FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

I am very happy to be here with you this evening. Over fifty years ago, a group of Bostonians led by your first President, Dr. Abram Sachar, envisioned honoring the memory of Justice Brandeis by creating a new university open to students and teachers of all faiths. Since that time Brandeis has flourished, both as a highly-ranked academic institution and as an intellectual catalyst for the Jewish community of America and indeed of the world. Thirty five thousand men and women count themselves among your alumni, including my wife, Fran Eizenstat, whom I met shortly after her graduation from Brandeis in the 1960s. Your President, Jehuda Reinharz, has taken Brandeis to new heights. I am pleased to be working with him on several Holocaust-related issues from Argentina to the United States.

It is fitting for Brandeis to host a conference on the impact of the Holocaust. Your very first program in Jewish Studies was taught by German professors who had been dismissed from their universities because of their religion, and by American scholars who found it difficult to obtain teaching positions in this country for the same reason.

You will be engaged over the next three days in a discussion of the ways the Holocaust has shaped today's world. It would be profane to say that an event so monstrous could have any beneficial consequences. But at least the world has learned some lessons. If the Holocaust occurred because Hitler and his henchmen exploited ancient religious and cultural prejudice against Jews to seize power in Germany and conquer the rest of Europe; if it occurred because the international community, including both political and religious leadership, stood aside while that prejudice was inflamed into vicious hatred and taken to its ultimate conclusion, then it is obvious contemporary society has taken heed. Nations today are willing to take collective action against nations that commit genocide and other crimes against humanity. When the ethnic cleansing was exposed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the NATO alliance-composed of some of the very nations that gave in to Hitler in the Rhineland and at Munich in the 1930s-- moved with unity and decisiveness to stop the slaughter. Two international courts, one for Ruanda, the other for the former Yugoslavia, stand ready today to indict and try war criminals, following the principles developed in the Nuremberg Trials. Non-governmental organizations, such as B'nai B'rith and the Simon Weisenthal Center, are on the alert to trace and publicize outbreaks of anti-Semitism anywhere in the world. The nations of the European Union moved decisively when the People's Party was allowed to participate as a partner in the government of Austria.

Culturally, it is no longer acceptable, as it was among the educated classes of Europe in the nineteen thirties, to look on Jews as a race apart, or talk of "the Jewish problem," as if people wishing to live in their communities and practice their faith created a "problem." The lessons of the Holocaust have opened a new era in interfaith relations, including, in the words of Prime Minister Barak of Israel, "an historic change in the attitude of the Catholic Church toward the Jewish people." This began when Pope John XXIII officially renounced deicide, the false and malicious teaching that the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. It was powerfully reiterated this week, when Pope John Paul II spoke so movingly about the Holocaust during his pilgrimage to Yad Vashem. .

As you know, the U.S. Government has been trying, in cooperation with other governments and many private organizations, to bring some measure of justice to surviving victims and their families, by recovering property that was stolen from them, by enforcing their rights under insurance contracts that were abrogated, by compensating them for slave labor and forced labor performed under brutal conditions. Over the last two years, a number of objectives have been achieved:

• Swiss banks have agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle lawsuits brought on behalf of victims who sent their funds to Switzerland for safekeeping and whose heirs had been refused access to those funds for over fifty years, and other victims with a relationship to the banks. The Volcker Commission has estimated that some 25,000 people may have had such accounts, and the court, with the help of Yad Vashem, is now trying to find their heirs so they can recover.
  
• Some of the largest European insurance companies have agreed to create a fund to make good on policies taken out by Holocaust victims before the War. Until now, their beneficiaries had been told the policies had been lost, or the premiums not paid, or that they could not be paid without a death certificate, which Auschwitz did not give out.
  
• Two massive U.S. government studies were completed in 1997 and 1998. The first discovered that over $4 billion in gold stolen by the Nazis was smelted into gold bars and converted, mostly through the Swiss National Bank, into hard currency the Nazis used to buy what they needed from neutral countries. The second documented the role of neutral countries in supporting the Nazi war effort. Six tons of gold still in the hands of the Tripartite Gold Commission was owed to central banks of various nations. We found some of this gold had, in fact, been taken from Holocaust victims, not just from central banks, and had been smelted into disguised gold bars. Ten of the nations which were entitled to receive it agreed to contribute to a fund to help surviving victims. With an added contribution from the U.S. the fund now stands at over $60 million.
  
• Once differences between the Jewish community in Poland and international Jewish organizations are resolved, the Polish government will return almost 3,000 synagogue buildings, cemeteries, libraries and other structures to help what is left of Polish Jewry rebuild their shattered communities. This type of property restitution is occurring throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
  
• At a conference in Washington a year ago December, forty four nations reached consensus on ways to try to find some of the 600,000 artworks stolen by the Nazis and their collaborators and return them to their pre-war owners. Some of the largest museums in this and other countries have been searching their collections to see if they own art with this tainted provenance. We hope they will publicize these works, on the Internet and elsewhere, so that the families of the people from whom they was stolen can come forward and make their claims. Art works in places ranging from France and Austria to Raleigh, North Carolina and Chicago are being returned to their pre-War owners.

