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Collecting on Moral Debts: Reparations for the Holocaust and Pořajmos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Andrew Woolford  and
Stefan Wolejszo
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Abstract

In the early 1980s, Sebba (1980) explored the victimological and criminological dimensions of German Holocaust reparations, utilizing a broad definition of victimization similar to Mendelsohn's (1976) earlier framing of this notion, which included victims of genocide and mass violence. Since this time, scant attention has been paid to the victimology of state crime, and even less to the victimological implications of genocide and mass violence. This is unfortunate since critical victimological lessons can be drawn from the study of the victims of genocide and mass violence. In this article, we focus on the post–World War II monetary reparations, or “compensation,” demands made against the West German state by Jewish and “Gypsy” survivors of Nazi state-sponsored violence. Through a comparative analysis of these two cases, we seek to illustrate the organizational, social, and discursive conditions that either enabled or obstructed victim mobilization and, in so doing, to develop critical tools for better understanding “victim movements” and the trauma narratives they construct.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 871 - 902
Copyright
© 2006 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Research for this manuscript was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). We also would like to thank R. S. Ratner, Herbert Kritzer, and the anonymous Law & Society Review readers for their helpful suggestions.

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