ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Holocaust Racketeers Have Money to Burn

This Editorial appeared in the July/August 2003 issue of The Barnes Review.

When Jewish Agency Chairman Avraham Burg announced in August 1995, presumably with tongue in cheek since he admittedly had no evidence, that Swiss bankers held hundreds of millions of dollars in unclaimed deposits of Holocaust victims and demanded that the banks return the money, he could have had no idea of the repercussions.

The normally secretive Swiss bankers declared that they had identified all unclaimed pre-1945 deposits and that the total value of the 775 dormant accounts was not more than $34 million. This amount represented deposits by both Jews and non-Jews. Jewish groups worldwide seized on this admission as a sign of weakness and demanded not only the $34 million but also much more. Edgar Bronfman, head of the World Jewish Congress, soon took up the cause and demanded that an interim fund of $200 million be set up and distributed to Holocaust survivors pending a final settlement.

Since that time he has claimed that the unclaimed balances total $7 billion. There are serious weaknesses in Mr. Bronfman's claim. The most obvious is the extremely acute shortage of foreign exchange that persisted in Germany throughout the 1930's which would have rendered impossible large transfers to Swiss accounts. Certainly $7 billion would have been out of the question since this amount exceeded Germany's annual foreign exchange earnings in the late 1930's, all of which in any event were required to purchase vital imports. Less obvious but equally verifiable were the constraints that were placed on Jewish economic activity which in the midst of the Great Depression would have precluded the accumulation of the huge cash balances allegedly deposited by the Holocaust victims. Even in the unlikely event that the Jews had accumulated substantial funds during the early part of the decade.

It is unimaginable that in those conditions Jews could have earned legitimately and retained the large fortunes allegedly deposited. Furthermore, if the victims' balances came to $7 billion, the survivors' balances must have been significantly greater -- another impossibility.

The less affluent Jews who remained in Germany at the outbreak of the war in 1939 (a minority of the total Jewish population) in some cases might have had Swiss bank accounts, but if so, the balances would not have been large and in many cases there is no convincing evidence that the owners would have perished in the concentration camps. On the contrary, there is convincing evidence that many German Jews passed through the war years unmolested and fully integrated into the German war effort. Canadian Jewish author Alan Abrams describes this phenomenon in his book Special Treatment (Lyle Stuart, 1985). Simple observation in Israel, North America, Europe and South Africa demonstrates clearly that the majority survived, and prospered.

Unless, therefore, Mr. Bronfman can show that the Jews who remained in Germany and the occupied countries were (1) extraordinarily affluent; (2) able to acquire quantities of gold and foreign exchange far beyond the amounts available; (3) able to effect transfers into Swiss currency while both Jews and foreign exchange were under the strictest scrutiny and; (4) put to death or died before the war's end, he is unlikely to convince anyone familiar with the facts. Which is not to say that Mr. Bronfman will not succeed. Despite their pre-eminence in international finance, indeed perhaps even because of it, the Swiss banks and other institutions are vulnerable and could suffer severely from a worldwide Jewish boycott unless they could marshal other threatened Gentile interests to their side in a worldwide counter-boycott.

Perhaps the most hazardous to Jews is Mr. Bronfman's frequent reference to the vast numbers who allegedly perished. If indeed the figure is Six Million, however, four million were said to have "perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

We know now from the camp records finally released by the Russians that the death toll at Auschwitz was just over 74,000, not all of whom were Jews. Even more awkward is the ubiquity of the so-called "Holocaust Survivors." While purported to be no more than a tiny remnant of European Jewry, in fact they number at least 4.5 million, if individual claims for compensation filed with the West German Government are valid.

Scholarly research on Jewish demographics, notably that of Walter N. Sanning, author of The Dissolution of East European Jewry, published in 1983 by the then-viable Institute for Historical Review, confirms the thesis that very large numbers found safe havens.

Of the Jews confined to ghettos, labor camps and concentration camps, there was more to fear from the Allies than from the Germans, especially in the closing months of the war, when, ironically, in response to pleas from organized Jewry, the "railway lines leading to the death camps" were bombed, cutting off vital supplies of food and medicines. Most of the Jews who died, including Anne Frank and her sister, were victims of typhus, which would have taken many more lives had it not been for the use of a powerful German-manufactured fumigant, Zyklon B, the same chemical claimed by Holocaust proponents to have been used in the alleged extermination of the Six Million.

Absurd as the Jewish financial and human alleged losses may seem to the objective observer, they have been accepted at face value by western politicians, educators and even by normally skeptical journalists. Heavily infiltrated western governments led by venal politicians have declared the Holocaust an incontrovertible fact that can be questioned only at one's considerable peril, including loss of livelihood and imprisonment. That a "fact" should require such protection seems odd, but no more so than the failure of Churchill to have made even one single reference to the horrendous gas chambers in his definitive work on the conflict.

Soon, according to recent news reports, we shall learn of the wartime heroism of the hitherto unheralded "Jewish fighting man" in a special gallery to be built at the Canadian War Museum.

Mr. Bronfman is on no firmer ground when he accuses the Swiss of collaborating with Nazi Germany. Why wouldn't the Swiss have collaborated? Germany was not Switzerland's enemy, on the contrary was doubtless seen by most insightful citizens as the only reliable safeguard against communism. And if the Swiss made profits, they were as nothing compared to the windfall pocketed by world Jewry. In the light of this reality Mr. Bronfman's admonition that "No one should profit from the Holocaust" has a distinctly hollow ring, as does his appeal to principle, unless, of course, he is prepared to apply the same principles in the case of the dispossessed Palestinians.

-- Ian V. Macdonald

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