Address by

David A. Harris

Executive Director, AJC

15 Jahre Partnerschaft und Vertrauen Bundeswehr und American Jewish Committee

Federal Press Office

Berlin

December 8, 2009

Minister zu Guttenberg; Distinguished members of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr; Members of the German parliament; Distinguished diplomats; Friends of the American Jewish Committee; And my colleagues from the AJC Berlin Office, in particular our Botschafter in Berlin, Ms. Deidre Berger:

This is, for me, a very special moment. I hope you will allow me a personal reflection or two in introducing my own comments.

This story of 15 years of partnership, which we celebrate here today at the Federal Press Office, began in the months and years after the Second World War.

In 1946, 1947, 1948, AJC began – very tentatively, but nonetheless persistently – to try to understand what would replace the Third Reich.

It was unclear. But AJC understood that we had a profound stake in the answer to that question.

Who would fill the space? I don’t mean the geographic space, but rather the spiritual, ethical, political, values-based space left behind after the Third Reich. And so, in preparing for today’s event, I went back into the archives of AJC. I found extraordinary documents, vigorous debates and discussions among our leaders, addressing how we should answer this question for ourselves.

The reply, in the end, was that we must engage Germany. Germany will reemerge, our predecessors understood, and we must contribute to the re-education of Germany to ensure a path of democracy and respect for fundamental human rights and human values.

There were those on the other side. Those like the then-Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who spoke about the ostracism of Germany, permanent pariah status. But I am proud to say that AJC rejected that approach. Instead, it grasped that there were individuals and institutions who were committed to the values of freedom, human rights, and democracy in Germany, and that they must become our partners. And they did.

We were criticized quite heavily in the Jewish world for making that decision. There were those who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Germany – then or ever.

And there were others who were prepared to engage in what, in German, unfortunately, is called Wiedergutmachen. (I say “unfortunately” because I doubt whether one can simply make things “well again,” as the word suggests.) Nonetheless, there were issues of restitution and indemnification, and we participated in those talks, culminating in the Luxembourg Agreements of 1952.

But we went beyond, continuing the search for partners. That process has never ended. It is now more than 60 years old, and it is that forward-looking organization that I joined 30 years ago. And perhaps, in a way, my own story converges with its history.

My own story really began, for purposes of today’s discussion, in 1960. My father, an electrical engineer, worked for CBS Television in the United States. They had been experimenting with what was then state-of-the-art technology, though it would be laughable today – special effects, video technology, and the like. CBS entered into a partnership agreement with a German television station. That station was interested in this technology, and it asked if CBS would send its specialist to Germany.

I got an education in life very quickly.

My father, you see, comes from this city, from Wilmersdorf. He was a young German boy on the road, I believe, to full assimilation. I think you have an expression in German, “Ein Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte,” a kind of ironic joke of history. Well, the Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte is that, had my father been left alone, I doubt very much that he would have remained a Jew. Instead, his son is the director of the American Jewish Committee.

But, in 1960, my father was asked to go back to a country to which he swore he would never return. And so, at the age of eleven, I witnessed my father and my mother, herself a refugee from Nazi tyranny in France, up late at night, talking, whispering, trying to hide the discussion from me about whether or not our family should move to Germany.

In the end, my father agreed to go for a few weeks only. And if it was successful, psychologically speaking, he would call the family to join him in Munich. And so he left, and we waited in New York. Then, one day, the phone rang and my mother said, “We’ll start packing.”

And so, in September 1960, at the age of eleven, fifteen years after the Second World War, I moved to Ainmillerstrasse 38 in Schwabing, the district of Munich. I was curious about my new life, but already sensed that there was something different about that new life, the new setting – and, yes, about us.

So I grew up very quickly, watching my parents engage in discussions almost every single day along the lines of: “See that person? He’s 35 years old. That means that in 1945 he was 20. Where was he? On the Russian front? A guard at Sobibor? In the SS? In the Einsatzgruppen? Where was he?”

Day after day after day, I was exposed to this. The same family that would not speak German at home, would not buy German products, was now on Ainmillerstrasse in Munich. I was compelled to try to reconcile the weight of my parents’ experience with the normal curiosity of an eleven-year­-old child.

And then, to add to this emotional drama, my maternal grandparents, also wartime refugees, missed us. They swore wouldn’t go to Germany, but they missed us. But they wouldn’t go to Germany. But they missed us. In the end, they missed us more than they swore, so they came. I was witness to yet another emotional journey, this one by my grandparents.

What did I discover that has bearing on today’s event? I discovered that there were “two Germanys,” if you will. The Germany of the past, hopefully receding, and the Germany of the future, hopefully ascending.

In everyday life, I encountered the kindnesses of everyday people – neighbors, shopkeepers, other children. I was forced, as my parents were forced, to confront not just the past but also the present, and to think about the future at perhaps a younger age than I should have been asked to do so. But there it all was.

In 1961, I picked up the International Herald Tribune, which quickly became my favorite newspaper in Germany. I saw a small article, which said that Eric Harris – my father – had been arrested in East Berlin behind the new wall, arrested with Daniel Shore, a prominent CBS News correspondent, for doing something, whatever this something was.

This, too, added a layer of history. My mother had first been a refugee from Communism. She was among the last to leave legally under Stalin in 1929, together with her family, and I grew up in a fiercely anti-Communist home, just as I grew up in a fiercely anti-fascist home. And then I learned the Communists detained my father in 1961.

And so this experience was one more convergence between AJC’s story and my own, when we first encountered each other in 1979. In 1990, I became the director, or, as I like to joke, the “chief professional worrier” for the organization.

It was an enormous moment in history. A few months earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the succession of dramatic events from Poland to Hungary to Czechoslovakia had all begun to unfold in breathtaking fashion. And among the very first decisions with which I was confronted was what to do about the prospect of German unification.

I knew the answer for myself. I wanted to see whether AJC had the same answer. It did.

AJC’s experience over 50 years, and my own experience, had both persuaded us, unlike some European leaders and unlike many Jewish leaders, that this was a moment to celebrate and not to mourn – that German unification could represent a milestone in progress towards the kind of Europe we seek, a Europe built on human freedom, human rights, and human dignity for all, including 17 million former citizens of the GDR.

AJC became the first, and for quite some time the only, Jewish organization in the world to actively and openly support the prospect of German unification.

A few years later, we received a phone call from the German military attaché’s office in Washington. “Would you receive a group of Youth Information Officers at your building in New York?” he asked. We didn’t quite know what a Youth Information Officer was, but we said, “With pleasure,” and that began a very special relationship whose 15^th anniversary we celebrate here in the Federal Press Office.

Minister zu Guttenberg made generous reference to several highlights of that partnership, and I would like to add one or two.

First, I remember the discussion we had with many of the officers – some of you may be here today – about the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The question that was on your mind was: Should we or should we not wear our Bundeswehr uniforms when visiting the Holocaust Museum? Year after year, your decision was not to wear the uniforms, for fear of potentially offending a survivor who might be at the museum.

Ironically, it was we who tried to persuade you to change your mind, to change your dress. Eventually you did. We told you that you have every reason to be proud of your uniform. You have every reason to be proud of today’s Bundeswehr. You have every reason to be proud of the Federal Republic of Germany. And you should want the survivors to know that an integral part of your political education today as members of the Bundeswehr is an immersion in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. They should know it’s you, and they will only know if you are in uniform.

What an irony of history – a Jewish group trying to persuade the Bundeswehr to have sufficient pride in itself to wear its normal daily dress!

And, second, a few years later, I shared an experience with my dear partner, Colonel Jochen Bürgermeister, who was the “co-godfather” of this program but could not be here today because his wife is ill. We agreed that I would come to Germany on the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and meet young people, to try and understand who they are and what makes them tick.

Among the places that he took me, in addition to several beautiful cities, was the little town of Duderstadt, in the Harz Mountains. He showed me a military-political exercise you call Polis. And then he kind of nudged me, and he said, “David, they’re not proud of the Bundeswehr, they’re not even proud of Germany, can you help make them proud?”

So here once again, the son of the Jew from Wilmersdorf, the son of the refugee from France who was on the run for 17 months trying to escape the clutches of the Nazis moving south, had to engage in an effort to persuade young Germans to take pride in who they are today. Not some kind of triumphalistic, excessively nationalistic pride, but the kind of genuine pride that any citizen should feel for his own country.

And then came the pièce de résistance. In 1999, Slobodan Milošević unleashed his ethnic cleansing against the Muslim population of Kosovo. We were outraged as human beings. We were outraged as Jews. We wanted to do something.

So, we traveled to Macedonia, first to see the refugees, to bear witness. As I recall, there were four main refugee camps, one of which was run by the Bundeswehr and assisted by the Johanniter. We were profoundly impressed by the way the camp was run. We were struck by the effort to instill dignity in the refugees, including hot meals where others served cold meals, wooden floors in the tents where others lived in the mud.

