A measure of Justice?
Ten years on from Germany's slave labour settlement
Ron Leaton was twelve when arrested in Krakow by the Nazis, but told his captors that he was fourteen in order to be taken into slave labour rather than being shot as a child. Nowadays he tours schools to relate his experiences directly to children, finding solace in talking to them face to face, rather than letting them learn about the war and the holocaust “through books”.
Following his detention, Ron Leaton claimed to be a machine operator and learned the trade by copying the lathe-workers around him in the Ebernsee branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. They were making nuts and bolts for tanks, but “how many of those components actually worked,” he said to me with a chuckle, “is another matter.”
December 17 marks the tenth anniversary of the controversial agreement between the German and American governments over the compensation payable to survivors of forced labour under the Nazi regime, and in the seventieth year since the outbreak of World War II, some former inmates of the slave labour camps are determined that their stories are not forgotten.
Ron Leaton later campaigned with another survivor, Rudy Kennedy, who died last year, for compensation from the companies that profited from their slavery, and for those companies and the German government to admit responsibility for their crimes.
Rudy Karmeinsky had become Rudy Kennedy after a British officer with that surname notified his aunt in London that he had survived slave labour within the Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau and Belsen concentration camps. Devastated by the loss of the rest of her family, the aunt committed suicide soon after Rudy arrived in England in 1946.
Rudy had been forced to work for IG Farben, which was broken up after the war into separate companies including Bayer. They, together with Siemens, Ford, Deutsche Bank and others denied legal responsibility for what happened, as did the German Government.
Their legal campaign ended in a settlement in an American court during the Clinton administration, while the influential Stuart Eizenstat was American Under Secretary of State. The companies that had used slave labour did not recognise any legal liability, but would make voluntary contributions to a fund from which compensation would be paid. The German Government agreed to set up the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation ( www.stiftung-evz.de/eng/ ), which would make the compensation payments to former forced labourers and “other victims of National Socialist injustice”.
German businesses almost matched their government’s financial contribution, with the public and private sector granting the foundation assets of 5.1 billion Euros. 4.4 billion Euros was distributed in single payments of €7,670 to survivors of forced labour “within concentration camps or closed ghettos”, while €2,560 was paid to those forced to work “under detainment”. The payments were made to more than one and a half million people in almost 100 countries, but remain contentious given that individually, the awards amount to less money than that paid to the survivor’s former SS guards through pensions.
Rudy Kennedy never accepted his payment, disagreeing with the condition that a beneficiary’s rights to sue for further damages were surrendered by the deal, and Ron Leaton remains unimpressed with the award itself, insisting that the vital thing is that the history of slave labour under the Nazis be recognised and remembered.
“What matters” he says, “is that the Germans realise what they had done. At the start of the legal campaign for compensation the German companies and government were shifting responsibility from one to the other, then Volkswagen, Krupps, and Siemens stopped trying to get away with it, and then with their small payment they thought they had done their bit of compensation. It is like giving a beggar ten pence and thinking you have done your job. They had kept us alive for the purpose of getting something done. What mattered ten years ago was that they recognised they had indulged in slave labour, underfed us, dressed us in those pyjamas. This recognition of what they did is what counts.”
Hillary Kessler-Godin of the New York based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany recognised the limitations of the financial settlement, and emphasised the importance of the official admission of responsibility. She described the 1999 agreement to me as “at best, a small measure of justice for survivors. The Claims Conference insisted that the agreement establishing the German foundation include a statement of German moral responsibility, which was delivered by the late President Johannes Rau.”
The extent to which Germany has addressed its past is open to debate, for some German companies still refuse to open their wartime archives to researchers, and Johannes Rau’s statement of moral responsibility was part of a settlement exempting the German government and companies from further litigation. Siemens has carefully managed its corporate profile in relation to slave labour, giving financial support to supportive historians but refusing to open company files from the Nazi era. It is now the largest engineering company in Europe, winning a 6.9 million pound contract to install a new IT system in the National Assembly’s Senedd building. The company is also involved in aerospace, utility and transport industries throughout Wales.
The president’s statement could, however, be seen as a step on the path to a moral framework within which a degree of reconciliation could take place. Aryeh Neier, an academic of international justice, distinguishes between the disclosure of past crimes and their acknowledgement by the state, arguing that “it is not sufficient that the truth be known, but also that an official body should acknowledge the wrongdoing of the state.”
Primo Levi, the former slave-labourer and writer, would caution against hopes that an official acknowledgment could in any way remedy the experiences of the past. He commented on his memories of Auschwitz thus: “Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor (if they do rack him, assisted or not by human punishment), but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.”
