| Gabriel Schoenfeld & Critics STUART EIZENSTAT: In "Holocaust Reparations--A Growing Scandal" [September], Gabriel Schoenfeld asks the Jewish community to reconsider the usefulness and propriety of the efforts that have been made in the last few years to win compensation for survivors of the Holocaust and their families. Respectfully, I could not disagree more. Putting aside for the moment the fact (which Mr. Schoenfeld fails to mention) that non-Jews comprise over 80 percent of the estimated 1 million slave and forced laborers who will share in the largest of the settlements that have been achieved with Germany, law, justice, and logic all come down strongly in favor of what has been done. In every developed nation on earth, the accepted method of compensating the victim when a civil wrong has been committed, a contract breached, or labor extracted under duress is through the award of money. Victims of negligent and reckless acts of all types, including radiation exposure, oil spills, medical malpractice, and smoking-related illness routinely bring lawsuits asking for money damages for themselves and for others who have suffered the same injuries. Only those on the fringe--those who deny the Holocaust and other wrongs ever occurred--would disagree that its victims, Jews and non-Jews alike, were grievously injured, both by the Nazi government and by German private industry. The same can be said when it comes to Austrian industry and Swiss banks. Insurance policies were not honored, dormant bank accounts went unpaid, brutal labor conditions went uncompensated, "Aryanized" property was never returned. If these injuries occurred, why should their victims not have the same right to sue for justice as victims of other and lesser catastrophes? I can conceive of only two possible reasons. The first is if they have already been compensated. For those Jews who, sensing danger in the 1930's, sent their money to Swiss banks for safekeeping, or who purchased policies from European life-insurance companies to provide for their families in case they did not survive, the failure to pay for 50 years was either a simple breach of contract or a more serious breach of trust, both of which create the right to money damages under the laws of almost all nations. Jewish survivors have received monthly payments from the German government since 1956 (since 1991 for those living in former Iron Curtain countries), but this has been for injuries inflicted by the Hitler regime itself. Until the settlement of last July, neither they nor non-Jews living in Central Europe had been compensated for the work they performed as slave and forced laborers for German private- and public-sector companies. The companies profited from their work during World War II. Many German firms would never have been able to resume production as quickly as they did after 1945 had their production facilities not been moved to huge underground pits to protect them from Allied bombing. Those pits were dug by slave and forced laborers. The only other rationale for surviving victims not to seek redress--and the one on which Mr. Schoenfeld lays great stress--is, in essence, because they are Jews. Polish Catholics who worked in a Nazi munitions factory under terrible conditions, he implies, should be repaid for their forced labor, but the Jews who worked beside them should not. Why not? Because it is crass, unseemly--in short "bad for the Jews," as the phrase goes--to seek compensation for Holocaust injuries; because doing so exacerbates anti-Semitism by reinforcing the age-old stereotype that equates Jews with greed. Anti-Semitism is not something that can be accurately measured in any country. Nor, sadly, is it something even the most selfless and decorous behavior on the part of Jews themselves can eliminate completely. Suffice it to say that during eighteen months of negotiation over the terms of the slave- and forced-labor settlement, public and editorial opinion in Germany, as well as the German government and all the major political parties in the German parliament, strongly supported a generous payment to the victims. Mr. Schoenfeld cites some evidence from Switzerland and Austria to support the opposite conclusion, but here too there is overwhelming evidence on the other side. Most of the Austrian press and all four political parties, including the right-wing Freedom party, supported the recently negotiated slave- and forced-labor settlement in that country. And even if this were not so, Jews should not be deterred from seeking justice because it may cause latent anti-Semitism to rise to the surface. In today's society, the effort to obtain compensation in the case of man-made disasters is often accompanied by actions many people consider messy and distasteful. Solicitation of plaintiffs, threats of boycotts, and exploitation by ambitious politicians are some that are alleged in Mr. Schoenfeld's article. For sure, there were unfortunate elements of this in the Swiss, German, and Austrian cases in which I have been involved. Our class-action system is virtually unique, for better or worse, in the world. When the CEO of Union Carbide arrived in Bhopal to express regrets for the chemical disaster there, he was arrested on the spot. But if Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the asbestos cases, silicone-breast implants, and Bridgestone-Firestone tire defects can spawn such byproducts, what do we say about an event in which millions of people were forced to surrender their property, live and work under the cruelest of circumstances, and deliberately put to death? We have tried to moderate the public tensions of this process by strongly opposing sanctions against German, Swiss, and Austrian firms by American state and local governments. We have urged all parties, including those involved in claims for stolen art and other property, to resolve their differences by negotiation, mediation, and arbitration instead of by lengthy, expensive lawsuits. We have succeeded in limiting attorneys' fees to a tiny fraction of the customary percentage awarded in class actions (in the German and Austrian cases, only about 1 percent of the final award) and by subjecting individual lawyers' claims for those fees to third-party arbitration. Mr. Schoenfeld ends by expressing concern about the effect of the reparation effort upon "Jewish honor" and the security of Israel. His predictions on these matters are much too dire. Nor has the reparation effort weakened Israel's ability to purchase weapons for its legitimate defense needs from this country or others. Survivors of the Holocaust and millions of other World War II victims have been deprived of their property and unable to pursue justice in the courts for far too long. Finally achieving this after 55 years could hardly have been expected to be an antiseptic process. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Washington, D.C. ROMAN KENT: Gabriel Schoenfeld's article is extremely short on honesty and long on distortion. He is an excellent advocate for four entities: the Swiss, the German government, German industry, and European insurance companies. The question I pose is this: where is his interest in the well-being of the survivors of the Holocaust, the real victims? And did he think about the tens of thousands of survivors who are worse-off today than they were 50 years ago? And did he give serious thought as to why, 50 years ago, these survivors did not want to participate in making any claims, and why they did not even join the Claims Conference? The reasons were simple. At that time the survivors were skin and bones, broken up both physically and mentally. Their first consideration was to restore their strength and to find their families and loved ones. Above all, they needed to forget the terrifying experiences they had endured. Most wanted to leave Europe and make a new life for themselves by starting families and building a future. Today, for tens of thousands of them, these dreams have evaporated. They are old, their families are gone, and in many cases their spouses are no longer alive. They live in substandard economic conditions without enough money for prescription drugs, nursing care, or psychological help. Their loneliness, aggravated by past experiences, leaves them unable to perform everyday tasks. And with the onset of old age, the memories of life in the concentration camps are more vivid now than 50 years ago. Mr. Schoenfeld did not need to question the health and well-being of many survivors. All he had to do was travel to the Bronx, or to the former Soviet Union, to see for himself the conditions in which many now live. Since he quotes from the New York Times, he could even have found some survivors on that newspaper's list of "100 Neediest Cases." It seems, however, that this was too much to ask of him, since it was easier to sit, to write, and to criticize. What have he, his colleagues, and that bunch of what he calls "fee-grabbing lawyers" been doing for the past 20 or 30 years? Have they been fighting for justice and historical truth? No! The reason why nothing was done is that there was no money in it for the lawyers. As for the press, there was no sexy "glitter of gold" to sensationalize. What is even more obscene is that Mr. Schoenfeld tries to justify the position of the Swiss, the German government and industry, and the insurance companies. Although 50 years late, we survivors, before we depart, are demanding that the historical facts regarding the role of Switzerland and its banks, and the insurance companies and industrial giants involved with profiteering during the Holocaust, be exposed and the truth be known. If, as a result of such exposure, long-overdue and token compensation is given to survivors, we deserve it. Justice demands it. History demands it. For generations, we were taught to believe in and to trust the institutions of banking and insurance. What was recently uncovered is as shocking as it is disgraceful. No longer, despite all the so-called justifications, can Swiss banks inspire confidence--not after 86 dormant accounts become 55,000 or more; not after the bankers have demanded death certificates from the heirs of victims of concentration camps; not after safe-deposit boxes have been opened only to find that the contents have vanished. Please do not tell us that the world should not know the truth. Similarly, when tens of thousands of insurance policies were not paid; when payments to lawful heirs were denied; when company officers knew or must have known that their records showed tens of thousands of unpaid policies, should such practices not be exposed? As for the Dutch role in the Holocaust, Mr. Schoenfeld's lengthy explanation distorts the facts. I would like to know how the Jews of wartime Holland, 80 percent of whom were murdered, would accept his statement that "in absolute numbers of ... Righteous Gentiles, tiny Holland outstrips all of the countries of Western and Central Europe combined." Even if Mr. Schoenfeld's numbers are correct, they are meaningless, since they do not take into consideration the fact that the penalty for hiding a Jew in Holland was quite mild in comparison to Poland where, as Nechama Tec shows in When Light Pierced the Darkness, the penalty was death. The situation is the same with the issues of slave and forced labor. The heads of the companies involved knew quite well the "death-through-work" reality prevailing in their workplaces, and present-day management knows as well. Should the history of such crimes be forever hidden and not properly documented? The problem in all these cases is not the survivors--the real victims--but the companies, ably assisted by hungry lawyers who are fed by the press with a frenzy of sensational articles prominently quoting the attorney Edward Fagan. Here again, while Mr. Schoenfeld justly criticizes Fagan and his actions, he simultaneously elevates the firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld by citing its "boast that it has assumed the struggle for justice for Holocaust victims on a pro-bono basis." It is true that Michael Hausfeld worked on a pro-bono basis on the Swiss case, but for the last two years he has become the biggest "ambulance chaser" in the slave-and forced-labor dispute and is now demanding millions of dollars for his services. Is that how Mr. Schoenfeld checks his facts? Let me end by disagreeing with Mr. Schoenfeld's conclusion: "The reduction of the Holocaust to a matter of dollars and cents amounts to a `desecration' and `too high a price to pay for a justice we will never achieve.'" This is a far cry from what we survivors believe and how we want the Holocaust to be remembered. We survivors have never talked just in terms of dollars and cents; we have spoken primarily of justice, of the sanctity of the Holocaust, and of the need for Holocaust education. Only by exposing the historical facts, and educating the next generations, can we avoid a repetition of the past. What Albert Einstein once said applies perfectly to the Holocaust: "The world is too dangerous to live in--not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who stand by and let them." These words are my credo. There is no price too high to pay for justice. Let us never again be bystanders. Vice President Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany New York City MANFRED GERSTENFELD: In his essay on Holocaust reparations, Mr. Schoenfeld claims, inter alia, to present a balanced picture of the Netherlands. Perhaps he would also care to balance the following wartime facts: that the Dutch supreme court of justice, appointed by the prewar democratic government, decided that the expulsions of Jews from Dutch society ordered by the Germans were not against the Dutch constitution; that Adolf Eichmann specifically said of the Netherlands, "The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see"; and that the German-appointed police commanders in Amsterdam reported in detail how zealous the Dutch policemen had been when arresting Jews, doing much more than their duty. Can Mr. Schoenfeld explain why, in her many speeches over the radio to her people, the Dutch queen, in exile in London, devoted only five sentences in five years to the fate of the Jews; or why it took the Dutch government-in-exile one-and-a-half years after the deportations began to inquire of the Polish government-in-exile, located in the same building in London, about the fate of the Jews being deported to the east? Perhaps Mr. Schoenfeld would also like to balance the fact that during the war the Amsterdam stock exchange approached the Germans, asking them to trade through the exchange the securities that had been looted from Dutch Jews; and the fact that, after the war, the Amsterdam stock exchange continued for many years to sabotage the restitution of securities to the dispossessed Jews, something for which it only recently apologized. There is probably a greater discrepancy between the benign image and the harsh reality of Dutch wartime and postwar behavior than for any other country. Those Jews--and I am one of them--who were saved in the Netherlands by Righteous Gentiles are extremely grateful to these people for risking their lives on our behalf. It is painful, however, that, based on the behavior of these individuals, a worldwide myth is still being perpetuated of "the good Dutch nation." Mr. Schoenfeld expects the World Jewish Congress to honor its "special obligation to historical truth" on the Dutch issue; he would have done well to start with his own obligations by reading the many Dutch sources on this issue before writing. Jerusalem, Israel MICHAEL J. BAZYLER: As the author of a 283-page legal study entitled "Nuremberg in America: Litigating the Holocaust in United States Courts" (University of Richmond Law Review), I found Gabriel Schoenfeld's article most unfair. The European corporations who eagerly participated in wartime theft would be let off the hook by Mr. Schoenfeld solely because to seek the return of their stolen Jewish assets risks soiling the reputation of world Jewry. Swiss, German, Austrian, French, and even some American banks profited handsomely during World War II at the expense of Holocaust victims. The same goes for various European insurance companies who comprise today some of the world's wealthiest concerns. Allowing these entities to keep their ill-gotten gains amounts to unjust enrichment. Forcing a wrongdoer to pay is a form of retributive justice. But there are other beneficial effects of the Holocaust-restitution movement that Mr. Schoenfeld also ignores. The litigation in the United States has compelled European governments to create various historical commissions, which have unearthed new and valuable information about the financial wrongs committed against European Jewry during the war. Private companies, against whom similar accusations have been made, are likewise putting Holocaust historians on retainer and, for the first time, opening up their wartime files for inspection. This trend by governments and corporations finally to "come clean" would not be occurring without the spotlight being shined on their activities through the lawsuits in the United States. These suits have also led to claims being filed against Japanese corporations for their use of captured soldiers and civilians during World War II. Holocaust-restitution cases can thus serve as a template for a new era of relief to victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity--but this time without the 50-year wait for justice. Human-rights abusers are being put on notice: eventually you will be held responsible for your misdeeds. Whittier Law School Costa Mesa, California GLORIA LANDY: To me, it is simple justice to seek redress for Holocaust survivors no matter how long claims have lain dormant on account of the lack of means and strength to pursue restitution. That pursuit is not about money, it is about blood. The blood of time lost; health destroyed; dreams turned into lifetime nightmares; parents, children, homes, all destroyed. It is therefore inconceivable to me that COMMENTARY would publish an article whose title and author I cannot bring myself to name. I prefer both to fade away into the oblivion they deserve. My first inclination upon reading the article was to cancel my subscription. My second, however, was to wait and give the magazine the opportunity to make up somehow for this horrible and inexcusable error of editorial judgment. Rumson, New Jersey ANGELO M. CODEVILLA: In his excellent "Holocaust Reparations--A Growing Scandal," Gabriel Schoenfeld takes issue with my book, Between the Alps and a Hard Place, writing that there can be no blinking some of the terrible things done by the Swiss, like encouragement given to the German authorities in 1938 to stamp the passports of Jews with a "J" in order to help the Swiss border control
keep
out terrified refugees fleeing for their lives. Although some have denied
anti-Semitism was prevalent in Switzerland in this period, and Codevilla
goes so far as to say that no Swiss officials wanted to put their names on "a policy of exclusion of Jews per se," a profusion of easily
obtainable
documents belies such apologetics. | |
| | In fact, my book refers to the "easily available documents" mentioned by Mr. Schoenfeld. In its March 1938 memo to Swiss consulates, the foreign ministry's political department specifically mentioned that henceforth Swiss policy would be to admit only those Jews who had reasonable prospects of moving on. In a host of later memos, the Swiss begged the Reich foreign ministry to do something to cut the flow of migrants bereft of such prospects, some 4,600 of whom had entered Switzerland in July and August alone. The Reich was creating a huge human tragedy, and dumping it on a small neighbor. The Reich's response was the "J" stamp. The documents show the Swiss officials' rationale for what they were doing: the standard economic foolishness of the time, that jobs are inherently limited and hence that people are burdens instead of assets. Then there was the hoary fiction (which endures to this day) that those fleeing the murderous, totalitarian regime in Germany were merely "economic refugees." Hypocrisy is the debt that vice pays to virtue. Even the worst instigator of measures to exclude Jews, the Swiss official Heinrich Rothmund, wrote his decisions in such a manner as to deflect possible accusations of anti-Semitism. That is because anti-Semitism was indeed out of fashion, not just in polite society but also in the army, the churches, and among the countless Swiss individuals who set aside their tradition of abiding the law to shelter refugees whose numbers will never be known. Swiss civil society ultimately trumped Swiss officialdom on this and other important issues relating to the war. Finally, COMMENTARY knows better than to associate my name, however tenuously, with "apologetics" for anything or anyone. Boston University Boston, Massachusetts WERNER COHN: There is another side to the subject addressed in Gabriel Schoenfeld's otherwise thoughtful article. First, Jews were victims in a historically unique way, and I would put more emphasis on that than does Mr. Schoenfeld. Second, there remain significant pockets of skullduggery and bad faith in the German elite, despite all the tremendous efforts by the German government to the contrary. The story of the Berlin Zoo illustrates the attitudes that pervade quite a number of German enterprises. This zoo, since its inception in the middle of the 19th century, had private stockholders whose main privilege was free admission. A substantial proportion of these stockholders, perhaps as many as half, were Jews. My father was among them. In November 1938 the Nazi government forbade Jews to enter the zoo grounds. In December, Jews were no longer allowed to own stock in German enterprises. After the war the surviving Jewish stockholders were informed that their shares had been "sold." When I suggested that my family's stock must have been expropriated illegally, the zoo's lawyer sent me a letter stating that our stock had been "sold" voluntarily and under "no pressure, no compulsion, no duress." Furthermore, the zoo had never cared about the religious faith of its stockholders, not even during the Nazi period. There was never any sort of discrimination on its grounds. The zoo, in short, denies all. But to a German reporter who interviewed him, the director has stated that his institution is fully protected by the statute of limitations, and that he has no intention of going back to Adam and Eve. I am sure that there are greedy Jews somewhere who need to be called to order. But I have also run into greedy, malicious, lying Germans, still in power in some pockets of an otherwise benign modern Germany. Brooklyn, New York [RABBI] ANDREW BAKER: Reading Gabriel Schoenfeld's article, one might imagine that compensation to victims and the restitution of Holocaust assets can be secured only by the public commotion of class-action lawyers and the heavy-handed, high-pressure tactics of organizations like the World Jewish Congress. For outside commentators like the ADL's Abraham Foxman and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer--and for Mr. Schoenfeld himself--this is too high a price to pay. Better, they conclude, to leave this messy, embarrassing, even "scandalous" business behind us. But these are not our only choices. The most successful compensation and restitution agreements of the past decade were achieved by the Jewish Claims Conference in negotiations with Germany. Conducted with a minimum of publicity and not a single class-action lawyer, they resulted in the creation of 40,000 new pensions for needy survivors and the restitution of heirless Jewish property in Eastern Germany, which has already translated into several hundred million dollars for projects to benefit Holocaust victims. Even in the matters of the Swiss bank settlement and the German agreement to compensate former slave and forced laborers, credit may have been unfairly claimed. Surely, success was due more to the measured and determined negotiating efforts of Deputy Treasury Secretary Smart Eizenstat than to the lawyers or the World Jewish Congress officials who dominated the headlines. Director of European Affairs The American Jewish Committee Washington, D.C. WALTER REICH: Gabriel Schoenfeld's article highlights the obscene and brooding reality of Holocaust reparations--but the rubric of "reparations" is, in this case, horribly misleading, implying, as it does, that damage has been repaired. Not only is the damage beyond repair, it is beyond speech. Does that mean that Holocaust survivors or the heirs of murdered victims should not seek to recover property that was plundered or withheld from them, or that the survivors should not be compensated in some way for their suffering, as absurdly inadequate as such compensation inevitably is? Does that mean that, because no reparations could be adequate, or because seeking or accepting reparations may sully the purity of memory, those who stole or retained property that belonged to victims should not be required to return it, and those who caused suffering should not be expected to pay for it financially? I do not think so. Each survivor, and each heir of a victim, should be free to decide on this matter in a personal way. Some of the means that have been used in recent years to obtain such reparations may have been, as Mr. Schoenfeld argues, far less than noble, and may have caused, as he and too few others have argued, a monetary pall to fall on the zone of Shoah memory. But, as in so many other areas that are morally wrenching, there is no clarity here. George Washington University Washington, D.C. SUSAN GLAZER: Gabriel Schoenfeld is correct that Holocaust restitution projects should be examined on their merits and legitimacy. These projects have taken on mythic/redemptory implications for many individuals in the American Jewish community to whom any questioning is shocking. Critical examination is necessary, however, and I commend Mr. Schoenfeld on his boldness in approaching it. Mr. Schoenfeld has neglected one very important issue--how the money collected from the various class-action cases and international agreements is being distributed and utilized. No one would dispute that the money should be given to the remaining victims and their heirs. But a second concern should be to provide funds for additional research and to create educational programs for teaching about the Holocaust. This would help take the focus away from the purely monetary considerations that have clouded perceptions and place it back on the issue of morality and justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts GARY M. OSEN: Gabriel Schoenfeld's essentially fair and accurate article misses one important point. Holocaust-related claims have proliferated because of a myriad of factors, such as the collapse of the Soviet empire and the current enthusiasm for "victims' rights" generally. But to understand recent developments fully one must return to the Faustian bargain that the Western Allies entered into at the end of World War II. Fearing (in my view, rightly) further Soviet aggression, they rushed to reconstitute Germany as a democratic state and Western ally. This necessarily meant making compromises on the question of de-Nazification. While certain leading Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, the vast majority of "Hitler's willing executioners"--to use Daniel Goldhagen's phrase--returned to normal life with a proverbial slap on the wrist or no punishment at all. In the case of reparations, a similar policy was implemented. From 1945 to 1953, restitution, as well as compensation, was handled on an ad-hoc basis by local German courts supervised by the American military government. The results were, as one might expect, less than satisfactory. This was due both to the hostility of the German judiciary and to the complexities of proving any given claim. Moreover, in an effort to give the new German state breathing room, the allies formulated what became known as the "London Debt Agreement," which suspended slave-labor claims and other potential causes of action against German industry. This suspension remained in force until 1990-92 with the reunification of the two Germanys. Mr. Schoenfeld is almost certainly right that the lawyers will proceed in their fashion, the Jewish organizations in theirs, and the targets of the present sweep of claims will continue (and sometimes rightly) to feel aggrieved. Yet without seeking to exculpate any of them, it is worth remembering that the hard bargain made to save Western Europe from the Soviets a generation ago was still worth it. Oradell, New Jersey RICHARD HAALBOOM: Having been raised hearing stories about World War II from Dutch relatives and friends--stories of indescribable horror and of simple, straightforward courage by ordinary people who helped their fellow citizens hide from the clutches of Nazi officials and Dutch collaborators--I was struck by Gabriel Schoenfeld's account of how Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress has spun the story of Dutch Jewry during the war, asserting that Holland "had the worst record in Western Europe during the Holocaust--some 80 percent of its Jewish population was murdered." Thousands of Dutch men and women lost their lives for having hidden their fellow countrymen who happened also to be Jewish. To hide a Jew, even for one night, meant having to live in fear of betrayal for the rest of the war. Betrayal usually resulted in torture, imprisonment, and death. Most of the ordinary Dutch men and women who risked their lives by hiding Jews have not been--and have not asked to be--recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial and research institute. They just did what they felt had to be done for fellow human beings. For Mr. Singer and the World Jewish Congress to speak of the Dutch war record in such an off-hand and self-serving way, in testimony recorded for posterity by the U.S. Congress, is a slap in the face of all the ordinary people of the Netherlands who suffered the yoke of an occupier evil beyond comprehension. Kitchener, Ontario Canada JOERG BAUMBERGER: Gabriel Schoenfeld's article constitutes a long-awaited response of reason to the ill-begotten reparations campaign unleashed in the 1990's