German Insurance Association: $350 million (comprising Allianz and sixty-nine smaller insurance companies)
Generali: $100 million
Winterthur and Zurich companies: $25 million
Austrian General Settlement Fund: $25 million
Others (including Dutch and Belgian companies): $50 million
There were only two other implicated insurance companies who refused to join the ICHEIC process – one of these was Munich Re and the other was the British insurer Prudential. Prudential had controlled 7 per cent of the Polish insurance market at the outbreak of war, and held $21 million of dormant policies from Jewish clients at the end of the war. Because of their failure to co-operate with ICHEIC, Eagleburger called on the 2001 proposed merger between Prudential and American General to be blocked, which it was, after an international boycott caused serious financial damage to the company. Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress said that ‘we consider Prudential’s response not simply inadequate, but frankly insulting’.
The most remarkable aspect of all this is that it had taken fifty-five years from the end of the war for these financial corporations to be held accountable. It is striking that thousands of individual Nazis were tried in the immediate post-war period, yet it took more than half a century for companies who had not only co-operated with Nazism but actually contributed to the Holocaust, to face a legal reckoning. This raises critical questions about comparable justice, and why it is so much harder to bring corporate perpetrators to court, and their boards of directors, than individuals. I also found it telling that the overwhelming media focus was on the legal aspects of the compensation claims, the amounts of money involved and the impact on the banks and insurers – for instance, delays to potential mergers. In all the news coverage between 1998 and 2001 we gained very little insight into the methods by which these corporations colluded, the details of how they had co-operated with the Nazis, nor the human cost in terms of their victims.
Perhaps there is a truth, hard for us to look at, in those supposedly insignificant insurance clerks making their inspections at Auschwitz. If we can move beyond the repeated images, the visual clichés of history, we might be able to see the truth – ‘somewhere as yet undiscovered’, as Sebald puts it. We’ve been staring at the monstrous images of those railway lines curling under that sinister arch at Birkenau, and those foul words in iron over that gate at Auschwitz – ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – for so long. But if we could release ourselves for a moment from those known images we might find something else – terrifying, rarely glimpsed, but another reality: the totally amoral exterminism of the bureaucrat, the blind annihilating greed of a corporation. Maybe, if we look up from the pages of history books for a moment, we will be able to see more. A single page from the Financial Times might convey a darker truth. The bastions of German finance – Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Allianz – all together, still powerful at the beginning of our century – all of them critical pillars of support for Nazism:
Dresdner Bank, the bank that pioneered Aryanisation.
Deutsche Bank, the bank whose loans built extermination camps.
Allianz, the company which insured those camps.
Today, two of these three companies – which Hitler and Himmler relied on so strongly – are still major global players, without ever having undergone a proper reckoning with their pasts.
*
At the opening of the Imperial War Museum’s permanent Holocaust Exhibition in June 2000, walking into a small, square room I saw something I had never seen before. It wasn’t the most dramatic of exhibits, there was nothing graphic or overtly shocking about what was on these two walls, yet, in my eyes, it was the most remarkable display in that exceptional exhibition. There were two walls of the most intricate diagrams and webs of interconnectivity, attempting to convey something hugely complex – how all the numerous state institutions and agencies of Nazi Germany interacted to organise the Holocaust. I could hear the spirit of Raul Hilberg, the greatest historian of the Shoah, cheering from the other side of the Atlantic, because this was one of the challenges he always set himself, and his readers – to look at the structures and the details of history, to reconstruct, painstakingly, the precise interrelationships between the agencies and institutions that enabled the extermination to happen. As human beings, we have a tendency to prioritise the stories of individuals over the narratives of systems. This is entirely understandable, as it is vastly easier to encompass the meaning of a single life than to try to comprehend how institutions, how whole systems work. Yet, by focussing mainly on the biographical, we blur the wider reality.
Being in that exhibition room made me think about how the Holocaust has been represented to us over the last seventy years or so – particularly in the balance beween focussing on individual lives, of the survivors and perpetrators, and focussing on the numerous institutions and agencies which enabled the extermination to take place.
The years immediately after the war were dominated by the Nuremberg Trials and accounts of some of the key protagonists on both sides, but perhaps the most significant single book (certainly in terms of impact) was the publication in the Netherlands in 1947 of Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (‘The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944’), which on its publication in English five years later immediately became a global phenomenon as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl – this teenage girl’s testimony gave a human face to the enormity of the genocide for the first time. One Dutch historian remarked that ‘this apparently inconsequential diary by a child … embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together’.1
In 1953 a law was passed in the Israeli Knesset establishing Yad Vashem,fn5 ‘the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority’, which would become the world’s first designated museum and memorial to the Shoah (the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’, ‘calamity’), as the Jewish genocide was then officially called. Two years before, the government in Israel had initiated the original Hazikaron la Shoah Ve-Mered Hagetaot (‘Holocaust and Ghetto Revolt Memorial Day’), later shortened to Yom HaShoah – the national day of remembrance of the Shoah. 1953 was also the year that Gerard Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 was published – the most significant work on the extermination written since the end of the war. 1956 saw the release of Alan Resnais’ groundbreaking film Night and Fog, which made a great impression on audiences around the world. The late 1950s witnessed two publications of survivors’ testimonies, both of which were to become internationally known. In 1958, Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit came out, and the English edition Night followed in 1960. However, it took years for this work to be recognised; by 1963 it had sold just 3,000 copies. A very different fate awaited a book by a Viennese psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, originally published in German in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (‘Nevertheless, Say Yes to Life: A Psychologist Experiences a Concentration Camp’). When it was translated into English and published by Beacon Press in 1959, with the much snappier title Man’s Search for Meaning, it rapidly became a global bestseller.