The Silent Partners of Hitler

A journalist for Toronto's Globe and Mail details the continuing, wretched story of Swiss collusion, as financiers and dealers in stolen goods, with Nazi Germany. The story isn't simple, and the culpability extends far beyond Swiss bankers.

For instance, Vincent notes that a US intelligence report from 1945 suggested that even the International Committee of the Red Cross, with headquarters in Switzerland, smuggled ""Nazi assets and valuables across Europe in diplomatic pouches.

A number of Swiss firms may also have worked closely (and profitably) with the Nazis. While it was known in official circles that Switzerland flagrantly abused its neutrality, its complicity was only lightly considered by the Allied victors, largely because of pragmatic realpolitik. Although Swiss banks, throughout the war, paid Germany needed foreign currency for gold bullion usurped from the central banks of conquered countries and for bars refined from the gold gathered from the ring fingers and teeth of millions of slaughtered Jews, they were not pursued by any international courts. Secret accounts established by beleaguered Jews before they disappeared were ignored, too.

An amount approaching $6 billion (in current dollars) may have been involved. Only under intense international pressure, generated at first by the World Jewish Congress, have the Swiss begun, reluctantly, truculently, to open their bank records for review. Vincent provides a thorough summary of what is known about Swiss actions during and since the war, and to humanize the issue, draws on a number of interviews with individuals attempting to find out about family accounts, and especially on the efforts of the surviving descendants of Abraham Hammersmith, a Viennese textile exporter, to reclaim their past. The history of the Hammersmith family, many of whom died in the Holocaust, is a kind of record in miniature of Jewish suffering and Swiss mendacity. A clear, angry, important (though interim) work that treats significant matters with clarity and intelligence.

Holocaust Denial

One of the most notable anti-Semitic propaganda movements to develop over the past two decades has been the organized effort to deny or minimize the established history of Nazi genocide against the Jews. In the United States, the movement has been known in recent years primarily through the publication of editorial-style advertisements in college campus newspapers. The first of these ads claimed to call for "open debate on the Holocaust"; it purported to question not the fact of Nazi anti-Semitism, but merely whether this hatred resulted in an organized killing program. A more recent ad has questioned the authenticity of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. These ads have been published in several dozen student newspapers on campuses across the country.

Similar propaganda has established a beachhead on the computer Internet. In addition to creating their own home pages, Holocaust deniers have sometimes "crashed" the sites of legitimate Holocaust and Jewish discussion groups in a blatant effort at anti, Jewish provocation and self-promotion. Additionally, Holocaust deniers have advertised their Web sites by purchasing innocuous-sounding, inconspicuous classified ads in college and community newspapers.

These paid advertisements and Internet activities have been a national phenomenon since 1991. Though there is no evidence that they have persuaded large numbers of students to doubt the settled record of events which comprise the Holocaust, their appearance has generated acrimony and has frequently caused friction between Jewish and non-Jewish students.

This is precisely the intent of the Holocaust deniers: by attacking the facts of the Holocaust, and by framing this attack as merely an unorthodox point of view, their propaganda insinuates subtle but hateful anti-Semitic beliefs of Jews as exploiters of non-Jewish guilt and Jews as controllers of academia or the media. These beliefs, in fact, bear comparison to the preachings which brought Hitler to power in prewar Germany.

This pamphlet has been designed to provide a brief summary of the propaganda campaign known as Holocaust "revisionism," or Holocaust denial. What follows is (1) a "Q&A" description of the movement, its history, and its leading activists, as well as a review of legal and scholarly responses to this propaganda; (2) a summary of the movement's most common allegations, with brief factual responses, and (3) a selection of quotes by the leading propagandists, demonstrating their anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi agendas.

It is highly unlikely that this report will dissuade the Holocaust deniers from their mendacious and hateful campaign. But this information should provide students and educators with the facts to make informed decisions and vigorous responses to these bigoted lies.

(For further details concerning the Holocaust denial movement, see also the Anti-Defamation League publication, Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of 'Holocaust Revisionism')