Reparations, claims Regula Ludi, have their origins in the last years of the Second World War when, in different countries, survivors of Nazi atrocities demanded financial compensation for the suffering they had endured. Ludi's book begins with a short reflection on the semantic shift in the modern concept of ‘reparations’, from the payment of war damages from one sovereign state to another to the compensation of individuals for their suffering of human rights abuses. Other than that, Ludi remains vague about the longue durée history and culture of reparations. Surely, reparations have a much longer history, going back at least to ancient times when Rome forced the payment of high financial damages on Carthage after the First and Second Punic Wars. Even more powerful examples of reparations spring to mind in modern European history. For instance, after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/1871, the newly united German Empire imposed massive reparations of 5 billion gold francs on a defeated France. Above all, after the First World War, in the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies condemned Germany to pay huge reparations, set in excess of a 100 billion gold marks by the 1921 Inter-Allied Reparations Commission, for the damages and suffering caused to the Allies during the war. These reparations became a hotly contested political issue in Germany and around the world. Until recently, there was a widespread view that it was the massive reparations, seen as a gross injustice by most Germans, that led to the dismantling of the political fabric of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent rise of the Nazis.

This long-term perspective would have provided a crucial background for Ludi's study and strengthened her claim that in the wake of the Second World War, the concept of reparations underwent a transformation from war damages to individual compensation for suffering inflicted during brutal human rights abuses. ‘Reparations’ for her are not just legal or political interventions, ‘but must be conceptualized as a complex interplay of practice and discourse that determines, transforms, and reproduces the meaning of redress and the historically contingent ideas of the underlying wrongs’ (p. 10). Her book comprises three case studies of post-war states that paid out reparations to survivors of Nazi terror. France was the first European state to pay out reparations to selected survivors of Nazi repression. Switzerland paid out moneys to some survivors to cover up its ambiguous role during the war. Ludi links these two relatively unfamiliar cases with the well-known and thoroughly researched West German reparations to selected groups of survivors of Nazi persecution. Crucially, reparations were not exclusively paid out to Jewish survivors, but not all forms of suffering under Nazi persecution were recognised, such as the repression of gay men in concentration camps or the fate of most camp prisoners arrested as ‘anti-social elements’. Ludi's work raises some significant questions on how post-war European states dealt with the aftermath of the Second World War. Victimhood and individual suffering became important political and moral concepts, alongside the figure of the survivor whose sufferings were officially recognised by the state.

Occasionally, in some of the book's best and most engaging passages, Ludi leaves the administrative level and discusses the fates and circumstances of survivors who were in many ways the main actors in this significant episode of twentieth-century history. There can be no doubt that Ludi has done some solid research in French, Swiss, German, British and American archives. However, her prose is not always easy to follow, maybe the result of Ludi's laudable aim to bring some analytical order to the very complex post-war French, Swiss and West German dealings with the reparations issue.