Waging War on Wartime Memory: Recent Swiss Debates on the Legacies of the Holocaust and the Nazi Era

In recent years, Holocaust legacies have attained an unprecedented and unexpected political significance on an international scale. The failure not only of Germany but also of Allied and neutral countries to appropriately compensate the victims of the Nazis and to return looted assets eventually became a scandal. At the center of these debates were the "dormant accounts" of Nazi victims in Swiss banks. For many observers, these assets came to symbolize how justice had been denied to Holocaust survivors and their children. Though initially confined to the Swiss banks, subsequent research soon revealed the international dimensions of the issue.¹ Many other European countries, as well as the United States and Israel, had to admit the existence of dormant accounts in their banks and launched investigations into the problem of looted property and heirless assets.² In addition, big corporations such as insurance companies, financial institutions, and industrial companies were forced to open their archives to historians.³ The entire process of examination and restitution was accelerated by the dozens of class-action suits filed by Holocaust survivors. Although in many cases no settlement has yet been reached, these lawsuits have pushed governments and corporations to allow investigations into their wartime past and, eventually, to consider offering compensation to Holocaust survivors and their descendants.⁴

In most European countries, these activities have led to efforts to reconsider the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on contemporary society. But, rather than generating unanimity, the recent discussion has proved highly contentious. In most countries, portions of the public are reluctant to acknowledge previous failures and omissions toward Holocaust victims. Critics have also complained of a "Holocaust industry" and a "Shoah business," pointing to the monetary demands of victims' groups and their lawyers.⁵ Yet more is at stake than money. For the victims, clearly, neither monetary payments nor the belated restitution of property can do justice. Instead, survivors who have had to wait for decades often experience the recent, politically motivated attempts to bring to closure the Nazi legacies as demeaning and insulting. In these debates it is the symbolic issues that count most, such as whether governments and companies are willing to acknowledge their responsibility as beneficiaries from or collaborators with the Nazi regime. At stake, therefore, is a reevaluation of wartime history with regard to the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary society.

This reassessment of the Nazi legacies requires paradigms and analytical categories that reach beyond the familiar frameworks of interpretation. Recent scholarship indeed shows that Nazi racial policy left no area of social life untouched. Further, the meticulously organized program of exploitation, looting, and robbery, which was an intrinsic part of the "Final Solution," involved many more individuals and organizations than just the SS and the Wehrmacht.⁶ Slowly but surely the behavior of bystanders—individual persons as well as companies, political bodies, and whole nations—has come to be regarded as a decisive factor in the ability of the Nazis to accomplish their murderous goals. Such insights raise new questions about political and moral responsibility during World War II and suggest the need for many nations to rethink their understanding of the Nazi past.

Subsequently, the question of how authorities, business circles, and the wider public have reacted to Nazi mass murders, deportations, and persecution has challenged representations of the wartime past all over Europe. The debate over Holocaust legacies has become entwined with a broader set of issues about the construction of collective or cultural memory—a topic that has lately attracted growing scholarly attention but has also caused dissent regarding the term's usefulness as an analytical category.⁷ Borne by living societies, highly selective, and susceptible to manipulations, collective memory (according to Pierre Nora) determines the implicit presence of the past and structures the process of social remembering and forgetting as a...