Our century brings into focus, perhaps more sharply than at any time in the past the elastic quality of human nature; our capacity for great acts of compassion and our capacity for absolute evil. For while extreme acts of barbarism have characterized much of human history, never before has technology reached such a sophisticated level that we can now talk of extermination or liquidation of human beings like they were insects. Technology; mass ideologies and the revolutionary rate of change in which our world has plunged since the industrial revolution have been a fatal combination for our century.
The European Jewish community was the subject of the first hideously successful experiment by which 20th century systems of efficient bureaucracy and advanced technology were combined with the propoganda of dehumanization to destroy a civilization.
The Holocaust, or in Hebrew Shoah, was potentially devastating to the very survival of the Jewish people. So let me talk of some of the practical responses of our community to the Holocaust. Immediately after the War, when the full significance of the Holocaust was realized, elements within the world community and the Jewish community were in great shock. Some did not want to hear the survivors’ stories and many of the survivors felt that their stories would not be believed or were too terrible to tell. Individually they somehow carried on with their lives; they married - had children and tried to suppress their memories. Over time however, the survivors started telling their stories and this courage was a major factor in enabling our community as a whole to begin to respond.
Our communal leadership started advocating for the establishment of human rights legislation in different jursidictions. There is no question that one of the principle factors in the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the Holocaust. As a community, our efforts in working for the establishment of the State of Israel were redoubled so that persecuted Jews in other countries would always have a refuge. And in the 1960’s the cry of Never Again inspired the work of thousands of students and other activists to free Soviet Jews community and other dissidents. The memory of the Holocaust was also the inspiration for the world Jewish communities’ work in saving the tens of thousands of Black Jews in Ethiopia and bringing them to safety in Israel.
In aid of these efforts on the human rights and rescue fronts were the generously funded documentation centres, memorials, museums, Holocaust studies programs in Universities and the reconstruction of synagogues and other Jewish infrastructure in Europe. The Jewish community funded youth trips to the concentration camps and scholarships for the study of Judaism and summer experiences in Israel.Volunteers recorded the oral histories of survivors; indeed efforts are being made to attempt to identify every Holocaust victim for the purpose of some form of memorialization - for while our people were mass murdered we are intent on rescuing their individuality.
In summary, I think it is fair to say that in the last 50 years the response to the Holocaust has engaged Jewish communal political leadership, the artistic community, philospohers, theologians historians and educators, all in their different spheres of expertise.
So, as the Jewish community responded in these different ways how did the perpetratror European states respond?
West Germany initially responded more adequately than any other jursidiction. It replaced Nazi totalitarianism with a strong consitutional democracy. It brought and continues to bring its own Nazi war criminals to justice. It banned through legislation any manifestations of its Nazi past including making the display of the swastika illegal and criminalizing the denial of the Holocaust; not only for concern for Jewish sensibilities but out of the recognition that Nazism brought down the entire nation of Germany. The new Germany institutionalized the Holocaust with official days of remembrance and museums. It confronted its citizens with the ugly reality of what transpired through the promotion of visits by Jewish survivors back to their former homes. The new Germany established strong relations with Israel almost from their mutual beginnings and Germans of all ages, but particularly youth, regularly visit and do volunteer work in Israel.
Germany has also been at the forefront of an elaborate and expanding system of Holocaust redress for the Jewish State, the survivors and the heirs of the victims. The first wave of compensation had a clearly established recipient in the State of Israel, which absorbed so many of the survivors. A subsequent initiative involved government reparations to the survivors themselves. To discuss the evolution of the payment of compensation and the successes and failures is beyond the scope of these remarks. But let me at least highlight some of the issues.
The essential question was that posed by the Canadian journalist and author of Hitlers’ Silent Partners, Isabel Vincent, who succinctly asked: “ How do you bring about justice for the expropriation and murder of a civilization?” The answer of course is we cannot bring about justice but steps towards partial justice are possible and that in fact has occurred.
The process began immediately after the war when Dr. Chaim Weizmann, perhaps one of the most highly regarded Jewish leaders and later to become Israel’s first president, wrote to the Allies in September, 1945 calling for German redress. Six years later, Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s Chancellor addressed his Legislature as follows:
… unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity… The Federal Government [is] prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel… to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.
