For new ZGram readers who come to the controversy of "Holocaust Reparations" cold, a brief explanation for Saturday's and Sunday's two-part ZGram:
It was written, apparently as an addendum to foreign translations, by Professor Norman Finkelstein, { normangf@hotmail.com } a disillusioned son of "Holocaust survivors" and author of the best-selling bombshell booklet, "The Holocaust Industry".
Finkelstein believes - or so, at least, we are asked to accept! - that the so-called "Holocaust", replete with gas chambers and all the gruesome trappings, did indeed take place exactly as propagandized by the Holocaust Lobby. Finkelstein parts way with the Lobby's self-serving version of being the moral, above-board champion of "needy Holocaust survivors" and accuses them of shameless exploitation of a "documented" World War II tragedy.
Revisionists, of course, wish for Finkelstein to "go all the way" and to delve deeper into this very murky story, as befits an intellectually and morally courageous scholar. Most Revisionists anticipate that this will happen sooner or later, as the wrath of the Holocaust Lobby intensifies on this rather brave and articulate Jewish dissident, who has already given the Lobby plenty of headaches.
Please keep in mind that footnotes to this extraordinary summary of the extent of the Holocaust Reparations Racket follow in tomorrow's Part II.
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How the Holocaust Industry Stole the Swiss Monies
Postscript to Foreign Translations
In chapter three of this book I documented the Holocaust industry's "double shakedown" of European countries as well as Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide. Recent developments confirm this analysis. Indeed, for confirmation of my argument, one need merely place documents readily available in the public domain under critical and close scrutiny.
In late August 2000 the World Jewish Congress (WJC) announced that it stood to amass fully $9 billion in Holocaust compensation monies. (1) They were extracted in the name of "needy Holocaust victims" but the WJC now maintained that the monies belonged to the "Jewish people as a whole" (WJC executive director, Elan Steinberg). Conveniently, the WJC is the self-anointed representative of the "Jewish people as a whole." Meanwhile, a black-tie Holocaust reparations banquet sponsored by WJC president Edgar Bronfman at New York's Pierre Hotel celebrated the creation of a "Foundation of the Jewish People" to subsidize Jewish organizations and "Holocaust education." (One Jewish critic of the "Holocaust-themed dinner" conjured this scenario: "Mass murder. Horrible plunder. Slave Labor. Let's eat.") The Foundation's endowment would come from "residual" Holocaust compensation monies amounting to "probably billions of dollars" (Steinberg). How the WJC already knew that "probably billions" would be left over when none of the compensation monies had yet been distributed to Holocaust victims was anyone's guess. Indeed, it was not yet even known how many would qualify. Or, did the Holocaust industry extract compensation monies in the name of "needy Holocaust victims" knowing all along that "probably billions" would be left over? The Holocaust industry bitterly complained that the German and Swiss settlements allotted only meager sums for survivors. It is unclear why the "probably billions" couldn't be used to supplement these allocations.
Predictably, Holocaust survivors reacted with rage. (None was present at the Foundation's creation.) "Who authorized these organizations to decide," a survivor newsletter angrily editorialized, "that the `leftovers' (in the billions), obtained in the name of Shoah victims, should be used for their pet projects instead of helping ALL holocaust survivors with their mounting health-care expenses?" Confronted with this barrage of negative publicity, the WJC did an abrupt about-face. The $9 billion figure was "a bit misleading," Steinberg subsequently protested. He also claimed that the Foundation had "no cash and no plan for allocating funds," and the purpose of the Holocaust banquet was not to celebrate the Foundation's endowment from Holocaust compensation monies but rather to raise funds for it. Elderly Jewish survivors, not consulted in advance of, let alone invited to, the "star- studded gala" at the Pierre Hotel, picketed outside.
