Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

To what extent can past injustices perpetrated by states and entire societies be “repaired” through offering victims official recognition and material compensation? The question reflects a distinctively post–1945 understanding of the meaning and goals of reparations. Previously, the term had been associated with questions of “war guilt and the burdens victorious nations placed on defeated enemies.” The magnitude of Nazism's crimes necessitated new approaches to restorative justice centering the violation of victims’ human rights.

Nobles’ losses of income and property during the French Revolution have been widely discussed in the historiography on modern France. Less is known, however, about how nobles pursued financial compensation from the French state. In the France of the Bourbon Restoration, former émigrés and their heirs became eligible to receive payment through the indemnity law of 27 April 1825 that became known as le milliard des émigrés. This article presents five case studies of noble families’ experiences in claiming an indemnity for properties in France and Haiti. Nobles’ engagement with the administrative processes set up for the 1825 indemnity law served as collective memory-making for the goal of consolidating patrimony to protect status and income in future generations.

This article looks at the relationship between reparations and the reconstruction of Jewish livelihoods in West Germany, focusing on businesses. Reparations were a vital source of capital for the many Jewish businesses (re-)established after the war. Indeed, without them, the postwar Jewish (re-)turn to entrepreneurship would undoubtedly have been smaller. However, reparations did not provide enough capital, or provide it in a timely enough manner, to allow Jewish business owners to establish stable enterprises. They thus contributed to the precarity of postwar Jewish economic life. This situation encouraged collective action. Through their organizations, Jewish business owners and their supporters fought not only to improve the existing program but also to gain access to the kinds of assistance available to other recognized war victims in West Germany, especially German refugees. In doing so, they highlighted the discrepancies between what were effectively different reparations regimes and sought to bring them into alignment.

This article approaches the subject of reparations for Nazi crimes by understanding the reparations process primarily as routine administrative practice. This is an approach that has rarely been adopted by historians. During their often lengthy compensation proceedings, applicants gained experiences that went far beyond dealing with the final decisions. Close analysis of the concrete interactions and complex dynamics between Sinti and Roma claimants and the compensation bureaucracy in Baden-Württemberg, conceptualized as a systematic “contact zone” of individual negotiations of Wiedergutmachung, shows that, for this specific victim group, compensation was often experienced as frustrating. This had as much to do with antigypsy discrimination as it did with tragic misunderstandings and negative preconceptions on both sides. These difficulties of mutual understanding eroded acceptance of the political program of reparations.

Forced sterilization of ethnic and social groups the regime considered “inferior” constituted a key element of Nazi racial policy. However, after 1949, the resilience of eugenics in the Federal Republic blocked reparations (Wiedergutmachung) for victims of Nazi-era sterilizations. The first group of persons labeled “non-Aryan,” whom the Nazis subjected to systematic forced sterilization, were the German descendants of French and US soldiers of color who had participated in the 1920s Rhineland occupation. Between four hundred and six hundred biracial Rhenish children and teenagers were forcibly sterilized over the summer of 1937. Many aspects of biracial Rhinelanders’ lives remain obscure. Their struggles for reparations in the Federal Republic mark a virtually unexplored field. This article is a first attempt to address this historiographic gap. Based on extensive archival research, it focuses on five biographical case studies. The preliminary research does not confirm assessments that victims of the 1937 Rhineland campaign never received any compensation. However, although a small number of biracial Rhinelanders may have obtained modest levels of Wiedergutmachung, there is little evidence of growing public awareness of the crimes of the Rhineland campaign. Biracial Rhinelanders’ political isolation challenges us to revisit influential interpretations of reparations for the forcibly sterilized as a contested and slow yet ultimately productive societal “learning process.”

This article explores the transnational and intergenerational dynamics of Holocaust reparations in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on these dynamics in the case of Austria in the context of deepening European integration, through detailed case studies of two Austrian Holocaust survivors’ reparations and restitution claims history. Those claimants were the author's paternal grandparents; her portrait of their experience draws on both archival research and private family papers. The article suggests that a transnational approach to the instrumentalization of Holocaust reparations in contemporary Europe can open up fruitful new lines of inquiry for comparative research on reparations for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

Recent calls in the United States for reparations for slavery have often referenced Germany as a useful model because of its payments to Israel and efforts to atone for the Holocaust. This article traces how Germans have grappled with the Nazi legacy since 1945, focusing on developments and debates in the Federal Republic. It brings more specificity to the lexicon of reparative justice as it considers the lessons that emerge from the German case. Pondering the relative absence of reparative justice for slavery in the United States, the article suggests that the failure to reckon with this difficult history has paradoxically created conditions that made racism's shape-shifting nature more evident and necessary to confront in the United States than they have appeared in Germany.