In Germany and Austria, holocaust denial is a crime. Germany has assiduously attempted to memorialize that horrific chapter of its history, building museums and monuments and including the holocaust in school syllabi. The latest example of Austrian guilt is the Academy Award winning film, “The Counterfeiters” which deals with a skilled group of Jewish artists, printers, lithographers and bankers who were imprisoned in a separate unit of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They were recruited to create counterfeit pounds and dollars to aid the German war effort by destroying the economies of Great Britain and the U.S. In exchange for their skill, the Nazis kept them alive and allowed them some meager perks that differentiated them from the rest of the imprisoned population. The film, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, one of the survivors of this team. In many ways, precisely because the film does not concentrate on the most brutal tortures that we associate with that era, we identify more with the intrinsic degradations suffered by the Jews. It is often painful and harrowing to watch this movie, a tribute to the skill of the director and the extraordinary cast of actors. After watching it, I thought this film should be included in every high school curriculum in Europe and the U.S. to remind us of the deep-seated hatred that animated Nazi policies and the ordinary people who oiled the Nazi machine.
Then I stopped to consider that Germany and Austria are the two biggest European investors in the Iranian economy. While they both deplore the extermination of Jews in the last century, they actively support efforts to replicate it through a surrogate power. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly both denied the holocaust and announced his intentions to destroy Israel and rid the world of Jews. The most recent comments by him and his henchmen include the description of Israel as a filthy bacteria and a cancerous growth that will soon disappear. The Austrian oil company OMV has signed a deal with Iran which will amount to 22 billion euros over the next 25 years; the Austrian government owns 31.5% of this company. Germany has exported billions of dollars of high tech engineering equipment and other goods to Iran and has imported hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods from this active trading partner.
The ironies inherent in the display of remorse on the one hand and the vital, wholehearted support of Hitler’s newest heir should not be lost on a world that professes abhorrence of the slaughter of six million Jews. We should not be making pilgrimages to the Holocaust museum in Berlin while Germany sends Iran the parts and know-how that are adaptable for military use. Stefan Ruzowitzky’s powerful film should end with the reminder that his countrymen are reviving a frightening and unforgivable pledge to renew the holocaust, this time exporting it to a more distant location where their own hands need never touch the descendants of their previous victims.
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