HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY --Part II
by Norman Finkelstein
Chapter 2
Fragments 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. Star of documentaries, keynoter at Holocaust conferences and seminars, fund-raiser for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wilkomirski quickly became a Holocaust poster boy.
Acclaiming Fragments a "small masterpiece," Daniel Goldhagen was Wilkomirski's main academic champion. Knowledgeable historians like Raul Hilberg, however, early on pegged Fragments as a fraud. Hilberg also posed the right questions after the fraud's exposure: "How did this book pass as a memoir in several publishing houses? How could it have brought Mr. Wilkomirski invitations to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as recognized universities? How come we have no decent quality control when it comes to evaluating Holocaust material for publication?"41
Half-fruitcake, half-mountebank, Wilkomirski, it turns out, spent the entire war in Switzerland. He is not even Jewish. Listen, however, to the Holocaust industry postmortems:
Arthur Samuelson (publisher): Fragments "is a pretty cool book. . . It's only a fraud if you call it non-fiction. I would then reissue it, in the fiction, category. Maybe it's not true — then he's a better writer!"
Carol Brown Janeway (editor and translator): "If the charges . . . turn out to be correct, then what's at issue are not empirical facts that can be checked, but spiritual facts that must be pondered. What would be required is soul-checking, and that's an impossibility."
There's more. Israel Gutman is a director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust lecturer at Hebrew University. He is also a former inmate of Auschwitz. According to Gutman, "it's not that important" 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.45
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 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 Lewis of denying genocide. But Lewis denied the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I, not the Nazi genocide of Jews, and Lewis is pro-lsrael.52 Accordingly, this instance of holocaust denial raises no hackles in the United States. Turkey is an Israeli ally, extenuating matters even further. Mention of an Armenian genocide is therefore taboo. Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg as well as the AJC and Yad Vashem withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv because the academic sponsors, against Israeli government urging, included sessions on the Armenian case. Wiesel also sought, unilaterally, to abort the conference and, according to Yehuda Bauer, personally lobbied others not to attend.53 Acting at Israel's behest, the US Holocaust Council practically eliminated mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.54
To question a survivor's testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes in World War II — this is all evidence, according to Lipstadt, of Holocaust denial.55 And to suggest that Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust denial.56
The most "insidious" forms of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt suggests, are «immoral equivalencies»: that is, denying the uniqueness of The Holocaust.57 This argument has intriguing implications. Daniel Goldhagen argues that Serbian actions in Kosovo «are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale."58 That would make Goldhagen "in essence" a Holocaust denier. Indeed, across the political spectrum, Israeli commentators compared Serbia's actions in Kosovo with Israeli actions in 1948 against the Palestinians.59 By Goldhagen's reckoning, then, Israel committed a Holocaust. Not even Palestinians claim that anymore.
Not all revisionist literature — however scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners — is totally useless. Lipstadt brands David Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial" (he recently lost a libel suit in England against her for these and other assertions). But Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism, has nevertheless, as Gordon Craig points out, made an "indispensable" contribution to our knowledge of World War II. Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul Hilberg cite Holocaust denial publications. "If these people want to speak, let them," Hilberg observes. "It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that's useful for us.60
Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor commemorations, often in state legislative chambers. The Association of Holocaust Organizations lists over 100 Holocaust institutions in the United States. Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The first question is why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation's capitol. Its presence on the Washington Mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans .61
It "tries meticulously to refrain from any attempt at indoctrination," the Holocaust museum's designer wrote, "from any manipulation of impressions or emotions." Yet from conception through completion, the museum was mired in politics.62 With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the President's recognition of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinians. The chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, deplored Carter's recognition of Palestinian humanity as a "shocking" initiative. Carter announced plans for the museum while Prime Minister Menachem Begin was visiting Washington and in the midst of a bruising Congressional battle over the Administration's proposed sale of weaponry to Saudi Arabia. Other political issues also emerge in the museum. It mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism so as not to offend a powerful constituency. It downplays the discriminatory US immigration quotas before the war, exaggerates the US role in liberating the concentration camps, and silently passes over the massive US recruitment of Nazi war criminals at the war's end. The Museum's overarching message is that "we" couldn't even conceive, let alone commit, such evil deeds. The Holocaust "cuts against the grain of the American ethos," Michael Berenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum. "We see in [its] perpetration a violation of every essential American value." The Holocaust museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the "appropriate answer to Nazism" with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.63
The politicization begins even before one crosses the museum's threshold. It is situated on Raoul Wallenberg Place. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is honored because he rescued thousands of Jews and ended up in a Soviet prison. Fellow Swede Count Folke Bernadotte is not honored because, although he too rescued thousands of Jews, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir ordered his assassination for being too "pro-Arab."64
The crux of Holocaust museum politics, however, bears on whom to memorialize. Were Jews the only victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of Nazi persecution also count as victims?65 During the museum's planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the "undisputed expert on the Holocaust period," Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. "As always, they began with Jews,» he typically intoned. "As always, they did not stop with Jews alone."66 Yet not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the first genocidal victims, of Nazism.67
Justifying preemption of the Gypsy genocide posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The Nazis systematically murdered as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses roughly equal to the Jewish genocide.68 Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that the Gypsies did not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did.69
Multiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply couldn't compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as "cockamamie," executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether Gypsies even "existed" as a people: "There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing." He did allow, however, that "there was a suffering element under the Nazis." Edward Linenthal recalls the Gypsy representatives' "deep suspicion" of the council, "fueled by clear evidence that some council members viewed Rom participation in the museum the way a family deals with unwelcome, embarrassing relatives."70
Second: acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish "moral capital." Third: if the Nazis persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the Gypsy genocides In the museum's permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive only token recognition.71
Finally, the Holocaust museum's political agenda has also been shaped by the Israel-Palestine conflict. Before serving as the museum's director, Walter Reich wrote a paean to Joan Peters's fraudulent From Time Immemorial, which claimed that Palestine was literally empty before Zionist colonization.72 Under State Department pressure, Reich was forced to resign after refusing to invite Yasir Arafat, now a compliant American ally, to visit the museum. Offered a subdirector's position, Holocaust theologian John Roth was then badgered into resigning because of past criticism of Israel. Repudiating a book the museum originally endorsed because it included a chapter by Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian critical of Israel, Miles Lerman, the museum's chairman, avowed, "To put this museum on the opposite side of Israel - it's inconceivable."73
In the wake of Israel's appalling attacks against Lebanon in 1996, climaxing in the massacre of more than a hundred civilians at Qana, Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit observed that Israel could act with impunity because "we have the Anti-Defamation League . . . and Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum."74
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