REVISIONISM 101

Paul Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906, in Beaumont, a small village near Montbéliard, the son of a farmer. He received his formal education in the schools of the area and passed the necessary examinations which allowed him to teach history and geography at the secondary school level and to use the title of "professor." He taught in the secondary school at Faubourg de Montbéliard where students were prepared to take the "brevet," an examination that is somewhat inferior to that examination which is taken by students in the lycées who desire to matriculate at the university. It was at this school that he was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943.

Having joined the Socialist Party, SFIO, in 1934, Paul Rassinier became the head of that party in the Belfort area when the war broke out in 1939. Following the German occupation of France, he participated in the founding of the "Libre Nord" organization which became involved in various forms of "passive resistance," including the smuggling of Jewish refugees over the Franco-Swiss border into Switzerland in cooperation with the Swiss Jewish Committee. Rassinier's activities eventually came to the attention of the German authorities who caused him to be arrested and to be deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Later he was sent to the camp at Dora where he was incarcerated until the end of the war.

Upon his liberation in 1945, he returned to France where he was elected to the Assemblée Nationale as a Socialist deputy. He served for one year and then retired He was awarded the highest decoration which the French government bestowed for service in the wartime resistance movement. Due to his frail health, a consequence of his two years of imprisonment at Buchenwald and Dora, he retired from teaching and received a small pension from the French government. He died on July 29. 1967, at his home in Asnieres, near Paris. He is survived by his wife, Jeanette, and his only son, Jean-Paul, who is a practising physician

Introduction by Pierre Hofstetter

In every respect, Paul Rassinier was a remarkable man of his time -- out of the ordinary, we are tempted to write -- a man to whom can be immediately attributed these three essential qualities, all of which are rather rare today in a single person: courage, honesty and ability.

As a professor of history and geography. he could have had a brilliant and lucrative career in these disciplines if he had confined himself to the "official history" -- i.e. the "official false history that is taught ad usum Delphini" and of which Balzac spoke -- and if he had not opted for historical revisionism by beginning to study carefully the "hidden history" wherein lies the true causes of events, in short, of the "shameful history". He devoted the last twenty years of his life to the debunking of the historical orthodoxy that surrounds World War II produced a shelf full of books which culminated in the remarkable work, insufficiently known, entitled Les Responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale (1) which was published shortly before his death in July 1967.

Paul Rassinier also could have made a name for himself in politics if, when he was a socialist representative in 1946, he had submitted to the oppressive climate of that period in France and had accepted open collaboration with the Communist Party. But, he refused such collaboration, and that party did all that it could to defeat him in his bid for re-election. As a matter of fact, the Communists always did want Paul Rassinier's "hide" in both the literal as well as the figurative sense. A confirmed, total pacifist, Rassinier, in 1922 at the age of 16, under the influence of the anarchist Victor Serge, had been drawn into the Communist Party from which, having later gone to the opposition, he was quickly excluded. He joined the Socialist party in 1936, where he made himself known particularly in the pacifist wing that was opposed to the French policies that led to the 1939 war. Then, after France was occupied by the German army, he was one of the earliest resistants to this occupation and helped to found the "Libre-Nord" movement, but, unlike the murderous guerrilla bands and the "shadow assassins," he tried to inculcate into these Resistance movements "the idea of nonviolence and the principles of total pacifism." Such an attitude succeeded in getting him "condemned to death" by the Communist resistance (which had arrived on the scene late following the German attack on the U.S.S.R. in June 1941) and in putting him on the receiving end of the ritual "little warning coffin" effigy. It is bitter irony that this man -- deported to Buchenwald and to Dora, where he endured frightful suffering for nearly two years -- should later concede that he only escaped from the rain of Communist machine gun fire thanks to his arrest by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943, and his subsequent deportation to Germany.

Liberated in 1945, returned to France on a stretcher, and declared to be a severe invalid, Paul Rassinier could have, once again, had a lucrative and successful career in what was called "resistantialisme," that is to say, the shameless, continuous and highly advantageous exploitation -- "make room for us!" -- of the events of the "resistance," real or imaginary. However in Belfort, his native city, he began with a nearly naive honesty to proclaim vociferously that he had never met in the Resistance most of the men who were speaking in its name, which was in itself, already a bold step But, he went even further and with the exceptional courage of an honest man who was sickened by the flood of lies that flowed before his eyes, he began to denounce exaggerations of every kind concerning German war crimes, while maintaining that there had been as many war crimes committed on the Allied side as on that of the Axis and that they were all of a similar horrible nature.

Indignant. Paul Rassinier was thoroughly indignant, this former deportee, about the whole avalanche of questionable and often fanciful literature about the German concentration camps that passed before him. In the preface of Rassinier's Le Parlement aux mains des banques (2), the dramatist and screenwriter Henri Jeanson described Paul Rassinier's indignation as follows:

I like Rassinier very much. I like him very much because, without losing his composure, without grandiloquence, quite simply Rassinier lived, in the word of Zola, "indignant." Indignant, but calm because he was sure of his facts. Indignant, but imperturbable. Indignant since the age of sixteen.

The indignation of Rassinier does not make itself known through spectacular temper tantrums. He does not at all become carried away and avoids all invective. >From these traits stem his strength and perfect aim. He does not belong to that race of congestive polemists who rid themselves in one article -- whew -- of their scrupulosity or their bad temper and who write like someone purging himself. Once the article has been published, he does not consider himself released from duty as concerns himself and does not move to another sort of exercise. No, he carries on with a good faith that no one dreams of reproaching him for, with the exception, of course, of these national organizations in which authentic resistance fighters and deportees innocently allow themselves to be duped by the profiteers of the crematoriums. And these profiteers do exist. They have always existed. No one is unaware that the ossuary of Verdun, for example. has become a circus attraction and an excellent business whose profits are all the greater since the merchandise is never replenished. It is always the same skeletons which are used. The remains are not a loss for everyone.

Indignant; Paul Rassinier began, then, almost immediately upon his return from Buchenwald, to do battle against the numerous concentration camp legends, as a free spirit and a scrupulous historian. There were then published in succession Le Passage de la ligne (3), an impartial and lucid account of his life as a deportee, Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (4), a critical look at the orthodox concentration camp "literature," and Ulysse trahi par les siens (5), a companion work to Le Mensonge d 'Ulysse. The bulk of these three works makes up the first eleven chapters of this present edition; some redundant material i.e., overlapping material which appears more than once in the original French editions -- has been removed from the present English language editions which combines the three books, in an effort to retain the readability of the original works and to reduce the production costs of this edition. Naturally, the scope and the meaning of the original editions have not been altered by this editing.

On the subject of atrocity propaganda, Paul Rassinier, as the reader will discover when he reads the chapters which follow minces no words:

The atrocities and those responsible for them are clearly inseparable. Moreover, I shall perhaps astonish you. I forego, as a matter of fact, either giving you a list of these atrocities or decrying them to you. You have already heard far too much on the subject. The atrocity proves nothing, moreover. in history, either against he who commits it or in favor of he who is subjected to it. We have all too many examples of a world where today's victim is tomorrow's executioner and vice versa. It will be enough then for me to tell you that the concentration camps were a world of horrors. And if anything ought to be added, it would be this: in spite of this, just about all those who have spoken of them have overdone it and particularly their explanations have little in common with the truth .... Concerning figures, the "witnesses" have said and written the most improbable things. Concerning the implementation of the means of' killing, also. Concentration camp literature on the whole has the appearance of a collection of contradictory pieces of illnatured gossip.

With such a view on the worth of concentration camp literature, it is no surprise that Paul Rassinier began to question the central tenet of the concentration camp orthodoxy, to wit: the claim of Jewish genocide. On this subject. the authoritative work of Paul Rassinier clearly remains his Le Drame des Juifs européens (6) in which he examined, with the care of the scrupulous historian that we know him to be, the documents. the statistics, and the census figures that are related to the alleged holocaust. The translation of this study is found in the final four chapters of this volume. Without question, it is an authoritative work in its genre. And, as such, it has been circulated widely through Europe during the past decade. Moreover, Le Drame -- as well as Rassinier's numerous other works -- has inspired an ever-growing library of other "revisionist" works on the subject, including the excellent study by Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. (7)

Paul Rassinier's contentions that there was no Nazi policy of Jewish genocide, that there were no officially sanctioned "exterminations by gas" and that there were no six million Jewish deaths at the hands of the Nazis have, naturally, bothered greatly the "court historians," caught with their hands in the cookie jar, so to speak, with their dishonest scholarship, as well as the entire Zionist establishment which has built the State of Israel on the "myth of the six million." In fact, the post-war politics of the Soviet Union, of the Bonn government in West Germany, and of the United States with regard to its "Cold War" policies have been justified, to a large extent, by the pointing to the alleged Nazi wartime atrocities, with the expressed hope that the given policy under consideration will prevent what the Nazis "did" from ever occurring again, et caetera, ad nauseam. Thus, it should be no secret why historical revisionism in this area of study has been greeted with such hostility from "official quarters" on both sides of the "Iron Curtain."

Notwithstanding his iconoclastic contentions, Paul Rassinier kept things in balance. In the chapter concerning the "Jewish question" in his Les Responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale, he argued that "... even stripped of all the exaggerations that have falsified its meaning" Hitler's policy against the Jews was an unquestionable attack on human rights and was, according to the sanctioned expression 'more than a crime, a transgression'". But, he hastens to add that to a certain extent the misfortunes of the Jews during that period were a consequence of their own doing:

Let us recognize that [the Jewish] claim to wanting to be in Germany -- as in every other country that they regard as a "land of welcome" -- a national minority was scarcely tenable either. It was up to themselves to admit that they were foreigners in Germany and to surrender any right to protest if, in his turn, Hitler treated them like foreigners. The other governments of the world were free to accept this claim of the Jews, it was a problem of domestic policy which was none of Hitler's affair. Let the Jews of Germany go settle elsewhere, he said. The Third Reich was a totalitarian state, and, in its bosom, there was no room for a national minority.

The only problem with Hitler's plan was that the other sovereign states wanted nothing to do with these Jews, at least in appreciable numbers. "Even had they wanted to deal with them, Hitler's policy would have remained, without any doubt a blow to human rights," Rassinier remarked further, "but it would have remained such only from the point of view of principles and, on the practical level, it would have not taken on [the subsequent] inhuman turn of events. The matter could have been resolved by the expedient of a transfer of the population accompanied by a transfer of personal property, the likes of which history offers us many an example. That is what Hitler was proposing."

In spite of the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, this policy of population transfer remained the ultimate goal of the Hitler government, and, as the study that is printed in the final four chapters of this book demonstrates, such a population transfer actually did take place for the vast majority of European Jewry, although admittedly it occurred under inhumane and brutal conditions which caused numerous casualties. But, as the study also shows, such deaths were an unfortunate coincidence and were not the result of a deliberate policy of "genocide. "

As an important revisionist historian in the tradition of the late American historian Harry Elmer Barnes -- through whose efforts, incidentally, this translation was commissioned -- Paul Rassinier left an impressive body of work, without doubt indispensable to a complete understanding of the events of the Twentieth Century. Among his works which have not been mentioned previously, is a large volume, rich in documentary material of prime importance and analyzed with his customary lucidity, concerning that gross example of "kangaroo justice" known as the Jerusalem Tribunal which passed judgment on Adolf Eichmann; it is entitled Le véritable procés Eichmann ou Les Vainqueurs incorrigibles (8).

Other works that should be noted include his Candasse ou Le Huitième péché capital (9), a "story beyond time" that is told a bit in the manner of Anatole France, and, above all, his L'Opération Vicaire (10) in which he admirably exposes the political operation which consisted, in conjunction with the play "The Deputy," in charging Pope Pius Xll with the crime of "having favored Nazism," and, in doing so, having favored the anti-Jewish persecutions conducted by the Nazis, whereas, to the contrary, the Pope condemned those policies. Interestingly, as if by chance, there were found in rather great numbers in the gaggle of the Pope's accusers people who had helped Hitler to come to power.

To the everlasting credit of Paul Rassinier is the fact that with his L'opération "Vicaire" he undertook the defense of the "highest moral authority on earth" in spite of the fact that he was a professed atheist. It was likewise honorable for this former deportee, the poor victim of the hell of the concentration camps, to refrain from capitalizing on his experiences as a camp inmate and, instead, to put himself at the service of historical truth concerning the German camps and the "Jewish holocaust." Clearly, Paul Rassinier belonged, as his friends and admirers were always able to appreciate, to this elite of men whose sole ambition is never to repudiate themselves and to conserve an unswerving allegiance to the principles they have chosen to serve.

Notes

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Part I:

The Author's Experience

Chapter One: Prologue

It rained a fine, cold, icy April rain; steady, relentless, and inexorable. It had rained for two days and the third night was beginning.

The train, a long line of cars grinding along the rails. slowly disappeared into the blackness. The engine, a locomotive of another era, sweated, blew and strained, coughed and spat. slipped and back-fired. A hundred times it hesitated. and a hundred times it seemed to refuse to make the effort expected of it.

It rained unceasingly. In the gondola car open to the sky. were eighty huddled cringing bodies, intertangled, on top of each other. Were they living? Were they dead? No one could say. In the morning they woke once more, frozen in their miserable rags; they were emaciated and hollow with their eyes staring out, feverish and dazed. With a superhuman effort they shook themselves. They were aware of the daylight. They felt the rain -- the stinging slashes of the rain -- go through their ragged clothing, to their thin and hardened flesh. reaching to the very bone. They arched their backs with an imperceptible shudder. Perhaps, they were just beginning to make those thousands of instinctive, waking up movements, when they saw themselves reflected in each other's eyes. Through the fog of fever and the sheet of water falling from the skies, they noticed the men in uniform, armed to the teeth, planted in the four corners of the car, impassive but vigilant. Then they remembered. They realized their destiny, and with a start, dejected and overwhelmed, they fell back into that half sleep, that half life, that half death.

It rained, and rained, on and on. A heavy fetid air rose from the mass of bodies, and disappeared into the cold wetness of the night.

