The Holocaust
Wars
The virulently
anti-Semitic Zundelsite (www.zundelsite.org)
has posted this essay,
(“Jewish Power” by
Paul Eisen http://www.righteousjews.org/article10.html)
which it
describes as “brilliant.” Of course, Eisen cannot control the
use of his work by these scum, but that is hardly the point.
The sad fact is that it represents a “brilliant” endorsement of
their own ideology of Jew-hating.
Joel Finkel
(1)
I. Scum
The “scum” to which Joel Finkel refers are
Ernst Zündel, currently in solitary confinement in the Metro
West Detention Center, Toronto, and Ingrid Rimland, his wife,
who owns and runs the Zundelsite – a website dedicated to
supporting Zündel, his work and his struggle. All day every day
Zündel sits in his cell on a pile of court transcripts (chairs
are not permitted), wearing the same orange jumpsuit as all the
rapists and murderers, and with the permitted pencil stubs
(ball-points are forbidden) he fights his campaigns, writes,
draws and meditates on the past, present and future. Meanwhile,
from her Tennessee home Ingrid wheels and deals, begs and
borrows, plots, posts and publishes to try to get him out, or at
least to stop his imminent deportation to his native Germany
where he can expect a warrant for his arrest under Germany’s
severe “hate laws” and a possible five year sentence.
Ernst Zündel immigrated to Canada in 1958 to
avoid the draft (he is a lifelong pacifist), where he has lived
for forty-two years. Unlike most Holocaust revisionists (rather
an austere, academic lot), Zündel is a hands-on activist – by
all accounts , a gentle, good-humored man, kind and honest and
with those qualities often found in the strangest places: a fine
mind and a good heart. Born in Germany’s Black Forest, Zündel
sometimes refers to himself as a ‘Swabian peasant’, and it’s
true, he does have that about him. But Zündel understands
people and, most important, he understands history. He is, to
use his own word, a Vordenker – one who thinks ahead of
the crowd, one who sees the panorama of life.
For decades now Zündel has battled the Holocaust establishment:
“I was like
everybody else in my own postwar years in Germany. I was
disgusted with my father’s generation whom I believed to have
been monsters. Like practically all people on our planet, I
used to believe in the standard, widely accepted notion that the
government of National Socialist Germany, under the leadership
of Adolf Hitler, had attempted to kill the Jews by an act of
state-decreed genocide. I was ashamed to be a German…..In the
1960’s ….I experienced my first doubts about some details of the
Holocaust story. Further study, mostly at night, convinced me
that many segments of the story were highly exaggerated, and the
number of Jewish losses were wildly inflated.”
Ernst Zündel
Thus began Zündel’s activism – persistent,
flamboyant and effective. Who else would have got himself
photographed carrying a martyr’s cross up the steps of a
Canadian courtroom? And who else, after having been beaten on
the steps of a courthouse by members of a violent Jewish group
when he appeared for court dates, would thereafter appear for
all court hearings in a hard hat and bulletproof vest?
His first brush with Canadian law was when
the government sought to remove his special mail privileges. He
won that one and has never looked back.
In 1985 Zündel ended up in court when he
distributed a booklet: Did Six Million Really Die?, and
ran foul of Canada’s “False News”
Laws:
Everyone who
willfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is
false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief
to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offense and
liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
Twice Ernst Zündel was in
court for what turned out to be the two greatest Holocaust
revisionism trials of our time, twice he was convicted and twice
the convictions were overturned. The
first in 1985 lasted seven weeks and ended with a 15 month
sentence, overturned in 1987 by the Ontario Court of Appeal
citing errors of law ordering a retrial. This, the second Zündel
trial in 1988, lasted for almost four months.
It was in this trial that Zündel
commissioned Fred Leuchter, an expert on executions by gas in
the U.S. to visit Auschwitz and conduct a forensic examination,
which was presented in court as proving conclusively that there
were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. For the
revisionist community, that day in April 1988, when Fred
Leuchter presented his report to the court, was the day the myth
of the Holocaust was finally laid to rest.
Despite an impressive defense from
revisionist heavyweights such as Robert Faurisson, Mark Weber
and David Irving who, having just read the Leuchter report, took
the opportunity of the trial to proclaim his conversion to
Holocaust revisionism, Zündel was again found guilty and
sentenced. But in 1992, the Supreme
Court of Canada struck down as unconstitutional the law banning
the spread of false news. This decision temporarily put an end
to the deportation proceedings launched against Zündel after his
1988 conviction.
