The Holocaust Industry (13 page)

with the United States in the Cold War, Germany was quickly rehabilitated and the Nazi holocaust

forgotten. Nonetheless, in the early 1950s Germany entered into negotiations with Jewish institutions

and signed indemnification agreements. With little if any external pressure, it has paid out to date

some $60 billion.

Compare first the American record. Some 4 - 5 million men, women and children died as a result of

the US wars in Indochina. After the American withdrawal, a historian recalls, Vietnam desperately

needed aid. "In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres

of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were an estimated

200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and one million widows; all six of the

industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as were provincial and district towns, and 4,000

out of 5,800 agricultural communes." Refusing, however, to pay any reparations, President Carter

explained that "the destruction was mutual.» Declaring that he saw no need for "any apologies,

certainly, for the war itself," President Clinton's Defense Secretary, William Cohen, similarly opined:

"Both nations were scarred by this. They have their scars from the war. We certainly have ours."
7

The German government sought to compensate Jewish victims with three different agreements signed

in 1952. Individual claimants received payments according to the terms of the Law on Indemnification

(
Bundesentschädigungsgesetz
). A separate agreement with Israel subsidized the absorption and

rehabilitation of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees. The German government also negotiated

at the same time a financial settlement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against

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Germany, an umbrella of all major Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee,

American Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith, the Joint Distribution Committee, and so forth. The Claims

Conference was supposed to use the monies, $10 million annually for twelve years, or about a billion

dollars in current values, for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who had fallen through the cracks in

the compensation process.
8
My mother was a case in point. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto,

Majdanek concentration camp and slave labor camps at Czestochowa and Skarszysko Kamiena, she

received only $3,500 in compensation from the German government. Other Jewish victims (and many

who in fact were not victims), however, received lifetime pensions from Germany eventually totaling

hundreds of thousands of dollars. The monies given to the Claims Conference were earmarked for

those Jewish victims who had received only minimal compensation.

Indeed, the German government sought to make explicit in the agreement with the Claims Conference

that the monies would go solely to Jewish survivors, strictly defined, who had been unfairly or

inadequately compensated by German courts. The Conference expressed outrage that its good faith

was doubted. After reaching agreement, the Conference issued a press release underlining that the

monies would be used for "Jewish persecutees of the Nazi regime for whom the existing and proposed

legislation cannot provide a remedy." The final accord called on the Conference to use the monies "for

the relief, rehabilitation and resettlement of Jewish victims."

The Claims Conference promptly annulled the agreement. In a flagrant breach of its letter and spirit,

the Conference earmarked the monies not for the rehabilitation of Jewish victims but rather for the

rehabilitation of Jewish
communities.
Indeed, a guiding principle of the Claims Conference prohibited

use of monies for «direct allocations to individuals." In a classic instance of looking after one's own,

however, the Conference provided exemptions for two categories of victims: rabbis and "outstanding

Jewish leaders" received individual payments. The constituent organizations of the Claims Conference

used the bulk of the monies to finance various pet projects. Whatever benefits (if any) the actual

Jewish victims received were indirect or incidental.
9
Large sums were circuitously channeled to

Jewish communities in the Arab world and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe.
10

They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in

Holocaust studies, as well as a Yad Vashem showboat pensioning "righteous Gentiles."

More recently, the Claims Conference sought to appropriate for itself denationalized Jewish properties

in the former East Germany worth hundreds of millions of dollars that rightfully belonged to living

Jewish heirs. As the Conference came under attack by defrauded Jews for this and other abuses, Rabbi

Arthur Hertzberg cast a plague on both sides, sneering that "it's not about justice, it's a fight for

money."
11
When Germans or Swiss refuse to pay compensation, the heavens cannot contain the

righteous indignation of organized American Jewry. But when Jewish elites rob Jewish survivors, no

ethical issues arise: it's just about money.

Although my late mother received only $3,500 in compensation, others involved in the reparations

process have made out quite well.

The reported annual salary of Saul Kagan, long-time Executive Secretary of the Claims Conference, is

$105,000. Between stints at the Conference, Kagan was convicted of 33 counts of willfully

misapplying funds and credit while heading a New York bank. (The conviction was overturned only

after multiple appeals.) Alfonse D'Amato, the ex-Senator from New York, mediates Holocaust

lawsuits against German and Austrian banks for $350 per hour plus expenses. For the first 6 months of

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his labors, he took in $103,000. Earlier Wiesel publicly praised D'Amato for his "sensitivity to Jewish

suffering." Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State under President Bush, earns an annual salary of

$300,000 as chair of the International Commission On Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims. "Whatever

he's being paid," Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress opined, "it is an absolute bargain."

Kagan rings up in 12 days, Eagleburger in 4 days, and D'Amato in 10 hours what my mother received

for suffering six years of Nazi persecution.
12

The award for most enterprising Holocaust huckster, however, must surely go to Kenneth Bialkin. For

decades a prominent US Jewish leader, he headed the ADL and chaired the Conference of Presidents

of Major American Jewish Organizations. Currently, Bialkin represents the Generali insurance

company
against
the Eagleburger Commission for a reported "high sum of money."
13

In recent years, the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket. Purporting to

represent all of world Jewry, living and dead, it is laying claim to Holocaust-era Jewish assets

throughout Europe. Fittingly dubbed the "last chapter of The Holocaust," this double shakedown of

European countries as well as legitimate Jewish claimants first targeted Switzerland. I will first review

the allegations against the Swiss. I will then turn to the evidence, demonstrating that many of the

charges were not only based on deceit but apply even more accurately to those issuing them than to

their targets.

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Switzerland's president formally

apologized in May 1995 for denying Jews refuge during the Nazi holocaust.
14
About the same time,

discussion reopened on the long-simmering question of Jewish assets deposited in Swiss accounts

before and during the war. In a widely reported story, an Israeli journalist cited a document —

misread, as it turned out — proving that Swiss banks still held Holocaust-era Jewish accounts worth

billions of dollars.
15

The World Jewish Congress, a moribund organization until its campaign denouncing Kurt Waldheim

as a war criminal, leapt at this new opportunity to flex its muscle. Early on it was understood that

Switzerland was easy prey. Few would sympathize with rich Swiss bankers as against "needy

Holocaust survivors." But more importantly, Swiss banks were highly vulnerable to economic

pressures from the United States.
16

In late 1995, Edgar Bronfman, president of the WJC and the son of a Jewish Claims Conference

official, and Rabbi Israel Singer, the secretary-general of the WJC and a real estate tycoon, met with

the Swiss bankers.
17
Bronfman, heir to the Seagram liquor fortune (his personal wealth is estimated

at $3 billion), would later modestly inform the Senate Banking Committee that he spoke "on behalf of

the Jewish people» as well as "the 6 million, those who cannot speak for themselves."
18
The Swiss

bankers declared that they could locate only 775 unclaimed dormant accounts, worth a total of $32

million. They offered this sum as a basis for negotiations with the WJC, which refused it as

inadequate. In December 1995, Bronfman teamed up with Senator D'Amato. His poll ratings at a nadir

and a Senate race not far off, D'Amato savored this occasion to boost his standing in the Jewish

community, with its crucial votes and wealthy political donors. Before the Swiss were finally brought

to their knees, the WJC, working with the gamut of Holocaust institutions (including the US

Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center), had mobilized the entire US

political establishment. From President Clinton, who buried the hatchet with D'Amato (the

Whitewater hearings were still going on) to lend support, through eleven agencies of the federal

government as well as the House and Senate, down to state and local governments across the country,

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bipartisan pressures were brought to bear as one public official after another lined up to denounce the

perfidious Swiss.

Using the House and Senate banking committees as a springboard, the Holocaust industry orchestrated

a shameless campaign of vilification. With an infinitely compliant and credulous press ready to give

banner headlines to any Holocaust-related story, however preposterous, the smear campaign proved

unstoppable. Gregg Rickman, D'Amato's chief legislative aide, boasts in his account that the Swiss

bankers were forced "into the court of public opinion where we controlled the agenda. The bankers

were on our turf and conveniently, we were judge, jury, and executioner." Tom Bower, a main

researcher in the anti-Swiss campaign, dubs the D'Amato call for hearings a "euphemism for a public

trial or a kangaroo court."
19

The "mouthpiece" of the anti-Swiss juggernaut was WJC executive director Elan Steinberg. His main

function was dispensing disinformation. "Terror by embarrassment," according to Bower, "was

Steinberg's weapon, as he uttered a string of accusations to cause discomfort and shock. OSS reports,

often based on rumor and uncorroborated sources and disregarded for years by historians as hearsay,

suddenly assumed uncritical credibility and widespread publicity." "The last thing the banks need is

negative publicity," Rabbi Singer explained. "We will do it until the banks say, 'Enough. We want a

compromise.'" Anxious to share the limelight, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal