Commentary
A different take on the Holocaust
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jun 26, 2009, 00:26

Norman Finkelstein is not a wild-eyed Holocaust denier. In fact, his parents were both survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the camps, his father from Auschwitz, his mother from Majdanek.

A feisty intellectual raised in Brooklyn and expertly trained in political science at Princeton and in Paris, Norman Finkelstein published his book The Holocaust Industry – Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering in 2000, a second paperback edition in 2003, all of which created a “a firestorm” in Europe and little but tsuris in America.

At the time of its writing, in the late ’90s, Finkelstein was a professor of Political Science at Hunter College in New York City. He taught too at my alma mater, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers University, most recently DePaul University in Chicago, from which he resigned when he was denied tenure in 2007, most notably through the efforts of the uncritical Holocaust booster, Alan Dershowitz.

Apart from the Wiki profile linked above, an interview by Victor Frolke, ironically titled There’s No Business Like Shoah Business, Shoah meaning “calamity” in Hebrew, a shorthand for the Holocaust, the title bearing its own kind of Jewish wit, not unlike Finkelstein’s, and providing a good inside view of the author’s wit, erudition, and convictions about the Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein has accused as well Eli Wiesel and Jewish leaders worldwide, including American Jewish elites, of a vast shakedown of dollars from European countries and corporations, mainly Germany, Switzerland and Poland, in the name of “needy Holocaust survivors” when in fact the monies have gone largely to Holocaust programs, memorials, studies, literature, museums, and, in general “the Jewish community.”

Finkelstein also criticized Wiesel for taking $25,000 plus a limousine for each of his lectures (given with a mystically proprietary pain) on the Holocaust, forgetting, perhaps, the Gypsies had their own German genocide in relatively the same percentage for their number. Wiesel comes off vaguely like America’s self-appointed Sheriff Rudy Giuliani, who made millions in speaking engagements on 9/11, multi-millions on his own various companies post 9/11. This while he pushed first responders to clean up Ground Zero in eight months not the allotted two and a half years, and then walked away when those same first responders became fatally ill and started dying off. I say this to level the religious-political playing field here.

I add that another Italian-American, Senator Al D’Amato, made the Holocaust his cause as his polling numbers were sagging, helping to bully these same European nations and corporations into excessive and misdirected Holocaust survivors’ reparations. Of course, America paid little to nothing for its failures to accept a limited number of survivors, and turned away others.

Together Finkelstein tells us these various Holocaust causes form more than a “cottage industry,” but a full-fledged promotion industry, fueled by an ongoing ideology of “Holocaust correctness” that serves “certain class and political interests.” Ironically, instead of helping the Jewish cause, Finkelstein argues that the Holocaust Industry has become “the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe,” spreading an image of greedy Jews. For his tough-mindedness, a genetic gift from his parents, Finkelstein was labeled alternately “poisonous . . . a disgusting self-hating Jew . . . something you find under a rock.” As Jesus, also a Jew, would say, “Let he who is not guilty cast the first stone.”

Finkelstein, who is swift and astute man by nature, points out in the Frolke interview that the New York Times in its Sunday Book Review reserved a full page “to compare [his] book to ‘The Protocol of the Elders of Zion,’ a notorious anti-Semitic work, and called its author ‘indecent,’ ‘juvenile,’ ‘self-righteous,’ ‘arrogant’ and ‘stupid.” Is that all the news that’s fit to print or is it just a major media organization serving the Holocaust Industry?

“I’ve looked it up; this review is worse than the one of Mein Kampf,” Finkelstein says, in his high-pitched voice, full of moral indignation. Finkelstein’s theory that the memory of the Nazi Holocaust is being abused for political, moral and financial blackmail has had some considerable impact. Not surprisingly, he has received death threats from fanatics within the Jewish community and heard Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, say, “Mr. Finkelstein is full of shit” on the nightly television news in Germany. So much for respecting a fellow Jew’s dissenting opinion.

Historically, Finkelstein points out that the frequent Holocaust mention arrived in the US only after the Six Day War in 1967, that is when Israel was seen as a winner not a victim, and able to protect American interests in the Middle East. It grew exponentially in both places, becoming “an ideological weapon in the Palestinian conflict.” He points out, ironically, that his parents, being real Holocaust victims, used the specter of the Holocaust to defend Palestinian rights. Finkelstein mentions, too, in the second part of his book that the Nazi Holocaust “is ideologically recast to serve certain political ends.” And so, his aim is to establish “a distinction between Holocaust scholarship and Holocaust literature.”

This latter literature is the one to which Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners belongs, according to Finkelstein, because it has two dogmas at its core: one, “the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the gentiles’ [purportedly] eternal irrational hatred of the Jews.” For the author this becomes “a very small step from ‘Holocaust framework’ to ‘Holocaust conspiracy.’” He questions who profits from “a body of literature with no historical merit.” In other words, “it only exists to serve certain political and ideological goals . . . It’s called the sociology of ideas.”

When questioned if the success of Goldhagen’s book was due in some part to “an almost masochistic feeling of guilt in certain parts of Europe,” Finkelstein’s response is “not probable. And besides, the book was a bestseller in the US, too, and America had nothing to do with the Holocaust.” Finkelstein asks if the book would have been equally successful titled Hitler’s Unwilling Executioners. He doesn’t think so. Its thesis -- that the gentiles were all killers waiting for the leader’s signal -- “was ideologically convenient. It is the same thing the American writer Cynthia Ozick said after the 1973 War [when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel]: ‘Why does everybody hate Israel? Simple [stock] answer: All the world wants to wipe out the Jews.’”

Asked if he was a conspiracy theorist, Finkelstein answered “I’m not sure why you’re invoking the conspiracy theory. Look, whenever you show patterns, whenever you go beyond the spontaneous actions of people, you hear conspiracy theory! I think that there’s more to history than just the spontaneous actions of people.”

Asked how Finkelstein first conceived the book, he responded, “This book is a result of 15 years of reflection. While I was working to get financial compensation for my mother, I listed on a piece of paper around 60 things that really bothered me about the Holocaust business. One of these was the whole notion of ‘survivors.’ In the early days, I knew that a lot of Jews were stretching it a bit in order to be considered as ‘survivors’ under the German reparation laws. If you were in the Soviet Union during the war, you weren’t eligible. So I knew people had falsified their papers -- which was fairly easy because there was no way to prove it. The only numbers there were, were from Auschwitz.

“So for a piece I did about the reparations issue, I looked in the old agreements, from the ’50s, the Luxembourg Agreements. The German government paid in all about $50 billion. And, in addition, it gave $10 million a year between 1953 and 1965 to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany -- a billion dollars in current values. The Germans said that only 15 percent of this money went to the victims. The large chunk of the rest of it, according to Ronald Zweig, an expert on the subject, went to Jewish communities in the Arab world, such as Iraq, and institutions, such as Yad Vashem in Israel.

“You know why they didn’t give everything to the survivors? That’s what is so amusing. They said there weren’t any victims anymore. All their needs had been met. So the irony is, after misappropriating the money in the ’50s because there weren’t any more victims, now they claim all these needy Holocaust victims have languished in poverty all these years, because the Germans gave them no money. I find that funny.”

When Victor Frolke asks Finkelstein, “Your mother received $3,500 from the German government right after the war. What happened?”

“In the ’50s my mother, a mathematician who worked for Chase Manhattan Bank, was diagnosed by a doctor -- I believe it was a Jewish doctor -- as having extreme hysteria, but this was not from her experiences in Majdanek, she was told, but from her difficulty with adjusting in the U.S. -- which is, of course, a filthy diagnosis. The Claims Conference was exactly designed to pay out money to people like my mother, who were either unfairly or inadequately compensated by the initial reparations. Cases like hers were being corrected by giving a lump sum. But she didn’t get a penny. Only so-called outstanding Jewish leaders and rabbis got anything.

“My father got injured in Auschwitz and was given a lifetime pension by the Germans. They delivered the money promptly and efficiently. I still remember the blue envelopes from Trier. My father had Alzheimer’s near the end of his life and I was his guardian. Every three months I had to go to the German consulate to pick up his checks and to prove that he was still alive. At the end of his life it came down to $600 a month. All in all, $250,000 during his lifetime.

“All the survivors I talk to -- the Finkelstein residence quickly became known as CCBC, Claims Conference Buster Central -- say the same thing: We want the money that was distributed by the German government; we don’t want the money given to the Jewish organizations. I think that is one of the most devastating insights on the Holocaust industry -- that the victims of Nazi persecution trust the German government more than they do the Jewish organizations.”

When Finkelstein is asked about Jewish organizations claiming too much money, and complaining that people like his mother didn’t get enough, he responds “Some people misinterpret my book as saying I’m against compensation. Oh no, I’m not! I’m all for compensation. But it should only go to the real victims, and not to pseudo victims or to Jewish communities and organizations.”

