Address
of
MARK WEINTRAUB
Authored by Manuel Prutschi Executive Director of Canadian Jewish Congress National Community Relations Committee and Mark Weintraub National Chair of Community Relations of Canadian Jewish Congress
to
International Citizens’ Forum on
War Crimes and Redress: Seeking Reconciliation and Peace for the 21st
Century
Conference Day Three, Panel
Symposium IV
December 12, 1999
Tokyo, Japan
“War Crimes and Redress:
the Perspective of a Canadian Jew
Fellow members of the panel; ladies and gentlemen:
Our century brings into focus, perhaps more sharply
than at any time in the past the elastic quality of human nature; our capacity
for great acts of compassion and our capacity for absolute evil. For while extreme acts of barbarism have
characterized much of human history, never before has technology reached such a
sophisticated level that we can now talk of extermination or liquidation of
human beings like they were insects. Technology; mass ideologies and the
revolutionary rate of change in which our world has plunged since the
industrial revolution have been a fatal combination for our century.
The European Jewish community was the subject of the
first hideously successful experiment by which 20th century systems
of efficient bureaucracy and advanced technology were combined with the
propoganda of dehumanization to
destroy a civilization.
The Holocaust, or in Hebrew Shoah, was potentially
devastating to the very survival of the Jewish people. So let me talk of some
of the practical responses of our
community to the Holocaust. Immediately after the War, when the full
significance of the Holocaust was realized, elements within the world community
and the Jewish community were in great shock. Some did not want to hear the
survivors’ stories and many of the survivors felt that their stories would not
be believed or were too terrible to tell. Individually they somehow carried on
with their lives; they married - had children and tried to suppress their
memories. Over time however, the survivors started telling their stories and
this courage was a major factor in enabling our community as a whole to begin
to respond.
Our communal leadership started advocating for the
establishment of human rights legislation in different jursidictions. There is
no question that one of the principle factors in the passage of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was the Holocaust. As a community, our efforts in
working for the establishment of the State of Israel were redoubled so that
persecuted Jews in other countries would always have a refuge. And in the
1960’s the cry of Never Again inspired the work of thousands of students and
other activists to free Soviet Jews community and other dissidents. The memory
of the Holocaust was also the inspiration for the world Jewish communities’
work in saving the tens of thousands of Black Jews in Ethiopia and bringing
them to safety in Israel.
In aid of these efforts on the human rights and
rescue fronts were the generously funded documentation centres, memorials,
museums, Holocaust studies programs in Universities and the reconstruction of
synagogues and other Jewish infrastructure in Europe. The Jewish community funded youth trips to the concentration
camps and scholarships for the study of Judaism and summer experiences in
Israel.Volunteers recorded the oral histories of survivors; indeed efforts are
being made to attempt to identify every Holocaust victim for the purpose of
some form of memorialization - for while our people were mass murdered we are
intent on rescuing their individuality.
In summary, I think it is fair to say that in the
last 50 years the response to the Holocaust has engaged Jewish communal
political leadership, the artistic community, philospohers, theologians
historians and educators, all in their different spheres of expertise.
So, as the Jewish community responded in these
different ways how did the perpetratror European states respond?
West Germany initially responded more adequately
than any other jursidiction. It replaced Nazi totalitarianism with a strong
consitutional democracy. It brought and continues to bring its own Nazi war
criminals to justice. It banned through legislation any manifestations of its
Nazi past including making the display of the swastika illegal and criminalizing
the denial of the Holocaust; not only for concern for Jewish sensibilities but
out of the recognition that Nazism
brought down the entire nation of Germany. The new Germany
institutionalized the Holocaust with official days of remembrance and museums.
It confronted its citizens with the ugly reality of what transpired through the
promotion of visits by Jewish survivors back to their former homes. The new Germany established strong relations
with Israel almost from their mutual beginnings and Germans of all ages, but
particularly youth, regularly visit and do volunteer work in Israel.
Germany has also been at the forefront of an
elaborate and expanding system of Holocaust redress for the Jewish State, the
survivors and the heirs of the victims. The first wave of compensation had a
clearly established recipient in the State of Israel, which absorbed so many of
the survivors. A subsequent initiative involved government reparations to the survivors themselves. To discuss
the evolution of the payment of compensation and the successes and failures is
beyond the scope of these remarks. But let me at least highlight some of the
issues.
The essential question was that posed by the
Canadian journalist and author of Hitlers’ Silent Partners, Isabel Vincent, who succinctly asked: “ How do you bring about
justice for the expropriation and murder of a civilization?” The answer of
course is we cannot bring about justice but steps towards partial justice are
possible and that in fact has occurred.
The process began immediately after the war when Dr.
