German reparations

SIR – Professor David Abulafia makes a powerful case when arguing that financial reparations may not always be the most appropriate or effective way to make amends for historical wrongs suffered by aboriginal populations in countries such as Canada (Comment, May 19).

However, from my experience as honorary academic adviser to my fellow Holocaust survivors in several years of meetings with German ambassadors and high officials, I do not agree with his assertion that the German government “offered a willingness to face the sheer awfulness of what its leaders had done between 1933 and 1945”.

Beneath the velvet glove of PR, we experienced an iron fist of denial even that the slave labour imposed on them in Auschwitz and other camps had been illegal.

Dr Michael Pinto-duschinsky Oxford