Revisionism 107

In April 1995, Reinhold Elstner, a WW2 army German veteran,
poured gasoline over himself 

IN April 1995, Reinhold Elstner, a WW2 army German veteran, poured gasoline over himself and committed suicide in Munich's busy city-centre Lenbach Platz. He was a supporter of David Irving, had often written to him. He had left behind an open letter explaining the reason for his terrible action (which the cowardly German press largely ignored).

Reinhold Elstner's last letter, translated by Hans Schmidt

Germans!

In Germany, in Austria, in Switzerland, and everywhere else in the world: Please awaken! 50 years of never-ending defamation, ugly lies and the demonization of an entire people are enough,

50 years of incredible insults to former German soldiers, of blackmail that costs billions, and of "democratic" hate, are more than one can take,

50 years of judicial Zionist revenge are sufficient,

50 years of trying to create rifts between generations of Germans by criminalizing the fathers and grandfathers are too much.

It is incredible what we have to take in this anniversary year. A Niagara-like flood of lies and defamations inundates us. Since I am now 75 years of age, I cannot do much anymore but I can still seek death by self-immolation; one last deed that may act as a signal to the Germans to regain their senses. Even if through my deed only one German will awaken, and because of it will find the way to the truth, then my sacrifice will not have been in vain.

I felt I had no other choice after I realized that now, after 50 years, there seems a little hope that reason would gain the upper hand. As someone who was driven from his home after the war, I always had one hope, that that which was granted the Israelis after 2,000 years, namely the right to return to "home" would also be granted German expellees. What happened to the promise of self-determination that was promulgated in 1919, when millions of Germans were forced to live under foreign rule? To this day we have to suffer from these wrongs, and I can state that it wasn't the Germans who can be held responsible for it.

I am a Sudeten German. I had a Czech grandmother, and from the other side Czech and Jewish relatives, some of whom had been incarcerated in concentration camps like Buchenwald, Dora (Nordhausen) and Theresienstadt. I never belonged either to the Nazi party or even to any other group that was in the slightest tainted by the association with national socialism. We always had the best of relationship with our non-German kin, and, when necessary, we helped each other. During the war, our food market with bakery was responsible for the distribution of food stuffs to the French POWs and Ostarbeiter living in the town. Everyone was dealt with fairly, and this assured that at war's end our business was not plundered because the French POWs guarded it until they were repatriated to their own country. Our relatives who had been prisoners in the concentration camps came already home on the 10th of May, 1945 (two days after the hostilities had ceased0, and offered their help. Of special assistance was the Jewish uncle from Prague who in the Czech capital had seen the horrible blood bath Czech partisans had caused among the Germans left there. The horror of these cold-blooded killings could still be seen in the man's eyes, obviously a horror the likes of which this former prisoner of the Reich had not experienced during his incarceration.

I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht of the Greater German Reich, fighting, from day one on the Eastern front. To this one must add a few years of slave work as a POW in the Soviet Union. I well remember the Kristallnacht of 1938 because on that day I met a crying Jewish girl, a girl with whom I had been studying. But I was much more shocked when I saw in Russia how all churches had been desecrated, how they were used for stables and machine shops; I saw the pigs grunt, sheep bleat, machines hammering in holy places. Yet, for me the worst was when I saw churches being used as museums for atheism. And all this occurred with the active connivance of the Jews, that very small minority of which so many members were the executing goons of Stalin. Foremost amongst these people was the Kaganovich clan, seven brothers and sisters, who were such mass murderers that alleged SS-killers can be called harmless by comparison.

After I was permitted to go "home" after my discharge from Russian POW camps (what a mockery to say to go "home" to a POW who has been expelled from his ancestral homeland), I heard for the flrst time of the brutalities of the German concentration camps but at flrst nothing of any gas chambers and of the killing of human beings through the use of poison gas. On the contrary, I was told that the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Buchenwald (Dora) even had bordellos for the inmates within the confines of the camp. Then, on the occasion of the "Auschwitz trials", and not only at the Nürnberg trials, Herr Broszat of the "Institute for Modern History" stated that the famous "six million" figure is only a symbolic number. In spite of the fact that Herr Broszat had also declared that there had been no gas chambers used for the killing of human beings in any camps on German Reich soil, for years alleged gas chambers were shown to visitors at Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and the like. Lies, nothing but lies to this day.

Everything became very clear to me when I read dozens of books written by Jews and so-called anti-fascists. In addition, I was able to draw upon my own experience in Russia. I lived for two years in the hospital town of Porchov, where already in the flrst winter the danger of typhus epidemic arose, and all the hospitals and flrst-aid stations were deloused with what we called then "K.Z.Gas" (concentration camp gas), namely "Zyklon-B". There I learned how dangerous it was to handle this poison gas even though I did not belong tot the teams that defumigated the buildings. At any rate, ever since then I have had no choice but to regard all concentration camp memoirs that describe the alleged "gas chambers" as fairy tales. This may be the real reason why all concentration camp reports (by the victims, the translator) are being accepted as true under a so-called "Judicial notice" and need not to be proven.

In 1988 the German TV brought a report on Babi Yar (the ravine near Kiev in the Ukraine, the translator) where it was stated that the SS had killed 36,000 Jews by stoning them. Three years later, a Mrs. Kayser wrote a report for the newspaper "tz" in Munich stating that these Jews had been killed by shooting, and that their bodies had then been burned in the deep crevasses. Asked about it, Dr. Kayser pointed to a bookstore in Konstanz that sells the book "Shoa at Babi Yar". On the day that book arrived at my home, the German TV brought a report from Kiev telling of the findings of a Ukrainian commission: at Babi Yar where the remains of about 180,000 murdered human beings, all killed on orders of Stalin (before 1941, the translator). The Germans were not responsible at all. But everywhere in the world one can still find Babi Yar monuments blaming the Germans for the killings there. (Note by the translator: President Clinton visited Babi Yar on 10 May 1995, and spoke, in front of a menorah, of the Jews the Germans had allegedly killed there. An outright lie.)

Due to the facts as told by Herr Broszat, that we had been lied about the occurrences in a dozen concentration camps, I myself am unwilling to believe the fairy tales that are being told about the alleged happenings in the camps in Poland. I also do not believe the postwar accusations that we Germans are particularly aggressive. After all, it was Germany that kept the peace from 1871 to 1914, while England and France, the foremost democracies, conquered most of Africa and expanded their colonies in Asia. At the same America fought Spain and Mexico, and Russia battled Turkey and Japan. In these matters I consider the government of the United States particular cynical since it was that country which twice this century crossed the ocean to attack Germany and turn us towards "democracy". One must consider that this was a government whose nation eradicated the original inhabitants, and to this day treats its black population as second class citizens.

During my years I met nice and helpful Jews not only among my relatives but also as a POW in Russia. In Gorki a female Jewish professor helped me back to health when I suffered from pleurisy and severe eye problems. But I also had heard many bad things about this small minority. Did not Churchill write in the London Sunday Herald ( 8 February 1920) as follows:

"From the days of the Spartakus Weishaupt to Marx, Trotzky, Bela Khun, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldmann, there is a worldwide conspiracy busy to destroy our civilization, and to change our society on the basis of unhampered developments of ugly greed, and an impossible dream of equality of all. This conspiracy with its relentless undermining of every existing institution was able to engage a gang of unscrupulous people from the underworld of the larger cities of Europe and America to take over Russia, and make itself masters of this large empire. It is not necessary to overestimate the role which these godless Jews played in the establishment of Bolshevism."

I hope I am entitled to quote the recipient of the prestigious German Karls-Prize. [With this sentence Mr. Elstner alluded to the fact that in "free" and "democratic" Germany there are now many taboos in force, particularly in the political and historical fields. Even quoting Churchill's sentences from 1920 may land a person in jail for "inciting hate against another group", namely, the Jews. The truth of a statement is no defense. -- The translator]. In the XVIIIth Century, Samuel Johnson wrote: "I am not certain what we should fear more, a street full of soldiers who are out to plunder, or a room full of writers who are used to lie."

Considering our experience After 1918 and after 1945, we Germans ought to know what we have to fear most!

München, 25 April 1995 Reinhold Elstner

Reproduced gratefully from:  http://reportersnotebook.com/newforum/indexforum.html 

      66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust

     A Revisionist Perspective

1. What proof exists that the Nazis killed six million Jews?

None. All we have is postwar testimony, mostly of individual "survivors." This testimony is contradictory, and very few claim to have actually witnessed any "gassing." There are no contemporaneous documents or hard evidence: no mounds of ashes, no crematories capable of disposing of millions of corpses, no "human soap," no lamp shades made of human skin, and no credible demographic statistics.

2. What evidence exists that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis?

Extensive forensic, demographic, analytical and comparative evidence demonstrates the impossibility of such a figure. The widely repeated "six million" figure is an irresponsible exaggeration.

3. Did Simon Wiesenthal state in writing that "there were no extermination camps on German soil"?

Yes. The famous "Nazi hunter" wrote this in Stars and Stripes, Jan. 24, 1993. He also claimed that "gassings" of Jews took place only in Poland.

4. If Dachau was in Germany, and even Wiesenthal says that it was not an extermination camp, why do many American veterans say it was an extermination camp?

After the Allies captured Dachau, many GIs and others were led through the camp and shown a room alleged to have been a "gas chamber." The mass media widely, but falsely, continues to assert that Dachau was a "gassing" camp.

5. What about Auschwitz? Is there any proof that gas chambers were used to kill people there?

No. Auschwitz, captured by the Soviets, was modified after the war, and a room was reconstructed to look like a large "gas chamber." After America's leading expert on gas chamber construction and design, Fred Leuchter, examined this and other alleged Auschwitz gassing facilities, he stated that it was an "absurdity" to claim that they were, or could have been, used for mass executions.

6. If Auschwitz wasn't a "death camp," what was its true purpose?

It was an internment center and part of a large-scale manufacturing complex. Synthetic fuel was produced there, and its inmates were used as a workforce.

7. Who set up the first concentration camps?

During the Boer War (1899-1902), the British set up what they called "concentration camps" in South Africa to hold Afrikaner women and children. Approximately 30,000 died in these hell-holes, which were as terrible as German concentration camps of World War II.

8. How did German concentration camps differ from American "relocation" camps in which Japanese-Americans were interned during WWII?

One significant difference was that whereas the Germans interned persons on the basis of being real or suspected security threats to the war effort, the Roosevelt administration interned persons on the basis of ethnicity alone.

9. Why did the German government intern Jews in camps?

It considered Jews a threat to national security. (Jews were overwhelmingly represented in Communist subversion.) However, all suspected security risks -- not just Jews -- were in danger of internment.

10. What hostile measure did world Jewry undertake against Germany as early as 1933?

In March 1933, international Jewish organizations declared an international boycott of German goods.

11. Did the Jews "declare war" on Germany?

Yes. Newspapers around the world reported this. A front-page headline in the London Daily Express (March 24, 1933), for example, announced "Judea Declares War on Germany."

12. Was this before or after the "death camp" stories began?

This was years before the "death camp" stories, which began in 1941-1942.

13. What nation was first to practice mass civilian bombing?

Britain, in a raid on Freiburg on February 10, 1940.

14. How many "gas chambers" to kill people were there at Auschwitz?

None.

15. How many Jews were living in the areas that came under German control during the war?

Fewer than six million.

16. If the Jews of Europe were not exterminated by the Nazis, what happened to them?

After the war millions of Jews were still alive in Europe. Hundreds of thousands (perhaps as many as one and a half million) had died of all causes during the war. Others had emigrated to Palestine, the United States, and other countries. Still more Jews left Europe after the war.

17. How many Jews fled or were evacuated to deep within the Soviet Union?

More than two million fled or were evacuated by the Soviets in 1941-1942, and thus never came under German control.

18. How many Jews emigrated from Europe prior to the war, thus putting them outside of German reach?

Perhaps a million (not including those absorbed by the USSR).

19. If Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, why did the commandant, Rudolf Höss, confess that it was?

He was tortured by British military police, as one of his interrogators later admitted.

20. Is there any evidence of American, British and Soviet policy to torture German prisoners to exact "confessions" for use at the trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere?

Yes. Torture was used to produce fraudulent "evidence" for the infamous Nuremberg trials, and in other postwar "war crimes" trials.

21. How does the Holocaust story benefit Jews today?

It helps protect Jews as a group from criticism. As a kind of secular religion, it provides an emotional bond between Jews and their leaders. It is a powerful tool in Jewish money-raising campaigns, and is used to justify US aid to Israel.

22. How does it benefit the State of Israel?

It justifies the billions of dollars in "reparations" Germany has paid to Israel and many individual "survivors." It is used by the Zionist/Israeli lobby to dictate a pro-Israel American foreign policy in the Middle East, and to force American taxpayer aid to Israel, totaling billions of dollars per year.

23. How is it used by many Christian clergymen?

The Holocaust story is cited to justify the Old Testament notion of Jews as a holy and eternally persecuted "Chosen People."

24. How did it benefit the Communists?

It diverted attention from Soviet war mongering and atrocities before, during and after the Second World War.

25. How does it benefit Britain?

In much the same way it benefited the Soviet Union.

26. Is there any evidence that Hitler ordered the extermination of Europe's Jews?

No.

27. What kind of gas was used in German wartime concentration camps?

Hydrocyanic gas from "Zyklon B," a commercial pesticide that was widely used throughout Europe.

28. For what purpose was "Zyklon B" manufactured?

It was a pesticide used to fumigate clothing and buildings to kill typhus-bearing lice and other pests.

29. Was this product suitable for mass extermination?

No. If the Nazis had intended to use poison gas to exterminate people, far more efficient products were available. Zyklon is a slow-acting fumigation agent.

30. How long does it take to ventilate an area after fumigation with Zyklon B?

Normally about 20 hours. The whole procedure is very complicated and dangerous. Gas masks must be used, and only trained personnel are employed.

31. Auschwitz commandant Höss said that men would enter the "gas chambers" to remove bodies ten minutes after the victims had died. How do you explain this?

It can't be explained because had they done so they would have suffered the same fate as the "gassing" victims.

32. Höss said in his "confession" that men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled bodies out of gas chambers, ten minutes after gassing. Isn't hydrocyanic gas explosive?

Yes. The Höss confession is obviously false.

33. What was the exact procedure the Nazis allegedly used to exterminate Jews?

The stories range from dropping gas canisters into a crowded room from holes in the ceiling, to piping gas through shower heads, to "steam chambers," to "electrocution" machinery. Millions are alleged to have been killed in these ways.

34. How could a mass extermination program have been kept secret from those who were scheduled to be killed?

It couldn't have been kept secret. The extermination stories originated as wartime atrocity propaganda.

35. If Jews scheduled for execution knew the fate in store for them, why did they go along with the Germans without resisting?

They didn't fight back because they did not believe there was any intention to kill them.

36. About how many Jews died in the concentration camps?

Competent estimates range from about 300,000 to 500,000.

37. How did they die?

Mainly from recurring typhus epidemics that ravaged war-torn Europe during the war, as well as from starvation and lack of medical attention during the final months of the conflict, when virtually all road and rail transportation had been bombed out by the Allies.

38. What is typhus?

This disease always appears when many people are jammed together under unsanitary conditions. It is carried by lice that infest hair and clothes. Ironically, if the Germans had used more Zyklon B, more Jews might have survived the camps.

39. What is the difference if six million or 300,000 Jews died during the Second World War?

5,700,000.

40. Some Jewish Auschwitz survivors say they saw bodies being dumped into pits and burned there. How much fuel would have been required for this?

A great deal more than the Germans had access to, as there was a substantial fuel shortage during the war.

41. Can bodies be burned in pits?

No. It is impossible for human bodies to be totally consumed by flames in this manner because of lack of oxygen.

42. Holocaust historians claim that the Nazis were able to cremate bodies in about ten minutes. How long does it take to incinerate one body, according to professional crematory operators?

About an hour and a half, although the larger bones still remain intact.

43. Why did the German concentration camps have crematory ovens?

To dispose efficiently and sanitarily of the corpses of those who had died.

44. Given a 100-percent duty cycle of all the crematories in all the camps in German-controlled territory, what is the maximum number of corpses it would have been possible to incinerate during the entire period such crematories were in operation?

About 430,600.

45. Can a crematory oven be operated 100 percent of the time?

No. Fifty percent of the time is a generous estimate (12 hours per day). Crematory ovens have to be cleaned thoroughly and regularly when in heavy operation.

46. How much ash is left from a cremated corpse?

After the bone is all ground down, about a shoe box full.

47. If six million people had been incinerated by the Nazis, what happened to the ashes?

That remains to be "explained." Six million bodies would have produced many tons of ashes, yet there is no evidence of any large ash depositories.

48. Do Allied wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz (taken during the period when the "gas chambers" and crematoria were supposedly in full operation) show evidence of extermination?

No. In fact, these photographs do not reveal even a trace of the enormous amount of smoke that supposedly was constantly over the camp, nor do they show evidence of the "open pits" in which bodies were allegedly burned.

49. What was the main provision of the German "Nuremberg Laws" of 1935?

They forbid marriage and sexual relations between Germans and Jews, similar to laws existing in Israel today.

50. Were there any American precedents for the Nuremberg Laws?

Years before Hitler's Third Reich, most states in the USA had enacted laws prohibiting marriage between persons of different races.

51. What did the International Red Cross report with regard to the "Holocaust" question?

An official report on the visit of an IRC delegation to Auschwitz in September 1944 pointed out that internees were permitted to receive packages, and that rumors of gas chambers could not be verified.

52. What was the role of the Vatican during the time six million Jews were allegedly being exterminated?

If there had been an extermination program, the Vatican would most certainly have been in a position to know about it. But because there was none, the Vatican had no reason to speak out against it, and didn't.

53. What evidence is there that Hitler knew of an on-going Jewish extermination program?

None.

54. Did the Nazis and the Zionists collaborate?

As early as 1933, Hitler's government signed an agreement with the Zionists permitting Jews to emigrate from Germany to Palestine, taking large amounts of capital with them.

55. How did Anne Frank die?

After surviving internment in Auschwitz, she succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp, just a few weeks before the end of the war.

56. Is the Anne Frank Diary genuine?

Evidence compiled by Dr. Robert Faurisson of France establishes that the famous diary is a literary hoax.

57. What about the familiar photographs and film footage taken in the liberated German camps showing piles of emaciated corpses? Are these faked?

Photographs can be faked, but it's far easier to add a misleading caption to a photo or commentary to a piece of footage. Piles of emaciated corpses do not mean that these people were "gassed" or deliberately starved to death. Actually, these were tragic victims of raging epidemics or of starvation due to a lack of food in the camps toward the end of the war.

58. Who originated the term "genocide"?

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, in a book published in 1944.

59. Are films such as "Schindler's List" or "The Winds of War" documentaries?

No. Such films are fictional dramatizations loosely based on history. Unfortunately, all too many people accept them as accurate historical representations.

60. How many books have been published that refute aspects of the standard "Holocaust" story?

Dozens. More are in production.

61. What happened when the Institute for Historical Review offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz?

No proof was submitted as a claim on the reward, but the Institute was sued for $17 million by former Auschwitz inmate Mel Mermelstein, who claimed that the reward offer caused him to lose sleep and his business to suffer, and represented "injurious denial of established fact."

62. What about the charge that those who question the Holocaust story are merely anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi?

This is a smear designed to draw attention away from facts and honest arguments. Scholars who refute Holocaust story claims are of all persuasions and ethnic-religious backgrounds (including Jewish). There is no correlation between "Holocaust" refutation and anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism. A number of Jewish scholars openly admit the lack of evidence for key Holocaust claims.

63. What has happened to "revisionist" historians who have challenged the Holocaust story?

They have been subjected to smear campaigns, loss of academic positions, loss of pensions, destruction of their property and physical violence.

64. Has the Institute for Historical Review suffered as a result of its efforts to uphold the right of freedom of speech and academic freedom?

The IHR had been bombed three times, and was completely destroyed on July 4, 1984, in a criminal arson attack. Numerous death threats by telephone have been received. Media coverage of the IHR has been overwhelmingly hostile.

65. Why is there so little publicity for the revisionist view?

Because for political reasons the Establishment does not want any critical discussion about the facts surrounding the Holocaust story.

66. Where can I get more information about the "other side" of the Holocaust story, as well as facts concerning other aspects of World War II historical revisionism?

The Institute for Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, carries a wide variety of books, audio cassettes and video tapes on significant historical subjects. See also the Institute's Internet Web site at: http://www.ihr.org.

last updated: 12/98

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

The 'Holocaust' and the Failure of Allied and Jewish Responses: 

The Logic Of Disbelief

Over the past several years, there has emerged with increasing frequency the charge that because it failed to bomb the Germans' concentration camps, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the Holocaust. There are even those who in- sist that American officials were well aware of Hitler's crimes during World War Two, yet chose purposely not to stop them.1

Documentation made available only during the past decade, however, amply demonstrates that the volatile accusations of American indifference -- even collusion -- are unwarranted. That the Roosevelt administration (and, it is also charged, American Jews) did not act with dispatch to effect the rescue of European Jewry, shows essentially that the tales of extermination were not believed.

This study will examine what was known of allegations of a German policy of mass murder in Europe, and whether the many wartime reports about such allegations were credible. I contend that the mass murder reports were, in the main, of such a patternless character that their key elements are thrown into doubt.

Consequently, with few exceptions the information as received in the West was dismissed as atrocity propaganda. It was not treated seriously by the Allied leadership, nor by Allied intelligence; not by the American public nor the English; not by American Jewry nor even European Jews. Who could accept the fantastic allegation that Hitler would exterminate a vital manpower source late in the war, while engaged in ferocious battles on three fronts and desperate for every available hand?

Because the Allied response to the sporadic accounts of mass killings was conditioned mainly on intelligence data, it is appropriate that the study begin here. Records of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's chief wartime intelligence agency, are currently being declassified and to date show a startling paucity of data on "exterminations." By themselves the OSS documents challenge the notion that Allied leaders "knew" what was happening to the Jews under German occupation. Not only is the information given in them remarkably scant, it is often mutually contradictory and sometimes bizarre.

One document quotes a "Polish underground source" as saying during the Spring of 1944 that Auschwitz was metamorphosing from a death camp into a massive "forced labor camp."2 This was ostensibly taking place during the alleged time of greatest killing at the Birkenau facility, when 700,000 Hungarian Jews were presumably being murdered. This report directly contradicts all that has been claimed about that period since the end of the war.

Another document, distributed by OSS headquarters in Washington in March 1944, refers to Belzek, Sobibor and Treblinka as the best-known death camps. Some 20 others are mentioned as well-yet Auschwitz, sometimes called "the kingdom of death," is nowhere discussed.3 This document is significant because, as Walter Laqueur notes in his book The Terrible Secret, Auschwitz had been open since 1940. Thus, any report failing to point to Auschwitz as the Nazis' key extermination plant would be puzzling. There are, however, many reports which do not connect Auschwitz with exterminations.

In the same period, June 1944, a captured SS man told his Allied interrogators that his brother had witnessed an extermination of Jews in special "gas barracks." After the murders, the OSS report says, he told his captors that the corpses were "sticking together; it was one block of dead which could not be separated. Apparently the gas destroyed the skin and therefore the bodies melted together."4 Few other accounts, contemporaneous or postwar, have described such queer and doubtful effects.

