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Who Is a Nazi Victim? Constructing Victimhood through Post-War Reparations in France, Germany and Switzerland by Regula Ludi
My presentation today deals with the question of how post-war victim reparations have transformed the fact of someone’s victimization into normative ideas of victimhood and how they have contributed to a particular understanding of Nazi persecution. I use the term “constructing victimhood” to characterize this relation. This expression might sound awkward in the context of Nazi persecution. Terms like construction or production, when used to describe social, cultural and political phenomena, tend to convey the impression that something is invented or even fabricated, therefore not a given reality. It is of course not my intention to leave this impression or question the nature of Nazi persecution. But instead, I use the term in the attempt of capturing developments and phenomena of the immediate post-war era. At that point, the fact of victimization was highly confusing and for the victims often associated with blame and shame. When we look at the treatment of Nazi victims over time, public sympathy and respect for the survivors of Nazi abuses are fairly recent historical phenomena. Right after the Second World War, individual Nazi victims instead met ambiguous reactions that were oscillating between contempt as a result of demeaning Nazi propaganda and glorification of the victims’ sacrifices. Under the conditions of war and military rhetoric, undeserved suffering was often associated with weakness and passivity. Even the pervasive use in the immediate postwar years of a discourse instilled with religious terms, such as sacrifice and martyrdom, was ambivalent in its impact. Such rhetoric transfigured victimization and on top of that insinuated that the victims had visited the affliction upon themselves with their behavior and conduct, however noble their motives had been.
Victimhood, as an officially recognized legal status that entailed particular rights and entitlements to financial benefits thus became a much desired good. For the survivors of state sponsored violence it represented more than the mere vindication of their undeserved affliction. To a great extent it came to stand for moral authority as the trademark of innocence and a highly valued form of symbolic capital, to use the terminology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It is my intention in this presentation to examine the emergence of these conceptions through postwar reparation practices. But let me first say a few brief words about victim reparations in the post-war era. Distinct from war reparations, the demand to make redress to individual victims of human rights violations was a legal innovation, a novel concept that appeared at the end of the Second World War. Prior to this, there existed no direct precedents in international law, neither in the design of the Versailles treaty for war reparations nor in the mechanisms of the interwar minority regime. Victim reparations were part of the responses to the unprecedented nature of Nazi crimes, embedded in a wider range of transitional justice measures aimed at overcoming the legacies of systematic violence, state organized mass murder and genocide. The first post-war decade was the period when the course was set, the decisions were taken and the mechanisms evolved that have determined reparation politics ever since. In the late 1940s, for instance, the German legislation introduced a canonical definition of Nazi persecution. It centered on the perpetrators’ ideological motives. In other words: an individual was entitled to redress when the Nazis had violated his or her rights for racial, political, religious or ideological reasons. In the early 1950s, the Federal Republic of Germany assumed state responsibility for the Nazi crimes and acknowledged in principle its obligations toward the survivors of Nazi persecution. The 1940s and early 1950s also saw the implementation of legal mechanisms and the creation of special bureaucracies to handle compensation claims. Most countries in Western Europe introduced some kind of special welfare benefits for the survivors of Nazi atrocities.
