Author: Marisa Hirschfield (Page 1 of 2)

How does a corporation which aided and abetted the Nazi atrocities properly atone? Is a legitimate reckoning with past wrongs even possible if the company’s goals must be narrowly tailored to maximizing profit?

I’m letting my inner cynic write this post.

Today, we visited Bayer, a pharmaceutical company known for inventing aspirin and commercializing the hormonal IUD. It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. And it had a hand in the extermination of at least a million Jewry.

The Bayer archivist, a nice man named Thore, led us through a seminar on the evolution of memory culture at the company. The presentation sought to track the company’s transformation from marketing a “defensive narrative” to assuming “historical responsibility” for its participation in the Nazi atrocities. But the lecture felt remarkably evasive.

Most disturbing was the lecture’s silence on the specifics of Brayer’s contributions to the Nazi project. There were mentions of slavery and of a Brayer-sponsored labor camp adjacent to Auschwitz. Beyond that, the company’s shoddy past was broadly whitewashed. Notably, Brayer was responsible for the distribution of Zyklon B, the pesticide used to gas over a million Jews at death camps. There was no acknowledgment of this fact until it was raised by a member of our group during the Q&A. Moreover, only through independent research (read: a Wikipedia skim) did I discover that Brayer conducted medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz. In one case, the company transported 150 women from Auschwitz to its own facility in order to test a new anaesthetic. An employee wrote to Rudolf Hoss, the death camp’s commandant: “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments.” I learned of this crime online, rather than from the company historian.

It seems that Brayer’s little history project, ostensibly devoted to remembrance, is suffering from amnesia.  

Beyond suppressing the most egregious aspects of the collaboration, our lecturer also parroted Nazi legal defense strategies when describing the actions of the company. He argued that Bayer executives perhaps “did not know” that Zyklon B was being instrumentalized at a death camp. And because of “complicated decision structures” at the company and its subsidiaries, assigning blame for the Nazi collaboration was challenging. The company seems more interested in maintaining a facade of innocence rather than engaging in real self-assessment.  

Part of me wonders if any performance of guilt would have been satisfying. At a corporation where profit is the only prize, accountability will always seem like PR. We know there are ulterior motives. Indeed, it was not until the company faced public backlash – an economic threat from its customers – that they began to catalogue their crimes. 

It may be said, then, that the structure of the corporation inherently limits the authenticity of its soul-searching. Regardless, Bayer made a sorry attempt. Ignoring the least comfortable (and most fatal) aspects of its Holocaust-era activity is certainly not accountability. It’s a cop-out for cash.  

Credit to visionary cinematographer Deb Amos

Though I appreciate Panievsky’s commitment to holding journalists accountable for the rise of the far-right, I feel she gives the danger of social media short shrift. She writes, “Journalists and newsrooms cannot cry ‘press freedom!’ and pride themselves on being essential for democracy, but blame it on TikTok whenever democracy goes rogue.” She also cites what social scientists call the “trust gap,” a phenomenon which describes the public’s belief in institutional/mainstream journalism being greater than news sourced from social media platforms. To be sure, journalists are certainly responsible, at least in part, for accelerating the far-right’s ascendancy. (Donald Trump, for example, has particularly benefited from the ceaseless mainstream news coverage). But most Americans do not have New York Times subscriptions, nor do they regularly watch CNN or NBC on network television. As of 2025, social media became the main source of news for most Americans. Even if the public is less willing to trust headlines on Meta, they are most definitely seeing them and internalizing them, even subconsciously. These platforms, I believe, are primarily to blame for the popularity of the far-right.

Part of the danger with social media is that it situates its users in echo chambers, where there may be a normalizing effect on extremist ideas. Panievsky writes about this phenomenon in the context of Trump’s election. His victory seemingly gave individuals the license to express xenophobic views which had previously been espoused privately. As Panievsky recounts: “After being shown data suggesting that Trump’s election was certain in their state, Americans were more likely to donate to anti-immigration causes. Even individuals who were less likely to agree with xenophobic behaviour sanctioned it less when they learned that it was more popular in their community than they expected.” The perceived reduction in stigma led to an uptick in vocalizing extremist ideas. This pattern is of course amplified on social media, where one’s feed consists almost entirely of ideological sycophants. It is no wonder, then, that these platforms can become breeding grounds for extremism. 

