The Holocaust as Highway Robbery

By AVIYA KUSHNER

IMPERFECT JUSTICE
Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II
By Stuart Eizenstat.
400 pages. Public Affairs. $30.

The numbers of the Holocaust are staggering and familiar: one and a half million Jewish children murdered, three million Polish Jews snuffed out, six million European Jews slaughtered in total, along with millions of Allied soldiers killed or maimed by the Nazi war machine. But Stuart Eizenstat, a longtime American diplomat, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and member of both the Clinton and Carter administrations, spent years painstakingly researching a less familiar Holocaust number: the profit piece.

Eizenstat acknowledges that no amount of money can compensate for the loss of human life, nor for the terrible blow to Jewish culture. To drive this point home, he includes a preface by Elie Wiesel in his new book Imperfect Justice, which describes Eizenstat's efforts to attain financial restitution for Holocaust victims. Eizenstat's hope is that, despite the limitations of monetary compensation, a financial accounting of the Holocaust can return something to the survivors who lost so much. With patience, persistence, and diplomatic tact, Eizenstat and his staff have used the full prestige of the United States Government to uncover a long-buried story of slave labor, greed, and unsettled accounts.

What they found was worse than what they expected. The Holocaust, Eizenstat and his team proved, was not only the most horrifying case of mass murder in human history, but also a colossal robbery in which many individuals, financial institutions, and nations played a role. Theft fueled the killing machine.

Among Eizenstat's most damning findings was the conduct of the so-called neutral countries. After the Nazis extracted gold from victims' teeth, they melted the gold into bars and sold them to "neutral" Switzerland's banks, where they were converted into legitimate hard currency. This and other forms of financial cooperation from the Swiss were so essential that a top Nazi official said "we wouldn't be able to survive for two months" without it.

Banking services from the Swiss, key natural resources from Portugal, and tacit cooperation from nations like Turkey kept the Nazis going far longer, and helped them kill more people, than they otherwise could have. Even more disturbingly, Eizenstat found that after the war, the Swiss financial elite stonewalled survivors who tried to recover their accounts, and basically pocketed whatever they could. In many countries, survivors didn't get their property back. "Greed trumped morality," Eizenstat writes sadly.

While the Swiss bank affair may have received the most press, Eizenstat's book also documents his negotiations to return religious and communal property–synagogues, schools, sports facilities, even hotels–to the decimated Jewish communities of Europe, who are now trying to rebuild. The European Jewish community and the entire Jewish world is stronger today because of Eizenstat's decades-long effort to reveal the truth, and his leadership in the pursuit of justice, however imperfect.

Q: What were the biggest surprises for you, in years of researching the financial side of the Holocaust?

A: Two surprises were the biggest of all. The first was the role of the Swiss National Bank. In 1997 dollars, it had purchased five billion dollars of looted gold, and this was one of the ways the Nazis financed the war effort. This gold was stolen from conquered countries, and sometimes from individual victims themselves. Then, this looted gold was used to buy crucial war materials. After the war, the Swiss National Bank and the Swiss government refused to return the bulk of the stolen gold and other German assets in their possession. All of this came as a complete shock.

The second surprise was that Hitler forcibly moved ten million people to work for Germany. The massive quantity of people who were dislocated allowed Hitler to use millions of additional Germans for his army. [In his book, Eizenstat writes, "Wartime Germany had a population of seventy-nine million, and there were seventeen million men in the armed forces, meaning that forty percent of all males were soldiers."] The economy was kept running by slave labor and forced labor. I knew about the concentration camps, of course, but I wasn't focused on the labor part. The majority of money we got went to non-Jewish forced laborers, who until then, had received virtually nothing.

Q: What's the difference between slave labor and forced labor?

A: Most slave labor–55%–was Jewish, with the remainder Slavs, Poles, Romanis (gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners. This was labor as extermination. They lived and worked in concentration camps. But 99% of the forced labor was not Jewish. They lived in labor camps, often with their families, were lightly guarded, and got enough food to live. The goal was not extermination, but exploitation.

Q: What's your response to the charge that emphasizing the financial aspect of the Holocaust overshadows the human tragedy of it all?

