The only thing that makes Credit Suisse special is how hard it tried to cover up its guilt. In general, you can be a Nazi collaborator and a Nazi profiteer and live a happy, powerful, profitable life thereafter. So can your children, and so can all of the managers of your company.

It feels like this is a lot of manufactured fury about Credit Suisse, when in fact it’s so deeply systemic that most people have not thought it worth the cover up. You just have to shut up and move on — you won’t be bothered. And even if, someday, you will be bothered, you’ll commission a historian, paid with money from your company or family or foundation, and you’ll release their findings together, and you’ll do a big celebration of how you’ve overcome your past. Then you can move on again like nothing happened.

I would have a difficult time picking an example, as you have the Aufarbeitung (“reprocessing”) work of really almost any German company to choose from. Professors are paid to go into the archives, and then they release a book at a press conference together with the leaders of the company and talk about how this historical responsibility is so important. It’s all tears and balloons: “Look at us. We’re so great. We did it.” We could be talking about nearly any company in the German automobile industry or really any chemical or steel company. Just about all the biggest companies in Germany have followed this pattern, without ever having to do the work that Credit Suisse put in for a cover-up.

I was invited as a guest by the Swiss delegation to the UN to celebrate the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it was set up by the Swiss delegation. It did a beautiful job celebrating something deeply important, and the ambassador himself was generous and kind. I asked him how much harder these Credit Suisse revelations have made his job.

The answer was very surprising in its honesty. He said Switzerland’s diplomacy is separate from Switzerland’s business: one has nothing to do with the other. I have nothing but respect for Switzerland’s diplomats. But when it comes down to who has power in Switzerland, it’s not the diplomats, it’s the business sector.

This fits well with the strange idea that politics and business don’t have anything to do with each other. Germany has become world famous for dealing with its history; its way of dealing with its history I view deeply critically. Germany is pretending to have overcome its history, while at the same time never having given back the profits. The €250 billion that Zabludoff mentions has blossomed today into companies and assets in the realm of between €300 billion and €1 trillion in the German economy. And this money funds everything. It’s everywhere.

It cannot be overstated: It funds civic life. It funds sports. It funds art. It funds culture. It funds schools. It funds civil society. It funds hospitals. It funds whatever. But it also funds millions each year in politics.

It is at the core of Germany’s inability to face the fascism that has risen here. People want to talk about parallels to the Nazi times, but they aren’t parallels — they are continuity. We’re today looking at a major political party leading the polls in Germany, the Christian Democrats (CDU), whose history includes postwar Nazis fighting denazification and trying to ensure that denazification ended before it could do any damage to the Nazis who were still around. You have the Social Democrats (SPD), who in the 1960s had Nazis inside their party who worked in the judicial branch to ensure laws that would grant amnesty to Nazis throughout the German system.

Denazification itself was supposed to last fifty years. It lasted at most six, and the process of denazification during those six years was a shadow of what it was supposed to be.

Denazification was a joke. Nazis’ money and wealth wasn’t expropriated. Now Nazi profiteers and heirs have started funneling money into building up the extreme right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). What surprised me was how ready the German populace was to accept this rising AfD. But Germany never learned lessons from the anti-Nazis in the 1920s and ’30s.

Exactly. The worst part is that when Friedrich Merz brings the Nazis into the cooperation at the legislative level, when he gives them power, when he shows the world that we can work with them, and then someone does the courageous thing and calls Friedrich Merz a Nazi for doing it — when they get criticized for calling Merz a Nazi, they don’t have the courage of their convictions to stick with it. [Anti-Nazi writer and journalist] Kurt Tucholsky would be spinning in his grave watching Karl Lauterbach walk back his statement that Friedrich Merz is a Nazi on the eightieth anniversary of Auschwitz liberation. Once you’ve called him a Nazi for being a Nazi, you don’t walk it back because you made the Nazi sad. You stick to your position. But that’s not what Germans do. And we’re never going to beat the Nazis that way.

The AfD has been trying to polarize Jews against migration, mostly of Muslims, [for a long time]. This has long been a strategy. The AfD talks about “imported antisemitism.” In my first years in Germany, my closest friends were from countries that Germany accuses of being the sources of imported antisemitism. I have noticed German antisemitism being a significantly more dangerous entity than imported antisemitism.

What I think is vital, when Germans talk about imported antisemitism, is to talk about the year 1941 and the decision by Adolf Hitler to support Iraqi independence against British colonialism, in a German colonial move to gain Iraqi resources and undermine British and French wartime maneuvers. Hitler’s decision to support Iraq led to Nazi propaganda being translated into Arabic and widely dispersed through mass amounts of money and printing presses into organizations throughout the Middle East, through Iraq, through the Muslim Brotherhood.

This was the first time in Arabic history that exterminationist antisemitism entered the Arabic language. There had been antisemitism. I’m not going to deny that, but the idea of the Jews as a race that needed to be exterminated was something the Germans translated into Arabic and spread widely. When we talk about imported antisemitism from that space, it’s only because of what Germany brought there in the 1940s. It created a whole new kind of antisemitism.

When Julius Streicher was in the dock in the Nuremberg trials, he declared that the model for antisemitism was Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies.” The antisemitism in that is just astounding. Antisemitism has been sitting deep in German culture for over five hundred years; it didn’t need to be imported.

We demand nothing. What we say is that if you don’t return the Nazi money, then you have to stop pretending you overcame the Nazis. But Germany’s positioning on the world stage, pretending to have overcome history, prevents the possibility of taking that first step. The current hypocrisy is crippling.