FEBRUARY 2011 VOLUME 25 NUMBER 1 Kissinger’s ‘Despicable’ Comments THE BACKGROUND OF THE RECENT About Gassing Soviet Jews Revealed in NEGOTIATIONS WITH Nixon Tapes GERMANY By MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT, JEWISH WEEK By ROMAN KENT I cannot remember reading anything as despicable or callous as Henry Kissinger’s obser-vation, captured The last round of negotiations with the German for posterity on secret White House recordings newly government was described by the Chairman of the released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Claims Conference at the beginning of his memo that “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is dated December 6th, 2010 to the Board of Directors not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they as follows, and I quote “I am pleased – no, let me put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is be more candid to my fellow board members – I not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian am delighted to inform you that the Claims concern.” Conference has successfully negotiated an Kissinger, then National Security Adviser, made the odious remarks on March agreement with the German government to provide 110 million Euros 1, 1973, to President Nixon after Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had requested (approximately $145 million) for homecare for Holocaust victims in 2011.” American intervention on behalf of Soviet Jewry. The results of this meeting were similarly expressed at a press conference. Nixon’s response was no less disconcerting. “I know,” he said. “We can’t It was the Claims Conference’s achievement. There was no mention of my role blow up the world because of it.” in the negotiations. For practical purposes I did not exist. Kissinger and Nixon would have been right at home with the most extreme I received many calls and letters from survivors asking for clarification of elements of the America First crowd who desperately wanted to keep the United what appeared to be an oversight. As an example, I received the following letter: States out of any European conflict during the 1930’s and early 1940’s. “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are “Dear Roman: neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?” “Some of us know the crucial role you have again played in securing asked the hate spewing Father Charles Coughlin in January of 1939. German Government approval of these vital added funds. It may not be Along the same lines, Charles Lindbergh, reaching essentially the identical obvious or known to the Jewish community at large or even the survivor community what your work means to the lives of needy survivors, but basic conclusion as Kissinger would 31 and a half years later, declared in a speech those few of us who know the facts are privileged and honored to be in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, that “the leaders of both the British and counted among your friends.” the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to Accordingly, I feel obliged to describe my role in obtaining the $145 million in involve us in the war.” home care funding for survivors. The Executive Board of the American Gathering The literary critic George Steiner once wrote that if Hitler had ceased his felt the same, and I was asked by them to describe my role in the October/ territorial expansionism after the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, November, 2010 German negotiations. “Dachau, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt would have operated in the middle of As Chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, I twentieth-century civilization until the last Jew had been made soap. There would take my responsibility on behalf of survivors in America and throughout the world have been brave words on Trafalgar Square and in Carnegie Hall....But no foreign very seriously. That is why, as a survivor of Auschwitz, I have worked for many power would have taken action.” years in various Holocaust-related organizations including the Claims Conference. Kissinger’s mindbogglingly perverse 1973 comments validate Steiner’s thesis. I have been particularly involved in the negotiations conducted with the German Since the United States had not yet become a party to the 1948 Genocide government. Unfortunately, German sources have provided only a limited amount Convention during the Nixon years– Congress did not ratify it until 1988 – Kissinger of funds to give adequate solace to survivors for the suffering they endured. clearly did not believe that the United States had even a moral obligation to There are generally many facets in our negotiations with the Germans, but in implement the Convention’s spirit. In his utilitarian conception of American foreign the last few years it became more and more clear to me that something must be policy, “if they put Jews into gas chambers...it is not an American concern.” done about home care for the aging survivor population. I firmly believed that this Kissinger’s attitude toward his Jewish identity has always been, to say the key issue now becomes the focus in our negotiations with the German government. least, conflicted. On his first visit to Israel as Secretary of State, he was reluctant As such, I advised the members of the Claims Conference negotiating team to visit Yad Vashem and only agreed to go to the country’s official Holocaust that I planned to introduce this to the Germans. In the beginning, we were able to memorial when it was pointed out to him that other foreign ministers did so as a receive a very modest amount of funding, namely about 9 million Euros. This matter of course. In 1985, he publicly supported President Reagan’s controversial allocation was slowly increased until in March, 2010 at the yearly negotiation decision to lay a wreath at the German military cemetery at Bitburg where meeting with the Germans, it reached 55 million Euros (approximately $70,000,000 members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS lie buried. He opposed building the U.S. Holocaust U.S. dollars). Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., warning ominously that having such a After receiving the amount of 55 million Euros during the March, 2010 museum on federal grounds would constitute “too high a profile” for American negotiations, I realized that it was totally irresponsible and impractical to wait a Jews and would “reignite anti-Semitism.” cont’d on p. 2 cont’d on p. 3 PERMIT NO. 4246 NO. PERMIT New York, New York 10001 York New York, New NEW YORK, N.Y. YORK, NEW 122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 Suite Street, 30th West 122 PAID Jewish Holocaust Survivors Holocaust Jewish U.S. POSTAGE U.S. American Gathering of Gathering American NON-PROFIT February 2011 visit our website at www.amgathering.org TOGETHER 1 Kissinger’s ‘Despicable’ Comments cont’d from p. 1 TOGETHER The crux of the issue, of course, is that Kissinger, in addition to being the quintessential court Jew, is also a hypocrite. He obviously has no problem with February 2011 Volume 25 Number 1 the fact that he and his family were given refuge in the United States when they c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s fled Nazi persecution in 1938. Unlike the biblical Joseph who used his position of Kissinger’s ‘Despicable’ Comments by Menachem Z. Rosensaft...........................................1 power in Egypt to save his people from famine, the motto Kissinger lived by The Background of the Recent Negotiations with Germany by Roman Kent......................1 seems to have been, “hoist the lifeboat’s gangplank now that I’m on board.” Op-Ed: Claims Conference Must Bring In an Ombudsman by Elan Steinberg....................3 Indeed, Kissinger has consistently been far warmer toward his native Germany, Deal Reached for Needy Survivors by Stewart Ain..................................................................4 which he and his family fled in 1938, than toward the people into which he happened Report Urges Claims Conference to Reopen Goodwill Fund..................................................4 to have been born. Upon receiving a medal in 2007 from the German state of More Than 10,000 Unrestituted Nazi-Looted Art Objects Now Listed on Internet...........5 Baden-Württemberg, for example, he euphemistically referred in passing to “the Jewish Assets Seized by Nazis Funded 30% of WWII Expenses by DPA..........................5 Holbrooke’s Swiss Bank Diplomacy by Stewart Ain.............................................................5 difficulties of my childhood” before bestowing lavish praise on Germany and Former POW Donates Unique Artifacts to Museum................................................................6 German society. Not a word about Nazism. Not a word about having been a Comptroller Slams ‘Deficient’ Efforts to Return Assets to Holocaust Survivors persecuted Jew. Not a word about the millions of Jews murdered by Germany by Dana Weiler-Polak.................................................................................................7 during World War II. Pope’s Praise of Pius Dismays Holocaust Survivors.............................................................7 Still, Kissinger has disingenuously exploited his refugee status when it suited Holocaust Survivor Reaches Out to Students by Sally Kalson...........................................7 his purposes. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, quotes him as telling Jewish leaders Germany’s Foreign Ministry Was Complicit in Holocaust, Study Says “How can I, as a Jew who lost thirteen relatives in the Holocaust, do anything