The Holocaust Industry (9 page)

whether
Fragments
is a fraud. "Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply;

that's for sure.... He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. The pain

is authentic." So it doesn't matter whether he spent the war in a concentration camp or a Swiss chalet;

Wilkomirski is not a fake if his "pain is authentic": thus speaks an Auschwitz survivor turned

Holocaust expert. The others deserve contempt; Gutman, just pity.

The New Yorker
titled its expose of the Wilkomirski fraud "Stealing the Holocaust." Yesterday

Wilkomirski was feted for his tales of Gentile evil; today he is chastised as yet another evil Gentile.

It's
always
the Gentiles' fault. True, Wilkomirski fabricated his Holocaust past, but the larger truth is

that the Holocaust industry, built on a fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes,

was primed to celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust "survivor" waiting to be

discovered.

In October 1999, Wilkomirski's German publisher, withdrawing
Fragments
from bookstores, finally

acknowledged publicly that he wasn't a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born man named Bruno

Doessekker. Informed that the jig was up, Wilkomirski thundered defiantly, "I am Binjamin

Wilkomirski!" Not until a month later did the American publisher, Schocken, drop
Fragments
from its

list.
42

Consider now Holocaust secondary literature. A telltale sign of this literature is the space given over

to the "Arab connection." Although the Mufti of Jerusalem didn't play "any significant part in the

Holocaust," Novick reports, the four-volume
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
(edited by Israel Gutman)

gave him a "starring role." The Mufti also gets top billing in Yad Vashem: "The visitor is left to

conclude," Tom Segev writes, "that there is much in common between the Nazis' plans to destroy the

Jews and the Arabs' enmity to Israel." At an Auschwitz commemoration officiated by clergy

representing all religious denominations, Wiesel objected
only to
the presence of a Muslim qadi:

"Were we not forgetting . . . Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich Himmler's friend?"

Incidentally, if the Multi figured so centrally in Hitler's Final Solution, the wonder is that Israel didn't

bring him to justice like Eichmann. He was living openly right next door in Lebanon after the war.
43

Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as official Israeli

propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's "new historians," apologists desperately

sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter

of his short history of anti-Semitism, and fully three pages of his "brief history of the last 2,000 years»

of the Middle East, to Arab Nazism. At the liberal extreme of the Holocaust spectrum, Michael

Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum generously allowed that "the stones

thrown by Palestinian youths angered by Israel's presence . . . are not synonymous with the Nazi

assault against powerless Jewish civilians."
44

The most recent Holocaust extravaganza is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Every important journal of opinion printed one or more reviews within weeks of its release.
The New

York Times
featured multiple notices, acclaiming Goldhagen's book as "one of those rare new works

that merit the appellation landmark" (Richard Bernstein). With sales of half a million copies and

translations slated for 13 languages,
Hitler's Willing Executioners
was hailed in
Time
magazine as the

"most talked about" and second best nonfiction book of the year.
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Pointing to the "remarkable research," and "wealth of proof . . . with overwhelming support of

documents and facts," Elie Wiesel heralded
Hitler's Willing Executioners
as a "tremendous

contribution to the understanding and teaching of the Holocaust." Israel Gutman praised it for "raising

anew clearly central questions" that "the main body of Holocaust scholarship" ignored. Nominated for

the Holocaust chair at Harvard University, paired with Wiesel in the national media, Goldhagen

quickly became a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust circuit.

The central thesis of Goldhagen's book is standard Holocaust dogma: driven by pathological hatred,

the German people leapt at the opportunity Hitler availed them to murder the Jews. Even leading

Holocaust writer Yehuda Bauer, a lecturer at the Hebrew University and director of Yad Vashem, has

at times embraced this dogma. Reflecting several years ago on the perpetrators' mindset, Bauer wrote:

"The Jews were murdered by people who, to a large degree, did not actually hate them.... The

Germans did not have to hate the Jews in order to kill them." Yet, in a recent review of Goldhagen's

book, Bauer maintained the exact opposite: "The most radical type of murderous attitudes dominated

from the end of the 1930s onward.... [B]y the outbreak of World War II the vast majority of Germans

had identified with the regime and its anti-Semitic policies to such an extent that it was easy to recruit

the murderers." Questioned about this discrepancy, Bauer replied: "I cannot see any contradiction

between these statements."
46

Although bearing the apparatus of an academic study,
Hitler's Willing Executioners
amounts to little

more than a compendium of sadistic violence. Small wonder that Goldhagen vigorously championed

Wilkomirski:
Hitler's Willing Executioners is Fragments plus
footnotes. Replete with gross

misrepresentations of source material and internal contradictions,
Hitler's Willing Executioners
is

devoid of scholarly value. In
A Nation on Trial,
Ruth Bettina Birn and this writer documented the

shoddiness of Goldhagen's enterprise. The ensuing controversy instructively illuminated the inner

workings of the Holocaust industry.

