It is wrong that Germany refuses to pay reparations for businesses and property stolen by the Nazis if that property happened to be in areas that were no longer German after the war
October 28, 2021 16:48
Last column, I wrote a mainly jovial piece about the idea of claiming, because in 1939 my mother was born in that country, German citizenship. This one is not so jovial.
I said in that piece that I admired the modern Germany, particular the way it has come to terms with its own history. But there is one element of that history which remains unresolved. About 10 years ago, I made a documentary for BBC1 called Baddiel And The Missing Nazi Billions, about Holocaust reparations. In it I talked about the dispossession my own family suffered. My grandfather, Ernst Fabian, owned a brick factory in what was then Konigsberg, in East Prussia. He was a rich man, an industrialist. Obviously, he lost everything. He also was never properly compensated for this. He received a small pension from Germany which came through in the 1960s, but nowhere near anything that matched what his business would have been worth before the war.
The history of post-war reparations is complex, but to sum up: if your family assets were — and were still, after the redrawing of the map – located in West Germany, you were fine. The Americans made the Marshall Plan rebuilding of West Germany contingent on proportionate reparations to survivors (or their children). East Germany, then under Soviet control, had no such compunction, although some reparations to Jews who’d lost assets were paid out after reunification.
My family’s brick factory, after the war, though — or at least, the remaining stumps of it, which I have actually seen as a result of another BBC documentary, Who Do You Think You Are? — was not in Germany at all. Konigsberg after the war became Kalingrad, a remote part of Russia. And Russia has never been at all interested in contributing to reparations.
Here is why. At the end of my documentary about the subject, I hold in my possession a letter from some Russian ministry, explaining to me that Russia suffered greatly during the war, and sees no responsibility at all for compensating victims of the Nazis. I look up from reading it, and say that this very long letter, with its very formal notepaper and extensive legalese is basically telling me to f**k off.
What I don’t say is something I didn’t truly realise until afterwards. Which is: Russia is right. Russia should not be paying compensation to me, or anyone else, just because our assets, or what’s left of them, ended up on soil which after the war became Russian. Because that doesn’t make it Russia’s responsibility, or Russia’s fault. The country who should be liable is of course Germany. It is absurd that Germany has paid little or no reparations to descendants of families who were robbed by Nazis in the 1930s but whose businesses or property happened to be based in areas that after the war were no longer German. The issue here is nothing to do with geography, but morality.
I don’t expect anything to be done about this. Something else I learnt from my documentary is that to get any reparations at all — whether it be from the state, or from insurance companies who held Jewish life policies, or Swiss banks with Jewish accounts — what’s required is a long legal process, normally achieved via a class action initiated by many people, often from the USA. It’s a lot of money that we are talking about here, and I would fully expect that if Germany did start drafting laws towards this, it would be resisted by the far right and others who believe that reparations towards Jews is basically about Jews being money grabbers anyway.
As it happens, I don’t need the money. But others will. And besides that isn’t the point. The motivation for reparations, which tend in quantity never to match the losses anyway, isn’t financial. It’s about justice. It’s about some small sense of a wrong, repaired. My grandfather worked as a hotel porter in Cambridge after the war. He never got over his trauma, and was in and out of a mental hospital with clinical depression for the rest of his life. I doubt that any amount of money would have made a difference to that. But a genuine, proportionate gesture from the German post-war government would still have been the least he, and my grandmother, deserved.
So, if you’re reading this, and you’re an international lawyer with some time on your hands and a burning need to right wrongs, do call me. Or, if you’re reading this and you’re Angela Merkel, maybe before you empty your desk, do the right thing.
