The Historian and Holocaust Restitution: Personal Experiences and Reflections

Before turning to the subject at hand, I would like to express my appreciation to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for making this wonderful year possible, for organizing this symposium, and for inviting me to speak to so distinguished an audience. I find myself in the odd situation of being the only humanist-social scientist among the four speakers and the only person who is working on Germany and Central Europe. As is so often the case, historians feel themselves a bit like impostors when they are referred to as "scientists." And while for good historical reasons that can be explained-both natural scientists and scholars of the humanities and social sciences are all referred to as Wissenschaftler in German-some find what we have to offer more akin to "unorganized soft matter" than to "real science." Nevertheless, historians often do deal with problems of very contemporary relevance that affect us all and become involved in political issues and debates, and this has been the case with myself during the past decade. I have a special interest in German business history, a field that has been at the center of recent efforts to deal with the problems of the role of business in the National Socialist dictatorship between 1933 and 1945 and with the questions of restitution and compensation for Jews-but not only Jews-for property and various assets stolen by the Nazi regime and for forced labor. Historians do not normally become involved in such "hot" issues directly-the Owl of Minerva, in Hegel's famous phrase, normally being heard at sunset-and I thought it might be of interest to discuss some of my experiences in the "real world" of a historian suddenly caught up in these emotionally charged and highly political issues. As some of you may know, the issue of Holocaust assets came to the fore in 1996-1997 thanks to charges emanating from Jewish groups angry about unpaid Swiss bank accounts, the mobilization of the U.S. government to put pressure on the Swiss to open their banking files, and the mobilization of various American legislative and regulatory authorities to put the heat on the Swiss. The