Another story, sent in early January 1944 from the American Consulate-General in Istanbul to the State Department in Washington, discusses Jewish underground activities at length. But while prisoner-smuggling techniques and other issues are bandied about, nothing in this internal memo relates to the Nazis' killing of Jews.5

A high-ranking OSS official, William L. Langer, received a report apparently composed in August 1943. In it Auschwitz is described in some detail. Among other claims made for the camp is the immediate gassing of 98% of all Jewish arrivees, "mostly young and healthy individuals." These, the report alleges, were "gassed and then burned half-alive." Women and children were gassed, then "thrown out through an apperture and cremated on a stake." Langer was asked by a horrified subordinate to give this information "maximum publicity" in the United States. In the postwar era, of course, most of the extensive body of Holocaust lore insists that healthy persons were not killed outright, but worked to death. Since then, "stakes" have not seriously been associated with Auschwitz. (For unexplained reasons this document adds that "only a German could have perpetrated such destruction.")6

Still another late-war dispatch (made also at the supposed time of greatest killing) rejects news of gas as a murder agent, in favor of steam. At Treblinka, it says, "men and women were separated and driven into hermetically-sealed baths, in which instead of water steam was introduced through the faucets. The victims [at Treblinka] are in general killed by steam, and not by gas as had been first suspected."7

One of the most nettlesome and persistent tales, accepted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, involved the manufacture of soap from Jewish bodies. While no one was convicted of such loathesome business by the war crimes courts (nor any reliable evidence produced for it), the soap story continues to enjoy widespread currency. This despite occasional debunking by scholars like Walter Laqueur,8 and the dismissal several years ago by a German court in Flensburg of "soap recipes" presented by Holocaust survivors. (The former inmates had claimed that a "soap factory" had existed at the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany.9)

Certainly one of the most significant events bearing on the question of the Allies' knowledge of German extermination preparations or operations occurred in 1979. Owing to research by two CIA photo-analysts, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert Poirier (who said they were moved by the original NBC Network telecast of Holocaust), the National Archives and the CIA released dozens of aerial photographs taken by Allied warplanes over Auschwitz in the Spring and Fall of 1944.10

The two CIA men, who apparently worked in their spare time, said they wondered whether any actual "photo-imagery" existed of the camp's extermination annex, Birkenau. They began an exhaustive search of government photographic holdings from this period, finally locating many images of Auschwitz I (the main camp), Auschwitz III (the primary industrial sector), and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

The unusual photos, made sharper by advanced computer enhancement techniques, are often cited by critics of the U.S. government as proof of a callous disregard for the fate of the Jews. Author Konnilyn Feig, for example, contends that since the photos were available to the American military, there can be no doubt that this country "knew" about Hitler's "death camps." Feig says that the American explanation that it had inadequate information was now proven to be "a clear lie." Here, finally, were photos bearing "clear... topographical information."11 According to Feig and other contemporary writers, for the American government to have had this evidence and not concluded what today seems obvious is somehow incriminating.

These accusations, however, have the classic hallmarks of "20-20 hindsight." At the original press conference announcing the release of the photos (a conference that Feig appears to have missed), CIA analyst Brugioni said that when the photos were first viewed they indeed seemed inconsequential. There was nothing in them to suggest anything besides a conventional prison camp -- or even army camp -- of the sort which dotted the Silesian landscape at that time.l2

Brugioni also explained that when he served as a young Army Corps photo-interpreter in Europe, there were no reports in Yank, Stars and Stripes, or other publications referring to Polish camps as the locus of Nazi murder programs.13 Moreover, the two intelligence analysts (along with Robert Wolfe, curator of the National Archives' Modern Military Branch) stressed that the current means of minutely examining the photos were unavailable to the armed forces of 40 years ago.14

The real significance of the CIA/Archives photos lies not in what they show, however, but in what they fail to show. That is: evidence to sustain "ground accounts" of mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz in the Spring of 1944. Whereas the great majority of the extensive descriptions of Auschwitz speak of between ten and thirty thousand victims gassed and cremated daily at this time, in none of the hundreds of aerial photos examined by the CIA officials is found any hint of the smoke and flame said to blanket the entire Auschwitz region.15

The great and infamous "burning pits" meant to accommodate the overflow of Hungarian Jews are absent as well. Only one shallow pit -- perhaps 15 by 20 feet -- is visible in any of the photos. And even with the benefit of computer-enhancement it shows no evidence of the revolting purpose ascribed to it.

The CIA analysts and the National Archives (which in 1979 supplied for the photos such labels as "possible cremation pit," "Jews on the way to gas chambers," "gas chambers," etc.), were unable to reconcile this anomaly. A footnote accompanying the monograph observes only that the photos did not conform to "corollary ground accounts" of the purported events at Birkenau.16 In light of this, declarations by writers such as Otto Friedrich that the "remarkably clear" photos show "the essential evidence -- the gas chambers, the crematoria, the prisoners standing in line"17 are without foundation. They are, in fact, utterly ridiculous.

The keys to understanding these important photographs, are, rather, that 1) Auschwitz was not "reliably" reported by Allied authorities as a death camp until the Fall of 1944, and 2) the photos' seemingly-authoritative captions were not applied until 34 years after the war ended.

Robert Wolfe -- under whose aegis the Birkenau pictures were released by the National Archives -- is concerned lest people today use them as weapons against various government agencies or officials. Yes, he says, the U.S. did receive scattered atrocity reports, but "if you don't know or suspect something like [gassing at Auschwitz], you wouldn't look for evidence like chimneys." Besides, the custodian of the Archives' vast Modern Military Branch added, "the truth was intermingled with all sorts of rumors and stories... The U.S. didn't put [the information] together correctly."18

Wolfe, who is Jewish, says that investigations of this sort are difficult for him, but that as a professional archivist he must rely on "contemporary textual and documentary evidence." In the realm of extermination data, this evidence is largely absent. According to Wolfe, the rules governing the acceptance of mass-murder intelligence data were and are the same as those impinging on other areas.

"You have to evaluate [the information]," he said intently. "How good is the source? Where does the data come from? How does it fit in with something else?" He offered as an analogy the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. In that instance Allied commanders possessed information that, assembled in a cogent way, would have thwarted the unpleasant surprise of the Germans' sweep through American lines in Belgium.

In marked contrast to critics who insist that the Allies had obtained good information on exterminations of Jews as early as 1942, Wolfe would prefer not to characterize inaction as indifference. "The main questions involve when and to what extent, and which part of the Allies [knew about the extermination], and what could they do about it. All of that is pretty hard to boil down."19

Author Edward T. Chase is similarly aware of the need for probity about the CIA/Archives photos and other evidence. In assessing the role of former Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy in the American failure to bomb Auschwitz, Chase said: "You've got to be enormously careful... before you start throwing bricks around; you have to really look at [the question of responsibility]. You can't just impose hindsight on events that took place then."

To Chase, the information of the period -- as well as post-war "revelations" of Allied culpability for not rescuing European Jews -- "has to be examined with more responsibility."20 Chase's views reflect the experience gained from his service as a Naval Intelligence officer during World War Two.

It appears that the treatment of intelligence data received throughout the war was, in the main, distinguished by such rigorous evaluation. Even analysts in the British ENIGMA program, which decrypted nearly all German intelligence ciphers from 1942 on, possessed nothing of sufficient moment with which to frame a conclusion of a German extermination policy. Thus, although the Allies had, through the possession of a captured ENIGMA coding machine, decoded the messages of the SS, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and other organizations, a highly respected authority on the ENIGMA program has little to say on the subject of extermination. In the nearly 1000 pages of Bodyguard of Lies, Anthony Cave Brown refers to the Nazi concentration camps primarily as adjuncts of German industry.

In this seminal study, Cave Brown also cites standard intelligence sources which failed to establish a relationship between deportation and mass murder. "... [British] MI-6 and [American] OSS," he writes, "had gained considerable success discovering Hitler's secrets through conventional... channels -- the reports of spies and informants throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and in the satellite and neutral countries; the censorship of foreign mail; the interrogation of POWs."2l

A "massively-detailed" but "little read" study of Britain's wartime intelligence published in 1981, British Intelligence in the Second World War, strongly bolsters the notion that the British did not associate what appeared to be random shootings of Jews with a policy of mass murder. In fact, from 1942 on there were no references in the SS and Police decrypts to gassing. Underscoring a seeming disbelief in the reports, mention of German concentration camps in any connection became increasingly scant as the war progressed. The British did, however, "carefully log" the return of prisoners -- presumably from work details -- to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and seven other camps.22

In both the massive British intelligence study and in SS records at the National Archives there are, to be sure, field reports alluding to "executions" of Jewish partisans and civilians in Russia. "Field reports" of this sort are hardly persuasive evidence of an extermination program, however. Nor were they taken as such by analysts of the time.

Another recent book on Allied intelligence, Joseph Persico's Piercing the Reich (dealing specifically with American agent penetration of Germany), devotes only four pages to what was known of the activities of camps like Auschwitz. This is curious, inasmuch as the author's preface states that "the U.S. reaped an abundant harvest of intelligence in the operations of the wartime OSS."23 And a former OSS operative who served in Europe made this observation recently: "... the OSS learned in advance about the development of German jet aircraft, the Nazi effort to develop a nuclear weapon, secrets of the V-ls and V-2s, and the plot against Hitler."24 These were some of the most highly secret goings-on in the entire Third Reich. Had even verbal information about a projected slaughter of the Jews been gleaned by the OSS, knowledge of this ought to appear in study after study of wartime European intelligence. It does not. Rather, it is fairly clear that American agents' reports directly from Germany itself expressed no knowledge about -- or belief in -- accounts of Jewish exterminations in Europe.

As the previously-cited British study indicates, Allied planners in the U.S. and England did calculate the size of concentration camp populations through the years; the linkage between manpower capabilities and industrial output clearly interested them.

Investigating the manufacture of ersatz fuel at Auschwitz, for example, was deemed a vital mission by Allied intelligence because the hydrogenation worlds were a key to Germany's capacity for future military operations. It is virtually certain that information concerning Jews at Auschwitz -- who were employed in many of the three dozen enterprises located there -- was both obtained by American agents inside Germany and published in manpower or demographic studies.

Had the rumors of extermination, with which the camps were reportedly rife, been credible, the agents' reports ought to have conveyed shock and anxiety. This because a sudden diminution of available laborers in the camp would logically have prompted questions about their disposition. To date (although there remains much classified data on the subject) indications are that intelligence analysts viewed the waxing and waning of inmate populations as no more ominous than intra-camp transfers, which occurred on a regular basis depending upon which prisoners had which skills.25 (Auschwitz, for example, had an artillery fuse plant and cement works; Dachau a clothing factory for the Waffen SS; Neuengamme a research and development facility for V-2 missiles. All were staffed largely by Jews.)

Some students of the period, such as American University professor Allen Kraut, contradict Persico's contention that the OSS was well-informed on concentration camp matters. To Kraut, the "OSS was just a bunch of amateurs beginning to learn professional methods." Moreover, "the plight of the Jews was really a very secondary matter. What the OSS wanted was military intelligence." Yet the OSS received vast assemblages of data on the role of concentration camps in the German war effort; it in effect concluded that the evidence for charging Germany with an extermination program was insufficient.

Kraut is similarly hard-put to explain the lack of plausable extermination information on the part of the British, who largely taught America its intelligence craft. "They weren't looking for [evidence]," he contends. "They were getting some about the ex- ecutions of Jews; many times they were ignoring it. And other times they saw it, they read it, and they didn't believe it. But there's a difference between that and simply not having any information."28 It might be added that there is a difference between having an unconsolidated mass of raw intelligence about the killings of Jewish civilians, and knowing which reports were more reliable than the discredited "Belgian baby"-type allegations of the previous war, which members of the British Parliament later admitted fabricating.

It appears, then, that in the intelligence sphere the accounts of mass killings lacked credibility. Even if some analysts suspected that Germans randomly shot Jews, Slavs, Poles and others considered racially inferior by the Reich government, a quantum leap of faith was required to accept tales of Europe-wide extermination.

If the reports had at that time been accorded the respect and credibility they have acquired since the war, some attempt to warn Europe's Jews would almost certainly have been inaugurated. Yet those agencies (the OSS, MI-6, and others) privy to the most secret communications throughout the far-flung Reich failed to attempt even rudimentary leaflet campaigns for this purpose.27

Even American officials like Roswell McClelland, who found the term "deportation" pregnant with evil meaning, kept their suspicions mostly to themselves. "One wonders why... It's something I've never entirely explained to myself," McClelland says in answer to the question of why he didn't mobilize others to act on his "gut feelings."28

McClelland was stationed in Switzerland during the war as War Refugee Board (WRB) representative at the American Consulate in Bern. In addition to his work on behalf of war refugees, including Jews, he often communicated, he says, with the Switzerland-based OSS chief, Allen Dulles. McClelland is widely acclaimed for having transmitted to Washington from his post in Bern the report of two Slovakian Jewish escapees from Auschwitz. (This report was later to gain notoriety as the main evidentiary feature of the "WRB Report.") His remarks to this writer on his failure to propose the obvious -- a massive warning campaign for the Jews -- are all the more puzzling for it. They underscore that fact that although some people in rumor-choked Switzerland had a "gut" suspicion that extermination was taking place, their actual behavior did not reflect such concerns. Pressed on his inaction, McClelland offers little. "You had intimations," he recalled rather weakly. "But then you were swept on, and there was a lot of [other] work to do. [The extermination allegations] sort of faded to the background."29

There was another, earlier, report which sparked a great deal of controversy, because it appeared more authoritative and complete than the notably brief and usually unattributed fillers that the New York Times and other U.S. papers started publishing in mid-l942.30

Like Roswell McClelland, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) representative in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner, was apparently a man who "could not believe, yet did believe" information on exterminations. He made many protestations to Allied governments on the basis of a report he allegedly obtained from an anti-Nazi German industrialist in the Summer of 1942.

In that report, Riegner was quoted recently as saying, were somber warnings that Hitler had prepared for the total physical annihilation of European Jews. Authorities in the U.S. and Britain were asked to believe that the industrialist (who owned factories employing 30,000 workers) had access to the highest counsels of the German government, and was invited to a secret meeting at which the Nazi extermination plan was laid out.

In the first of several messages to American and British diplomatic representatives in Switzerland, Riegner asked that the data be transmitted to their governments and to key Jewish leaders. As is now well known, the information was dismissed as fantasy by the foreign service establishments of both countries. A typical reaction was that these allegations were merely "the opinion of one Jew in Geneva."31 As Riegner himself told the Washington Post: "No one really believed it. Not even the Jews who knew it [?]... I counted 4 million Jews as dead." (How they were counted is not indicated.) "My own World Jewish Congress office in New York -- where I sent all my reports -- published the figure of only 1.5 million."32

While he has reportedly "struggled" long and hard with the reasons his industrialist's -- and by extension, others' -- reports were suspect, Riegner concludes that the human mind simply could not accept claims of such magnitude.

There are, of course, less metaphysical reasons why Riegner's claims were viewed as little more than rumor. The most obvious is their unsubstantiated character. As Martin Gilbert made plain in his 1981 book Auschwitz and the Allies, Washington and London were "disinclined" to believe Riegner's "fantastic" tales, in part because no others had been as strikingly grandiose. Although Riegner spoke of interrogating the mysterious industrialist (it was two full days before he believed the man's accounts himself), authorities in the West remained dubious. Much of this attitude appears to have hinged on the phrase "at one blow exterminated," found in Riegner's first urgent telegram, of 8 August 1942.33 To be sure, some officials, including the American Vice-Consul in Geneva, Howard Elting, considered the 30-year-old lawyer "a serious and balanced individual," but inside the State Department skepticism prevailed.

Against Vice-Consul Elting's view that Riegner would not have asked to see him had Riegner "lacked confidence in his informant," must be weighed the questions of Elting's colleagues about the messenger. Riegner was, in fact, an entirely unknown quantity either in Foggy Bottom or in Whitehall. When the Riegner correspondence was forwarded from Switzerland to London, the response of Richard Law, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was to ask: "What do we know of Mr. Riegner?"34 After pouring over refugee files and consulting with British Zionists, the answer was: nothing. As Gilbert notes, "the Foreign Office drew a blank."35

Owing to such official reservations the Riegner report was not made public. On 17 August the U.S. Minister in Bern, Leland Harrison, was told by Washington that the report also had not been delivered -- as requested by Riegner -- to World Jewish Congress President Rabbi Stephen Wise. The reason, according to U.S. documents quoted extensively in Gilbert's book, was "the unsubstantiated nature of the information."

The American Consul in Geneva, Paul Squire, bluntly echoed this language in communicating to Riegner a week later. Until "corroboratory information" on the extermination of the Jews was received, Squire told a frustrated Riegner, the State Department was "disinclined to deliver the message in question in view of the apparently unsubstantiated character in the information that forms its main theme."

There was another reason for this disinclination. The report repeated some of the most gruesome atrocity canards of the First World War.36 Some stories retained the discredited charges intact, others dropped certain elements and replaced them with ones which may have had a plausible basis. The result was an incomprehensible hash of fact and fancy.

A typical illustration: Quoting on authority of an "anti-Nazi" German officer attached to German Army Headquarters, Riegner contended that Nazi factories were rendering Jewish bodies into fertilizer, glue and lubricants. This part of his story was similar to other dreadful tales circulating around Europe at the time -- tales whose authors were, of course, anonymous. Recalling the propaganda of the previous war, one British diplomat remarked: "The facts are quite bad enough without the addition of such an old story as the use of bodies for the manufacture of soap."37

Just as the contents of intelligence reports on the Jews' misfortunes were disjointed in extremis, so did poorly-sourced news accounts about people like Riegner help to undermine public confidence in them. The content of many stories circulating in Geneva tended, in fact, to make all "extermination" information suspect in the eyes of Allied officialdom. In addition to the "soap and glue" tales, there were even accounts alleging that Hitler sought the elimination of Jews because European food supplies were dwindling.38

Nor did reports from nations bordering on Germany or Poland give credence to charges by Riegner and his fellow messengers of the unthinkable. For example, Eduard Benes, the exiled but well-informed President of Czechoslovakia, wrote to the World Jewish Congress in late 1942 to say that Riegner's claims were false.39 This statesman hardly regarded himself as a friend of the Germans; he was, however, convinced that they had drawn up no plans to murder the Jews.

The Swiss government reacted in a similar vein, declaring (after the poorly-detailed Allied atrocity declaration of 17 December 1942) that such claims were "foreign rumor propaganda of the worst type."40 Roswell McClelland found the Swiss view reflected in an October 1942 interview with Heinrich Rothmann, head of the Swiss Federal Police. McClelland says that the extermination charges against Germany were judged patently untrue.4l This was not the case with various reports of sporadic killings. brutality, and general abuse of Jews and others by German occupation forces. Yet, as disturbing as these reports were to many people, few were prepared to extrapolate the likelihood that the extermination of a race was in the offing.

American and European Jews, too (for emotional, logical, or other reasons) largely dismissed as rumor the tales of massive killing. The connection between the two Jewish communities is important. Contrary to a popular postwar impression, the flow of information from one to the other was far from totally circumscribed.

Information on numerous topics flowed freely between Germany and neighboring Switzerland, transmitted by phone, telegrams postcard, word-of-mouth and other methods. Remarkably German censors even passed data of intelligence value from Nazi-occupied areas -- including messages about Jewish suffering. Historian Walter Laqueur describes, for example, cards sent from Jews in Europe to relatives in Allied nations. Had fear of imminent death been endemic or palpable, surely this would have been communicated. Had the extermination accounts been accepted by European Jewry in a serious way, concerted efforts to bring them to the attention of Jews everywhere would have been made.

Rather than merely one or two examples of data transmitted by the mails containing, for example, "coded" messages about exterminations to fellow Jews outside Nazi control, one would expect to find hundreds or thousands in Jewish archives. Laqueur knows of only two extant.42 This is not to say that other "coded" letters or phone-call transcripts might not exist. They would certainly be considered of immense value to historians and thus publicized, if indeed they were preserved and known.43

The foreign press stationed in Germany also succeeded in passing a great deal more information in their dispatches to "the outside world" than is generally believed. Often these accounts were uncensored, though critical of the Nazi regime. Others from countries occupied by Germany were similarly uncensored for the most part; reporters from neutral powers in these nations sent "a steady stream" of material to their home offices.44 On occasion, the foreign press coverage focused on tales of Jewish civilian deaths, sometimes even describing them as the product of extermination. Surely some people believed the tales, Gentiles as well as Jews; most did not.

On 6 June 1943, the secret Polish radio station SWIT was quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of two months before. Jewish survivors of the fighting, said SWIT, were "deported to an unknown destination." After the war it was learned that the destination was Auschwitz. By 1943 the camp had supposedly become a household word throughout occupied Europe, as the most notorious camp in the Nazi "kingdom of death."45

It is thus surprising that the SWIT report did not mention the "destination" in any context suggesting a grisly fate for the ghetto soldiers. Rumors were rife at this time, of course; SWIT broadcasters were no strangers to them. Yet the failure to mention death camps implied that captivity was the Warsaw survivors' lot. Moreover, the World Jewish Congress even omitted mention of the important uprising in the "Resistance" column of its newsletter, Jewish Comment, for 11 June l943.46

The fact that this portentous event was overlooked by a major Jewish organization (although covered in some detail by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on successive days thereafter) amply illustrates the crisis of credibility engendered by mass-murder stories. And it foreshadowed the bitter infighting and recriminations that attend the current debate on Jewish behavior during the war.

The Judenraete, or Jewish councils of the occupied towns and cities of Europe, similarly had no inkling of any German plans for the complete physical annihilation of their people. These organizations have been severely lambasted over the years by writers who have found in them "Nazi collaborationists." While this collaboration may in some instances have occurred out of fear for individuals' lives, it is only through the optic of hindsight that the elders of the Judenraete are so disparaged. Of the views of such writers as the late Hannah Arendt, National Archives official Robert Wolfe says exasperatedly: "Those poor [Judenraete] bastards. It wasn't their idea to exterminate their fellow Jews." He maintains that "hope" led them to believe in resettlement (not extermination), and that the end of the war would save them "from whatever the fate was -- resettlement or death; whatever they happened to know or believe."47

Clearly, what most of the elders and their flocks knew was less unsettling than the fears they are now criticized for not giving rein to. The councils' actions seem best reflected in examples like the following. In early 1943 the elders of Amsterdam were disturbed at the lack of postcards from two categories of Dutch deportees: the elderly and mothers with children. But the source of their concern was not the one that now leaps quickly to mind, i.e., extermination. The Amsterdam Jewish Council was, rather, angered because the Germans had broken their promise to keep Jewish families united on their journeys to various camps.48 There was what has been called "an unbridgeable gulf" between what was ultimately concluded about the fate of the deported Jews, and the remarkable dearth of information as to where this killing was taking place. It bears repeating that the great majority of Jewish officials did not mentally associate trains with gas chambers.49

One highly-respected elder, Berlin Rabbi Leo Baeck, reportedly rejected as rumor claims of mass murder eight months into 1943. He had been told of large-scale gassing at Auschwitz by a fellow inmate at Theresienstadt camp, and decided against informing the camp elders' council about it. "... this death was not certain at all," he reasoned. "... There was selection for slave labor; perhaps not all transports went to Auschwitz. So I came to the grave decision to tell no one."50 Why Baeck's informant did not then himself communicate this urgent information to everyone, may never be known.

French Jewry apparently refused to believe in the deportation-means-death theory until the end of the war. The increasing reports of the putative fate of Europe's Jews were generally chalked up to British propaganda; few paid any attention. It was not merely the blasé rejection of the genocide information as propaganda that led the French Jews to their conclusions; its disjointed character made rejection a virtual certainty. And so it went throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The French, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Hungarian and other Jews behaved in a manner that bespoke disbelief in the fantastic gossip of the time.

The most dramatic evidence -- even proof -- that the claims were generally dismissed, however, is the simple fact that throughout the war Jews passively boarded the "resettlement" trains. Certainly there were cases of panic, and the odd suicide -- but there was little resistance to speak of. Roswell McClelland recalls having a "gut knowledge" that the Jews of France -- some of whom he aided after they had fled the war zone in 194 -- would be murdered. Yet he confined expressions of his fears to a 10-minute chat with the Vichy President, Pierre Laval. Laval told the American relief worker that he was a victim of "atrocity propaganda"; no such killings were taking place.5l Granted that Laval was not the most authoritative source, his remarks nevertheless could only have reinforced McClelland's own experience. Resistance by French Jews? "There wasn't any, besides some infrequent hysteria," he agrees.52 Instead, entire Jewish populations of cities, towns and hamlets throughout Europe, numbering in the millions, grudgingly accepted the journey to "labor assignment in the East."

Jewish organizations in America and in other Allied nations betrayed a similar disinclination to honor the stories emanating from "the old country." Yes, most people had seen the press reports of the cruelties being inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis, and yes, the word from relatives under occupation confirmed that conditions for the Jews were harsh. Nonetheless, at no time did American or British Jews mount an all-out, sustained, unified mobilization for rescue or even protest.53 In view of this lack of visible attempts on the part of Jewish leaders themselves, it seems tendentious now to heap blame on British or American statesmen for "complacency."

