Jewish Post-War Claims

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.