Chaim Weizmann, perhaps one of the most highly regarded Jewish leaders and
later to become Israel’s first president, wrote to the Allies in September,
1945 calling for German redress. Six years later, Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s
Chancellor addressed his Legislature as follows:
… unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name
of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity… The Federal
Government [is] prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State
of Israel… to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus
easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.
Negotiations between Chancellor Adenauer and Nahum
Goldmann, then President of the World Jewish Congress, produced a first
agreement, which primarily indemnified the State of Israel. This was confirmed
by the Luxembourg Treaty of September 10, 1952
between Israel and West Germany.
There were Jews in Israel and the Diaspora who, on
principle, opposed accepting any damages payments from Germany. There are those who do see the logic in
Israel having accepted these payments, since the State at the time was badly in
need of funds to cover the costs of resettling hundreds of thousands of
Holocaust survivors. There does
continue to be members of the Jewish community who decry, apart from Israel,
the receiving of any indemnification, as “blood money.” They would agree with
the views expressed by the commentator Roger Rosenblatt who has written:.
The Holocaust not only lies
beyond compensation; it also lies beyond explanation, reconciliation,
sentiment, forgiveness, redemption or any of the mechanisms by which people
attempt to set wrong things right. In a way, that fact is as much a sign of its
unique enormity as the monstrosity itself. All moral thought is grounded in the
possibility of correction. Yet here is a wrong that will never be set right,
and people are left groping for something to take the place of the
irreplaceable.
The majority of the Jewish community, however, agrees with the view of Edgar
Bronfman, the current President of the World Jewish Congress.
… each dollar recovered represents a little
piece of dignity, not just for the survivors who will benefit but for all
mankind, who will have demonstrated that it remains morally unacceptable for
anyone to profit from the ashes of man’s greatest inhumanity to man. …
Financial redress,
therefore, has been a central element
of the post-Holocaust world. Germany,
the central perpetrator, began the process with the Federal Indemnification
Law, continued it with the Hardship Fund, and followed it with the Article 2 Fund and the Central and
Eastern European Fund. Each new fund brought a new set of Holocaust survivors
into the indemnification system. Austria subsequently somewhat followed Germany’s
lead.
Today, not only members of the former Axis are
involved in restitution. Included are the governments of the occupied and/or
collaborator countries such as France and the
various central and Eastern European states, as well as those ostensibly neutral states such as
Switzerland. It does not merely involve governments but also members of the
financial and business infrastructure. Redress is for the suffering inflicted,
the forced and slave labour, the gold stolen or indeed extracted from Holocaust victims, the confiscated property and the stolen art,
as well as the bank accounts and insurance death benefits not honoured. More
and more, the governments, industries and financial institutions across Europe
are being called to account for collaborating with Nazi Germany or otherwise
providing the funds and resources to wage war, perpetrate the Final Solution,
and plunder two thousand years of Jewish life on the continent.
The Holocaust was directed against millions of
individual Jews but, at the same time, it was an assault on the Jewish people
as a whole and on Judaism itself. One
controversy that remains within the Jewish community concerns the distribution of redress funds. Should
the focus be on specific individuals
for suffering and loss, or on the needs of the collectivity as a whole. It is
likely that this contradiction is not resolvable. On the one hand, after all,
it was individuals who were victimized, but on the other, the Jewish whole is
greater than the sum of its Jewish parts.
The most recent stage is wide-ranging with
responsibility shared by government and the country’s entire infrastructure-
(all elements of which profited from the catstrophe inflicted upon the Jewish
people). Redress is puny in comparison to the slave labour exploited from the
victims; the robbery of their property and even exploitation of their body
parts for profit after death.. but at
least Germany proceeded on a course of partial justice and that must be fully
and properly recognized. Some have estimated that in total over 60 billion
dollars in some types of compensation have been paid by the German State or
institutions but we must be careful of numbers here. I am not certain that this
is a correct amount, but certainly we can say that substantial sums have been
paid over 50 years though they represent a very tiny fraction of the value of
that which was robbed.
Germany, after the war, also assumed with some
degree of seriousness the prosecution of its Nazi war criminals. Many, nonetheless, have escaped punishment.
The collaborator and/or occupied countries have been much less forthcoming on
accountability for mass murder. Even the Allies have been far from vigorous in bringing
to justice the criminals that fell under their jurisdiction or ended up in their midst. Between 1945 and
1948, paralleling and flowing from the two International Military Tribunals,
for Europe and the Far East, there were
trials of some of the major transgressors. But the momentum for such
prosecutions quickly dissipated after
1948.
