Norman Finkelstein writes as follows:
The issue of the total figure for ex-Jewish slave-laborers still alive bears on the Jewish Claims Conference's negotiations with Germany. The Claims Conference put forth the figure of 140,000 ex-Jewish slave-laborers still alive, and claimed that 700,000 Jewish slave-laborers survived the war. These figures are sheer nonsense and amount to Holocaust denial. The issue of ex-Jewish slave-laborers also bears on the agreement with the Swiss banks. They are supposed to be compensated in one of two "slave labor" classes. (There is a separate class for those who worked at Swiss enterprises.) ...
On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Michael Pollak wrote:
> ... C.G., if you are in touch with Norman, could you ask him about
> point two? There are a couple of claims in his book I can't account
> for at all, and this is one of them:
>
> > (2) The Jewish organizations have made claims on compensation
> > based on wildly inflated figures for ex-concentration camp inmates still
> > alive. Indeed, these figures verge on Holocaust denial;
>
> Norman is very fond of this claim. He made it in his interview with
> Alexander Cockburn, he made it in his interview with Doug, he makes it
> in his book, and he has made it many times since. But I am at a loss
> to understand what he is talking about. The original claimants in the
> Swiss affair were the *heirs* of people *who left money in the bank.*
> This group had no necessary overlap with camp victims. If every Jew
> who died in the camps had an account, you could still have a
> legitimate live claimant for every one of those accounts today. In
> fact you could have 10. And this leaves out the dormant accounts for
> refugees who escaped the clutches of the camps. There are lots of
> dormant accounts in the world for people who never went through bad
> times at all. And better off Jews, of the sort that would have had
> Swiss bank accounts, had a better chance of getting out. But all they
> would have had to have done is suffer the loss of their account ID
> number and they'd be on this list.
>
> Two classes of recipients were then added: the relatively small group
> of refugees who could prove they had been denied swiss asylum during
> the war, and the much larger group of slave laborers utilized by firms
> with whom Swiss banks had financial dealings. The last group is
> mostly made up of non-Jewish Eastern Europeans who were never in
> extermination camps.
>
> So when Norman asserts that the people now claiming money couldn't
> possibly be members of the original set of 100,000 extermination camp
> survivors who were left at war's end, he seems to be starting from a
> premise that has nothing to do with present-day reality, and then
> constructing upon it a scarily obsessive math. It's clear you don't
> have to be an extermination camp survivor to belong to *any* of these
> classes. And he recognizes himself that these are the three claimant
> groups involved (Holocaust Industry, p. 103). There are several other
> things about way Norman elaborates this particular argument that I
> find disturbing. But it's its collision with the factual basis that
> he himself states that puzzles me the most.
>
> The slave laborers, who became the main focus of the Swiss case, and
> then set off the parallel German case, are overwhelmingly made up of
> non-Jewish Poles, Ukranians and other Eastern Europeans who never got
> a dime before. They are the first non-Jews to get reparations from
> Nazi successor firms or governments, which is a turn of events I would
> think Norman would be in favor of, since it emphasizes that Jews were
> not alone in being victims, and hence undercuts the recurrent claims
> for "uniqueness" that he so dislikes. These non-Jews are also the only
> deserving receipients for whom a successful outcome will make any real
> difference. 5,000 or 15,000DM won't make much difference to an old
> Jewish survivor living in Israel or the US today. But to an old
> person without a pension in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union,
> it could be a big deal.
>
> If I were Norman, I would emphasize a different argument he made in
> his book, namely that it cost $200,000,000 dollars to audit all the
> Swiss accounts, and it is quite possible that all that money and four
> years later, the money found in dormant accounts that can be legally
> vouched for will end up being less than the amount spent to find it,
> which is exactly what the Swiss banks claimed in the first place.
> And since the Swiss banks said they'd pony up $200,000,000 sight
> unseen near the beginning of the whole process in 1997, they would
> deserve an apology on that account. This would require us to put an
> innocent reading on the destruction of 2,000,000 out of 6,000,000
> relevant account records, but that's not an implausible claim. This
> is also the simplest argument against extending the original dormant
> accounts case to other European countries, who were much less likely
> to be the destination of such funds, and who would thus have even
> higher retrieval costs.
>
> And I would then move on to his second very good point, which is that
> the two other main destinations of Jewish refugee money during the war
> were the US and Palestine/Israel, neither of whose banks are doing any
> looking at all, or are ever likely to. The reasons for this are
> pretty obvious, and they chime pretty well with Norman's long-standing
> concern with the use of the holocaust as an ideological weapon that
> purifies some countries in the present by anathematizing others in the
> past.
>
> But claiming that holocaust fetishists are holocaust deniers is a bad
> argument. It's like when Jews call each other Nazis. It may be
> satisfying to see your enemies splutter when you use such a huge
> insult. But it's got nothing to do with reality.
>
> Michael
>
> __________________________________________________________________________
> Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
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