Finkelstein has a web page with a number of links at
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/default.htm
One link is to "The New German Debate on Finkelstein," five articles (in German) from the last two months.
Also, Finkelstein replied earlier to his German critics as follows:
Conjuring Conspiracies or Breaking Taboos?
A reply to my critics in Germany
by Norman G. Finkelstein
First published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, September 9, 2000
The main brief of my critics is that in The Holocaust Industry I contrive a conspiracy theory that fosters anti-Semitism. Before addressing this objection directly, I would want to make a preliminary observation. Although the explanatory value of conspiracy theories is marginal, this does not mean that, in the real world, individuals and institutions don't strategize and scheme. To believe otherwise is no less naive than to believe that a vast conspiracy manipulates worldly affairs. Consider the important recent study by Frances Stonor Saunders entitled, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.[i] Saunders documents that virtually every cultural icon from the left to the right end of the mainstream spectrum during the Cold War was directly or indirectly subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, even Abstract Expressionism was showcased by the CIA as the free worlds antidote to Socialist Realism. Imagine if someone charged in the 1950s that lurking in the wings of a Jackson Pollock exhibition were CIA spooks. He would no doubt have been dismissed as a hare-brained conspiracy theorist. It happens that he would also have been right.
Two conspiracy theories supposedly inform The Holocaust Industry: (1) I argue that Jewish elites moved The Holocaust to the center stage of American life after the June 1967 war to immunize Israel from criticism, and (2) I argue that the Holocaust industry, acting in concert with the Clinton Administration, has engaged in a "double shakedown" of European countries as well as the actual Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. I will address each argument in turn.
Professor Ulrich Herbert both denies that The Holocaust emerged in American life in the late 1960s and that its emergence was related to the June 1967 war. It bears emphasis that, apart from Herbert, no scholar I know of disputes these claims. The consensus - to quote the British historian, Geoff Eley - is that "By the late Sixties, the term Holocaust was appearing in the titles of essays and books, freshly equipped with both a capital letter and the definite article."[ii] To cite one typical indication, in September 1968, the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)," for material that earlier would have been categorized under such headings as "World War, 1939-1945 Jews."[iii] It is equally uncontroversial that the June 1967 war prompted this development. It seems that Herbert does not comprehend the terms of the debate. The question is not when The Holocaust emerged in American life but why? The mainstream interpretation is that fears for Israel's vulnerability in June 1967 jogged Jewish memories of The Holocaust. I present extensive evidence to show that the mainstream interpretation is untenable, and that the likely reasons were to protect Israel's new strategic alliance with the United States.
Herbert also professes that The Holocaust is not instrumentalized in American life to support Israel and that leading Israeli Holocaust historians are the sternest critics of Israel's occupation policy. Such claims (and many more in Herbert's article) will surely raise eyebrows among those knowledgeable on these topics. I sought to demonstrate that the main dogmas of the Holocaust framework - The Holocaust is a categorically unique event, and The Holocaust marks the climax of a millennial, irrational Gentile hatred of the Jews - lack scholarly value, but rather are propounded for political gain. Professor Sznaider maintains that The Holocaust marks a unique historical event, but one which nonetheless serves as an important signpost against future genocides. To buttress this claim, he cites Elie Wiesel, who both espouses the uniqueness of The Holocaust and personally intervenes to avert potential genocides. Yet one is hard pressed to name a single example where Wiesel's invocation of The Holocaust didn't serve US statecraft, or a single example where Wiesel's invocation of The Holocaust served the victims of US statecraft. Thus Wiesel invoked The Holocaust for Cambodia post-1975 under the Khmer Rouge but not Cambodia pre-1975 under American bombs; for the Miskito Indians under the Sandinistas, but not for Nicaragua under Somoza or Nicaragua under American attack. In the case of the Mayan Indians of Guatemala, Wiesel refused to protest against ongoing genocide even in private. Professor Maier vehemently denies that the dogma according to which The Holocaust marked the climax of Gentile hatred of Jews figures centrally in Holocaust literature. Yet the Zionist doctrine permeating Holocaust literature posits - in Hannah Arendt's words - "an eternal anti-Semitism governing relations of Jews and Gentiles everywhere and always."