A: It's a very tough question and there are two answers. One, in civilized society, the way in which we deal with wrongs–say, a breach of contract or an act of negligence, or a willful action–is we monetize it. We did that with the victims of 9/11, and we compensated the families monetarily. It's a way of society building accountability. Why should these companies, who used slave labor and stolen money, and then refused to return the money, go scot-free? It's succumbing to a fear of anti-Semitism not to go after them.

Second, I didn't want the last lesson of the Holocaust to be money. I wanted it to be education. I got the Presidents of Austria and Germany to issue apologies, and those apologies are mailed with every check for slave labor. We have held international conferences on the Holocaust, and we have encouraged everyone to open their archives. We want to create Holocaust education programs so we can learn the lessons of what happens when good people remain on the sidelines. What we did established for the first time in the annals of warfare that private companies–like Daimler-Chrysler, Ford, Siemens, and Volkswagen–should be held responsible for their parts in acts of genocide.

Q: Do you think your work brought honor to the United States, and if so, how?

A: I think as much as the US did in a self-sacrificing way to win the war–in blood and material–we did very little before, during, and after the war to help refugees. That was a cloud over our history. What we did [with restitution] couldn't bring the dead back to life, and that's why I called the book "Imperfect Justice." It is a way that the U.S. Government tried to bring justice, and it was a very small but important way of rectifying our acquiescence [on the refugee issue] during the war.

Q: How did your personal understanding of the Holocaust change over your years of work on the crimes of World War II?

A: Growing up in Atlanta, I had virtually no knowledge of the Holocaust, despite the fact that my father and two uncles served in the armed forces during World War II. I never met a survivor, and I never studied the Holocaust in school.

My first coming to terms with the Holocaust was during the Presidential campaign of 1968. Arthur Morse, who was also working on the campaign, had just written a pathbreaking book–While Six Million Died. Morse told me about the degree to which President Roosevelt and his top aides knew what was happening and refused to act. That had a profound impact on me.

In 1979, when the Jews of Iran–who had been in Iran since the destruction of the Second Temple–were fleeing for their lives after Ayatollah Khomeni took over, begging for entry to the United States at consulates in Europe, I remembered what Arthur Morse told me. I was able to get President Carter to issue a new type of visitor's visa which would expire only when the Shah of Iran was returned to power as a measure to protect some 50,000 Iranian Jews. Almost all of those Iranian refugees are American citizens today.

As chief domestic policy adviser to President Carter, I recommended creation of an official U.S. Holocaust memorial in Washington, which became the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. I also worked in Brussels (as the American ambassador to the European Union), where my wife and I met many European Jews. We learned that everyone was either a survivor or a child of a survivor–so it became personal. Curiously, I didn't know that two of my grandfather's sisters were killed in the Holocaust until 1995. So this also personalized it for me. The restitution work amplified it even further.

Q: How did you keep your emotions in check while uncovering such disturbing information?

A: The difficult thing was to keep that separated from the negotiations. I couldn't let my emotions get in the way of being a neutral arbiter. I had to be seen as an honest broker, and I had to segment my thinking to do that. I had to be extremely disciplined, and separate my emotions from the negotiations. If I was viewed only as an advocate for Jewish survivors and not as a representative of the US Government, I would not have been effective.

Q: What is your reaction to the current wave of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe?

A: It's a disappointment. I had hoped there would be a closure for victims, and that [restitution] would help Europe come to terms with its past.

I think it's wrong to condemn the whole continent as anti-Semitic. However, I think the vehemence with which the European elite has criticized Israel has gone beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism. You've got supermarkets labeling Israeli products and people boycotting Israeli universities. There is a degree of lingering anti-Semitism, and when they see Israeli tanks in the West Bank it perhaps relieves them of some of the guilt of the Holocaust.

Q: In the last pages of your book, you write: "I believe the most lasting legacy of the effort I led was simply the emergence of the truth." What truths do you hope your readers will take away from this book?

A: The greatest truth is not only understanding the dimensions of this tragedy–how people were stripped of everything, and how governments just stood by while it happened, but the broader truth is that when intolerance goes unchecked and good people stand on the sidelines, that evil can occur. We shouldn't have had to wait fifty years, and all those millions of people shouldn't have been killed in the first place. We have to act proactively to fight intolerance, and if we learn that, then this effort will have been well worth it.