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BERLIN: How long should Germans be held accountable for the Holocaust?
The question has taken on a new urgency in the wake of a row over a right-wing politician’s anti-Jewish speech and a blighted attempt by a leading German company to atone for its Nazi links by helping to build a memorial to murdered Jews.
Sixty years after six million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps, the Christian Democrat party expelled member of parliament Martin Hohmann for saying Jews, like Germans, could be seen as a people of “perpetrators.”
But Hohmann, an obscure backbencher, got an unexpected outpouring of support for his view that it was time Germans stopped being blamed, and blaming themselves, for the Holocaust.
Hohmann was condemned by German leaders, from centre-left President Johannes Rau to fellow conservatives, for a speech which was seen to belittle the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, an underlying question has begun to resound, from Berlin to the Black Forest: Can Germans ever win redemption?
“Certainly there is a yearning by some to draw a line and stop belabouring the past,” Rau said. “After all, they say, the perpetrators are no longer alive and neither are the victims. But we’ve got to do everything to fight that mentality.
“There is no ‘collective guilt’ but there is a ‘collective shame’ and that won’t change,” he said, adding he was shocked by Hohmann’s speech. “There may be anti-Semitism everywhere, but our inhibition threshold must be higher than elsewhere.”
NO REDEMPTION: The chemical company Degussa has discovered that the answer to the question of redemption for German firms is: “Not yet”.
In the Hitler era, Degussa was the parent company of a firm which made Zyklon B. hydrogen cyanide gas pellets used in the extermination camps.
Degussa has a long post-war record of trying to atone for its past, and was a founding member and key contributor to a 2.6 billion euro ($3 billion) fund to compensate Nazi-era slave labourers.
But recently, Degussa’s Nazi links prompted trustees to strip it of a prestigious contract to treat the pillars of a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin with anti-graffiti paint.
Weeks later Degussa faced another public humiliation when it was revealed that it had provided material for the pillars and their foundations.
Following an anguished debate, trustees decided to continue using Degussa materials rather than scrap 25 completed pillars.
It was a public relations fiasco for the company, one of many German firms whose histories are tainted by links to the Nazis.
Hohmann, ironically, had tried to stop the Holocaust memorial supported by Degussa.
DICTATORSHIP OF LIKE-MINDEDNESS: German historian Arnulf Baring criticized the CDU for ejecting Hohmann and said the reaction was exaggerated.
“Naturally his speech was problematic,” Baring told Bavarian television. “But his ouster is a farce. It appears we live in a dictatorship of like-mindedness.”
But Wolfgang Benz, head of Berlin technical university’s anti-Semitism research centre, said Hohmann went beyond anything a German politician had said since Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
“For the first time we’ve seen a member of parliament present an anti-Semitic way of thinking,” he said.
Hohmann, who will now sit alone in parliament, has long demanded drawing a line under Germany’s Nazi past — but his calls were largely ignored.
In a speech made in 2000 and recently unearthed by Der Spiegel magazine, he said: “The Nazi era is being increasingly instrumentalized as time goes on to force Germans to behave in a certain way.”
Just before the CDU voted by a four to one margin to throw him out he made a last-ditch appeal to conservative deputies: “I cannot accept the thesis that Germans share a collective guilt.”—Reuters