Finally, I’m interested in the question of newsworthiness in the Trump era / Age of Distraction. Just over a decade ago, President Obama’s choice to wear a tan suit at a press conference constituted the biggest White House scandal of his tenure. Today, scandals of much greater magnitude – calling a female journalist “miss piggy”, falsely claiming that Haitian migrants eat their pets – are reported as mere headlines and disappear from the news cycle in a remarkably speedy fashion. What happens when these scandals/controversies occur so frequently that we hardly pause to recognize their danger? This, too, creates a normalizing effect which helps contribute to the destigmatization of extremist ideas.

As governments around the world cut aid funding, humanitarian leaders are looking to philanthropists for money. They are also reevaluating how to best spend it in these desperate times.

“Humanitarian needs are outpacing resources,” said Barham Salih, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. “We are speaking today at a time when there is an unprecedented record of forcibly displaced people around the world. Nearly 25 million refugees have been displaced for 5 years or more and around 14 and a half million remain dependent on humanitarian assistance for basic needs.”

As the refugee crisis grows, donor governments are retreating. In July of 2025, President Trump officially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), exacerbating humanitarian crises worldwide. Just a few months before, the UK government announced a reduction in their foreign aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of the gross national income, the lowest level in decades. Over the last three years, across all public donors, humanitarian funding dropped by nearly 30%, the most drastic sustained decline in recorded history. Donor governments are prioritizing military spending instead. 

“It’s the exact opposite direction we need to go,” said Ambassador Rick Barton, former Deputy High Commissioner for the UNHCR. 

Part of the problem is that politicians have failed to make the case against engaging in costly wars. “I think we’ve really got to build a constituency for peace,” Barton said. “We have just not articulated the benefits of prevention versus the inefficiencies, and the grotesque expenditures, and the torturing of society that war produces.” 

The result is that more money has been funneled into combat, and less is available to provide for civilians in crisis. Researchers at Boston University estimated that the USAID cuts have already caused six hundred thousand deaths, the majority of them children.

Philanthropists are stepping up where they can. Several foundation leaders announced new commitments to action at the Clinton Global Initiative in September. Dr. Nahla Gadalla, CEO of the Sudanese American Medical Association, spoke about establishing a permanent humanitarian relief center in eastern Chad, which will provide essential services to over 1 million Sudanese refugees who fled the ongoing civil war. Laura Miller, CEO of the War Child Alliance, revealed a $100 million grant going toward mental health and wellbeing for 10 million children affected by conflict, to be distributed over the next decade. Direct Relief CEO Amy Weaver is launching a $40 million campaign to allocate towards maternal health in conflict and disaster zones.

At the conference, Salih encouraged the UNHCR’s partners to consider the longevity of stability in the regions they support. “I do believe strongly that we really need to move beyond the concept of managing displacement year on end. We need to have a pathway to giving people the agency they deserve.”

There’s been a long-standing frustration, Barton elaborated, that aid only serves to save “a life today in order to save it again tomorrow.” This inability to move beyond recurring crises may stem from a paternalistic approach to aid. That is, many donors are hesitant to let local forces lead the rebuilding process. 

“There’s been more of an effort to take power and authority away from people in the field and sort of centralizing authority back at a headquarters in Washington or Paris or Rome or wherever, and that’s not good because I think the people that are best positioned to figure out the solutions are the people that are right at the site of the disaster,” said Princeton lecturer Doug Mercado, who has decades of experience directing emergency operations and post-conflict recovery.

Direct cash grants are one way to shift the power back to local actors. Carolyn Makinson, former executive director of the International Rescue Committee UK and the Women’s Refugee Commission, recalled the funding model of GiveDirectly, a non-profit which provides unconditional cash assistance to households in need.

“They had almost zero overhead, and they found very clever ways in settings, whether they were humanitarian or development settings, of identifying absolutely the poorest people in the community,” she said. “They just gave them cash grants, and it was quite remarkable what happened.”

“Cash preserves dignity and choice while also supporting long-term self-reliance when linked to education, livelihoods, and income-generating opportunities,” Salih said. 

Investments in long-term recovery, though important, may need to take a backseat for now, as foreign aid cuts have made meeting even basic needs for survivors of war and disaster difficult.     

Mercado emphasized the importance of reestablishing a disaster response agency to save the lives most imminently at risk. Philanthropists alone cannot accomplish this. Government aid spending must resume, he said. “You can’t do more with less. You’ve got to do less with less.”

