Some Comments on this book and Israel...
Of particular interest to the aims of this site are Lilienthal's meticulous explanations and many illustrations of how the Holocaust story serves to this day as Israel's first and last line shield against world criticism of her unbroken stream of wrongs aimed at driving indigent Palestinians from the land Israel now claims by dent of her very special relationship with the "Great Realtor in the Sky," as Gore Vidal so aptly puts it. The aim of relentless Holocaust promotion to the mind-numbing levels that have infiltrated even into our public education system, Lilienthal says, is to keep us all eternally in the 1940-45 time period. If our attention focuses there, then the choice in any situation involving Israel reduces to siding with Hitler or siding with whatever else. There is of course no choice, and you must side, however reluctantly, with "whatever else," or face venomous and potentially ruinous attack as an obvious "Nazi" and "anti-Semite." Efforts such as Lilienthal's, and ours, are often attacked by those who say that the mere questioning of any part of the Holocaust story, including Israel's utilization of it, is an intolerable insult to the memory of the kabbalistic "6 million" dead, and must be silenced. To the contrary; we hold that Israel's supremely cynical manipulation of this memory, thereby suborning the good faith of world Jewry to support her ongoing execution of a Palestinian Holocaust, is an intolerable insult not only to the arguable number of dead, but to all Jews not privy to their true intentions as well.
The Zionist Connection II
To Christians, Jews, Muslims and Non-Believers, living and dead, who have had not only the courage to place their concern for mankind above their allegiance to any group or sect but also the willingness to do battle in behalf of this conviction. - Alfred M. Lilienthal
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Introduction
Euphoric Americans clung to their video sets over that weekend. Sadat was addressing the Knesset--Egyptians and Israelis were not only talking to one another, but smiling. The "A-rabs" were at last willing to give up war. Peace, surely, must be on the way. This wishful thinking of course overlooked the fact that since 1948 there had been two wars going on simultaneously in the Middle East. The one between Israel and the Arab states was only a secondary consequence of what Syrian President Hafez al-Assad has called the "mother question"-the conflict between the Israeli Zionists and the Arab Palestinians. While there was some possibility of a separate agreement ending the Egyptian-Israeli war, a solution for the core of the dangerous Holy Land conflict seemed as distant as ever. The November 10, 1975, U.N. resolution equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination, and for the first time placed the genesis of the continuing Middle East struggle squarely before a startled American public. But fervent supporters of Israel, Christians as well as Jews, reacted with unprecedented furor to the overwhelming U.N. censure and stirred the media to direct an equally unprecedented onslaught against the U.N., the Arab states, and the Third World bloc. The supporters of the resolution were denigrated with the charge "emulators of Hitler." The pro-Israel American public was led to believe that this was indeed but another attack on Jews and Judaism, a Nazi renaissance. The pertinency of this U.N. action to the continuing Arab rejection of the State of Israel was totally covered over by whipped-up emotionalism. What is Zionism, and what is its connection with the Middle East conflict? How, if at all, is it differentiated from Judaism? Why has Organized Jewry, invariably an unequivocal exponent of the separation of church and state, condoned their union in an Israeli state demanding the allegiance of everyone everywhere who considers himself a Jew, whether he be an observant practitioner or not? What validity is there to the insistence of a persistent minority that anti-Zionism is the equivalent of anti-Semitism? Such questions may mystify 90 percent of Americans, yet the answers go to the very heart of the Middle East conflict. It was the serious confusion between religion and nationalism that led directly to the 1948 establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world, causing disastrous consequences for all concerned, including Americans whose government had played a major role in that nation-making. The resultant uprooting of Palestinian Arabs, whose numbers today have swollen to more than 1.6 million, many exiled for thirty years to refugee camps living on a U.N. dole of seven cents per day, brought down on the U.S. the enmity of an Arab-Muslim world, eroding a measureless reservoir of goodwill stemming from the educational and eleemosynary institutions America helped found. The creation of Israel, likewise, led to the penetration of the area for the first time by the Soviet Union, endangered the security interests of the U.S., and thrust the burden of a premature energy crisis into every American home. However much the essence of Judaism may have remained as distinct as ever from Zionism, the nationalist shadow has so overtaken the religious substance that virtually all Jews have, in practice, become Israelists, if not Zionists. Many who mistrust the Zionist connotation can still have their cake and eat it, through Israelism. While the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora (the aggregate of Jews living outside of Palestine) do not believe in Zionist ideology, out of what is mistaken for religious duty they have given fullest support, bordering on worship, to Israel. Such worship of collective human power is just about as old as Pharaonic Egypt, and was practiced by the Sumerians, pre-Christian Greeks, and Romans as well. As Dr. Arnold Toynbee pointed out in A Study of History.
And these Jewish Zionists-Israelists have been joined by a large segment of articulate Christian opinion in the new worship of the State of Israel, which has been accorded the same privileges and immunities that have been vouchsafed to religionists who follow a genuine faith. On every other issue of concern to Americans, both sides have invariably been publicly presented, no matter how controversial: the cigarette lobby vs. cancer research, the drug alarmists vs. the upholders of pot, traditionalists-oldsters vs. Beatles-hippies, civil rights gradualists vs. extremists, hawks and doves over Vietnam, pro-Watergate outcome vs. Nixon apologists-to mention but a few. It has only been on the subject of Jews, Zionism, and Israel that the U.S. and most of the Western world have had a near-total blackout. The mere presence of the powerful Anti-Defamation League, even before the fearsome "anti-Semitic" label might be brandished, has imparted a sensitivity so powerful as to smother any idea of private discussion, let alone public debate, on the grave issues involved. The record of pressures, suppression, and terrorization practiced against many-including Presidents of the U.S., who in undisclosed memoranda, letters, and documents have entertained serious doubts about the course upon which Zionism has embarked-is massive and yet incomplete. The more submissive of the Victims of Jewish nationalist pressure have usually been either too ashamed or too afraid to publicize their experiences. Rarely has the deceit of so few been so widely practiced to the disastrous detriment of so many, as in the formulation and implementation of U.S. Middle East policy. Guilt, fear, and the preoccupation with domestic politics rather than consideration of policy, justice, and security interests have molded the direction of the deep U.S. involvement. And if John Q. Citizen was unmindful of what was really taking place, it was largely due to the inordinate power of the media to penetrate the inner sanctum of every home with its slantings, distortions, and myth-information. "T'ain't people's ignorance," as Artemus Ward once quipped, "that does the harm, 'tis their knowin' so much that ain't so." Barnum notwithstanding, the media has been able to fool the people most, if not all, of the time. The Watergate cover-up has to play second fiddle to the concealments in the Middle East fiasco for more than thirty years, involving, as it has, the continuous serious threat to world peace manifested by four regional wars and three serious Big Power confrontations, which only narrowly missed becoming World War III. The stationing of American technicians in the Sinai to help supervise the second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accord may have been a step in the making of a new Vietnam. "One day," predicted a senior U.S. diplomat, according to Newsweek magazine, "there will be a congressional investigation into how we lost the Middle East that will make the great China debate seem trivial." This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a great Middle East debate that should take place before, rather than after, catastrophe strikes again in that already harassed portion of the globe. Certain basic questions require. answers: "Whose legal and moral claim to Palestine is stronger, the Israeli Zionists or the Arab Palestinians? How, if at all, may these claims be reconciled? How may the U.S. protect its vast political and economic stake in the area and simultaneously continue to foster its special, unique relationship with Israel? Will the undeniable, overwhelming public statement of "never again," as to another Vietnam, be meticulously regarded in our pursuit of Middle East peace? And above all, this clincher: Will President Reagan and his policy advisers cease avoiding and openly face the central issue in the entire problem--not the existence of an Israeli state, nor even the nonexistence of a Palestinian state, but the kind of a state Israel has to become so as to bring lasting peace to the area? For some time it has been apparent that someone would have to assume the burden of carefully examining the historical record of the Arab-Israeli conflict, starting with the "original sin" in uprooting the indigenous Arab Palestinians, and daring to articulate conclusions seldom aired. As Norman Thomas once observed, one of the Jewish faith is perhaps able to speak with "the necessary moral authority that no Gentile can express." However strong the temptation may be for any author to succumb to the prevailing mood of his surroundings and to indulge in indiscriminate stereotyping, heightened by cliche's and slogans, I have tried to maintain a fair perspective and not to allow personal experiences to dull the observer's vision, nor instill too deep-seated a passion. It is out of sadness, not anger, that I am forced to conclude that in embarking upon the new path that Organized Jewry has hewn for it, prophetic Judaism has incurred an incalculable loss in moral values, which author Moshe Menuhin has described as "the Decadence of Judaism in Our Times." What else can account for the anomaly by which the once-persecuted have adopted the philosophy of their chief persecutor? In doling out incarceration and death while sweeping through conquered Europe, did not the Führer undo the laws of emancipation for which so many Jews had so long struggled, as he decreed: "You are not a German, you are a Jew-you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew, you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew"? Yet these are the identical words that Zionist leaders have been intoning as they have meticulously promoted the in-gathering to Israel (Palestine) of Jews from around the globe, even plotting their exodus from lands in which they have lived happily for centuries. If at times this book seems unduly critical of Israel, and neglects to place in balance the oft-repeated arguments in its favor, it is simply because the gigantic propaganda apparatus of Israel-World Zionism has spun such extensive and deeply ingrained mythology that there is hardly enough space to refute widely accepted theses and expose the picture as it really is. The reader, however, is particularly cautioned to keep in mind at all times the very vital distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel. Nor can he overlook the fact that one of Western man's most precious possessions is the inalienable right to dissent. As Thomas Jefferson expressed it, "For God's sake, let us freely hear both sides." This new, updated paperback edition has been published as an answer to the widespread demand to learn more about the untold side of a subject, the understanding of which may be vital to man's very existence. In giving fair consideration to what to many will come as an astounding recital, my readers are asked to display what William Ellery Channing once defined as the free mind:
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Part Three. The Cover-OverXIII The Holocaust: Stoking the FiresThis--all this--was in the olden Time long ago. - Edgar Allan
Poe YAD VASHEM, A LARGE COMPOUND on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, is a memorial to the Jewish martyrs and heroes of World War II. The Hall of Remembrance is a large rectangular building of basalt boulders and uneven concrete, purposely recreating the appearance of a Nazi gas chamber. Within, on a floor of inlaid tile, are inscribed the names of the twenty-one largest Nazi concentration camps. A shaft admitted through a skylight illuminates the eternal flame contained in the hollow of a colossal broken bronze urn. Next to the hall is a large square where thousands gather annually for the ceremonies on Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day in April, the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. To the left of the floor is a double-story museum, on the top floor of which are kept the names of those who perished in camps. A photographic recreation of the history of Nazi anti-Semitism is on the bottom floor. Guarding the museum is an anguished statue of Job by the sculptor Nathan Rappaport. Circling these buildings is a small forest called the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, which honors Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. The archives contain records of rescue activities by Jewish organizations, and documents captured in Germany and satellite countries. Upon leaving Yad Vashem, one passes The Pillar of Heroism, a very modern, severe triangular shaft of stainless steel rising seventy feet on the Judean hill. Deeds of Jewish valor are carved into the surrounding stones. This sanctification of the holocaust,1together with the Masada monument commemorating the Zealots who killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans, carries out the biblical command: Tell your children of it and let your children tell their children, and their children, another generation. Yad Vashem epitomizes the last trump of the professional anti-anti-Semite. The holocaust is the weapon that hovers behind the cover-up and supplies the principal prop to the cover-over. When all else fails, the six million Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust remain the ultimate silencer. These six million are quite literally pulled from the ovens, propped up, and pushed forward to confront any who might raise the slightest question or smallest voice of dissent. Even the mere threat of this suffices to silence most people. But on many occasions, the six million are ritually brought out. Silence ensues. The line is maintained. Hitler had made reluctant Zionists out of many guilt ridden Christians and assimilated Western Jews. As Hitler exploited the Jews, it is paradoxical that certain Jews should have exploited and up to this very moment are still very much intent upon exploiting Hitler for Zionist propaganda purposes. There has been an almost continuing conspiracy, fostered by an unholy alliance between the media and the Zionists, to keep us all in the era of 1940-45. Since there can be only one side to any issue where the alternative would be Hitler, the aim of the game is to keep Adolf and his gang alive. In 1952, 1967, early in 1972, and later again in November of that year, the hue and cry was raised: "He is alive." And there appeared in the world press still another widely distributed photo of someone alleged to be Martin Bormann, Nazi adjutant to Adolf Hitler. On further investigation, the stories have faded into nothingness. But this speculation, widely encouraged by the media and based on total rumor, brought on a new spate of articles and books about Nazism, further flavoring the atmosphere in which the Middle East conflict was being judged and additionally pinching the Christian conscience lest the already growing number of those disenchanted with Israel further increase. The latest Bormann episode was by far the most elaborate. It was built around a series of articles by the writer-historian Ladislas Farago, which appeared in a six-part account in both the London Daily Express 2 and the New York Daily News. 3 Sensational articles appeared in other newspapers concerning the series on Bormann and the Nazis, until New York Times correspondent Joseph Novitski printed an interview with one Jose Velasco of the Argentine Intelligence Service, who denied ever having questioned Bormann at an Argentine checkpoint, as alleged by Farago. Velasco stated that the photograph in question showed him not with Bormann, but with a high school teacher named Rudolpho Sira in downtown Buenos Aires. The Farago contention that Bormann, aided by the Vatican and Juan Peron, then dictator of Argentina, had escaped from Berlin and managed to smuggle out of Germany treasures in excess of $200 million in the last days of the Hitler regime, was debunked by writer Charles Dana Gibson. Putting finishing touches himself to a book dealing with German blockade-running during World War II, Gibson declared it was impossible to remove loot without the knowledge of Hitler and it was also most unlikely that Bormann "could have arranged such a cargo shipment on a U-boat." 4 As a reply to their own correspondent, the Times, in line with its usual "liberal tradition," permitted Farago a three-column rebuttal, in which he rehashed the whole Nazi bit and claimed his evidence regarding Bormann was 'authoritative, authentic, and accurate." He was then completing The Aftermath 5 for which Simon and Schuster had given him a $100,000-plus contract. The cult of anti-anti-Semitism apparently was about to be fattened anew. A last word was had by English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Oxford Professor of Modern History and the author of The Last Days of Hitler, in a piece in the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times. 6 The whole past controversy was reviewed and an elaborate history of Bormann as well as some of his Nazi colleagues was added. But not one shred of new evidence had been provided to prove that Bormann was alive, even as the Hitler era was relived all over again. All this was brought to the attention of the Sunday readers with this caption in black, bold type: "The world has never had any difficulty remembering his name, but has almost forgotten who he was." There were very few, indeed, who would bet that this would ever be allowed to happen. Off the presses has come an unbelievable, endless spate of books pricking the world's conscience, as if there was still a Nazi peril today. Scarcely a week passes without an addition to the already imposing list of gory tomes. It would seem that writers of fiction and nonfiction, for television, the movies, and the stage alike, had no other theme than the holocaust. We should have thought Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died, 7 Lucy S. Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, 1933 - 1945, 8 Myron S. Kaufmann's The Coming Destruction of Israel-Will the U.S. Tolerate Russian Intervention in the Middle East, 9 Richard Chernoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littel's If Israel Lost the War 10 would have been more than enough. But then along came an imposing advertisement to tell the readers of the Times of Eli Wiesel's One Generation After. 11 Wiesel's Night 12 and then a new spate of books in the wake of the October war and the latest "threat" of genocide to Jews followed in 1974. Other aspects of the holocaust were set forth in Open the Gates, 13 The Destruction of European Jews, 14 and They Fought Back, 15 all which with the Dawidowicz book "were reviewed together by Libertarian magazine. 16 The latter, referred to by the cultists as a "classic," was supplemented in 1977 by a new work by the same authoress, The Jewish Presence, 17 in which she assailed Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem for placing some of the blame for Jewish extermination on the leaders of the Jewish Community Councils, the Judenrat, who "cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another with the Nazis." After a lengthy Times review of this new Dawidowicz collection of essays on a Sunday, 18 Times chief reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt gave the book another forward push in his daily "Book of the Times" column the next day. 19 What should have appeared in the first or second paragraph of the critique, where the reviewer praised the authoress for her other writings and her habitual "do not forget the six million" thesis, was kept to the very last three lines of the two columns: "The Jewish Presence simply lacks what would have made it as fresh and surprising as a good collection of essays ought to be." And, of all people, the readers of the Times scarcely had to be told by Lehmann-Haupt: "Nor do we need to be reminded that the struggle of Israel to remain alive, particularly during the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, has served to raise the consciousness of Jews and non-Jews all over the world." Thirty-two years after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker, and hundreds of volumes later, no book on the German Führer, no matter how trivial its contribution or how ineptly it is written, still failed to win big, bold headlines on the "Books of the Times" page. Lehmann-Haupt even apologized-- "Why read yet another book about Hitler?" 20 And then he proceeded to dissect John Toland's Adolf Hitler 21 at length, using the gathering of "tidbits of new information" as his excuse. The real reason, of course, must be the endless compulsion that this chief Times book reviewer feels to lend a hand to "little Israel" by propagating the syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism Nor did this end it. The Times of July 12, 1977 carried a half-page advertisement of a "gripping, powerful portrait," the new book, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, 22 which was given the benefit of prepublication features in major New York Times and Time magazine stories and rave notices in Harriet Van Home's syndicated column and in Publishers Weekly for putting "the lie to the view that Hitler may not have known about the crimes committed against the Jews." And Hitler himself was not the only theme pursued. A few months earlier the Howard Blum book, Wanted: The Search for Nazis in America, 23 had been released and was synthesized in a New York Post 24 series illustrated by more horror pictures of Nazi deeds. The takeover of G. P. Putnam's Sons publishing house by Music Corporation of America (whose chairman, Lew Wasserman, was described in the Robert Scheer Los Angeles Times 1978 controversial series as "the most powerful Jew in Los Angeles as well as the most powerful leader of the entertainment industry") was reflected in the publication and promotion of such books as 17 Ben-Gurion. 25 According to an advertisement in the Times, the book concerned "the terrorist-ridden Middle East in this big, exciting novel of a ruthless Palestinian terrorist organization plotting to destroy Israel and Israeli Intelligence agents racing against time to trace the conspiracy to its source and smash it forever." 26 Within three weeks came the companion novel, The Plot to Destroy Israel, "documenting how the Arab nations intend to wipe Israel off the face of the earth." 27 The emerging power of the PLO, the threat of OPEC, the growing recession, and the open speculation about U.S. armed intervention in the Middle East caused consternation in Jewish-American circles. Gerald S. Strober, a former staff member of the American Jewish Committee, in his book American Jews. Community in Crisis predicted that current trends will make "life rather unpleasant for the individual Jew" in America, and that U.S. Jews are now entering "the most perilous period" in their history. 28 Eli Wiesel claimed in the New York Times 29 that for the first time he could "foresee the possibility of Jews being massacred in the cities of America or in the foresteps of Europe" because of "a certain climate, a certain mood in the making." According to Cynthia Ozick in her Esquire piece "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," Israel's survival was in grave doubt, and with it Zionism and thus all Jews. She proclaimed "The Jews are one people You cannot separate parent from child, the Jews from Zion." 30 The rash of hysterical articles continued: Alfred Kazin's piece in the Atlantic Monthly; 31 Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz's January 1975 article in the New York Times 32 and his 1976 editorial article in his own magazine; 33 Richard Reeves' New York magazine article, "If Jews Will Not Be for Themselves, Who Will Be for Them?" 34 All were aimed at creating panic among Jews, at linking anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and at crushing any stillborn opposition to the maintenance of the Middle East status quo. The lead article in the New York Times Magazine of June 19, 1977 was the Helen Epstein emotional outpouring, "The Heirs of the Holocaust," in which controversy was built over whether children and grand-children should or should not feel guilty for having survived their parents and grandparents. Speculation was kept alive by the publication of eight letters the following month, which generally expressed a "deep feeling of guilt for having survived our parents and for being an heir of the holocaust. Because I am a Jew and because the suffering was so great, I can carry only an infinitesimal part of this sorrow." 35 Even obituary page headlines in the Times, "Rudolf Weiss, 77, Actor Who Fled Austria After Nazi Invasion, Dead," are used to fasten attention on the holocaust. 36 The Sunday New York Times' Travel Section is not immune. On September 3, 1972, it carried one article on anti-Semitism in Germany and another on concentration camps in Poland over a three-page spread including a tremendous picture of a skull-capped Jew baring his Nazi tattoo. Rarely has writing as contrived, platitudinous and banal as Stephen Birnbaum's "Germany: The End of Assimilation" appeared anywhere, let alone in the promotion of tourism. A visitor dropped from another planet would have believed that the Third Reich was still ruling Germany and threatening the world. This writer, calling himself an assimilationist but referring to "Rosh Hashonah, 5372," feels forced in 1972 to make excuses for making a trip to West Germany. By his own confession he has avoided attending a synagogue for eighteen years. On this first visit to Germany, while enjoying his first meal in a German home on the North Sea coast, his eyes happen to fall upon an oil painting of the Nazi SS father of his host. He can scarcely keep down his food, and the next day he rushes to a "spiritual reunion" in a Regensburg synagogue. Television likewise continued to keep viewers back in the unforgettable 1940s. In late 1974, for instance, a two-part documentary study of Adolf Hitler had been cunningly timed by WNET Educational Television to fall as Jews celebrated Hanukkah. According to the New York Times, it was "a devastating reminder and somber warning of a madness that was able to grip a large part of the world in this century." This was followed in January on Channel 9 by "In Our Time," a 1944 drama of Nazi-shadowed Poland, starring Ida Lupino and Paul Henried; then a Sunday evening "Report on World War II" depicting the concentration camps of Belsen and Auschwitz; and then a revival of the de Sica film, The Garden of the Finzi- Continis, the story of Jewish persecution under Italian Fascism. This, even as the Odessa File with its blatant propaganda about a fictitious Nazi-Egyptian spy ring in Frankfurt, was drawing tears from thousands, who had stood in long cues to view the new hit purporting to show Egyptians and resurgent Nazis building a rocket assembly line to threaten the very existence of Israel. In short order this was followed by (he appearance of Rosebud, the Otto Preminger film about a hijacking by Black September Palestinians of a yacht on which there are five wealthy girls, one of whom is Jewish. Among the propaganda ploys used by the film was an Israeli intelligence officer uttering, "They'll never get us in gas chambers again," as he shows off his skillful "know-how" of American equipment locating the guerrillas' Corsica hideout. 37 This outpouring came in the wake of the PLO's appearance before the bar of international opinion and was endless. Nearly two full pages of the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section of the New York Times was covered by an Alfred Kazin piece, "Can Today's Movies Tell the Truth about Fascism?" The article started off with the admission, "World War II is by now the longest running movie of all time," an assessment with which no objective observer could quarrel, only hoping the writer would not further prolong it. Two tremendous pictures, each 9 X 6-1/2 inches, evoked the immediate sympathy of the reader. One showed "a Jewish girl in occupied Paris seeking a priest's aid in the movie Black Thursday,"and the other was a pretty shot of a Jewish mother and her little son escaping the Nazis in the movie Les Villons du Bal. But the author decried the happy ending in which mother and son "manage to slip under the barbed wire and a benevolent Swiss guard looks down on them and croons 'Now you are free.' " History, he claimed, was not so kind. "For the Swiss were as gentle to 'illegal immigrants' as one of their bank tellers would be to a pauper. French filmmakers, stimulated by Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity in 1972, began to portray their countrymen in less than Resistance-hero terms, with an alleged anti-Semitism that even at times exceeded that of the Nazis. Their products were greeted with great popularity in the U.S., as in France, with the help of Zionist stimulation. But Kazin still was far from satisfied. Even when a movie did give a picture of Jews being tormented, the persecution was often not vivid or horrible enough for Kazin's taste, as was the case of Louis Malle's exceptionally interesting and intelligent film Lacombe, Lucien. The producer was held to be "not altogether well-informed because he was only thirteen when the war ended." Hollywood continued to advance the cult, although not always successfully. The Voyage of the Damned, the film based on the story of the 1939 attempt by 937 Jews aboard the St. Louis to find a refuge from Hitler in Cuba, was reviewed by Vincent Canby as "clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous," another attempt to "wildly fictionalize and exploit the tragedies of real people." 38 The 1977 Alain Delon's Mr. Klein brought to the screen a novel aspect of anti-Semitism--an exposure of someone from the haute monde, who though "not an active Nazi supporter, found anti-Semitic sketches in a cabaret revue amusing and brought objects d'art at rock-bottom prices from Jews fleeing the country. 39 Again, after the emergence of Menachem Begin in power in Israel, amidst the subsequent soul-searching by American Jews and the emerging debate over the Geneva Conference, the holocaust burst anew on the television screens of New York viewers. "The World at War: The Final Solution" was given seven hours August 1-4, 1977, on Mutual's outlet, Channel 9 (WOR-TV). On the night this series ended, an old third-rate movie, Operation Eichmann, was dug up out of the morgue and shown. Later that month smatterings of the persecution theme were woven into the first of three "Jewish Tradition" series of ten Sunday half-hour shows and in "Jerusalem Lives" over Channel 13 (WNET). That station had earlier shown, as part of a network program, L 'Chaim, the story of the Jewish people in Europe from the mid-l9th century through the Nazi period to the present. In the 1977 series Israel: A Family Portrait, which was unveiled as a special four-part series September 7-9, 1977, over WABC (Channel 7) "Eyewitness News" at prime 6:00 P.M. time, correspondent Joel Siegel was shown visiting relatives in the Zionist state. Here a cousin who survived "the concentration camp where 300,000 Jews were massacred" described the holocaust and his heightened feelings about Israel. In addition to such "news" outlets, a special half-hour feature picked up Siegel's narration for the September 17 season premiere of Mort Fleischer's WABC's award-winning public affairs series, "People, Places, Things." Many television stations in all parts of the country on all networks repeatedly through 1976 and 1977 showed the half-hour United Jewish Appeal-produced film, The Commitment, which depicted Jewish persecution under the Nazis and closed with an appeal for funds. Israeli-American singer of note, Theodore Bikel, did the narrating. This propaganda-laden presentation was shown as a public service, at no charge whatsoever to the UJA. In addition to keeping alive the Hitler days and the holocaust there has been the related phenomenon of bringing to life the fear of imminent revivals of Nazism and Fascism 40 both abroad and at home. The Nazi shadow and peril were kept aglow by a plethora of New York Times stories and the competition between the networks in trying to magnify the importance of the U.S. Nazi party. An NBC "Tomorrow" show interviewed American Nazi leader Frank Collin who defended his vehement anti-Jewish, anti-black position. The New Rochelle shooting spree of crazed Fred Cowan provided the excuse for focusing national attention on a fascist movement whose membership numbered little more than 1,000. Not to be outdone, a CBS "Sixty Minutes" on February 20, 1977 presented another view of the U.S. Nazis. These fanatics were pictured against a background of swastikas as a growing force of hate. When asked by their Nazi parents, little children six to seven years of age responded correctly before the cameras with a quick "Kill the Jews." The American Nazi Party claimed less than 1,000 total membership, forty-one of whose members turned up at its 1978 national convention in St. Louis to reelect Collin as successor to the notorious deceased George Lincoln Rockwell. Although this conclave had already received prominent reportage, the Times accorded two full columns on April 18, 1978 to the "Nazis in the U.S.," with pictures of a swastika-armed Rockwell and of swastika-dominated "Nazis on parade in St. Louis last month" (all of twenty-five had marched). The article admitted bringing "American Nazis a notoriety that seems to be really disproportionate to their numbers." The scheduled July 4, 1977 Nazi march through Skokie, the Chicago suburb with its fifty-seven percent Jewish population of 40,000, including 7,000 former concentration camp inmates, opened up new ears for propaganda. Through the long court fight to halt the parade, the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups had a field day picturing a "grave new threat" to America. This was heightened by media attention to the "growing" Ku Klux Klan with its 7,000 members, split into three principal vying groups, the most articulate leader of which was David Duke. Both Collin and Duke appeared with leaders of the black community on most of the stations of National Educational Television's Black Perspective" 41 on which the danger from these fascist groups was grossly exaggerated. The Ku Klux Klanner was given ample time to attack Jews and Zionists alike for "forcing" a pro-Israel Middle East policy on the United States. On December 14, 1977 WNET Channel 13 avid Israelist Seymour Lipset, Anti-Defamation League representative Irwin Suall, and American Civil Liberties Union executive Bruce Ennis engaged in the pros and cons on how to cope with the threat of the Rockaway (Long Island) Klan chapter of fifty members (admittedly already reduced to twenty through an ADL campaign). Suall argued: "They are capable Of perpetrating violence and constitute a real danger. It is a real obligation to point out what they stand for and what they did in our times." To help achieve this goal, the American/Jewish Committee, closely allied with the ADL, published and widely distributed a specially prepared three-article series "Nazi Groups Flourishing Throughout the U.S.A." The fearsters were determined to justify the large tax-deductible gifts given to their tax-free treasuries to fight the dangers of anti-Semitism and at the same time to spread propaganda which could only improve Israel's position in the U.S. This is why the Jewish groups rejected Collin's offer in late May 1978 to cancel the Nazi march through Skokie if the legislation barring the June 25 parade were withdrawn. The sponsors of the bill replied: "He is not the kind of person you make a deal with." And the New York organization, Survivors of Nazi Camps and Resistance Fighters, pointing to the Skokie march as "evidence that Nazi activities were not terminated with the demise of Hitler," sent out a broad mail appeal for more information on victims of the holocaust to be added to the central archives-of Yad Vashem. Earlier attention had been directed to incidents in Germany and Italy, building upon occasional rumors and unconfirmed reports of rising anti-Semitism to create an atmosphere of constant fear. After a small German extreme rightist group gained a victory in local elections in one West German state, the drums began to roll "The Nazis are coming." Old scare stories and exaggerated figures were dragged out. When the election came, this "big" threat polled less than one percent in the federal elections and won no seats. 