by a vocal part of American Jewry against European institutions whose bad luck it was to be the legal successors of institutions in existence during the troubled 30's and 40's. Regrettably, this response might well be coming too late. By now, the self-appointed leaders of the Jewish cause such as Israel Singer, Edgar Bronfman, Avraham Burg, and a handful of Jewish lawyers are, for better or worse (in Switzerland definitely for worse), widely perceived as the true and only representatives of the Jewish community. Likewise, the U.S. government and media have successfully conveyed the impression of subscribing to the same biased historiography and the same other-worldly moral standards that have been championed by the proponents of belated reparations and transnational moral reeducation. The United States, no doubt, is the most benign imperial power the world has seen so far. Still, it has not yet shed all the bad habits generally associated with great-power status. And the Jewish organizations could also play a more beneficial role if they abstained from what not only appears as, but actually is, aggressive profiteering. Remembrance is valuable, but their conduct is a recipe for ongoing resentment and renewal of injustice. There is such a thing as justice in remembering, and Gabriel Schoenfeld's article does an excellent job in promoting this virtue. St. Gallen, Switzerland ULRICH ALDAG: As a German, born in 1930, I wholeheartedly endorse all aspects of Gabriel Schoenfeld's article. Along with Mr. Schoenfeld and others, I am most concerned lest damage be done to the healing process between Jewry and the descendants of a generation that lived when unspeakable crimes were committed. I sincerely hope that Mr. Schoenfeld's call to reason will be heard. There must be a moral category that provides forgiving even for the seemingly unforgivable. Money cannot be substituted for forgiving. We, the current generations of Jews and Germans, need closure. Without closure, the wounds will never heal. Portola Valley, California YAACOV LOZOWICK: The Claims Conference can plausibly assert that over its first several decades, it did its best to transfer as much money as possible from the perpetrators and their successors to the survivors. Can the present campaigners for restitution make any such claim? Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to lawyers, accountants, consultants, travel agents, and hoteliers, and it is unclear how the balance might ever be redressed in favor of the survivors. As for the pursuit of justice, let us never forget that the Shoah was the result of a decision made by the leaders of a nation--Germany--to murder an entire people; that it entailed the participation of many Germans and others, and the slaughter of millions; and that it lingers on in the pain of the survivors, bereft of their families, of their ability ever to achieve peace, of their entire world. Against that backdrop, justice is unattainable. Better not to use its name in vain. Jerusalem, Israel GUNTHER KARGER: The world believes that Holocaust survivors are getting billions of dollars in reparations when in fact that is far from the truth. The recent $5.2 billion slave-labor settlement is a case in point. Less than 30 percent of the slave-labor settlement funds are targeted to Jewish causes, and from this portion a mammoth $335 million has been allocated to the Claims Conference to be distributed at its discretion for "education and Holocaust remembrance" projects. My entire family, including my parents and aunts and uncles, were taken to a concentration camp and forced to labor as slaves until their deaths. Obviously, none of them was alive as of February 15, 1999, the deadline to qualify for payments from the slave-labor settlement. As my relatives' sole heir and as someone who was sent from foster home to orphanages before being left to fend for myself in foreign lands, I am disqualified because my parents were killed. Yet millions go to "remembrance" projects. Something seems very wrong here. Particularly troubling is the "overflow" provision that allows funds that are left after all claims have been settled to revert to the Claims Conference and the World Jewish Congress. This means that these organizations will receive more money for their discretionary allocation if more of us die off. Delay would thus be to their benefit as Holocaust survivors are getting older and sicker. A potential conflict of interest is inherent in this. That negotiators for a settlement can allocate to their own organizations vast sums for discretionary spending is equivalent to a corporate board's authorizing sweetheart deals for its members at the expense of the company's shareholders. Child Holocaust Survivors Miami, Florida EDWARD N. LUTTWAK: Gabriel Schoenfeld has performed a great service, which I hope will encourage him and others to investigate and expose further the crass misconduct of institutional Shoah entrepreneurs and the unbridled profiteering of lawyers and accountants. The actual workings of current compensation arrangements are one such scandal; for example, the worthies who administer the Generali insurance company's exgratia fund for unpaid claims meet once a month and review only a handful of applications on each occasion, thus ensuring the longest possible term of service for themselves, while elderly claimants die off. It has become an urgent task for Jewish leaders everywhere to delegitimize Holocaust profiteering in all its forms--and not only those explicitly pecuniary. Chevy Chase, Maryland HERMAN F. WOLF: Gabriel Schoenfeld's article on restitution was factual and devoid of exaggeration. Fifty years have passed since the Holocaust. We have now reached a point where second- and third-tier claims are being pursued as if the parties involved can be directly tied to Holocaust-related crimes. We have sought and received redress from the primary parties--Germany and its wartime factotum Switzerland, the two countries that benefited most from the victimization of the Jews. Today, we survivors of the Holocaust constitute fewer than 10 percent of the Holocaust's victims, who in turn constituted fully one-third of world Jewry. We cannot and should not leave behind us a situation where the remaining two-thirds suffer from our overzealous pursuit of claims arising from actions that are beyond the pale of redemption. The Holocaust was an event that leaves its victims victimized ad infinitum regardless of what they can extract as restitution. The victimizers, too, will never shed their guilt, for the simple reason that more than 90 percent of the victimized are not in a position to be swayed by acts of contrition. Such is the enormity of the Holocaust that in the end it injures and reinjures the victims and the victimizers and everybody else half a century after the fires of the crematoriums have gone cold. Syracuse, New York MICHAEL KELLMAN: Perhaps the most important point made in Gabriel Schoenfeld's article concerns the way in which the pursuit of Holocaust reparations adversely affects the security of the state of Israel. For decades, maybe centuries, to come, the Jewish state will need all the friends it can muster. Yet the hand of friendship is extended only so often, whether out of guilt and shame or true affection. As I write, the Middle East peace process is collapsing--and Holocaust lawyers have begun to pursue American companies. Bravo therefore to Gabriel Schoenfeld for an utterly courageous and timely piece. Given the venue, there is hope that it will make a difference. Eugene, Oregon HARRY CARASSO: I had just closed the last