“Hast thou murdered, and also taken possession?”

Nazi Wrongs and the West German Equalization of Burdens Law

Dr. Iris Nachum

This research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF, personal research grant no. 678/21)

 

The project investigates, for the first time, how the West German Equalization of Burdens Law (Lastenausgleichsgesetz, LAG) coped, in theory and in practice, with cases involving Nazi wrongs. The LAG was enacted by the West German legislature on August 14, 1952. It intended to financially compensate those Germans who had suffered economic harm due to World War II. A major reason for the law was the eight million ethnic Germans living in West Germany who had fled or been expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after 1944-45. Due to the expulsion, they often had had to leave behind all their belongings and hence lost everything they possessed. The ultimate purpose of the LAG was to offset these massive material injuries. Compensation covered lost household goods, apartments, factories, and other real estate. The LAG had thus affected millions of German citizens since entering into force in 1952. Nevertheless, it is a largely forgotten issue in today’s German society and a much-understudied topic in historiography.

Drawing on hitherto unrevealed documents from the Equalization of Burdens Archive (Lastenausgleichsarchiv) in Bayreuth, Germany, and cross-checking LAG claims with land registry records, the research project aims to establish the LAG as a significant field of research. The main research questions of the project are: How did the law address instances in which expelled ethnic Germans demanded compensation for lost assets which they had obtained in their old homeland in the frameworks of Aryanization, i.e., the Nazi plunder of Jewish property, and of Germanization, i.e., the takeover of local non-Jewish property? Moreover, how did the law deal with cases in which expellees filed for compensation for lost real estate that had been used as forced labor sites during World War II? These questions are answered drawing on the analysis of a large and diverse corpus of published and unpublished material, especially, archived LAG compensation files and legal texts pertaining to the LAG. However, the significance of the research project goes beyond these specific questions into the wider question of what can be learned from the law about West Germany’s general dealing with its Nazi past.

By focusing on Nazi wrongs, the project closes a major research gap on the intriguing LAG, but also enhances our understanding of both the participation of ethnic Germans in Nazi atrocities in Central and Eastern Europe and of West German society’s coping with the Nazi past.