When they had left there were a hundred of them. They had been collected together in a hurry, with dogs at their heels and thrown pell-mell in groups into the train, under blows and shouted commands. They were horror stricken when they found themselves about to leave from the small platform, without provisions for the journey. Suddenly they understood that a great ordeal was beginning.

"Achtung, Achtung!" they were warned. "On your feet during the day; sit down during the night!... Nicht Verschwinden Any breaking of the rule, sofort erschossen ! understand?"

The open car, the cold, and the rain, that was one thing- that had been seen before. But, nothing to eat, nothing to eat!

To cap their misery, for weeks there had not been an ounce of bread in the camp, and they had had to make do with supplies from the storage pits: plain soup of rutabaga, a quart sometimes half a quart, and small potatoes, in the evening, after a long, hard day of work. Nothing to eat. Everything else vanished before this menace. The sound of the Americans seven and a half miles away barely reached them.

Standing during the day, sitting down at night...! Before the end of the first night, three or four of them who had shown too precipitately a desire to satisfy a pressing need, were seized by the collar, smacked brutally against the high wall of the car and executed point blank: Craa-ack! against the wood, craa-ack! They did it in their pants, cautiously at first, holding themselves so as to soil themselves as little as possible; then, progressively they gave up.

Three or four others who had fallen down with exhaustion during the following day, were coldly finished off with a bullet in the head. Craa-ack! against the floor, craa-ack! The bodies were tossed out, as the train rolled along, after the registration numbers were removed. At the beginning of the third night, the ranks were considerably thinned, and fear gave way to terror, and terror to complete resignation. Abandoned was any urge to escape this hell, any urge to live; they let themselves die in their own excrement.

And still it rained, on and on and on. A little breeze riffled across the convoy, and the bit of canvas, that make-shift shelter under which in each corner the guard passed his long hours of watch, was lifted. It was as if the miasma were blown away, and the S.S. man, nervous at first, fussing about although in a determined way, suddenly became concerned. For some time, fewer rifle shots were heard, and there was less machine gun chattering. The dogs themselves-oh those dogs!-barked and yelped less at the numerous stops. In 48 hours, due to the constant changing of direction from side-track to side-track, the train was less than twelve and a half miles from where it started. Late in the afternoon it set off toward the southwest, after having tried the north, the south, and east in vain. If this track was cut like the others, it would mean that we were trapped and that we would be taken. The S.S. guards frowned, and then passed the news on from car to car, throughout the length of the train. "We are trapped, we will be captured!" They were completely bowled over. They were going to be captured, and all of these half conscious prostrate bodies were going to come back to life, rise up to accuse them; they would be caught red-handed.

Still, during the morning we heard them frequently calling out questions to each other with guttural voices, cracking jokes, and laughing coarsely at the sad and disabused girls who all along the right of way gave them back only occasional and melancholy encouragement. Now they were silent, only the click of a lighter, or the red end of a cigarette, from time to time broke this death-like silence, or disturbed the thick and humid obscurity of the night.

It rained endlessly, on and on. On top of this, the wind had become stronger. It began to whistle sharply between the boards, and the water came down in torrents. The canvas cover over one S.S. guard ballooned up, and its props gave way. Suddenly, the tent cloth began to flutter like a flag and to flap against the wall of the car. The S.S. swore. Then, grumbling and swearing, he tried in vain to repair the damage. If he got it attached on one side, the wind tore it off on the other! "Gott Verdammt ! "

After two futile attempts he gave up. Suddenly, he turned toward the nearest of the miserable creatures, and gave a few shoves with his knee. "Du," he cried. "du... Du. blöder Hund!" Blöder Hund? The man heard, understood where the cry came from, automatically collected all the strength left in him, and got up frightened. When he saw what he was expected to do, he felt a little reassured. He raised himself onto the top of the wooden side of the car where he balanced on his hands and knees. Then, very carefully so as not to fall over the other side onto the road bed, he brought in the canvas, and helped the guard to fix the corners onto the supports.

And, then an extraordinary thing happened. He came to his senses all of a sudden. All of a sudden the thought came to him that he was on his knees on the top edge of the wall, that his two legs were turned toward the outside, that the train was not moving very fast, that it was raining, that the night was black, and that the Americans were perhaps seven or so miles away, that freedom... Freedom, oh liberty! With that evocation, a sudden madness filled him who just a little while before was afraid of falling-oh irony-a light filled his brain, flooded his whole being: "Ja... " he repeated; then cried, "Ja! Ja! Ja!...a...a... ah!"

Before the S.S. guard even had time to register surprise, the man, the half-dead skeleton, tightened his muscles in one supreme effort, propped his poor thin arms on the edge of the board, and threw himself backward. He heard the crackling of gunfire ringing in his head, and he still found the strength, the astonishing lucidity, to realize that he had fallen into a spot, that was out of the line of fire. He felt himself caught there, body and soul, and he collapsed into the nothingness of unconsciousness. A machine gun continued to fire: Tch!... Tch!... Clac! Tcheretchstche !... Clac !... Tch !... Clac ! Taratatata !... Tche!... Tche!... Tche!... Tche!... The locomotive sweated and blew, hesitated, slid and back-fired, and the train moved on. The guns stopped spitting death. Little by little the great indifferent silence of nature asleep closed over the drama going on, disturbed only by the hissing of the rain that now became steady with the dying of the wind. It rained on and on and on.

First, two eyes tried to open, but the heavy eyelids sank down in a sudden reflex, as though the head were under water.

His dry throat contracted to salivate and brought up the taste of earth on his tongue. An arm sketched a movement which was paralyzed in mid air by a sharp pain in the elbow, dull at the shoulder. Then, nothing more; the man lost himself again in a strange sense of well-being, and actually thought that he was falling asleep.

Suddenly, a shiver came over him and enveloped him. His chest was bared of its wet covering, brrr!... He wanted to curl himself up to get warm. Then, he tried to wake up. his eyelids fluttered nervously, and he forced them to stay open. He stared into the opaque blackness.

A desire to cough rose up from his lungs and shattered him. He had the feeling that his body was acting in sections, independently and aching, in the dripping grass, and on the muddy ground.

He tried to think. Like a knock in his head came the thought "The dogs." This time he did wake up. He reviewed everything. A flood of experiences assailed him, one after the other: the loading, the train, the hell of the railroad car, the cold, the hunger, the canvas, the wind, the jump into the night. The train; what if it should come back over the same way once again? The dogs! Oh! Any death but that.

He wanted to flee; there was nothing else to do, but the pieces of his body were riveted there. He wanted to gather himself together, he heard his bones grating against each other. But, he had to get away from there, at any cost.

His reasoning took another turn: a railway line was a military objective for the attackers and a defensible breastwork for those attacked The Germans would return to make use of it as a defensive line, and they would find him.

To flee! To get a few hundred yards from the railway right of way and wait there would be a little safer. The Americans would eventually come. "But, first, stand up! First, stand up." He was thinking out loud and the murmur from his lips brought forth from his mouth gritty bits of earth. He sputtered.

With infinite carefulness he moved his arms one after the other; the left seemed all right, but from the right came that pain in the elbow and shoulder. "Well, well, it seems to be going away." He repeated the motion, and it was true; the pain grew less as he moved his muscles and joints. Nothing was broken. He breathed easier. Now the legs. Gently he moved his muscles. He felt no pain; nothing was broken there either-at least it did not seem so. He became calmer.

He managed to sit up. His bruises became more painful, and his wet sticking clothes became more icy. He shivered. In the pit of his stomach he felt a round ache. He was hungry, and that was a good sign. He was surprised that he had not felt this hunger before. He put his hand to his head, his prison beret was still in place. This fact made him laugh. He thought of his clogs which he had lost during his jump; never mind. He felt all over himself: he was covered with mud and was rolled up in a tangle of wire from which he at once tried to extricate himself. He turned and got on all fours; one more effort and he would be standing up ....

On his feet; he was standing; he would get away; the Germans could double back, cling to the railway... not so fast; his head was spinning. He felt like vomiting. He felt himself tottering, about to fall. He stiffened, held himself upright as long as he could. and saw that he was going to collapse and that he might hurt himself in the fall. So, gently and very carefully, he crouched down. If he could not walk, he would drag himself, but he would not stay there; no, he would not stay there. He thought of the train, the dogs, and the Germans who would be coming back. And, he thought of the Americans... "To think that they are there seven miles away. No, it would be too stupid."

On his hands and knees, crawling like a huge tormented worm, he managed to go down a slope, to cross what seemed to be a ditch, full of gluey water, and to slither along a newly ploughed section of an adjacent field where the earth came up in hunks and stuck to his knees, his legs and his elbows. He stopped and got his breath back.

Meanwhile the night had become less black. and the sky was higher. Already the shapes of the hedges and the single trees around him could be made out in the thinning fog. Day was about to break and that was another danger. A few hundred yards away on a little rise of ground he made out a dark mass: woods, no doubt.

He made it his first objective to reach them before dawn. He started to move again. The struggle had warmed his body, had loosened his muscles and his joints, and had localized the pain down the whole length of his right side. He succeeded in standing up, in staying up, in putting one foot before the other, and in walking. He walked slowly because his right leg pulled and his shoulder was very painful. But, he was walking, and he made progress. Bent over, dead beat, broken, twisted, he pulled himself toward the woods. He straightened up, forced himself, and kept hold of himself. He would be there before dawn, and would take cover there; the Americans would come, and he would be saved. The rest took place in a dream a long, dead tired, slow-motion dream.

Day broke. The ground which sloped down from his feet gradually appeared out of the darkness; the indistinct checkerboard pattern of fields and meadows became more outlined: the railroad tracks down below stood out like a long ribbon. In between two distant hills, a church spire rose among little wisps of smoke rising straight up from invisible chimneys. Very quickly the radiant spot in the still grey sky. which announced the sun piercing the clouds, was high in the sky. The country-side was animated here and there with yokes of oxen peacefully going and coming. A man, a civilian too, but whose brassard could be distinguished, had nonchalantly begun to do his stint along the tracks.

The sight evoked in him the image of a similar corner of the earth in similar weather, under the same sky, and with the same checkerboard of fields and meadows, the same woods, the same isolated trees, the same church steeple, and the same railroad somewhere in the vicinity of Alsace and Franche-Comté.

It occurred to him that if his mother could see this scene at this very hour, she would certainly have commented that the sky was "washing itself" or that the weather was "drying itself off." For a long time he watched two horses about five hundred yards away who were pulling a sort of harrow, over a square of meadow, to "scatter" the mole hills; the old man guiding them, surely that was father Tourdot, and that good little girl pulling on a rope attached to the back of the harrow that was his granddaughter, whose father, Tony, was a prisoner in Germany! In an association of ideas he saw the worried face of his wife bending over a little bit of a fellow two years old... Then, the reality of his present situation came to him with a start of anxiety.

No, no, it was a trap! The Americans couldn't be seven miles away because everything was too quiet. Nothing in these fields and meadows and these woods gave a sign of war, much less of a complete collapse. He was crushed; what was going to become of him? He could not approach those people in his prisoner's clothing! He was hungry, very hungry, and thirsty, and he picked up a twig which he put into his mouth that was another remedy of his mother's, when he had cried into her skirts with thirst in the hot afternoons during the harvest. It took his mind off it.

The hours went by; the sun managed to pierce the greyness and to clear up the sky. A church bell rang; noon it was. The afternoon went by in the same way. The teams of animals became more numerous under a hotter sun which completely dried his garments. A man went by near him, a hoe over his shoulder, and almost brushed against him. He didn't move a muscle, but he realized that he couldn't stay there much longer without being discovered. The next day was Sunday, he had no trouble deciding that since they had left the camp on a Wednesday evening. So, in the morning he would be all right, but in the afternoon he would have a lot to worry about, since the Germans, large and small, liked to walk in the woods

Evening came, then the night. The moon, a huge moon, the color of embers, shed its strange light over the country. The guard on the tracks was still going back and forth. There had been no alert; in fact, there had not been the least little noise of an airplane motor in the sky during all day long. But, now he heard heavy thuds sounding in the distance. He thought, "They are still twenty-five or thirty miles away. The dogs, if they are set after me, will find me before the Americans get here. I must go, go toward them, but which way first?"

He was about to despair of everything when the sound of aircraft gave him back his courage. Airplanes wheeled above him and dropped their bombs in the immediate vicinity, without in the least being disturbed by anti-aircraft fire. Then they went away, and others came; a continual coming and going until dawn.

Daylight came, and the fog quickly broke up under a bright sun. All at once the day became clear. It was a beautiful springtime Sunday morning that gave no hint of what was to come. It might have been ten o'clock when the great upheaval finally came. Tac! .... Tac! .... Tacatacatacatac!.... Tac! He estimated the distance: two to three miles at the most. It came from the direction of the church and a little beyond . Tac ! Tac!.... tac tac tac!.... Tac!

The machine gun persisted, and another replied. Toc! Toc! .... toc toc! Toc toc!

Then a great uproar: Boom! boom! Boom!... Boom! The projectiles did not fall far away, but still on the other side of the village. Boom ! Boom ! ... boom, boom .... A pause, Boom ! ... boom !... Another pause . Boom ! Boom ! Boom !... Boom ! Boom!... Boom! They came right at him; the discharge was regular, sharp, ringing. It would soon be time to do something, but what? A formidable explosion tore the air behind him; a shell had almost fallen on top of him. Brr... oom ! Then another. Brr... oom! His ear drums were bursting with it! Brr... oom! Br... oom! It didn't stop, and was echoed from behind. Boom!... Boom!... Boom!... Boom!... The countryside was deserted, and the man with the brassard had disappeared. He was alone. Brr... oom!... Boom, boom, boom, Brou... Brr... oom !

He was on the axis of a trajectory that was cut almost at right angles by the rail tracks, along which the Germans were doubling back. They would try to defend it, but they could not hold out for long in the face of the artillery fire; they would then retreat into the woods, where they would find him. "No, he must not stay there!"

He got up. He went down the slope, veering toward the left to get out of the line of the trajectory. His leg hardly dragged any more, the earth was dry, the ground was hard, and he was in possession of all his faculties. The last act of the tragedy was about to be played, and no false step must be made. "Not too near the tracks, not too near the forest," he decided.

The artillery duel continued: Boom! ... Boom! ... Boom! ... Boom!... The shells came down again; the were hitting the tracks. He saw the earth explode in a long line which cut obliquely across the tracks. He could smell the burning explosives. "The Devil! Get Down!" He would have liked to go farther on, but .... He saw a single bush that was near by: a poor shelter. He preferred a deep trough which separated two farm plots; he threw himself down in it.

ZZ... . Boom! ... . ZZ... . Boom! Just in time! The shell whistled over his head and fell near him. The thunder behind him, which had ceased, began again, the sounds were heavier and farther away. They were drawing back !

While the American lengthened their fire, the Germans shortened theirs, following their withdrawal step by step. Suddenly, he found himself in the very center of a terrifying earthquake, a cloud of smoke, iron, earth. He was almost buried in earth and wondered what miracle had saved him from being pulverized.

As the dust settled, he risked taking a look around him. He could see forms in field grey who were crossing the tracks, one after the other, in rapid spurts between bursts of machine gun fire. They flattened themselves against the embankment; a burst of fire! They were up and moving again. Down again, another burst of fire! They retreated toward him, trying to get out of the open, to make it to the woods. Down ... a burst of fire; fifteen steps backs, a burst of fire ... . down again. "Let's hope that one of them doesn't throw himself down next to me!" he thought. A shot rang less than fifteen feet on his left, another less than five on his right. He could not see anyone. "What are they shooting at, Good Lord?"

The exploding artillery shells, little by little, reached the woods, and the chattering of machine gun fire raked it. More grey forms climbed up over the tracks and withdrew into the woods from which they directed their fire: Clac! ... . Clac! ... . Clac! ... . Clac ... . Clac! But in the face of the brisk artillery fire, the reports from the forest grew weaker, and finally stopped altogether.

Suddenly there was a great clamor. It came from all corners of the horizon and echoed nearer and nearer, never ending. Suddenly, a host of men began to appear with rifles and machine guns in hand. While those who, a short while ago, had crossed the tracks amounted to a few dozen men, a hundred at the most, there were at least a thousand of these. They all seemed to be converging on the same point. Soon they were everywhere, walking and running. Not one of them saw him, which was just as well since one never knew what might happen at moments like these. He was careful not to make his presence known too soon. He waited for the excitement to subside. Finally he dared to move.

He sat up. About three hundred yards away some fifteen very nervous men, with their hands above their heads, were slowly emerging from the woods under the watchful eyes of guards, with their machine guns on the alert. In front of them, their backs to the woods, other men were already lined up, their hands resting on their heads, rigid. Finally others with their arms raised high appeared one by one; they threw their guns to the ground, took off their equipment, and took their places in the lineup.

"Jump to it!" One of them, too slow, was reminded of his new status with a well placed kick. Another received a blow with a gun-butt. A third tried to argue; Cra-a-ac! A machine gun was fired point blank at his chest. A few more blows, kicks, and slugs with the gun-butt, and the column was ready. "Get marching, toward the church!"

The group passed him at a distance of about seventy-five yards. The prisoners, in rows of five, completely stripped of equipment, jackets unbuttoned, and hands behind their heads shuffled by, awkward, silent and docile. On both sides an armed cordon of seven or eight men showered them with insults and warnings. He decided that it was time to show himself, and he rose up with a leap. "Hey! ... Hey! ... " he shouted, and he raised one arm in a gesture of appeal.

Without delay, the group halted, four men detached themselves on the run, and before he had time to realize what was happening to him, the barrels of four machine guns were pressed against his chest and back. "Like this, at least, I know they won't shoot ! " he thought. The questions all came at once, menacing and in a language that he did not understand.

''French man," he said. It was all the English that he knew and he wasn't sure that was right. They looked at him round-eyed, astonished and mistrustful. He was obviously not understood. Then, he said, "Francaise!" This was not understood either. He tried his last resource: "Franzoesische Häftling! Franzous!" This time it worked; one of the machine guns was lowered.

"Was?" He briefly explained, in broken phrases, and he saw that he was in the presence of a German, two Spaniards and a Yugoslav, whose lingua franca was Italian. They had understood, all the machine guns were lowered, and a canteen was offered to him. He drank a bitter cold drink, which he wanted to spit out. He grimaced. "Koffé," said the German, "gut Koffe." They got out dry biscuits, hard, hard, oh how hard, chocolate, tins, cigarettes .... Cigarettes! First a cigarette .... But, they must not waste time. "Schnell," said the German, "Wir müssen... " (Hurry .... we have to .... ) They saw what condition he was in. Two of them hoisted him onto their shoulders, and like a living trophy took him, laughing, to the group which was waiting. "Sin-Sin?" asked one of the fellows of the escort. "Yes," he answered. But, the others said nothing. There was only one Englishman-or an American-in the company... which was a kind of international brigade, and he thought of the Spanish War.

As evening fell, the little column resumed its march toward the church, with the emaciated figure keeping his balance with difficulty on the shoulders of the two men, while nibbling slowly, his mouth watering copiously, on the biscuits and the chocolate. The sarcastic comments, the warnings, and the oaths, continued to rain on the prisoners, who, always docile, moved along, awkwardly in the unlaced shoes, their heads hung down their two hands crossed at the nape of their necks. "Porco Dio... Gott Verdammt!!" >From time to time the German spoke up: "Du! Bloder Hund!... Du!!" And, he pointed to a prisoner. Then, taking his revolver out of its holster, he asked him, "Muss ich erschiessen?" (Shall I shoot?) The prisoner rolled his frightened and pleading eyes, waiting for the answer a neutral, resigned smile. "Du hast Glück! Mensch! Blöder Hund!" (You're lucky ... stupid dog .... ) he said and spat contemptuously, "tt!... Lumpe." The roles were reversed.

From insult to insult, gibe to gibe, and threat to threat, the column of triumphant conquerors and disappointed losers made their entrance into the village just before midnight. They were past a station, very small, just like others that he knew, in Franche-Comté and Alsace. On the front he read "Munschof' in Gothic lettering. They set him down on the ground and the column rested. Then, slowly they started up again, amidst the deafening noise of the imposing war machines which at full speed went through the deserted but intact village on to new positions. Sometime later, the column reached the headquarters encampment.

"First, find a place to stay, my friend, eat, get your strength back, rest, a good bed. Then, we will see .... Knock at the first door that strikes you as a good place .... No, no, not with my men, they haven't the time, the hell with them now. Knock; if they open the door to you, ask for something to eat, hot, you need something hot. You will get a little something extra, from us, cold of course .... If they don't open, go in just the same, whether there is someone there or not; make yourself at home; all these people are our servants, it is their turn .... All they have to do is behave properly. No, no, don't be afraid, at the slightest lack of respect .... Come back to see me tomorrow. Until then .... Not wounded? Not sick? ... Yes, of course, weak, just weak. Until tomorrow then. And try to find another pair of shoes there... and another dinner jacket!"

The next day he went back. The Commanding Officer was sitting in an armchair on the porch, playing around with two very pretty persons, laughing out loud, who seemed to be quite ready "to behave properly" in the military sense of the phrase as applied to civilians of the opposite sex. "The female always submits to the conqueror with smiles," he thought. In France, in 1940 .... All of them, girls from Colas Breugnon.

But, the Commanding Officer said at once: "Ah, there you are! You know, since last evening I have been handed quite a lot of people like you. Since dawn my men haven't stopped bringing them to the Arbeitsdienst camp. What am I going to do with them, Good Lord? There is a train load of them, a train! And me, I haven't any way to transport them to the rear! They are all going to die; they'll all die! What sort of a place was it that you were in. Ah! the skunks! Well, don't worry about it, old boy, these two girls ...."

"Good," he began again, "You can walk?... Then, don't go to the Arbeitsdienst camp Go West, my friend, toward the West. Escapee, get there on your own, on friendly ground Hague Convention, deportee, priority .... Signal the first ambulance you run into. In eight days you'll be in Paris. All the laws, I'm telling you We'll see that you have something to eat to take with you. Really, is that all you have found since last evening? You'll give a fright to the girls all the way, old boy. Wasn't there anything where you spent the night? We won the war, in God's name!... She's pretty good that one! Ah, these French, you can't ever teach them anything Frantz!"

"Also, bye, bye! Follow the guide, he's going to give you something to take along. Good luck, but... try to do better the next time!"

Well weighed down with canned food, sugar, chocolate, biscuits and cigarettes, among other things... which he didn't know where to put, he found himself outside. He wanted to see the train from which he had escaped, and he turned toward the station.

People, civilians and soldiers, were busily going back and forth along the platforms. They made room for him as he came along: the clothes that he wore gave him a sort of respect. Gangs of men were pulling from the cars, the half clothed bodies, in rags, lank, dirty, bearded, and muddy! Some civilians were helping and watching them, full of pity, horrified. The dead bodies were lined up along the edge of the tracks, after their numbers, if there were any on their rags, were taken down. He looked to see if he could find anyone he knew among the dead .... Two men, two German civilians, arrived carrying a big thin body. "Kaput?!" one of them said. "Nein," answered the other, "atmet noch.... " (Finished .... No, he's still breathing.) He recognized Barray; Barray!

Barray was an engineer from St. Etienne. In camp they had slept together on the same straw mat for three weeks and had become friends. They had promised to write to each other if they got out. He learned from one of the survivors that the poor man had gone down under the blows of some German prisoners for having, in the delirium of hunger, cold and fever, begun to sing the Marseillaise. The S.S. guards had stood by unconcerned during the show. "Barray ! " .... "It's all over," he said to himself.

And, he went away thinking that there was a fatality in things that some premonitions did come about in life: for fifteen days, at least, Barray had been swearing by all the Gods that they would be freed on Quasimodo (Low) Monday He promised himself to write to his widow and two children about whom they had so often talked before they went to sleep.

A survivor told him what had happened to the convoy. A mile and a quarter beyond the station, it had been brought to a halt, very early Saturday morning. The S.S. guards had hurriedly made all of the able-bodied men get down from the cars and had formed them into a long endless line, which trailed away into the landscape, accompanied by the howling of the dogs and the sound of gun shots. The S.S. had left-on the train-the dead, the dying, and all of those who, taking advantage of the general confusion, were lucky enough to pass for dead, Obviously, there were too many of them, and there wasn't time to kill them one by one-nor was there the desire to do so. (Since this was written, it has been determined that there was no order to kill the prisoners, either.)

He continued his inspection. In one wide open car that no one was paying any attention to, the surviving prisoners shivered in spite of the full sun; they crawled out from under the pile of dead bodies; they huddled together to protect themselves from a cold that they alone felt. "What are you waiting for?" "Well... waiting to die, can't you see?" "What?" "There are still fourteen of us living; all the rest are dead; we are waiting our turn.... " He could not understand how they could be so little concerned with the saving of their lives. "They have given up," he thought; "It is not worthwhile to bother with them. They are already 'dead' and are satisfied. To force them back to life would be to inflict a kind of punishment on them .... "

And, he went on, with a feeling of indifference. He had known many prisoners in the camp who had been burdened with a sort of "death wish" and whom one could never meet without thinking that they were already dead, but that their bodies, in some manner, had survived them .... They were the ones who never missed a chance to announce, to drum it into one, that the war would be over in two months, that the Americans were here, that the Russians were there, that Germany was in revolution, and so forth. They were irritating, and they exhausted one's patience. Then, one fine day they were seen no more. The two months-or whatever-had gone by, and, since nothing had happened, they had just "let go of the railing," as it was said, and had let themselves die on the appointed date. These prisoners had let go of the railing right at the winning post; the two months had ended there, and the day of liberation had arrived ! He knew from experience that there was nothing to do. But, two steps farther on a feeling of remorse overcame him. "Don't stay like that; get out of there; the Americans are here; they are emptying the next car, and they will get to you soon. They will give you something to eat; there is a hospital in the village." They did not believe him, but he had made peace with himself.

At the end of the train was a boxcar that was filled with supplies; sacks of peas, flour, canned goods, packages of every sort of ersatz goods imaginable, liquor, beer, liqueurs, suits of clothes, shoes, accessories, and equipment. He took a soldier's nap sack and a pair of Italian shoes, with cloth sides and low-heels, which fitted his feet wonderfully. Then he left, eager to leave behind all that misery.

But, he still wanted to see the Arbeitsdienst camp where the Commanding Officer had told him that the Americans were taking those inmates who were still living. On the mustering grounds, surrounded by wooden buildings, living skeletons were coming and going, and corpses lay crumpled here and there... There were some five or six hundred men milling about. Well-wishing nurses -- attached to the American army -- busied themselves among them, running from one to another. The nurses did their utmost in vain to try to get the inmates to understand that they should stay inside the barracks and rest on the straw mattresses. Few among them had in their hearts any desire to live. Those who might have been saved began to die of dysentery because they had, disregarding all warnings, stuffed themselves too greedily with all of the food that was so profusely distributed among them. They ate, then felt a great need for air, and then went outside to die in the yard. No, no, this was no place for him. In the first place, he was too near the front lines; one could still hear the cannon fire all too sharply. He thought of Ulysses' return.

He made his way toward the villa where he had slept the night before and where another tug at his heart awaited him. On the way, he found an American soldier who wanted to shave him, amused.

To tell the truth, it was not a villa but the modest house of an engineer or a retired person just like so many in France- with an iron fence and a garden all around. The evening before he had found it empty with all the doors open. In the kitchen, the table had not even been cleared; a white cheese was on one plate, and jam was on another. In the dining room, the doors of a cupboard were swung open, and the linen and various other things were piled up on the sofa, on the table, and on the chairs, without thought. A trunk with its top gaping open sat waiting. The bedroom was in perfect order. He felt there the pressing distress of a comfortably well-off family who had hoped to the end and had waited until the last minute before leaving. "They aren't far away," he had thought, "They will come back any minute ."

He had slept in the big bed in the bedroom; he had laid there lazily in the morning smoking a cigarette. He had stretched himself out under the warmth of the covers, under a wide beam of sunshine which shone on the polished furniture. Leaving this house, to go to the Commanding Officer's about ten o'clock in the morning, he had thought of what had happened to him in 1940 when, turning back into Alsace, he had wanted to go home one last time. He had caught himself holding a pencil to write a note which he would have stuck on the door if at the last moment a sort of pride, which he had always felt was misplaced, had not restrained him: "Make use of everything, steal nothing, break nothing. Do not take vengeance on things for what you reproach people for. Do not make individuals pay for what you believe is the error of the whole community." And so he had taken out of the linen cupboard only what was indispensable: a shirt a pair of under shorts, a handkerchief, and from under the kitchen sideboard the pair of imitation leather sandals that had made the Commanding Officer laugh so much... He had even resisted the very strong temptation, when passing in front of the garage, to borrow the magnificent Opel that was parked there.

Now everything had disappeared, the magnificent Opel was gone, the cupboards were emptied, the linen was stolen, and the dishes were broken. "And I who was so conscientious," he thought "The war, ah the war!" On the night table, an alarm clock that he had noticed the night before was still there by some miracle It pointed to 6:30. He threw himself. still all dressed, onto the bed and went to sleep.

He glanced at the titles: Kritik über Feuerbach; Die Räuber of Schiller; Kant und der Moral. Goethe, Hölderlin, Fichte, Nietzsche, and others, were all there as if at a tragic rendez-vous, and they were waiting for their fate to be decided by less noble lords, the Goebbeles and the Streichers. The paper was fine, the bindings were unpretentious, and the workmanship was good. He had always had a weakness for books of any kind. He spotted one, Du und die Kunst by one of National Socialism's leaders. He opened it mechanically, and he saw a colored reproduction of "La Liberté guidant le peuple," by Delacroix. He leafed through it more attentively: Monet's flowers, a detail from Renoir, la Joconde, Mme. Recamier, le Martyr de Saint Sebastien. This sharp contrast with the hell out of which he had just come made him ill. He asked if he could take this book away with him, as a souvenir of that civilization that had been so cruel to him, and which would astonish and shock the world for years to come. Permission to take the book was given with a smirk and a sneer. Of course it was difficult for them to understand .

He turned west again, with the feeling that he would never come upon an ambulance and that he would continue to the end on foot All of a sudden, he felt that he was on the threshold of a new adventure, and that he would have liked to have it resemble, although in other times and under a different sky, that of Ulysses of whom he had thought the day before.

Before him he saw roads, the peasants in the fields, the hedges in bloom, the trees budding, the farms, the people who asked about him and to whom he gladly told his story, and the never ending roads. And, there at the end of this mirage-like horizon a small house with arbor vitae, on the outskirts of a small village. In the little yard, a little boy always two years old playing in the sand, who raised astonished eyes at seeing him arrive in his prison clothes ... On the tip of his tongue he was about to ask, "What's your name? Little fellow? Where is your mama?" He wept.

To continue reading the entire book please go to the web site of the Institute For Historical Review

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Conclusion: Six Million Exterminated Jews -- Fact or Fiction

Logic demands that this demographic study end with general statistics which include the following four items for each of the European nations which I have surveyed:

In order to give the exact truth of this dark story, these statistics should be accompanied by others giving the structure of the world Jewish population at the end of 1962. And, in four sections also, for each of the nations of the other continents:

This was my intention at the beginning. Now, this double labor turns out to be impossible; the second statistics cannot be determined unless and until the leadership of international Zionism agrees to undertake a census of the world Jewish population, and we have seen that Zionist leaders are not about to accept this idea. As for the first statistics, there is a long series of other difficulties that still present obstacles in spite of all the specific data that the preceding study has produced.

The most insurmountable of these difficulties, and which sums them all up, is the following: if we now know that a minimum of 4,419,908 Jews succeeded in leaving Europe between 1931 and 1945, we are much less well informed on their nationalities. For countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and one or two others -- the Baltic countries for example, even Greece -- there is no problem; they were not on the route of the Jewish migration; the Germans found only national Jews in those countries and everything is clear. But it is not the same in the other countries -- Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Hungary, Rumania -- which were countries into which to escape, or to go through, before they became occupied by German troops. There, the Jews were arrested and deported pell-mell, and it is impossible for us to determine accurately the nationalities of those who managed not to get arrested as well as those who were. Hungary is the archetype of this difficulty: there, we did succeed in determining that out of the 800,000 Jews who were living there on March 19, 1944, 543,000 had not been deported; that about 200,000 had been deported; that 57,000 had very probably been massacred in police operations; and that 343,000 had managed to emigrate. But, in each of these categories, it was impossible to determine who was Hungarian, who was Yugoslavian, who was Czechoslovakian, and who was Polish. The same questions hold for Rumania, where we found 147,650 massacred, and 652,350 survivors, 227,350 of whom emigrated. The same questions are found again for Holland, for Belgium, for Luxemburg and for France. In France, we found that only 81,000 Jews of one nationality or the other could have been arrested and deported; we know also that there were no Belgians among them, that the number of French was necessarily between 6,000 and 11,999, and that the number of the Luxemburgers was between 0 and 2,000, the others being Dutch. But these are, all the same, figures which are insufficiently exact to be called statistics. In Poland, we know that 729,040 Jews were arrested, either on their national land or on the emigration route toward the west; but of the 289,300 who tried to emigrate by the Danubian route, how many were arrested in Hungary and how many in Rumania? So many questions for which there are no answers and which can equally be applied to the Czechoslovakians who fled to Hungary and the Yugoslavians who fled to Italy.

In the final analysis, rather than to circulate statistics based on nationalities, every datum of which might have been open to question, and to add to the confusion created by the historians and the statisticians who voice the line of international Zionism, I have preferred to draw up these statistics on the only plane where we are sure of ourselves, that is in Europe. Here, no serious debate is possible: we have affirmed that a minimum of 4,419,908 European Jews managed to emigrate early enough to escape arrest and deportation to concentration camps, and we can add them to those that the historians and statisticians who support the Zionist "genocide" fiction, found living in Europe in 1945.

Here then, on information from the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, are our statistics on the European scale in four sections, with the integration, for 1931, of the 300,000 German Jews and the 180,000 Austrian Jews who are admitted to have left Europe to flee from Hitler together with the million Jews who were in the part of the Russia that was never occupied by the German troops.

Page 389
Description	1931	1945	Official Losses	Emigrants Traced	Actual Losses1
Statist. totals from p. 302	8,297,500	2,288,100	6,009,400	-- --	-- --
Known German Emigrants	300,000	300,000	-- --	-- --	-- --
Austrian Emigrants Ackowledged	180,000	180,000	-- --	-- --	-- --
Russian Jews saved by Soviet	1,000,000	1,000,000	-- --	-- --	-- --
Actual totals from WCJD	9,777,500	3,768,100	6,009,400	-- --	-- --
Ac. totals as arrived at in this study	9,777,500	3,768,100	___	4,419,908	1,589,492

Here again are the same statistics, but this time based on the information of Mr. Raul Hilberg who did not divide Russia into the two zones, but who, too, acknowledged that there were 300,000 German and 180,000 Austrian Jewish emigrants.

Page 390
Description	1931	1945	Official Losses	Emigrants Traced	Actual Losses
Totals from p. 302	9,190,000	3,782,500	5,407,000	-- -	-- --
Known German Emigrants	300,000	300,000	-- --	-- --	-- --
Austrian Emigrants aknowledged	180,000	180,000	-- -- -	-- --	-- --
Totals of Mr. Hilberg for 1945	9,670,000	4,262,500	5,407,500	-- --	-- --
totals as arrived at in this study	9,670,000	4,262,500	-- -- -	4,419,908	987,592

On the basis of the preceding analysis, this is where we stand now: First, out of the study of the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and from its own data, we find 1,589,492 European Jews dead or missing as a consequence of Nazi persecutions in concentration camps or in some other way. Second, out of the study of Mr. Raul Hilberg's data we find only 987,592 dead or missing Jews.

Twice I took up this problem: first in Ulysse trahi par les siens, published in France in 1960, and, second, in an article for the German review Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (Tubingen, 12, February 1963). Each time that I reviewed the problems, I did it in terms of the data from Jewish sources that had been published at the time. But, the first time, neither the judgment of the Jerusalem Tribunal, nor, more significantly, the study of The Jewish Communities of the World of February 1963 had been brought out. And, in terms of what was already known, my conviction had been that the number of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, in concentration camps or otherwise, should be placed at about 1,000,000, more or less. The second time, I had in my hands the Judgment of the Jerusalem Tribunal, and I had followed day by day the hearings of the Trial, but I still was not acquainted with the study of the Jewish Communities of he World, then not yet published. As a conclusion to my writing for the Deutsche Hochschullehrer-Zeitung (pp.61, 62) I had claimed that if the number were greater than 1,000,000 it could not by any means exceed 1,655,300 victims. Today, with all the documents at hand which were lacking then, it can be said that, based on data prior to that of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the number of victims is 1,589,492. On the other hand, the figure is 987,592, based on Mr. Raul Hilberg's data. To achieve greater exactness, we must wait for the new Zionist leaders like Salo Baron, Leon Poliakov, and Michel Borwicz, among others, to give new avowals, or for another trial like the Jerusalem one, to bring us new light on the question. As well as we know these Zionist circles, neither one nor the other of these hypothesis is excluded, but, rather, both are more likely than not to occur. In those circles, indeed, neither talkers without conscience, seeking cheap publicity, nor, alas, judges looking for vengeance, are lacking. I shall bet a good deal on two other things: the latent and continuous dissensions which exist between Mr. Ben Gurion and Mr. Nahum Goldmann, and the fracas between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung.

For a long time now Mr. Nahum Goldmann has been showing signs of fatigue and impatience with the policies of Mr. Ben Gurion with regard to Germany. For example, he had stated publicly that he was not enthusiastic about the arrest of Eichmann and the trial which followed. Through various indiscretions we learn that he does not place much value on all the trials in Germany, aimed at former members of one or another of the Nazi organizations of Hitler's time. In Israel itself, there is a very serious divergence between his group and that of Mr. Ben Gurion, each time the latter finds a German minister stupid enough to accept an invitation sent him with the sole object of having him publicly insulted in Israel by his partisans, and thus of making an issue that attracts the attention of the whole world to the debt which Germany, because she rallied to Hitler in 1933, assumed with regard to Israel. Everything takes place as if, not daring publicly to take a position in opposition to Mr. Ben Gurion with regard to his policy toward Germany, Mr. Nahum Goldmann were trying behind the scenes, to silence him on his main theme. And, the fact that, with regard to the Jews who were exterminated, the statistics which we have from the American partisans of the Zionist line are generally more moderate than those which come from the European branch (as is illustrated by the figures of Mr. Raul Hilberg compared with those of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) could very well reflect the dissentions between the two men. This would then explain the divergencies and contradictions revealed in the Jewish sources in their statistics.

As for the quarrel between Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung, it could be of consequence in that, along with that of the United States, the Jewish population of Russia is one of the greatest enigmas weighing on the problem. The Institute of Jewish Affairs of London and the Jewish Communities of the World both told us clearly in 1962 that there were 2.3 million Jews in Russia. But Mr. Raul Hilberg revealed to us that there were 2,600,000 in 1946, and that estimate, which can be considered to be confirmed by the journalist, David Bergelson (in Die Einheit, December 5, 1942), can also be considered closer to the truth. In that case, it is not 2.3 million Jews that were in Russia in 1962, but 3,016,000, adjusted for a natural increase at the rate of sixteen per cent. If we take Professor Salo Baron at his word, that figure would be even greater: 3,120,000. But, let us not be tempted. However, we could justify the use of a larger figure, all the less, because in reality there are surely many more than 3,016,000, since the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, also told us, let us not forget, that eighty per cent of the Baltic Jews, the Poles, and the Rumanians, who found themselves behind the Russian lines as they fled before the German troops in 1941-1942, were saved and sent on their way toward Central Asia by the Soviet authorities. At the end of 1942, Bergelson estimated that there were about 5.2 million Jews on Soviet territory, 3 million of them Russian, and in that he agrees with the statistics of April 17, 1943, of Mr. Richard Korherr, which have already been referred to. Question: what happened to those 2.2 million non-Russian Jews? Answer: some of them managed to escape and reach either the American continent or Israel; the rest of them did not. How many were in each group? We cannot tell. But, we can be sure that as long as Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung were getting along together it surely was not easy for Jews who had been transported to Central Asia during the war, to make it to the American continent via China; those who have been able to manage the trip in the postwar period must have managed it clandestinely. The subsequent quarrel between these two grand men of Bolshevism could result in Mao Tse-tung aiding the Jews to leave Soviet territory, just as the China of Chiang Kai-shek aided them before World War II, and for the same reasons. In that case, it could happen that one day a very significant number of Jews might turn up suddenly in all of the countries of the American continent, and perhaps also in Israel. And, unless it is kept hidden in the dark, a new light will be shed on the statistics of world Jewry. Neither is this hypothesis excluded. And, if the United States should adopt a rational policy toward Russia, the truth would come out very fast.

But to return to the problem as it exists in the data that we actually have: we know that the number of European Jews who died as victims of Nazi persecutions is either 1,589,492 persons, established on the basis of data from the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation compared with the Exhibits of the Tribunal at Jerusalem and the study, The Jewish Communities of the World, which came out in February 1963, or is 987,952 persons, based on the data of Mr. Raul Hilberg compared in the same manner. It still remains to be discovered how the 4,419,908 Jews, who were living in 1945, were divided among the other countries of the world, and who, not being listed as living in the European statistics of Jewish sources, are necessarily thought to have left Europe between 1931 and 1945. That is the problem for the second statistical analysis, which, in my opinion, should present by country the structure of the world Jewish population in 1962. And, as is pointed out in a preceding paragraph, these statistics are impossible to establish at the present time.

We already know one thing which was revealed to us in the study of the Israeli Jewish population, and that is that it includes 1,048,368 European Jews who immigrated to Israel between 1931 and 1962. It remains to be seen how the remaining 3,371,540 European Jews are distributed around the rest of the world.

It is in this latter matter that the Jewish sources are the most secretive. Rarely do we find, for example, in the study of the Jewish Communities of the World and in the World Almanac of 1963, non-European countries where the admitted Jewish population is greater than it would have been by natural increase based upon the statistics of Mr. Arthur Ruppin for the period of 1926-1928. There are some places where even the natural rate of increase has not been reached; that is the case with the United States, where, if we can believe the aforementioned publications, the population has not risen more than from 4,461,184 in 1936 to 5,500,000 in 1962. However, we have seen that at the natural rate of increase of one per cent there cannot be fewer than 5,550,489 Jews in the United States, and that, at the natural rate of increase, which Mr. Salo Baron gives, there should be 6,170,837. The few countries on continents other than Europe, where the Zionists concede that there is a Jewish population greater than what it would have been by natural increase, based on the Ruppin statistics, are the following: Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. For these four countries, these are the statistics that can be drawn up:

By making an allowance for the natural increase, we get close to 200,000 immigrants of European origin for these four countries, assuming that the figures published in the aforementioned authorities for 1962 are exact, and it would be astonishing if they were. If they are, we still have 3,171,540 European Jews to locate. To do that we would have to be able to draw up figures for all of the countries of the world in the same manner as we did for Argentina, Canada, Brazil, and South Africa. But we cannot, since the latter are the only ones given by the Zionists which concede any immigration.

Still, something must be done, since, if they are not in Europe and not in Israel, these 3,171,540 Jews who were certainly living in 1945 must be somewhere else -- together with the additional number that they have accumulated at the natural rate of population expansion. Where? In order to say that with any real certainty we shall have to wait once again for new revelations that the publicity-seeking Zionist movement will not fail one day inadvertently to produce. Until then we can only conjecture, and that is not my method. I shall, therefore, limit myself to stating my basic principles which have defined the direction that my research has taken, and which I continue to pursue.

1. It is not probable, but it is possible -- that in August 1945, the date when Mr. Poliakov told us (Le Troisieme Reich et les Juifs, p. 196) that the European Jewish communities had begun to make an inventory of their losses for Justice Jackson and had come up with only 3,768,100 survivors according to the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, or 4,262,500 according to Mr. Raul Hilberg -- that they gave figures considerably understated for reasons of propaganda. I say it is possible, for two reasons: there was such a chaos of displaced persons in Europe at that time that any serious census was out of the question; and the method used in the Jewish communities, which everywhere counted only Jews of the nationality of the country, might have distorted the results.

2. Even if the result of this Jewish census of 1945 was not out of line (which is not admitted), it is certain that, if all the Jews who had left Europe between 1931 and 1945 had not returned by 1945, many of them came back later, at least to Western Europe, since we can assume that those who returned to the other side of the Iron Curtain were the exceptions. France, in this case, is typical: 300,000 Jews in 1939 and between 450,000 and 500,000 at the end of 1962, with about 130,000 Algerian Jews and about 20,000 Moroccan and Tunisian Jews who came seeking refuge, after the granting of independence to those three countries. 300,000 to 350,000 French Jewish nationals is a normal figure in relation to the entire French population in 1962. But the statistics of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation continue to claim 180,000 in 1945 plus the natural increase rate of 16 per cent, or 208,000 (216,000 if we use the natural increase rate of Mr. Salo Baron). It is very probable that if one went to the trouble, one could make similar statements for Belgium (where, in addition, 20,000 to 25,000 Jews returned from the Congo), Holland, Austria, and perhaps even Germany. However, all of the Jews who returned to Europe after the month of August 1945, whose number we cannot know exactly as long as the Zionists refuse to give it to us, since official census-taking will "bring down the wrath of God," surely must amount to several hundreds of thousands and must belong with those 3,171,540 which no Jewish source allocates to any place.

3. The problem of the Polish, Baltic and Rumanian Jews, who in the years 1941-1942 were evacuated to Central Asia and who, if one can believe the Jewish journalist, David Bergelson, should have numbered between 2 and 2.2 million in 1942, since there were 3 million Jews in Russian in 1939, and at the end of 1942, there were about 5.2 million. How many of these Jews are still living in "Central Asia" (read, Siberia) with their offspring? How many have succeeded in escaping in the past 16 years? Where have they gone? Everything points to the fact that those who managed to escape secretly from the U.S.S.R. reached the American continent, which was for them the easiest to get to. Concerning that supposition, a hypothesis, for what it is worth, and which I do not offer as a certainty, runs through my mind: in 16 years, it is possible that half of them, at a cost of immeasurable difficulties, managed to leave Central Asia for the American continent. If that is so, and since the Zionist demographers have not located them in Canada, Brazil, or in any other country in the Western Hemisphere, they must be in the United States. Thus, the following statistics could be drawn up for Russia and the United States:

2. Jews still living in Central Asia, according to Mr. David Bergelson: 2,200,000

But, this total of 6,826,489 includes only immigration from Central Asia, and, therefore, it excludes all of those who, like Mme. Hannah Arendt and Mr. Robert W. Kempner, came to the United States by some other route from Europe. We can surely say that they number more than two, but, how many we do not know, or, at least, not yet. All that can be said is that they are there and that surely the Jewish population of the United States is greater than 6,826,489 persons. It can also be stated that the claim of the National Observer (July 2, 1962) that there were 12,000,000 Jews in the United States in 1962 may be an exaggeration toward the other extreme, but, I would not be astonished if one day soon a Zionist leader inadvertently reveals that there were about 8 million Jews in the United States. The estimate of 12,000,000 in the United States has been repeated several times with an attempt at numerical documentation by the Economic Council Letter published in New York City.

I repeat that the preceding analysis is only conjectural and is not a fact; it is, however, the hypothesis that is necessary to every work as a basis from which to conduct further research; it is the hypothesis which orients mine. To my, mind, it is plausible and it expresses, all the better, my profound conviction which, until now, has not led me to any impasse or error and which has made it possible for me to state some ten years ago the conclusions that were to be drawn later from the Jerusalem Trial and the study of the Jewish Communities of the World.

The actual Jewish population of the world in 1962 is very close to being the following, at least in the order of magnitude of the figures. By using statistics for each country of the world dated for 1926, or 1927, or 1928, as the case was, Mr. Arthur Ruppin estimated that world Jewry had reached a total of 15,800,000 persons as of that date. We have seen that the World Almanac of 1951 estimated the world Jewish population at 16,643,120 for 1939. The natural rate of increase having considerably dropped between 1926 and 1939 (Poliakov dixit, cf p. 295), but when it is compared with that of Mr. Arthur Ruppin, this estimate is allowable. Here, then is the Jewish population of the world in 1962, calculated on the corrected data of the World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.

And, here we are at the end of this study. It remains for me only to make an apology to the reader: this study has clearly been very long, and difficult to follow, like all that is technical by nature. But a demographic study can only be of such a technical nature. What the reader must recognize is that, until now, the proponents of the Zionist line -- whose "official" contentions on the horrors of the war I have been following -- have never been faced with arguments other than those from journalists, which have been often vague and specious, factors that have been the main reason for their lack of success. The only way to shatter their arguments was to set up against them the arguments of a specialist. And, that is what I have tried to do.

Notes

1. Between 15 and 18 million in 1947," as Hanson W. Baldwin has said (cf p. 294 above).

2. It must not be forgotten that this total comes out of the study of Jewish sources, that is, those which have been published under the sanction of the Zionist movement or by the Rabbinate, after investigation of the synagogues. But, if it is true, as claimed by Arthur Koestler (A l'ombre du Dinosaure), that not more than two-thirds of the world's Jews are registered in the synagogues, then there is room to wonder if this figure should not be augmented in the same proportion.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Afterword

It is difficult to imagine anyone better suited to be the great pioneer of what has become known as Holocaust Revisionism than Paul Rassinier. This French professor of history was a non-Communist Socialist who was arrested during the war for "passive resistance" activities, which included helping to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland. Rassinier was then sent to the Buchenwald and Dora camps in Germany, where he remained an inmate until the end of the war. When he returned to France, he was astonished by the stories that were being circulated about the camps, and he felt honor-bound to tell the truth as he knew it. For example, a French priest who had also been an inmate at Buchenwald claimed to have seen "thousands and thousands of persons" going into gas chambers there. When Rassinier met with the priest and pointed out to him that no one was ever gassed at Buchenwald, he replied: "Right, but that's only a figure of speech.... and since those things existed somewhere, it's not important." (pages 129-130 of this volume. See also: M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87.) Rassinier was a man of rare courage and conscientious devotion to historical truth. In spite of poor health he traveled many thousands of kilometers across Europe to meet with persons who claimed to have personal knowledge of mass killings. (p. 271). As he put it,"... A historian worthy of the name should not suppress anything that he knows which is relevant to the subject under discussion." (p. 282). His obvious intellectual honesty contrasts sharply with the deceitful spirit of "Exterminationist" historians such as Leon Poliakov, Lucy Dawidowicz and William L. Shirer. Rassinier's work has stood the test of time remarkably well. His basic thesis -- that there was no German policy or program of extermination, and that the incessantly repeated figure of six million Jewish wartime dead is a gross exaggeration -- has been abundantly confirmed by a tremendous amount of new evidence collected by the scholars who have followed in his path. All Revisionists owe a great debt to this man. Some of the more important of those who have built upon the foundation he laid are Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon (France) and Henri Roques, who knew Rassinier personally. (Incidentally, Dr. Butz provides a useful summary of Rassinier's work in his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, pp. 10-11.) It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the case for the revisionist view of the Holocaust story is immeasurably stronger today than it was when Rassinier died in 1967. Because Holocaust Revisionists challenge an official and prevailing view of history, they have a tremendous burden of proof. They are held to a much more rigorous standard of accuracy than most historians. This was dramatically demonstrated, for example, in the essentially political trials of Revisionists Robert Faurisson in France and Ernst Zündel in Canada. Rassinier was in frail health when he wrote most of the works that have been brought together in this volume. And because he was a pioneer who worked virtually alone, a number of errors unfortunately found their way into his writings. These mostly minor errors are neither malicious nor deceitful, which is shown by the fact that they are not crucial to his central thesis. It may even be said that these mistakes underscore Rassinier's basic honesty. If he were alive today, he would be the first to revise his findings in the light of more complete and accurate information. Thus, in the spirit of historical accuracy that Rassinier himself vigorously supported, the following corrections and explanatory points are offered:

These corrections should not discourage the reader from digging into this important volume, which is a valuable memoir of concentration camp life, as well as an insightful and often brilliant critique of the Holocaust extermination story.

1. The figure in this column actually represents the number of European Jews who were not accounted for in the preceding study. Consequently, this figure must be viewed with the following caveats: first this figure represents a maximum figure which doubtless would be considerably smaller if a census of the world Jewish population were taken today since whenever a question has arisen pertaining to the propriety of some statistic, it has been resolved in a manner which has favored the proponents of the Zionist line. Second, not every person who is included within this figure can be said to have died at the hands of the Germans. The mere fact that a person is not accounted for does not necessarily mean that he is deceased. These comments also hold true for Mr. Hilberg's statistics which are outlined on the following page

3. The total allows one to admire once again the seriousness of the statistics from Jewish sources. For Argentina, Canada and Brazil, the totals is 844,000. However, there are, in addition, a few Jews in the other countries of the American continent, notably in Mexico, 70,000; in Uruguay, 60,000; in Chile, 15,000, and so on. The total, therefore, for these six countries is 989,000. And for the whole Western Hemisphere, the same statistics give a total of 6.3 million, which the Jerusalem Post Weekly (April 19, 1939) brings forward. If, from this total for the two American continents, we subtract these 989,000 persons, there remain for the United States 5,311,000 and not 5.5 million as is claimed by the official statement of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of London and the World Almanac of 1963 (p. 159). That is what you come to when you want to conceal the actual total of the Jewish population of the United States.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

The Myth of the Six Million -- Appendix 4

Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist

BY HERBERT C. ROSEMAN

THE RECENT DEATH of Paul Rassinier, French historian and geographer left a gap that few can fill. A lifelong pacifist, Paul Rassinier's scholarship took him where few others dared venture-the study of World War II atrocities.

Paul Rassinier's main appointment was as professor of history and geography in the College d'enseignement general at Belfort, Academic de Besancon, 1933-1943. In the Second World War Rassinier engaged in pacifist work until arrested by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943. Rassinier was a member of the French Resistance from the moment of German occupation, which was the reason for his arrest and subsequent deportation and confinement in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora, 1943-f945 which so ruined his health that he could not resume teaching. After the war's end Rassinier was given the Medaille de la Resistance, and Reconnaissance Française. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies, Rassinier was defeated in November, 1946 largely through the machinations of the Communists.

Rassinier then embarked on his remarkable and little-known series of volumes depicting life in the German concentration camps and a systematic and statistical analysis of German war atrocities. Rassinier's record, both personal and ideological proves that nobody could be less inclined emotionally or intellectually to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Further, he had always opposed vigorously in France and elsewhere and especially in Germany after 1933 the seeds of anti-Semitism. In all his writings Rassinier attempts no "whitewash" of the Germans. As a historical revisionist, in the tradition of Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, Herman Hesse, Frederick Bausman, his aim is simply "keeping the record straight."

Rassinier's most important works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses), 1950, on his personal concentration camp experience; Ulysse trahi par les Siens (Ulysses Betrayed by His Fellows), 1960, on the exaggerations of French propagandists and impostors relative to the German concentration camps. Paul Rassinier's last published works, completing a monumental task, were Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs European (1964) wherein Rassinier attempts to refute the myth of German diabolism and Le Vicaire, a devastating critique of Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy.

The chief merit of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of German "wickedness." Rassinier recognizes that the seeds of war are inherent in our iniquitous economic system as he explains briefly and succinctly in his introduction to the unpublished collection of his works.

Machinations of Vested Interests

Rassinier thoroughly exposes the machinations of financial oligarchies, propagandists, politicians both racist and Zionist, various vested interests in sowing the seeds of hatred and war. Viewed in this light the destruction of a large portion of European Jewry becomes doubly tragic because the search for historical truth and accuracy becomes well-nigh impenetrable and the diligent searcher becomes lost in a fog of partisan propaganda.