42 The continued spate of stories on the apprehension, release, extension of statute of limitations, conviction, and even escape of former Nazi and alleged Nazi criminals used up valuable newsprint inches. The Times was ever digging up Nazi terror stories, as they did in pointing the finger at the German Catholic Bishop of Munich for the alleged execution twenty-five years earlier of twenty-seven Italians in the small village of Filetto Di Camarda, running the accusation under and across the page heading: "Priest and Red in Italian Village Battle Over Role of German, Now a Bishop, in Wartime Reprisal Killing." 43 In one single issue of the monthly Jewish Currents, 44 which is more broadminded in its view toward the Palestinians, there were articles on "Holocaust and Jewish Resistance," "Flight from Hitler, 1939," and "Obstacles to Nazi Hunting." When this periodical was not calling some people anti-Semitic, they were clearing others of a similar charge spread by other Jewish groups. Certain remarks had been adduced by the Yiddish and Jewish student press to prove that even Benjamin Franklin had been a pronounced bigot. And not too many days were allowed to pass without some human interest Times story bringing back the holocaust--a reunion of survivors of Buchenwald, Dachau or of the Cracow Ghetto which was accorded large coverage and a four-column head. 45 The extent to which the Masada complex in Israel and its U.S. counterpart, the holocaust saga, had taken hold was illustrated in 1971, during one of the alleged Bormann "sightings." When questioned on a David Frost television show, Foreign Minister Abba Eban carelessly exclaimed that he was "hardly interested" in whether "some wretched man in Paraguay or Brazil is brought to justice." Front-page headlines in Israeli papers, from the English-language Jerusalem Post to Israel's Hebrew newspapers, resounded with group as well as individual castigation of Israel's most eloquent voice. Someone was threatening to put a yawning hole in the reservoir from which the anti-anti-Semitic syndrome must draw its publicity, and this was not to be tolerated. The concentration camp commemoration groups shrieked loudly and called for Eban's resignation. Golda Meir, neither publicly disavowing nor supporting her minister, refused to become involved at that critical moment in the post-Nasser period on yet another front, and as quoted, "swept the matter under the rug." It did not end with this. An opposition party motion in the Knesset, brought by Menachem Begin's Gahal alignment and calling for Eban's resignation, failed only by a 27-22 margin. Such was the power of the syndrome that an unusually large number of Labor party coalition members abstained from voting in the face of the charge that their Foreign Minister's indifference was providing the Germans with the excuse to discontinue other planned Nazi war trials. And this was practically on the eve of a vital U.N. debate in which Eban was to assume the leading role in presenting the Israeli position. Because it sought to link Nazi war criminals with Nasser's Egypt, The Champagne Spy, 46 the colorful story of the espionage work of top Israeli agent Wolfgang Lotz, found ready publishers and received favorable reviews. Operating within Cairo's haut monde under the cover of a wealthy German horsebreeder, Lotz was apprehended in February 1965 by Egyptian security officers after three years of sending back to Israeli intelligence such invaluable information as the disposition of Egyptian troops, which facilitated the 1967 attack. Lotz and his attractive wife, Waltrand, were arrested in February 1965 and became the center of a sensational public-show trial involving certain leading personalities in Egypt. According to Lotz's interesting recital, he had encouraged the rumor that he was an ex-SS officer hiding from arrest for war crimes, which allegedly forthrightly opened doors for him in the Egyptian capital, particularly among the influential circle of German businessmen and scientists there who were working on the development of rockets and other lethal instruments. Described as nonfiction, it was most difficult to know where the anecdote ended and the fiction began. An Egyptian-Nazi conspiracy against "little" Israel was continuously depicted. When the Lotzes were apprehended after they made their way into a top-secret post off the Cairo-Alexandria desert road where important secret missiles were being tested and manufactured, a phone call to an influential military friend freed them. The base commandant was quoted apologizing as follows:
Lotz's artificial and stilted wording failed to bring to life an Egyptian speaking this language. Whatever this book had to say in depicting inefficient, corrupt, venal, and nepotistic Egyptians, no amount of cliched language could convincingly convey a portrait of Egyptians as Nazi-loving bigots. This was just not in line with their character. But to give his book the right flavor, the Egyptian prosecutor was alleged to have quoted from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his summation against spy Lotz, and every German introduced to the readers was insinuated to be a Nazi or neo-Nazi. Apparently the author was not acquainted with the large number of German non-Nazi scientists whose talents the U.S. had most advantageously used. 48 Undeniably, one special objective of the persistent raking up of the Nazi past has been Germany itself. Through constant harassment Germans were not allowed to forget the Hitler days, and at all levels of society they were placed under continued pressure to redeem themselves. The ritual visits of German leaders to Israel for the purpose of unloading guilt, and the return visits of Israeli leaders to Germany for purposes of piling on more guilt, have kept the pot boiling. On an important trip to West Germany in 1970, lengthy articles prominently placed with a photograph revealed that Foreign Minister Abba Eban had proceeded directly from the airport to the site of the Nazi Dachau crematory even before calling on his host, German Chancellor Willi Brandt. Likewise, the energetic Chancellor, when he went to Warsaw to sign the German-Polish treaty finalizing agreement on the Oder-Niesse boundary, was shown by the press of the world kneeling in front of the memorial to Jewish insurgents killed by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In 1973 the state visit of Brandt to Israel overflowed with emotion and national significance from the moment the Israeli army band struck up "Deutschland Über Alles" through his departure four days later. Wearing a dark blue suit and black homburg and accompanied by Gideon Hausner, prosecutor at the Eichmann trial and Chairman of the memorial complex, the Chancellor's first official act was to visit Yad Vashem, where he donned a yarmulke and laid a wreath. Brandt climaxed his stay with the statement that "what was done cannot be undone" but accepted the moral responsibility for Nazi genocide and declared all-out support of Israel's demand for direct negotiations and her insistence there be no substantial changes in the border of the Zionist state. The enormous German sense of guilt, deeply felt by its postwar leadership of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, and Willy Brandt found expression in the words of West German editor Axel Springer: "Since the German Jewish Community no longer exists for any practical purposes, I believe it is our duty to make all possible efforts to support Israel." 