Despite words of assurance from West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that were meant to alleviate Jewish fears concerning a unified Germany, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to whom the assurances were written, says that the chancellor fell far short of legitimate guarantees.
“The gist of the letter was ‘trust me,’ you can rely on us without any special demands to ensure that we do the right thing,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles.
“But that’s not what the chancellor is saying to President Bush, Prime Minister Thatcher or President Mitterrand about their concerns. Why doesn’t he tell them ‘trust me’ about the demilitarization of armed forces, monetary union and Germany’s continued NATO membership?
“Just as the Western allies don’t accept ‘trust me’ as a means of settling external disputes, so the victims of Nazism don’t take it as a solution to solving the great internal questions that have to be raised. Trust is simply not enough,” Hier said.
Hier was referring to a Feb. 28 letter he received from Kohl, in which the chancellor said that while he understands the anxiety expressed by American Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, “it needs to be asked whether such anxiety is essentially justified, whether its roots lie not only in the past but also in the present.
“I cannot conceal my deep disappointment at how little many opponents of German unity take note of the fact that for decades now especially the young generation in the free part of Germany has been informed without any taboos of the causes and consequences of the National Socialist tyranny.
‘ALARMING LACK OF INFORMATION’
“It is high time for the positive things that have happened in Germany since 1945 to be discussed more intensively in the United States. I feel that an alarming lack of information exists in this respect,” the chancellor said.
Kohl’s letter was in response to a Feb. 9 letter that Heir had written, alerting the West German leader to American Jewish concerns regarding a reunited Germany and its Nazi past.
“Those who bear the scars of the last ‘unified Germany’ do not see their concerns being addressed in the current reunification discussions between world leaders,” wrote Hier.
“Not a single word is said publicly about the great internal questions of how to educate millions of people who have been cut off from the real world for more than 40 years and how to prevent their ignorance of the past from negatively affecting the course of the future.”
But in Washington on Wednesday, West Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Juergen Ruhfus, said that he was optimistic that if the Germanys were reunified, East Germany would “accept the full truth of the past.”
Speaking to the National Leadership Conference of the Wiesenthal Center, Ruhfus said that the Holocaust is an “obligatory part of the curriculum” in his country, and that in the event of reunification, West Germany would “spread all of the information we have” to East Germany.
In his letter to Kohl, Hier suggested that certain actions on the part of a united German government would soothe American Jewish concerns. His recommendations included the establishment of a national education task force and a federal agency to monitor hate groups.
Kohl’s response showed noticeable irritation.
Citing West Germany’s long-standing dedication to educating its young about their country’s Nazi past, its penal code, which specifically combats “crimes of hatred” with fines and criminal sentences, and its various measures against “right-wing extremism,” Kohl wrote that Hier’s suggestions were unnecessary.
“Your anxiety,” he wrote Hier, “appears to rest on the assumption that the people in the GDR have not been given any opportunity to learn from the past. That is not correct, but even if it were true, it would surely be an additional argument in favor of the Germans coming together at last in common freedom.
“To my mind there is no doubt that (West German) provisions will also apply in a united Germany. This does not require any special demand!”
Kohl argued in his letter that if anyone has established a long history of loyalty that warrants international trust, it’s West Germany.
“Do you realize that the Federal Republic of Germany has for decades maintained particularly close and good relations with the state of Israel and has for years been the only one of the twelve members of the European Community to stand up actively and without restriction for Israel’s interests?” he queried.
“He is right that West Germany has made a great effort,” said Hier. “But the issue is that despite such attention in West Germany in recent years, statistical polls taken in West Germany, including the ones in the last six months, show that a large majority dislikes Jews and distrusts them.
“Our task is to make sure that the Deutsch memory should be as strong as the Deutsch mark,” said Hier.
(JTA correspondent Howard Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
