About the Genocide Forum
A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary
- To Be Or Not To Be: The Genocide Forum's Future
- Gold, Seduction, and Genocide: A Book That Should Be Read
- When Did The Holocaust Begin?
- Vatican Deconstruction: Clintonian Denial
- Guarding the Gates
- Two Poems
Jan-Feb 1999
Year 5, No. 3
Bonnie Falchuk: Managing Editor
Carol Rittner: Associate Editor
Henry R. Huttenbach: Founder- Editor
Sandrine Dikambi: Assistant Editor
To Be Or Not To Be: The Genocide Forum's Future.
The Readers' Choice
The decision to continue or discontinue a publication with a devoted readership should be made openly to allow those interested to participate. With this issue The Genocide Forum is well into its fifth year, and, as noted a year ago, its success spawned a new journal, Genocide Research, scheduled to begin in Spring 1999. By now, most readers will have received at least one "Call for Papers"; one is included at the end of this issue.
This scholarly publication raises the question whether to (dis)continue The Genocide Forum. This year (1998-99) — as the date on the masthead indicates — The Genocide Forum is appearing bi-monthly in a slightly enlarged form. Thanks to generous donations collected by The Genocide Forum supporters — who wish to remain anonymous — The Genocide Forum will appear for this entire academic year.
Its future, however, rests squarely on the interests (not donations!) of the readers. So, if The Genocide Forum is to continue, what is called for is a strong vote in favor of The Genocide Forum; that means, each reader should take time out to fill out and mail back the following questionnaire, checked according to each one's wishes. It will be, as it should be, the readers' choice.
Henry Huttenbach
Ballot
I would like to see The Genocide Forum continue [ ]
I believe The Genocide Forum should be discontinued [ ]
[Please return to the editor. See last page for address]
Gold, Seduction, and Genocide: A Book That Should Be Read
Mark Aaron and John Loffus' Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis and the Swiss Banks (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998) is a book that should be read. It is no mere exposé: the outlines of the separate evils committed by each of the three protagonists have long been known and, before that, suspected. What this book does is irrevocably strengthen their conspiratorial interconnections and admirably substitutes for a criminal indictment. Nazi Party greed, the Vatican hierarchy's naked opportunism, and the rapacious Swiss bankers knowingly worked hand-in-glove. Sufficient evidence is now in: future denials will be on the order of lies and will no longer fall within the broad limits of "believability."
On the US side, crucial facts were withheld from the White House by intelligence operatives, allowing the Dulles brothers (Allan and John Foster) to manipulate and launder truly dirty money derived from gold stolen from Jewish victims of genocide. It circulated from Germany all the way to Argentina and back. Both brothers knew of the gold's origins, and both recruited the Vatican to provide couriers. Under cover of diplomatic immunity, these intermediaries acted as transmitters of those immoral and criminal transactions of gold and money originating in the heart of the Holocaust. Literally billions of dollars were involved. Not all the looted funds, of course, originated from Jews, but a significant proportion did; exact figures still need to be established, if possible.
The essential crime that emerges from this book and unites all the participants is complicity. All three parties, including high-ranking Americans, knew the source of some of the gold. Both authors have lifted the veil of secrecy that once shrouded this plot. Now we know, without any doubt, except it is virtually too late to obtain satisfactory justice. Token justice, perhaps, but neither complete nor fair. All that remains is accurate history which cuts through decades of silence and prevarication.
This will not be the last book on this sordid topic. More information will be forthcoming; but it will most likely not alter the basic truth about the dealings in gold during the Holocaust. It will be enough to read this book and learn about the depth of depravity and corruption of those covertly cooperating, mesmerized by the glitter of blood-stained gold. It was an evil alliance of party, bank, government, and ecclesiastical bureaucrats lusting for ill-gotten gain.
Henry R. Huttenbach
When Did the Holocaust Begin?.
There are right questions and wrong ones; the one of this essay's title is — despite its frequent use — more of a distraction than an opening towards clarification. All too often it is called forth in conjunction with Kristallnacht, the two-day outbreak of state-choreographed violence against Jews throughout Germany on November 9-11, 1938. (The latest occasion was a lecture given on November 5 by Gerald Schwab at the US Holocaust Museum).
It is, of course, a catchy question. Unfortunately, it leads one down the path of simplicity and, therefore, serious error with respect to a better understanding of the complexities of the Holocaust years and the event itself.