page of Norman Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry, when the September issue of COMMENTARY reached me containing Gabriel Schoenfeld's (as usual) brilliant article on Holocaust reparations. I was at first shocked by Mr. Schoenfeld's blunt dismissal of Finkelstein's work, for though I felt compelled to condemn it in my own review (published here in France in Diasporiques), I was nevertheless impressed by some of the book's assertions. Finkelstein is right when he says that demanding "restitution" from a country like Belarus, which has a per-capita income of $100, is a pure dream, and that such a policy will only feed the growing anti-Semitism in such places. I was then shocked again by the way that Mr. Schoenfeld concludes by "leaving aside" the "`fee-grabbing lawyers'" who charge $640 per hour; these fellows are doing far too much moral damage to the Jewish community to let them go with just one line. But the two shocks were quickly dimmed by the accuracy and far-reaching character of the article's contents. Most important are Mr. Schoenfeld's remarks about the possible reactions of those countries in Europe--like Germany, Switzerland, and Holland--that have been most friendly to the state of Israel, and who may reconsider their position if this strange sort of blackmail continues. This is a very wise warning, and Mr. Schoenfeld deserves praise for the courage to express it. Paris, France ROLAND STEPHEN: I have only distantly followed the very complicated history of postwar reparations. However, even a remote observer is well aware of the minefield of passions that lies beneath this issue. Gabriel Schoenfeld has done a great service with his unflinching commentary. The rhetorical and moral balance of the piece are exemplary, as proof of which I predict his castigation from every direction. North Carolina State University Raleigh, North Carolina BURTON S. LEVINSON: Having been involved with the California department of insurance on the issue of Holocaust-era claims, I found Gabriel Schoenfeld's analysis to be completely accurate. He has written a very impressive and thoughtful article. Honorary National Chairman Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith Beverly Hills, California Gabriel Schoenfeld IN ADDITION to being the second-ranking official in the U.S. Treasury, the top public servant charged with coordinating Holocaust restitution efforts in the United States, and a leading figure in the Jewish world, Stuart Eizenstat is also a renowned attorney. Given his formidable credentials, his letter deserves to be taken seriously--though it is a mystery to me how someone with his reputation for intelligence and integrity could so thoroughly misconstrue the straightforward meaning of what I wrote. Mr. Eizenstat's response is based entirely upon the premise that I oppose Holocaust restitution. Whether this mischaracterization is deliberate or inadvertent I do not know, but let me say for the record that I am not now and never have been opposed to restitution for any and all victims of the Nazis; nor is there a word in my article to suggest otherwise. In my plainly stated view, David Ben-Gurion was right when he decided in 1952 to accept reparations payments from Germany to help build the Jewish state, and individual victims of the Holocaust and their heirs around the world also have every right to demand compensation for that which was stolen from them, as well as for having been enslaved, maimed, and murdered. I do not believe there should be a statute of limitations for redressing crimes of such magnitude. At the same time, to repeat what I wrote in COMMENTARY, I am concerned that the restitution effort being conducted by the Jewish community go forward with consideration for the legitimacy of individual claims; with punctilious regard for historical truth; and with attention paid to how Holocaust restitution affects other pressing Jewish interests, foremost among them the well-being and security of the state of Israel. In my article, I presented evidence that each of these conditions has been seriously violated. If Mr. Eizenstat had read my article with a minimum of care, he would have discovered that I unequivocally reject the arguments he ascribes to me, beginning with the "great stress" I allegedly lay on the dangers of Holocaust restitution because it "exacerbates anti-Semitism," and ending with my "implied" advocacy of payments to "Polish Catholics who worked in Nazi munitions factories" while simultaneously opposing compensation for "the Jews who worked beside them." Though I did point to a new mood of anti-Semitism in Europe, and though I traced this mood in part to the way Holocaust claims have been pursued in recent years, I expressed explicit agreement with the assertion of Richard Cohen of the Washington Post that if the demands of Jewish organizations have exacerbated anti-Semitism in places like Switzerland, then it is the Swiss who "ought to look to their own values and not the Jews to theirs." If Holocaust claims are legitimate, I added, "it would be a double injustice to forgo them out of fear of arousing anti-Semitism." As for Polish Catholics, I certainly never advocated that they (or anyone else) be compensated while Jews are not. Indeed, I said not a word about Polish Catholics in my article. Such brash misrepresentations aside, Mr. Eizenstat's letter itself suggests that he has been struggling with some of the very same problems that he reproves me for calling attention to. Thus, he acknowledges that in the Swiss, German, and Austrian cases there were ill-considered "threats of boycott" by Jewish organizations, "exploitation [of the issue] by ambitious politicians," and other forms of behavior that "many people consider messy and distasteful." He reports also that he has used his office to "moderate the public tensions" in part by opposing "sanctions" against European corporations as well as by working to avert "lengthy, expensive lawsuits." I wish him every success in these endeavors, but his letter makes me doubt his fitness for the task. While quarreling with me over things I never said, he remains volubly silent on the single specific criticism that I leveled directly at him for his "armchair moralizing" about Swiss wartime neutrality. As for his false and wholly gratuitous comparison of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with victims of cigarette smoke, medical malpractice, defective tires, and even silicone breast-implants--well, this makes me doubt his fitness all the more. ROMAN KENT'S is the sole response from a representative of the Jewish organizations whose actions I criticized. Though his rhetorical thunderbolts are mighty--my article, he says, is "extremely short on honesty and long on distortion," and my supposed advocacy for the Swiss, the Germans, and European insurance companies is nothing short of "obscene"--I could identify only three real issues of contention between us, and not one of them touches on the primary substance of my article or even remotely challenges its central claims. First, Mr. Kent offers a lengthy disquisition on the health of Holocaust survivors today. But his bleak portrait supports my case, not his. In my article, I asked: | |
Can it really be that, at the very moment when American Jewry has been
investing millions of dollars in the construction of Holocaust museums and
memorials in every city and suburb of the United States, and when hundreds
of millions of dollars have been spent digging through European banking
archives, these suffering sores have been kept waiting for Swiss and German
money to materialize?