Among those honored inside the Pierre was President Clinton, who movingly recalled that the United States stood in the forefront of "facing up to an ugly past": "I have been to Native American reservations and acknowledged that the treaties we signed were neither fair nor honorably kept in many cases. I went to Africa...and acknowledged the responsibility of the United States in buying people into slavery. This is a hard business, struggling to find our core of humanity." Notably absent in all these instances of "hard business" were reparations in hard currency. (2)
On 11 September 2000 the "Special Master's Proposed Plan of Allocation and Distribution of Settlement Proceeds" from the Swiss banks litigation was finally released (hereafter: Gribetz Plan). (3) Publication of the Plan - more than two years in the making - was timed not for the "needy Holocaust victims dying everyday" but the Holocaust gala that same night. Burt Neuborne, lead counsel for the Holocaust industry in the Swiss banks affair and "the most vocal supporter of the distribution plan" (New York Times), praised the document as "meticulously researched ... painstaking and sensitive." (4) Indeed, it seemed to belie pervasive fears that the monies would be misappropriated by Jewish organizations. The Forward typically reported that "the distribution plan...proposes that more than 90% of the Swiss monies be paid directly to survivors and their heirs." Protesting that "the World Jewish Congress has never asked for a penny, will never take a penny and does not accept restitution funds," Elan Steinberg piously acclaimed the Gribetz Plan as an "extraordinarily intelligent and compassionate document." (5) Intelligent it surely was, but hardly compassionate. For hidden in the details of the Gribetz Plan is the devilish reality that probably but a small fraction of the Swiss monies will be paid directly to Holocaust survivors and their heirs. Before considering this, however, it bears notice that the Plan conclusively, if unwittingly, demonstrates that the Holocaust industry blackmailed Switzerland. (6)
Readers will recall that in May 1996 the Swiss banks formally consented to a comprehensive, external audit - "the most extensive audit in history" (Judge Korman) - in order to settle all outstanding claims by Holocaust survivors and their heirs. (7) Before the audit committee (chaired by Paul Volcker), even had an opportunity to meet, however, the Holocaust industry pressed for a financial settlement. Two pretexts were adduced to preempt the Volcker Committee: 1. the Committee couldn't be trusted, 2. needy Holocaust victims couldn't wait for the Committee's findings. The Gribetz Plan demolishes both pretexts.
In June 1997, Burt Neuborne submitted a "Memorandum of Law" justifying preemption of the Volcker Committee. Against all evidence and with remarkable effrontery, Neuborne dismissed the Committee as a Swiss initiative to deflect criticism into a "private mediation effort that is sponsored, paid for and designed by the defendants." (8) It bears notice that Neuborne even held against the Swiss bankers that they footed the $500 million bill for the unprecedented audit imposed on them. In August 1998 the Holocaust industry successfully forced a non-recoupable $1.25 billion settlement on the Swiss before the Volcker Committee completed its work. (9) Although the pretext for this settlement was that the Volcker Committee couldn't be trusted, the Gribetz Plan heaps praise on the Committee and emphasizes that the Committee's findings and mechanism for processing claims ("Claims Resolution Tribunal" - "CRT") were and continue to be of "vital significance" in distributing the Swiss monies. (10) The Holocaust industry's enthusiastic reliance on the Committee for distributing the Swiss monies confutes its main pretext for preempting the Committee with a non-recoupable settlement.