The concern over exaggerations was by no means limited to suspicious officials in the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office, however. Such was the wide and wild variety of extermination stories from occupied Europe that even the Zionist press often warned against "padding" them. Thus, while the organ of the World Zionist movement, Ha'olem, published up to June 1942 no news concerning Nazi massacres, it did contain a feature by a Polish Jewish leader claiming that the propaganda uses of Jewish suffering had been discovered and the truth "actually exaggerated two-fold and more." (This, and the following citations quoting Jewish newspapers Ha'olem, Davar, and Hatzofe are from Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, pp. 184-85.)

Another Hebrew-language newspaper, Davar, cautioned all of its reporters (and readers) that great care should be taken in evaluating tales of, for example, soldiers returning from the front. Some people had accepted claims in the Soviet Army tabloid, Red Star, that most of those killed by the Germans at Babi Yar (Kiev) were Jews. Laqueur writes that Davar admonished readers not to accept such reports because the Soviet paper had not adequately supported its claims.

Even the information from Warsaw Ghetto leader Schmuel Zygelboim (whose report constituted key evidence of extermination after the war) was discredited when it appeared. Another Hebrew paper, Hatzofe, commented about Zygelboim: "The irresponsible informants... absorb every rumor, they desperately look for every piece of bad news, every enormous figure and present it in a way that makes the blood curdle in one's veins." This organ scolded careless correspondents and informants, comparing their inaccurate stories to those about the Palestine riots of 1936-39. These, the paper recalled "were spread all over the world and... were so much exaggerated." (In the earlier case, Zionist press accounts dealt falsely with the degree of Arab violence towards the increasing numbers of Jewish refugees in Palestine.)54

Perhaps more than any single document, the detailed physical description of Auschwitz given in the War Refugee Board [WRB] Report convinced some that the rumors of extermination were based on fact. The information, carried by two young Slovakian Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, was published by the U.S. War Refugee Board in November 1944. The late date is significant for the purposes of this study. The Roosevelt administration, reacting to the two Slovakian Jews' report as it had to earlier data alleging a Nazi extermination campaign, "sat on" the Auschwitz news for four months before authorizing the WRB to release it.55

Again the believability issue had surfaced. While more detailed than previous questionable reports, this one by escapees Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba contained similar data. One element, however, distinguished it: for the first time Auschwitz was mentioned primarily as an "extermination camp." The introduction of this new term -- new at least in connection with "genocide" -- probably undergirded the widespread suspicions among Allied leaders. When the Auschwitz claims reached Washington via OSS London representative Arthur Goldberg, officials at the State Department remained unimpressed. Remember, one said privately: "... stuff like this has been coming out of Bern since 1942... this is a Jew telling about other Jews."56

Although some Jews may have begun to accept the claims by this time (having read similar material in the past), Jewish organizations in Hungary apparently steadfastly rejected them. Instead of a dramatic rescue plan for Jewish camp inmates, a laborious barter arrangement was established. Gilbert describes in some detail the talks between SS-Standartenführer Adolf Eichmann and Hungarian Zionist authorities, in which Eichmann offered Jews their freedom in exchange for food, trucks and other commodities needed by the struggling German military.57

As impressive a document as the Vrba/Wetzler report is supposed to have been, the desperate warnings it contained about the endangered Hungarian Jews were somehow shunted aside in favor of an inherently time-consuming approach. To this day, Vrba is said to be convinced that had the facts brought to Bratislava been circulated immediately throughout Hungary, many of the 450,000 Jews scheduled for deportation would have resisted, evaded or otherwise obstructed their transfer to concen- tration camps. As it happened, the two young Jewish messengers sparked the same lukewarm response as had Gerhard Riegner.

Some people, however, still do not accept the logical notion that masses of panicked Jews in the middle of a war could have wrought havoc among the Nazi authorities. Among these are former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, National Archives curator Robert Wolfe, and Holocaust scholar David Weinberg. The first two argue that any resistance to the Germans would have been futile, and that the Jews were conscious of their fate.

Weinberg (a member of an interdisciplinary Holocaust research team) agrees that awareness of impending doom was widespread among the deportees, but he describes a kind of "moral resistance." It was "not necessarily a passive acceptance" that the trains' occupants expressed, says Weinberg, but "a pattern of resistance that manifested itself in a commitment to Jewish identity and a will to survive as witnesses to Nazi brutality." This explanation is untenable, however, if only because of the em- phatically "survivalist"mentality evolved in the Jews through centuries of bitter experience. How Weinberg expected the doomed Jews to have "survived as witnesses" -- if they believed they were to die -- is nowhere explained in his writings about the behavior of Jewish prisoners.58

One final report on the Jews' response to information about mass killings deserves examination. It is one which, considering its background and sponsors, seems surprisingly to have been quoted only rarely in the post-war period. The Displacement of Population in Europe, published in late 1943 by the International Labor office in Montreal, contains heavily annotated data on the far-ranging movements of civilians during the war. But despite having been prepared and sanctioned by an impressive coalition of Jewish organizations, the Red Cross, and others concerned with refugee work, Displacement echoes the Nazi line on deportation.59 The rule, this 100-page document found, was that following concentration in ghettos, European Jews (along with other civilians) were transferred from their homes to make room for "repatriated. Germans."

"At the same time, however," the report continues, "another factor, perceptible since the end of 1940 and now assuming growing importance, is strongly operating in a contradictory direction -- namely, the needs of the German war economy. As a result, Germany's Jewish policy may be described as a compromise between the extermination of the Jews and their utilization in the war economy." It is difficult to understand whether the term "extermination" in this context refers to physical murder, or to the elimination of all vestiges of Jewish unity and cultural heritage.60 But because the report proceeds at length concerning the manner in which Jews were being forced to labor for Germany (and only rarely refers to "extermination" in other contexts) it seems clear that many Jewish organizations accepted the Nazis' explanation of the word "deportation." In addition to the surprising and conspicuous absence from the population report of the "extermination camp" category from its list of labor and other camps, there is the interesting observation that Jews were "permitted to return home" following a day's work.61

There is, certainly, a complicated matrix of elements involved in the attitudes of the Allied governments accused of failure to destroy the Nazi "extermination" camps. Some relate to concerns that heavy rescue efforts on behalf of Jews would be construed as preferential treatment for their Jewish civilians by nations seeking help from the major powers. A related issue was apparently the belief that responding to the sporadic pressures from Jewish leaders would make the conflict appear to be a "Jewish war," causing latent anti-Semitism to rise in the U.S. and Britain and playing into the hands of Nazi propagandists. Another element involves the wisdom of diverting military resources for humanitarian purposes.

But such concerns -- now the subjects of many books and articles -- are dependent upon, and rightly subordinated to, the question of what was known factually, and believed, about Nazi atrocities. Highly-charged debate over questions like the Allied failure to bomb Auschwitz becomes moot when viewed in light of the absence of evidence supporting allegations of mass murder.

Whether or not greater rescue efforts by the Allies or Western Jewish groups could have prevented Jewish deaths is highly speculative. What is far clearer and, I believe, amply demonstrated by the foregoing, is that neither the Allied powers nor world Jewry had adequate knowledge from which convincingly to argue a case that the extermination of the Jews was occurring.

The "bottom line," perhaps, is this: with the Goldberg Commission (to investigate Jewish behavior during the war) now -- Summer 1984 -- aswirl in charge and countercharge -- accusations about who helped and who did not, who had the resources and who did not, who "knew" about the atrocities and kept silent, and so on ad infinitum -- it is unjust for the seemingly growing numbers of Jewish leaders now to accuse the Allied governments of indifference. What appears to be taking place is a dangerous scapegoating, aided by an entirely misplaced and inappropriate guilt among those Gentile leaders who associate with this school of thought. Among these are President Ronald Reagan, Vice-President George Bush, and other government officials endorsing the goals of the semi-official "President's Commission on the Holocaust."

Because the fruit of the Commission's work will be the opening of a "Holocaust Museum" in Washington, in which Allied "indifference" will reportedly be highlighted, the Mea culpas of present-day administration figures have the effect of aligning them with only one (albeit the loudest) faction in a dispute that has yet to be resolved.

It is hoped that this study may help to illuminate those darker corners of the dispute that some have preferred to shun.

Notes

Full References for Sources Cited in the Notes Are Given in the Bibliography

1. Washington Post (19 May 1983), p. B1. Columnist Richard Cohen called "a disgrace" the conferring of an honorary degree by Harvard University upon John McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt). Cohen, like other writers of late, finds fault with the decision by the Allies not to bomb Auschwitz. McCloy himself has said that the decision was not his to make. The Washington Times of 8 April 1983 (p.2-B) quotes the President of the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors: "Why wasn't the world telling what was happening to [European Jews]?... These are the questions, not why did we go like sheep." In Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, historian Konnilyn Feig cites the "extensive topographical information" in the aerial photos of Auschwitz in 1978 as proof that the Allies "knew" what was occurring there; in an interview with this writer Arthur Goldberg claimed bluntly that "the Allied governments... did not exercise... these powers... of deterrence... to the fullest. This is to their everlasting shame." Yet Goldberg (with the OSS Labor Section in London during the war, and currently Chairman of the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust) concedes that "there was great difficulty... to accept what was going on." One reason cited: the Belgian-babies-being-eaten-by-the-Germans falsehoods of the First World War.
2. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Record Group RG 226, National Archives and Records Service, Washington D.C. Document Number 81854-C, June 13, 1944.
3. Ibid., Doc. 61701, September 27, 1944.
4. Ibid., Doc. 80227, June 1, 1944.
5. Ibid., Doc. 56166, January 8, 1944.
6. Ibid., Doc. 66059, August 12, 1943.
7. Ibid., Doc. 67231, April 13, 1944.
8. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's Final Solution, p. 82. The soap story was very reminiscent of stories which surfaced in the previous conflict, and was equally suspect in the minds of the (by-then) somewhat more sophisticated public in America and abroad. In the "war to end all wars," it was recalled, Germany -- so it had been said by Allied propagandists -- established "corpse factories" for rendering civilians into various lubricants, glue, and so forth. The ever-popular soap allegation was freely repeated at Washington's 1983 gathering of Holocaust survivors from around the world.
9. Erich Kern, Meineid Gegen Deutschland, p. 152-63.
10. Dino A. Brugioni and Robert Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz/Birkenau Extermination Complex.
11. Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, p. 368.
12. See Gilbert, generally, and press conference cited below.
13. Press conference, National Archives, Washington, D.C., 23 February 1979.
14. Ibid., and author's interview with Robert Wolfe, April 1983, on the intelligence value of the photos: "That was 1978, and nobody had ever looked at those things since the war. And when they looked at them during the war... they had no idea that Birkenau was a murder mill... How good was the [information on extermination] being evaluated? After all, it was coming from behind enemy lines."
15. Brugioni and Poirier, p. 11
16. Ibid., note p. 11.
17. Otto Friedrich, "The Kingdom of Auschwitz," Atlantic (September 1981), p. 54.
18. Author's interview with Robert Wolfe.
19. Ibid.
20. Author's interview with Edward T. Chase, May 1983. Chase said that four factors "conspired to ruin" the Jews' case for sparking Allied rescue and bombing efforts: 1) Roosevelt's "lack of imagination"; 2) "the degree of divisiveness and hostility among the American Jewish groups themselves... and between upper-class German Jews and the Russian and lower-class Jews," which was "immense"; 3) the [related] impatience this squabbling caused among the non-Jews and State Department and other officials, who "wondered who the hell they were going to deal with"; and 4) the question of "what's true, what's false about the extermination stories. "
21. Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, p. 5. Cave Brown also makes an interesting observation on the uses by modern nations in wartime of what is generally termed "black propaganda." Quoting Sir Garnet Wolseley, former Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, in his 1869 Soldier's Handbook: "We are brought up to feel it a disgrace ever to succeed by falsehood... that honesty is the best policy... These pretty little sentiments do well for a child's copybook, but a man who acts on them had better be prepared to sheathe his sword forever." The Allies in both world wars certainly did heed these words on occasion, fabricating some data about Nazi atrocities to discredit the Germans and to encourage greater efforts against the "barbaric enemy." Such propaganda has become a standard fixture of modern warfare, on all sides.
22. "British Intelligence and the Holocaust," Baltimore Jewish Week (15 April 1983), "News" section, p. 30, quoting F. H. Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War.
23. Joseph Persico, Piercing the Reich, p. xi.
24. Richard Dunlop, "The Wartime OSS," American Legion (June 1984), p. 15.
25. In The Terrible Secret (p. 86), Laqueur claims that "studies about what, if anything, was produced at Auschwitz ... were probably undertaken [by Allied intelligences but they have not been declassified." While it is true that some records remain classified -- involving as they do intelligence sources and methods -- a large body of material on Auschwitz industries has been, or is in the process of being, declassified. See, for example, OSS RG 226 at the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives, and archivist John Taylor. Some 36 sub-camps at Auschwitz produced goods for the German war machine as diverse as cement and electrical fuses.
26. Author's interview with Professor Allen Kraut, May 1983. Kraut is co-author of a work-in-progress entitled American Refugee Policy, 1933-1945.
27. Ibid., and Laqueur, p. 85. Laqueur makes the valuable observation that highly-classified Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SS Security Service or "SD") codes could be read in London by late 1941, thanks to British Intelligence's acquisition of a German ENIGMA coding machine. Although much in the ENIGMA files remains classified, what is presently known (from Anthony Cave Brown and others) makes patently evident that even in the covert communications of those German agencies most often associated with extermination of the Jews, the subject of Jewish killings rarely arises.
28. Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983. McClelland acted as the WRP representative in Switzerland from 1942 on. From 1940 until that time he and his Quaker wife travelled through unoccupied France aiding war refugees.
29. Ibid. Laqueur (p. 99) says that OSS spy-master Allen Dulles was "profoundly shocked" at the report of the two Auschwitz escapees in 1944, saying: "one has to do something immediately." What Laqueur fails to explain is why Dulles should have expressed surprise at the information, considering that he occupied the best listening post in Europe, had an efficient and elaborate agent network which extended across Europe, and regularly received vital intelligence from such high-ranking anti-Nazi German leaders as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (head of the Abwehr, or military intelligence). Laqueur suspects that such professionals as Dulles may have inhabited a twilight zone "between knowing and not knowing" the truth about the Holocaust, or knew "and kept their knowledge to themselves." Dulles, whether or not his "shock" was genuine (it may more likely have been affected for the benefit of the British newsman who brought him the Auschwitz report), confined his only known reaction to writing a cable to the State Department the next day.
30. A selection of items from the New York Times from 1943 reflects the low order of priority assigned to charges of extermination by America's "newspaper of record" -- despite the magnitude of the charges. Note the page numbers: 14 February, p. 37: "Mass executions of Jews in Poland on an accelerated tempo was reported by [European Jewish leaders]... In one place 6000 Jews are killed daily, according to reports"; 16 February, p. 7: "All the aged and feeble [from Czestachowa] Poland] were sent to Rawa-Russka, in Galicia, for execution by the Nazis, sources inside Poland said"; 10 March, p. 10: "40 thousand persons listened and watched ... last night to two performances of 'We Shall Never Die,' a dramatic mass memorial to the two million Jews killed in Europe... The narrator said, 'There will be no more Jews left in Europe for representation when peace comes. The four million left to be killed are being killed, according to plan' " ; 20 April, p. 11: "Two million Jews have been wiped out since the Nazis began their march through Europe in 1939 and five million more are in immediate danger of execution ... The report said lethal gas and shooting are among the methods being used to exterminate the Jews."
31. Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. The Devil's Chemists, pp. 184, 188.
32. "The Nazi Secret No One Believed," Washington Post (5 February 1983), pp. C-1, C-4.
33. Arthur B. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, p. 57. Riegner's telegram read: "Received alarming report stating that, in Führer's headquarter, a plan has been discussed and is under consideration, according to which all Jews ... numbering 3 1/2 million to 4 million should be ... at one blow exterminated ... Action reported planned for autumn. Methods under discussion include prussic acid."
34. Washington Post (5 February 1983) p. C-4.
35. Gilbert, pp. 57-59.
36. Ibid., p. 57, and Morse, p. 4.
37. Laqueur, p. 82, quoting Frank Roberts, Central Department official in the British Foreign Ministry.
38. Ibid., p. 98. Also expressing an incredulity that seemed widespread was the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson. Johnson had heard a story from a "German eyewitness" about a document alleging that of 450,000 Jews in Warsaw only 50,000 remained. Although he sent the report on to his superiors in Washington in April 1943, he noted that "so fantastic is the story... that I hesitate to make it the subject of an official report." Bernard Wasserstein, in Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1945, pp. 295-96, delves into very similar attitudes of British government officials toward the reports. He quotes a member of the Propaganda Directorate who said after the war that "Exaggeration, excitement, threats and extravagance in all forms were avoided." Concerning the Foreign Office's consideration of further declarations against German mass killings of Jews and others, similar to a previous declaration of December 1942 (in which Jews were not singled out as victims), Wasserstein explains that "officials agreed that evidence for the use of gas chambers was untrustworthy and inconclusive." The Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, moreover, commented irritatably: "The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up."
39. Laqueur, pp. 162-64.
40. Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, p. 229.
41. Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
42. Laqueur, pp. 130-31.
43. Gilbert, p. 340. Between May 1942 and June 1944, Gilbert notes, almost none of the messages reaching the West referred to Auschwitz as the destination of Jewish deportees or as a killing center. "Nor had Auschwitz made any impression on those who were building what they believed to be an increasingly comprehensive picture of the fate of the Jews." Bauer (note p. 325) and Gilbert (p. 121) both indicate that Jewish records confirm what is suggested by the postcards cited by Laqueur. Jewish organizations in Europe were "diligent record-keepers," yet despite what Bauer says is a good amount of documentation that survived the war, there is "an absence of vital [i.e., extermination-related] subjects from the records." Gerhard Riegner, whose report from the anonymous German industrialist made believers of some (since the man supposedly had access to the killing chemicals), strangely mentioned only "eastern camps" in his reports. Had his informant truly been aware of any "secret talks" at Hitler's headquarters -- or actually attended them, as Riegner claims -- surely Auschwitz would have received high priority. Further straining the credibility of such stories is the fact, noted by Laqueur, for example (pp. 22-25), that notwithstanding Auschwitz's top-secret status, any serious suspicions would have spread quickly. This, he says, is because "Auschwitz inmates were dispersed all over Silesia, and... met with thousands of people. Hundreds of civilian employees worked at Auschwitz, and journalists travelled regularly in the Government-General (Poland) and were bound to hear." Obviously, what was heard was written off as propaganda or gross exaggeration.
44. Laqueur, p. 215.
45. Jewish Week, Washington, D.C. (7-13 April 1983), p. 10.
46. Ibid.
47. Author's interview with Robert Wolfe, April 1983.
48. Gilbert, p. 121.
49. If the Jews in close proximity to the Germans failed to appreciate an ominous "deportation-equals-extermination" formulation, the Allied leadership thousands of miles away can hardly be faulted for not seeing the connection.
50. Laqueur, p. 148; Bauer, pp. 56, 58. Bolstering Leo Baeck's essentially "upbeat" view is the fact that there were many deportations from Theresienstadt; apparently no credible information existed there to alter the venerated rabbi's position.
51. Author's interview with Roswell McClelland, April 1983.
52. Ibid.
53. Gilbert, p. 5.
54. Laqueur, pp. 184-85.
55. Allied officials can only have wondered why they did not hear earlier about the "extermination" activities of Auschwitz. My own conclusions are manifest.
56. DuBois, pp. 184-88.
57. Gilbert, pp. 204-05.
58. David Weinberg, "The Holocaust in Historical Perspective," in Byron L. Sherwin and Susan G. Ament (eds.), Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey, pp. 61-62. After speaking of the "heroic resistance" in the Treblinka concentration camp and the Warsaw Ghetto, Weinberg concedes that "the overwhelming majority of Jews did not actively resist their slaughter." That is presumably because "it was impossible for a powerless and unarmed people to mount an effective defense against the most powerful military and political force in Europe." Aside from the fact that Jews were not entirely "unarmed" (and, with stolen and airdropped arms, engaged the Germans in battle much as the Afghan "freedom fighters" do against the Soviets today), Weinberg's logic is open to question. If the annihilation of Europe's Jews was the certainty that he sees 40 years later, uprisings like the one in Warsaw should have attained a far greater fury and been more numerous than they were. Jews have no lesser instinctive desire to live than do other peoples. The scale of their resistance actions against the Germans occurred in direct proportion to their fears.
59. Eugene M. Kulischer, The Displacement of Population in Europe. A partial list of contributors to the report: The American Joint Distribution Committee, the American National Red Cross, the American Jewish Committee Research Institute, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the Board of Economic Warfare (Washington, D.C.), the Central and Eastern European Planning Board (New York), the Office of Population Research (Princeton University).
60. Bernard Wasserstein, "Jewish Silence," Midstream (August-September 1980), p. 13. Wasserstein quotes Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in a May 1940 letter to aide Meyer Weisgal: "European Jewry, with very few exceptions, has been practically blotted out." The fact that the term "blotted out" is as strongly connotative of physical murder as "extermination" illustrates the problems that arise from rhetorical license and faulty translation. Few, certainly, would argue that most German Jews before or during the early period of the war -- to say nothing of Jews in Eastern Europe -- were overcome with a foreboding that tragedy would befall them several years later. Weizmann's declaration is, therefore, both inflammatory and grossly misleading. In 1940, the European Jewish community was intact and its members quite alive.
61. Kulischer, pp. 109-110.

Bibliography

Author's Interviews

Edward T. Chase, May 1983.

Arthur Goldberg, June 1983.

Allen Kraut, May 1983.

Roswell McClelland, April 1983.

Robert Wolfe, April 1983.

Books

Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust. Chicago: Wayne State University Press, 1979.

Brenner, Leni. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983.

Cave Brown, Anthony. Bodyguard of Lies. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

DuBois, Josiah E., Jr. The Devil's Chemists. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.

Feig, Konnilyn G. Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1981.

Gilbert, Martin. Auschwitz and the Allies. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1981.

Grunberger, Richard. The Twelve-Year Reich. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971.

Hinsley, F.H.; Thomas, E.E.; Gransom, C.F.; and Knight, R.C. British Intelligence in the Second World War. London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1979, Vol. II (1981), Vol. III (1984).

Kern, Erich. Meineid gegen Deutschland. Preuss-Oldendorf, W. Germany: Verlag K.W. Schutze, 1971.

Kulischer, Eugene M. The Displacement of Population in Europe. Montreal: International Labor Office, 1943.

Laqueur, Walter. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's 'Final Solution.' London: Penguin Books, 1980.

Morse, Arthur B. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York: Random House, 1968.

Persicos Joseph. Piercing the Reich. New York: Viking, 1979.

Wasserstein, Bernard. Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1979.

Weinberg, David. "The Holocaust in Historical Perspective," in Byron L. Sherwin and Susan G. Ament (eds.), Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey. Chicago and New York: Impact Press, 1979.

Yad Vashem Institute (ed.). Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1977.

Other

"British Intelligence and the Holocaust." Baltimore Jewish Week (15 April 1983), "News" section, p. 30.

Brugioni, Dino A., and Poirier, Robert. The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz/Birkenau Extermination Complex [monograph]. Washington D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979.

Cohen, Richard. "John J. McCloy and Harvard." Washington Post (19 May 1983), p. B-1.

Dunlop, Richard. "The Wartime OSS." American Legion (June 1984), p. 15.

Friedrich, Otto. "The Kingdom of Auschwitz." Atlantic (September 1981), pp. 30-60.

Jewish Week [Washington D.C.l (7-13 April 1983), p. 10.

"The Nazi Secret No One Believed." Washington Post (5 February 1983), pp. C-1, C-4.

New York Times: (14 February 1943), p. 37; (16 February 1943), p. 7; (10 March 1943), p. 10; (20 April 1943), p. 11.

"Washington Hosts Holocaust Survivors' Gathering." Washington Times (8 April 1983), p. 2-B.

Wasserstein, Bernard. "Jewish Silence." Midstream (August-September 1980), p. 13.

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

'Holocaust Deception' Makes Waves in Turkey

A new revisionist book in Turkey has been receiving both warm praise and sharp criticism. Published in Istanbul, Soykirim Yalani ("Holocaust Deception") is the first book-length dissident study of the Holocaust issue to appear in the nation of some 64 million people.