Like some slave-labour campaigners, Primo Levi’s work can be seen as an attempt to build a public memory of the slave labour and genocide that he witnessed, which might enable the holocaust to be analysed and understood. Levi was concerned, however, that the memory of the holocaust had become institutionalised into remembrance days and monuments, rather than being internalised into the collective psyche.
I asked Martin Bock, Senior Manager of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation’s documentation of forced labour programme, about how his foundation could overcome this trend and reach out to make the history of forced labour an active part of popular memory. Speaking in the foundation’s office on Berlin’s Lindenstrasse, close to the Jewish museum, he told me of the initiatives to foster face-to-face contact between former slave labourers and young people, and of a forthcoming exhibition seeking to bring the human stories of forced labour to public attention.
The foundation is charged by Berlin with continuing to support slave labourers, and is supporting the European Union website www.zwangsarbeit.eu, which catalogues (thus far only in German) survivors’ accounts of their ordeal. While researching this article it was indeed through discovering those details that official or book-bound histories might overlook, that brought home to me the naked atrocity of slave labour. That it had been, for example, a bar mitzvah present of a toy train set that saved Rudy Kennedy’s life when it enabled him to secure a job as a concentration camp electrician while the others about him were deemed unproductive and executed. That when asked by schoolchildren whether he still believed in God, Ron Leaton could find no words of reply.
One also learns of what the experiences couldn’t destroy, and of how slave labourers could uphold their beliefs even in such an apparently dehumanising environment. Ex-slave labourer Roman Halter has written of being marched from Auschwitz as the allies advanced, and wondering at the architecture as they passed through Dresden: “As we were marched by the SS from the railway station to the factory on 68 Schandauerstrasse, starved, thin and weak as I was, I was nevertheless overwhelmed by the beauty of the town.”
Ron Leaton has this concentration camp recollection: “We were once housed in a barracks, and they chased us out of there – perhaps they wanted to search or to clean the place. Anyway, we were all out in the cold, all these different nationalities, struggling to keep warm. The camp was in Austria, and in the distance above everything were these high and beautiful mountains, dusted with a powdery snow. It was sunny that day, although it was probably minus twenty degrees. I remember thinking: ‘This is reality. The present is just an unfortunate detail. This is the real truth – the overwhelming beauty of nature.’ It was like an injection of sanity. I have always taken that with me, that decision to think positively, and not to roll in the misery of despair.”
The foundation’s exhibition, due to open at Berlin’s Jewish Museum in autumn next year, will at least allow other powerful memories of the former forced labourers to circulate, although it remains to be seen whether the event will address those issues left unsettled by the agreement. Just before parting, Martin Bock described the agreement of ten years ago as ‘only a settlement’. As someone who has become so familiar with the atrocities of slave labour under the Third Reich, he concluded: “There cannot be justice.”
Ten years on, the historic statement of responsibility by the German president can be said to have led many Germans to feel that their country is atoning for its past, and given a degree of overdue recognition to survivors of Nazi crimes. The degree of this atonement must, however, remain in question while corporate archives remain closed to researchers, and while the companies involved in slave labour continue to deny legal accountability for their actions.
Bibliography:
Eizenstat, Stuart: Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labour, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. Public Affairs, Washington 2003.
Halter, Roman: The Kindness of Strangers. Viewed Online 12/5/09:
http://www.hmd.org.uk/files/1149791888-12.pdf
Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved. Summit Books, New York 1988.
Munsat, Stanley: The Concept of Memory. Random House, New York 1967.
Neier, Aryeh: Rethinking Truth, Justice, and Guilt after Bosnia and Rwanda. Carla Hesse and Robert Post: Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia. Zone Books, New York 1999.
Pendas, Devin: “Law, Not Vengeance”: Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and the Claims of Memory in German Holocaust Trials. in: Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights.
Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation: The Law on the Creation of a foundation: ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.stiftung-evz.de/eng/about-us/foundation_law/
Sodi, Risa: The Memory of Justice: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 4, No. 1, pp89-104. 1984. Maxwell Pergamon Macmillan, London 1989.
Soyinka, Wole: Memory, Truth, and Healing. in: Amadiume, Ifi & An-Na’im, Abdullahi: The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing, and Social Justice. Zed Books, London 2000.