June 1940, Sophie who had just enrolled as a student at university was gradually drawn into political activity. With a group of fellow students she became involved in the printing and diffusion of underground literature and she started to commit sabotage acts against the German occupier. Late in 1943, probably due to a denouncement, the French police arrested Sophie in her hometown Lyon. They immediately handed her over to the Gestapo. During the interrogations, Sophie was severely beaten. Yet she withstood the torture and succeeded in denying most of the allegations. This was of little help, however. The Germans were well informed about her activity, and in the spring of 1944, a German military court sentenced her to death in a summary trial. The execution was put on hold. Instead, Sophie was deported to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück on the last transport to leave France. Sophie was lucky to survive the concentration camp. But upon liberation, she was severely ill of tuberculosis. She never fully recovered and in the following years increasingly suffered from various mental conditions. Depression, insomnia and anxieties impeded her from resuming her studies and rendered a regular professional occupation impossible. But Sophie stayed politically alert and was active in the amicale de Ravensbruck, the association of the former concentration camp inmates. At an international gathering of former political prisoners she met the German concentration camp survivor Karl M. whom she married soon after. Theoretically Sophie fulfilled the citizenship requirements to file compensation claims in Germany, France and Switzerland. She first submitted her claim in Germany. But the Germans turned her down. They argued that the French resistance defied the legal authority that was established by the armistice of 1940. Moreover, they claimed that resistance fighters were not persecuted for political motives which would have entitled them to compensation payments according to the canonical formula. Instead the German compensation bureaucracy argued that resistance movements were driven by national rationales that gave the military authorities the justification to treat opponents as insurgents
and subject them to martial law. Sophie B. did not appeal against this decision, as the slowness of the German compensation bureaucracy was notorious at that time and left little hope that she would be handed down a final decision within the foreseeable future. Sophie B. instead filed her claim in Switzerland. The Swiss authorities admitted that the torture, the unfair trial and the concentration camp detention qualified as acts of Nazi persecution. Yet they held that her resistance activity was an illegal act under occupation law and the punishment therefore partly self-inflicted. This justified a 50 percent reduction of the compensation payment. But in the end they decided to reject her claim on the grounds of citizenship. Although Sophie had been Swiss citizen at the time of the persecution, the Swiss authorities considered her allegiance to Switzerland too feeble to justify a claim to compensation from that country. This finally left Sophie with the French procedure as her last resort. In Lyon her case was examined by a mixed commission of officials and representatives of veterans’ and victims’ organizations. It did not take them long to come to a positive decision. Sophie B. was recognized as a Déportée et intérnée de la Résistance , the highest rank in the French victim hierarchy. This entitled her to the same welfare benefits as war veterans as well as privileged employment conditions. And the mayor of Lyon specially honored her sacrifice for the sake of the nation in his speech on veteran’s day when she was awarded a special medal for her merit. On her journey through the three compensation systems Sophie B. was confronted with three different assessments of her affliction. Two countries penalized her for her resistance activity which conveyed the confusing message that the abuses she had suffered were partly justified because she had provoked the persecution with her imprudent behavior. In France, on the other hand, Sophie was celebrated as a hero. Her tortured body became a symbol for the humiliation of the nation and at the same time, her sacrifice and survival stood for national redemption.
nevertheless point at idiosyncrasies as well as similarities in each of the three case studies. Compensation procedures produce normative ideas of victimhood which link the instance of victimization by the Nazis to expectations of conduct and behavior that in turn also testify to societies’ grappling with their role and responsibilities in the Nazi era. This transnational approach, however, immediately raises some questions: Are the three case studies with their completely different wartime history at all comparable? And is it at all possible to talk of victim reparations in France and Switzerland, given that Germany as the main aggressor was legally responsible for the abuses and, subsequently, their redress? In the first place, some reservations are necessary for the understanding of a complicated legal situation: Although Germany in principle endorsed its obligation toward Nazi victims, it often eschewed their fulfillment. The international community provided for a ready excuse. More interested in a prompt repayment of pre- and postwar debts, Germany’s western creditors had agreed at the London Debt conference of 1952/53 to postpone all German obligations resulting from the war to the instance of a future peace treaty. Thus they tacitly sanctioned the exclusion of their own nationals from German victim reparations. Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s, upon pressure of West-European governments, did the Federal Republic agree to make lump sum compensation payments to formerly occupied and neutral countries on behalf of their Nazi victims. But before that, it had persistently refused to shoulder any responsibility with regard to aliens who were not residents in West-Germany or former German nationals. So, to alleviate the suffering of their citizens, France in the late 1940s and Switzerland in 1957 introduced special legislation. These compensation mechanisms can be deemed victim reparations because they were directed to Nazi victims as a clearly defined group, involved a procedure to establish Nazi persecution and linked to such recognition of victimhood the allocation of special benefits. In both countries the legislation conveyed a clear sense of state responsibility, in so far as it held the Third Reich (and its successor state)
alone accountable. This entailed that any notion of a shared responsibility or even complicity of the French state and the Swiss government respectively be discarded.
