The Holocaust Industry (18 page)

about 15 percent — had even a chance to survive, we must assume that Jews made up no more than 20

percent of the concentration camp population.

"We can thus estimate," he concluded, "that the number of Jewish survivors numbered no more than

100,000." Friedlander's figure for surviving Jewish slave laborers at war's end, incidentally, is at the

high end among scholars. In an authoritative study, Leonard Dinnerstein reported: "Sixty thousand

Jews . . . walked out of the concentration camps. Within a week more than 20,000 of them had

died."
70

In a May 1999 State Department briefing, Stuart Eizenstat, citing the figure of "groups representing

them," put the total number of slave laborers, Jewish and non-Jewish, still alive at "perhaps

70-90,000."
71
Eizenstat was Chief US Envoy in the German slavelabor negotiations and worked

closely with the Claims Conference.
72
This would put the total number of still living Jewish slave

laborers at 14,000 - 18,000 (20 percent of 70-90,000). Yet, as it entered into negotiations with

Germany, the Holocaust industry demanded compensation for 135,000 still living former Jewish slave

laborers. The total number of still living former slave laborers, Jewish and non-Jewish, was put at

250,000.
73
In other words, the number of former Jewish slave laborers still alive increased nearly

tenfold from May 1999, and the ratio between living Jewish and non-Jewish slave laborers drastically

shifted. In fact, to believe the Holocaust industry, more former Jewish slave laborers are alive today

than a half-century ago. "What a tangled web we weave," Sir Walter Scott wrote, "when first we

practice to deceive."

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As the Holocaust industry plays with numbers to boost its compensation claims, anti-Semites gleefully

mock the "Jew liars" who even "huckster" their dead. In juggling these numbers the Holocaust

industry, however unintentionally, whitewashes Nazism. Raul Hilberg, the leading authority on the

Nazi holocaust, puts the figure for Jews murdered at 5.1 million.
74
Yet, if 135,000 former Jewish

slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That's at least a

half-million more than standard estimates. One would then have to deduct this half-million from the

5.1 million figure of those killed. Not only does the "6 Million" figure become more untenable but the

numbers of the Holocaust industry are rapidly approaching those of Holocaust deniers. Consider that

Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler put the total camp population in January 1945 at a little over 700,000

and that, according to Friedlander, about one-third this number was killed off by May. Yet if Jews

constituted only 20 percent of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies,

600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By

the Holocaust industry's reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn't have been harsh at all; in

fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate.
75

The standard claim is that the Final Solution was a uniquely efficient, assembly-line, industrial

exterminations But if, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews

survived, the Final Solution couldn't have been so efficient after all. It must have been a haphazard

affair — exactly what Holocaust deniers argue.
Les extremes se touchent.

In a recent interview Raul Hilberg underscored that numbers do matter in comprehending the Nazi

holocaust. Indeed, the Claims Conference's revised figures radically call into question its own

understanding. According to the Claims Conference's "position paper" on slave labor in its

negotiations with Germany: "Slave labor was one of the three main methods used by the Nazis to

murder Jews — the others being shooting and gassing. One of the purposes of slave labor was to work

the individuals to death.... The term slave is an imprecise word in this context. In general slave

masters have an interest to preserve the life and condition of their slaves. However, the Nazi plan for

the 'slaves' was that their work potential be utilized and then the 'slaves' should be exterminated."

Apart from Holocaust deniers, no one has yet disputed that Nazism consigned slave laborers to this

horrific fate. How can one reconcile these established facts however, with the claim that many

hundreds of thousands of Jewish slave laborers survived the camps? Hasn't the Claims Conference

breached the wall separating the ghastly truth about the Nazi holocaust from Holocaust denial?
77

In a full-page
New York Times
advertisement, Holocaust industry luminaries such as Elie Wiesel,

Rabbi Marvin Hier, and Steven T. Katz condemned "Syria's Denial of the Holocaust." The text

decried an editorial in an official Syrian government newspaper that claimed Israel "invents stories

about the Holocaust" in order to "receive more money from Germany and other Western

establishments." Regrettably, the Syrian charge is true. Yet the irony, lost on both the Syrian

government and the signatories to the ad, is that these stories themselves of many hundreds of

thousands of survivors constitute a form of Holocaust denial.
78

The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the

shakedown of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, alluring prospects opened up in

the former heartland of European Jewry. Cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of "needy

Holocaust victims," the Holocaust industry has sought to extort billions of dollars from these already

impoverished countries. Pursuing this end with reckless and ruthless abandon, it has become the main

fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.

