From: Manfred Gerstenfeld: Europe's Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today's Anti-Semitism (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem, World Jewish Congress 2003).



Restitution Issues Destroy National Myths

An Interview with Avi Beker

For decades it was inconceivable that the issue of financial restitution for Jewish properties looted and stolen during the Second World War would be reopened, other than by historians. A few years ago, however, this subject rather suddenly received major international media attention. Gradually, European governments became preoccupied with published data incriminating their predecessors on many accounts. This led to more than 50 inquiries, instigated mainly by governments, followed by much-publicized negotiations and a number of financial settlements with Jewish bodies.

Avi Beker has been a key player in this renewed interest in financial restitution in many countries. Elected Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in 2001, Beker discusses why, after so many years, Europeans suddenly wanted to confront their countries' pasts more honestly.


The Coming Together of Several Elements

"A number of elements came together, which unlocked a window of opportunity for the Jews in a world which had changed. One was the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. The West had been united by this threatening enemy and had remained heavily armed against it. This prevented their occupying themselves with a fairly recent past. Now people wondered how they would function in a world without a major adversary. This vacuum enabled a new discourse to emerge.

"At the same time, Holocaust survivors began speaking more openly about their suffering. Further, the generation of those guilty or responsible for what happened during the war left the stage to younger representatives who were more willing to break longstanding national myths about the Second World War. Their common denominator was that Nazi Germany had been responsible for all the evil. It alone had planned and implemented the destruction of the Jews."


Entering into the Post-Communist Seam

Organized Jewry penetrated the post-communist seam, putting the restitution issue forward. Some observers considered the WJC's approach too aggressive, but Beker asserts that challenging longstanding national legends can only be done emphatically.

"The Jews were able to prove to the world that many European authorities had been active partners in expropriating Jewish properties; and their nationals had provided lists for the theft. They also stole Jewish-owned art which, after the war, was concealed in the cellars of their museums while their banks hid Jewish deposits. The media made it clear that these authorities had long tried to suppress what they had done and shared the guilt.

"Austria created one of the strongest national myths, presenting itself as one of the Nazi's first victims, rather than as their partner and fellow perpetrator. Another major legend was that Vichy France was not the 'real' France. The Swiss national myth centered on its fake neutrality. Once organized Jewry presented claims based on documented figures, everyone realized that many countries still possessed major amounts of stolen Jewish property. These financial demands simultaneously led to a discussion of national myths."


Restitution Process Breaks National Myths

"The connection between confronting national myths and the progress of the restitution process can easily be proven. Dealing with the concrete financial claims' issues illustrated that throughout the entire expropriation process thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of local nationals were profoundly involved in the prelude to the destruction of the Jews. The same can be demonstrated with respect to governments and financial institutions.

"The restitution process benefited from major publicity and media attention. Many facts were published which undermined national myths. Not only did new archival material become accessible, it was also discovered that much documentation available after the war had been forgotten or not even studied.

"Another factor influencing perceptions was the 'personalization' of the Holocaust. Austria provides the most obvious examples. Many Austrians were active Nazis, holding very senior positions in the German system. Hitler was the most prominent Austrian national, while others included extermination camp commanders."


The Fake Neutrality of Switzerland

"The Swiss case is more intricate and therefore more revealing. The Swiss government hid behind the quite common legend of its neutrality in international relations. Even today, international law allows a neutral country to remain aloof from all hostilities, while maintaining economic relations with the belligerents. The Swiss benefited intensely from this, claiming that they traded with both the Allies and the Nazis. With this, Switzerland constructed the myth that its neutral behavior had protected it from being drawn into the war. The national legend presented neutrality as a heroic attitude, enabling the country to live through the Second World War unharmed."

Since it is so difficult to deconstruct the neutrality concept, the Swiss case is particularly important for a moral discussion on war attitudes toward the Jews. Beker clarifies: "The problems of this notion were raised in a report coordinated by U.S. Under-Secretary of Commerce Stuart E. Eizenstat. In his first report of May 1997, he explicitly accused the Swiss of systematically helping to prolong the war. Under Swiss pressure, he had to soften his conclusions in his second report. As a U.S. government official he could not speak freely. The WJC, however, could."


An Intimate Swiss-German Partnership

"To present its own version of events, the Swiss government instituted the Bergier Commission (1996), named after its chairman Jean Fran?ois Bergier, whose scholars investigated the country's war-time past. It was particularly gratifying that the commission reached the same conclusions as the WJC, comprehensively proving that the Swiss-German partnership was most intimate, reflecting a low level of morality. Many Swiss knew what was happening in Germany, including facts about the extermination of the Jews.

