by TFK

Created on: January 20, 2008   Last Updated: January 22, 2008

German Reparations for the Holocaust. Is there now an unethical element to it as it places a burden on the wrong generation?

The Holocaust simply must be viewed through the lenses of moral realism. There is universal acceptance that Nazi Germany was responsible for the most appalling act of genocide in contemporary history if not arguably human history itself. Not only in scale but in methodology. The organised, scientific and bureaucratic method in which Nazi Germany attempted to annihilate a race (and other groups they deemed to be undesirable) involved the complicity of virtually every strata of that society in the process. The global recognition of the moral repugnance of the horror, equates with the notion of the existence of a universal core of morality.

The fact that Germany has had to pay Reparations to Israel as a means of atonement and in an attempt to amend an historical injustice would clearly indicate the existence of a cross cultural, shared global ethic. It is unreasonable to suggest that Germany's actions in the Holocaust were a by-product of German culture or any facets of it. Therefore, the assertion of truth being relative to each society is inapplicable in relation to this exact example. Germany had committed a dreadful deed and virtually everyone on both sides of that injustice knew it. Interestingly what does pertain culturally is the fact that in the immediate aftermath and right up to the 1980s, Germany was very much focused on the suffering its citizens endured under the advancing Allied armies and the numerous incidents of rape, forcible expulsion, looting and terror.

Through the Nuremberg Trials many of those responsible for implementing the horror of the Holocaust faced justice. Simultaneously there was a process of denazification' in an attempt to cleanse the population at large. Leading Nazis were accused of, and found guilty of, crimes against peace and humanity. The notion of accountability entered the lexicon. Holocaust survivors and European Jewish communities took little solace in the emerging verdicts. Having emerged from one incomprehensible nightmare they stumbled into another. Families were gone. Homes and businesses occupied or destroyed. Financial records erased. Focal points of communal life such as the Synagogue razed. The ties that had bound whole communities together were shredded to insignificance. Reclaiming and rebuilding was going to be a mountainous task. The World Jewish Congress, Zionists and other Jewish groups

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