Negotiations between Chancellor Adenauer and Nahum Goldmann, then President of the World Jewish Congress, produced a first agreement, which primarily indemnified the State of Israel. This was confirmed by the Luxembourg Treaty of September 10, 1952 between Israel and West Germany.
There were Jews in Israel and the Diaspora who, on principle, opposed accepting any damages payments from Germany. There are those who do see the logic in Israel having accepted these payments, since the State at the time was badly in need of funds to cover the costs of resettling hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors. There does continue to be members of the Jewish community who decry, apart from Israel, the receiving of any indemnification, as “blood money.” They would agree with the views expressed by the commentator Roger Rosenblatt who has written:
The Holocaust not only lies beyond compensation; it also lies beyond explanation, reconciliation, sentiment, forgiveness, redemption or any of the mechanisms by which people attempt to set wrong things right. In a way, that fact is as much a sign of its unique enormity as the monstrosity itself. All moral thought is grounded in the possibility of correction. Yet here is a wrong that will never be set right, and people are left groping for something to take the place of the irreplaceable.
The majority of the Jewish community, however, agrees with the view of Edgar Bronfman, the current President of the World Jewish Congress.
… each dollar recovered represents a little piece of dignity, not just for the survivors who will benefit but for all mankind, who will have demonstrated that it remains morally unacceptable for anyone to profit from the ashes of man’s greatest inhumanity to man. … Financial redress, therefore, has been a central element of the post-Holocaust world. Germany, the central perpetrator, began the process with the Federal Indemnification Law, continued it with the Hardship Fund, and followed it with the Article 2 Fund and the Central and Eastern European Fund. Each new fund brought a new set of Holocaust survivors into the indemnification system. Austria subsequently somewhat followed Germany’s lead.
Today, not only members of the former Axis are involved in restitution. Included are the governments of the occupied and/or collaborator countries such as France and the various central and Eastern European states, as well as those ostensibly neutral states such as Switzerland. It does not merely involve governments but also members of the financial and business infrastructure. Redress is for the suffering inflicted, the forced and slave labour, the gold stolen or indeed extracted from Holocaust victims, the confiscated property and the stolen art, as well as the bank accounts and insurance death benefits not honoured. More and more, the governments, industries and financial institutions across Europe are being called to account for collaborating with Nazi Germany or otherwise providing the funds and resources to wage war, perpetrate the Final Solution, and plunder two thousand years of Jewish life on the continent.
The Holocaust was directed against millions of individual Jews but, at the same time, it was an assault on the Jewish people as a whole and on Judaism itself. One controversy that remains within the Jewish community concerns the distribution of redress funds. Should the focus be on specific individuals for suffering and loss, or on the needs of the collectivity as a whole. It is likely that this contradiction is not resolvable. On the one hand, after all, it was individuals who were victimized, but on the other, the Jewish whole is greater than the sum of its Jewish parts.
The most recent stage is wide-ranging with responsibility shared by government and the country’s entire infrastructure- (all elements of which profited from the catstrophe inflicted upon the Jewish people). Redress is puny in comparison to the slave labour exploited from the victims; the robbery of their property and even exploitation of their body parts for profit after death.. but at least Germany proceeded on a course of partial justice and that must be fully and properly recognized. Some have estimated that in total over 60 billion dollars in some types of compensation have been paid by the German State or institutions but we must be careful of numbers here. I am not certain that this is a correct amount, but certainly we can say that substantial sums have been paid over 50 years though they represent a very tiny fraction of the value of that which was robbed.
Germany, after the war, also assumed with some degree of seriousness the prosecution of its Nazi war criminals. Many, nonetheless, have escaped punishment. The collaborator and/or occupied countries have been much less forthcoming on accountability for mass murder. Even the Allies have been far from vigorous in bringing to justice the criminals that fell under their jurisdiction or ended up in their midst. Between 1945 and 1948, paralleling and flowing from the two International Military Tribunals, for Europe and the Far East, there were trials of some of the major transgressors. But the momentum for such prosecutions quickly dissipated after 1948.
The experience of Canada, which we know best, provides a good example. My country’s refugee policy denied safe haven to Jews fleeing Nazi Europe throughout the 1930’s. Researchers have shown that after the war, it was easier for the Nazi victimizers to enter Canada than it was for those of their victims who managed to survive. Few would question that hundreds if not thousands of Nazi criminals gained refuge.
