Some Measure Of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Movement

Michael R. Marrus in Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) states that given the questions surrounding the emergence of the restitution campaign of the 1990s: why it emerged, when, how it fits in with earlier reparations to Jewish peoples (p.9); Marrus argues in the instance of the Holocaust what constitutes justice and whether it is even possible to achieve justice given the magnitude of the claims from the Holocaust. Marrus utilizes the works of many historians like Michael Bazyler and Stuart Eizenstat, who focus on different aspects of Holocaust legacy as well as Holocaust era restitution. He uses these historians as a basis for both sides of multiple topics …show more content…
Marrus argues that one of the main reasons that it took some fifty years for the restitution wave to hit was because there was a lack of unity. The lack of unity that Marrus is referring to is seen in many different areas. He states, “… I will argue, it was defined most importantly by the end of the Cold War, while at the same time reinforced by other developments (p. 75).” For example, the breaking up of Germany into East and West German states and the spread of the Cold War. He states that the falling of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the fall of Soviet communism ushered in a sense of “unity”. This sense of unity allowed more individuals a sense of comfortability to push forward with garnering a restitution case. To be clear there were pushes for restitution from the late 1930s well into the 1990s, but the difficulty was that the fate of these restitution cases was being carried out by governments not by individuals (p.63) who were not too concerned with cases of restitution while impending a