What of the broader issue? Pinto-Duschinsky is surely right to say that German industrial foundations, like other institutions that played a contested role in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Vatican, should open their archives, as the Toepfer Foundation has done. Whether he is right to doubt the objectivity of historians commissioned by them to write about their past is less clear. If they obtain proper guarantees of independence of research and publication, then there is no prima facie reason why their work should not be trusted.

Companies and the foundations using their profits should indeed, as Pinto-Duschinsky argues, pay proper compensation to those they employed under degrading and murderous conditions as forced labourers, or to their families. And he is right to be worried about the tendency in Germany to dwell on German sufferings in the 1940s. Yet there have been no "concerted attacks against scholars who have ventured to be too bold in their critical analyses of Nazi Germany", as Pinto-Duschinsky alleges. Ever since the 1960s German historians have been increasingly critical in their approach to the Nazi past and above all the involvement of German institutions and the German people in its crimes.

Michael Pinto-Duschinsky

Shortly before he submitted a revised version of his response to Standpoint, Richard J. Evans sent me a friendly email pointing out that we are not far apart. I hope this is the case concerning our views on many underlying moral and historical issues about the Holocaust. His critical remarks in Standpoint about the work of Hans Mommsen and the "functionalist" interpretation of the Holocaust and his comments on compensation for victims of the Nazis are welcome. 

His response to Standpoint gives a somewhat more critical interpretation of the book on the German multi-millionaire published in 2000 by an "Independent Academic Commission" sponsored by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. Yet Evans still is unwilling to face up to the defiance and excuses of the Toepfer Foundation and has too complacent a view about German historiography of the Holocaust. On March 10, 2011, he wrote in the THE ("Tainted Money?") that the official history was "devastating". His revised judgment is that "the commission's report does now look as if it was pulling its punches in some respects".

Our controversy about the Hanseatic Scholarships funded for Oxford and Cambridge graduates by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation of Hamburg started with that critical article in the THE. Standpoint provided me an opportunity to reply in the July/August 2011 issue, for which I am extremely grateful. Standpoint has also given Evans and me the chance for a last printed exchange, though the debate is likely to continue with further documentary evidence on Standpoint's website and on my website: michaelpintoduschinsky.com.