When we left Macedonia, we asked ourselves at AJC: Is there something more we can do than simply look and sympathize? We had an idea, and we called our friend Joschka Fischer, who was then the foreign minister, and we said, “Can we see you? We would like to propose something to Germany.” We came to Berlin, and we proposed that the German government and AJC partner to bring assistance to Muslim refugees from Kosovo.

The German government agreed, and the Bundeswehr became our partner. And as a result, thousands of refugees in Macedonia, who may never know your name or ours, were given an additional measure of assistance because they had rights as human beings, and we had an obligation to help them.

Beyond the actual assistance, we also thought there might be a bit of symbolism. If 54 years after the end of the Shoah, Germans in uniform and AJC could partner to assist Muslim refugees in the Balkans, then, frankly, anything was possible.

All it took was dreamers to dream, architects to construct, and statesmen to elevate. This is the essence of our partnership. It’s both substance and symbol. And we are committed – like you, Minister – to continuing to go from strength to strength in setting an example to the world. For the world desperately needs such examples of how the past need not paralyze, but can instead inspire us to a better future.

And lastly, as we look toward that better future, we have joint obligations that we wish to pursue with you. We want together to be guardians of history, because no one more than the people of Germany and the Jewish people understand the slippery slope that begins with demonization and moves to dehumanization and ultimately arrives at destruction.

We have an obligation to protect the past for its own sake, and the sake of the victims, yes. But we also have an obligation to protect the past because it has pulled back the curtain on the darkest side of human nature that we must desperately seek to keep in check.

We have a second common obligation, and that is to serve as an early warning system, very much as the AWACs provide early airborne intelligence to armies, when the rights of men and women are being violated, when genocide is being perpetrated, when ethnic cleansing is underway. We together have an obligation to stand shoulder to shoulder, and to demand that our world respect human dignity.

And third, we have an obligation to stand together with fellow democracies, and against those who would disrupt the international system. Minister, you spoke very eloquently on the subject.

Israel, as the Minister said, is linked to Germany not simply by dint of history, but by dint of a common foundation of shared values and shared visions.

Ladies and gentlemen, Israel does not need lessons in seeking peace. Israel needs partners for achieving peace.

There is no nation on the face of this earth that seeks peace more than the nation of Israel. For there is no nation on the face of the earth that, for 61 years since its establishment, has known not a single day of true peace, security, or harmony with its neighbors.

When partners have emerged, Israel has responded. And when partners will emerge, I have no doubt Israel will continue to respond. Israel recognizes that there will be a price to pay for peace, to be sure. But, as you know in the heart of Europe, a real peace is the objective. A false peace cannot substitute.

Israel faces true enemies. Iran calls for a world without Israel. Iran flouts the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even as we meet, students in Iran are protesting and challenging their rulers. Will the world stand with the students? Or will the world remain silent?

Every day that the world does not respond to the Iranian nuclear challenge is another day gained for Tehran and lost for us. A world in which Iran acquires a nuclear weapons capability – whether it is breakout capacity or actual weaponization – is a world that may have to say goodbye to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. If Iran succeeds, it will trigger other nations in the region to follow suit with their own proliferation, creating an ever more dangerous security environment for Europe, for the Middle East, and for the globe.

Ladies and gentlemen, as Chancellor Merkel has said, we cannot, we must not, allow Iran to cross the nuclear goal line. This will require the maximum partnership of all like-minded nations, and Germany is critically important to this effort.

At the same time, Israel faces Iran’s heavily-armed proxies in Lebanon and Gaza – Hezbollah and Hamas. These are objective threats. So when we look at the challenges of making peace, a peace for which Israel has yearned since the days of David Ben-Gurion, let’s be clear-headed about what the core obstacle to peace is.

Yes, the settlements are an issue. Yes, refugees are an issue. But the core issue of the conflict remains what it was in 1947 and 1948. Will the Palestinians, their leaders, and the larger Arab world recognize the inherent right of the Jewish people to sovereignty and statehood, whatever the final borders of the state might be? If so, peace becomes not just possible, I believe, but inevitable.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, as we gather here at the Federal Press Office to celebrate 15 years of partnership and trust, I want to say thank you.

Thank you to you, Minister zu Guttenberg. Thank you to the Ministry of Defense. Thank you to the Bundeswehr. Thank you to all of our German partners, who have not only have worked with us, but who have built from the ashes of the Third Reich a country that every German child in Duderstadt, and everywhere else, should be immensely proud of.