The system which sets German against Jew, Jew against German, Negro against White, White against Negro will result in atrocity of one sort or another be it in "peace" or war. A system that allows power to accumulate in the hands of central banking systems and their bloodsucking proclivities, a system that places the compounding of interest above human life will provide the frame work for Hiroshimas, Buchenwalds, and Dresdens. "Man's inhumanity to man will continue."

Paul Rassinier's writings are not for squeamish liberals or dogmatic conservatives. They are not pleasant reading or easy reading. The prospective reader should also be warned that Rassinier was not a trained historian and 100% statistical accuracy cannot be guaranteed. On the other hand Paul Rassinier's work if published in the English version will be the most important book of its kind in at least a decade and the most controversial.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Letter to 'The Nation'

I would like to make a few comments about the book review by Ernest Zaugg (The Nation, 14 July 1962) dealing with my three books about the German concentration camps, the responsibility for World War II and the Eichmann trial (The Lie of Ulysses, Ulysses Betrayed by his Fellows, and The Real Eichmann Trial).

Genocide

Until Eichmann's arrest it was a sacred dogma of journalists to believe there were orders to exterminate the Jews issued by the top Nazis of the Third Reich. Nobody has ever produced such an order, but this has not prevented the theory that such orders were given from being stubbornly maintained. Then came the Eichmann trial. It was deemed necessary to prove that he was responsible for the exterminatons and had acted without orders. Hence, finally, the lack of evidence of such orders from the top Nazis was admitted. Dr. Kubovy, Directer of the Tel Aviv Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, wrote (La Terre Retrouvée, 15 December 1960):

This is what I have been saying since 1948. It disposes of the theory of "deliberate genocide" in which Mr. Zaugg seems to believe.

Methods of Genocide

The official thesis is that 6 million Jews were exterminated, without orders naturally, as is now admitted. To exterminate such a number an extraordinary method was needed-to wit, gas chambers.

In this matter European public opinion has changed greatly since the first Nürnberg trials (1945-6). After a lecture tour I made in Germany covering a dozen cities, the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) of Muenchen, a democratic institute, of course, was obliged on 19 August 1962 to state officially that "there were no gas chambers in any of the concentration camps in the territory called by the Nazis 'Greater Germany,' "none in Dachau, none in Bergen Belsen, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, etc. One concludes that the witnesses in the 13 Nürnberg trials and in the Eichmann trial who stated under oath that there were gas chambers in these camps were no more than vulgar false witnesses.

Mr. Zaugg accuses me of whitewashing the Nazis and giving aid and comfort to the neo-Nazis. My answer to this charge is that the best way to give aid and comfort to the neo-Nazis, if such there be, is to accuse the Germans of crimes which were never committed. It is astonishing that after 17 years of false accusations more damage has not been done in this respect.

Auschwitz

The question of the Auschwitz gas chambers has not been fully cleared up. They are the only ones which are still a problem. Thanks, in part, to my research we know the following:

a) On 8 April 1942 the economic section of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) ordered from Topf and Sons, Erfurt, crematoriums (not gas chambers) equipped with showers (Badeanstalten) and morgues (Leichenkeller). These showerbaths and morgues have been presented to the world as gas chambers. The official version is that these gas chambers were destroyed by the Germans on 17 October 1944 and rebuilt by the Russians after the war-just as the "gas chambers" of Dachau were built after the war by the Americans. Now scholars are wondering whether the Russian-built gas chambers of Auschwitz are not perhaps "Potemkin villages," as are those built by the Americans in Dachau.

b) All witnesses at Nürnberg were agreed that these installations at Auschwitz which became "gas chambers" were constructed "in the heart of winter 1942-3," which means at the earliest the end of January or the beginning of February.

c) If these installations were gas chambers, they were at least not used as such "from autumn 1943 to May 1944" (Kastner Report, which, when printed by Kindler in Germany, was edited to suppress this passage). The only question that now remains is whether they were used as gas chambers from February until autumn, 1943, and after May, 1944.

We hope this will be cleared up in the trial of Richard Baer, camp commander at Auschwitz from 10 November 1943 to 25 January 1944. It is very doubtful that the gas chambers were used in the Baer period, which is perhaps the reason that since his arrest in October, 1960, his trial has been postponed five times. He was to be tried last November, but now the trial has again been postponed until spring! When and if this trial takes place the matter of the Auschwitz "gas chambers" will, we hope, be definitely cleared up.

There are only eleven doubtful months in which perhaps people were gassed in Auschwitz. How many people could have been gassed in these eleven months, if any were gassed?

The Six Million

It has been accepted as gospel truth that the Nazis murdered six million Jews. First question: where did they find these six million Jews, since the prewar Jewish statistics (Arthur Ruppin) prove without doubt that in the territories occupied by Hitler there never were six million Jews.

Furthermore, a booklet published July, 1961, by the Institute for Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, page 18, states that 900,000 of the six million "perished" in Auschwitz. Second question: where did the other 5.1 million "perish"? Not in the gas chambers of "Greater Germany," since the official Institute for Contemporary History of Muenchen has stated that they never existed.

Perhaps at Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor or Treblinka, all situated in Poland? The only document which speaks of gas chambers in these camps is the Gerstein document. It states there were "gas chambers of 25 square meters in which 750 to 800 persons were exterminated at one time." Gerstein, however, according to the official version, hanged himself in his prison in Paris on 4 July 1945. The document he allegedly wrote was so obviously phony that it was rejected as evidence at Nürnberg on 30 January 1946, and not permitted to be read before the court.

Jewish statistics of the prewar period, compared with those of after the war, show that the number of Jews who died during the war in the camps or elsewhere was about 1 million, a large enough figure. To explain it, it is not necessary to resort either to "deliberate genocide" or to "gas chambers," since anyone who has experienced the concentration camps knows that conditions there were bad enough to account for a large number of deaths. Many were killed in the guerrilla warfare on the Eastern front and in the saturation bombings.

Everything else which Mr. Zaugg says against my books shows that his imagination is without limits and that he has great talents, not for historical investigations, but for "Wild West" tales. This is a general weakness of American journalists. They do not realize that public opinion in Europe has evolved since 1945 as more and more light has been cast on wartime events. Most of the exaggerations about the concentration camps, the neo-Nazis and the revival of German militarism are fabrications invented by the manipulators of Bolshevism to isolate Germany from its neighbors and prevent the birth of the great nation, Europe.

By believing these legends the American press played the game of the Reds and helped lead the Slavs to the gates of Hamburg-the Slavs whom Charlemagne threw back to the banks of the Vistula 1,100 years ago. Do these irresponsible publicists want the Cossack horses drinking from the Rhine and the Russian tanks parading in the Sahara? If so, they have but to continue to support the "historical verities" of the Communists.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Book Reviews

New Books Seek to Discredit 'Growing Threat' of 'Holocaust Denial'

The earlier method of opposing Holocaust Revisionism was to ignore it entirely as a scholarly, historiographical phenomenon (except for a few dismissive phrases about "flat earthers") in favor of attacking it as a political threat, branding it as "neo-Nazi," "anti-Semitic," etc. With the exception of Bradley Smith's radio talk show appearances and college newspaper advertisements, Revisionism's opponents have been able to impose an effective blackout on Revisionist challenges to the Holocaust. The result? In the United States, some 16 years after the title of Professor Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century was mistakenly reported by The New York Times in its first notice of Holocaust Revisionism, there are scores of millions who know that there is a determined movement that challenges the factuality of the alleged World-War-II genocide of the Jews, and tens of millions of Americans who, according to the latest polls, question it themselves.

Whether the growth of this opposition occurred so much in spite of the blackout of what the Holocaust Revisionists say and have written, or rather because of an increasing aversion to the spread of what one Jewish writer has called "Holocaustomania" is unclear, but obviously the blackout hasn't worked to its proponents' satisfaction. Thus, the powerful lobby which propagates (obligatory) reverence for the "Holocaust" has decided to mount an elaborate propaganda campaign against the Revisionists. This time, as the Holocausters march into the fray, some of them are proclaiming a new theme: confronting and defeating Revisionist scholarship.

Generous Help

Two of the three books here under review advertise themselves as setting off on this new demarche; the third, ADL's Hitler's Apologists, sticks unabashedly to the tried and true tactics of what might be called "McCarthyism."

Chief among these three intellectually slight works is Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, a labored exposé that has been years in the gestation (the New York Times devoted a major fanfare to Lipstadt's lucubrations on the Revisionists as far back as June 20, 1988), yet manages to give off telltale signs of desperate, last-minute suturing and low-voltage jolts of stylistic electricity, by a crew of editorial Igors in New York City.

The book that shambles forth from the Free Press (a division of Macmillan in Manhattan) is, as author Lipstadt herself acknowledges, heavily dependent on the assistance of professional character assassins from Jewish so-called "defense organizations": operatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress' Institute for Jewish Affairs in London, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center all receive thanks in the preface.

Denying the Holocaust is copyrighted by something called the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as a perquisite of which the author may have received the stylish haircut pictured on the dust jacket).

What's actually new about Lipstadt's approach? Not much, despite the author's all-but breathless intimations that she's the first researcher who has dared to look Holocaust Revisionism in the face, and despite the hosannas which have poured forth from the book review sections of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers. Although the author, proudly enthroned on something called the "Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies" at Emory University, makes much of the need to analyze the Revisionist case against the Holocaust, in sum her promised "exposure" of the Revisionists has little to do with confronting Revisionist scholarship.

Ineptitude and Deceit

While Professor Lipstadt is less than honest elsewhere in her book, she is disarmingly frank about her dogmas and purposes at the outset: "The existence of the Holocaust [is] not a matter of debate" (p. 1); Revisionists are "extremist antisemites" who "camouflage their hateful ideology" "under the guise of scholarship ..." (p. 3).

But how to expose them, other than by proclaiming that the Holocaust is beyond question (which comes perilously close to relegating it to the realm of religion) and calling the Revisionists names, particularly when she has haughtily announced her refusal to be "sucked into a debate that is no debate and an argument that is no argument"?

In fact, her promised "analysis" and "exposure" is in large measure derived from the tried-and-true methods of the ADL and its junior partners at the Wiesenthal Center and elsewhere. Lipstadt parades the same labeling and smear techniques as the slick dossiers churned out by the "watchdog groups": antisemite/neoNazi/fascist/pofessional-hatemonger/bigot/Hitlerian/Holocaust-denier. As you flip through the pages of Denying the Holocaust, the epithets all seem to run together into a single quavering wail.

Where Professor Lipstadt can't believably pin one of her slanderous labels on her subjects, or has perhaps temporarily tired of impugning their supposed motives, she is forced to attempt, as best she can, historical analysis and scholarly argument. However, she gives scant evidence of any grasp of historical knowledge or method, and more than a little indication of scholarly indolence and a timidity about confronting the masters of Holocaust Revisionism in their areas of expertise. Her analytic efforts are further vitiated by errors, big and small; omissions, deliberate or in ignorance; and distortions and misstatements, that, coming from any real scholar, can only be called deceitful. Lipstadt's ineptitude, after years of ballyhooed toil amid Revisionist writings, is only underscored by her pitiful efforts to take refuge in her own academic credentials (by the way, all the evidence indicates that is unable to read Revisionist works in the original French or German) and those of the numerous professional historian-hacks whose authority she invokes. These she brandishes, like Medusa shaking her snaky locks, at the Revisionists in hopes of petrifying these alleged amateurs. But this tactic will impress only other amateurs.

To catalogue the slanders and mistakes of Denying the Holocaust, let alone refute them, would require almost a book itself, and despite all the media trumpet blasts, this book isn't worth the effort. Still, a look at some of the more important techniques that serve Lipstadt, as well as the rest of the now sweating wardens of Holocaust orthodoxy, is perhaps of some merit.

Word Wizards

Chief among these is one surprisingly simple: a reliance on the emotive and minatory power of the Word. For Lipstadt and her fellows, words such as "antisemite" (her spelling), "neo-Nazi," "denier," "Holocaust," "memory" and the like aren't so much (if they are at all) labels for independent realities as they are weapons, first for controlling discourse, then for anathematizing opponents, and finally for striking directly at the central nervous systems of the population at large. Thanks to the Holocaust lobby's ready access to the international media, efforts by Revisionists to reverse the process by labeling the other side "Exterminationists" and the like tend to strike even sympathizers as odd, labored, and reeking of reactive, tu quoque ("you too").

Nevertheless, it is indispensable for Revisionists untiringly to confront and mercilessly to dissect the shibboleths of the word wizards: as in this book, deceptive labels are 90 percent of their case. "What is the Holocaust?" Revisionists must ask, and why does "denying" it sound so direr and more unreasonable than merely questioning whether the Germans had a policy to exterminate the Jews, resulting in the deaths of around six million of them, largely in gas chambers?

What is an "antisemite"? If the word denotes merely someone who opposes the Jews, what's wrong with using a term that says so? [note 2] (And why don't we hear more of "anti-Hamitism" and "anti-Japhetism"?)

Was Robert Faurisson correct when he suggested, in a 1989 article, that the Jewish "memory" that professional Holocausters so often invoke might more accurately be defined as the "beliefs" and "legends" of the Jews?

Historical Revisionism

For those who doubt that Lipstadt's long tussle with Holocaust revisionism is based largely on her manipulation of a handful of empty words, a more specific analysis of her use of the terms "Holocaust" and "Holocaust denial" is in order.

After decreeing that the "Holocaust" is not subject to debate, it is the author's ploy to equate the word with the facts supposed to underlie it. She approvingly quotes (p. 198) the following pontification emanating from the Duke University history department shortly after the appearance of Bradley Smith's full-page advertisement challenging several well-known tales of the Holocaust:

Sorry, profs, but that sophomoric stance wouldn't fool many college freshmen -- at least not in the days when a demonstrated ability to think critically was a prerequisite for college admission, let alone this or that professorship. In this reviewer's freshman days, students learned quickly that many alleged "major events" -- such as "the fall of the Roman Empire," "the Middle Ages," and "the Renaissance" -- are in large measure names and interpretations coined by historians based on their evaluation of a large, but still painfully limited, amount of evidence. Although perhaps various proponents of this or that historical interpretation might have welcomed anathemas aimed at their opponents, this reviewer doesn't recall any of them attempting to turn logic on its head by invoking the "reality" of the "Dorian invasion" or the "Ottonian renaissance" to validate each component of the theory, as Lipstadt and her colleagues have tried to do to save the lampshades, shrunken heads, Jewish soap bars, and spectral gas chambers attacked by Smith in his campus ads. Nor, outside of the flacks from the Holocaust lobby, has he ever encountered the cheap trick of representing a historian who doubted the applicability of the name "Dark Ages" for a period in European as arguing that the centuries in question "never happened."