"One example concerns the laundering of gold and other Jewish valuables from the extermination camps. Swiss involvement in this was not restricted to a few individuals; and those involved handled it methodically. Banking then was quite different from today. The bankers who dealt with the Germans could not execute international financial transactions by simply pushing a few computer buttons. Almost daily, convoys of trucks loaded with valuables crossed the German-Swiss border. Thousands of Swiss were occupied with this. Some transported the goods, while others registered them. Yet others determined their destination or transmitted necessary information."

Beker clarifies: "I am not claiming that they knew the origin of every single truck; but they were well aware that, throughout the extermination, considerable Jewish gold and valuables were being stolen. Any intelligent person involved on an on-going basis in such a process would have made the connection. This became very clear in the advanced stages of the war, as testimonies attest.

"The Swiss supplied not only food to the Germans, but also weapons. Witnesses claim that they knew that Germany was going to be defeated anyway, and that the weapons transferred to it in the money-laundering process would only help prolong the war. Toward the end of the war, Switzerland was already preparing the ground for commercial relations with post-war Germany."


The Cold War's Influence

"The Swiss were under heavy pressure from the United States, between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, due to their attitude. At the same time, the Swiss preemptively levied accusations of anti-Semitism against some Americans.

"It is amazing to see how, despite fresh memories of the Holocaust, Swiss negotiators in Washington made anti-Semitic remarks when describing American political pressure. The Swiss resentment against the large Jewish presence - in their eyes - in the American delegation was reflected in their reports. The Swiss chief negotiator, Walter Stuckey, referring to Seymour Rubin, exclaimed: 'Why do I have to negotiate with a Jewboy?' Others referred to a Jewish conspiracy against Switzerland.

"William Rappard, chairman of the Swiss delegation in the 1946 negotiations in Washington, wrote to his superiors: 'since Morgenthau left the Treasury, all my friends here believe we are now experiencing a gradual demobilization of the Jewish lobby, which has had the upper hand for some time under President Roosevelt's influence.' Fifty years later a report prepared for the Swiss Foreign Ministry by two Swiss historians, Peter Hug and Marck Perrenoud, confirmed the existence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the Foreign Ministry after the war.

"Swiss post-war policy on this issue was one of procrastination to gain time. The Swiss government understood that it risked severe economic punishment. The Cold War changed the situation radically, dividing the world again into two camps. The United States' prime interest was diverted in another direction: building NATO to contain the Soviet Union.

"The change in U.S. policy allowed the Swiss and others - including the Austrians and the French - to avoid confronting their wartime behavior in any major way. The Swiss, now undisturbed, embellished their history, creating their neutrality myth. Yet it is too simple to identify the Cold War as the sole reason for enabling them to avoid confronting their past. Time also had to pass before a new and non-involved generation could ask profound questions."


The Psychology of Nations

In Beker's view, besides a collective memory, each nation has a common psychology. "They suppress truth at the national collective level like individuals do on theirs." In a book he edited entitled "The Plunder of Jewish Property during the Holocaust" Beker wrote: "As in the case of a patient suffering from a mental disorder, the suppressed traumas tend to resurface and topple the psychological balance of the collective national memory."

He now adds: "When at present some European leaders viciously attack Israel, this must be seen in the context of their country's Shoah past, which also explains why some politicians use anti-Semitic motifs. Nations try to console themselves about their own misbehavior and guilt by claiming that among Jews there is also moral degradation. This may stimulate their leaders to overstate what the Israelis are 'doing to the Palestinians' in an attempt to balance that with the horrible acts their countries committed against the Jews during the Shoah. To salve their consciences requires them to become hypocritical and apply more severe standards to Israel and the Jewish people than they ever did to themselves."


The Globalization of Holocaust Memory

"In most European countries, the financial restitution process led to a debate far beyond the figures. Movies on this issue and related subjects were screened on television. Investigations on stolen art were undertaken in many museums. The financial issues also raised many moral questions.

"Together, these events contributed to the globalization of Holocaust memory. Earlier public screenings such as the NBC series The Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List made significant contributions to this, inter alia influencing two individuals who would play a significant role in the restitution process. Bjarte Bruland, a student at Norway's Bergen University researched the confiscating of Jewish property in Norway after seeing Lanzmann's Shoah. In 1997 Christopher Meili, a security guard at the Union Bank of Switzerland, exposed the destruction of war-time documents by his employers, after having been affected by Schindler's List.