Implied in hanging the tag of "The Beginning" on to Kristallnacht is that it launched an era of violence culminating in the Final Solution. Analysis of any kind based on the evidence fails to make that connection, directly or indirectly. If it were true — that violence against Jews is the hallmark of the Holocaust — then the on-going violence in Nazi Austria since its annexation in March 1938 would have to be the "starting date" of the Holocaust. But that presumes, in turn, that the years 1933-1938 were bereft of violence aimed at Jews. But that, too, was not the case. Individual Jews numbering in the thousands were victims of Nazi state violence from the first day Hitler assumed power on January 30, 1933. Hundreds of Jews (exclusively men) arrested for their political views were incarcerated in Dachau as early as 1933 and, later, in other concentration camps and prisons. There they were brutally beaten, sometimes lethally. The Third Reich was a Terror State at its inception. One need only follow the activities of the SA — before and after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Their goal was a permanent state of "spontaneous" violence against Jews. In a real sense, Kristallnacht was their victory over those (the SS included) who counseled a more "restrained" approach for a number of reasons, including preserving Germany's image abroad. It was the SA who primarily introduced an era of mass violence into Austria half a year before Kristallnacht.
Those seeking a "beginning" would be better served by focusing on January 30, 1933, when the racist revolution began as an official state policy of a government that had achieved near absolute power. What preceded 1933 belongs to "background" or "origin" or "causes," the traditional way of tracing the events that led to a singular event, in this case the political triumph of National Socialism.
The Holocaust should not be reduced to "violence" or, better, sheer "physical violence." It was so much more, starting with psychological violence, not to mention economic violence, and above all the phenomenon of legal violence. With the onset of Nazi rule, a flood of antisemitic laws literally drowned German Jews. It imposed cruel conditions by steadily strangling every civil activity of the Jews and, thereby, endangering their ability to survive. This is not the place to enumerate the breadth and depth of Nazi laws forced onto the helpless Jews of Germany. These laws were designed to uproot, to marginalize, to humiliate, and to endanger life. The violence of the Gestapo, the SS, the SA, and, of the street gangs against Jews was both condoned, encouraged, and practiced without legal recourse on the parts of the victims and accountability of the criminals. The latter operated in a criminal climate legalized by the Nazi state.
With this in mind, it is better not to hang the label "The Beginning" on any event other than the one that actually marks the moment of the Nazi ascent to power. As for Kristallnacht, it still needs examination. The definitive book has still to be written. One dimension still not incorporated is the events signaling a war not only against Judaism — the burning of the Torah Scrolls (the Five Books of Moses) — but against Christianity. The destruction of part of the Old Testament went unrecognized among German Christians. It still remains unacknowledged half a century later. The understanding of Kristallnacht is not enhanced by labels but by thorough informed analysis and imaginative questions, starting with:What accounted and still accounts for the Christian failure to see Kristallnacht for what it was, a pagan assault on all religions?
Henry Huttenbach
Vatican Deconstruction: Clintonian Denial
September 1998 will go down as the month the president of the United States lectured the American People (via his video to the grand jury) on the finer points on the verb "to be," in particular its third person singular form "is." The Sophists and Derridarists must have delighted at this display of Oval Room denialism and downright evasion — itself a slippery form of truth dodging.
As if that were not enough, October brought with it the display of an even greater performance of true-or-false Speak in the form the Vatican's round-about justifications for its reasons to elevate to sainthood Sister Teresa Benedicta, the former Edith Stein. She died a "Christian martyr" we are told; yet, she was murdered not for her faith but on account of her birth. She was a "daughter of Israel," we are also told; nevertheless, we are again told, she suffered a Christian's death. A "miracle" attributed to Edith Stein's intervention was conveniently unearthed as support for her elevation by Pope John Paul II.
The Christianization of the Holocaust is one accusation rendered by Jews sensitive to trends and nuances. Would this were the only "fault" with this sordid episode of historical piracy. True to form, the ADL echoed this and similarly less than imaginative post-facto complaints. Yet something far more serious than Holocaust highjacking is taking place in the Vatican.
For one, its navigators are engaged in a systematic campaign of historical rewriting, namely, to whitewash the black years, 1933-45, when the role of the Vatican and its integrity and moral soul during the years of the Third Reich are more than in question. As the evidence pours in, the ties between the Vatican and Hitler's Berlin strengthen. Indeed, as information increases about the Vatican's pre-and post-Hitler diplomacy surfaces, there emerges an ominous continuity: 1) the hope that a strong Germany would become a bulwark against an aggressive Soviet Union clearly antedates 1933; and 2) the vision of a fascist (i.e. anti-Communist pro-Catholic) post World War II era, entrenched in Latin America, accounts for the Vatican's systematic rerouting and clandestine spiriting of as yet uncounted Nazis from Europe to South America.
