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The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book published in 2000 by Norman G. Finkelstein, who argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain, as well as to further the interests of Israel. According to Finkelstein, this "Holocaust industry" has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust. Finkelstein's parents were both Holocaust survivors who had been inmates of concentration camps.

The book was a bestseller in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, and has been translated into 16 languages.

Finkelstein on the book

As the child of Holocaust survivors (every member of both of his parents' families having been exterminated by the Nazis), Norman Finkelstein has lived with the Holocaust all his life. However, he thinks of the Nazi holocaust as a historical event, while "The Holocaust" is its ideological representation.

His earliest memory of the historical event is his mother watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Other than that, it did not intrude on his childhood. No friend (or parent of a friend) asked any questions about what his mother and father had suffered. As he says "This was not a respectful silence. It was indifference. In this light, one cannot but be sceptical of the outpourings of anguish in later decades, after the Holocaust industry was firmly established."

In the foreword to the first paperback edition, Finkelstein notes that the first Hardback edition had been a considerable hit in several European countries and many languages, but had been panned in the US. He sees the New York Times as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust industry, and notes that the 1999 Index listed 273 entries for the Holocaust and just 32 entries for the whole of Africa. Historian Omer Bartov, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of genocide, ridiculed the notion of Holocaust profiteers as a "novel variation of `The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," - only a few months later he railed against the "growing list of Holocaust profiteers," and fingered "The Holocaust Industry" as a prime example.

Chapters

• Chapter 1: Capitalizing The Holocaust - by the 1980s, the "War against the Jews" had become more important to American cultural life than the "War Between the States".
• Chapter 2: Hoaxers, Hucksters and History - in 1967 two new dogmas appeared for the first time in public discourse. They were the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust, and that the Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational Gentile hatred of the Jews. These became the central feature of the Holocaust Industry, but neither figures in genuine scholarship of the Nazi Holocaust.
• Chapter 3: The Double Shakedown - the number of Holocaust Survivors increased from c. 100,000 in 1945 to nearly 1 million in 1997. "Fraudulent" claims were made on Switzerland, while accounts and assets in the US and Israel were ignored. Payments were made to the wrong people and real survivors lost out.

The 100 pages of new material in the 2003 edition mostly expand Chapter 3 concentrating on the Swiss Banks case. Finkelstein set out to provide later researchers with a guide to the relevant sections of the case. He feels that the presiding judge elected not to docket crucial documents, and that the Claims Resolution Tribunal could no longer be trusted. The CRT was on course to vindicate the Swiss banks before it switched tacks in order to "protect the blackmailers reputation".

Other topics

Fraudulent writings on the Holocaust

Finkelstein describes two known frauds, that of The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski) and Fragments (Binjamin Wilkomirski), and how they were defended by people even after they'd been exposed. He identifies some of these people as members of the Holocaust Industry, and notes that they also support each other. Elie Wiesel supported Kosinski; Israel Gutman and Daniel Goldhagen (see below) supported Wilkomirski; Wiesel and Gutman support Goldhagen.

Holocaust Industry defends itself

Finkelstein has published heavy criticisms of several books in his career and he did the same to Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Johnah Goldhagen, which he calls "replete with gross misinterpretations of source material and internal contradictions", and says "the book is devoid of scholarly value". Independently, Ruth Bettina Birn (the world's leading authority on the archives that Goldhagen had consulted and chief historian for War Crimes with the Canadian Department of Justice) did the same - she and Finkelstein worked together on A Nation of Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. Goldhagen refused the journal's invitation for a full rebuttal, and instead enlisted a London law firm to sue Birn and the Cambridge University Press. Protests were made to Birn's employer, calling her "a member of the perpetrator race" (she is German born), prompting an official investigation of her.(p.66)

Armenian Genocide

Finkelstein scathingly compared the media treatment of the Holocaust and the media treatment of the Armenian Genocide, particularly by members of what he calls "The Holocaust Industry". (1 to 1.5 million Armenians died in the years between 1915 and 1917/1923 - denial includes the claim that they were the result of a Civil War within World War I, or refusal to accept there were deaths). In 2000, Finkelstein documented in this book how, in 1982 and 1995, the genocide (and even the suffering) of the Armenians was rejected by Israel, by Elie Wiesel and the US Holocaust Council. In 2001, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres went so far as to dismiss it as "allegations," and Armenian accounts of the mass slaughter as "meaningless". However, by this time historical consensus was changing, and he was "angrily compared ... to a holocaust denier" by Dr Charny, executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem.

In August 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide. However, Wiesel's organization asserted there would be no legal "basis for reparations or territorial claims", anticipating Turkish anxieties that it could prompt financial or property claims. The ADL's Abe Foxman announced: "Upon reflection, the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide".

Other forms of Holocaust denial

Finkelstein explains that to suggest that Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust Industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust Denial, according to Elie Wiesel. Questioning a survivor's testimony, denouncing the role of Jewish collaborators, suggesting that Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes in World War II are all evidence of Holocaust denial according to Deborah Lipstadt and the most "insidious" forms of Holocaust denial are "immoral equivalencies", denying the uniqueness of The Holocaust. Finkelstein examines the intriguing implications of applying this standard to another member of the "Holocaust Industry", Daniel Goldhagen, who argued that Serbian actions in Kosovo "are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale".

Holocaust deniers in real life

Deborah Lipstadt claims there is widespread Holocaust denial, but in "Denying the Holocaust" her prime example is Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The chapter on him is entitled "Entering the Mainstream" - but Finkelstein considers that, were it not for the likes of Lipstadt, no one would ever have heard of Arthur Butz. Holocaust deniers have as much influence in the US as the flat-earth society (p. 69). Finkelstein believes there to be only one "truly mainstream" holocaust denier. This is Bernard Lewis, convicted in France of denying the Armenian genocide. Since Lewis is pro-Israel "this instance ... raises no hackles in the United States."

Reviews and critiques

The critical response has been varied. In addition to prominent supporters, such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, the esteemed Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg is on record as praising Finkelstein's book:

I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy. He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough."

Others have argued that The Holocaust Industry is an unscholarly work that promotes antisemitic stereotypes. For example, according to Israeli journalist Yair Sheleg, in August 2000, German historian Hans Mommsen called it "a most trivial book, which appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices."

Omer Bartov, Professor of History and European History at Brown University reviewing the first edition of the book wrote:

I find so striking about The Holocaust Industry is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

Here he combines an old-hat 1960s view of Israel as the outpost of American Imperialism with a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Now, however, the Jewish conspiracy is intended to "shake down" (his favorite phrase) such innocent entities as Swiss banks, German corporations and East European owners of looted Jewish property, all in order to consolidate Jewish power and influence without giving the real survivors of the genocide anything but empty rhetoric.

This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that "The Holocaust" will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own."

Finkelstein was to later blame Bartov's review for the poor US sales of the book.

University of Chicago Professor Peter Novick, whose work Finkelstein described as providing the "initial stimulus" for The Holocaust Industry , asserted in the July 28, 2000 Jewish Chronicle (London) that the book is replete with "false accusations", "egregious misrepresentations", "absurd claims" and "repeated mis-statements" ("A charge into darkness that sheds no light"). Finkelstein replied to the "hysterical" allegations by Novick on his homepage.

Hasia Diner has accused Peter Novick and Finkelstein of being "harsh critics of American Jewry from the left," and challenges the notion reflected in their books that American Jews did not begin to commemorate the Holocaust until post 1967.

Andrew Ross reviewing the book for Salon magazine wrote:

On the issue of reparations, he barely acknowledges the wrongs committed by the Swiss and German institutions — the burying of Jewish bank accounts, the use of slave labor — that gave rise to the recent reparations drive. The fear that the reparations will not wind up in the hands of those who need and deserve them most is a legitimate concern. But the idea that survivors have been routinely swindled by Jewish institutions is a gross distortion. The chief reason why survivors have so far seen nothing of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement, reached in 1998, is that U.S. courts have yet to rule on a method of distribution. On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bete noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone."

