Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s Norman J.W. Goda (bio) Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s. By Michael R. Marrus. Foreword by William A. Schabas. Madison, WN: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. xviii + 196 pp. The wave of Holocaust restitution cases from 1996 to 2001 brought settlements in the amount of some eight billion dollars to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. It involved litigation against banks, insurance companies, industrial concerns, and art museums whose predecessor organizations either stole or purchased assets belonging to Jewish victims or used Jews and others for forced and slave labor. All cases were filed in the United States and settled out of court, only a small fraction of Holocaust survivors received anything, and most individual awards were pitifully small, at least compared to the level of suffering. [End Page 311] Prosecuting attorneys and restitution advocates, some ethical and some not, claimed that their efforts provided justice a half century after the fact for a universe of suffering. The scholarly evaluation of this claim by Michael Marrus, who has written and directed standard works on postwar justice, is worth serious attention from lawyers and historians alike. All Holocaust trials–even the large number of postwar criminal proceedings–distort history somewhat for the sake of fitting the vast crimes within the law and for the sake of convicting individual defendants. Marrus argues, however, that the restitution campaign was a different animal still. It was not that Jews did not lose property and assets. It was not that millions were not used for forced and slave labor. It was not that restitution was not warranted. And the new "Holocaust consciousness" of the 1990s was, if anything, overdue. The problem lay with the sheer scope of the restitution issue combined with the procedural shortcomings of the United States civil litigation system. United States class action lawyers chose defendants owing to their conspicuousness and their business connections in the U.S., where a more facile civil code, opportunistic politicians, and noisy press could leverage out-of-court settlements. Indeed, the intent to settle out of court prevented any serious courtroom examination of the responsibility of manufacturing firms, banks, and insurance companies. Thus companies such as UBS, Ford, Daimler, IBM, and others paid negotiated sums for the sins of their predecessors and their subsidiaries to avoid nightmarish publicity; political figures such as Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) grandstanded with "new findings" that historians had known for years; and plaintiff groups (mostly Jews and Slavic slave and forced laborers) argued bitterly among themselves as to how the smallish pie should be cut based on degrees of suffering. Restitution often became more about business than justice. "There were reasonable grounds," Marrus judiciously says, "to feel uncomfortable about the process" (27). The irony lay in the fact that the defendants, after a half-century of buyouts, mergers, and business degrees, bore little resemblance to their predecessor firms. It lay also in the fact that the everyday robbery during the Holocaust was lost in the public discourse. One could not sue the Germans of Hamburg, Lithuanians of Kovno, or Ukrainians of Lviv who helped themselves to mounds of Jewish property. Moreover, tales of great stolen treasures, such as that supposedly aboard the Hungarian "Gold Train," revealed little more than the bric-a-brac of victims' shattered lives. And the postwar West German government's effort at broader Wiedergutmachung in the 1950s was obscured by the newer [End Page 312] notion that firms rather than governments should pay. Historian Gerald Feldman lamented that "our worst history students have decided to take up law" (99). Writer Leon Wieseltier was more acidic. "I would rather grieve than sue," he said, "It seems more lucid" (4). Still, Marrus notes that much was accomplished. In a unique moment of United States ascendancy, intervention by the Clinton administration made a new global discourse on the Holocaust possible. The Volker Commission after 1996 established the existence of more than fifty thousand dormant accounts in Swiss banks. The 1997 United States government inquiry under Stuart Eizenstat made stolen Jewish assets a front-page issue. The Washington Conference of...