Seen in this broader context, the Vatican's recent stance towards the Final Solution becomes all the more understandable. Far from being yet another passive, weak institution in the face of an aggressive, violent Germany, the Vatican played an active role in furthering its world view in the first half of the 20th century. Like France's continuing unwillingness to face the Vichy phenomenon and legacy, and like Austria's decade-long fiction of being the Third Reich's first victim of Nazi expansionist aggression, the Vatican cannot fully abandon the historical lie it wishes to perpetrate about its ambiguous behavior vis-à-vis the fate of Europe's Jews.
A case in point is the former Ustashe Greater Croatia — a German puppet state — and pro-Nazi Slovakia. In both cases it sought and continues to seek sainthood for two clerics, both suspected of having collaborated with the Germans and assisted or looked on the disposition of the Jewish residents in both countries. To be sure, Cardinal Stepinac was a staunch anti-Communist; but he equally did next to nothing to soften the Croatian Catholic clergy's animus towards Jews during the war when Croatian officials killed Serbs, Gypsies and Jews en masse.
Slowly but surely, inescapably piece by piece, the Vatican is reinventing its past during the early and mid-century. The misuse of the memory of Edith Stein is but a piece in a larger puzzle, seeking to depict a morally benign and not reprehensible church leadership. It is a process of careful image building. In the case of Edith Stein it involves establishing an inflated case for widespread Christian suffering and martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis. That is the reason for the small field of crosses near Auschwitz: it too has become a building block in the campaign to portray Catholicism as a major target of Nazi mass violence.
The trouble with this kind of "corrective" in that there is always an ounce of truth, some accurate details, especially taken out of context — an old device of deception. True, Catholic priests were incarcerated in Auschwitz, but almost exclusively because they acted as Polish patriots and only seldom for their faith. To achieve the goal of the Church Suffering and Martyred, the Vatican does so at the expense of Jewish history, experiences and memory. Stealing or preempting Edith Stein, ascribing to her a false fate is not only lying. It is 1) breaking the Commandment that warns against coveting that which is not yours, and 2, most central, it violates the Commandment abjuring one to take the name of G-d in vain. Thus does each new sin compound the original sin of diminishing Vatican/Catholic-Jewish relations.
After all, Clinton had only to admit his "indiscretion" in January to avoid the present accounting. It is no different for Switzerland, France, Austria and the Vatican. The lies and omissions will not blot out the past indefinitely.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Guarding the Gates: On Being a Survivor and Becoming a Righteous Gentile
In numerous essays appearing in The Genocide Forum emphasis has often been on defining terms clearly and unambiguously. Inappropriate use of words and the application of vague terms are never helpful in any circumstance where serious consequences may flow from poor expression of what is meant. At the same time, those doing the defining ought not to enjoy a monopoly of interpretation. Terminology and the conclusions that derive from it should be the product of open dialogue and not the function of an entrenched few.
Two examples spring to mind in the context of the Holocaust: that of being recognized as a survivor and of becoming accepted as a Righteous Gentile. Belonging to either is determined by a set of criteria that are applied more and more politically, rather than rationally, by a handful of people with the power to impose their views over anyone seeking to question their reasoning in determining or denying anyone the status of one — survivor— or the other — Righteous Gentile.
For some time now, the status of Survivor of the Holocaust has been tacitly reserved for those Jews who experienced incarceration or were in hiding from the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. This parameter has been upheld by a majority of those fitting into this narrow definition. Quite recently during a planning session for a conference to be held in 2000, this restrictive definition was challenged, arousing very strong feelings on the part of old-style Survivors. It was pointed out that the standard definition leaves out, for example, tens of thousands of Jews arrested and imprisoned during Kristallnacht: many were killed; most were released upon showing emigration papers. And what of the 10,000 in the Children Transports? And those fortunates who left Germany prior to 1939 or 1941 and wandered stateless from country to country, eventually finding haven in England or the USA — are they not survivors, too? Are they not Witnesses? Do they not also have a story to tell, including of relatives disappeared and murdered? Should they not also be interviewed as possessors of memories central to the genocide that was the Final Solution? Why should they be excluded? Is there something less authentic about their tales of survival?
There seems to operate a tyrannous process of exclusion exercised by some Survivor groups and those academics deeply influenced by them. On a community level this operates in terms of who is chosen to speak — in schools, at fundraisers — as a voice from the Holocaust past. The experiences of tens of thousands are blindly bypassed. "Real" survivors fear that the concept of survivor will be diluted till "everyone becomes a survivor." In a sense they are right, especially if we count the claims of the "second generation" and now "third generation" bandwagon who cling to the pedigree of "children of Survivors," i.e. "real" survivors. Again and again "other" kinds of survivors are either shunned or diminished. To rectify this loss of witnesses to the past, scholars and community leaders might do well to challenge the exclusivist premises upon which survivorhood rests and not be bound by "fixed" criteria.
