Beschreibung
It has been only recently that the long drawn out international
negotiations conducted in the U.S. on the subject of the finalization of
reparations to be paid by Germany to the, mainly Jewish, forced laborers
of the National Socialist regime were concluded. The American-Jewish
aspect of the broader subject of involvement with the aftermath of the
Holocaust has already evoked an echo of wide-ranging discussions in the
recently published works of Wolf Calebow, Peter Novick and Norman
Finkelstein.
Siegfried Moses, a German Jewish lawyer who had made his
home in what was then British Mandated Palestine, was already in the early
1940’s tentatively seeking the legal bases for reparation to be demanded
of Germany. He designed models for solutions to be applied, and by doing
so became one of the most important early thinkers on this subject – a
subject which was later codified in thousands of pages of German
legislation. Moses, whose main essay on future reparation claims
(originally published in German) has recently been reissued, has
influenced legal thinking up to the very recent past. This essay, a
document of contemporary history by any definition, is now being made
available to English readers, with introductions covering the juridic as
well as the bio-bibliographical aspects.
