AFP

Monumental row

THE “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, now under construction near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, has long been controversial, not least for its monumental design by an American architect. Now it is in the headlines once more. And the latest row raises again the question of how far companies should be held responsible for their shameful histories during the Nazi era.

The problem does not lie with the memorial itself. It is the anti-graffiti coating meant to be put on the 2,751 huge concrete slabs that it consists of. This coating was meant to stop the slabs being covered by swastikas or otherwise defaced by neo-nazis. The product was to have been provided by Degussa, a big German chemical company.

Now it turns out that Degussa once owned Degesch, the firm that produced the Zyklon B used to gas Jews in concentration camps. At first, nobody noticed—or nobody wanted to notice. But then the press discovered the link, reportedly after being tipped off by a Swiss company that had hoped to win the contract until Degussa decided to donate half the material needed.

After the story broke, the memorial's board of trustees, after an apparently heated discussion, concluded that using the firm's product, called Protectosil, would be “unacceptable given the specific nature of the Memorial project”. It advised the construction company to stop using the coating until another product could be found.

Degussa has not, in fact, been one of the companies that shies away from its past. It is an active member in the foundation created by German companies to compensate victims of forced labour. And it has commissioned researchers to look into its history, without having any say over what they publish.

This behaviour is by no means exceptional these days. Since the mid-1990s, says Manfred Pohl, a historian and head of corporate cultural affairs at Deutsche Bank, most large German companies have reappraised their history. It is now time, he argues, to forgive them (not the same as forgetting). By excluding Degussa from the Holocaust memorial, an opportunity has been missed to do just that. One could also claim that it is unfair to penalise today's shareholders or employees of Degussa for the actions of the company in the past.

All this may make eminent sense. Yet Degussa is still the wrong firm to provide the anti-graffiti coating for Berlin's Holocaust monument, if only for emotional reasons. If Holocaust survivors or their descendants could not bear to visit the site because the very material it was composed of brought to mind Zyklon B, finding a more neutral product was the right way to go.