Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror (review)

Christian Pross. Paying for the Past: The Struggle over Reparations for Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror. Translated by Belinda Cooper. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xxii + 265 pp. $29.95.

This English-language edition of Christian Pross's timely study will help ensure that it attracts the broad readership it deserves. Originally published in German in 1988, it was a product of the then-heated internal political debate over the moral sincerity of (West) Germany's postwar reparations program for the victims of Nazi barbarism. Paying for the Past deconstructs the West German reparations project from its intellectual inception in 1947, through the high-water mark of reparations legislation and litigation in the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1980s. Far from being conceived as a form of justice for the almost infinite number of injustices suffered by victims of Hitler's "racial state," the reparations project, as Pross clearly points out, was viewed by most German bureaucrats as an economically costly but politically necessary form of social welfare. Reparations bought West Germany Marshall aid, afforded it integration into the Western alliance, aided the reintegration of former Nazis into office, and neutralized political dissent. As such, it "thus became not only an instrument of foreign policy but also a way of stabilizing the Federal Republic internally" (p. 174).

Insofar as the government's motivation for reparations was largely political rather than moral, most of the officials responsible for writing the statutes and administering the program did their best to keep costs down. The few individuals who were motivated by a sense of guilt and justice and attempted to fight the petty bureaucrats and high administrators in the Ministry of Finance (the latter serving as a constant source of resistance to generous reparations) were the rare exception. Pross is at his best in revealing the diversity of cynical strategies employed both to limit the number of victims eligible for compensation and to reduce the payment made where injury was demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt. He also takes issue with the German government's official history of the reparations project, a six-volume work published by the Ministry of Finance, accusing its authors of silencing critics who were unwilling to view reparations as an unabashedly moral victory for the Federal Republic, and of publishing distortions of facts. Paying for the Past is at once a critique of the German reparations program and an indictment of the official whitewashed version of its historical development.

The core of Pross's study focuses on the medical aspects of reparations, and it is this feature that is probably most relevant to those reading this journal. One of the categories of injury recognized by the 1957 Federal Restitution Law was damage to body and health caused by Nazi persecution. Pross demonstrates in no uncertain terms how statutes outlining this category of harm--a category affecting the "little people"--were deliberately designed to make it incredibly difficult for persecutees to receive their compensation. Indeed, according to official statistics cited by the author, the rejection rate for health damage claims was relatively high: more than half of all applications for reparations under this provision of the law were at least initially rejected by the authorities. There were numerous reasons for this state of affairs. In order to process a claim, the victim was required to undergo a medical examination by a reparations office-commissioned physician; unlike German war veterans filing claims for health damage, persecutees were not allowed to choose their own physician. They were required to obtain documents on health-related privations resulting from persecution--something virtually impossible to acquire in the chaos of the early postwar period. Many of the victims living outside Germany were examined by non-German physicians who were severely hampered by their inability to...