3 pitches:

• Holocaust Memory and the Rise of the AfD

The relationship between German memory culture and anti-migrant sentiment has been the focus of sociologists for some time, and I now turn journalistic attention to the subject as the AfD and strands of its racist ideology become more popular. White, right-wing Germans, who commit the majority of antisemitic offenses in the country, primarily take two main approaches to memory culture: 1) they reject it or 2) they proclaim that sufficient atonement for the Nazi atrocities has already occurred, and any antisemitism lingering in the country has actually been “imported” by migrants. Migrants have become scapegoats for anti-semitism, just as Jews became the Nazis’ scapegoats for the ills of the day. I aim to investigate this symmetry. I am primarily interested in investigating how those who have accepted German guilt for the Holocaust can still support the AfD or espouse Nazi-adjacent beliefs about migrants. There is a sort of moral blindspot here.

For a scholarly perspective, I’d be delighted to interview Susan Neiman, who studies evil, German self-consciousness, and the Holocaust (and was previously interviewed for a memory culture piece in this class). Tracking down sources to speak on their support for AfD, coupled with their views on memory culture, will be the primary challenge in researching this piece.

• The “District Mothers”  

Somewhat distinct yet connected to the memory culture idea, I am interested in pursuing a project on the Stadtteilmütter (“district mothers”), an organization of migrant women who act as mentors to newer arrivals in their neighborhoods. Memory scholar Michael Rothberg has written about these women hosting seminars and directing documentaries about the Holocaust and Nazism. It has led me to be interested in how and why newcomers invest in memory culture, and the relationship between memory culture and citizenship.

• The migrant comedy scene in Berlin

“Humor is just truth, only faster!” declared comedian Gilda Radner. There is perhaps no better window into the zeitgeist than comedy: it reflects the fears and absurdities of the cultural/ political moment. I am interested in locating migrant comics in Berlin and evaluating the function/evolving value of humor in an era of increasing racism, uncertainty, and violence. 

I’ve come across several prominent migrant comics whose work is particularly socio-politically engaged. Enissa Amani, a refugee from Tehran, is a comedian and activist based in Frankfurt. She was the first European woman to have an international Netflix special in 2018, and she uses her platform to criticize racism and intolerance in Germany. Kinan Al is a Syrian-born stand-up whose work tackles Arab identity. Serdar Somuncu, from Turkey, is a provocative and controversial comic whose upcoming show in Berlin reportedly “dismantles everything that considers itself sacrosanct: political correctness, outrage culture, moral arrogance – and you.” Then there’s RebelComedy, a German stand-up troupe composed completely of comedians from migrant backgrounds. Their routines poke fun and respond to current events. 

These are all relatively big names in Berlin– so I’m not certain I’ll be able to interview them. I’m in the process of reaching out now. Otherwise, there are weekly (English-language) shows at Cosmic Comedy Club Berlin, Comedy Café Berlin, and other venues, where I can find sources and discern the problems of the day via satire.

What struck me from this week’s readings were the parallels between Nazism and AfD ideology. The language employed by the parties is strikingly similar. Both considered the concept of “remigration”/plans for mass deportation; both have a dangerously nationalistic approach to policy, evident in the AfD’s wish to protect the Leitkultur (leading culture); and both parties have succeeded democratically (that is, voted in) by way of scapegoating vulnerable populations (Jews or migrants mainly). The secret meeting described in the Correctiv investigation proves the hypotheses about this ideological symmetry true. The AfD convention, perhaps by mere coincidence, took place only 8 kilometres away from the site of the Wannsee Conference, the meeting where the Nazis devised the Final Solution. And the AfD’s “masterplan” for migrants echoes the Nazis’ “solution” to “the Jewish Question.” I am left to wonder how neo-Nazism survived the decades-long, state-championed campaign to instill the Holocaust in the conscience of every German, and thereby root out the bigotry that fueled it. Has memory culture failed? Or is this backlash to it? Do supporters of AfD not see the connection between anti-migrant xenophobia and anti-semitism? Or is this kind of moral doublethink simply an unavoidable habit of the human conscience?  

There is also, of course, the parallel with MAGA. The AfD’s “Vision 2026” is reminiscent of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” And the populist support for the AfD, born out of discontent with the cost of living, mirrors Trump’s appeal to working class Americans. This has led me to be curious about the relationship between German and American political leadership. How does Merz feel about Trump? And how does the AfD feel about him?   

