Introduction: Reparations and the Historiography of the Holocaust – An Entangled History

Abstract

Reparations and restitution have long been a marginal subject of historical research, even in the Federal Republic of Germany. Until the early 1990s, legal, diplomatic and institutional history dominated the field. Early studies provided important information on how the Federal Republic dealt with the legacies of Nazi crimes and the general awareness of the Holocaust in the post-war era. Not least because its authors had only limited access to the archives, they often reflected the official perspective of indemnification, most prominently documented in the multi-