Die Nazis waren ja nicht einfach weg.
Ausstellung zum Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland seit 1945
Crime Without Punishment
Exhibition station 4
The suffering and loss inflicted on millions of people by the Nazi regime was indescribable. Politicians in both the East and the West promised to make amends by paying ‘reparations’ or ‘compensation’ to victims. Making amends for theft, mass murder and extermination, however, is not actually possible. Moreover, the amount of compensation paid was shamefully low.
The GDR leadership’s compensation policy for ‘victims of fascism’ focused on the communist resistance. Under socialism, no one was entitled to restitution for expropriated wealth or property.
The West German government, which was primarily confronted with the losses suffered by Jews, negotiated with the Jewish Claims Conference, an organisation representing Jewish interests. Since most Holocaust survivors lived in the United States or Israel, German policy was subjected to international scrutiny.
Victim group associations representing people who were forcibly sterilised, homosexual men and Sinti and Roma struggled for decades to receive recognition and compensation.
Suffering as an act of protest
In 1980, eleven Sinti, including four Holocaust survivors, went on a hunger strike at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. Their demands included the official recognition of the Nazi’s genocide of Sinti and Roma. German politicians had yet to officially acknowledge the brutal persecution of Sinti and Roma under the Nazis. The survivors and their descendants experienced social discrimination and were excluded from receiving any form of reparations.
Late apologies
Homosexual men were persecuted, imprisoned and driven to death during the Nazi era. Homosexual relations continued to be a crime after 1945. Article 175 of the German criminal code, which prohibited sex between men, was tightened by the Nazis. The law was amended several times in the West and East, but it was not fully abolished until 1994. Finally, in 2002, the gay movement succeeded in getting the German Bundestag to apologise to homosexual victims of the Nazi regime.
Victims’ revolt
Survivors of Nazi persecution joined forces after the war. Their Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (VVN) expanded in 1971 to include the League of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA). At times it had as many as 200,000 members, including many leftists who had resisted Hitler. The organisation was frequently the target of anti-communist hostility.
Returning assets
As Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer (1905-1981) was responsible for the exploitation of millions of forced labourers and the expropriation of Jewish property. Decades later, his daughter Hilde Schramm (b. 1936), a member of the ‘Alternative List’ parliamentary group (later The Green Party) in the Berlin City Parliament, campaigned for the recognition of the Holocaust’s forgotten victims. She used the inheritance from her father to establish the foundation ZURÜCKGEBEN (Giving Back).
Donating instead of looting
This piece of jewellery, which had belonged to a Jewish family, ended up in the hands of non-Jews in 1941. The current heiress donated the proceeds from the sale to the foundation ZURÜCKGEBEN (Giving Back). This foundation, established in 1994, offers non-Jewish Germans the opportunity to make a donation to support female Jewish scientists and artists, as a way to symbolically return stolen Jewish property.
Lacking insight
A 1949 survey showed that just over half of all Germans were in favour of providing compensation to Jewish survivors for the damage and harm they suffered under the Nazis. A third were opposed and 15% were undecided.
Late proscription
People who were targeted and mistreated by the Nazis for being allegedly ‘hereditarily unhealthy’ were late in making their voices heard. One such victim was Klara Nowak (1922-2003), who co-founded the Association of Victims of ‘Euthanasia’ and Forced Sterilisation in 1987. She was forcibly sterilised in 1940 during a short, unjustified stay in a psychiatric ward. The West German Bundestag finally designated such measures as ‘acts of Nazi injustice’ in 1988.
Concentration camp for children
Karl-Heinz Warnecke, who was forcibly sterilised in the so-called children’s ward of a psychiatric clinic in Dortmund-Aplerbeck in 1941, sketched drawings as a way to process his memories of this time.
A fighter’s identity card
Walter Blumenthal (1908-1977) [not to be confused with another Walter Blumenthal, a Holocaust victim from the West] was a communist resistance fighter who spent time in prisons and concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. After the war, British authorities certified his status as a former political prisoner. In the GDR, this entitled him to travel on trains for free and receive housing and medical treatment more easily.
The ‘fighter’ as victim
This certificate recognised Ernst Frommhold, who resisted the Nazis, as a ‘victim of fascism’. The word ‘fighter’ stamped in red at the top provided him access to certain privileges.
Decades of struggle
Both East and West Germany began paying ‘reparation measures’ as early as 1945. An awareness of any wrongdoing was often lacking, however. The situation was influenced by the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and its allies: In the West, communist victims of persecution were excluded from compensation, whereas in the East they received preferential treatment. Most victim groups had to wait a very long time for reparations.
Information denied
In 1938, Jewish families were forced to sell their homes and leave the Franconian town of Forth. The local residents took possession of their furnishings and valuables. In 1947, the mayor of the town claimed that he was unable to provide any names or additional information about this.
Perpetrators as judges
In 1956, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) declared that the imprisonment of Sinti and Roma in concentration camps until 1942 was lawful. It stated that their way of life, and not racist motives, were a decisive factor in their imprisonment at the time. Several of the judges involved in the judgement were former Nazis. The decision helped prolong discrimination against the victims.
The decision was overturned in 1963. In 2016, the BGH apologised for it.
Perpetrators as experts
For decades after World War II, some Nazi criminals used their role as experts to block any form of compensation. In 1961, three of the seven experts on a Bundestag Committee on Reparations for Forced Sterilisation were former Nazi ‘euthanasia’ perpetrators. Prof Hans Nachtsheim, who carried out human experiments on children until 1944, was one of them.
German victimisation
Between 1939 and 1945, more than 20 million people were forced to perform slave labour under terrible conditions. The majority were prisoners of war or people who had been deported to Germany from abroad to work. In 2000 the German Bundestag agreed to pay them a symbolic compensation. Incorrigible Germans felt they were also victims who likewise had suffered.
Late recognition
In 1982, the Federal Government officially acknowledged that the Sinti and Roma had suffered severe injustices under the Nazi dictatorship, that they had been persecuted on racist grounds and that many had been murdered. This was the first time that the genocide of the Sinti and Roma was recognised by the German government.
Siegfried Heilig
Siegfried Heilig, a Sinto, was born in Magdeburg in 1934. His family endured constant harassment by the Nazis and went into hiding in 1943. Malnourished and ill, the parents fled with their three sons from one hiding place to the next. In the end, only a few members of the family escaped being murdered in Auschwitz.
Heilig spoke at schools as a contemporary witness and campaigned for the interests of Sinti and Roma until his death in 2021.
Great achievements
In 2014, Siegfried Heilig received the German Federal Order of Merit for his engagement as a contemporary witness, for his work on the board of the Association of German Sinti and Roma (Bavarian regional association) and for his commitment to reconciliation. After decades of discrimination, this recognition marked a turning point in how Sinti and Roma were perceived in politics.
One-time payment
The payments eventually made to Sinti and Roma were very small given how much they had suffered under the Nazis. Siegfried Heilig received a one-time payment of 5,000 German marks in 1983, the equivalent of 2,500 euros. He did not receive monthly financial assistance until 2013 – just eight years before his death.
Red tape
Since 1997, Siegfried Heilig had applied several times for a monthly compensation for the damage inflicted on him during the Nazi era. He suffered from depression, anxiety and sleep disorders. He was granted a mere 300 euros a month from 1 January 2013.
The grandson
Nino Schneeberger, Siegfried Heilig’s grandson, speaks about his grandfather’s suffering and the current situation of Sinti and Roma in Germany.