Beginning in 1998, over 30 class action lawsuits were brought in U.S. courts against German companies who used slave labor in concentration camps and forced labor in their factories and fields during World War II. The Nazis used 12 million such laborers, as many as 1.5 million of whom are still living. The German companies responded by denying legal liability but accepting moral responsibility, and offering to create a Foundation in Germany to process claims and make payments. This was clearly a better solution than lengthy and uncertain litigation. The survivors are old and class action lawsuits, even if settled, take a long time. The Swiss case was settled over a year ago and not a penny has yet been paid out. Moreover, a class action settlement would only benefit those survivors who worked for the 16 companies being sued, whereas the Foundation will compensate everyone who did forced or slave labor for the Nazi economy, even if the firms they worked for are now defunct. In addition, the companies wanted our government to ask U.S. courts to consider the Foundation as the sole remedy for any future claims against German industry in actions brought before them. Count Otto Lambsdorf and I were asked to served as mediators.

I have been involved in many negotiations on behalf of my Government, but this has been the most difficult, most tension-filled, most personal I have ever experienced. Around the table, in addition to plaintiffs' lawyers and German industry, are the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany representing Jewish survivors, five Central and East European Governments representing their citizens, and the Government of Israel. Count Lambsdorff and I have tried to act as honest brokers to facilitate a settlement. It is the interplay of all these different groups, each with a somewhat different agenda, each representing a constituency which suffered grieviously, each fully able to make its case both in the meetings and to the waiting media that has made negotiation so challenging to conduct. It has taken eleven rounds of negotiations, over a period of thirteen months, to get to where we are today. The Germans began with an offer of 1 1/2 billion DM, or 750 million dollars, to settle all the cases. The plaintiffs' initial demand was 30 billion dollars or some 60 billion DM. Last December, and only after the intervention of President Clinton and Chancellor Schroeder, the parties agreed on a figure of DM 10 billion for all World War II injuries committed by German industry-from slave and forced labor to insurance, banking, Aryanized property, and medical experiments.

We next had to allocate this amount among the different countries and the different types of claims, since it had been decided that claims for unpaid insurance policies and for the theft, or "Aryanization" of Jewish business property should also be included. After a marathon session last Wednesday and Thursday, our eleventh round of negotiation, which included 17 hours of negotiations over a 24 hour period, we achieved an agreement. 8.1 billion DM, plus 50 million in interest, will be allocated to slave and forced laborers and to others for other personal injuries, and the rest will go for property claims and insurance. While no amount of money can ever compensate the survivors for their loss and their suffering, what they will receive from this agreement will help them lead a life of dignity.

We still must be sure that the German law to be passed by the Bundestag creating the Foundation incorporates the substance of our agreements, so that legal peace can be sought for German companies in U.S. courts. The draft law submitted by the German cabinet to the Bundestag is not yet adequate. And we have other details to iron out. But we are doing everything we can to finalize this agreement and set in motion the machinery that will make possible the distribution of payments before the end of the year. There is a sense of urgency since survivors are dying at a rate of close to 1% per month.

And I am happy to report, based on my meeting with their representative the week before last, the government of Austria intends to use the same standard as Germany in making payments to some 200,000 survivors who performed slave and forced labor in that country.

Negotiations of this nature require new mechanisms of diplomacy. It used to be that bilateral and even multilateral agreements were reached in secret negotiations between governments. Indeed, the series of negotiations dealing with restitution and compensation issues after World War II were handled in that way. Diplomacy today has many more participants. It was the World Jewish Congress, its chairman, Edgar Bronfman and its executive director Israel Singer which first brought attention to the dormant accounts that had lain in Swiss banks for more than fifty years. It was a group of scholars, such as Lynn Nicholas, Jonathan Petropolous and Hector Feliciano who documented the fact that one-fifth of all the art in Europe had been dislocated during World War II and a large proportion has still not been restituted. It was the globalization of the world economy which resulted in German and Swiss companies entering the American market, thereby subjecting them to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, where verdicts are larger than in Europe. It was the U.S. Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, in a series of hearings, and our State and local insurance commissioners and treasurers that kept up pressure for settlement of these suits. All these parties influenced the negotiations.

The issue of compensation for Holocaust losses has created intense interest and generated deep emotions in Europe. It has served as a reminder that almost every country on the Continent was complicit to some degree in the theft of property from Jewish victims during the War and the denial of adequate restitution and compensation afterwards. A general consensus has developed there that Europe needs to complete this, the last piece of unfinished business of World War II, if it is to enter the new century strong and united.

It is also an important issue in the United States. Over a hundred thousand survivors reside here, and our people mourn their loss and admire their courage.

