Annette Strauch
Researcher
3 Dec 2011

The money has been accepted now. -
I have discussed this with a few people yesterday, and we have all come to more or less the same conclusion that it is not the money that's the problem here. However, it is not right in my view that the benefactor, a Nazi, is given an elevated status by being associated with a respectable institution in Wales. We are at risk of validating the activities of these collaborators by giving them status. We still need to be critical. I therefore agree with the Heritage Minister. Perhaps the library should have liked to think about how people like me from abroad would feel about this decision. I am very pro Wales, pro Welsh, speak the Welsh language fluently and try to promote Wales wherever I can.
The National Library of Wales is trying to make money in every way (incl. weddings - but that is another subject), esp. now in a time of economic hardship in Wales and the UK as a whole. This is how it comes across to the outsider. It does not seem to matter where the money comes from?
If you come from Germany you see it differently perhaps. I am disappointed. Since I was a child I had to deal with the German history. It was a long and painful process. Most of us have learnt tolerance and to deal with the past. We do not think about the war and move on. I hear more about WWII in the UK, in the media here than in Germany nowadays. It is often taken very lightly over here.
I try to see it from a Welsh view where Owain Glyndŵr still means a lot to many - and he in the past, too. It would be good to move on and live in the 21st century having learnt some lessons, too. In any case I would never accept money from an enemy but that is a personal opinion.

[Reply]

Adrian Beney
Partner
More Partnership
2 Dec 2011

Lord Woolf wrote 188 pages on the LSE's gift from Gaddafi. The Welsh Executive seems ignorant of the law (trustees need to have very good reasons for turning down gifts) and arrogant and ignorant about the genuine difficulties of the ethics of these situations.

If the donor had left this bequest with a condition that his war record had to be exonerated, or airbrushed, then of course this would have been unacceptable. But the man is dead, and his papers, records and cash will do good things.

Well done the National Library of Wales for consulting, getting legal opinion, and accepting the gift.

In my blog at http://bit.ly/LSEWoolf I suggested ethics come first, PR second. I don't know how well the NLW has planned the PR fallout, but they seem to have got the ethics process right.

[Reply]

Geoff Roberts
Catalyst
2 Dec 2011

History is written by the winners. And here we have the winners suggesting that the losers have no role to play in objective analysis of the past.
Nazism was abhorrent to me but to refuse a donation because of someone's past is worrying. Surely we are 'big' enough to accept this bequest and let people judge the past for themselves?

[Reply]