Not until the late 20th century, especially after the 1967 War, did the Holocaust take up its role as the foremost historical event in the American mind – so Finkelstein argues.

He writes that Daniel Goldhagen, in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, inaccurately characterizes the entire German people as eager Jew murderers driven by pathological hatred.

[5][3]: 72–78 Finkelstein takes book reviewers and historians to task for praising two Holocaust memoirs that were later revealed to be fraudulent: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński (1965) and Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1995).

[3]: 55–62 In 1995 the World Jewish Congress initiated a lawsuit against Swiss banks to recover the assets in accounts left dormant by victims of the Holocaust.

Finkelstein accuses the leaders of Jewish organizations of exaggerating the size of the assets and of using Swiss payouts to fund their own pet projects.

[6] The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg said: Today [Finkelstein] is rather unpopular and his book will certainly not become a best seller, but what it says is basically true even though incomplete.

[7] Referring to the part of the book that deals with the claims against the Swiss banks and to forced labor, he noted: I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy.

[6]Israeli historian Moshe Zuckermann welcomed his book as an "irreplaceable critique of the ‘instrumentalisation of the past’ and underlined its ‘liberating potential’".

He suggested that the book should be seen as an opportunity for stimulating public debates about difficult topics related to "the politics of memory and on the public uses of history"[1] Donald D. Denton, reviewing the book for Terrorism and Political Violence journal, noted that it "will be valuable as an historical piece of research and of interest to those who now attempt to deal with the contemporary genocides and the subsequent generations of children of those who endured such horrors".

Historian Peter Novick, whose work Finkelstein described as providing the "initial stimulus" for The Holocaust Industry,[12] said in the July 28, 2000 issue of London's The Jewish Chronicle that Finkelstein's book is replete with "false accusations", "egregious misrepresentations", "absurd claims" and "repeated mis-statements" ("A charge into darkness that sheds no light").

On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bete noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone.