by Günter Saathoff, Member of the Board of Directors of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”

Preliminary remarks:

The crimes committed under National Socialism are well nigh impossible for us to grasp today. The most egregious of these include

- the murder of six million European Jews and almost 500,000 Sinti and Roma,

 - the compulsory sterilisation of over 400,000 people who were considered “inferior”, many of whom subsequently fell victim to the euthanasia programme,

- the invasion of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and thus

- the responsibility for a war of conquest that culminated in the deaths of 60 million people in World War II, and

- the deportation of more than 12 million people from their home countries to Germany, where they were forced to work, often under desperate conditions, in public sector institutions and private enterprises. 

In order to enable people in other countries to grasp the long and difficult political and social process that Germany has embarked on in recent decades in its efforts to come to terms with historical injustice, it is helpful to “visualise” this process, or in other words to hold up a mirror.

Through the crimes of the National Socialist regime, Germany effectively excluded itself from the “family of civilised states”. When the dignity of the country was at issue, the German nation and the German population after 1945 could no longer “look into the mirror” of human civilisation. Indeed, this was all the more difficult as National Socialism in the political sense did not “fall from the heavens” and was not imposed on the Germans; the National Socialists came to power through the very agency of the German population. After 1945 the questions Germany had to answer when it looked in the mirror of its crimes, were: What did we do? Can we ever make amends? Who was guilty of all these crimes? And: What do we owe the victims, keep remembrance and create a new future on the Motto “Never again” ?

Another important fact: Germany was not capable of liberating itself from the scourge of the National Socialist regime by itself. As the opposition had been imprisoned and partly liquidated during the National Socialist era, the country did not have the strength to do this on its own. The country was liberated by the opposing forces – the victors. And this initially bore consequences for the willingness and ability to come to terms with historical injustice.

I am not speaking here as an official representative of Germany or of the German government, as someone who is responsible for explaining in all dimensions the official version of German political history. I would like to mention at this juncture that for many years I have criticised our government, the governing parliamentary fractions in the German Bundestag and German industry for failing to act or to act with sufficient conviction on their obligation. This obligation rooted in history and a “moral impetus” that had to be met if we were to be able to look into the “mirror of civilisation” again. I am speaking to you as an academic and a chronicler and, in the second part of my speech, in my official capacity as Member of the Board of Directors of a German foundation that has an important role to play in our coming to terms with National Socialist injustice and in making compensation. You will however see that there have been many positive developments in this field in Germany in recent decades.

In order to gain an understanding of the current status of this facing-up process, I would like to outline the developments of the last decades by drawing on a number of arguments, and then – with the help of a few statistics - illustrate Germany’s efforts to compensate the victims of National Socialism before going on to present the special contribution made by our Foundation on this theme.

1^st statement: Dealing with Nazi history in Germany took place in waves/phases in response to various political influences.

Let us remember that the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945/46 (like those in Tokyo in 1946-48) came about as a result of the fact that the German Reich was liberated and occupied by the Allies. Germany did not liberate itself from the Nazi regime out of its own conviction or by itself. Therefore, the extent and subject of its historical coming to terms with Nazi injustice in the post-war period was largely influenced by foreign countries.  For example, the United States government had already insisted in what was then its zone of occupation that the Länder and later the Federal Republic of Germany should pass laws to compensate victims of the Nazis.

Conversely, from the end of the forties onwards, the will to persistently come to terms with the injustice, for example by prosecuting Nazi criminals, was already abating significantly because the USA needed the Federal Republic of Germany as an ally in the cold war. If they could be taken into service for the new state, Nazi war criminals were not consistently prosecuted in the GDR either. The Soviet Union allowed the GDR to refrain from taking over any historical responsibility for Nazi injustice towards foreign countries, and particularly to refrain from taking responsibility for the victims. In the GDR, it was claimed without further ado that its population were the “better Germans” who had had nothing to do with National Socialism.

2^nd statement: The process of coming to terms with injustice has developed over the decades up to the present day in that it has detached itself more and more from the self-justification of perpetrators and hangers-on to be replaced by academic and political debates outside the generation that experienced the events in question.

The prototypical course of an initially prevented process of coming to terms with crimes against humanity, not only with Nazi injustice, appears to lie in either denying, relativising or justifying one’s own actions, identifying oneself as not having been responsible in a chain of command or even redefining oneself as a victim. This is sociologically understandable, but in no way justifiable. It is understandable that this approach is typical of a generation consisting of perpetrators, accomplices and hangers-on who experienced the events in question.  The victims spoil this pretty picture, of course, chief witnesses, so to speak, against this “self-assurance of non-responsibility”.

In the context of the cold war and the need to reconstruct the German economy, it was easier for the war generation to conserve the politics of denial in the public consciousness over a period of nearly 20 years than to face up to coming to terms with the past. The cold war made this conservation easier, partly because it reinforced structures based on concepts of the enemy. This involved justifying crimes by reference to the other party’s crimes, crimes of Nazi regime and the Soviet Union’s Stalinist regime.

3^rd statement: After the war, it was easier for German society to see itself principally from the point of view of the victim and only to grieve for its own war victims. However, the cultural achievement of coming to terms with injustice and suffering should be measured primarily against the yardstick of the extent to which this coming to terms discusses one’s own guilt, responsibility and complicity and sees the victims of the other parties. 

4^th statement: At first, it was mainly the perpetrators who were the focus of public discussion in coming to terms with the past. Only much later did attention turn to the victims.

At the end of the sixties, the generational conflict of the perpetrators’ children with their parents promoted the public discussion in West Germany on the conduct of their parents in the Third Reich. It was only with increasing distance in time from the reality of the crimes that German society gradually found the strength to “look the horror in the eye”. Thus, socially, this debate was initially cloaked in the discourse of the self-definition of the children’s generation and their disassociation from their parents’ generation.  It became more differentiated only later. From the eighties onwards, the debate took an increasingly holistic approach to coming to terms with genocide and crimes against humanity, where the most important dimensions may be identified as the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators, a turning towards the victims and their claims for restitution and compensation and (self-)clarification by society of the causes and social dynamics of complicity. Also, these debates within society were no longer mainly under the political influence of former victorious powers. They were rather autonomous debates by German society on coming to terms with the past and were for the most part held by the “second and third generation”.

5^th statement: The arduous process of coming to terms with the past after 1945, also in the political context of the cold war, also meant that not all Nazi injustice was recognised as injustice by the state, and thus also that by no means all groups of victims of the Nazi regime and of the German conquests were present in the Germans’ social consciousness. This, often coupled with a lack of political will, had direct effects on compensation policy.

Even if one wanted to take into account that the young Federal Republic of Germany after 1945 could not within a brief period assume complete material responsibility from its current resources alone for all crimes committed by the Nazi regime i.e. particularly financial indemnification, even if it had been uncertain what the Soviet Union and its satellites, for example, would have done with German compensation payments for former forced labourers – it would probably have used these funds to fill up its treasuries – none of this justifies the decade-long exclusion of large groups of victims from the provisions for recognising and compensating victims of Nazi injustice, both within Germany and in particular abroad. In the fifties, political intervention from Western countries was necessary before Germany was prepared to take on material responsibility also for victims of the Nazis abroad. After long negotiations, eleven global agreements were concluded with Western countries. For example, at that time France received 400 Mio. D-Marks, The Netherlands 125 Mio. D-Marks or Greece 115 Mio. D-Marks for “their Nazi-Victims”.