Exercise in Evasion

Having conjured the "Holocaust" into existence without worrying about such inconsequential matters as the documents ordering, planning, and budgeting it, or the forensic tests establishing the murder weapons, or the autopsies showing deaths by gassing, Lip-stadt performs her next sleight-of-hand trick. This is to impose her own name for Revisionism, "denial" -- with all its shopworn Freudian implications -- on her targets. Focusing on "denial" and "deniers" as on some pathological syndrome allows her to "analyze" them without reference to the full body of Revisionist scholarship, of which she seems woefully uninformed, even after more than half a decade's study.

In fact, most of her book is an exercise in evasion of precisely that body of Revisionist findings that would seem to have made her work necessary. Conversely, an inordinate amount of Denying the Holocaust is devoted to tracing the antecedents of contemporary Holocaust Revisionist scholarship.

Her book is front-loaded with Revisionists and Revisionist arguments which have been long since been incorporated, superseded, and in some cases corrected by later Revisionists. Indeed, Lip-stadt devotes five chapters, spanning 91 pages, to the predecessors of Arthur Butz, whereas Butz and his contemporaries and successors, including Robert Faurisson, Fred Leuchter, and the Institute for Historical Review, get a measly three chapters and an appendix comprising a comparatively modest 64 pages. (It should be noted that much of this text, particularly that concerning the IHR, is rife with the sort of irrelevancies that fill the pages of ADL's "exposés": the life and times of Willis Carto and David McCalden, headlines from The Spotlight, and the like.) Other chapters virtually devoid of analysis of Revisionist argument include her Chapter One, largely devoted to lamenting an alleged tolerance for Holocaust Revisionism in the mass media (that is, agonizing that a good number of radio and television talk shows have not blacklisted revisionists), and a speedy, superficial tour of "denial" abroad. In Chapters Ten she marshals such arguments as she can to support the banning of Revisionist advertisements and articles from college newspapers in the wake of Bradley Smith's remarkably successful campaign of two years ago. Chapter Eleven, called "Watchers on the Rhine," is her attempt to chart "the future course of Holocaust denial," and to prescribe what must be done to thwart the Revisionism and an evidently looming rise of the Fourth Reich.

Paul Rassinier

Characteristic of her technique is the way she handles the work of two courageous pioneers of Revisionism, Paul Rassinier and Austin App. Each of these is accorded considerable space in Denying the Holocaust, largely to focus on flaws and errors, many of them minor, in their work.

Most readers won't know that where both men genuinely erred, Revisionists have long since corrected them. Rassinier's mistakes on Jewish population statistics, avidly cited by the author (pp. 58-62) were set right by Journal editor Mark Weber in testimony at the second (1988) trial of Ernst Zündel, a trial with which Lip-stadt should be familiar since she dwells on it at some length and has had access to the transcript. If that weren't enough, however, Weber summarized his corrective testimony in the Journal ("My Role in the Zündel Trial," Winter 1989-90, pp. 391, 415-416), and included three pages of specific corrections in an "afterword" to the IHR's most recent edition of Rassinier's key Revisionist writings, The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses (pp. 414-416).

Although Lipstadt states rather murkily that what she calls Rassinier's "use of the numbers game ... established a pattern followed by all deniers who try to prove that the death tolls are not valid" (p. 58), the knowledgeable reader searches in vain for evidence of this: she has omitted any and all mention of Walter Sanning's key book The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry; the posthumous article "How Many Jews Were Eliminated by the Nazis?" in the Spring 1983 Journal (pp. 61-81) by Professor Frank Hankins, a longtime demographer and former president of the American Sociological Society; and Swedish demographer Carl Nordling's two Journal studies, "The Jewish Establishment under Nazi Threat and Domination" Summer 1990 (pp. 195-209) and "How Many Jews Died in the German Concentration Camps," Fall 1991 (pp. 335-344).

Austin App

Similarly, Lipstadt has chosen to give Austin App an entire chapter, eighteen pages long, subtitled "The World of Immoral Equivalency," by which she means to say that App dared to compare such genuine, but comparatively unpublicized and certainly unpunished Allied atrocities as the mass expulsion of millions of Germans from their ancestral homelands, or the mass rapes carried out especially by conquering Soviet troops, to those alleged German atrocities of which we never cease to hear and for which the United States and other governments still dog innocent men, such as John Demjanjuk, to the present day.

While Dr. App, a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of this Journal from its founding until his death in 1984, deserves the highest praise for his indomitable courage, his unflagging loyalty to his German roots, and his dedication to propagating the case for the German nation and people during and after the Second World War, only a writer less than familiar with the progress of revisionist research could claim that App "played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial" (p. 85), or that "his major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial" (p. 86). In fact, a survey of the more than 50 issues of The Journal of Historical Review published to date reveals only a single article by Dr. App ("The Holocaust Put in Perspective," Vol. 1, no. 1 [Spring 1980]), an obituary tribute to him (Winter 1984, pp. 446-450), and a handful of mentions of his incisive but not always meticulous pamphlets.

It should not be necessary, by the way, to point out that Dr. App, a life-long Catholic who never wrote a word against the republican form of government its founding fathers bequeathed his native America, was by no stretch of the imagination a "fascist," as Lipstadt terms him (p. 87).

Arthur Butz

Bad as is her work on Rassinier, App, and other precursors of contemporary Holocaust Revisionism such as David Hoggan or "Richard Harwood" (Richard Verrall), Lipstadt's real inadequacies as a scholar begin to shine when at length she attempts to analyze and expose the work of Dr. Arthur R. Butz and the Revisionist scholars who have followed him.

Her attack on Professor Butz and his epoch-making Hoax of the Twentieth-Century is represent Butz as a master of trompe-l'oeil, assuming "a veneer of scholarship and the impression of seriousness and objectivity" (p. 123) to fool the unwary. To that end, she claims, he provided The Hoax with what Lipstadt calls "the hallmarks of scholarly works," that is, "the requisite myriad notes and large bibliography" (p. 124), and criticized the work of earlier Revisionists as well as "German wartime behavior" -- a ploy "that was clearly designed to disarm innocent readers and enhance Butz's aura of scholarly objectivity" (p. 124).

Lipstadt's efforts to unmask Butz's pseudo-scholarly trumpery and hidden "agenda" are vitiated by both her ineptitude and her dishonesty. She bypasses both the central issues of The Hoax and Butz's often complex argumentation to reduce its theses to caricatures. Thus, her chapter makes no reference either to Butz's key (and as yet unanswered) question as to how the mass gassings at the huge, comparatively open, and closely monitored Auschwitz complex could go unnoticed and unreported for more than two years, or to the dual interpretations of German public-health measures at Auschwitz (brilliantly summarized on page 131 of The Hoax). Instead, Lipstadt would rather dog Butz for his appearance at a meeting sponsored by Minister Louis Farrakhan, or for the fact that "his books [sic] are promoted and distributed by the Ku Klux Klan and other [sic] neo-Nazi organizations" (p. 126).

Where Lipstadt does lay hands on what Butz actually writes, she almost invariably misrepresents, misstates, or otherwise garbles his positions. Butz does not argue that "the key to perpetrating the hoax was the forging of massive numbers of documents" (p. 127). As the discerning reader will discover by checking the citation from The Hoax that Lipstadt cites here, Butz in fact wrote of "a fabrication constructed of perjury, forgery, distortion of fact and misrepresentation of documents" (Hoax, p. 173).

Lipstadt similarly badly misconstrues (or misstates) Butz's thesis on why so many postwar German defendants refused to challenge the extermination allegations. The vast majority of them did not "plead guilty" to the Holocaust, as she clearly implies (p. 130). Rather than argue (to their extreme peril in the context of the show-trial hysteria) that it hadn't taken place, the defendants usually argued that they had had nothing to do with it.

Lipstadt is either unable or unwilling to follow Butz when he argues closely. For example, she badly misrepresents his argument regarding Oswald Pohl's testimony at Nuremberg. Butz's point is that it is absurd to imagine that Pohl, the head of the SS agency (the WVHA) that supervised the construction and operation of all the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, would only have learned of the alleged exterminations through a speech of Heinrich Himmler at Posen in October 1943, as Pohl claimed (Hoax, p. 195). Lipstadt is silent regarding this claim, stating only that Pohl testified "that he had heard Himmler deliver his famous 1943 speech to the SS leaders at Posen" (p. 131). Elsewhere she cites the word "ludicrous," with which Butz characterizes Pohl's claim about his first knowledge of the supposed genocide, as evidence of Butz's dismissal of "anything that disagreed with [his] foregone conclusion and the thesis of his book" (p. 124).

This reviewer defies anyone to compare Lipstadt's criticisms of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century with what its author actually writes, both in those passages Lipstadt cites as well as the far more numerous aspects of Butz's book she has chosen to ignore, and come away convinced that the would-be confounder of the deniers has made so much as a dent in his thesis, even where it is perhaps most vulnerable.

Mistakes and Irrelevancies

Aside from the intellectual dishonesty that members of the professional Holocaust orthodoxy share (which can only grow as Revisionist researchers gain access to more evidence), Lipstadt seems to suffer from an intellectual incapacity crippling in a scholar bent upon penetrating veneers and veils of supposedly false scholarship through rigorous criticism. She excels at mistaking a point or fixing on an irrelevancy, then dwelling on it for half a page or more, as when, for example, she taxes Richard Verrall ("Harwood"), author of Did Six Million Really Die?, for quoting Hitler biographer Colin Cross to the effect that "murdering [the Jews] in a time of desperate war emergency was useless from any rational point of view" (pp. 113-114). She reproaches Verrall for the better part of a page for having tried to represent Cross as challenging the "Holocaust." Checking the passage in question (Did Six Million Really Die?, p. 20), reveals no such intent to co-opt Cross.

Then again, the fact that Revisionists have paid close attention to Exterminationist writers, and cited such authors as Raul Hilberg, Gerald Reitlinger, and J.-C. Pressac to bolster their case either by referencing otherwise unobtainable evidence or by employing the valid controversial tactic of admission against interest, brings forth an anguished yelp from our author: "They [the "deniers"] rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors' objectives (p. 111)." Well, what's sauce for the Gentile goose... but we understand perfectly, Debbie, that you and your colleagues would much prefer that we ignore your works -- and we understand why.

Omissions

Another tactic (or failing) of Denying the Holocaust, is in the matter, already adverted to, of omission -- omission of all sorts of pertinent facts, arguments, writings, personages, and attainments of Revisionist scholars. Lipstadt seems only half aware of the compass of revisionist research and publication. Her book contains no mention of such key Revisionist authors as Wilhelm Stäglich, Fritz Berg, Carlo Mattogno and Enrique Aynat. And, despite the fact that she makes use of the English translation of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory, she omits all reference to world-class Jewish historian Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, with its two crushing observations: "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" and "There is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources."

Lipstadt's understating of the achievements and credentials of Revisionists, despite their availability from the sources she cites, is too frequent to be anything but willful. James Martin, gets mention in a single footnote, which fails to mention his doctorate in history from the University of Michigan, his 25-year academic career, and his authorship of five well-received books and numerous articles: Lipstadt does credit him (p. 44) for being listed as "a contributor to the 1970 Encyclopaedia Britannica." Mark Weber, who studied history at four different universities, including Munich and Indiana University, obtaining a master's degree from the latter, is said (p. 186) only to have been "educated in a Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon."

When Lipstadt refers (p. 67) to Stephen Pinter's famous letter published in the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor (June 14, 1959), which challenged the gas chamber and extermination claims, she leaves out all reference to the fact that Pinter served as an attorney for the U.S. War Department during the postwar Dachau trials, and that he based his knowledge of the wartime treatment of the Jews on having "interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria."

Fred Leuchter

Lipstadt's noisiest evocation of the "credentials" issue comes in her assault on the findings of Fred Leuchter regarding the purported gas chambers at Auschwitz. She takes considerable pains to show that: 1) Leuchter has only a B.A. in history; 2) he is not a certified engineer; 3) a Canadian judge deemed him unqualified to "serve as an expert witness on the construction and functioning of the gas chambers" (p. 164); and he is not America's leading authority on execution gas chambers.

Lipstadt presents a melange of truth and fiction to make her case that Leuchter's analysis of the feasibility of execution gassings at Auschwitz, Majdanek and elsewhere may mislead the uninformed or the unwary, but the essential facts and elementary common sense refute her.

Leuchter's formal educational credentials easily exceed those of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, or the Wright brothers; he holds numerous patents for inventions ranging from the first electronic sextant to a color stereo helicopter mapping system to various types of execution hardware (Lipstadt omits all mention of these). Even worse, she flagrantly misstates the truth by writing that Leuchter was not allowed to testify during the Second trial of Ernst Zündel as an expert on execution gas chambers: he certainly was, as the transcript makes perfectly clear.

As to Leuchter's pre-eminence as the American expert on gas chamber design, operation and maintenance, a recent book by journalist Stephen Trombley, The Execution Protocol, makes abundantly clear that Leuchter was all that in abundance, before his career was wrecked thanks to his steadfastness in standing by the conclusions he reached in his widely-circulated 1988 Report. Lipstadt is aware of The Execution Protocol, since she reproaches it for having "resurrected" Leuchter's reputation, but she has no specific criticisms to make of its massive confirmation, coming from an author unsympathetic to capital punishment, of Leuchter's expertise and authority. (Trombley's book also throws light on how Leuchter's ambiguous position as an inventor and technician dedicated to humane execution methods, and an ambitious businessman, made him vulnerable to unfair charges from state officials that his testimony against defective and inhumane equipment and procedures was prompted merely by venality.)

