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\"Reparations of Nazi Victims in Postwar Europe traces reparations back to their origins in the final years of the Second World War, when victims of Nazi persecution for the first time articulated demands for indemnification en masse. Simultaneous appearance of claims in New York, London, Paris and Tel Aviv exemplified the birth of a new standard in political morality. Across Europe, the demand for compensation to individuals who suffered severe harm gained momentum. Despite vast differences in their experiences of mass victimisation, post-war societies developed similar patterns in addressing victims' claims. Regula Ludi chronicles the history of reparations from a comparative and trans-national perspective. This book explores the significance of reparations as a means to provide victims with a language to express their unspeakable suffering in a politically meaningful way\"-- Provided by publisher.

Reparations of Nazi Victims in Postwar Europe traces reparations back to their origins in the final years of the Second World War, when victims of Nazi persecution for the first time articulated demands for indemnification en masse. Simultaneous appearance of claims in New York, London, Paris and Tel Aviv exemplified the birth of a new standard in political morality. Across Europe, the demand for compensation to individuals who suffered severe harm gained momentum. Despite vast differences in their experiences of mass victimisation, post-war societies developed similar patterns in addressing victims' claims. Regula Ludi chronicles the history of reparations from a comparative and trans-national perspective. This book explores the significance of reparations as a means to provide victims with a language to express their unspeakable suffering in a politically meaningful way.

In 1937, the League of Nations decided to undertake an international inquiry into the status of women and nominated an expert committee to conduct the research. This was the result of interwar feminist agitation for an international equal rights treaty. The work of the experts, however, was interrupted by the beginning of the Second World War. The survey was never completed. Preliminary results nonetheless influenced the international understanding of inequalities between men's and women's status. By analyzing the epistemic premises of the inquiry and its methodological design, this article argues that the League's engagement with the status of women constituted gender as an organizing principle of the global order and recognized women's rights as a legitimate objective of international cooperation. The knowledge production on the nature of gender difference impacted the future framing of gender relations in the activity of international organizations after the Second World War.

In 1956, thousands of Hungarian refugees found a warm welcome in Switzerland. Swiss students took to the streets to demonstrate against Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising. However, the upsurge of public sympathy for the refugees barely covered up recent controversy in Switzerland over asylum policy during the years of fascism and the Second World War. In 1954, only two years before the Hungarian refugee crisis, newly released German foreign policy documents had revealed Swiss involvement in the introduction of the 'J'-stamp in 1938 to mark the passports of German (and formerly Austrian) Jews, making it easier for Swiss immigration officials to identify Jews as (undesirable) refugees. Those revelations came as a shock to the Swiss public, who had taken pride in the country's humanitarian achievements during the Second World War and had readily accepted official propaganda aimed to counter Allied criticism of Swiss neutrality policy. International and domestic indignation over those revelations eventually motivated the Swiss government to mandate an official investigation into asylum policy during the pre-war and wartime period. The findings of that examination pointed to concerted efforts by the highest authorities to prevent Jewish refugees from seeking asylum in Switzerland and turn them away at the Swiss border until 1944. This led over the following decades to an ongoing debate on the history of asylum policy. Closely linked to elements of national identity, such as neutrality, the Red Cross and humanitarianism, the specifics of Swiss asylum policy were rarely considered in a wider European context. In situating recent research on Swiss refugee policy during the 'Forty Years' Crisis' in a wider European context, this article reconsiders Switzerland's situation as one of Nazi Germany democratic neighbours in the 1930s and as the only neutral country within reach for many refugees during the Second World War. Placing special emphasis on the transnational dynamics of refugee policies, it also questions some of the received assumptions guiding the interpretation of the history of asylum in Switzerland.

This article discusses the reparation schemes that were developed in response to the nazi policies of persecution and genocide. It looks at the measures aimed at redressing nazi atrocities in a wider context of postwar planning and reconstruction and asks how proposals for individual compensation payments dealt with the shortfalls in international law. In comparing French, East German and Swiss compensation policies, it also focuses on intersections between victim reparations and the construction of collective memory. Depending on a country's history in the nazi era and its desire to construct meaningful narratives of this period, reparation policies were often aimed at bolstering dominant interpretations of the past. At the same time, they also mirrored the degree of political influence that specific victim groups could mobilize in favour of their rehabilitation. This raises the question of how such interconnections affected the chances of individual victims to find recognition of their victimhood as well as financial relief for the damages they had suffered.

More than once it happened that Jewish claimants were asked for death certificates of relatives murdered at Auschwitz. [...]for many years neither Jewish organizations nor individual claimants received any support from the Swiss government.17 Although Switzerland had promised in the Washington Agreement of 1946 to identify heirless assets of victims of Nazi persecution and to transfer the money to Allied refugee relief organizations, the subsequent investigation did not produce the expected results.18 Yet the Western Allies soon subordinated their efforts in favor of Nazi victims to the new political and economic priorities of the Cold War.19 Beginning in the late 1940s, they showed less and less inclination to pressure the Swiss government to live up to its postwar promises. [...]in 1962, after an international press campaign, the Swiss parliament passed a bill that obliged the banks to identify heirless assets of Nazi victims.20 Although the outcome of these inquiries by no means met the expectations of victims' organizations, no further steps were taken by the government.21 Similarly, Swiss victims of Nazi persecutionincluding surviving relatives of Swiss Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz-had to wait until the early 1960s to receive reparation payments. The diplomatic crisis pointed at the international interrelatedness of the country, a fact that could no longer ho denied without negative repercussions. [...]the domestic crisis has affected majority-minority relations and pointed at intolerance and hostility toward minorities, particularly toward Jewish citizens, who had the hurtful experience of being exposed to verbal abuse and insult in public. In Swiss political discourse, \"neutrality\" came to imply a personal obligation of every citizen to stay neutral, which signified a certain degree of political restraint in the face of the events beyond the country's borders, including the atrocities committed by the Nazis.47 On such grounds, for instance, the army censored news coverage of the Holocaust and silenced protests of persons who publicly condemned atrocities they had witnessed or heard about while abroad. [...]the government expected international organizations based in Switzerland to share its notion of neutrality, and in late 1942 it succeeded in preventing the International Committee of the Red Cross from making a public appeal against the Nazi genocidal policy.48 Based on similar arguments, the authorities required that all foreigners abstain from political activity, including antifascist publications.