The Correctiv piece is a great example of what investigative journalism can do at its best: catalyze a movement. I think of the more famous investigative pieces– Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which helped bring about federal food safety laws, The Boston Globe’s report on the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, which engendered accountability for the victims, and Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey’s story on Harvey Weinstein, which essentially launched #MeToo. The Correctiv’s story is perhaps less flashy than those – it’s about the exchange of ideas at a secret conference – but it made a splash nonetheless. I’m curious if there’s some commonality between these pieces, ones which have the ability to transform public outrage into action, or whether this kind of impact is simply a mix of good reporting and luck. Regardless, it is gratifying to know that journalism has this power, to illuminate wrongdoing and rouse backlash forceful enough to culminate in accountability. 

NEW YORK– NY 

On September 23rd, leaders in the humanitarian sector convened at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City for a panel discussion on conflict and disaster recovery as international funding diminishes. The session, called “Rewriting the Humanitarian Playbook,” featured International Rescue Committee executive director David Milliband, actress and humanitarian Carey Mulligan, and CEO of The LEGO Foundation Sidsel Marie Kristensen, among other speakers.

“Humanitarian needs are outpacing resources,” said Barham Salih, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in his opening address. “We are speaking today at a time when there is an unprecedented record of forcibly displaced people around the world. Nearly 25 million refugees have been displaced for 5 years or more and around 14 and a half million remain dependent on humanitarian assistance for basic needs.”

As the refugee crisis grows, donor governments are retreating. In July of 2025, President Trump officially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), exacerbating humanitarian crises worldwide. Just a few months before, the UK government announced a reduction in their foreign aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of the gross national income, the lowest level in decades.

Philanthropists are stepping up where they can. Several foundation leaders announced new commitments to action at the Clinton Global Initiative on Wednesday. 

Dr. Nahla Gadalla, CEO of the Sudanese American Medical Association, spoke about establishing a permanent humanitarian relief center in eastern Chad, which will provide essential services to over 1 million Sudanese refugees who fled the ongoing civil war. Laura Miller, CEO of the War Child Alliance, revealed a $100 million grant going toward mental health and wellbeing for 10 million children affected by conflict, to be distributed over the next decade. Direct Relief CEO Amy Weaver is launching a $40 million campaign to allocate towards maternal health in conflict and disaster zones.

Initiatives that focus on long-term recovery and delivering resources beyond food, water, and shelter, are a newer development in the humanitarian sector, where “emergency” is narrowly-defined, explained Carolyn Makinson, former executive director of the International Rescue Committee UK and the Women’s Refugee Commission. In an interview, she described early challenges she faced fundraising for maternal health. “In most places, they didn’t even have help for women with childbirth,” she said. “There was a kind of mindset in the humanitarian community that this was inappropriate for emergencies.”

At the conference, Salih encouraged the UNHCR’s partners to take the long view on recovery. “I do believe strongly that we really need to move beyond the concept of managing displacement year on end. We need to have a pathway to giving people the agency they deserve.”

But with budgetary restraints, long-term recovery might have to take the backseat. The rollback of foreign aid has problematized meeting even basic needs for survivors of war and disaster.    

“This is painful. Lives are being lost. Lives will be lost because donors don’t want to put in sufficient funding to provide basic life-saving and life-sustaining aid to people,” said Princeton lecturer Doug Mercado, who has decades of experience directing emergency operations and post-conflict recovery.

He emphasized the importance of reestablishing a disaster response agency. “I’m not talking about USAID with all of this development programming, peace-building, economic development. I’m talking about an agency that’s solely dedicated to emergency response overseas.” 

Azmat Khan’s two-part article reveals the need for independent investigative mechanisms in wartime. The military has little to no incentive to conduct thorough investigations of their own misconduct, nor publicize their wrongdoing, as this could invite public scrutiny, fuel foreign propaganda, and slow the progress to reaching military aims. And it’s clear that the U.S. military has no interest in drawing attention to its own faulty methods; they only recommended full investigations in twelve percent of credible cases. Especially concerning are the anecdotes about the blatant refusal of some officials to accept or document civilian harm (“tell the cameras to look somewhere else”). Khan’s reporting reveals that the military cannot be trusted to hold itself to account. Journalists, NGOs, and UN bodies must do the evidence collection and analysis, so that war crimes can eventually be prosecuted, victims’ families can receive explanations and restitution, and failures can become lessons learned.

