Germany's Holocaust legacy revisited - any opinions?

[Pickaxxe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/in...partner=GOOGLE

Holocaust Legacy: Germans and Jews Debate Redemption
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: October 29, 2003


ERLIN, Oct. 28 — It might seem obvious, at first glance anyway, that a German affiliate of a company that once supplied poison gas to the Nazis should not be a subcontractor for the very memorial now being constructed in Berlin to the Nazis' many millions of victims.

That, at any rate, is what the Memorial Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe, which has overall responsibility for the memorial, decided in the case of the chemical company Degussa, which was to have provided the anti-graffiti material being used to protect the 2,700 concrete steles that are to be placed into the memorial ground.


After what was described as a long and agonizing meeting, the 23-member board of directors of the Memorial Foundation decided last week not to use the Degussa anti-graffiti product. They did so because a company affiliated with Degussa called Degesch was identified as a supplier of Zyklon B gas pellets, which were used in the death camps to murder Nazi victims.

"The problem we discussed is very complicated," Lea Rosh, a member of the board, told a German newspaper on Sunday. "We asked ourselves: Where should one draw the line? And we came to the conclusion that the line is very clearly Zyklon B."

But in the days since then, the decision on Degussa has provoked a debate in Germany on exactly the issue of line-drawing. It happens that Degussa, a company based in Düsseldorf that is the world's largest maker of specialty chemicals, employing some 48,000 people worldwide, has had an exemplary record in examining its wartime past and making restitution to victims of the Nazis.

Most important in this regard, Degussa was one of the 17 German companies that created the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future, which raised millions of dollars for a special fund to be distributed to victims of concentration camp and slave labor during the Nazi period.

So the issue quickly seemed less than clear, and many questions have been raised: Did the Memorial Foundation board act correctly in singling out Degussa? At what point, especially 60 years later, has a company earned exoneration for its past behavior? Why should Degussa be singled out when so many other German companies — Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler), for instance, Siemens or even an American company, I.B.M. — also collaborated with the Nazis?

"I'm really astonished, because Degussa was very strongly involved in the slave labor initiative, in starting it, in leading the negotiations with the Jewish side and groups in Eastern Europe," said Wolfgang G. Gibowski, a spokesman for the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future. "The Degussa of today is not the Degussa of 60 or 70 years ago."

"Where do you begin and where do you stop with these arguments?" Mr. Gibowski continued, arguing that practically every German company in existence at the time collaborated with the Nazis. "Where do you get the sand to produce those monuments? Do you get it from Israel and America or Germany? Where do you get the cement, the trucks? What kind of buses do you use to take visitors there in the future?"

The debate over the role of Degussa is the latest issue to bedevil the Holocaust Memorial project, which, after many years of discussion, was approved by the German parliament in 1999. Even after that, there were fierce arguments about the memorial's location, cost, design and even the materials used in its construction.

Work on the project, designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, finally began this year in a large open field in central Berlin, a few hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate and adjacent to the site of the future American Embassy. So far, about 25 of the 2,700 memorial steles have been installed, and work is expected to be finished in 2005.

Some have questioned why Memorial Foundation board members raised no objections to Degussa's participation earlier, even though its role was well known to them. In fact, Degussa itself is not even directly involved; its product, reputedly the best anti-graffiti material on the market, was to have been supplied by another subcontractor.

According to some people familiar with the board's decision, objections were first raised by Holocaust survivors. One of them, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, told board members that she would not be able to visit the memorial herself if the distributor of Zyklon B was allowed to supply the material.

"We all know that it's a very sensitive issue," Sibylle Quack, a spokeswoman for the Memorial Foundation, said in a telephone interview. "On one hand you have survivors of the Holocaust who can't stand a firm like Degussa being involved in the memorial, and on the other hand you will hardly find firms in Germany that were not involved with the Nazis.

"But more than 40 percent of Degesch was owned by Degussa, and Degesch distributed Zyklon B," Ms. Quack continued, "so this is a very important symbolic issue. Zyklon B symbolizes the murder."

In many ways, two principles oppose each other in this emerging debate: one is the principle of a sort of forgiveness for a company that has taken real action to atone for its past. The people who work at Degussa are not the same people who worked for it 60 years ago. According to this principle, it is wrong to penalize them for something that they had nothing to do with.

The company itself seemed to embrace this point. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Degussa said that it "regrets" the Memorial Foundation's decision "but respects it." But the company also said it would be difficult to explain the decision to its employees, given its record of the recent past.

In an editorial to be published Thursday, Michael Naumann, co-editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, expressed irritation at people who insist on a sort of eternal and insurmountable German guilt.

"After four decades of intensive research, after many Holocaust movies and books, nobody can accuse the Germans of remaining oblivious to their history," Mr. Naumann writes. "Some of the accusers and those who would educate us about history have turned into impersonators of their own righteousness. They have usurped the role of victim."

The competing principle is that, whatever the abstract rights and wrongs of the decision involving Degussa, the most important element in the picture is the feelings of the Holocaust survivors themselves.

"You can't say anything against this argument, in my opinion," Klaus Hillenbrand, editor of the newspaper tageszeitung, said. "You can't argue to the survivors that Degussa has become a very fine company, so you have to change your view of this case.

"It's a personal question," Mr. Hillenbrand said. "If there are survivors of the Holocaust who feel this way, you just have to accept it."

[Cerebral Knievel]

There comes a time when the past has to be acknowledged as just that, or the future will always slip away. By continuing to stigmatize Germans as Nazis and to label all the companies that were involved in Nazi enterprises as irredeemably guilty is to remain locked in victim status forever. I think in this case the company has moved forward in the healing process, and the other side needs to meet them half way. If companies in America were half as forthcoming as European companies on profits from slave labor and support of past wrongs, I'd be impressed.

[F.A.U.S.T]

i think this whole thing is stupid BUT you have to realize that in some areas public perceptions are more important than the actual facts.

a memorial is obviously a very sensitive thing, it's supposed to bring up strong subjective emotions for a lot of people.

getting your holocaust memorial labelled as the "poison gas company memorial" -- even if the company has totally repented, is something i can understand wanting to avoid. it might be childish, it might be unfair to the now-friendly poison gas company... but monuments aren't functional if they raise the wrong associations for the public. in this case, public perception of the project's good intentions is of unusual importance, because a monument has no purpose or function other than to stir up the proper feelings of sober remembrance in the public. if it fails at that, if people see it and think "poison nazi gas" FOR WHATEVER REASON, VALID OR NOT, then it's a failed monument.

[b psycho]

How many people in germany actually know all this back story?

Could be fussing over nothing for all they know. Eventually people gotta move on...

Besides, the company could portray it as a gesture of apology if they wanted to.

[Pickaxxe]

Originally posted by b psycho

Besides, the company could portray it as a gesture of apology if they wanted to.

Lea Rosh (see above) said, it could be discussed using Degussa's product, if -that's the catch- they supply it for free. Which makes her whole point pretty much void, IMO. It ain't like Degussa still has to prove it's denazification, so Mrs. Rosh better decide where she stands. It's illogical to say "I don't want a survivor of the holocaust standing there and knowing who supplied the coating for those steles" and then add "...as long as we don't get em for free!". IF she is right in her first assessment, then I don't think it would matter that much to any survivor whether or not Degussa got paid for their part of the construction of the memorial.