The handsomely produced 285-page softcover work, subtitled "The Secret History of the Zionist-Nazi Collaboration and the True Story of the 'Jewish Holocaust'," is an attractively laid out volume, with numerous photographs, nine pages of source reference notes, an eight-page bibliography, and a good index. A second edition, with an English-language supplement, is scheduled for publication soon.

The book has received praise from Turkish newspapers affiliated with the country's Islamist Welfare Party, whose leader is the country's prime minister. At the same time, "Holocaust Deception" has come under fire from pro-Zionist sources. The author, who wrote the book under the pen name of Harun Yahya, has brought a defamation suit against a journalist who denounced "Holocaust Deception" as "dirty propaganda." His lawyer points out that this serious study is based on extensive research and more than 100 documents in four languages.

The book's first section explores in detail the little-known story of collaboration between Zionists and Third Reich Germany, relying in part on an article on this subject in the June-August 1993 issue of this Journal.

Holocaust deception and fraud is the focus of the book's second section, which relies to a considerable extent on books and other material put out by the Institute for Historical Review, including the IHR Journal. This section traces the development and impact of Holocaust revisionism, showing how revisionist scholars have succeeded in debunking numerous Holocaust claims. Accompanying this detailed survey of revisionist scholarship are photographs of such key personalities as Henri Roques, Fred Leuchter, Germar Rudolf, Arthur Butz, David Irving and Robert Faurisson.

The extensive efforts by Zionist groups, both legal and extra-legal, to suppress revisionism are also detailed. For example, readers are told how the large-circulation Japanese magazine Marco Polo was shut down in early 1995 because it had published an article questioning aspects of the Holocaust extermination story. Photographs in this section show Dr. Faurisson in his hospital bed following the nearly fatal attack against him in September 1989, and the devastated IHR offices in the aftermath of the July 1984 arson attack.

Zionism's "ingathering of the exiles" efforts is the focus of the book's third section, which details the dirty tricks and underhanded measures used by Israeli officials to pressure diaspora Jews into emigrating to Israel.

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

12:33 2002-02-01

REVISIONISTS OF THE WORLD HELD A UNIQUE FORUM IN MOSCOW

On the eve of the World Economic Forum that is to open in New York soon, an international conference for global problems of the world history was held in the Moscow social humanitarian academy (January 26-27). The event remained practically unnoticed in Russia, despite the forum’s uniqueness and high-level organization. The international conference was organized by the founders of Barnes Review US magazine and Russian Civilization Encyclopaedia publishing house (Moscow). Scientist from Switzerland Jurgen Graf conducted sessions of the conference.

Scientists, writers and public figures from Russia, the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Bulgaria came to the forum. The forum was unique because many famous revisionists took party in it. Revisionists are the people who cast doubts on some historical facts of the second world war (they have been unquestionable until now). First of all, it concerns the so-called Holocaust and the number of its victims.

Much can be spoken about every report of the forum’s participants. The reports of Russian historian Oleg Platonov “Globalization and Christianity”, of philosopher Alexander Zinoviyev “New globalization stage”, of American journalist Christopher Bollen “The Sept.11 events and the consequences” are to be noted among the most interesting reports. Special attention of the forum was also paid to a report of US journalist Michael Piper “Assassination of President Kennedy”, which revealed connection of the Israeli special service Mossad with the assassination; to a report of Jurgen Graf “Treblinka: a critical analysis of the official version”. After a special electromagnetic research of the mass burial places in the two concentration camps of Treblinka and Belsiz the version about a mass burial went to pieces: the research revealed that the ground was untouched there.

One of the forum’s participants told at the end, he could not understand why all researches of the revisionists caused only threats and curses from the Jews. Indeed, the researches demonstrate that millions of Jews were not killed, but are alive now.

Ex-ambassador of Yugoslavia to Russia Borislav Milosevic was expected to deliver a report at the conference, but the brother of Yugoslavia’s ex-president failed to come to the session because of illness.

Sergey Yugov On the materials of Russian Line Orthodox news agency

Translated by Maria Gousseva

P.S. PRAVDA.Ru will publish Alexander Zinoviyev’s report “New globalization stage” within the nearest time.

From: serbia@mail.line.ru  

Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 20:13:16 +0300 

Dear anti-NWO warriors! 

Here's a report about the ground-breaking revisionist history conference
held in Moscow in January

The article can be found on our site at: 

http://eairc.boom.ru/reports/revisionists.html 

 Webmaster, Eurasian Anti-Imperialist Resource Center "Dedicated to the struggle of the peoples of the Orthodox Christian world and the Eurasian continent against the totalitarian New World Order." serbia@mail.line.ru  http://eairc.boom.ru/  ======================================================================== 

Revisionists of the world, unite! 

Summing up the Conference on Global Problems of World History. (A report on the revisionist history conference held in Moscow in January, 2002.) 

[2]Russkaya Liniya Translated from the Russian Webmaster-editor's note: Here's a complete translation (plus commentary) of the [3]article by the [4]Russkaya Liniya agency on the recent revisionist conference which was held in Moscow in January. This article appeared in [5]abbreviated translation on the [6]Pravda.ru website and elsewhere. Since the conference was somewhat of a landmark in the history of world revisionism, I think it deserves to be documented fully, accurately, and in real English. 

On the 27th and 28th of January a unique international conference on global problems in world history took place within the walls of the Moscow Social-Humanitarian Academy. Scientists, writers and activists from Russia, the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Bulgaria took part in it. The conference was organized by the "Encyclopedia of Russian Civilization" (Editor-in-Chief Oleg Platonov) and the American Journal "The Barnes Review", whose publisher Willis Carto was the conference's main sponsor. 

The reports of the participants were dedicated, in the main, to various aspects of globalization and the influence of the Zionist factor in various countries of the world. This conference was in many respects unique, above all in that many of the world's leading revisionists were gathered there. Revisionism is a somewhat little-known phenomenon in Russia, while in the West these people enjoy loud renown and many of them are already acquainted with the charms of prison life. [Here I have to disagree with the author of this article. The trials, hounding, physical terror and imprisonment of Western revisionists has been accompanied by a rather effective conspiracy of silence on the part of the mainstream (read Jewish) media, and the masses are either unaware of revisonism at all or have been frightened away from it by the scare-words "holocaust denial" or "anti-semitism". 

In Russia the main tenets of holocaust revisionism are discussed not only in patriotic, communist and nationalist circles, where Jurgen Graf's "The Holocaust Myth" and other similar books continue to circulate, but even more mainstream publications, such as the the St. Petersburg Weekly "Novy Peterburg" and in Dmitry Cherkasov's popular series of action novels "March of the Victors". -- Webmaster] Revisionists cast doubt on several historical facts, heretofore considered irrefutable, connected with the results of the Second World War, above all the number of victims in the so-called Holocaust. They call the standard assertions of the destruction of Jews in concentration camps "a supreme historical lie". For this they have been smeared in the West as "fascists", anti-semites" and so forth. But, as one well-known revisionist Jurgen Graf noted, revisionism is a scientific method, and scientific methods ought to be criticized from a scientific, not ideological, position. 

The conference went off quite well, in spite of a whole series of unpleasant incidents which happened just days before it began. Two days before opening day one of the main organizers, Oleg Platonov, landed in the hospital with a broken leg. Due to illness, both the former Yugoslav ambassador to Russia, Borislav Milosevic, and well-known philosopher and mathematician Alexander Zinoviev were unable to appear. 

Zinoviev sent his speech "Globalization's New Phase" to the conference's organizers. [Borislav Milosevic is the brother of embattled former President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic. His emotional appearances on television during the NATO bombardment of Serbia remain seared on this observer's memory to this day. 

Zinoviev is one of the few big-name dissident emigres who has returned to Russia to live, citing the moral crisis in the West. (Zinoviev lived in West Germany). -- Webmaster] 

The Petersburg historian and Dean of the History Department of St. Petersburg University, Igor Froyanov, was also unable to come to Moscow. He courteously furnished his report "Globalization and Russia" to "Russkaya Liniya". [Froyanov was recently dismissed from his post as head of the History Department after a long campaign of harassment in which even Moscow "mainstream" media (most notably Gusinsky's "Obshchaya Gazeta") joined in. His books, which subjected Russia's post-Soviet "reforms" to merciless criticism, were labeled "reactionary" and "anti-semitic". 

St. Petersburg University Rector Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who spearheaded his dismissal, is Jewish (as are most heads of institutions of higher learning in today's Russia) and very chummy with Vladimir Putin, who has known her since his university days. -- Webmaster]

The American journalist and writer Christopher Bollyn was unable to get a Russian visa, for reasons unknown, and therefore his report "The Events of September 11th and Their Consequences" had to be read by another of the conference's attendees. 

The conference was opened by the Rector of the Moscow Social-Humanitarian Academy Igor Ilyinsky, who then read his report "Globalization and Education".

 In connection with Oleg Platonov's illness (the text of his report "Globalization and Christianity" was disseminated among participants) the conference was led by Swiss historian Jurgen Graf. 

On the first day the Austrian physicist and Catholic writer Gerhoch Reisseger appeared with his report "The Monetary Consequences of September 11th", in which he offered listeners an analysis of the situation on the American and European financial markets. He referred metaphorically to the dollar as "chestnuts in the fire", and defined the euro as an "emergency channel for the salvation of the dollar". Mr. Reisseger sees only one way out: "to pray and struggle", and he called for the uniting of the West with and the Islamic and Orthodox Christian worlds in the face of a common threat.

 Moscow professor Mikhail Kuznetsov, who appeared next, spoke on the theme of "Judicial Aspects of Civilization". Calling attention to the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, he noticed with alarm that along with the destruction of the idea of sovereignty comes the dissolution of the "very essence of justice". The law is based on God-given moral imperatives, and when God is excluded from public institutions the organs of justice cease to fulfill the function for which they were created. 

Especial interest was aroused by the pithy report delivered by the General Secretary of the organization "Verite et Justice", which is fighting for freedom of speech in Switzerland, Rene Berclaz, entitled "The Blackmailing of Switzerland". He began by recounting to Russian and foreign listeners about how in 1820 Russia provided food aid to Switzerland, which had suffered losses on account of the French Revolution. Monsieur Berclaz expressed his gratitude to Russia for her generosity. His detailed report was dedicated to how little Switzerland, always proud of its independent banking system, was recently brought to its knees by international Jewish organizations. These organizations, as the speaker noted, showed the whole world thereby that they're above the law, above sovereignty. Their action was a show of strength. 

Swedish citizen of Moroccan origin and founder of "Radio Islam", Ahmed Rami, who delivered his report "The Influence of Zionism in Western Europe", enlivened the conference considerably due to his oratory skills. His speech was repeatedly interrupted by applause and his sharper remarks drowned out by laughter, for example the witticism that "in today's Europe the only permissible argument about Jews is one in which both participants are Jews". Rami stated with assurance that Russia remains the only country able to throw a monkey wrench into the wheels of globalization. Unfortunately, in his brilliant speech Rami, who is a Muslim, permitted himself some mocking remarks about the Old Testament, which, alas, were met by the Russian audience with unabashed chuckles. One hopes, due only to unthinkingness and lack of knowledge. 

Jurgen Graf's speech "Treblinka: A Critical Analysis of the Official Version" was heard on the second day of the conference. Graf's appearance made an especially marked impression, being a supplement to Australian engineer Richard Krege's report "The Use of Radiation Techniques in Historical Research". Krege, with the help of special equipment, carried out electromagnetic scanning of soil layers at the sites of alleged mass burials at the two camps Treblinka and Belsec. The data obtained in this research turned out to be unfavorable to proponents of the mass-burial hypothesis: The soil in both locations was found to be pristine, not subjected to external influences. 

A whole series of other researchers, writers and activists made appearances at the conference. American journalist Michael Piper, in his report "The Murder of President Kennedy", defended his version of the Israeli Mossad's involvement in the "crime of the century". 

Bulgarian journalist Volen Siderov spoke on a theme of great interest to Russian listeners: "Globalization: The Last Stage of the Colonization of the Orthodox East". 

Doctor of Philology Frank Toben, from Australia, in his report "A Discussion of Revisionism in Western Europe", spoke about the persecution of scientists-revisionists in Western Europe for the mere fact that they express doubts about the gas chambers and Holocaust. 

