The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood – in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified" (Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000) published by Verso, p. 3).
In other words, Finkelstein exposes the HYPOCRISY.
Some further quotes:
"In an authoritative study, Leonard Dinnerstein reported: Sixty thousand Jews . . . walked out of the concentration camps. Within a week more than 20,000 of them had died." But ‘As it entered into negotiations with Germany [just two years ago, in 1999], the Holocaust industry demanded compensation for 135,000 still living former (camp inmates).’
On page 83 he notes that ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.’ Finkelstein exposes the LIES.
On page 127 he further notes ‘If 135,000 former Jewish slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That’s at least a half-million more than standard estimates. . . If Jews only constituted 20% of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies, 600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By the Holocaust industry’s reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn’t have been that harsh at all; in fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate. . . If, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews survived, the Final Solution couldn’t have been so efficient after all – exactly what Holocaust deniers argue" (pp. 127-8).
"Both my father and my mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. . . One of my father’s lifelong friends was a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment, my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and profit. As the rendering of the Holocaust assumed ever more absurd forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry Ford: "History is bunk." (ibid. p. 7).
"The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel" (ibid p. 30).
"Much of the literature on Hitler’s Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud." (p. 55).
"Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics". (p. 68).
"Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor commemorations, often in state legislative chambers. . . Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust museum in Washington. . . [This] museum’s annual budget is $50 million, of which $30 million is federally subsidized." (p. 72). (This is in spite of the fact that, as he points out on page 32, per capita Jewish income in the US is almost double that of non-Jews).
"With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the [US Holocaust Museum] project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the president’s recognition of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinians.’ (p. 73).
Finkelstein exposes the SWINDLE, a word formerly most often associated with Jews.
"The Holocaust" is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust. Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality. The Holocaust is not an arbitrary, but rather an internally coherent construct. Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests." (p. 3). And:
"The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the "greatest robbery in the history of mankind". . . The Holocaust industry has clearly gone berserk." (p. 138-9).
Is this evaluation fair?
Have a look at a typical account by one of the seemingly endless number of survivors: Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: a woman survivor’s true story of Auschwitz (Granada/Ziff-Davis, 1947, 1972).
The blurb on the cover of the book quotes the New York Herald-Tribune: "Passionate, tormenting". Albert Einstein, the promoter of the US construction of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is quoted as offering "You have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten (sic) speak."
Lengyel says:
"After June, 1943, the gas chamber was reserved exclusively for Jews and Gypsies. . . Three hundred and sixty corpses every half-hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night. However, one must also reckon the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record, one that speaks well for German industry." (Paperback edition, pp. 80-81). [No trace of any remains of or in ‘death pits’ has been found.]
This implies almost 100,000 corpses per four working days, or a million in 40 days, or six million in 240 days (eight months).
Could this claim be a misprint?
Kitty Hart, in spite of her name, a Jewish survivor born in Poland, fully confirms these figures:
"Working around the clock, the four units together could dispose of about 18,000 bodies every twenty-four hours, while the open pits coped with a further 8,000 in the same period." (p. 118; Return to Auschwitz - paperback edition by Granada (1981, 1983).
According to the cover blurb, "The subject of the award-winning Yorkshire television documentary of the same name." "Both engaging and harrowing . . . an important addition to the growing holocaust literature, very little of which conveys so courageously both the daily torment and the will to survive" – Martin Gilbert, The Times.
Martin Gilbert, indefatigable Jewish campaigner on behalf of the ‘Holocaust’ and biographer of Winston Churchill, adds to the rich flavour and makes his own numerical claims, certainly not without chutzpah:
In his book Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) he states:
"The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka." (p. 26).
If we assume a minimum figure of 200,000 per day, this amounts to say one million over a five-day working week, or 6 million in six weeks, and this does not include the truly awe-inspiring claims for Auschwitz put forward by Hart and Lengyel with Gilbert’s blessing.
A detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground penetrating radar, has found no evidence of mass graves there.
For six days in October 1999, an Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination of the soil at the site of the former Treblinka II camp in Poland, where, Holocaust historians say, more than half a million Jews were put to death in gas chambers and then buried in mass graves.
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997), for example, "a total of 870,000 people" were killed and buried at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. Then, between April and July 1943, the hundreds of thousands of corpses were allegedly dug up and burned in batches of 2,000 or 2,500 on large grids made of railway ties.
Krege's team used an $80,000 Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) In its Treblinka investigation, Krege's team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples.
The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka II site, especially the alleged "mass graves" portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.
"From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site," says the 30-year old Krege, who lives in Canberra. "We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether." Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted.
While his initial investigation suggests that there were never any mass graves at the Treblinka camp site, Krege believes that further work is still called for.
"Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated toward the end of the Treblinka camp's use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed," he says. "Personally, I don't think there was a mass extermination camp there at all."
Krege prepared a detailed report on his Treblinka investigation. He says that he would welcome the formation, possibly under United Nations auspices, of an international team of neutral, qualified specialists, to carry out similar investigations at the sites of all the wartime German camps.
(Sources: "'Vernichtungslager' Treblinka: archaelogisch betrachtet," by Ing. Richard Krege, in Vierteljarhreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, June 2000 [4. Jg., Heft 1], pp. 62-64; "'No Jewish mass grave' in Poland," The Canberra Times, January 24, 2000, p. 6; "Poland's Jews 'not buried at Treblinka'," The Examiner [Australia], Jan. 24, 2000. Information provided by Richard Krege; M. Weber and A. Allen, "Treblinka," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1992, pp. 133-158; Y. Arad, "Treblinka," in I. Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust [New York: 1997], pp. 1481-1488.)