FWD: Degussa and the Holocaust Memorial, Part I

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

October 29, 2003

Holocaust Legacy: Germans and Jews Debate Redemption

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

ERLIN, Oct. 28 — It might seem obvious, at first glance anyway, that a German 
affiliate of a company that once supplied poison gas to the Nazis should not 
be a subcontractor for the very memorial now being constructed in Berlin to 
the Nazis' many millions of victims.

That, at any rate, is what the Memorial Foundation for the Murdered Jews of 
Europe, which has overall responsibility for the memorial, decided in the case 
of the chemical company Degussa, which was to have provided the anti-graffiti 
material being used to protect the 2,700 concrete steles that are to be placed 
into the memorial ground.

After what was described as a long and agonizing meeting, the 23-member board 
of directors of the Memorial Foundation decided last week not to use the 
Degussa anti-graffiti product. They did so because a company affiliated with 
Degussa called Degesch was identified as a supplier of Zyklon B gas pellets, which 
were used in the death camps to murder Nazi victims.

"The problem we discussed is very complicated," Lea Rosh, a member of the 
board, told a German newspaper on Sunday. "We asked ourselves: Where should one 
draw the line? And we came to the conclusion that the line is very clearly 
Zyklon B."

But in the days since then, the decision on Degussa has provoked a debate in 
Germany on exactly the issue of line-drawing. It happens that Degussa, a 
company based in Düsseldorf that is the world's largest maker of specialty 
chemicals, employing some 48,000 people worldwide, has had an exemplary record in 
examining its wartime past and making restitution to victims of the Nazis.

Most important in this regard, Degussa was one of the 17 German companies 
that created the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future, which 
raised millions of dollars for a special fund to be distributed to victims of 
concentration camp and slave labor during the Nazi period.

So the issue quickly seemed less than clear, and many questions have been 
raised: Did the Memorial Foundation board act correctly in singling out Degussa? 
At what point, especially 60 years later, has a company earned exoneration for 
its past behavior? Why should Degussa be singled out when so many other 
German companies — Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler), for instance, Siemens or 
even an American company, I.B.M. — also collaborated with the Nazis?

"I'm really astonished, because Degussa was very strongly involved in the 
slave labor initiative, in starting it, in leading the negotiations with the 
Jewish side and groups in Eastern Europe," said Wolfgang G. Gibowski, a spokesman 
for the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future. "The 
Degussa of today is not the Degussa of 60 or 70 years ago."

"Where do you begin and where do you stop with these arguments?" Mr. Gibowski 
continued, arguing that practically every German company in existence at the 
time collaborated with the Nazis. "Where do you get the sand to produce those 
monuments? Do you get it from Israel and America or Germany? Where do you get 
the cement, the trucks? What kind of buses do you use to take visitors there 
in the future?"



kwp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20031029/ed782445/attachment.html>