For the next few years Zündel continued his
struggle despite various assaults, both legal and illegal –
prosecutions, violence against his person, arson against his
home and possessions.
In the spring of
1994, several Marxist street groups organized to attempt to
drive Zündel out of his neighbourhood in Toronto. Pamphlets were
distributed calling him a "hatemonger" and "white supremacist"
and calling for his charging under Canada's hate laws. These
groups began a campaign of posters put up across Toronto with
Zündel's face in a rifle sight, giving directions to his home
with instructions on how to build Molotov cocktails. Street
graffiti appeared on fences and buildings calling for people to
"drive Zündel out." Zündel lodged complaints with Toronto
police but nothing ever came of his complaints…On May 7, 1995,
an arsonist torched Zündel's house which was almost completely
gutted on the second and third floors, causing over $400,000.00
in damages and destroying an extensive library and rare book
collection. No person was ever charged with this offence. After
the arson, Zündel suffered from severe anxiety, loss of memory,
and loss of concentration……At the end of May 1995, a powerful
pipe bomb was sent to Zündel through the mails from Vancouver,
British Columbia. Suspicious of the parcel, he took it unopened
to the police. The bomb contained nails and metal shrapnel;
Toronto police determined it would have killed anyone who opened
it and anyone within 90 metres of the blast. (2)
Twice he submitted faultless applications for
Canadian citizenship, and twice he was refused. There was a
conviction for ‘hate crime’ in Germany and prosecutions for
being “a threat to the safety and security of Canada”, and there
were the incessant legal battles about the Zundelsite.
In 2000, exhausted after the struggles of the
eighties and nineties, Zündel moved to the United States, where
he married Ingrid, a U.S. citizen. There the couple lived
quietly, establishing an art gallery, experimenting in organic
agriculture and thinking about future campaigns. Then, on
February 5th 2003 Ernst was arrested because, as he
was told, he had missed showing up at a scheduled immigration
hearing in May of 2001. “Remember what I told you?” He said to
Ingrid as they faced together the arresting officers, “That’s
what they were going to do. Use a bureaucratic excuse to get
me.” He also told her, as he was led away in handcuffs, where
to find her Valentine gift.
In what amounted to a legal kidnapping,
Zündel was deported to Canada, where he faces extradition
proceedings to Germany where “Holocaust denial” is against the
law. There, you can get up to five years in prison for having
the wrong opinion or, as they put it, for “... defaming the
memory of the dead.” Two years later Zündel is still in prison
as the legal wrangles continue.
“…you have just arrived at what is
sneeringly called a “Holocaust denier.”
Ingrid Rimland
I had neither heard of Zündel nor the
Zundelsite until I received an email from Ingrid Rimland asking
permission to post my essay Jewish Power as one of her
‘Z-Grams’ – the emails she sends out to Zündel supporters all
over the world. I agreed, and logged onto the Zundelsite. I
appreciated its excellent selection of revisionist literature,
but confess to being a little unnerved by its schwarz-weiβ-rot
livery, runic-style logo and anti-Jewish cartoons. But I
carried on until I came across her introduction to my piece.
“Despite some occasional slipping into the RKPS mode….this Eisen
essay is one remarkably crafted essay! Beautifully done! Rich
in imagery and ice-cold in precision. “
…one remarkably crafted essay! Rich in imagery and ice-cold in
precision!
But what was this RKPS that I was occasionally slipping into?
RKPS stands for
Requisite Knee-fall Paragraph Syndrome. It is a common, near
universal writer’s affliction in every Western country. It
neutralizes what crude folks call a “sh-t detector.” It befalls
otherwise perfectly reasonable intellectuals much more than
low-brow folks. It is as common as freckles.
It kicks in whenever
the so-called “Holocaust” comes up. It’s automatic. One cannot
help it. By inner command, one must immediately get down on
ones knees, bow to the dust, pay homage to the “six million”,
get up, kick Hitler in the shin, deplore the “racism” of the
Third Reich, and otherwise distance oneself from the period of
’33-‘45 so that there is no doubt as to exactly where one stands
- fair square against (gulp!) “Nazis”.