"The recent establishment of so many Holocaust museums is both a further indication of, and a contributor to, this globalization. These museums facilitate a moral confrontation with Holocaust issues. Without such stimuli, it remains difficult to even imagine that the Shoah happened, and thus to analyze it.

"The French now regularly write that they did not face the bitter truth about Vichy. Many accuse former President Fran?ois Mitterrand of being a falsifier of history. Sometimes individuals embody or symbolize collective national memories. Mitterrand is a typical example of France's longstanding inability to confront this indelible stain on its history. In 1994 Pierre Pean published a study which proved that, in his youth, Mitterrand had been an extreme rightist, employed within Vichy structures. Later he changed sides and joined the Resistance. For years Mitterrand refused to bring Nazi criminals to justice, publicly admitting he had intervened to delay the investigations against Maurice Papon, thereafter condemned to ten years in prison.

"Mitterrand even voiced his opinion that reopening unhealed wounds was wrong. He claimed it was bad for France's memory and sense of cohesiveness. The press and public intellectuals collaborated with this attitude, both out of respect for Mitterrand and an inability to confront their country's complicity in what had happened."


Waldheim Symbolizes Austria

"Kurt Waldheim similarly symbolized Austria. He obscured a few years of his biography. Many details about Waldheim's past were only revealed when he became the presidential candidate of the Austrian Popular Party running against a socialist opponent. During the campaign it became clear that he had lied about his wartime past. He recorded in his biography that he had been wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941 and hospitalized in Vienna. Then, in 1944, he reappeared in the Austrian Foreign Office, after he had studied law. Waldheim omitted the time he had spent as an intelligence officer of the Wehrmacht in war zones and areas where the extermination of the Jews was being prepared, such as Salonika, or where partisans were liquidated, as in Yugoslavia. He worked very closely with several people who were active in exterminating the Jews. In short, it was documented that he had been a consistent liar for many decades.

"The Austrians did the same on a national level, trying to eliminate these years from their collective memory. They also made believe that they were victims rather than perpetrators. Only thereafter, so they claimed, did they return to their normal ways. This fake history enabled them to avoid facing their own crimes and guilt. The attacks Waldheim suffered during the years 1986 to 1991, when he was President of Austria, forced the country to confront its national myth many years earlier than other European countries."


Anti-Semitic Reactions and Guilt

"Waldheim's past became a major issue in the international media, because he had been the Secretary General of the United Nations for ten years and, as such, was nominally the world's prime defender of human rights. When his past was comprehensively publicized, the Austrians could no longer avoid the difficult confrontation with their bloodstained wartime past. In response, Austrian latent anti-Semitism became overt. It took several years before the voices of truth got stronger and guilt feelings emerged.

"Toward the end of the 1980s, senior Austrian politicians finally started saying the right things. In 1991 Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitzky admitted that the Austrians had been willing Nazi collaborators. He apologized on behalf of his government and took responsibility for what had happened during the war. The issue of financial restitution was only discussed years later; and it was always the Jewish side which had to start moving issues. Elsewhere in Europe one had to wait for the restitution debate to initiate a major demystification process.

"The triggers for national reevaluation have greatly differed. Sometimes it was a moral issue, such as the Waldheim case. On other occasions it concerned financial restitution, with its many moral dimensions."


Bitburg: A Landmark

"Another important landmark in the demystification process was President Ronald Reagan's visit to lay flowers on the German war cemetery in Bitburg, where members of the Waffen SS are also buried, at the beginning of May 1985. It was intended as an American reconciliation gesture between the two major Second World War opponents. At the time Reagan needed Kohl's support to place NATO's mid-range missiles in Germany.

"The importance of the public protest against the Bitburg visit was that, for the first time, Jews dared to come out against the great Western powers including the United States. This despite Reagan's being a very pro-Israel president. The Jewish people had never acted in such a way on a purely moral issue.

"These protests against the collaboration of an American president with Prime Minister Kohl's efforts to improve the German war-time image were trying to say: 'We Jews have a long-standing accusation against the Allies vis-à-vis the Shoah. You cannot conduct business as usual, even when it is very important to the United States.' The Jews did not entirely succeed in their protest, because Reagan and Kohl went together to Bitburg; but it was balanced by the President's visit to a concentration camp. The Bitburg case showed that it is possible for Jews to stand up publicly, if the world media supports them.