Birn, the world's leading authority on the archives Goldhagen consulted, first published her critical

findings in the Cambridge
Historical Journal.
Refusing the journal's invitation for a full rebuttal,

Goldhagen instead enlisted a high-powered London law firm to sue Birn and Cambridge University

Press for "many serious libels." Demanding an apology, a retraction, and a promise from Birn that she

not repeat her criticisms, Goldhagen's lawyers then threatened that "the generation of any publicity on

your part as a result of this letter would amount to a further aggravation of damages."
47

Soon after this writer's equally critical findings were published in
New Left Review,
Metropolitan, an

imprint of Henry Holt, agreed to publish both essays as a book. In a front-page story, the
Forward

warned that Metropolitan was "preparing to bring out a book by Norman Finkelstein, a notorious

ideological opponent of the State of Israel." The
Forward
acts as the main enforcer of "Holocaust

correctness" in the United States.

Alleging that "Finkelstein's glaring bias and audacious statements . . . are irreversibly tainted by his

anti-Zionist stance," ADL head Abraham Foxman called on Holt to drop publication of the book: "The

issue . . . is not whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong but what is 'legitimate criticism' and what

goes beyond the pale." "Whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong," Metropolitan associate

publisher Sara Bershtel replied, "is precisely the issue."

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the pro-lsrael
New Republic,
intervened personally with Holt

president Michael Naumann. "You don't know who Finkelstein is. He's poison, he's a disgusting

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self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock." Pronouncing Holt's decision a "disgrace," Elan

Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, opined, "If they want to be garbagemen

they should wear sanitation uniforms."

"I have never experienced," Naumann later recalled, "a similar attempt of interested parties to publicly

cast a shadow over an upcoming publication." The prominent Israeli historian and journalist, Tom

Segev, observed in
Haaretz
that the campaign verged on "cultural terrorism."

As chief historian of the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section of the Canadian

Department of Justice, Birn next came under attack from Canadian Jewish organizations. Claiming

that I was "anathema to the vast majority of Jews on this continent," the Canadian Jewish Congress

denounced Birn's collaboration in the book. Exerting pressure through her employer, the CJC filed a

protest with the Justice Department. This complaint, joined to a CJC-backed report calling Birn "a

member of the perpetrator race" (she is German-born), prompted an official investigation of her.

Even after the book's publication, the ad hominem assaults did not let up. Goldhagen alleged that Birn,

who has made the prosecution of Nazi war criminals her life's work, was a purveyor of anti-Semitism,

and that I was of the opinion that Nazism's victims, including my own family, deserved to died

Goldhagen's colleagues at the Harvard Center for European Studies, Stanley Hoffmann and Charles

Maier, publicly lined up behind him.
49

Calling the charges of censorship a "canard,"
The New Republic
maintained that "there is a difference

between censorship and upholding standards."
A Nation on Trial
received endorsements from the

leading historians on the Nazi holocaust, including Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning and Ian

Kershaw. These same scholars uniformly dismissed Goldhagen's book; Hilberg called it "worthless."

Standards, indeed.

Consider, finally, the pattern: Wiesel and Gutman supported Goldhagen; Wiesel supported Kosinski;

Gutman and Goldhagen supported Wilkomirski. Connect the players: this is Holocaust literature.

All the hype notwithstanding, there is no evidence that Holocaust deniers exert any more influence in

the United States than the flatearth society does. Given the nonsense churned out daily by the

Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are
so few
skeptics. The motive behind the claim of

widespread Holocaust denial is not hard to find. In a society saturated with The Holocaust, how else to

justify yet more museums, books, curricula, films and programs than to conjure up the bogy of

Holocaust denial? Thus Deborah Lipstadt's acclaimed book,
Denying the Holocaust,
50
as well as the

results of an ineptly worded American Jewish Committee poll alleging pervasive Holocaust denial,
51

were released just as the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum opened.

Denying
the Holocaust
is an updated version of the "new anti-Semitism" tracts. To document

widespread Holocaust denial, Lipstadt cites a handful of crank publications. Her
piece de resistance
is

Arthur Butz, a nonentity who teaches electrical engineering at Northwestern University and who

published his book
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
with an obscure press. Lipstadt entitles the

chapter on him Entering the Mainstream." Were it not for the likes of Lipstadt, no one would ever

have heard of Arthur Butz.

In fact, the one truly mainstream holocaust denier is Bernard Lewis. A French court even convicted