wife received 16,000 DM in compensation. ⁷³ The authorities had asked her to prove when and by whom Friedlander's possessions had been taken. Since the Friedlanders had been deported, it was almost impossible to supply the authorities with this evidence.

In his scholarly work, Friedlander dealt even less with the compensation of Jewish victims than Hilberg. Given his personal experience, the topic was too close to home, ‘too colored by personal involvement for balanced historical treatment’, as he pointed out in 1992. ⁷⁴ However, Friedlander did not neglect to investigate reparation practices in general. He rather focussed on the compensation of Sinti and Roma. Sinti and Roma are a Romani subgroup, long described as ‘Gypsies’. Many states like Germany stereotyped them as ‘asocial’ and ‘criminal’, remaining unsettled and living on the outskirts. Estimates speak of 40,000 Sinti and Roma living in Germany and Austria before 1933, of which at least 25,000 were killed during the Holocaust. ⁷⁵ Even though the number of Jews murdered during the War is much higher than that of Sinti and Roma, and differences between their persecution exist – Friedlander argued that both had been murdered for the same racial reasons. ⁷⁶ Many historians were critical of Friedlander's account. They claimed that the murder of the Jews could not be compared to other crimes during World War II, since that would relativise the mass murder of the Jews. ⁷⁷ Scholars criticised Friedlander for not emphasising the different histories of suffering between Jews, Sinti and Roma, and handicapped people. ⁷⁸ This debate is ongoing, as we can see with the critique of Michael Rothberg's 2009 book Multidirectional Memory after the German translation appeared in 2021. ⁷⁹ Rothberg emphasises the necessity to regard the memory of the Holocaust and the process of decolonisation as correlated. This has caused a controversy amongst scholars and journalists over whether comparisons of mass murder and genocide should be freed from taboos, and what can be learned from such comparisons of state-based persecution and individual consequences of violence. ⁸⁰

Friedlander started working on the history of the ‘euthanasia’ programme and the murder of Sinti and Roma in the 1980s. However, he encountered difficulties in funding his research. In 1985, he asked the president of Brooklyn College for a research sabbatical, which was declined two times. Friedlander explained that he hardly received any funding for his project because his work was ‘interdisciplinary, dealing with law, medicine, and history’; ‘it has fallen between categories’, he wrote. ⁸¹ This shows that his research topic was not in high demand in the 1980s, though by that time the Holocaust had received broader public and scholarly attention and though he himself was well-known amongst Holocaust scholars, having published extensively on the subject. ⁸² The neglect resulted from a form of competition between victim groups – as Rothberg and others have described – that was inherent in the debate about the singularity of the Holocaust. Different victim groups fought for limited resources – to commemorate and to receive compensation.

In his foreword to People in Auschwitz, a memoir by the Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein, Friedlander wrote: ‘I do not believe that one can explain Auschwitz as a horrible chapter in Jewish history alone; an explanation also must take into full account Gypsies and other victims’. ⁸³ In consequence, Friedlander demanded the same rights to reparations for Sinti and Roma as for other victim groups. According to an analysis by the historian Sybil Milton, Friedlander's wife, ‘German postwar restitution legislation and its implementation excluded most Sinti and Roma survivors, subjecting them to arbitrary and repetitive bureaucratic humiliations’. ⁸⁴ Politicians and officials did not see Sinti and Roma as having been persecuted for racial reasons (but rather for being ‘asocial’ and ‘criminals’). Thus, they were not compensated for imprisonment prior to March 1943, when Sinti and Roma families were systematically deported from Germany under the order of Himmler. The Federal Supreme Court still subscribed to this notion in 1956, echoing the Nazi perception of Sinti and Roma. ⁸⁵ Only when the supplement to the BEG was ratified in 1965 could Sinti and Roma obtain reparations payments for imprisonment after December 1938. Nevertheless, most Sinti and Roma did not receive compensation, since the law did not consider claims in which ‘racial’ reasons for the imprisonment were in doubt. Whether Sinti and Roma were eligible for pension payments or compensation was often decided by medical officers who had implemented racist health policies during the Nazi era, as recent studies have shown. ⁸⁶ Furthermore, many claims, for example, for physical and psychological trauma or for incarceration in camps and ghettos prior to 1938, were ignored. In the late 1990s, Friedlander and Milton consistently pointed to the fact that Sinti and Roma were excluded from post-war reparations because many prejudices and stereotypes prevailed after the end of World War II. ⁸⁷ ‘Germany refused to acknowledge the genocidal crimes committed against Sinti and Roma […] by finding rationalizations in the supposedly antisocial danger represented by this small minority. Historians have tended to legitimize these denials’, ⁸⁸ Milton concluded, acknowledging the responsibility of historians in lending credibility to political actions and racist beliefs.