49 With the payment of $3.9 billions in reparations and in restitution, Germany was second only to the U.S. in keeping Israel economically afloat. In July 1975 Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli head of state to visit Germany (the 1973 October war had spared a reluctant Golda Meir this visit). 50 Scarcely had he touched down at Frankfurt Airport amidst tightest security, when he was whisked away by army helicopter to visit the former death camp of Bergen-Belsen (The same treatment was accorded Moshe Dayan on his first visit to Germany in the fall of 1977.) A New York Times news story July 9, 1975, described his feelings: "Israel's first native-born premier, Mr. Rabin did not suffer directly from the Nazis. But he has described himself as 'an heir to the holocaust', and his aides say that he felt strongly that the first official visit by an Israeli chief of government should begin with some recognition of the past." Mrs. Rabin, who accompanied her husband, had been born in Germany and had learned German as her first language. While Bergen-Belsen today resembles more a park than "an apocalyptic vision of a vast death camp" (language of the Times), the reality of what happened among its green fields confronted the Rabins as they stepped into the modern museum at the entrance. The Times related, "On all the walls hung huge pictures of the faces and twisted bodies of the camp's thousands of victims, the faces standing out of the pictures with eyes hollowed out by anguish." The 1976 visit to his German birthplace of Fürth by Secretary Kissinger, on which he was accompanied by his parents, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law, provided the Times with a new opportunity to spotlight attention on one of their favorite topics. Its account seemed to go far out of its way to note that "the only synagogue which the Nazis had not burned to the ground" was that which the Kissinger family had attended, and to quote the wording of a plaque in Hebrew and German inside the house of worship (which incidentally the Secretary and his family did not visit) reading: "On the 22nd of March, 1942, the last occupants of this building, 33 orphaned children, were sent to their deaths in Izbica with their teacher and director, Dr. Isaak Hallemann." 51 In West Germany today there are more than twenty-six million men and women who were born after 1945, nearly half of the population alive today. And most of these, according to Der Spiegel and other Sources, are beginning to question the awkward, special relationship that their parents' generation built with Israel. "After all," said a twenty-three-year-old student from Munich, "Why should I feel guilty. I was not born then. I had nothing to do with it." Most of that age group feel that Germany's present relationship should be replaced by more normal balanced ties taking into account the Arab states. Virtually all Germans now insist that Germany has already paid sufficient moral and financial reparations. It is for these in Germany and the new generations all over the world that the Zionist ploy must be advanced with gusto. "Hitler..." "the Nazis...,""the six million..." One by one these icons have been and are today continuously invoked at any moment, into any present-day question of Jewish or Israeli affairs. Under
the impact of the holocaust, even those like
sixty-nine-year-old French novelist Simone de Beauvoir, who
moved in left-wing circles and would normally be alienated
from Israel, assailed France's attitude toward Israel in an
angry Jerusalem interview:
As the one weapon that will never let "them" forget how "we" suffered, the holocaust continues to be immemorialized whenever Jews will it, and their multifold actions, exacted as many pounds of flesh, are never questioned. In 1976 the Endowment for the Humanities in Washington announced a $76,544 grant for writing a ninety-minute historical film to examine the experiences of the victims of the Nazi occupation of Poland; in 1978 a youth grant was awarded to three children of holocaust survivors to produce a documentary film on the story of their own families. To ingrain the State of Israel more deeply into the Jewish consciousness, the International Association of Conservative Rabbis incorporated the events of the last 2,000 years in prayer. The death of the six million as well as the establishment of Israel, the June war, and the reunification of Jerusalem were all woven into the revised liturgy. The greater the need for Israel to defend itself against pressure to yield the occupied territories, the more the holocaust was pushed before the American public. Two days before Begin's March talks with President Carter, the Times Op-Ed piece, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich " 52 illustrated with a swastika, described the takeover of a suburb of Vienna, the burning of the synagogue, and other Nazi criminal actions. At a time the Middle East was in flames over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the recital of this forty-year outdated, newsless, and unrelated incident could have had no other purpose than to prick the world conscience anew. Nothing, not even Begin's first visit to the U.S. in the summer of 1977, was as widely heralded as the NBC TV 2-hour, four-episode series, "Holocaust." For thirteen months the Brodkin-Green series filmed in Vienna and funded by NBC and World Vision Enterprises 53 had been promoted as a rival to "Roots." The story spanned 1933-45 and followed a Jewish doctor from his secure social and financial position in Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto. The Mauthausen concentration camp and Reinhold Heydrich's office were used as locations to inject the appropriate Nazi flavor. |