| | The answer--to judge by what Mr. Kent reports in his letter--is yes, the survivors have been kept waiting. Indeed, according to the most recent statement I could obtain, as of December 31, 1998 the Claims Conference was sitting on investments worth $235 million, a sum that does not include an estimated $134 million that it expects to reap from the sale of property that has fallen to its care. The presence of Holocaust survivors living in poverty amidst the most affluent Jewish community in the world is a blot upon us all, and on none more than the Claims Conference. Next, according to Mr. Kent, I neglected to inform readers that the attorney Michael Hausfeld, whom I described as working on the Swiss-bank settlement on a pro-bono basis, has been running up a tab in the German slave-labor cases. I confess I was unaware of this fact. But that one more attorney should be reaping profits from the Holocaust is not exactly a shattering revelation; rather, it adds only another small brushstroke to the portrait I painted of law firms scrambling to sign up Holocaust victims, once again buttressing my position, not Mr. Kent's. Finally there is Holland, a subject that has elicited an indignant and much fuller letter from Manfred Gerstenfeld. Let me briefly address that letter before returning to Roman Kent. Although I do not read Dutch, there is no shortage of excellent studies on the Netherlands either in translation or in languages other than Dutch. None of the facts presented by Mr. Gerstenfeld was therefore unfamiliar to me, and none of them contradicts a word of what I wrote. Thus, I myself noted the "indisputable" fact that, "in percentage terms, more Jews perished in Holland than anywhere else in Western Europe"; that "there was extensive collaboration in the roundups and deportations of the Jews to the death camps, particularly by the Dutch police and the civil service"; and that in the aftermath of the war, the Dutch "were often as callous as they could be to the relative handful of Jews who returned alive." Mr. Gerstenfeld's litany of Dutch misdeeds only supplies the particulars to fill out these general statements. Though he sneers at me for attempting to be "balanced," what I was after was fairness and accuracy. These are qualities, I am sorry to say, in which he himself falls short. Shaking an accusing finger, he complains "that a worldwide myth is still being perpetuated of `the good Dutch nation.'" Though he puts the words "the good Dutch nation" in quotation marks, I never employed that phrase. What I did write was that the "good Dutchman" (emphasis added) is "not simply a myth to be torn away." I gladly stand by the proposition that there was a disproportionately high number of good Dutchmen. I concur with Mr. Gerstenfeld's statement "that there is probably a greater discrepancy between the benign image and the harsh reality of Dutch wartime and postwar behavior than for any other country." Yet it is one thing to attempt to bring image and reality into accord and a different thing entirely to substitute one false image for another. That is precisely what the World Jewish Congress and some of its affiliates have been doing as they blacken Holland's name in their effort to wrest concessions from Dutch insurance companies. A vivid example of the latter is on display in the letter from Roman Kent, to which I now revert. Mr. Kent writes that the figures I provided about the strikingly large number of Righteous Gentiles who gave shelter to Jews in Holland are "meaningless" because "the penalty for hiding a Jew in Holland was quite mild in comparison to Poland, where ... the penalty was death." But this, in addition to slurring the Dutch men and women who risked their lives on behalf of their Jewish countrymen, is an invention. Any number of memoirs and standard histories make clear (and my correspondents Manfred Gerstenfeld and Richard Haalboom both corroborate) that the sanction imposed by the Nazis for giving shelter to Jews was the same in Holland as in Poland, namely, death, with the only difference being that in Poland it was most often immediate, while in Holland it typically followed a period of confinement and torture in a concentration camp. MICHAEL J. BAZYLER, who finds my article "most unfair," seems to suffer from the Eizenstat syndrome when it comes to getting an argument straight. I am not for letting European corporations "off the hook" or for allowing them to "keep ill-gotten gains"; nor is Mr. Bazyler able to cite a single passage in my article leading to that conclusion. His own defense of Holocaust class-action suits--they have put "human-rights abusers ... on notice" that they will be "held responsible for their misdeeds"--reveals a law professor running away with the grandeur of his ideas. Somehow one doubts that tyrants around the world are trembling in their boots at the thought of being called to account by American courts that have been treating the Holocaust as a patronage mill. Nor are the "fee-grabbing" class-action lawyers likely to exercise much of a deterrent effect on the minds of aspiring war criminals. Even Stuart Eizenstat, as he reports in his letter, has been working hard to keep the Holocaust out of the courts. Gloria Landy's letter is an excellent example of how passions can distort understanding. Let me just point out that more than a few well-informed correspondents, including Herman E Wolf and Gunther Karger who experienced the Nazi horror firsthand, have clearly come to rather different conclusions about what my article says and the spirit in which it was written. Two other such well-informed correspondents are Walter Reich, the former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who laments that there have been "too few" voices like mine criticizing the "less than noble" form in which Holocaust reparations are being sought, and Burton S. Levinson, the honorary national chairman of the ADL. I can only hope that Gloria Landy reconsiders--and that she does not punish COMMENTARY for any sins committed by me. I have read a number of books and essays by Angelo M. Codevilla over the years, always with interest and with particular admiration for his commitment to, among other causes, the security of the state of Israel. Some of his statements in his book on Switzerland therefore came to me as a genuine shock. Though Mr. Codevilla defends himself here from the charge that he engaged in apologetics, I regret that I am not persuaded. To take the most important instance, Mr. Codevilla has clearly read the authoritative Bergier Commission report on Switzerland's treatment of refugees during the war. But he is unwilling to state plainly its most disheartening findings. The Swiss were not merely begging the Germans to cut off the flow of "migrants," as Mr. Codevilla has it, and the Germans did not merely respond to this begging with the "J" stamp. Rather, Swiss authorities actively collaborated with the Germans; indeed, according to the Bergier Commission, the "initiative and energy that ended up leading to the discriminatory marking came from the Swiss side." And while the Swiss official Heinrich Rothmund may on occasion have tried, as Mr. Codevilla writes, to cast his decisions "in such a manner as to deflect possible accusations of anti-Semitism," the