Michael is former politics fellow of Merton College and Pembroke College, Oxford and Brunel University, advisor to the policy planning staff of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, honorary academic advisor to Claims for Jewish Slave Labour Compensation and survivor of four camps and ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
In September 1952, West German and Israeli negotiators made an agreement for West Germany to provide and for Israel to accept financial and material aid as a post-Holocaust action. Following intense, sometimes violent controversy, the Knesset voted only by the narrow margin of 61 votes to 50 to accept the deal. In her talk to the Israel Studies Seminar of 26 October 2021, Dr Kathrin Bachleiter, author of Collective Memory in International Relations [Oxford University Press, 2021], analysed the pragmatic interests of both sides.
While Israel’s severe weaknesses in the early years of the new state in the late 40s and early 50s as well as its lack of friends among major governments the history of the postwar period arguably justified its acceptance of West German financial aid, Michael will stress the high price paid by Holocaust victims for Chancellor Adenauer’s carefully qualified wording concerning German responsibility. To this day, Germany does not recognise that slave labour in Auschwitz and elsewhere was illegal.
He also is critical of at least part of the Israeli record concerning Holocaust victims.
Approaching the history from the viewpoint of his fellow Holocaust survivors, Michael recognises the sincerity of some in Germany but is critical of the country’s general reputation for having come to terms with its past. His work has involved direct contacts over a long period with diplomatic actors and scholars. He has also had a role in negotiations.