Particularly in the 1990s, with the support of organisations, activists, and historians, the so-called ‘forgotten’ victims shed light on the crimes committed against them during the war by filing claims for restitution. In Germany, the civil rights movement of Sinti and Roma and the Council for German Sinti and Roma demanded attention for the crimes committed against them. Thus, the debates emerging in these years broadened the knowledge of the genocide of different victim groups. In the 1990s in particular, historians used their findings to support claims made by victims.

As we have seen, Friedlander repeatedly reflected on his perspective as both survivor and scholar. This double role affected the focus he chose in his studies. Like Hilberg, Friedlander depicted the Holocaust through the perpetrator's eyes. Their hope was that having the perpetrators’ commands on paper would put their guilt beyond dispute. In addition, as victims, they wanted to avoid the accusation of being subjective. Indeed, particularly German historians attacked émigré scholars for not being able to write recent German history in a sober manner after 1945. ⁸⁹ Leading West German historians like Gerhard Ritter perceived it as their responsibility to save German history from their interpretations: ‘We German historians will have a great deal to do to protect our German history against harmful insults’. ⁹⁰ Not only was the Holocaust a topic hardly dealt with in the 1950s and 1960s; West German historians also excluded scholars like Friedlander and Hilberg from being able to study ‘their’ German history. ⁹¹ Similar positions prevailed up until the 1980s, as we can see in the debate between the German historian Martin Broszat and Israeli historian Saul Friedländer about the historicisation of the Nazi period. Broszat attributed a ‘mythical memory’ to Jewish survivors which is not rational and which ‘coarsens historical recollections’. ⁹² Almost a decade later, Henry Friedlander positioned himself in an interview as both scholar and survivor by stating: ‘But I am not emotional’. ⁹³ Friedlander and Hilberg constantly had to fight the notion that as victims, they were not able to write about the Holocaust as scholars. The perspective they chose for analysing the crimes was affected by their attempt to portray themselves as objective researchers. Thus, they read the sources produced by perpetrators as closely as possible and showed how the process of destruction evolved from their perspective.

Even though Friedlander emphasised the legitimacy of demands for reparations by Sinti and Roma victims, he agreed with Hilberg that amends for the deeds committed by the Nazis were impossible. Like many other survivors, Friedlander was disappointed by the long and complicated process of restitution as well as by the minimal sums he received for years of imprisonment and the consequences for his education.

4. Conclusion: Historians as political observers

Friedlander and Hilberg were persecuted by the Nazi regime and later turned to the study of the Holocaust. In their scholarly work, both touched upon questions of restitution and reparations. However, they did not use the sources produced in these proceedings in their historical analyses for several reasons. Firstly, in their view, the bureaucratic documents of the perpetrators were able to provide insights that were not available in the sources from restitution and reparations cases. Hilberg in particular consistently regarded the Holocaust as a bureaucratic process in which the victims remained passive. ⁹⁴ He was convinced that only through the lens of the perpetrator could the machinery of destruction be explained. ‘The perpetrator had the overview. He alone was the key’, ⁹⁵ he wrote in his autobiography.

By focussing on the sources produced by the perpetrators, Friedlander and Hilberg wanted to be seen as objective scholars who were not biased by the accounts of the victims. Hilberg emphasised: ‘When I began my work my primary motivation was to find out the facts for myself. I set them down as I saw them’. ⁹⁶ For Hilberg, studying the sources of perpetrators and the ‘machinery of destruction’ meant reconstructing the facts. However, in the first edition of Destruction, Hilberg made strong judgments about the practice of restitution, writing as scholar and contemporary witness at the same time. In this regard, Hilberg's chapter ‘Salvage’ can be seen as both a historical account and an eye-witness testimony.

Secondly, neither scholar believed that the processes of restitution and reparations could redeem what Hilberg called the ‘non-assessable loss’ of the victims. ⁹⁷ Rather, they feared that Germans would feel like they had made up for the crimes committed. Neither compensation nor restitution could be achieved. As calculations show, <20% of property stolen from the Jews was returned. ⁹⁸ Thirdly, and in connection to that, they were convinced that the practice could not bring any form of justice, as the side with the better arguments won, not the side that was in the right. While being aware of the limits of the war crime trials, they placed more stock in them.

In the end, Friedlander's and Hilberg's descriptions of compensation politics shed light on changes in the self-perception of Holocaust researchers and what they regarded as their function in society through the post-war decades. Early on, Friedlander and Hilberg drew attention to the problems that arose in the practices of restitution and reparations, in particular the omission of certain groups in the process. In so doing, they wanted to attract public attention to what they perceived as an injustice.