1999: the Cape Town Holocaust Centre opens in South Africa
2000: the Imperial War Museum opens its permanent Holocaust Exhibition in London
2000: the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (the powerful work Nameless Library designed by Rachel Whiteread) is unveiled in Vienna
2001: the Jewish Museum in Berlin (strikingly conceived and designed by Daniel Liebeskind) is inaugurated
2004: the Holocaust Memorial Centre opens in Budapest, Hungary
2005: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, on a four-and-a-half-acre site in the heart of Berlin, opens to the public; the Memorial de la Shoah opens in Paris
2006: the University of Southern California is the new host of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
2012: the Memorial at Drancy is opened in Paris
2013: the Museum of the History of Polish Jews opens in Warsaw
A similar process can be seen in academic studies. In addition to the educational courses and research established by Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Musuem, Professor Martin Gilbert began a groundbreaking MA in Holocaust Studies at University College London in 2000. And important other initiatives were established – the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research in 2003, in Warsaw, and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Austria, in 2009. Many universities now offer degrees and postgraduate degrees, and schools around the world have made the Holocaust a central component of history curricula.
And as the twentieth century ended, calls for ‘Holocaust Memorial Days’ were widely accepted, with many countries adopting 27 January – the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army – as the day of remembrance; Britain marking its first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. For survivors who had lived through the late 1940s and 50s feeling as if the world had forgotten their appalling suffering, it must have been bizarre, to say the least, to watch presidents and prime ministers now queuing up to pay their respects. And for some, this new era of mass interest in the Holocaust was too much. In 2000 Norman Finkelstein published his critique, attacking what he called The Holocaust Industry, the way in which the American Jewish establishment and others had, in his view, exploited the suffering of Holocaust victims for political and financial ends – particularly an unconditional support for the state of Israel, regardless of its dubious human rights record.
But the aspect of 1990s historiography that was most fascinating from my perspective was the growing interest in the role of corporations in the Holocaust. Up until this decade, any focus on this aspect had predominantly looked at German manufacturing and chemical corporations, notably IG Farben, Degussa, Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Siemens, Krupp, Thyssen – all known as users of slave labour in the war years. But now three new developments occurred.
Firstly, as the slave labourers who’d survived the war years reached old age, their understandable indignation at never having received proper compensation from these pillars of German industry increased. Demands for reparation grew, aided by detailed new historical studies – for instance, Peter Hayes’ authoritative work, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987), Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger’s Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich (1996) and Neil Gregor’s Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (1998). As a result of this growing groundswell of pressure, in 2000 the German government and German industry established a 10 billion DM fund, ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future’, to compensate former slave labourers.
Secondly, in the wake of the German state and industries starting to accept their responsibility, more information emerged in the late 1990s about the role of German banks and insurers in the pillaging of Jewish assets (as we’ve seen earlier in this chapter), and so the focus shifted from the victims of slave labour (heavy industry – construction, steel, armaments, vehicles, etc.) to the victims of service industries (the financial sector, banking and insurance). From the brutality of slave labour to the lethality of paper.
And finally, we see a growing understanding of the part that international corporations played in the Holocaust – the significant responsibility of Swiss banks, the role of Austrian, Italian and French banks and insurers, and then, in 1998, the news emerged that Ford were going to be prosecuted for the fact that its subsidiary factory in Cologne had manufactured trucks for the Nazi war effort, and profited from the use of slave labour.
In 2001 Edwin Black published his explosive work IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, which showed that IBM’s Hollerith machine, created by their German subsidiary company Dehomag, had played a central role in Nazi Germany’s ability to gather information on Jews, Roma, Sinti and political opponents – information-gathering which had directly aided the organisation of the Holocaust, as we’ve seen in looking at the Wannsee Conference. On a more personal level, IBM’s president, Thomas Watson, admired Hitler and fascist Germany greatly, writing of his ‘highest esteem’ for the Führer. And the sentiments were reciprocated by Hitler, when they met in Berlin in 1937 on the occasion of Watson being awarded the Order of the German Eagle in recognition of the company’s exceptional service to Nazi Germany.
The publication of Black’s book in 2001 played a contributory role in two legal actions against IBM, in 2001 and 2004, and an eventual payment of $3 million by IBM’s German division into a German fund for Holocaust survivors.
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Why had it taken more than fifty years for such a work to emerge? To get from The Diary of Anne Frank to IBM and the Holocaust? To move from focussing on individual perpetrators like Himmler to judging the responsibility of entire sectors of business such as banking? Much can be explained by the human tendency to see events through the prism of a person’s life. But perhaps there is also something in the scale of research needed when looking into entire corporations, whole sectors of industry, which defeats not only our imaginations, but our best intentions and efforts.
Let’s return to the questions raised by that little room in the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust exhibition. I know we are still not yet able to understand the totality of how the Holocaust happened. I’m not even sure if we are yet able to formulate the right questions about the labyrinthine interrelations between the German state and industry, between all the different sectors of that society. Reading Raul Hilberg’s Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, published in 1992, I sense that he also shared this frustration, and that he didn’t feel that the strong foundations he had laid in The Destruction of the European Jews thirty years before had really been built upon in a substantive way.
I can still remember reading Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders in the Wiener Library and coming across Hilberg’s challenge to all of us, to think more systemically about the Holocaust. He emphasises that ‘all components of German organised life were drawn into this undertaking. Every agency was a contributor; every specialisation was utilised; and every stratum of society was represented in the envelopment of the victims.’ Then, over several pages, he lists all the institutions of government, Civil Service, business, the military and the judiciary that were necessary to co-ordinate the Holocaust:
Reich Chancellery: Co-ordination of laws and decrees
Interior Ministry: Definition of the term ‘Jew’; prohibition of mixed marriages; decrees for compulsory names; dismissals from the Civil Service; deprivation of property