What I found most striking about Cesarani’s book was the extent to which he remained attached to the view of events propounded between 1939 and 1948 by the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv). In 1939, the British government, which held the League of Nations mandate to govern Palestine, introduced a strict limit on Jewish immigration into Palestine. The policy lasted until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The temptation, therefore, was to blame British rather than German policy for the murder of six million European Jews. For many years, this remained a theme of Israeli Holocaust historians such as Yehuda Bauer.

In Cesarani’s case, a side effect has been excessive sympathy for German interpretations of the “unintended” Holocaust (the so-called “functionalist” thesis of the Mommsen school). History is rarely neat; events are complex; in a world war, there are inevitable variations between what happened in different localities. But this does not mean that the Holocaust was, in Cesarani’s term, “haphazard”. This view all too easily trivialises the Holocaust and lets many of the perpetrators off the hook of responsibility. It also risks being bad history.

A book which does take Holocaust responsibility seriously has been written by the British investigative journalist Dina Gold. It is riveting, humane and politically important, though I must admit that I had to overcome an initial reluctance — as it turns out unjustified — to approach the work in the first place.

Stolen Legacy (Ankerwycke, £17.99) is a highly readable account of the author’s arduous quest to document the story of her grandmother, a refugee from the Nazis. The family had  been forced to abandon a building in Berlin owned by their firm of furriers. After the war, the property became part of Communist East Germany. Only following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, by which time her grandmother had died, were Dina and her mother able to pursue the story and to embark on an epic, ultimately successful claim for compensation.

The author describes with admirable clarity the multiple legal steps this required, the internal family difficulties and the resistance of German bureaucrats and business representatives. At one point, she needed the guile acquired as a reporter for the BBC consumer watchdog programme Checkpoint even to be permitted to enter the building. Later, the fact that she stimulated two documentaries, in the UK and Germany, about her campaign must have given it a decisive push. Nevertheless, the book shows the exceptional determination, skill and luck needed by Jewish heirs in search of belated justice.

So, why had I reacted with reserve when I learned that she  and I were both to speak at a meeting last summer at a conference at the Brooklyn Law School? In the 1990s, Jewish Holocaust survivors in London, former slave labourers in Auschwitz, asked me to assist them in their campaign for compensation. They were not seeking the return of property but the simple acknowledgement that their slave labour had been illegal and merited at least as much financial reward as that granted after the war to most former members of the SS who had been their slave drivers. I was to be their “honorary academic adviser”.