In their settlement with the Holocaust industry, the Swiss were compelled not only to pay for Holocaust-era dormant Jewish accounts, but also to "disgorge the profits" they "knowingly" reaped from the Jewish assets looted, and Jewish slave labor exploited, by the Nazis. (11) The Gribetz Plan reveals the flimsiness of these charges as well. It admits that "very few if any" direct links - let alone direct profitable links or knowingly profitable links - could be established between the Swiss, on the one hand, and looted Jewish assets and Jewish slave labor, on the other. Indeed, the Plan makes clear that the entire indictment in these classes was built on what was "likely" or "presumed" or "potentially" to be the case. (12) Finally, Switzerland was compelled to provide restitution to Jews fleeing Nazism who were denied refuge. The Gribetz Plan explicitly concedes - if only in a footnote - the "questionable legal validity" of this claim. (13) Despite all these admissions, however, the Plan still approvingly quotes that "in a perfectly just world, plaintiffs should have received a far greater sum" than the $1.25 billion extracted from the Swiss. (14)
Apart from the Volcker Committee's alleged partisanship, the Holocaust industry gestured to the mortality of Holocaust survivors to force a non-recoupable settlement on the Swiss. Time was supposedly of the essence because "needy Holocaust victims" had only a short time left to live. With the money in hand, however, the Holocaust industry has suddenly discovered that "needy Holocaust victims" aren't dying so rapidly. Citing a study commissioned by the Jewish Claims Conference, the Gribetz plan reports that "the population of Nazi victims is declining more slowly than previously believed." Indeed, the Plan purports that "a fairly substantial number of Jewish Nazi victims may live for at least another 20 years and that 30-35 years from now" - that is, some ninety years after the end of World War II - "tens of thousands of Jewish Nazi victims are likely to be alive." (15) Given the Holocaust industry's track record, it should surprise no one if this revelation is eventually adduced to press yet new compensation demands on Europe. In the meantime it is already being used to slow the allocation of compensation monies. Thus the Gribetz Plan recommends that the monies be allocated in small increments over time because "building expectations among needy survivors, only to remove the funding and thus the assistance, would be a great disservice." (16)
During the Swiss banks affair, the Holocaust industry maintained that the average age of a survivor was 73 in Israel and 80 in the rest of the world. Life expectancy in the three countries where most Holocaust survivors currently reside ranges from 60 (former Soviet Union) to 77 (the United States and Israel). (17) One might be excused for wondering how it is possible for "tens of thousands" of Holocaust survivors to be alive 35 years from now. A partial answer is that the Holocaust industry has yet again revised the definition of a Holocaust survivor. "One of the reasons for this relatively slower decline in the size of the population," the above-mentioned Claims Conference study reports, "is the finding that, using the broad definition, there are many more relatively younger Nazi victims than previously believed." (emphasis added) (18) Indeed, in a Weimar-like inflation, the Gribetz Plan puts the number of living Holocaust survivors at nearly a million - a four-fold increase from the already extraordinary figure of 250,000 Holocaust survivors reported during the Swiss shakedown. (19)
To manage this actuarial and demographic feat, the Gribetz Plan now deems every Russian Jew who survived World War II to be a Holocaust survivor. (20) Thus, Russian Jews who fled in advance of the Nazis or served in the Red Army now qualify as Holocaust survivors because they faced torture and death if captured. (21) Even accepting for argument's sake this truly novel definition of Holocaust survivor, it is unclear why Soviet functionaries who fled in advance of the Nazis or non-Jewish conscripts in the Red Army don't also qualify as Holocaust survivors. They too faced torture and death if captured. Indeed, the Plan reports that a Jewish-American serviceman captured by the Nazis was interned in a concentration camp. (22) Shouldn't every Jewish-American G.I. from World War II count as a Holocaust survivor? Possibilities abound. Defending the Gribetz Plan mortality projections for Holocaust survivors, a senior historian for the Holocaust wing of the British Imperial War Museum explained that in a "still broader sense...second and even third generation can be considered" Holocaust victims because "they may suffer from psychiatric disturbances." (23) It's only a matter of time before the Holocaust industry restores Wilkomirski to grace as a Holocaust survivor since - to quote Yad Vashem Director Israel Gutman - his "pain is authentic."
For the Holocaust industry, this redefinition and upward revision of the figure for Holocaust survivors serves multiple purposes. Not only does it justify the shakedown of European countries, but it justifies the shakedown of actual Holocaust victims as well. For years these Holocaust victims have begged the Claims Conference to allocate compensation monies for a health insurance program. Noting this "thoughtful" proposal in a footnote, the Gribetz Plan laments that the Swiss settlement "would be insufficient" to provide medical insurance for "well over 800,000" Holocaust survivors. (24)
[END]
Tomorrow: Part II (Conclusion and footnotes)
Thought for the Day:
"A Little Brother of the Rich"
(Title of a poem by Elbert Hubbard)