The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. (Book Reviews).

THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: REFLECTIONS ON THE EXPLOITATION OF JEWISH SUFFERING by Norman G. Finkelstein London, 2001: Verso, pages 160.

"The Holocaust Industry" reopens, in part, the so-called "Historikerstreit", the argument which erupted among German historians in 1986. It began when Ernst Nolte published an article in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in which he argued that the Holocaust should be placed alongside all the other genocides of the twentieth century. In response, Jurgen Habermas, in an article in "Die Zeit", attacked what he called "apologetic tendencies" in Germany history of the Nazi period, citing the work of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber and Michael Sturmer (interested readers should see "Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung", 1987). Finkelstein supports Nolte's general point but before he gets there he examines the origins of what he calls the "Holocaust Industry" in three polemically headed chapters: Chapter 1, "Capitalising the Holocaust"; Chapter 2, "Hoaxers, Hucksters and History"; and Chapter 3, "The Double Shakedown".

His thesis is straightforward: "The `Holocaust' is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust", similar sentiments being expressed by Boas Evron. "Holocaust awareness", as Evron argues, is "an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present."

Finkelstein highlights what he regards as the moral corruption associated with the Holocaust industry: "Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers [Israel], with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a `victim' state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status."

Interest in the Nazi holocaust is, Finkelstein suggests, a relatively new thing in America. For example, Raul Hilberg, the pre-eminent historian of the Holocaust, was advised not to publish "The Destruction of the European Jews". According to Finkelstein, the real reason for the silence about the Holocaust after World War Two was "the conformist policies of the American Jewish leadership and the political climate of post-war America". The Six-day War of June 1967 provided a major boost for the Holocaust Industry. Thereafter Israel became a major asset for the United States: "Once ideologically recast", to quote the author, "the Holocaust (capitalised as I previously noted) proved to be the most perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel." And much else besides.

Two central claims underpin "The Holocaust Industry". The first is that the Holocaust was an absolutely unique event. Second, that it marked the ne plus ultra of irrational, Gentile hatred of Jews. Finkelstein quite rightly dismisses the claim that the Holocaust cannot be rationally apprehended. If the Holocaust cannot be understood rationally, then the application of rational disciplines such as law, the theory of restitution and economics to the process of assessing compensation, itself a rational process, is pointless. Indeed, does any compensation make sense if the Holocaust somehow lies outside of history?

On the other hand, it does not follow that even if one grants that the Holocaust is unprecedented in history that, "it must stand above and hence cannot be grasped by history." Stalin's deliberate and systematic starving to death of at least six million Ukrainian peasants was unprecedented and was prosecuted by rational people for certain ideological ends. And a generation later, Mao, learning from Stalin, slaughtered Chinese peasants on a scale that dwarfed Stalin and Hitler. Each gruesome chapter of mass murder in the twentieth-century -- from the Armenian Genocide to the Year Zero -- has its own distinct, even unique features, but within the context of the twentieth century, the Century of Ideology, these murderous chapters have a great deal in common and readily lend themselves to comparative analysis.

A natural consequence of the hostility towards any sceptical appraisal of the Holocaust Industry is that it encourages charlatans (the rise of Lysenko in the Soviet Union is another example). Thus, there is "The Painted Bird", the author of which, Jerzy Kosinski, was exposed as a literary hoaxer. Yet another is Benjamin Wilkomirski, the author of "Fragments", whose book, as Finkelstein notes: "was widely hailed as a classic of Holocaust literature. It was translated into a dozen languages and won the Jewish National Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize and the Prix de Memoire de la Shoah [...] Wilkomirski quickly became a Holocaust poster boy." Marketed as a Holocaust survivor, Wilkomirski was, it turned out, after he had been feted, not only not Jewish, but spent the entire war in Switzerland. But in the climate, as Finkelstein notes, Wilkomirski was "a Holocaust `survivor' waiting to be discovered". And Daniel Goldhagen's much-acclaimed "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is dismissed as "a compendium of sadistic violence" or" `Fragments' plus footnotes".

Having dealt with the origins and growth of the Industry, Finkelstein turns to the very successful attempts to extract huge sums of money in compensation from Germany and Switzerland. Again, any form of scepticism, such as denying a survivor's testimony or raising awkward questions as to the scale of compensation is seen as "denying the Holocaust". A point not generally realised is that Switzerland was not the sole nation receiving Jewish assets. The other main destination was the United States. Yet, Finkelstein notes, there has been no demand for an audit of U.S. banks along that conducted in Switzerland: "An audit of our banks on the scale of the Swiss audit would cost American taxpayers not millions but billions of dollars. By the time it was completed American Jews would be seeking asylum in Munich."

A Holocaust survivor was initially taken to be someone who had survived ghettoes, concentration camps and slave labour. It is generally agreed that the number of Holocaust survivors at the end of World War II was approximately 100,000, of whom, Finkelstein quite reasonably argues, only about 25,000 can still be alive. Subsequently, the definition was widened to include those who had managed to evade the Nazis, which, as Finkelstein notes, would include 100,000 Jews who sought refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion. According to Jacques Pat, secretary of the Jewish Workers' Committee of the United States, who visited Poland immediately after World War Two, the figure was 150,000, a significant addition to the numbers of those now redefined as Holocaust survivors. Pat calculated that 400,000 Jews who had fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion of Poland died in slave-labour camps and deportation. This represents eight per cent of the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis (based on Raul Hilberg's figure of 5.1 million). Clearly, the red Nazis were no slouches when it came to killing Jews, who, having fled Hitler, were not deemed to be class enemies.

Concerning the specific question of denying the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg has argued that those who deny or question specific features of the Holocaust do have a role to play, since they force historians of the Holocaust (as opposed to the many propagandists and charlatans) to examine their assumptions more closely. That is a good thing. That is what the study of history is about. Finkelstein's own response to the Holocaust deniers is characteristically robust and frank: "All the hype notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the Holocaust deniers exert any more influence in the United States than the flat-earth society does. Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust Industry, the wonder is that there are so few sceptics."

On the subject of denying certain historical events, it should be noted that any university professor who argued that the body count for communism had been exaggerated to serve the purposes of the Cold War could be assured of a warm reception. Whether one accepts a figure of six million murdered by Stalin or 15.5 million, or even higher, no one has ever been called a "Terror-Famine denier" or imprisoned for arguing that Stalin did not kill Ukrainian peasants on a scale greater than Hitler murdered Gypsies, Jews and Slavs. And this indifference to denying the crimes of communism is important, since it underlines the particularly savage and hypocritical laws designed to deter and to punish "Holocaust denial" in France and Germany. Had Norman Finkelstein been a citizen of Germany or France he would certainly have faced the possibility of being arrested and imprisoned for writing this incisive, well-researched and necessary book. There is no place in Western societies generally, and in academic circles specifically, for the institutional vilification of those who, reasonably or otherwise, beg to differ from Holocaust orthodoxy.

Finkelstein's concluding heresy is worth noting:

   "The abnormality of the Nazi holocaust springs not from the event itself
   but from the exploitative industry that has grown up around it. The
   Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly
   declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business. The noblest
   gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory, learn from
   their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace."

This is an eminently sensible and respectful suggestion. It pays due homage to the victims and the small band of survivors and acknowledges the need to liberate the study of history from the propagandists, the "hucksters" and the "hoaxers".

Frank Ellis