The Holocaust Industry
by Norman Finkelstein
Purchase this book here (UK) or here for US and Rest of the World
The BBC wrote on their website:
Jewish American historian Norman Finkelstein argues in his explosive new book,
"The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering"
that Holocaust remembrance has been exploited by the Jewish establishment.
In his book he contends that a greater threat to the memory of the Holocaust
than Holocaust deniers is what he calls 'The Holocaust Industry'.
He accuses those who exploit the Holocaust of telling lies and of naked greed.
He argues that the ruthless industrialisation of the Holocaust has encouraged
the rebirth of anti-semitism in Europe and the United States.
The son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps, he says, "I
do care about the memory of my family's persecution. The current campaign of
the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of "needy
Holocaust victims" has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a
Monte Carlo casino."
Neither Finkelstein's book nor this website in any way excuses the actions of
the Nazis, who (after being handed power by the German corporate capitalists in
1933) were eventually responsible for one of the greatest horrors ever to
afflict Europe (the Second World War, as a consequence of which sixty million
people died, including twenty million Russians). Awareness of the depravity
exhibited by those who ran the Nazi state and the Nazi extermination campaigns
should be part of any person's education, and should never be forgotten
(although this should not be used as an excuse to ignore other campaigns of
genocide against non-Jewish peoples — equally deserving of the term
"holocaust").
But Finkelstein makes clear that the Holocaust Industry is not about making
sure that Nazi depravity is not forgotten — it is about extorting huge sums of
money from Switzerland, Germany and any other country which can be tarred with
the Nazi brush.
Modern-day Germany has already atoned for the sins of the Nazi era, both
morally and financially. Many times since the war (and even today) Germany's
leaders have expressed their profound regret at the actions of the Nazis, and
have accepted collective responsibility for what happened. As Finkelstein
says, "In the early 1950s, Germany entered into negotiations with Jewish
institutions and signed indemnification agreements. It has paid out to date
some $60bn."
Although we may rightly feel contempt for the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s
who supported Hitler, most of them are now dead. Germans born after the war
(apart from a few young Nazi sympathizers) think very differently. Germany no
longer has any reason to abase itself before the denunciation of its Nazi
past. Especially not when that denunciation comes from those who appear to be
motivated primarily by a desire for money.
The following two extracts from Norman Finkelstein's book were first published
in The Guardian (London), Section G2, on July 12th and 13th, 2000.
Norman Finkelstein has caused a storm on both sides of the Atlantic and it is
not hard to see why: he says the Holocaust has been exploited to extort cash,
that most 'survivors' are bogus and that too much money is spent commemorating
the Nazi genocide. In the first of two exclusive extracts, he argues that it's
time to shut down 'the holocaust industry'.
The Business of DeathIn the second extract from his controversial new book,
Norman Finkelstein argues that the campaign to reclaim Jewish assets from Swiss
banks smacks of hypocrisy and double standards.
Swiss Toll
It's not only the hypocrisy of those profiting from the Holocaust industry —
the hypocrisy of the United States in this affair stinks to high heaven.
Finkelstein writes:
Like Switzerland, the US denied entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism before
and during the second world war. Yet the US government hasn't seen fit to
compensate them. And, although dwarfed in size and resources by the US,
Switzerland admitted just as many Jewish refugees as America (approximately
20,000) during the Nazi Holocaust. ...
Alongside Switzerland, the committee observed, the US was also a primary safe
haven for transferable Jewish assets in Europe. The question is, what happened
to the dormant Holocaust-era accounts in American banks? ...
In his House testimony [Professor Seymour] Rubin stated that, after a most
superficial and rudimentary audit of banks in just New York, the value of these
accounts was put at $6m. Jewish organisations requested this sum for "needy
survivors" from Congress ... [but the US] "took only very limited measures to
identify heirless assets in the United States, and made available a mere
$500,000, in contrast to the $32m acknowledged by Swiss banks even prior to the
Volcker inquiry." In other words, the US record is much worse than the Swiss
record.
And, as Finkelstein points out, the US refuses even to consider the question of
compensation to African-Americans for having enslaved their ancestors, reduced
them and their descendants to poverty and misery, and denied black Americans
their human rights during most of the history of the US.
And if we're talking genocide, let's not forget the genocide perpetrated by the
US against the original inhabitants of the land (almost all of the continental
US) seized by the US government. How many indigenous American Indian families
broken and destroyed? How many millions slaughtered? ... But will the US
government consider compensation for survivors of this genocide? No.
In August 1944 Dwight D. Eisenhower (who in the early 1960s ordered the
assassination of Patrice Lamumba) and Henry C. Morgenthau came up with the
Morgenthau Plan to inflict collective punishment upon the German people
following the end of the Second World War. This was, basically, a plan to
starve millions of Germans, mostly citizens, to death (reminiscent of the plan
that the Nazis had for Ukrainians and Russians). Although the plan was
officially cancelled, it was in fact implemented.
In March 1946 U.S. Senator Langer said in the Senate:
"[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fanatical plot to
destroy the German people by visiting on them a punishment in kind for the
atrocities of their leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot
[Eisenhower and Morgenthau] permitted the whole world situation to get out ...
out of hand ... but their determination to destroy the German people and the
German Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral principles ...
has become a world scandal. ... We have all seen the grim pictures of piled-up
bodies uncovered by the American and British armies, and our hearts have been
wrung with pity at the sight of such emaciation — reducing adults and even
little children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter horror, we discover
that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions even more widely
... among our former enemies." — Quoted in James Bacque's Crimes and Mercies,
p.39.
The result of the Morgenthau plan was that in fact millions of Germans, mostly
civilians, died during 1945-1950 as a result of starvation and disease. (It is
not irrelevant to point out that Morgenthau was himself Jewish.) This was a
genocidal action by the British and the American governments. But will the US
government consider compensation for survivors of this genocide? No.
Why not? Because (in the minds of the perpetrators) genocide is evil only when
done by another.
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