***
A related problem arises with the selecting or rejecting of candidates for Righteous Gentile status. Here the power rests, by default, exclusively with a committee operating under the aegis of Yad Vashem. One wonders why it is entirely left up to Yad Vashem's singular jurisdiction to exercise the power of determining who qualifies or does not merit the honor of Righteous Gentile. Why does Yad Vashem have in its hands alone the power to confer imprimatur? Why, for example, cannot the US Memorial Museum activate its own search team? Or for that matter any Jewish community?
The question arises presently in the context of attempts to have Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer numbered among those who helped Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1945. His name was proposed to Yad Vashem but his candidacy was declined. While it may be within Yad Vashem's right to decide who shall and who shall not be commemorated by it, under its own roof, the reasons it gives ought to conform to clear criteria not arbitrarily interpreted ones to suit an institution's purposes.
A sample of this is evidenced in a letter dated October 28, 1998, from Mordecai Paldier, Director of the Department of the Righteous, to Stephen A. Wise, a lawyer representing the International Bonhoeffer Society. The letter is a model of Bureau-Speak and self-serving logic: for example — 1) it conveniently lengthens the playing field; 2) it willfully ignores information that would qualify Bonhoeffer in accordance with its own criteria; and 3) rejects the arguments in favor of Bonhoeffer by qualified experts with a typical, arrogant, bureaucratic flourish, stating that these positive assessments were not made by anyone "on the Yad Vashem staff."* This stubborn attitude is reminiscent of the Vatican's authoritarian persistence in selecting who will be a candidate for sainthood regardless of information to the contrary and legitimate opposing views.
The real culprit is a mentality that desires to work en camera, in secret, without engaging in an open dialogue. Neither "Holocaust Survivor" nor "Righteous among the Nations" (to use the official title) are empty vessels subject to anyone's interpretation; by the same token they are not inflexible terms with but the narrowest of meaning determined by a monopolistically inclined group that corrupt the process of inclusion by political reasoning rather than open rational determination.
A POEM
In Memory of Gina Sack
by
Lois Edwina Grayson
There she sat, eternally etched
etched down to the bone
with a tattooed serial number
on skin so tender in tone.
a breakfast waltz in Radolfzell
I have mud on my boots how old is he we move my mother was born in Lodz the yews in Germany |
and now |
Announcement: A New Publication
___________________________
The Journal of Genocide Research
Editor in chief: Henry R. Huttenbach
Publisher: Carfax Publishing Co., (UK)
___________________________
Genocide Research's editorial policy seeks to further a deepening understanding of annihilationist events by promoting three paths of investigation:
- Theory
- Methodology
- Comparative Case Studies
Genocide Research will appear three times a year, beginning with Vol.I, No.1, in Spring 1999.
Genocide Research's Editorial Board is presently in formation and will be composed of an interdisciplinary, international group of scholars.
Genocide Research is a peer-review academic journal.
___________________________
Call for Papers:
Scholars are urged to submit their manuscripts to:
Professor Henry R. Huttenbach
History Department
The City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street.
New York, NY 10031
Fax (718) 624 - 0450
___________________________
For further information about Genocide Research — subscriptions, book reviews, etc. — contact Professor Huttenbach at the above address.
About The Genocide Forum
The Forum is a publication of the Center for the Study of Ethnonationalism located on the campus of the City College of New York. The founder and editor of The Genocide Forum is Professor Henry R. Huttenbach.
The Genocide Forum, which appears bi-monthly, is intended to serve as a convenient vehicle of exchange to discuss critical issues of common interest to students of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Forum is designed to accommodate experts in the field to share their concerns via concise (1,500 words) analytic essays.
Contributors are invited to submit their essay on a 3.5" disk (Macintosh/MicroSoft Word) with one double-spaced print-out to Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, History Department, The City College of New York, Convent Avenue at 138th St., New York, NY 10031. Tel: (212) 650-7384; Fax (718) 624-0450.
Back Issues of The Genocide Forum are available on request as long as supplies last. Complete sets of back issues are available on 3.5" diskette (Macintosh/Microsoft) for $25.
Quotations may be made as long as proper credit is given. Duplication of long passages or entire articles require the written permission of the editor.
The Genocide Forum is made possible through the partial support of the Division of Humanities of the City College of New York.
Nota Bene: Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the editor.
Henry R. Huttenbach
c/o History Department
City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street
New York, NY 10031
A Publication of The Center for The Study of Ethnonationalism
The City College of The City University of New York