In any case, Lipstadt is unable to shake the most important aspect of the Leuchter affair: that, thanks to the enterprise of Ernst Zündel and the dedication of Robert Faurisson, the first-ever expert forensic examination of whether mass homicidal gassing was feasible in the Auschwitz crematoria, and the first quantitative investigation of the physico-chemical evidence of such gassings, was conducted by a leading, professional, court-certified expert in homicidal gas chambers. Needless to say, she fails to report the existence of three subsequent reports on the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz -- carried out by a Polish forensic institute, a German chemist, and an Austrian engineer -- each of which corroborates Leuchter's 1988 report.

Jean-Claude Pressac

Aside from attempting to impugn Leuchter's credentials, Lipstadt makes a feeble effort to uphold the gas chamber myth by invoking the supposed findings and authority of Jean-Claude Pressac, the French pharmacist whose book Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers was published in 1989 by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Despite its labored attempts to substantiate the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz by revealing and discussing an unprecedented wealth of documents from Auschwitz, Pressac's book has to date received scant public notice from orthodox Holocaust scholars. It has, rather, been the Revisionists, above all in this journal, who have analyzed this and other of Pressac's writings -- to the embarrassment of the Exterminationists and to the great profit of historical truth.

Suffice it to say that Lipstadt (pp. 226-228) has merely listed (not always accurately) a few of the 39 allegedly criminal traces which Pressac claims to have discovered from documents relating to the Auschwitz crematoria: a gas-tight door here, a request for gas detectors there, an inventory listing shower heads, and so forth. Readers interested in ascertaining the perfectly banal usages of all these items are advised to turn to the Journal articles by Robert Faurisson (Spring 1991), Paul Grubach (Winter 1992-93), and Arthur Butz (May/June 1993). As for Lipstadt's own gross ignorance of the Auschwitz gas-chamber question, this reviewer is content to cite this sentence from Denying the Holocaust: "The delousing chambers were constructed in the same fashion as the homicidal gas chambers," and refer the reader to The Leuchter Report, Pressac, or any other source for blueprints and photographs he or she may choose.

Dread Portent?

Dr. Lipstadt seems to have begun unraveling in the course of her work on this book. In her preface (pp. vii-viii) she makes less than cryptic references to the growing stress she felt as she strove to confront and expose the increasingly powerful arguments of the Revisionists:

In her final chapter, entitled "Watching on the Rhine: The Future Course of Holocaust Denial," Debbie becomes completely unglued. After sniffing suspiciously at the work of such orthodox, but dismayingly skeptical, modern German historians as Ernst Nolte, who has recently called for open debate on the gas chambers, and Michael Stürmer, who seems to think that the interpretation of his country's recent past should serve purposes other than a source for Hollywood horror scripts and fundraising gimmicks for the United Jewish Appeal, Lipstadt conjures up the looming horror of a Fourth, Revisionist Reich.

The "deniers," she tells her readers, are really no different from the Ku Klux Klan, the skinheads, the Neo-Nazis: "They hate the same things -- Jews, racial minorities, and democracy -- and have the same objectives, the destruction of truth and memory." And the deniers are cleverer: they don't run around in sheets or Nazi paraphernalia, but "...attempt to project the appearance of being committed to the very values that they in truth adamantly oppose: reason, critical, rules of evidence, and historical distinction. It is this that makes Holocaust denial such a threat."

And just what does this dire threat portend? What final horror threatens Jews, racial minorities, and democracy? Here's how Lipstadt evokes (p. 218) the coming tribulation:

As a portent of the terrors to come, and as a tactic analogous to those of the deniers, Professor Lipstadt cites an attempt by one of the many Klan groupuscules to erect a cross on city property in Cincinnati during Christmas. Horrors!

She's not done yet, however. After considering (p. 219) "the most efficacious strategies for countering these attacks" (she lukewarmly opposes legal censorship because it may turn revisionists into martyrs, and advocates that the population at large be stuffed, like so many Strasbourg geese, with more Holocaust education, museums, etc.), Lipstadt ends (pp. 221-222) with a final, quavering, self-pitying wail (a wail that begs for annotation):

And with that last emetic cry, the Wicked Witch of the West (or is it the East?) dissolves into an oozing putrescence. Unwilling to confront the Revisionists, unable of answering their arguments, at best a second-rate mistress of the dossier and the exposé, she can only bequeath her formulas and her broom to the smear mongers at the defense agency.

As for Denying the Holocaust, to recall the German philologist Wilamowitz-Möllendorff's famous dismissal of a study of socialism in antiquity, "Dieses Buch existiert nicht für die Wissenschaft" ("This book doesn't exist for scholarship.") In a sane world, it would merit not a review, but an epitaph: "Here lies Deborah Lip-stadt."

Stern's Effort

Kenneth Stern, author of the American Jewish Committee's Holocaust Denial, is described therein as "Program Specialist, Anti-Semitism and Extremism" for that organization. Despite these ominous credentials, and endorsements from Deborah Lipstadt, Shelly Z. Shapiro (who tried to frame Fred Leuchter on orders from Beate Klarsfeld), and the irrepressible Mel Mermelstein, Stern's book is fairer than might be expected.

Why so? After all, his book contains many of the standard slurs and slanders: the IHR is "Carto's lie-tank" (p. 8), "Holocaust denial" is an "enterprise of professional anti-Semites" (p. 9) and "a dogma that provides ideological incentives to feel good about Jew-hatred" (p. 84). Stern relies heavily on slanted information provided by Gerry Gable, editor of the pro-Communist periodical Searchlight, Leonard Zeskind, research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal, and other Marxist flacks, and opines that "even if we do not agree with the complete agenda of the current Europe [sic] organizations that have a mission to fight fascism -- such as some of the mainstream left-wing 'antifascist' groups -- we should be more active in helping them." (p. 97)

Nevertheless, Stern takes Holocaust Revisionism seriously enough to provide nearly fifty pages of appendices with evidence -- from their own mouths and pens -- of Revisionist scholarly and polemical activity, including the full text of Brad Smith's first campus advertisement, "The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate"; a complete transcript of Montel Williams's April 30, 1992, television show devoted to Holocaust Revisionism, during which Journal editor Weber and Revisionist filmmaker David Cole easily bested a gaggle of Holocausters, including a couple of survivors; and an 18-page listing of "Holocaust-denying" books, booklets, and pamphlets, and of articles from The Journal of Historical Review that should make even the hardiest true believer shiver at the evident industry and sophistication of the Revisionists.

Like Lipstadt (in her first chapter), Stern offers a world tour of Holocaust Revisionism. His Baedeker is rather more informative than hers, for all his errors, and even this reviewer, inundated as all IHR's editors are by Revisionist news from around the globe, read it with some profit.

Stern takes a stab at refuting selected Revisionist arguments, not very successfully, since he has either dodged major questions in favor of trivial ones ("[Revisionist] Claim: That neither Churchill nor Eisenhower, in their memoirs, mention either gas chambers or a genocide program" [p. 71]), or relied on empty pronouncements from Exterminationist authority figures, such as Professor Yehuda Bauer, who confutes the laws of physics by informing us that "the incinerators at Auschwitz were built to cremate nine corpses per hour" (p. 65), or put his faith, like Lipstadt, in J.-C. Pressac.

All in all, Revisionists will likely experience a warm feeling of satisfaction when they put down Holocaust Denial: we are on the march, and Stern makes clear that he and his fellow professional anti-anti-Semites don't know how to stop us.

ADL Hatchet Job

The second offering from the Jewish "defense agencies" under review is a rather less attractive effort. Hitler's Apologists lumbers along after Lipstadt's and Stern's books, its knuckles grazing already well-worn grooves of innuendo, smear, and what used to be called "guilt by association." Compiled by a cast of professional snoops, this 86-page booklet was edited by Alan Schwartz, who was dropped from the plaintiff's list of expert witnesses after he was mercilessly grilled by Mark Lane in deposition during the second Mermelstein case.

Although the booklet's subtitle, "The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust 'Revision-ism'," would seem to indicate a programmatic confrontation with the Revisionist case, the way Hitler's Apologists is organized belies that. Most sections are titled with the names of individual Revisionists, who are pilloried for all manner of associations and linkages, motives and agendas, positions and statements, some of them dating back decades, while their formal arguments are passed over or dismissed with ritualistic slurs.

For example, Mark Weber is falsely described as "a long-time neo-Nazi" (p. 10). (Question: How long does one have to be a "neo-Nazi" before he qualifies as a "paleo-Nazi"?) Bradley Smith, who has been earlier accused of falsifying credentials -- credentials he never claimed! -- by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, is taxed for being the co-director of a "pseudo-academic enterprise, the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust" (p. 12), although Smith has never represented CODOH as being in any way academic.

Once the ADL's smear apparatus has been turned on and has sputtered to life, it takes on a demonic existence of its own, like some odd carnival amusement, ultimately repellent whatever its attraction. Amid stomach-turning odors, to the manic burbling of a cranky calliope, the centrifugal pump that is Hitler's Apologists whirls faster and faster, spewing filth and falsehood about Revisionists, great and small, into the faces of the American public. Fred Leuchter! David McCalden! Jack Wikoff! Hans Schmidt! Ernst Zündel! Pat Buchanan! Arno Mayer! Keegstra! Faurisson! Roques! Le Pen! The Germans! Faster and faster! Eastern Europe! Lithuania! The Muslims! Saddam Hussein! The Intifada!

And on and on it spins and stinks, this latest ADL hatchet job, shooting half-truths and lies, irrelevancies and mistakes, to the point where it becomes idle to track down and refute them one by one. A production like this is of a piece -- either one great truth or one great lie. The big lie of Hitler's Apologists -- that all revisionists are simply Nazis -- is wearing ever thinner. Thus the insane energy of the liars and sneaks who basted it together.

Repression and Monopoly

Each of the books under examination here calls for or tolerates continued censorship of Revisionists -- if not through judicial or police measures, then by systematically refusing Revisionists the right of the effective public forum -- media, academia, advertising, and commercial distribution. Only grudgingly conceded is the right to assail the Holocaust hoax from a soapbox in a public park.

This intolerance of debate, this relish for repression, is the reverse of the counterfeit coin whose obverse is the gas chamber lie and the six million myth. Whatever the responsibilities of the wartime propagandists and the postwar survivors, the minters of the false currency of Holocaust history cannot be excused for temporary opportunity, hot-blooded vengeance, or passing confusion. Through their jealously guarded monopoly of historical discussion of the "Holocaust," the Second World War, and ultimately the entire modern era of the West, they mean to silence all dissent, from the rantings of the most repulsive race-baiter to the researches of the most meticulous scholar. And they aim, through their hypostatized Holocaust, to raise their own filthy calumnies -- of the Nazis, the Germans, the Axis, Europe, and ultimately America and the entire West throughout its history -- to an obligatory state cult.

That is why the work of Holocaust Revisionism -- including its sometimes peckish-seeming preoccupation with the innards of what Professor James J. Martin has called "Polish potato cellars," with the efficacy of insecticides, and the meaning of half-century old invoices for light bulbs or showerheads -- must continue. To use a military analogy, it is not enough that our scouts and our reconnaissance troops have won some skirmishes, not enough that General Rassinier's airborne troops have seized a bridgehead, not enough that Field Marshal Butz's panzer army has knifed deep into enemy territory. These victories must be confirmed and consolidated through further research and new findings, while the smallest and meanest of the Holocaust lies must be rooted out of the isolated intellectual bunkers in which they lurk, then destroyed.

Today, no matter how badly beleaguered by state censorship, by physical attacks, by economic pressure, Holocaust Revisionists are on the intellectual offensive. If the books reviewed above can't be much bettered by the Holocaust Lobby, both the lie and the lobby are in danger of definitive refutation and exposure before the decade is out.

Note

This reviewer recalls reading a "scholarly" article -- author, title and source long forgotten -- on the elaborate punctilio that governs the orthography of this term so dear to anti-defamatory bigdomes. "Anti-Semite was eschewed as seeming to indicate a (possibly rational) opposition to "Semitism" and "Semites," whereas the unhyphenated, uncapitalized form points to the unconscious miasmas of unreasoned bigotry that lead "antisemites" to oppose US handouts to Israel, a Holocaust museum on every block, etc. There remain simpler Jewish souls, however, who favor the term "Jew-hater" for such creatures.

About the author

Theodore J. O'Keefe is an IHR editor. Educated at Harvard, he is the author of numerous published articles and reviews on historical and political subjects.

Reproduced gratefully from: The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

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Debunking the Genocide Myth About The Author Paul Rassinier

Debunking the Genocide Myth Part I: The Author's Experience Chapter One: Prologue

Debunking the Genocide Myth Conclusion: Six Million Exterminated Jews -- Fact or Fiction

Debunking the Genocide Myth Afterword by Mark Weber, of the Institute for Historical Review

The Myth of the Six Million -- Appendix 4 Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist BY HERBERT C. ROSEMAN

Letter to 'The Nation' PAUL RASSINIER

Debunking the Genocide Myth

About The Author

Introduction by Pierre Hofstetter

Notes

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Part I:

The Author's Experience

Chapter One: Prologue

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Conclusion: Six Million Exterminated Jews -- Fact or Fiction

Notes

Debunking the Genocide Myth

Afterword

The Myth of the Six Million -- Appendix 4

Paul Rassinier: Historical Revisionist

Machinations of Vested Interests

Letter to 'The Nation'

Genocide

Methods of Genocide

Auschwitz

The Six Million

Book Reviews

New Books Seek to Discredit 'Growing Threat' of 'Holocaust Denial'

Generous Help

Ineptitude and Deceit

Word Wizards

Historical Revisionism

Exercise in Evasion

Paul Rassinier

Austin App

Arthur Butz

Mistakes and Irrelevancies

Omissions

Fred Leuchter

Jean-Claude Pressac

Dread Portent?

Stern's Effort

ADL Hatchet Job

Repression and Monopoly

Note

About the author