The title alone sounds like a provocation, like a whispered obscenity, all the more so here in the homeland of the perpetrators, many of them still alive. First, he accuses it of waging a propaganda crusade, declaring the Holocaust in a liturgical manner to be an incomparable, historically unique crime. Third, he charges that it is withholding billions of dollars of compensation funds, misusing the money for Holocaust museums, monuments or education, instead of giving it to the survivors. In effect, the major Jewish organizations are accused of profiteering, shamelessly enriching themselves on the Holocaust. The book is a long bill of indictment, full of weighty accusations, none of them proved.
Scant evidence is offered.
Then as now, the tenor of the German commentary was mainly negative, describing the book as unscientific, irrational and likely to provide ammunition to anti-Semitism. It seemed, at first, that the German media had created an early warning system even before the book was out on the German market. There is a palpable feeling around Germany these days of rising anti-Semitism. Some of it might have to do with the Holocaust restitution claims process. After a half-century under Communism, nobody prepared them for this.