Canada, nonetheless, in 1948, unreservedly complied with a secret memorandum, in which the United Kingdom directed its Commonwealth partners to cease war crime trials. The Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, established in February, 1985, not surprisingly thus reported that “Canada devoted not the slightest energy to the search and prosecution of war criminals.”
Today, the Canadian picture is somewhat brighter. In the last three to four years there has been a 180-degree turnaround. The government hired a former director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations as a consultant. It further demonstrated its new-found determination by committing an additional 12 million dollars specifically earmarked for the prosecution of Nazi criminals. And only two months ago the Minister of Justice initiated steps for new legislation which will facilitate the criminal prosecution of war criminals to supplement the process of revocation of citizenship and deportation. The current War Crimes Unit has a number of active files being pursued in the courts and more new cases are promised. The Government has not been able to win all of its cases, but the will to pursue justice seems to be firmly in place and the government has allocated ample resources to get the job done.
Over half a century has elapsed since the commission of the crimes in Asia. Japan does not have another 50 years to get the process underway. The biological clock is ticking for defendants, survivors and witnesses. It is a matter of the utmost urgency that justice be done now, otherwise justice delayed will undoubtedly mean justice denied.
For justice to be meted out fairly and swiftly there must be the confluence of three positive wills: the political, the bureaucratic and the judicial. One only can bring about this confluence if the Japanese people realize that to move successfully from the “Era of War” to the “Era of Reconciliation, Peace and Co-Existence,” it is absolutely essential that war criminals be brought to justice. This is not a matter of revenge but an issue of fundamental human rights. As the late Arnold Fradkin, a past member of Canada’s War Crimes Litigation Unit in the Department of Justice put it: “Justice does not mean revenge. It means redress according to principles of law, as imposed by courts of law after a fair and impartial trial according to law.”
Mankind, for centuries if not millennia, has set constraints so that war, inhuman by definition, is conducted within certain delimited parameters. This was the expectation in what came to be known as the “Law of Nations” and which was enshrined in pre World War II international agreements such as the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Combatants have obligations towards civilians and prisoners of war. Those who fail to uphold these obligations are termed by the community of nations to be “hostes humani generis,” i.e. “the enemies of mankind.” The precedent setting Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945, followed by a vast corpus of reports, resolutions, conventions and declarations by various trans-national organizations certainly mandated legal action against those who carried out war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ideally the international community must function in such a way that crimes against humanity are stopped before they happen. However, when they do happen, the world must bring those responsible to account.
The Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War (and in Asia that war can be said to have started in 1930’s with the aggression against China) committed monstrous crimes which went far beyond the most callous and hard-hearted definition of normal wartime activity. It is a moral outrage that these war crimes have gone unpunished.
The message must go out, for the sake of the memory of the victims and the survivors who continue to bear witness, that no one has the legal license to engage in the persecution, torture and slaughter of innocent civilians or defenseless prisoners. War criminals not answering for their crimes constitute a rejection of a country’s commitment to the principle of the rule of law. Past war criminals are vindicated and new war criminals encouraged. This gives comfort to those possessed by chauvinism and interested in a renewed militarism.
So what can we learn from the Jewish experience? There are both differences and similarities in the historical contexts. The Jewish communities’ response has not been a coherent response. We staggered to our feet and slowly bit by bit regained our dignity by drawing upon the courage of the survivors, the support of our friends in the non-Jewish community and through seeing the establishment of Israel as a State. We ensured that members of our community funded projects and we linked our near demise as a people to the failing of a world communities’ response to massive human rights violations. Our artists responded and have given us hope, despite the degradation. We have tried to emphasize not only the suffering and helplessness but the courage of Jew and non-Jew caught in horrific circumstances.
I think in dealing with this issue with the Japanese government your approach is a correct one. Continue to emphasize the Japanese contributions to world peace through her strong support of the United Nations while strategically countering the forces opposed to meting out justice in all its forms. Continue to reach out to your friends. Certainly I can tell you that the Jewish community stands as your good friend in solidarity with you….. For your remembrance is our remembrance; your struggle for justice is our struggle for justice and as we link ourselves together we collectively can show that the dogged, resolute and unflinching pursuit of justice is indeed the most powerful of all human forces.