This legislation clearly informed ideas of victimhood. Let me begin with France. The transitional government of de Gaulle faced upon liberation in the summer of 1944 the daunting task of reintegrating more then two million displaced persons, amounting to 5 per cent of the French population. The overwhelming majority were labor conscripts and POWs. From the very beginning, the new authorities embarked on a strategy of equal treatment, deliberately blurring the lines between different categories and treating all returnees as members of the same community of suffering and displacement. They had well-founded reasons to do so. As a consequence of the Vichy policies with regard to labor conscripts and POWs, these groups’ reputation was ambiguous. Their smooth integration therefore required oblivion to some extent. Also, the new authorities attempted to win the loyalty of circles that had been subject to intensive Vichy propaganda during their captivity. At the same time the Gaullists adopted rhetoric of heroism and resistance. Drawing on the memory of the First World War and the interwar activism of veterans’ movements, the combatant served as the revered icon and model. This helped invigorate the idea of a fighting France, as opposed to the France that had collaborated with the occupier and needed to be liberated by Allied troops. Special legislation soon assimilated various resistance groups to regular troops and assigned to their members the desired combatant ID which also made them eligible for veteran pensions. But this did not necessarily include resistance members who had been arrested, deported and incarcerated in concentration camps. Obviously, this created a discrepancy between political rhetoric and the actual treatment of former political prisoners. Meanwhile the communists had paralleled these efforts to heroicize the armed struggle with their own attempt to mobilize returnees. They tried to appeal with the inclusive term of Déportation to the mass of labor conscripts, political prisoners and persecution victims,
emphasized the hierarchy of relevance that was embodied by the two different laws. Such differentiation underlined the implicit message of victim reparations in France, which was to convey a sense of national honor and thus reward those who had defied occupation. The other side of the coin was that victims who could not provide evidence of special merit were downgraded and their rehabilitation remained in a limbo. We see in the French context, furthermore, the dialectic of assimilation and dissimilation at work. Initially, it was the combatant who served as the model. The welfare system for veterans framed the perception of persecution and suffering which were assimilated into the experience of armed conflicts. This was also expressed through a prevailing rhetoric of martyrdom which suggested that all victims of Nazi persecution had suffered for the sake of the nation. This was gradually to be replaced by deportation as the overarching concept. It captured for most victims the affliction in more adequate terms as it shifted the focus from active struggle to more passive endurance, and it dignified their ordeals by identifying deportation with unprovoked persecution, thus turning it into the touchstone of the victims’ innocence and virtue. Deportation therefore became the term everybody was striving for, and in particular groups like the labor conscripts who could never completely shed the suspicion of collaboration and moral ambiguity. Over the symbolic capital it embodied a bitter struggle flared up, a conflict that was finally settled with a court decision that banned the use the term déporté for labor conscripts. But these memory wars, by shifting boundaries, redrawing lines and redefining the dignity of victims, also blurred distinctions and often conflated different forms and motives of Nazi persecution. And they had an intrinsic tendency to exaggeration with often unpleasant verbal excesses. Returning to victim reparations: What role did compensation procedures play in this process? By producing legal definitions and distinctions and establishing an official recognition procedure, they validated particular conceptions of victimhood and invested them with official approval. In doing so, they gave momentum to the process of dissimilation and
assimilation, especially by declaring individual behavior the decisive criteria for rewards and benefits, instead of the fact and extent of abuse. Victimhood thus came to be the reflection of someone’s character and dignity as a person. The question of who was involved in the decision-making process was relevant for the outcome of compensation procedures. In the case of France we can identify a fairly strong involvement of different victims’ associations. Their conflicts were not only the fault-lines of the legislation process; they also influenced the recognition procedures through their presence in the respective agencies. In Germany, in turn, a special compensation bureaucracy emerged that excluded victims from the decision making process. In the literature, the most criticized deficits and blind-spots of