We at CCJ believe that it is important to hear and give voice to a broad spectrum of narratives, and this is especially the case around the particularly sensitive case of Holocaust commemoration. In this article, Oxford political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, reflects on his life and draws attention to Holocaust denial and obfuscation, systematic failure to bring Nazi murderers to court and denial by Germany of the legal rights of slave labourers. We are grateful for his honest and at times difficult reflections.

by Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky

Holocaust Memorial Day and other public memory initiatives have essential roles in alerting younger generations to words like ‘Auschwitz’. To many they mean nothing.

Yet official memories have their drawbacks too.

The prevailing, inspiring stories told at Holocaust Memorial Day events characteristically are of chosen survivors whose lives were a ‘triumph over adversity’. Their uplifting accounts tend to divert concern from those who, like the late Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz survivor and campaigner Roman Halter, awoke regularly in the early hours with their nightmares.

At a different level, prevailing versions of post-war history taught in schools tell an unrealistic, overoptimistic story of how the western world – notably personified by a new Germany – successfully came to terms with the Nazi past. Indeed, those who wish to present a more critical view may be blocked even from being heard. I too have personally experienced this – and, while acknowledging CCJ’s commitment to diverse viewpoints – I have at times sensed this reluctance even here.

Why does this matter so much to me? In my first 20 months of life, I experienced two different camps in Hungary following the entry of Nazi troops in March 1944 as well as two ghettoes. Having been smuggled out of the Munkacs ghetto in May, some ten days before the start of the deportations to Auschwitz, two months later, at the notorious Budakalasz brickyard in a northerly suburb of Budapest, I was one of less than a hundred ransomed in a justifiably controversial deal between a Jewish committee and Adolf Eichmann. The others numbering thousands were forced into the cattle cars of the Auschwitz-bound trains.

Escaping from a Hungary being taken over by Stalinists in 1948, I was transported to London.

Though always aware of my background, I put it to the back of my mind and was in fact ashamed of it. I sensed that identifying as a Holocaust survivor would produce ill-treatment rather than sympathy. How right that proved to be.

It was in the mid-1990s that I came out of the closet. A London-based group of Auschwitz survivors had approached me to act as their honorary academic advisor in making compensation claims for their slave labour. What shocked me at first was that the main Jewish organisations representing Jewry as a whole and Holocaust survivor in particular resented and resisted them. The Jewish authorities did not want to rock the boat in their dealings with the German government. Nor did the Israeli and United States governments.

With the rebel Claims for Jewish Slave Labour Compensation, I met a succession of German ambassadors in London. One declared to me, after listening to Rudy Kennedy’s experiences that ‘strictly speaking’ there had been nothing illegal in his ‘forced’ labour in Auschwitz. That was still the official position when I checked a couple of years ago with an untypically friendly, heroic retired legal officer of the German foreign office. His colleagues, he said, had rejected the idea of admitting legal liability in order to save money. German testimony before a US court argued that the forced labourers, rather than claiming back pay, owed a debt of gratitude to Germany since  otherwise they would have been gassed.

In similar fashion, popular history of post-war Europe tends to underplay the gross failures to track down and try suspected Nazi war criminals. Why are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller rightly remembered and admired when there is so much less attention to leading German church leaders who, as revealed in the US National Archives, worked so avidly to secure the premature release of some of the relatively few mass murderers who had been brought to trial and convicted? Professor Mary Fulbrook’s recent prizewinning study ‘Reckonings’ and the important documentary shown on Channel More 4 at the time of Holocaust Memorial Day 2023 titled ‘Getting Away With Murder[s]’ clearly demonstrate the gross inadequacy of post-Holocaust justice. In the words of Philip Rubenstein, director of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group, ‘I’ve personally never met a survivor who has felt that justice has been done.’

As the late Israeli/Romanian Professor Michael Shafir and the deputy director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have shown, Holocaust ‘obfuscation’ and efforts to overturn earlier court verdicts against Nazi operatives have become rampant in several parts of central and eastern Europe.

Those who, like CCJ, promote Jewish-Christian understanding, whether in Germany or in Britain, have a role in renewing, even at this very late date, the campaign to ensure full awareness and acceptance of the illegality and immorality of Nazi slave labour. The official German government position defending the legality of slave labour in Auschwitz and elsewhere is wholly unacceptable.

The full statistics about the wholly inadequate search for, and prosecution of, Nazi murderers need to be clearly exposed in educational programmes. As Mary Fulbrook points out, only one in every hundred Holocaust murderers were ever brought to court. And evidence in ‘Getting Away With Murder[s]’ implies that antisemitism among the victorious Allies accounts at least in part for the lack of persistence in the pursuit of them.

Reconciliation is a worthy aim. Essential, but largely unfulfilled, is that of justice for the victims of history’s greatest crime.

Ideally, the two aims complement each other. Sadly, the pursuit of justice too often has been portrayed as revenge with the hint that it is a Jewish trait.

Yet, it is dangerous to downgrade justice. As Dr James Smith, co-founder of the Aegis Trust and the National Holocaust Centre has put it, ‘If we don’t challenge the reasons why over 99% of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice for crimes of such gravity, we lay ourselves open to the repetition of mass atrocities in the future.’