record shows that he did not on all occasions try very hard or very successfully. In one report from 1939, Rothmund wrote, "we haven't spent 20 years fighting excessive foreign influence and especially `Jewification' in Switzerland with everything the Police for Foreigners has at its disposal, just to have emigrants forced upon us today." From Mr. Codevilla's book, alas, one would learn nothing about the existence of such naked anti-Semitism among high Swiss officials. SUSAN GLAZER is right to point out that I neglected the issue of how restitution funds are being, or should be, distributed. This is a huge and controversial subject in and of itself, and I could hardly have done it justice in a limited space. Let me just say here that I would question her call for more money to be directed to Holocaust studies. There appears to be an iron law that the more funds flow to a given field, the more rapidly it is in danger of becoming populated by specialists in grantsmanship and worse. This is fully evident in the recent downward spiral of Holocaust research into "gender studies" and other well-funded forms of intellectual frivolity. (For details, see my "Auschwitz and the Professors," COMMENTARY, June 1998.) Gunther Karger poignantly raises the issue of distribution from another angle entirely. As the World Jewish Congress moves forward with its plan to create a multibillion-dollar Fund for the Jewish People with the proceeds of its various restitution campaigns, the serious questions raised by Mr. Karger will become increasingly acute, and there may be legitimate reason to fear that much of the money will be used less than wisely. In his generous letter, Roland Stephen correctly predicts that my article would provoke "castigation from every direction." What he failed to foresee was that some of the praise sent my way might be at least as discomfiting as the criticism. Thus, writing as "a German born in 1930," Ulrich Aldag "wholeheartedly endorse[s] all aspects" of my article, and is "most concerned that damage will result to the healing process" between Jews and contemporary Germans. I have no doubt that Mr. Aldag's plea is heartfelt, but for victims of the Holocaust to speak of the need for forgiveness and closure--although few if any ever do--is one thing; for a German of his generation to do so is another matter altogether, and in my view decidedly inappropriate. Why, moreover, does Mr. Aldag refer to contemporary Germans as "the descendants of a generation that lived when unspeakable crimes were committed" (my emphasis)? Does he have some doubts about exactly who committed these crimes? Before I close, I wish to take up a point raised by Harry Carasso, who questions the short shrift I gave to Norman Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry. While I thank Mr. Carasso for the magnanimity of his letter, my answer, in brief, is that although there are a couple of sentences in the Finkelstein book that make some sense--Mr. Carasso has pointed to them--its overall thesis is not only false but lunatic. Among other things, Finkelstein argues that Holocaust reparations are part of the same "ideological offensive" by which, in pursuit of their "corporate and class interests," American and Israeli Jews oppress American blacks, Palestinian Arabs, and others; and that Jewish organizations have been manufacturing nonexistent Holocaust survivors in their effort to augment their resources and power. These are crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world. They would not have gained Finkelstein any attention whatsoever were it not for the fact, first, that he himself is Jewish and, second, as he repeats shamelessly at every opportunity, that he is the son of Jews who suffered in the Holocaust. Given the intersection of Finkelstein's lineage with his bizarre ideas, it should come as no surprise that his book has been received with delight in certain right-wing quarters in Germany as well as in certain left-wing quarters in Great Britain. Here in this country, however, the book has been dismissed by almost all reviewers across the board. The only two exceptions I know of are the Nation on the Left and, distressingly, First Things, the conservative journal devoted to religion in public life that is edited by Richard John Neuhaus. The Nation review is wholly predictable; there is no length to which that magazine will not go to denounce Israel. But the one in First Things (December 2000), by William D. Rubinstein, a professor at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth, is noteworthy on a number of counts. Although the reviewer is at pains to acknowledge that Finkelstein is in the grip of a "hostile obsession" with Zionism and may "fairly be termed an anti-Israel propagandist," evidently he does not judge this to be anything more than an intellectual tic, let alone a disqualification for being taken seriously as a historian. And although he finds "some of Finkelstein's attacks" in The Holocaust Industry to be "unjustified," mostly they strike him as perfectly on the mark. Particularly "unanswerable," according to Rubinstein, is Finkelstein's "courageous" exposure of the "greed and rapacity of Jewish organizations" like the World Jewish Congress. This organization (in Rubinstein's paraphrase) is "in effect, a pirate ship, sailing the waters, hunting for booty, and using the unique moral credibility of the Holocaust to extort fortunes from European governments." Here Rubinstein blends a new set of toxins into the poisonous cocktail already on offer from Finkelstein. Although I myself have no brief for the men who run the World Jewish Congress, and was harshly critical of them in my article, the notion that they are driven by "greed and rapacity" would be laughable were it not for the notorious historical pedigree of such language. Indeed, Finkelstein himself seems in general to avoid such words, preferring to speak less of greed than of "Jewish racism" as well as institutional "blackmail" and "extortion," offenses committed, in his view, not so much out of the Jewish drive to accumulate capital as out of a compulsion to "justify [the] criminal policies of the Israeli state." To Finkelstein's image of Jewish "racism," then, Rubinstein adds the Shylock-derived image of Jewish cupidity. As for the truth of the matter, as everybody knows, the head of the World Jewish Congress, Edgar Bronfman, is a billionaire, a man hardly in need of Holocaust "booty" to fund his organization's activities. If he and the WJC's ranking officials have pursued a just cause with so much zeal as to traduce it--and traduce it they have--it has been from misjudgment, heedlessness, an often breathtaking lack of circumspection, and a neglect of larger Jewish interests. These are real failings, which have had real and deeply worrisome consequences. But only those with another agenda entirely would take these failings and use them as a license to peddle hatred of the kind promoted by a whole host of fringe figures from the Holocaust denier David Irving down to Reverend Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. In closing, I want to thank all of my correspondents for writing, especially those who raised important issues that I failed to discuss. |
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