[iv] In this view The Holocaust is "taken almost as a given, as a natural law....If not ordered by God, it was at least an historical inevitability" (historian Omer Bartov).[v] Professor Marcia Pally opines that the fundamental schism in the Holocaust debate pits "essentialists" like Wiesel and Goldhagen against "contextualists" like myself. These distinctions obscure more than they illuminate. The main divide as I see it is simply between genuine scholarship on the Nazi holocaust (one thinks, for example, of Hilberg, Browning, Henry Friedlander, and Herbert), and the dogmatic, politically-freighted pap of the Holocaust industry.[vi]
Beyond ideologically exploiting The Holocaust for political ends, the Holocaust industry has crudely targeted real and imagined critics. Collaborating with Israeli and South African intelligence, the Bnai Brith Anti-Defamation League (ADL) assembled massive files on US intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and infiltrated hundreds of respected US organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.[vii] Deploring my "anti-Zionist stance," the ADL sought to block publication of my last book, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth.. When my publisher resisted, pressures were exerted on the employer of my co-author, Ruth Bettina Birn. A Canadian Jewish Congress-backed report denounced Birn, the chief historian of the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Section of the Canadian Department of Justice, as a "member of the perpetrator race" (she is German-born). When Birn publicly protested these strong-arm tactics, the Congress accused her of an "anti-Semitic canard."[viii] Professor Pally asserts that The Holocaust Industry was "greeted by scandalized reviews in the US." In fact, although it's been front-page news throughout Europe, there's been a virtual media blackout on the book in the US.[ix] Jacob Heilbrun credits this American silence to indifference. Similarly Professor Anson Rabinbach of Princeton told an Austrian paper that the book is ignored in the US because it lacks originality.[x] Such explanations strain credulity. Virtually every item on the Holocaust (including a Holocaust cookbook) is widely featured in the US.
It is also alleged that my account of the Holocaust compensation agreements is informed by a conspiracy theory. I want first to clarify one misapprehension. I emphatically do support material reparations for the victims of Nazi persecution. The wonder would be were it otherwise. After all, I personally invested much time over many years (alas, unsuccessfully) to securing financial compensation for my late mother. It is flat-out wrong, however, to extract Holocaust compensation on false pretexts. People wonder why I - a person firmly of the Left - would defend Swiss bankers. Indeed I share Brecht's credo, "What's robbing a bank compared to owning one?" Yet my concern in the book is not Swiss bankers or, for that matter, German industrialists. Rather it is restoring the integrity of the historical record and the sanctity of the Jewish people's martyrdom. I deplore the Holocaust industry's corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket.
The charge that I contrived a conspiracy theory is simply an evasion of uncomfortable facts. In the first place, it is not even a matter of dispute that, in order to extract Holocaust reparations, American Jewish organizations orchestrated a manifold campaign conscripting all levels of the US government - from President Clinton and Undersecretary of the Treasury, Stuart Eizenstat, through multiple Federal agencies and Congressional committees, down to numerous state and local governments - as well as the major US media and a clot of class-action lawyers. Moreover, for the US government to demand that Europeans compensate for past wrongs in the face of its own disgraceful record reeks of the grossest hypocrisy. "Property restitution," Eizenstat intoned during negotiations with Austria, "is a matter of particular priority for the United States."[xi] This will surely come as a surprise to Native Americans, not to mention Palestinian refugees. In mainstream American discourse on Vietnam the only question that arises is when will they own up to what they did to us. Professor Maier claims the Swiss incurred American wrath because they never fully accounted for Holocaust-era Jewish assets. Yet, as the leading US expert on this topic, Seymour Rubin, testified in a Congressional hearing, the record of the US was worse than the Swiss record: "The United States took only very limited measures to identify heirless assets in the United States, and made available...a mere $500,000, in contrast to the $32,000,000 acknowledged by Swiss banks even prior to the Volcker inquiry."[xii] Maier blithely ignores this crucial point.