We also have an important foreign policy interest in maintaining close relations with Germany, a partner of ours in promoting and defending democracy for the last fifty years, a nation that is vital to both the security and the economic development of Europe. Having just returned from Germany, I can report that the great weight of public opinion there supports adequate compensation for surviving victims of the Holocaust. This is shown not just by the sixty billion dollars Germany has already paid in compensation to Holocaust victims. It is shown by the willingness of the German government to make a significant contribution, amounting to fully one half the forced and slave labor settlement fund, at a time when its own budget for old age pensions and other social services is being severely reduced.

I know that bitter memories die hard. But from my experience in international affairs over the past seven years, I firmly believe that there is a new Germany now, a strong, free and democratic nation, fully European, which respects human rights and the dignity of the individual and has a special relationship with the State of Israel, a nation born of the horror Germany caused. The German people have many times and in many ways shown their acceptance of responsibility for the evils inflicted on the world by the Third Reich. To me, the new Germany is symbolized by its Federal President, Johannes Rao, who, on the day when the monetary settlement was announced, spoke to the survivors and said the following:

"I know that for many it is not really money that matters. What they want is for their suffering to be recognized as suffering, and for the injustice done to them to be named injustice. I pay tribute to all who were subjected to slave and forced labor under German rule and, in the name of the German people, beg forgiveness." I deeply hope that all of these actions will help abolish the stereotype of Germany and its people that arose out of the two World Wars.

The last legacy of the Holocaust and of our activities should not be money, but memory. Our people must understand what happened during the Holocaust and why it happened. Over a dozen nations, from Argentina and Brazil to Lithuania and the Baltics, including the United States, have commissions examining what their governments did during the War regarding the flow of assets stolen from victims and other Holocaust-related events. Switzerland has published two piercing reports by the Commission chaired by Professor Bergier, the first on the Swiss role in converting looted Nazi gold, the second on how that country closed its borders to refugees. The Matteoli Commission in France, headed by a survivor, is helping that country find stolen property and confront the ambiguities of how it treated its Jewish citizens during its Occupation and under the Vichy government.

It is important that all archives be opened up and all the facts be made public. Although decades may have passed, there are still many clues, and one clue leads to another. In some countries, when the facts are revealed, at first there is embarrassment and even resentment over digging these shames from the past. But after widespread public discussion, nations can recognize the lessons, make apology, and take steps to help the victims of injustice.

Nations that come to terms with their actions during the Holocaust serve as an example to other nations looking into crimes against their own people. The ongoing work of the Truth Commission in South Africa is allowing the people of that nation to confront the recent experience of apartheid and those who committed horrors in its name-not for the purpose of punishment, but in the hope of reconciliation. Chile is seeking the fate of the thousands who disappeared under the Pinochet regime. Guatemala is looking into atrocities committed during its years of civil war. The U.S. government recently decided to compensate citizens of Japanese descent living in countries of Latin America who, at our insistence, were taken from their homes and forced to live in guarded camps during the War, as were our own Japanese American citizens. Each step that is taken testifies to the healing power of truth.

Finally, we must devote increasing attention to educating young people about the Holocaust. We must move from money to memory. Even in this Information age, we find it difficult to break down national and cultural stereotypes and appreciate the common humanity that underlies differences in religions and race. We teach science and language and the arts in our schools, but we do not do enough to instill the basic elements of tolerance and fairness young people need to make the moral judgments necessary to active citizenship

It is for this purpose that delegates from 46 nations met in Stockholm, Sweden in January and committed their countries to encourage the study and remembrance of the Holocaust in their schools and communities. A nine nation Task Force, including the United States, has been established to devise practical ways to make this possible, through teacher training, curriculum development and educational materials. Teachers need to present this difficult subject matter whether or not, and perhaps especially if, the perpetrators, victims or bystanders were their grandparents, parents or neighbors. They must teach the difficult past to spare our children and their children a difficult future.

In your scholarly work, you must often reflect on why it is that fifty-five years after the discovery of the death camps the events of the Holocaust resonate so strongly around the world after being dormant for so long. There are several explanations. The end of the Cold War, freeing up energies and making documents available. The sense of urgency elderly survivors have to learn the full implications of the horrors they experienced before the end of their life cycle. The end of a millenium, which creates a desire to confront the past, come to terms with mistakes and move forward with lessons learned. But also I believe it is because the Holocaust goes to the eternal questions of human behavior. Why do people hate? How can they remain indifferent in the presence of evil? What is courage? How can we engender respect for human dignity? What can be done to prevent such horror from happening again? Where does national sovereignty end and international responsibility begin? The Holocaust forces us to face these questions.

If, by learning the events and consequences of the Final Solution, people can be sensitized to how they treat each other and how nations should relate to each other,;if nations can organize international responses to nip potential genocides in the bud; then the sacrifice of the victims will not have been entirely in vain. In the larger sense, this is what Holocaust studies are about, and why this Conference and the work you do every day are so important. I hope that over the next three days, you can both learn from each other and teach the world.

Thank you.