The
Problem with Boobies London
-- IGNATZ BUBIS,
current Vorsitzender des Zentralrates
der Juden in Germany, was the
self-appointed chief of the minuscule
community of 60,000 Jews in that country,
which now includes a substantial number
invited to live in Germany from the Soviet
Union. On Jan. 12 [1997] he celebrated
his seventieth birthday in stately
splendour in the presidential palace,
Schloss Bellevue in Berlin.; the next day
he celebrated it again in the centre of
real power in Germany, Frankfurt am Main.
These lavish functions were attended by
everybody who, as Dr Goebbels would
have put it in his diary, had "power and
an appetite" - the Speaker of the House,
the Federal President, the Chief Justice,
the heads of the parties, and the leaders
of the religious and trades union
communities. They find him a worthy successor to
Werner Nachmann, the former
scrap-metal dealer who headed the
community before him from 1967 to his
probable suicide in Jan. 1988 -- after
which demise it turned out that he had
embezzled twenty million marks of German
taxpayers' hard-earned funds poured into
the [Holocaust] restitution funds,
to shore up his own bankrupt empire. Bubis
himself heaped excoriation on Nachmann in
his memoirs,
Damit bin ich
noch längst nicht fertig
(1996), admitting that "between 1982 and
1988 Nachmann stole almost twenty million
marks of restitution funds for the victims
of National Socialism," a crime which,
Bubis had to concede, damaged "not only
the image of the Zentralrat [in
Germany] but that of the entire
[Jewish religious community
worldwide." With what glee right-wingers now cite
the oleaginous funeral eulogies for
Nachmann spoken by the then Federal
president, the odious Richard von
Weizsäcker, and that printed by
the Allgemeine
Jüdische Wochenzeitung on Feb
5, 1988, just before Nachmann's thieving
was discovered; it was all rather
reminiscent of the British establishment's
oily praise for Robert Maxwell
(a.k.a. Jan Hoch), publishing mogul, who
literally jumped overboard one night
rather than face the music when his
publishing empire began to collapse.
Maxwell was safely buried as a hero on the
Mount of Olives before it was found he had
embezzled millions from his companies'
pension funds in a vain attempt to patch
up the wreck. WHICH brings us back to Herr Bubis:
several countries of the world may find
cause to exclude him, on account of his
own, ahem, criminal record. In Dresden,
then one of the major cities of communist
East Germany which had been devastated by
the war, in 1952 he was one of a
thirty-five strong "gang of racketeers"
(Bande von Spekulationsverbrechern)
indicted for "anti-social, greedy and
conscience-less behaviour" which had done
serious damage to the community. By
racketeering in huge quantities of
communities the accused, says the charge
sheet, were enabled to live a life of
luxury. Bubis, declared by the court to
have been their ringleader, was sentenced
in absentia to twelve years jail and the
confiscation of his property. Right-wingers found and published the
criminal record recently. Bubis, visibly
embarrassed, tried to claim that the
sentence was a political ideological
sentence handed down by a communist regime
against an active opponent. But the
present German government, which has taken
over the records of the former
Soviet-controlled occupation government of
east Germany, has been unable to find any
evidence of such political opposition by
Bubis. In his own memoirs, in fact he
describes how he managed a
barter-organisation "in behalf of the
Soviet military government." He had sold
goods which he obtained from the Russians
in exchange for precious metals like gold
and silver. "I had a lot to do with the
Russians," he wrote. "You had to do some
hard drinking with them." He boasts that
the Russians even gave him the luxury
Horch limousine of foreign minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop (who had
been hanged at Nuremberg) to drive around
in. Fleeing justice in Dresden, he turned
up in west Germany and founded a real
estate empire in -- where else? --
Frankfurt am Main which had by the 1970s
made him a multi-millionaire and the
target of both extreme left- and
right-wing opponents of all that was
rotten in the new Germany. Bubis and his
ilk managed to prevent the staging of
leading playwright Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's latest work
Der Müll, die
Stadt und der Tod, claiming that
the play's grotesquely antisemitic
passages were aimed specifically at him,
as no doubt they were.
Related file: Jewish
Chronicle, London, assesses Bubis'
life.
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