Then there is the harder truth which comes to light in these articles: just because there were civilian casualties does not necessarily mean a violation of the law of armed conflict occurred. As Khan writes, the law requires two principles in an attack: 1) the military must take precautions to avoid the loss of civilian life and infrastructure and 2) the military must ensure that innocent deaths are proportional to the military advantage gained. But these requirements are all too vague. In practice, as Khan explains, what this means is that “The expected civilian toll was proportional if the officer making that determination reasonably believed it to be so, and if it did not exceed a ‘noncombatant cutoff value.’” It’s not that the military is always acting with impunity; it may be that the law is actually too permissive of civilian death, so long as it is not ambiguously “disproportionate.” This emphasis on subjectivity resonates with simulations I participated in for my humanitarian law class, taught by Danish veterans. We would do “exercises” wherein we roleplayed military commanders and had to decide whether or not to greenlight certain strikes. Especially in urban warfare, there was always the threat that civilians would be “collateral,” so we would weigh how important the military objective was against the possibility of the destruction of innocent life. It was morally miserable, even as a classroom exercise with no real consequences. I was left with the question of whether the law should be stricter/more prescriptive about what type of destruction is legal, or if subjective judgment will always be the basis of military decision-making for reasons of pragmatism. 

As several writers pointed out, the pause on the admission program for Afghan refugees is no doubt a result of the rise of the AfD party and an uptick in xenophobia. It is interesting, then, that Germany pays for some refugees’ room, food, and medical care in Pakistan. How do they garner support for this spending? And how does it compare to the cost of granting more refugees asylum, which is, as some sources voiced, a “matter of life and death”?

Warfare is evolving in a way that jeopardizes war crime accountability. Autonomous drones illustrate this concern. Autonomous machines are operated by computers far removed from the battlefield. They are often less accurate in identifying targets than human militants are. But the real problem is that autonomous weaponry largely eliminates humans from the “kill chain,” the process by which the military carries out an attack, from target identification through the actual launch. In traditional warfare, if something goes awry, the commander is ultimately responsible, as they sit at the apex of the kill chain calling the shots. With automated decisionmaking and a compressed kill chain, it will be harder to track culpability for a specific attack. Who should be responsible for an AI drone that mistakenly targets civilians? Is it the commander who relied on autonomous drones? Or the engineers whose algorithms yielded a problematic target list? Will computer scientists stand trial for a drone’s war crimes, or nobody at all?

The introduction of civilian volunteers in the Russia-Ukraine war raises further questions about accountability. Under international humanitarian law, civilians have a protected status: both parties in a conflict must take all necessary precautions to avoid the disproportionate loss of civilian life. But what happens when thousands of civilians begin to take direct part in hostilities, and in fact get paid to do so, using weaponry offered by the state? Likely, these civilians, though not enrolled in the army, are transformed into combatants, thereby losing protections afforded to them by the Geneva Conventions. When they cease to partake in these hostilities, interestingly, they again become classified as civilians. This liminal status – not quite militants, not quite civilians – will pose challenges for investigators and lawyers attempting to discern war crimes in the aftermath of a conflict. In fact, we are already seeing this in Gaza, where the IDF can claim that most civilians killed have been those with links to Hamas. At the moment of a strike, how can a military decide whether or not its victims have a protected status?

These questions about the nuances of accountability might ultimately be unimportant, as it’s clear from this week’s readings that there is widespread disregard for the rule of law in times of war. I was particularly struck by one man’s anecdote in the Ukraine documentary: despite the clear designation that only women and children were hiding in the basement of a church, Russia’s military still chose to attack it. Hundreds of innocents died as a result. And the children who are lucky enough to survive this war suffer devastation in their own way. Some Ukrainian children are forcibly transferred to Russian territory for “re-education” in their schools (which is clearly defined as an act of genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention, by the way).  And as the heartwrenching children’s literature depicts, the youngest generation in Ukraine is forced to confront death, violence, and unimaginable loss as facts of daily life. Bunkers are as commonplace as classrooms. I can’t quite imagine how pervasive the trauma is as a result of this war, how embedded it is in the culture. To rehabilitate the soul of the nation, not just its wrecked infrastructure, will be a core part of the “day after” rebuild.