The Holocaust Industry (14 page)

Center, spectacularly alleged that the Swiss incarcerated refugee Jews in "slave-labor camps." (With

wife and son on the payroll, Hier runs the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a family business; together the

Hiers drew a salary of $520,000 in 1995. The Center is renowned for its "Dachau-meets-Disneyland"

museum exhibits and "the successful use of sensationalistic scare tactics for fund-raising.") "in light of

the media barrage of mixing truth and assumption, fact and fiction." Itamar Levin concludes, "it is

easy to understand why many Swiss believe their country was the victim of an international

conspiracy of some kind."
20

The campaign rapidly degenerated into a libel of the Swiss people. Bower, in a study supported by

D'Amato's office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, typically reports that "a country whose citizens . .

. boasted to their neighbors about their enviable wealth, was quite knowingly profiting from blood

money"; that "the apparently respectable citizens of the world's most peaceful nation . . . committed an

unprecedented theft"; that "dishonesty was a cultural code that individual Swiss had mastered to

protect the nation's image and prosperity"; that the Swiss were "instinctively attracted to healthy

profits" (only the Swiss?); that "self-interest was the supreme guide for all of Switzerland's banks"

(only Switzerland's banks?); that "Switzerland's small breed of bankers had become greedier and more

immoral than most"; that "concealment and deception were practiced arts among Swiss diplomats"

(only Swiss diplomats?); that "apologies and resignations were not common in Switzerland's political

tradition" (unlike our own?); that "Swiss greed was unique"; that the "Swiss character" combined

"simplicity and duplicity," and "behind the appearance of civility was a layer of obstinacy, and beyond

that was solid egotistical incomprehension of anyone else's opinion"; that the Swiss were "not just a

peculiarly charmless people who had produced no artists, no heroes since William Tell and no

statesmen, but were dishonest Nazi collaborators who had profited from genocide," and on and on.

Rickman points to this "deeper truth" about the Swiss: "Down deep, perhaps deeper than they thought,

a latent arrogance about themselves and against others existed in their very makeup. Try as they did,

they could not hide their upbringing."
21
Many of these slurs are remarkably like the slurs cast against

Jews by anti-Semites.

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The main charge was that there had been, in the words of Bower's subtitle, "a fifty-year Swiss-Nazi

conspiracy to steal billions from Europe's Jews and Holocaust survivors." In what has become a

mantra of the Holocaust restitution racket, this constituted "the greatest robbery in the history of

mankind." For the Holocaust industry, all matters Jewish belong in a separate, superlative category -

the
worst,
the
greatest....

The Holocaust industry first alleged that Swiss banks had systematically denied legitimate heirs of

Holocaust victims access to dormant accounts worth between $7 billion and $20 billion. "For the past

50 years,"
Time
reported in a cover story, a "standing order" of the Swiss banks "has been to stall and

stonewall when Holocaust survivors ask about their dead relatives' accounts." Recalling the secrecy

legislation enacted by Swiss banks in 1934 partly to prevent a Nazi shakedown of Jewish depositors,

D'Amato lectured the House Banking Committee: "Isn't it ironic that the very system that encouraged

people to come and open accounts, the secrecy was then used to deny the people themselves, and their

heirs, their legacy, their right? It was perverted, distorted, twisted."

Bower breathlessly recounts the discovery of one key piece of evidence of Swiss perfidy against

Holocaust victims: "Luck and diligence provided a nugget that confirmed the validity of Bronfman's

complaint. An intelligence report from Switzerland in July 1945 stated that Jacques Salmanovitz, the

owner of the Societe Generale de Surveillance, a notary and trust company in Geneva with links to the

Balkan countries, possessed a list of 182 Jewish clients who had entrusted 8.4 million Swiss francs

and about $90,000 to the notary pending their arrival from the Balkans. The report added that Jews

had still not claimed their possessions. Rickman and D'Amato were ecstatic." In his own account,

Rickman likewise brandishes this "proof of Swiss criminality." Neither, however, mentions in this

specific context that Salmanovitz was Jewish. (The actual validity of these claims will be discussed

below.)
22

In late 1996 a parade of elderly Jewish women and one man delivered moving testimony before the

Congressional banking committees on the malfeasance of the Swiss bankers. Yet almost none of these

witnesses, according to Itamar Levin, an editor of Israel's main business newspaper, «had real proof of

the existence of assets in Swiss banks.» To enhance the theatrical effect of this testimony, D'Amato

called Elie Wiesel to bear witness. In testimony later widely quoted, Wiesel expressed shock —

shock! — at the revelation that the perpetrators of the Holocaust sought to plunder Jews before killing

them: "In the beginning we thought the final solution was motivated by poisoned ideology alone. Now

we know that they didn't simply want to kill Jews, as horrible as this may sound, they wanted Jewish

money. Each day we learn more about that tragedy. Is there no limit to pain? No limit to the outrage?"

