Saying, as I did, that Toepfer did not gain his wealth from the supply of poison gas to Auschwitz, the employment of slave labour, the looting of occupied countries, or anything comparable, is not the same as saying he did not profit from the war. Clearly he did, and I did not deny this in my THE article; on the contrary, I pointed out that like other German businessmen he contributed substantially to the German war effort through his activities in occupied Poland. It is uncertain whether or not Toepfer knew all the details of transactions carried out by the branch of his business in Posen, in occupied Poland. He supplied slaked lime (not quicklime), a building material, to the Lodz ghetto administration, but we do not know what the lime was supplied for. Although Jews and Gypsies employed in the ghetto were denied the food and medication needed to keep them alive, there is no evidence that any of them were employed by Toepfer or indeed that any of them used materials he supplied in their work.

One person who certainly was employed by Toepfer was Edmund Veesenmayer, who was indeed a senior German official in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Though my longer description of his wartime activities fell victim to editorial cuts, I did manage to note in the article that he was a war criminal. In fact, Veesenmayer was only a short-term employee and only in a branch of Toepfer's business in Tehran; he was not a "close associate" as Pinto-Duschinsky originally claimed, though that's no excuse for Toefper having employed him.

Pinto-Duschinsky accuses me of "dubious interpretations" but his claim that I suggested Toepfer's arrest by the Nazis on trumped-up charges of tax evasion was an indication of his opposition to the regime is false. What I did say was that the arrest reflected Nazi hostility to Toepfer's stubborn refusal to surrender the autonomy of his Foundation. Pinto-Duschinsky accuses me of misquoting him when I say he claims that through his foreign currency transactions "Toepfer was aiding the Nazi regime", but he goes on to say they were used "for the benefit of the Nazi regime". I may be forgiven if I fail to see the difference.

To point out that he was a fellow-traveller rather than a major perpetrator is not to be "unduly protective of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation" as Pinto-Duschinsky claims. As one of the Foundation's Hanseatic Scholars in 1970 I was shocked to discover the presence of ex-Nazis in its higher echelons, and disturbed by the racist views of its founder and his associates. Pinto-Duschinsky thinks I should have brought this to the attention of my supervisor in Oxford. But I was unable to find any information linking Toepfer or the Foundation to Nazism, and was assured by his staff that he had been politically opposed to the Nazis. Had I known then what I know now — thanks to the independent historical commission's report and Zimmermann's biography, as well as to Pinto-Duschinsky's findings — I might well have had serious doubts about the wisdom of associating myself with the Foundation in 1970.

The crucial question in the end, however, is what the Foundation has done about all this in the present day. It is good to note that Pinto-Duschinsky now no longer accuses the Toepfer Foundation in the present of covering up its past and that of its founder. The Foundation has expressed clear regret about its past and been scrupulously open in providing people, including potential Hanseatic Scholars, with the means to reach a verdict on it.