The American David Duke's speech "The Zionist Factor in the USA" was listened to with great interest, as was Boris Mironov's "The Influence of Globalization on the Policies of the Russian Government". [Duke, a nationally-known politician in the US, introduced his latest book "The Jewish Question in the Eyes of an American" in Moscow roughly two years ago. The book has been widely discussed in Russian patriotic circles ever since. Mironov served as Minister of the Press under Yeltsin in the early 90's. A Soviet holdover with outspoken anti-Zionist views, he (needless to say) didn't last very long in the thoroughly corrupt Yeltsin administration. -- Webmaster] 

"Russkaya Liniya" intends to publish some of these reports in the near future, as well as the reports of our Petersburg delegation in the conference: church historian Nikolai Simakov ("Globalization and Russia's Historical Calling"), well-known researcher of the "Protocols of Zion" Yuri Begunov ("Globalization and Zionism"), and art-critic and historian Mark Lyubomudrov ("Russophobia As an Instrument of Worldwide Destruction"). 

The appearance by the American Russ Granata, a former professor of German, unexpectedly turned out to be a real culmination of the conference. He began his report "Scientific Methods in the Investigation of Historical Questions" with words of thanks to Russia, where he and others like him have found understanding and support. The speaker announced that assertions of the destructions of the Jews in concentration camps are false, that not only Auschwitz, but all the other camps were never "death camps", as their so-called "victims" claim. Granata wittily noted that it's unclear to him why revisionist research has encountered such hostility among Jews. You see, this research is a real gift to them, for it turns out the millions of Jews weren't killed after all. But instead of gratitude for their discoveries revisionists receive only curses and threats. Unexpectedly for all, Granata grabbed at his heart and fell right from the podium. People rushed to help, doctors were summoned. The speaker's heart attack was a clear reminder of the intense pressure which revisionists are under in their struggle for historical truth. The heart attack became something of a symbol for the conference. It became clear that lawsuits, hounding in the press, ridicule and threats take their toll. Indeed, the labors of Russian and foreign revisionists is not just an intellectual game, but an authentic public and historical witness. A little while later Russ Granata returned to the hall, met by the applause of the conference's participants. He beamed back, and in his smile one could read the words: "We'll continue the struggle!" 

A. Stepanov 1. Alexander Zinoviev (Russia). "Globalization's New Phase". 2. Igor Froyanov (Russia). "Globalization and Russia". 3. Oleg Platonov (Russia). "Globalization and Christianity". 4. Jurgen Graf (Switzerland). "Treblinka: A Critical Analysis of the Official Version". 5. Volen Siderov (Bulgaria). "Globalization: The Last Stage of the Colonization of the Orthodox East". 6. Christopher Bollyn (USA). "The Events of September 11th and Their Consequences". 7. G. Reisseger (Austria). "The Monetary Consequences of September 11th". 8. Rene Berclaz (Switzerland). "The Blackmailing of Switzerland". 9. Ahmed Rami (Sweden). "The Influence of Zionism in Western Europe". [7]Russkaya Liniya is an Orthodox Christian Internet news agency based in St. Petersburg, Russia. ________________________________________________________ 

For more links on this topic, see: * 

[8]PRAVDA.RU: Revisionists of the World Held a Unique Forum in Moscow. * 

[9]Anti-Imperialist: What are scholars persecuted for in the West? Added to Site: 20 Feb. 2002 - Last modified: 20 Feb. 2002 The Russian-language original of this article can be found [10]here. URL of this page: http://eairc.boom.ru/reports/revisionists.html

 [11]HOME References 

2. http://www.rusk.ru/ 

3. http://www.rusk.ru/News/02/1/new27_01.htm 

4. http://www.rusk.ru/ 

5. http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/02/01/26146.html 

6. http://english.pravda.ru/ 

7. http://www.rusk.ru/ 

8. http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/02/01/26146.html 

9. http://eairc.boom.ru/reports/graf.html 

10. http://www.rusk.ru/News/02/1/new27_01.htm 

11. http://eairc.boom.ru/ 

Finkelstein describes a January 2000 Holocaust education conference attended by representatives of 50 countries, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. The conference declared that the international community had a “solemn responsibility” to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and xenophobia. A reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. “On principle, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: ‘We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees’ ” (p. 137).

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Preface.htm 

FROM THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE 

TO THE CULTURE OF THE HOLOCAUST

 © 2001 Kevin MacDonald Department of Psychology California State University-Long Beach Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 kmacd@csulb.edu 

While CofC describes the “culture of critique” dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements, perhaps insufficient attention was given to the critical elements of the new culture that has replaced the traditional European cultural forms that dominated a century ago. Central to the new culture is the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II, collectively referred to as “the Holocaust”, to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies. Since the publication of CofC, two books have appeared on the political and cultural functions of the Holocaust in contemporary life—Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry. Novick’s book, the more scholarly of the two, notes that the Holocaust has assumed a preeminent status as a symbol of the consequences of ethnic conflict. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:

We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Novick 1999, 12)

The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars: “Jewish organizations . . . [portrayed] Israel’s difficulties as stemming from the world’s having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex” (Novick 1999, 155). As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among non-Jews as an antidote to anti-Semitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organizations and staffed by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that “tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [being] ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ ” (pp. 258–259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests not only as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups—prototypically the Jews, but also as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies. As described in CofC, promoting high levels of multi-ethnic immigration has been a goal of Jewish groups since the late 19th century.

Jewish Holocaust activists insisted on the “incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust” (Novick 1999, 178)—an attempt to remove all rational discussion of its causes and to prevent comparisons to numerous other examples of ethnic violence. “Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically—subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they’re unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious” (p. 200). Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel “sees the Holocaust as ‘equal to the revelation at Sinai’ in its religious significance; attempts to ‘desanctify’ or ‘demystify’ the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism” (p. 201).

Because the Holocaust is regarded as a unique, unknowable event, Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats cooperated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating the Armenian genocide. “Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness—that it was ‘incomparable,’ beyond any analogy—they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable” (p. 195). Abe Foxman, head of the ADL, noted that the Holocaust is “not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God himself” (p. 199)—a comment that illustrates well the intimate connection between Holocaust promotion and the more extreme forms of Jewish ethnocentrism at the highest levels of the organized Jewish community.

A result was that American Jews were able to define themselves “as the quintessential victim” (Novick 1999, 194). As an expression of this tendency, Holocaust activist Simon Wiesenthal compiled a calendar showing when, where and by whom Jews were persecuted on every day of the year. Holocaust consciousness was the ultimate expression of a victim mentality. The Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism. “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust’ ” (p. 178).

While Jews are portrayed as the quintessential victim in Holocaust iconography, the vast majority of non-Jews are portrayed as potential or actual anti-Semites. “Righteous Gentiles” are acknowledged, but the criteria are strict. They must have risked their lives, and often the lives of the members of their families as well, to save a Jew. “Righteous Gentiles” must display “self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order” (Novick 1999, 180). Such people are extremely rare, and any Jew who discusses “Righteous Gentiles” for any other reason comes under heavy criticism. The point is to shore up the fortress mentality of Jews—“promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles” (p. 180). A prominent Jewish feminist exemplifies this attitude: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘would you hide me?’—and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence” (p. 181).

Consciousness of the Holocaust is very high among Jews. A 1998 survey found that “remembrance of the Holocaust” was listed as “extremely important” or “very important” to Jewish identity—far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance and travel to Israel. Indeed, Jewish identity is far more important than American identity for many American Jews: “In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty” (Novick 1999, 34). (See, e.g., the comments by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight above.)

However, consciousness of the Holocaust is not confined to Jews but has become institutionalized as an American cultural icon. Besides the many Holocaust memorial museums that dot the country and the mushrooming of mandated courses about the Holocaust in public schools, a growing number of colleges and universities now have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies. “Considering all the Holocaust institutions of one kind or another in the United States, there are by now thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive” (Novick 1999, 277).

This effort has been very successful. In a 1990 survey, a substantial majority agreed that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history” (Novick 1999, 232; italics in text). Recently, the main thrust of the Holocaust as cultural icon is the ratification of multiculturalism. Between 80 and 90 percent of those surveyed agreed that the need to protect the rights of minorities, and not “going along with everybody else” were lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust. Respondents agreed in similar proportions that “it is important that people keep hearing about the Holocaust so that it will not happen again.”

The effort has perhaps been even more effective in Germany where “critical discussion of Jews . . . is virtually impossible. Whether conservative or liberal, a contemporary German intellectual who says anything outside a narrowly defined spectrum of codified pieties about Jews, the Holocaust, and its postwar effects on German society runs the risk of professional and social suicide” (Anderson 2001). Discussions of the work of Jewish intellectuals have come to dominate German intellectual life to the almost complete exclusion of non-Jewish Germans. Many of these intellectuals are the subjects of CofC, including Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, and Sigmund Freud. “Shoah business” “has become a staple of contemporary German cultural and political life. Germans thrive on debates about the Holocaust and their ongoing responsibility to preserve its memory, campaigning to erect a gigantic memorial to the Jewish dead in the historic center of Berlin, or flocking to hear the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen’s crude and unhistorical diatribes against the German national character” (Anderson 2001). Scholars have lost all sense of normal standards of intellectual criticism and have come to identify more or less completely with the Jewish victims of Nazism.

For example, Holocaust poet Paul Celan has become a central cultural figure, superceding all other 20th-century poets. His works are now beyond rational criticism, to the point that they have become enveloped in a sort of stultifying mysticism: “Frankly, I find troubling the sacred, untouchable aura that surrounds Celan’s name in Germany; troubling also the way in which his name functions like a trump card in intellectual discussions, closing off debate and excluding other subjects” (Anderson 2001). Jewish writers like Kafka are seen as intellectual giants who are above criticism; discussions of Kafka’s work focus on his Jewish identity and are imbued by consciousness of the Holocaust despite the fact that he died in 1924. Even minor Jewish writers are elevated to the highest levels of the literary canon while Germans like Thomas Mann are discussed mainly because they held views on Jews that have become unacceptable in polite society. In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution, and genocide.

Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as the culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi-religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. As Amos Elon noted in describing the German response to a new Jewish museum in Berlin, "With so much hyperbole, so many undoubtedly sincere expressions of guilt and regret, and of admiration for all things Jewish, one could not help feeling that fifty years after the Holocaust, the new republic was, in effect, beatifying the German Jews" (Elon 2001).

Like Novick, Finkelstein (2000) takes a functionalist view of “the Holocaust Industry,” arguing that it serves as a vehicle for obtaining money for Jewish organizations from European governments and corporations, and for justifying the policies of Israel and U.S. support for Israeli policy (p. 8). Finkelstein also argues that embracing the Holocaust allows the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S. to claim victim status. The ideology of the Holocaust states that it is unique and inexplicable—as also noted by Novick. But Finkelstein also emphasizes how the Holocaust Industry promotes the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior stem completely from irrational loathing by non-Jews and have nothing to do with conflicts of interest. For example, Elie Wiesel: “For two thousand years . . . we were always threatened. . . . For what? For no reason” (in Finkelstein 2000, 53). (By contrast, the basic premise of my book, Separation and Its Discontents [MacDonald 1998a] is precisely that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior throughout history are firmly rooted in conflicts of interest). Finkelstein quotes Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, approvingly: “Holocaust awareness” is “an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (p. 41).

Finkelstein notes the role of the media in supporting the Holocaust Industry, quoting Elie Wiesel, “When I want to feel better, I turn to the Israeli items in the New York Times” (p. 8). The New York Times, which is owned by the Sulzberger family (see below), “serves as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust Industry. It is primarily responsible for advancing the careers of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Goldhagen, and Elie Wiesel. For frequency of coverage, the Holocaust places a close second to the daily weather report. Typically, The New York Times Index 1999 listed fully 273 entries for the Holocaust. By comparison, the whole of Africa rated 32 entries” (Finkelstein 2001). Besides a receptive media, the Holocaust Industry takes advantage of its power over the U.S. government to apply pressure to foreign governments, particularly the governments of Eastern Europe (pp. 133ff).

In a poignant allusion to the pervasive double standard of contemporary Jewish ethical attitudes (and reflecting a similar ethical double standard that pervades Jewish religious writing throughout history), Finkelstein describes a January 2000 Holocaust education conference attended by representatives of 50 countries, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. The conference declared that the international community had a “solemn responsibility” to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and xenophobia. A reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. “On principle, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: ‘We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees’ ” (p. 137).

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