The Times: Rudy Kennedy: Holocaust survivor, scientist and campaigner. The Times, 3rd March, 2009. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5834133.ece
Wiesen, Jonathan: German Industry and the Third Reich: Fifty Years of Forgetting and Remembering. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.adl.org/Braun/dim_13_2_forgetting_print.asp
Following his detention, Ron Leaton claimed to be a machine operator and learned the trade by copying the lathe-workers around him in the Ebernsee branch of the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. They were making nuts and bolts for tanks, but “how many of those components actually worked,” he said to me with a chuckle, “is another matter.”
December 17 marks the tenth anniversary of the controversial agreement between the German and American governments over the compensation payable to survivors of forced labour under the Nazi regime, and in the seventieth year since the outbreak of World War II, some former inmates of the slave labour camps are determined that their stories are not forgotten.
Ron Leaton later campaigned with another survivor, Rudy Kennedy, who died last year, for compensation from the companies that profited from their slavery, and for those companies and the German government to admit responsibility for their crimes.
Rudy Karmeinsky had become Rudy Kennedy after a British officer with that surname notified his aunt in London that he had survived slave labour within the Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau and Belsen concentration camps. Devastated by the loss of the rest of her family, the aunt committed suicide soon after Rudy arrived in England in 1946.
Rudy had been forced to work for IG Farben, which was broken up after the war into separate companies including Bayer. They, together with Siemens, Ford, Deutsche Bank and others denied legal responsibility for what happened, as did the German Government.
Their legal campaign ended in a settlement in an American court during the Clinton administration, while the influential Stuart Eizenstat was American Under Secretary of State. The companies that had used slave labour did not recognise any legal liability, but would make voluntary contributions to a fund from which compensation would be paid. The German Government agreed to set up the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation ( www.stiftung-evz.de/eng/ ), which would make the compensation payments to former forced labourers and “other victims of National Socialist injustice”.
German businesses almost matched their government’s financial contribution, with the public and private sector granting the foundation assets of 5.1 billion Euros. 4.4 billion Euros was distributed in single payments of €7,670 to survivors of forced labour “within concentration camps or closed ghettos”, while €2,560 was paid to those forced to work “under detainment”. The payments were made to more than one and a half million people in almost 100 countries, but remain contentious given that individually, the awards amount to less money than that paid to the survivor’s former SS guards through pensions.
Rudy Kennedy never accepted his payment, disagreeing with the condition that a beneficiary’s rights to sue for further damages were surrendered by the deal, and Ron Leaton remains unimpressed with the award itself, insisting that the vital thing is that the history of slave labour under the Nazis be recognised and remembered.
“What matters” he says, “is that the Germans realise what they had done. At the start of the legal campaign for compensation the German companies and government were shifting responsibility from one to the other, then Volkswagen, Krupps, and Siemens stopped trying to get away with it, and then with their small payment they thought they had done their bit of compensation. It is like giving a beggar ten pence and thinking you have done your job. They had kept us alive for the purpose of getting something done. What mattered ten years ago was that they recognised they had indulged in slave labour, underfed us, dressed us in those pyjamas. This recognition of what they did is what counts.”
Hillary Kessler-Godin of the New York based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany recognised the limitations of the financial settlement, and emphasised the importance of the official admission of responsibility. She described the 1999 agreement to me as “at best, a small measure of justice for survivors. The Claims Conference insisted that the agreement establishing the German foundation include a statement of German moral responsibility, which was delivered by the late President Johannes Rau.”
The extent to which Germany has addressed its past is open to debate, for some German companies still refuse to open their wartime archives to researchers, and Johannes Rau’s statement of moral responsibility was part of a settlement exempting the German government and companies from further litigation. Siemens has carefully managed its corporate profile in relation to slave labour, giving financial support to supportive historians but refusing to open company files from the Nazi era. It is now the largest engineering company in Europe, winning a 6.9 million pound contract to install a new IT system in the National Assembly’s Senedd building. The company is also involved in aerospace, utility and transport industries throughout Wales.
The president’s statement could, however, be seen as a step on the path to a moral framework within which a degree of reconciliation could take place. Aryeh Neier, an academic of international justice, distinguishes between the disclosure of past crimes and their acknowledgement by the state, arguing that “it is not sufficient that the truth be known, but also that an official body should acknowledge the wrongdoing of the state.”
Primo Levi, the former slave-labourer and writer, would caution against hopes that an official acknowledgment could in any way remedy the experiences of the past. He commented on his memories of Auschwitz thus: “Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor (if they do rack him, assisted or not by human punishment), but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.”
