Holocaust Reparations: Scrutinizing ‘the model’ of Transitional Justice

The German Wiedergutmachung has become a model for dealing with post-conflict situations worldwide, also an ideal in the field of Transitional Justice, a field that studies the long-term effects of human rights violations and instruments to deal with them. Its comprehensiveness embodies the idea of “having worked through one’s difficult past effectively” and is therefore often used as a reference by groups that have not yet been acknowledged. Susan Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans is a provocative call for the United States to do more to address its own history of slavery. This referencing to Germany is a powerful tool in current reparation movements; however, as some of the more anthropological and conceptual literature shows, often reparation instruments have felt less reparative as assumes. This chapter will argue that we have missed out by not learning more from these models’ deficits – learning from those for whom reparations programs were conceptualized in the first place. This chapter aims to bring insights from Holocaust Studies to the field of Transitional Justice and thus pursues a normative approach grounded in empirical data.