Of course, Nazi plunder of the Jews is hardly news; a large part of Raul Hilberg's seminal study,
The

Destruction of the European Jews,
published in 1961, is devoted to the Nazi expropriation of the

Jews.
23

It was also claimed that the Swiss bankers filched the deposits of Holocaust victims and methodically

destroyed vital records to cover their tracks, and that only Jews suffered all these abominations.

Assailing the Swiss at one hearing, Senator Barbara Boxer declared: "This Committee will not stand

for two-faced behavior on the part of the Swiss banks. Don't tell the world that you are searching

when you are shredding."
24

Alas, the "propaganda value" (Bower) of elderly Jewish claimants testifying to Swiss perfidy quickly

exhausted itself. The Holocaust industry accordingly sought out a new expose. The media frenzy fixed

on the Swiss purchase of gold that the Nazis looted from the central treasuries of Europe during the

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war. Although billed as a startling revelation, it was in fact old news. The author of a standard study

on the subject, Arthur Smith, told the House hearing: "I have listened all morning and this afternoon to

things that, to a large extent, in outline, were known for a number of years; and I am surprised about

the fact that much of it is presented as new and sensational." The point of the hearings, however, was

not to inform but, in journalist Isabel Vincent's words, «to create sensational stories." If enough mud

was flung, it was reasonably assumed, Switzerland would give in.
25

The one truly novel allegation was that the Swiss knowingly trafficked in "victim gold." That is, they

purchased vast quantities of gold which the Nazis had resmelted into bars after stripping down

concentration and death-camp victims. The WJC, Bower reports, "needed an emotive issue to link the

Holocaust and Switzerland." This new revelation of Swiss treachery was accordingly treated as a

godsend. "Few images," Bower continues, "were more searing than the methodical extraction in the

extermination camps of gold dental fillings from the mouths of Jewish corpses dragged from the gas

chambers." "The facts are very, very distressing," D'Amato mournfully intoned at a House hearing,

"because they talk about taking and the plundering of assets from homes, from national banks, from

the death camps, gold watches and bracelets and eyeglasses frames and the fillings from people's

teeth."
26

Apart from blocking access to Holocaust accounts and purchasing looted gold, the Swiss also stood

accused of conspiring with Poland and Hungary to defraud Jews. The charge was that monies in

unclaimed Swiss accounts belonging to Polish and Hungarian nationals (many but not all Jewish)

were used by Switzerland as compensation for Swiss properties nationalized by these governments.

Rickman refers to this as a "startling revelation, one that would knock the socks off the Swiss and

create a firestorm." But the facts were already widely known and reported in American law journals in

the early 1950s. And, for all the media ballyhoo, the total sums involved ultimately came to less than a

million dollars in current values
27

Already prior to the first Senate hearing on the dormant accounts in April 1996, the Swiss banks had

agreed to establish an investigative committee and abide by its findings. Composed of six members,

three each from the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Swiss Bankers Association, and

headed by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, the "independent

committee of eminent persons" was formally charged in a May 1996 "Memorandum of

Understanding." In addition, the Swiss government appointed in December 1996 an "independent

commission of experts," chaired by Professor Jean-Francois Bergier and including prominent Israeli

holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer, to investigate Switzerland's gold trade with Germany during

World War II.

Before these bodies could even commence work, however, the Holocaust industry pressed for a

financial settlement with Switzerland. The Swiss protested that any settlement should naturally await

the commissions' findings; otherwise, it constituted «extortion and blackmail." Playing its

ever-winning card, the WJC anguished over the plight of "needy Holocaust survivors." "My problem

is the timing," Bronfman told the House Banking Committee in December 1996, "and I have all of

these Holocaust survivors that I am worried about." One wonders why the anguished billionaire

couldn't himself temporarily relieve their plight. Dismissing one Swiss settlement offer of $250

million, Bronfman sniffed: "Don't do any favors. I'll give the money myself.» He didn't. Switzerland,

however, agreed in February 1997 to establish a $200 million «Special Fund for Needy Victims of the

Holocaust» to tide over «persons who need help or support in special ways" until the commissions

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completed their work. (The fund was still solvent when the Bergier and Volcker commissions issued

their reports.) The pressures from the Holocaust industry for a final settlement, however, did not

relent; rather, they continued to mount. Renewed Swiss pleas that a settlement should await the

commissions' findings — it was the WJC, after all, that originally called for this moral reckoning —

still fell on deaf ears. In fact, the Holocaust industry stood only to lose from these findings: should just

a few claims ultimately prove legitimate, the case against the Swiss banks would lose credibility; and

should the legitimate claimants be identified, even if a large number, the Swiss would be obliged to

compensate only them, but not the Jewish organizations. Another mantra of the Holocaust industry is

that compensation «is about truth and justice, not about money.» "It's not about money," the Swiss