Like some slave-labour campaigners, Primo Levi’s work can be seen as an attempt to build a public memory of the slave labour and genocide that he witnessed, which might enable the holocaust to be analysed and understood. Levi was concerned, however, that the memory of the holocaust had become institutionalised into remembrance days and monuments, rather than being internalised into the collective psyche.
I asked Martin Bock, Senior Manager of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation’s documentation of forced labour programme, about how his foundation could overcome this trend and reach out to make the history of forced labour an active part of popular memory. Speaking in the foundation’s office on Berlin’s Lindenstrasse, close to the Jewish museum, he told me of the initiatives to foster face-to-face contact between former slave labourers and young people, and of a forthcoming exhibition seeking to bring the human stories of forced labour to public attention.
The foundation is charged by Berlin with continuing to support slave labourers, and is supporting the European Union website www.zwangsarbeit.eu, which catalogues (thus far only in German) survivors’ accounts of their ordeal. While researching this article it was indeed through discovering those details that official or book-bound histories might overlook, that brought home to me the naked atrocity of slave labour. That it had been, for example, a bar mitzvah present of a toy train set that saved Rudy Kennedy’s life when it enabled him to secure a job as a concentration camp electrician while the others about him were deemed unproductive and executed. That when asked by schoolchildren whether he still believed in God, Ron Leaton could find no words of reply.
One also learns of what the experiences couldn’t destroy, and of how slave labourers could uphold their beliefs even in such an apparently dehumanising environment. Ex-slave labourer Roman Halter has written of being marched from Auschwitz as the allies advanced, and wondering at the architecture as they passed through Dresden: “As we were marched by the SS from the railway station to the factory on 68 Schandauerstrasse, starved, thin and weak as I was, I was nevertheless overwhelmed by the beauty of the town.”
Ron Leaton has this concentration camp recollection: “We were once housed in a barracks, and they chased us out of there – perhaps they wanted to search or to clean the place. Anyway, we were all out in the cold, all these different nationalities, struggling to keep warm. The camp was in Austria, and in the distance above everything were these high and beautiful mountains, dusted with a powdery snow. It was sunny that day, although it was probably minus twenty degrees. I remember thinking: ‘This is reality. The present is just an unfortunate detail. This is the real truth – the overwhelming beauty of nature.’ It was like an injection of sanity. I have always taken that with me, that decision to think positively, and not to roll in the misery of despair.”
The foundation’s exhibition, due to open at Berlin’s Jewish Museum in autumn next year, will at least allow other powerful memories of the former forced labourers to circulate, although it remains to be seen whether the event will address those issues left unsettled by the agreement. Just before parting, Martin Bock described the agreement of ten years ago as ‘only a settlement’. As someone who has become so familiar with the atrocities of slave labour under the Third Reich, he concluded: “There cannot be justice.”
Ten years on, the historic statement of responsibility by the German president can be said to have led many Germans to feel that their country is atoning for its past, and given a degree of overdue recognition to survivors of Nazi crimes. The degree of this atonement must, however, remain in question while corporate archives remain closed to researchers, and while the companies involved in slave labour continue to deny legal accountability for their actions.
Bibliography:
Eizenstat, Stuart: Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labour, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. Public Affairs, Washington 2003.
Halter, Roman: The Kindness of Strangers. Viewed Online 12/5/09:
http://www.hmd.org.uk/files/1149791888-12.pdf
Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved. Summit Books, New York 1988.
Munsat, Stanley: The Concept of Memory. Random House, New York 1967.
Neier, Aryeh: Rethinking Truth, Justice, and Guilt after Bosnia and Rwanda. Carla Hesse and Robert Post: Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia. Zone Books, New York 1999.
Pendas, Devin: “Law, Not Vengeance”: Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and the Claims of Memory in German Holocaust Trials. in: Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights.
Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation: The Law on the Creation of a foundation: ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.stiftung-evz.de/eng/about-us/foundation_law/
Sodi, Risa: The Memory of Justice: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 4, No. 1, pp89-104. 1984. Maxwell Pergamon Macmillan, London 1989.
Soyinka, Wole: Memory, Truth, and Healing. in: Amadiume, Ifi & An-Na’im, Abdullahi: The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing, and Social Justice. Zed Books, London 2000.
The Times: Rudy Kennedy: Holocaust survivor, scientist and campaigner. The Times, 3rd March, 2009. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5834133.ece
Wiesen, Jonathan: German Industry and the Third Reich: Fifty Years of Forgetting and Remembering. Viewed online 12/5/09:
http://www.adl.org/Braun/dim_13_2_forgetting_print.asp