Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

During the Holocaust, approximately 15,000 to 18,000 Jews found haven in Shanghai when the rest of the world closed its doors to them. When one juxtaposes the history of the Shanghai Jews with the nightmarish story of Auschwitz, one sees that lessons of humanity can be discovered even at times that are seemingly devoid of hope and dignity. The message of hope represented by the history of the Shanghai Jews is one that has been slowly emerging over the last two decades. More and more scholars are turning their attention to this history. Nevertheless, their focus has tended to stay narrowly on the Jewish experience within the Shanghai community itself, leaving much left unexplored. For example, very little has been written about what happened to the Shanghai Jews after the war. What did the West German government do when the Shanghai Jews—refugees who had lost most, if not all, of their belongings, had endured hardships, and who, in most cases, had lost relatives who had not accompanied them to Shanghai—asked for restitution? The paper examines how the Germans started the process of atonement. The study is based on restitution case files from the Bremen State Archives. The paper concludes that the Germans scrambled to respond to the Shanghai Jews, but issues of bureaucratic protocol had to be established, and the process by which retribution payments were distributed turned out to be a long and frustrating one for the former refugees.