Finkelstein responded to his critics in the foreword to the second edition:

Mainstream critics allege that I conjured a "conspiracy theory" while those on the Left ridicule the book as a defense of "the banks". None, so far as I can tell, question my actual findings."

Publishing history

Publishing history of The Holocaust Industry:

• 2000; First published, by Verso Books (London) 150 p. Hardcover, ISBN 1-85984-773-0 (Blue star of David on cover)
• 2001; First paperback edition, Verso. ISBN 1-85984-323-9 (Yellow star of David on cover)
• 2003; 2 edition, expanded; 286 p., paperback, Verso. ISBN 1-85984-488-X (Red star of David on cover)

See also

• Norman Finkelstein
• Nazi gold
• Claims Conference
• The Holocaust in American Life
• Jewish lobby
• Holocaust denial

References

1. See article on Norman Finklestein's webpage.
2. Finkelstein's mother was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek concentration camp and two slave-labor camps. His father survived the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz concentration camp and the Auschwitz death march. His entire family in Poland was exterminated.
3. GOOGLE Scholar: The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering NG Finkelstein - 2003 Google books, cited by 98, best seller in throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, translated into 16 languages. Verified 9th May 2008.
4. Bildner Center Event: Omer Bartov
5. Brown University German Studies
6. Henry Friedlander, "Darkness and Dawn in 1945: The Nazis, the Allies, and the Survivors," in US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1945 - the Year of Liberation (Washington: 1995), 11-35. Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.81.
7. Peres stands accused over denial of `meaningless' Armenian Holocaust". Findarticle archive of Independent 18th April 2001. Verified 22nd Jun 2008.
8. Nobel Laureates Call For Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, April 10, 2007. Verified 22nd Jun 2008.
9. "Upon reflection, the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. Armenian Weekly, September 15, 2007. Verified 22nd Jun 2008.
10. Wiesel, All Rivers, 333, 336. Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.70.
11. Lipstadt, Denying, 6, 12, 22, 89-90. Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.70.
12. Lipstadt, Denying, chapter 11. Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.70.
13. "A New Serbia" in New Republic (17 May 1999). Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.70.
14. "France Fines Historian Over Armenian Denial," in Boston Globe (22 June 1995), and "Bernard Lewis and the Armenians," in Counterpunch (16-31 December 1997). Cited in the 2003 edition of HI on p.69.
15. TheNation.com Giving Chutzpah New Meaning June 23 2005. Further statements made by Hilberg on the work are available at NormanFinkelstein.com Raul Hilberg interviews on The Holocaust Industry & Finkelstein (2000/2001).
16. From The New York Times, Book Review Desk A Tale of Two Holocausts August 6 2000 (archived).
17. From interview with Ha'aretz March 30 2001 The Finkelstein polemic "Finkelstein attributes the book's flop in the U.S. to a lethal book review by Israeli scholar Omer Bartov that appeared in the New York Times Book Review."
18. All Quiet; Were postwar American Jews really ‘silent’ about the Holocaust? BY ADAM KIRSCH | 7:00 am June 23, 2009, Tablet Magazine
19. From Salon Magazine September 6, 2000 REVIEW: 'THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY'

External links

• Author's web page for the book
• Akram, Tanweer (2002). "The Holocaust Industry book review" ( – ). 15 (11): 59. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help); External link in |format= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• http://www.crt-ii.org/index_en.phtm
• Final Report on the Work of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland (CRT-I) Zurich, 5 October 2001
• normanfinkelstein.com
• The business of death Wednesday July 12, 2000 The Guardian
• Swiss toll II, Thursday July 13, 2000 The Guardian
• "It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There" -- World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure (Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim speak in support of Norman Finkelstein's scholarship and "The Holocaust Industry" specifically.)

• 2000 books
• Holocaust charities and reparations
• Political books
• Books critical of Zionism
• Holocaust historiography