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The Holocaust industry has positioned itself as the sole legitimate claimant to all the communal and

private assets of those who perished during the Nazi holocaust. "It has been agreed with the

Government of Israel," Edgar Bronfman told the House Banking Committee, "that helpless assets

should accrue to the World Jewish Restitution Organization." Using this "mandate," the Holocaust

industry has called on former Soviet-bloc countries to hand over all pre-war Jewish properties or come

up with monetary compensation.
79
Unlike in the case of Switzerland and Germany, however, it

makes these demands away from the glare of publicity. Public opinion has so far not been averse to

the blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists, but it might look less kindly on the

blackmailing of starving Polish peasants. Jews who lost family members during the Nazi holocaust

might also take a jaundiced view of the WJRO's machinations. Claiming to be the legitimate heir of

those who perished in order to appropriate their assets could easily be mistaken for grave-robbery. On

the other hand, the Holocaust industry doesn't need a mobilized public opinion. With the support of

key US officials, it can easily break the feeble resistance of already prostrate nations.

"It is important to recognize that our efforts at communal property restitution," Stuart Eizenstat told a

House committee, "are integral to the rebirth and renewal of Jewish life" in Eastern Europe. Allegedly

to "promote the revival" of Jewish life in Poland, the World Jewish Restitution Organization is

demanding title over the 6,000 pre-war communal Jewish properties, including those currently being

used as hospitals and schools. The pre-war Jewish population of Poland stood at 3.5 million; the

current population is several thousand. Does reviving Jewish life really require one synagogue or

school building per Polish Jew? The organization is also laying claim to hundreds of thousands of

parcels of Polish land valued in the many tens of billions of dollars. "Polish officials fear,"
Jewish

Week
reports, that the demand "could bankrupt the nation." When Poland's Parliament proposed limits

on compensation to avert insolvency, Elan Steinberg of the WJC denounced the legislation as

"fundamentally an anti-American act."
80

Tightening the screws on Poland, Holocaust industry attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit in Judge

Korman's court to compensate "aging and dying Holocaust survivors." The complaint charged that the

postwar Polish governments "continued during the last fifty-four years" a genocidal "expulsion to

extinction" policy against Jews. New York City Council members jumped in with a unanimous

resolution calling on Poland "to pass comprehensive legislation providing for the complete restitution

of Holocaust assets," while 57 members of Congress (led by Congressman Anthony Weiner of New

York) dispatched a letter to the Polish Parliament demanding "comprehensive legislation that would

return 100% of all property and assets seized during the Holocaust." "As the people involved are

getting older and older every day," the letter said, "time is running out to compensate those

wronged."
81

Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, Stuart Eizenstat deplored the lax pace of evictions

in Eastern Europe: "A variety of problems have arisen in the return of properties. For example, in

some countries, when persons or communities have attempted to reclaim properties, they have been

asked, sometimes required . . . to allow current tenants to remain for a lengthy period of time at

rent-controlled rates."
82
The delinquency of Belarus particularly exercised Eizenstat. Belarus is "very,

very far" behind in handing over pre-war Jewish properties, he told the House International Relations

Committee.
83
The average monthly income of a Belarussian is $100.

To force submission from recalcitrant governments, the Holocaust industry wields the bludgeon of US

sanctions. Eizenstat urged Congress to "elevate" Holocaust compensation, put it "high on the list" of

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requirements for those East European countries that are seeking entry into the OECD, the WTO, the

European Union, NATO, and the Council of Europe: "They will listen if you speak.... They will get

the hint." Israel Singer of the WJC called on Congress to "continue looking at the shopping list" in

order to "check" that every country pays up. "It is extremely important that the countries involved in

the issue understand," Congressman Benjamin Gilman of the House International Relations

Committee said, "that their response . . . is one of several standards by which the United States

assesses its bilateral relationship." Avraham Hirschson, chairman of Israel's Knesset Committee on

Restitution and Israel's representative on the World Jewish Restitution Organization, paid tribute to

Congressional complicity in the shakedown. Recalling his "fights" with the Romanian Prime Minister,

Hirschson testified: "But I ask one remark, in the middle of the fighting, and it changed that

atmosphere. I told him, you know, in two days I am going to be in a hearing here in Congress. What

do you want me to tell them in the hearing? Whole atmosphere was changed." The World Jewish

Congress has "created an entire Holocaust industry," a lawyer for survivors warns, and is "guilty of

promoting . . . a very ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe."