The Holocaust Industry (17 page)

averred — with Bronfman agreeing - that "only" Switzerland "has failed to show the courage to

confront its own history."
55
Unsurprisingly, the Holocaust industry didn't launch a campaign to

investigate US banks. An audit of our banks on the scale of the Swiss audit would cost American

taxpayers not millions but billions of dollars.
56
By the time it was completed American Jews would

be seeking asylum in Munich. Courage has its limits.

Already in the late 1940s, when the US was pressing Switzerland to identify dormant Jewish accounts,

the Swiss protested that Americans should first attend to their own backyard.
57
In mid-1997 New

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York Governor Pataki announced the creation of a State Commission on the Recovery Of Holocaust

Victims' Assets to process claims against Swiss banks. Unimpressed, the Swiss suggested that the

commission might more usefully process claims against US and Israeli banks.
58
Indeed Bower recalls

that Israeli bankers had "refused to release lists of dormant accounts of Jews" after the 1948 war, and

recently it has been reported that "unlike countries in Europe, Israel's banks and Zionist organizations

are resisting pressure to set up independent commissions to establish how much property and how

many dormant accounts were held by Holocaust survivors, and how the owners can be located"

(Financial
Times).
(European Jews purchased plots of land and opened bank accounts in Palestine

during the British Mandate to support the Zionist enterprise or prepare for future immigration.) In

October 1998, the WJC and WJRO "reached a decision in principle to refrain from dealing with the

subject of assets in Israel of Holocaust victims on the ground that responsibility for this lay with the

Israeli government"
(Haaretz).
The writ of these Jewish organizations thus runs to Switzerland but not

to the Jewish state. The most sensational charge leveled against the Swiss banks was that they required

death certificates from the heirs of Nazi holocaust victims. Israeli banks have also demanded such

documentation. One searches in vain, however, for denunciations of the "perfidious Israelis." To

demonstrate that "no moral equivalence can be drawn between banks in Israel and Switzerland," the

New York Times
quoted a former Israeli legislator: "Here it was negligence at best; in Switzerland it

was a crime."
59
Comment is superfluous.

In May 1998 a Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States was

charged by Congress with "conducting original research on the fate of assets taken from victims of the

Holocaust that came into the possession of the U.S. Federal government" and "advising the President

on policies that should be adopted to make restitution to the rightful owners of stolen property or their

heirs." "The Commission's work demonstrates irrefutably," Commission chair Bronfman declared,

"that we in the United States are willing to hold ourselves to the same high standard of truth about

Holocaust assets to which we have held other nations." Yet a presidential advisory commission with a

total budget of $6 million is rather different from a comprehensive $500 million external audit of a

nation's entire banking system with unfettered access to all bank records.
60
To dispel any lingering

doubts that the US stood in the forefront of efforts to restore Holocaust-era stolen Jewish assets, James

Leach, chairman of the House Banking Committee, proudly announced in February 2000 that a North

Carolina museum had returned one painting to an Austrian family. "It underscores United States

accountability . . . and I think that is something that this Committee ought to stress."
61

For the Holocaust industry, the Swiss banks affair — like the postwar torments endured by Swiss

Holocaust "survivor" Binjamin Wilkomirski — was yet further proof of an ineradicable and irrational

Gentile malice. The affair pointed up the gross insensitivity of even a "liberal democratic, European

country," Itamar Levin concludes, to "those who carried the physical and emotional scars of the worst

crime in history." An April 1997 Tel Aviv University study reported "an unmistakable rise" in Swiss

anti-Semitism. Yet this ominous development couldn't possibly be connected with the Holocaust

industry's shakedown of Switzerland. "Jews do not make anti-Semitism," Bronfman sniffed.

"Anti-Semites make anti-Semitism."
62

Material compensation for the Holocaust "is the greatest moral test facing Europe at the end of the

twentieth century," Itamar Levin maintains. "This will be the real test of the Continent's treatment of

the Jewish people."
63
Indeed, emboldened by its success in shaking down the Swiss, the Holocaust

industry moved quickly to "test" the rest of Europe. The next stop was Germany.