"The WJC was a partner in these public protests. This - together with later protests against Austrian President Waldheim and in favor of financial restitution - changed the way Jews dealt with public issues that concerned them. Before that, the WJC had sometimes lobbied in favor of human rights and against anti-Semitism, as well as on other issues. Now it became clear that organized Jewry could fight publicly even against governments and states.

"We also discovered that, even when a myth has been demolished, sub-myths remain, such as the honorable war-time behavior of the common German Wehrmacht soldiers. Only in the last few years has this legend been broken, thanks in part to a privately sponsored traveling exposition which clearly shows how members of the German army participated in the mass murder of the Jews."


Consensus on the Shoah

"All important historic processes attract people who wish to rewrite the truth. We find revisionism concerning every major dramatic event. Yet ultimately, a mainstream opinion consolidates. The test for that is how it is expressed in public opinion, history books and finally in the educational system.

"Without belittling problems, it seems that a wide consensus exists today as to the unique character of the Shoah. One major expression of this was Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson's initiative to call an international conference on Holocaust education. At the 2000 Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, he brought together leaders from the whole world. It seems to me that he opted for this universal challenge because of Sweden's doubtful war past.

"At the conference Persson discussed Sweden's role during the Second World War, which he apologized for, saying he hoped Sweden would take the initiative for Holocaust history to be taught worldwide. If one observes what Sweden teaches, it appears to be very close to what Jews would like to be taught.

"We do not know to what extent or how this initiative will be taken up by other Western states, or if it will be done with the desired intensity. In text books there will always be a tendency toward universalization, putting other disasters in the same genocide category, such as those that befell the gypsies and Armenians. Yet my own impression is that the dominant feeling is that the Holocaust is a unique event and should be considered as such."


Sweden and Wallenberg

Beker tries to draw conclusions from these events for the Middle East situation: "Today the Swedish government is attacking Israel. I hope that ultimately Israel's moral case will be seen more clearly there and elsewhere in Europe. There is an important precedent in the struggle against the 'Zionism Equals Racism' resolution adopted by the U.N. in 1975. Before its annulment in 1991, the General Assembly of the United Nations had never canceled one of its resolutions.

"Sweden itself underwent major soul-searching. We Jews have turned Raoul Wallenberg into a symbol. He is now considered a moral hero of the Second World War to whose memory almost the entire world pays honor. For a long time he did not receive the same acclaim in Sweden, which distanced itself somewhat from him, because his two uncles, Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg, had collaborated with the Nazis. Indeed, their family business, through its trading activities, provided major economic assistance to them.

"The Wallenberg family became the symbol of the problematic nature of Sweden's so-called neutrality during the Second World War. Raoul Wallenberg, however, who was not typical of the Swedish attitude in the Second World War, became the icon of a universalistic attitude."


Quisling's Norway

"In Norway's war-time history there is the problematic, important and symbolic figure of Vidkun Quisling, whose name will forever retain an unwanted association with that country. The Norwegians want to distance themselves from their wartime government, which they try to present as something which is not truly part of their past.

"After the war Quisling was executed, yet many Norwegians had similar ideas, including intellectuals who openly preached anti-Semitism. Quisling was also supported by very senior Norwegian officials. A Norwegian Supreme Court judge headed the Liquidation Board of Confiscated Jewish Assets. The Norwegian wartime authorities played an important role in the deportations. Others were silent and benefited from Jewish properties.

"Though Quisling's Norway was very different from Vichy France, the two fall within similar categories. I assume that after the war - both in Norway and France - there were heavy guilt feelings among some people. Does it go too far to say that, as a compensatory act, both countries have supplied important parts of Israel's nuclear reactor?

"Norway never had a significant Jewish community, but repressed guilt feelings definitely existed. In the country's internal discussions on restitution, moral considerations played a major role. It was the first country to establish a commission of enquiry with wide support; and the Norwegian parliament wholeheartedly supported restitution payments."


Fifty Years Earlier

Beker concludes that many things which have become almost self-understood in recent years already existed in an embryonic form after the war: "Even in the run-up to the vote of the United Nations on November 27, 1947, one already sees the representatives of the Jewish Agency mentioning the Holocaust in their pleas to recognize Israel. They also pointed out the great debt which Europe owed the Jews."


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Dr. Avi Beker is the Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress. He received his Ph.D. in international relations at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and served on the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. He has published extensively on Jewish affairs and international security. He is the editor of The Plunder of Jewish Property during the Holocaust (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001).

Interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld


The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.