Several objections have been leveled against my account of the German reparations agreements. I document that the Claims Conference misappropriated the original funds earmarked by the German government for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Peter Longerich responds to this argument by reciting a Claims Conference press release.[xiii] One expects better from scholars. Herbert suggests the matter can only be resolved in the courts. Yet, when Ronald Zweig published his official history of the Claims Conference in 1987, he explicitly acknowledged that "despite the formal restrictions on the use of the reparation funds in the agreement with Germany, the Claims Conference channeled the monies to projects in the Arab world and elsewhere."[xiv] Incidentally, shouldn't responsible German periodicals like Der Spiegel be investigating these matters rather than my personal life?
I also charged that the Claims Conference wildly inflated the figure of Jewish slave-laborers during the recent German negotiations. Juxtaposing the standard scholarly figures for surviving Jewish slave-laborers at war's end - they range from 50,000 (Leonard Dinnerstein) to 100,000 (Henry Friedlander) - against the Claims Conferences figure of 700,000, I suggested that the Conference's figure verged on Holocaust denial. Although higher than the figures I cite, Herbert's maximum figure of 300,000 surviving Jewish slave-laborers at war's end also falls staggeringly short of the Claims Conference number. It also bears mention that German scholars like Professor Gunnar Heinsohn consider Herbert's figure much too high. I further suggested on the basis of anecdotal evidence that no more than 25% of these surviving Jewish slave-laborers at war's end were alive today. This percentage was confirmed independently by a scholar attached to the German team in the negotiations. Indeed, even the Claims Conference used this percentage in its calculations. Yet for unknown reasons, Herbert suggests that an extraordinary 30-40% of surviving Jewish slave-laborers at war's end are still living.
Herbert makes many other problematic assertions. He claims that without outside pressures, Germany wouldn't have compensated slave-laborers. It seems he underestimates the SPD-Green coalition's sense of historic responsibility. According to Klaus von Munchhausen, a long-time advocate for the slave-laborers, plans for compensation were already in the works before the exertion of external pressures.[xv] Herbert writes paeans to the beautiful bonds sewn between attorneys like Michael Hausfeld and their clients during the German negotiations. Yet according to insider accounts, lawyers for the various constituencies lapsed into ugly mutual recrimination and machination. (I myself became an unwitting party to these sordid maneuverings when Michael Hausfeld, representing the Slavic laborers, directed journalists my way in order to undermine the Claims Conference.) Professor Maier defends the Holocaust compensation lawyers against the charge of cupidity. Yet the Washington Post reported that the German settlement was stalled by "unseemly haggling over how much of the funds money should be paid to the American lawyers, who were hoping to secure large contingency fees."[xvi] Holocaust lawyers in the Swiss case billed at a rate of $600 per hour.