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After the Holocaust industry settled with Switzerland in August 1998, it deployed the same winning

strategy against Germany in September. The same three legal teams (Hausfeld — Weiss, Fagan Swift,

and the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities) initiated class-action lawsuits against

German private industry, demanding no less than $20 billion in compensation. Brandishing the threat

of an economic boycott, New York City Comptroller Hevesi began to "monitor" the negotiations in

April 1999. The House Banking Committee held hearings in September. Congresswoman Carolyn

Maloney declared that "the passage of time must not be an excuse for unjust enrichment" (at any rate,

from Jewish slave labor — African-American slave labor is another story) while Committee chairman

Leach, reading from the same old script, intoned that "history has no statute of limitations." German

companies doing business in the United States, Stuart Eizenstat told the Committee, "value their good

will here, and will want to continue the kind of good citizenship in the US and Germany that they've

always displayed." Forgoing diplomatic niceties, Congressman Rick Lazio bluntly urged the

Committee "to focus on the private sector German companies, in particular, those who do business in

the US."
64
To whip up public hysteria against Germany, the Holocaust industry took out multiple

full-page newspaper advertisements in October. The awful truth did not suffice; all the Holocaust hot

buttons were pressed. An ad denouncing the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer dragged in

Josef Mengele, although the evidence that Bayer "directed" his murderous experiments was nil.

Recognizing that the Holocaust juggernaut was irresistible, the Germans caved in to a substantial

monetary settlement by year's end.

The Times
of London credited this capitulation to the "Holocash" campaign in the United States. "We

could not have reached agreement," Eizenstat later told the House Banking Committee, "without the

personal involvement and leadership of President Clinton . . . as well as other senior officials» in the

US government.
65

The Holocaust industry charged that Germany had a "moral and legal obligation" to compensate

former Jewish slave laborers. "These slave laborers deserve a small measure of justice," Eizenstat

pleaded, "in the few years remaining in their lives." Yet, as indicated above, it is simply untrue that

they hadn't received any compensation. Jewish slave laborers were covered under the original

agreements with Germany compensating concentration camp inmates. The German government

indemnified former Jewish slave laborers for "deprivation of liberty" and for "harm to life and limb."

Only wages withheld were not formally compensated. Those who sustained enduring injuries each

received a substantial lifetime pension.
66
Germany also endowed the Jewish Claims Conference with

approximately a billion dollars in current values for those Jewish ex-camp inmates who received

minimum compensation. As indicated earlier, the Claims Conference, violating the agreement with

Germany, used the monies instead for various pet projects. It justified this (mis)use of German

compensation on the grounds that "even before the funds from Germany had become available . . . the

needs of the 'needy' victims of Nazism had already been largely met."
67
Still, fifty years later the

Holocaust industry was demanding money for "needy Holocaust victims» who had been living in

poverty because the Germans allegedly never compensated them.

What constitutes "fair" compensation for former Jewish slave laborers is plainly an unanswerable

question. One can, however, say this: According to the terms of the new settlement, Jewish former

slave laborers are each supposed to receive about $7,500. If the Claims Conference had properly

distributed the original German monies, many more former Jewish slave laborers would have received

much more much sooner.

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Whether "needy Holocaust victims" will ever see any of the new German monies is an open question.

The Claims Conference wants a large chunk set aside as its own "Special Fund." According to the

Jerusalem Report,
the Conference has "plenty to gain by ensuring that the survivors get nothing."

Israeli Knesset member Michael Kleiner (Herut) lambasted the Conference as a "Judenrat, carrying on

the Nazis' work in different ways." It's a "dishonest body, conducting itself with professional secrecy,

and tainted by ugly public and moral corruption," he charged, "a body of darkness that is maltreating

Jewish Holocaust survivors and their heirs, while it sits on a huge pile of money belonging to private

individuals, but is doing everything to inherit [the money] while they are still alive."
68
Meanwhile,

Stuart Eizenstat, testifying before the House Banking Committee, continued to heap praise on the

"transparent process that the Jewish Material Claims Conference has had over the last 40-some-odd

years." For sheer cynicism, however, Rabbi Israel Singer ranked without peer. In addition to his

secretary-general post at the World Jewish Congress, Singer has served as vice-president of the

Claims Conference and was chief negotiator in the German slave-labor talks. He piously reiterated to

the House Banking Committee after the Swiss and German settlements that "it would be a shame" if

the Holocaust compensation monies were "paid to heirs rather than survivors." "We don't want that

money paid to heirs. We want that money to be paid to victims." Yet,
Haaretz
reports that Singer has

been the main proponent of using Holocaust compensation monies «to meet the needs of the entire

Jewish people, and not just those Jews who were fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust and live

into old age."
69

In a US Holocaust Memorial Museum publication, Henry Friedlander, the respected Nazi holocaust

historian and ax-Auschwitz inmate, sketched this numerical picture at war's end:

If there were about 715,000 prisoners in the camps at the start of 1945, and at least one third — that is,

about 238,000 — perished during spring 1945, we can assume that at most 475,000 prisoners

survived. As Jews had been systematically murdered, and only those chosen for labor — in Auschwitz