German victim reparations have often been attributed to this fact. Many authors maintain that the administrative personnel, many of whom had begun their career under the Nazi regime, and a thriving industry of legal and medical expertise, served as conveyer belt for Nazi ideology and stereotypes. Still, the early German legislation and practice shows some surprising parallels to the French reparation policy, as well as similarities in the resulting conceptions of victimhood. The occupying powers left the design and provision of welfare assistance for the survivors of Nazi persecution to local German authorities. But no specific reparation plans originated from the circles of the German opposition to the Nazi regime, apart from very general declarations. Therefore, much of the early programs were makeshift and largely depended on the dedication of local law-makers and officials. Often their architects were former political prisoners who operated under the strong impression of their concentration camp experience. Conflicts among different inmate groups resulted from the SS-system of terror that had deliberately set inmate categories against each other. These tensions did not end upon liberation, and their reverberations often impacted compensation programs. Victim reparations therefore often mirrored the concentration camp hierarchy, with the political prisoners ranking at the top and claiming the prestigious title of fighters against fascism.
over scarce financial resources and political power. In these conflicts, recognized victimhood became a good that was in great demand. It validated a solid anti-fascist past and thus served as a source of moral authority. This engendered in victims the desire to keep their reputation spotless and prompted frequent purges which led to the denial of victim status for individuals who could not prove the impeccable conduct expected from anti-fascists. The driving force behind these purges were mostly victims’ associations themselves. Dominated by the political prisoners, these organizations in the early days wielded considerable influence over the official recognition procedures. But unlike in France, where victims’ association continued to play a key role in reparations policy, they soon became insignificant in Germany. With the beginning of the Cold War, the largest association was increasingly discredited in the western part of Germany for being under communist influence. Political parties founded their own victim groups while threatening party members with exclusion if they were not willing to give up participation in the victims’ movement. Such fragmentation broke the back of the antifascist movement in the West. In the Soviet occupation zone, in contrast, victims’ associations were quickly absorbed in the communist party. For many survivors in East Germany the purges of the early 1950s resulted in the loss of their legal victim status. This reinforced and confirmed the link between recognized victimhood and a sound anti-fascist stance, the latter being rapidly narrowed down to blind political loyalty. In West-Germany, on the other hand, we can observe in the 1950s a gradual reversal of the victim hierarchy as had been established immediately after the war. The antifascist fighters and political prisoners fell into disgrace, while those who had not actively provoked the persecution, but instead become victims of racial policy, came to epitomize the typical Nazi victim. As a tendency this shift in the conception of victimhood began in the 1950s. It was prompted for a number of reasons. The denigration of the anti-fascist movement, denounced as communist subversion, and the accelerated re-integration of former party
members probably helped to disperse the cult of political resistance. As antifascism was no longer a political virtue, opposition to the Nazi regime also lost its validity as a reason for victimization. With the ban of the communist party, its former members were stripped of their victim status and, for a sudden, appeared as promoters of totalitarian ideologies instead of virtuous fighters for freedom. On the other hand, the Jewish victims of racial persecution increasingly came to embody a new concept of victimhood, one that stressed innocence instead of political virtue. The shift in victimhood conception was also linked to the assimilation of reparation policy. Under considerable international pressure, West Germany in 1953 eventually passed federal legislation to harmonize the disparate practice of the Länder. It adopted the aforementioned canonical formula that entitled victims of racial, religious, political and ideological persecution to reparations. From the viewpoint of practice, this definition was limiting as well as undefined and thus required specification. In the first place, it excluded numerous victim categories, for example, labor conscripts on the grounds that their forced recruitment had not been motivated by racial, religious or political reasons and despite the abuses they had been exposed to. Based on a similar rationale, victims of Nazi criminal policy and eugenics were also denied reparation. But