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Following are excerpts from an interview with Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, which aired on New TV on June 21, 2006.
Report: The "Holocaust" is the Jewish term for burning the sacrificial offering to ashes. Never has there been an issue subject to as many contradictions, lies, and exaggerations regarding the number of victims as the issue of the Jewish Holocaust. The number of people killed in the Holocaust was estimated in the film "Night and Fog," by the French director Alain Resnais, to be between eight and nine million, on the basis of documents invented by the Jews. The number dropped to four million Jews in the Soviet report to the Nuremburg trials. The figure dropped further, to 300,000 victims, according to British historian David Irving, and reached only 50,000, according to Raul Hilberg the Jew.
Given the statistical contradictions in the number of Holocaust victims, the French intellectual Roger Garaudy asks how the truth can be determined. The Holocaust Industry, by Dr. Norman Finkelstein, recounts how the Jews of the world have turned Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis into a political and ideological industry in order to garner support for Israel, and into a source of economic extortion, which yielded inconceivable sums for the Jews and their organizations, using as a pretext the so-called victims of the Nazi annihilation operations.
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Norman Finkelstein: The main reason I wrote the book is because I thought that the Nazi Holocaust was being exploited by Israel and its supporters in the United States against the Palestinians and against basic principles of justice. That is, the Nazi Holocaust is being used as a political weapon in order to silence criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories.
There are also other reasons for writing the book. Obviously, there was a personal reason - namely, my parents passed through the Nazi Holocaust. Every member of their families was exterminated during the war, and I felt it was important to accurately represent what happened to them during the Nazi Holocaust.
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My book is mostly about the misuse or exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust for political purposes. The main claims I make in the book are, first of all, that this notion of Holocaust uniqueness - that is, no group of people in the history of human kind has suffered the way Jews have suffered.
This notion of Holocaust uniqueness has no basis in historical fact and is an immoral doctrine, because it ranks human suffering, saying some suffering is better and some suffering is worse. The main purpose of this claim of Holocaust uniqueness is to immunize Israel, protect Israel, from criticism.
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Well, one of the points I tried to make in the book is that there has been a gross inflation of the number of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, as all the historians have shown, Hitler's extermination of the Jews was very efficient. It was like a factory, an assembly line. Jews were processed to be murdered. When you have such an efficient system there can't be very many survivors. In fact, the best estimates show that by May 1945, that is, at the end of World War II, about 100,000 Jews had survived the death camps, the ghettos, and the labor camps. If 100,000 Jews survived the camps and ghettos in 1945, then 60 years later - that is, roughly around now - there can't be more than a few thousands survivors still alive.
But the Holocaust industry wanted to blackmail Europe in order to get compensation moneys. And in order to blackmail Europe they said there were hundreds of thousands of needy Holocaust victims who were still alive, and they started to inflate the number of survivors in order to blackmail Europe.
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I do not believe that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, and I do not believe that the suffering of Jews is unique. I think there is no basis in the historical argument for the uniqueness of the Nazi Holocaust. There are aspects, features, of the Nazi Holocaust which are unique, just as there are aspects and features of other genocides that are unique, but that does not mean that the Nazi Holocaust belongs in another category, apart from all the other sufferings in the history of humankind. I do not agree with that.
On a moral level, it's simply an abomination to rank suffering, and say one people has suffered more than another. How can you say it is more painful to die in a gas chamber than it is to die when your flesh is incinerated by Napalm? Who is to decide which is a more painful suffering? That, I think, is absurd.
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And there is something wrong when the United States has a museum devoted to what Germany did to the Jews, but it does not have a museum devoted to what America did to its native population - the expulsion and extermination of the native Americans. It does not have a museum devoted to what was done to Africans brought over here as slaves, yet it has a museum about what happened in Europe. What would Americans think if Germany, in its capital, were to create a museum commemorating slavery in the United States, commemorating the extermination of native Americans, but no museum devoted to the Nazi Holocaust? Of course, Americans would say that's pure hypocrisy. Well, we are now guilty of the same hypocrisy.
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There is no evidence at all that Swiss banks ever kept billions of dollars that belonged to Jews during World War II or before World War II. The basic facts are as follows: Number one, most Jews before World War II were very very poor. They lived in little villages in Eastern Europe. The villages were called shtetls. They were little villages in Russia and in Poland. Most Jews were poor.
Number two, beginning in the early 1930's, there was a worldwide depression, which means even if you had money, you lost it during the depression.
And number three, if you had the money, and you were... and you kept the money, then you managed to escape during the Nazi Holocaust. That's one of the advantages to being rich. You have enough money to buy your way out.
So those Jews who had money and kept it after the depression – they used the money to get out, and then they withdrew their money from the banks after the war.
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