The experience of Canada, which we know best,
provides a good example. My country’s
refugee policy denied safe haven to Jews fleeing Nazi Europe throughout
the 1930’s. Researchers have shown that
after the war, it was easier for the Nazi victimizers to enter Canada than it
was for those of their victims who managed to survive. Few would question that
hundreds if not thousands of Nazi criminals gained refuge.
Canada, nonetheless, in 1948, unreservedly complied
with a secret memorandum, in which the United Kingdom directed its Commonwealth
partners to cease war crime trials. The Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War
Criminals, established in February, 1985, not surprisingly thus reported that “Canada
devoted not the slightest energy to the search and prosecution of war
criminals.”
Today, the Canadian picture is somewhat
brighter. In the last three to four
years there has been a 180-degree turnaround. The government hired a former director of the U.S. Justice
Department’s Office of Special Investigations as a consultant. It further
demonstrated its new-found determination by committing an additional 12 million
dollars specifically earmarked for the prosecution of Nazi criminals. And only
two months ago the Minister of Justice initiated steps for new legislation
which will facilitate the criminal prosecution of war criminals to supplement
the process of revocation of
citizenship and deportation. The current War Crimes Unit has a number of active
files being pursued in the courts and more new cases are promised. The Government has not been able to win all
of its cases, but the will to pursue justice seems to be firmly in place and
the government has allocated ample resources to get the job done.
Over half a century has elapsed since the commission
of the crimes in Asia. Japan does not have another 50 years to get the process
underway. The biological clock is ticking for defendants, survivors and
witnesses. It is a matter of the utmost urgency that justice be done now,
otherwise justice delayed will undoubtedly mean justice denied.
For justice to be meted out fairly and swiftly there
must be the confluence of three positive wills: the political, the bureaucratic
and the judicial. One only can bring
about this confluence if the Japanese people realize that to move
successfully from the “Era of War” to
the “Era of Reconciliation, Peace and Co-Existence,” it is absolutely essential
that war criminals be brought to justice. This is not a matter of revenge but
an issue of fundamental human rights. As the late Arnold Fradkin, a past member of Canada’s War Crimes
Litigation Unit in the Department of Justice put it: “Justice does not mean
revenge. It means redress according to principles of law, as imposed by courts
of law after a fair and impartial trial according to law.”
Mankind, for centuries if not millennia, has set
constraints so that war, inhuman by definition, is conducted within certain
delimited parameters. This was the expectation in what came to be known as the “Law
of Nations” and which was enshrined in pre World War II international
agreements such as the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Combatants have
obligations towards civilians and prisoners of war. Those who fail to uphold
these obligations are termed by the community of nations to be “hostes humani generis,” i.e. “the
enemies of mankind.” The precedent
setting Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945,
followed by a vast corpus of
reports, resolutions, conventions and declarations by various trans-national
organizations certainly mandated legal action against those who carried out war
crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ideally the international community must function in
such a way that crimes against humanity are stopped before they happen.
However, when they do happen, the world must bring those responsible to
account.
The Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World
War (and in Asia that war can be said to have started in 1930’s with the
aggression against China) committed monstrous crimes which went far beyond the
most callous and hard-hearted definition of
normal wartime activity. It is a
moral outrage that these war crimes have gone unpunished.
The message must go out, for the sake of the memory
of the victims and the survivors who continue to bear witness, that no one has
the legal license to engage in the persecution, torture and slaughter of
innocent civilians or defenseless prisoners. War criminals not answering for
their crimes constitute a rejection of
a country’s commitment to the principle of the rule of law. Past war
criminals are vindicated and new war criminals encouraged. This gives comfort
to those possessed by chauvinism and interested in a renewed militarism.
So what can we learn from the Jewish experience?
There are both differences and similarities in the historical contexts. The
Jewish communities’ response has not been a coherent response. We staggered to
our feet and slowly bit by bit regained our dignity by drawing upon the courage
of the survivors, the support of our friends in the non-Jewish community and
through seeing the establishment of Israel as a State. We ensured that members
of our community funded projects and we linked our near demise as a people to the failing of a world
communities’ response to massive human rights violations. Our artists responded
and have given us hope, despite the degradation. We have tried to emphasize not
only the suffering and helplessness but the courage of Jew and non-Jew caught
in horrific circumstances.
I think in dealing with this issue with the Japanese
government your approach is a correct one. Continue to emphasize the Japanese
contributions to world peace through her strong support of the United Nations
while strategically countering the forces opposed to meting out justice in all
its forms. Continue to reach out to your friends. Certainly I can tell you that
the Jewish community stands as your good friend in solidarity with you….. For
your remembrance is our remembrance; your struggle for justice is our struggle
for justice and as we link ourselves together we collectively can show that the
dogged, resolute and unflinching pursuit of justice is indeed the most powerful
of all human forces.
Thank you very much.