International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Remembering means taking responsibility

Karlsruhe, January 29, 2026 – On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one central concept repeatedly comes to the fore: remembrance. What does it mean to remember? Remembering is not a state that one achieves once and then preserves. It is an attitude that we must consciously adopt again and again. January 27 makes this particularly visible. It commemorates not only a historical turning point, but also a responsibility that continues to have an impact. This responsibility is not, as is often misleadingly stated, a collective guilt of the current generation. It is something that we as Germans actually bear collectively and must constantly remind ourselves of. It becomes particularly noticeable in times when democratic principles are becoming more fragile and anti-democratic forces are gaining influence. In such moments, responsibility means not being content with ritualized remembrance, but making visible the conditions under which injustice became possible and can become possible again and again.

National Socialist rule was not an exceptional situation beyond any social normality. It was sustained by conviction and conformity, by ideological radicalism as well as administrative routine. Hannah Arendt described this with the concept of the banality of evil (1961): not to trivialize the crime, but to point out its dangerous everyday nature. This is precisely why remembrance must not remain abstract; it must become concrete. It must show how injustice was organized, how it was reflected in responsibilities, administrative processes, forms, files, and procedures.

As part of the German scientific landscape and as an institute for information infrastructure, we at FIZ Karlsruhe bear a special form of responsibility. Not through moral interpretation, but through the infrastructure for contemporary documentation and presentation in the digital space. Because memory and responsibility move in many ways. The path that we at FIZ Karlsruhe are taking together with our partner archives leads to securing historical documents, making them accessible, and making them available online worldwide so that memory remains accessible and verifiable.

What does reparation mean after 1945?

After the end of Nazi rule, Germany and the Allies faced a truly historic task: coming to terms with a state-organized rupture of civilization. It was clear early on that there could be no adequate response to something so extraordinary, neither morally nor legally. Nevertheless, since 1945, the idea of possible reparations has gradually developed, not as compensation for suffering, but as an attempt to take political, legal, and material responsibility.

The central reference point in the history of reparations is a government statement made by Konrad Adenauer in September 1951, in which he acknowledged the moral obligation of the Federal Republic of Germany towards the Jewish victims of National Socialism. This led to international agreements and comprehensive legal regulations on restitution and compensation. These processes spanned decades, underwent multiple reforms, and remained controversial. Not least because they translated individual suffering into administrative categories that were inevitably inadequate. The concept of reparations was therefore ambivalent from the outset. No one could make amends for what was irretrievably lost: human lives, families, life paths. Reparations were intended rather to signify a state effort to make responsibility visible and to give recognition. Incomplete, belated, and often fraught with conflict.

This is precisely why the surviving sources are of particular importance. They document not only state action, but also the experiences of those who survived persecution and had to go through the proceedings again. Reparation becomes tangible here as a historical process which, through the documentation of these administrative procedures, makes it possible to paint an initial picture of the systematic nature of disenfranchisement.