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Greg Burgess, Alexander Karn. Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1680–1681, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1680
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Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History is a challenging book, with many perceptive insights into the nature of history and memory that go well beyond its concern with the legacies of the Holocaust. Alexander Karn examines twelve Holocaust Commissions established in Europe after the mid-1990s: seven national commissions (France, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Italy, Lithuania, and Latvia), three bilateral commissions (Germany and France, Germany and Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, where the main objective was to write common history curricula for schools), and two international commissions (one on unsettled insurance claims, the other on the Vatican’s role during the Holocaust). Their aims included extensive reviews of historical records of the Holocaust era in order to address past injustices and to determine restitution for the loss of Jewish assets. The first such body, the Swiss Independent Commission of Experts, established in December 1996, was instructed “to obtain the historical truth and to shed light on” the fate of Jewish assets (3). Other commissions interpreted “historical truth” more strictly as legal and economic questions of spoliation of Jewish property.