Meanwhile, the World Jewish Congress just announced that it will accumulate fully $9 billion in compensation monies. They were extracted in the name of "needy Holocaust victims" but the WJC now maintains that the monies belong to the "Jewish people as a whole." Conveniently, the WJC is the self-proclaimed representative of the "Jewish people as a whole." At a black-tie Holocaust "reparations banquet" in New York's Waldorf-Astoria, the WJC will celebrate the creation of a Holocaust foundation which will subsidize Jewish organizations and "Holocaust education." Its endowment will come from "residual" Holocaust compensation monies amounting to "probably billions of dollars." How the WJC already knows that "probably billions" will be left over when practically none of the compensation monies has yet been distributed to Holocaust survivors is anyone's guess. It is not yet even known who qualifies and how many will qualify. Or, did the Holocaust industry extract compensation monies in the name of "needy Holocaust victims" knowing full well all along that "probably billions" will be left over? The Holocaust industry bitterly complained that the German settlement allotted a meager $7500 for each former Jewish slave-laborer. It is unclear why the "probably billions" can't be used to supplement the German allocation. Holocaust survivors are reportedly enraged. Attendees at the gala, however, need not worry: survivors weren't even told about it, let alone invited.[xvii]
Critics allege that The Holocaust Industry promotes anti-Semitism. It seems that the messenger is being blamed for the bad news. Indeed, even the influential conservative Jewish magazine, Commentary, has now repudiated elements of the Holocaust industry for a "grotesque scramble for money," a "revival of Shylockian stereotypes," "unrestrainedly availing themselves of any method, however unseemly or even disreputable," "wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of a sacred cause," "an ungrounded effort to bludgeon a company into submission," "unsightly entanglements in carrying out its fiduciary responsibilities," "the arm-twisting, the threats of boycott, the bad press some of it undeserved, some of it undertaken for the naked aim of extracting money," "stoking the fires of anti-Semitism on the far Right," and on and on.[xviii] If these charges sound familiar, it's because they echo The Holocaust Industry. (Strangely, I am not credited by Commentary but rather denounced as an "extremist.")
It is not my book but the Holocaust industry's ruthless tactics that fosters anti-Semitism. It is not my book but the Holocaust industry's falsification of history that fosters Holocaust denial. It is not my book but the Holocaust industry's threat of crippling American sanctions against Eastern Europe that conjures the ugliest caricatures from Der Sturmer. To fight anti-Semitism, it is not The Holocaust Industry that must be censored but the Holocaust industry that must be put out of business.
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Notes
[i]. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (London: 1999). For the CIA and Abstract Expressionism, see chap. 16. [ii]. Geoff Eley, Holocaust History, in London Review of Books, 3-16 March 1982. [iii]. Jon Petrie, The secular word HOLOCAUST: scholarly myths, history, and 20th century meanings, in Journal of Genocide Research (2000), 2(1), pp. 48-9. [iv]. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: 1978), 141; cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: 1980), p. 10. [v]. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst (New York: 1996), p. 60. [vi]. On this point, see Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial (New York: 1998), pp. 87ff. [vii]. Robert I. Friedman, The Anti-Defamation League Is Spying On You, in Village Voice (11 May 1993). David Barsamian (ed.), Chronicles of Dissent (Monroe, ME: 1992), p. 38 (Chomsky). [viii]. The Holocaust Industry, pp. 65-7; Jewish Post and News (4 February 1998). [ix]. Eva Schweitzer, Auf der schwarzen Liste, in Berliner Zeitung (28 August 2000). [x]. Michael Freund, Applau von richtiger une falscher Seite, in Der Standard (24 August 2000). [xi]. Eizenstat Remarks at Austrian Nazi Slave Labor Fund Conference. (17 May 2000) [xii].. Holocaust Industry, pp. 115-17. [xiii]. Peter Longerich. Ein Mann sieht rot, Frankfurter Rundschau (22 August 2000). [xiv]. Ronald Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World (Boulder, Colorado: 1987), p. 74. [xv]. Eva Schweitzer, Klaus von Munchhauser: Es geht nicht um die Opfer, es geht um Profit, in Der Tagesspiegel (14 June 2000). [xvi]. William Drozdiak, Germany signs Pact to Compensate Nazi Slaves, in Washington Post (18 July 2000). [xvii]. Joan Gralla, Holocaust Foundation Set for Restitution Funds, in Reuters (11 August 2000); Michael J. Jordan, Spending Restitution Money Pits Survivors Against Groups, in Jewish Telegraphic Agency (29 August 2000). [xviii]. Gabriel Schoenfeld, Holocaust Reparations A Growing Scandal, in Commentary (September 2000),