When asked if he, Finkelstein, considers himself a second generation Holocaust victim, he answers firmly: “I think such a concept is repulsive. That’s simply an effort to milk the Holocaust for another generation. If I had ever said that to my mother, she would have given me a good smack in the face! And rightfully so!”

Finkelstein’s personal morality is exemplary. And I think that’s part of the resentment towards him: that his critics don’t live up to his standards. Frolke suggests Finkelstein “believes only camp survivors are real Holocaust survivors.” Frolke asks “What about Jews who fled to the Soviet Union, came back and had nothing -- why not call them ‘Holocaust survivors’ as well?”

“Fine, then we should call Palestinians ‘Holocaust survivors.’ If you make the definition so elastic, so flexible that it includes refugees, then you should count them all.”

“That wouldn’t be fair to the real survivors,” Frolke comments.

“It’s not a question of fair. You can’t argue on the one hand that the Holocaust is fraught with moral meaning, and then trivialize the term ‘Holocaust survivor’ by including everyone. There is a difference whether you spent the war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, like Mr. Kissinger, or you spent it in Auschwitz . . . Since Hitler targeted all of world Jewry, Israel Singer says, anybody who has survived is a Holocaust survivor. But I would say, what about all the Vietnamese people who suffered from the politics of Mr. Kissinger? Are they Holocaust survivors? No, no, we can’t call them that. Do you think the Vietnamese received one nickel of compensation? Forget it. The U.S. won’t even officially apologize.”

When Finkelstein asserts that the “Holocaust Industry” has become an even bigger Holocaust denier than the usual Holocaust deniers, Frolke wonders, “How so?”

Finkelstein responds that “The official number of Holocaust survivors the Israeli government now gives is a million. Or 960,000, to be exact. At the same time Jewish organizations have been claiming, since the early ’90s, that 10,000 die each month. So that would mean that in 1990 there were 2 million survivors left. In 1990, not more that a quarter could be alive from World War II. That means 8 million in May 1945. Well, there were fewer than 8 million Jews in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. In other words, if these numbers are correct, the Holocaust didn’t happen. As my mother used to say, if everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?”

When reminded that in 1998, when Swiss banks restituted $1.25 billion to Jewish organizations for dormant Jewish accounts, Finkelstein is asked if they get should get their money back. He responds, “The case should have been handled by the international Claims Resolution Tribunal, instead of by the World Jewish Restitution Organization. They could have processed the claims and given out the money to those who deserve it.

“By the way, nobody noticed one of the most interesting revelations in the book: that banks in the U.S. also sit on dormant Jewish accounts from the war. It’s not even my own finding. It’s on Page 2 of the Volcker Report [the $500 million audit report on Switzerland that came out in 1999]. It amounts to $6 million, of which only $500,000 is going to be paid. In other words, the American record is worse than the Swiss! That’s what Seymour Rubin, American delegate during the negotiations, testified to the House Banking Committee. Not a word reported anywhere. Not a word.” When asked what American banks were involved, Finkelstein answered, “Nobody knows. We have to do a $500 million research report just like the Swiss to find out. We might never. We would be on a slow boat to Munich.”

When Frolke says to Finkelstein, “you are totally opposed to the claims that are now being laid on property owned by the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland. Your family is from Poland. You could get some money back after all.” Finkelstein answers, “No! It never occurred to us. We don’t want the money. My mother’s father owned a little tobacco store, my father’s father owned a little lumber mill. Jewish organizations are claiming back my grandparents’ property without asking our permission. We never gave our sanction! It’s grave robbery!

“I say: Enough. The American Jewish community is rich enough. It doesn’t need to evict Polish peasants from their land, Polish tenants from their homes and Polish sick from the hospitals for more money. They have plenty of money. Mr. Bronfman just sold Seagram for $27 billion. That’s plenty. You don’t have to impoverish Polish people even more.”

When asked, “What if your grandparents’ lumber mill is owned not by a poor Polish family but by a wealthy former Communist apparatchik? Still not interested? Finkelstein answers, “That wouldn’t make any difference.”

When asked, “Have you ever been to Auschwitz?,” Finkelstein answers, “No. I’ve lived with the Holocaust for 40 years. That’s enough. I don’t need to have more of it. I’m not like one of those second-generation Holocaust victims that go lie in a gas oven.” And so, we’ll leave Finkelstein’s story at that for now . . .

There’s much more to know, to find out, about the Holocaust from this amazing man, Norman Finkelstein. I offer this article up as a belated review. It’s never too late to understand, to change your opinion about, what you thought was absolute truth and is not. Give Norman a look. You’ll never look at the Holocaust the same way again.