apart from that, the canonical formula also required interpretation: What, for instance, constituted an act of racial persecution? With regard to Jewish victims, this did not raise too many difficulties—the anti-Semitic laws were quite explicit and their enforcement systematic. In the case of the Roma and Sinti, however, compensation agencies were less inclined to recognize racial persecution, although Gypsies had been subject to the Nuremberg race laws and much of the anti-Semitic legislation. But many acts of persecution were based on arguments of criminal anthropology and eugenics rather than racial theories. Unlike scientific racism these academic disciplines were not entirely discredited after 1945 and still considered useful for fighting crime and profiling groups with allegedly innate criminal
The Swiss procedure, though adopting the principles of the German practice, produced its own idea of victimhood, to some extent a reversal of the French model. The Swiss compensation agency rewarded what was considered innocence in the face of Nazism. Those who had endured their fate passively and without provocation were most likely to get the highest compensation payments. Defenseless widows who only indirectly, through the loss of their breadwinner, had become victims of persecution acts, appeared as the model victims. On the other hand, resistance fighters, members of the political opposition or even individuals who just showed courage in the face of the Nazis and helped those in distress, were penalized. They faced severe cuts of their benefits because the compensation agency held that their persecution was self-inflicted. Instead of vindication the compensation procedure for them meant a confirmation of blame and prejudice. This tendency appears as a pretty obvious strategy to exonerate the diplomats who had come under fire for having neglected their fellow citizens in the Nazi era. But it was also symptomatic for the official idea of neutrality, which was no longer seen as a pure instrument of foreign policy, but more and more as a political virtue and obligation of the individual citizen who was expected to abstain from meddling in political affairs abroad as if acting in an official function. And of course it can also be understood as a reflection of the Swiss government’s ambiguous stance toward Nazi Germany. It is finally an irony of history, that of all things the country that had the luck of preserving its democratic constitution in the Nazi era was most likely to penalize through its compensation procedure bravery and courage in the face of the Nazi oppression of all articulations of freedom, democracy and human solidarity. The Swiss compensation procedure equally founded victimhood on a presumption of political virtue, although with a different outcome than the two other countries. Thus as a common denominator we can observe in all three cases that victimhood resulted from a recognition procedure that was predetermined by implicit normative assumptions about
individual behavior and features. Only this recognition procedure validated victimhood and transformed it into a source of moral authority, whereas the fact of victimization remained ambiguous for the affected individuals, always leaving the door open for suspicions of having provoked or even deserved the affliction.
Let me finally come to a conclusion: There are four points that I would like to emphasize. First, compensation procedures are a relationship and interaction between state authorities and the individual. This distinguishes them from property restitution which is basically an interaction between private parties, with the courts functioning as the arbitrators. While the latter involve forceful interventions in the social fabric and are thus fraught with an explosive potential, compensation procedures circumvent these conflicts. Instead they are characterized by an obvious imbalance of power. So, the recognition of victimhood in many respects mirrors the persecution: it is an official act and a demonstration of state power, it often deals with the same or a similar set of evidence and records: police reports, court records, and so on and so forth. Second , victim reparations are a mechanism of integration and exclusion. They constitute a ritual that either results in the vindication of the victims or in its denial. Denial draws the line between unlawful abuse and justifiable acts of force. It thereby tends to shift the blame onto the individual because the act of persecution appears self-inflicted and therefore deserved. Claimants thus often experienced the denial of recognition as a second persecution or justification of the Nazi abuses. Third , recognized victimhood can be understood as symbolic capital which in some cases is invested with moral authority. The battles of various victim groups over terms and titles testify to this symbolic dimension. The aforementioned dynamic of integration and exclusion is partly driven by these conflicting interests among different victim groups. Its outcome depends on the leverage these groups can mobilize, and this again is a function of their ability