Now, dear (future)
friend - I have probably nixed a potentially congenial
friendship right at the start by showing my true colors and
putting my foot in the mouth - but I am a German, married to the
world’s premier thought-criminal presently languishing in Abu
Ghraib North, and my heart aches when I read otherwise
magnificent writing like yours - and then detect the RKPS. It
hurts me, because it is unworthy of thinking and otherwise fair
people who have been raised on the Holocaust Drip that has
deformed that part of their nature that is meant to be fair and
critical.
Here is the example
of the RKPS in your piece:-
“In its zeal and
self belief Zionism has come to resemble the most brutal and
relentless of modern ideologies. But unlike the brutal
rationality of Stalinism, willing to sacrifice millions for
political and economic revolution, this Jewish ideology, in its
zealotry and irrationality, resembles more the National
Socialism which condemned millions for the attainment of a
nonsensical racial and ethnic supremacy.”
(From “Jewish Power”
by Paul Eisen)
(3)
You see, Paul, when
I read passages like that, I wince. Let me take it apart, bit
by bit. “Zealotry”, yes - to the extent one wants a better,
cleaner, saner, more honest, more compatible world for one’s own
where life does not feel like having to wear a hair shirt for
the benefit of strangers. Scientists deeply committed to their
inventions are zealous. Mothers are zealous in wanting the best
for their children. I am zealous when it comes to keeping smut
out of the language I love. But not zealous like some Deep
South Baptist preacher who thumbs the Bible, chews tobacco, and
thinks nothing of spitting on your feet.
“Irrationality” -
far from it! I used to think like that - I am ashamed to say I
suffered badly from RKPS for most of my life. When I first
started questioning why I behaved exactly like some brainless
robot, I became curious about what people who were part of the
National Socialist movement really thought. I talked to an old
man whom I respected deeply for his integrity, and who had lost
his only 18-year-old son at Stalingrad. He said to me, holding
his son’s picture in his hands: “It felt right in my mind, and
it felt right in my soul.” I asked: “You paid a price. Do you
regret it?” And he said very quietly: “How could I? How could
anyone who took the trouble understanding?”
That was the start
of my resolve to take the trouble understanding.
“Non-sensical racial
and ethnic supremacy.” You are just plain misinformed. Let me
put it this way. You have been lied to about the murder of JFK,
about Vince Foster, about the USS Liberty, about Weapons of Mass
Destruction, about --- you get the point. You have been lied to
and lied to and lied to. You know you have. You accept that.
And you haven’t been lied to about this “racial and ethnic
supremacy” nonsense?
Here’s what I say to
people who question my motives. Hitler has been dead for more
than half a century. I don’t want to resurrect him. Nobody in
my circle does. It cannot be done. What is gone is gone and is
never going to return. But what we Germans want is balanced
thinking, fair assessment of what the Hitler days were like. We
don’t want people to assault us morning, noon, and night for
things we didn’t do. I for one don’t like to watch grown men
and women run and hide like rabbits the moment the Holocaust
Lobby says “Boo!” After all, we all enjoy the Autobahn, don’t
we? Why should not our world enjoy the benefits that came out of
those times - the research in fighting cancer, for instance?
The superb appreciation of genuine art? The emphasis on simple
lifestyle, respecting the ecological system? The brilliant
strides in space research? It is unworthy of us to let ourselves
be spooked by professional smear mongers for profit. Paul, put
your hand on your heart and confess: Just what have you read of
the times that did not come out of the propaganda mills of
Hollywood and such?
For me, your
sentence read like a traditional RKPS - to nodding agreement of
the audience. Am I wrong?
If I am right, you
have just arrived at what is sneeringly called a “Holocaust
Denier.” I will look you straight in the eye and say that one
cannot deny what did not exist. And now, to my regret, we have
a mis-tone in our new-found mutual love (dare I say zealotry?)
for ideas expressed in precise and finely honed words.
I suggest that
forensic science ought to settle that disagreement about what
Germans did or did not do in World War II in an open public
forum - not by imprisonment and “torture lite” - as has happened
to my husband, who sent the first forensic team EVER to inspect
the “murder weapon”, the so-called “gas chambers at Auschwitz” -
and found it not what it was purported to be.
Ingrid.
…I am frightened of you but I am more
frightened of my ignorance…
Message to Ingrid Rimland from a ZGram reader
Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust revisionist or, a
‘Holocaust denier’ as some would have it. Like all revisionists,
Zündel does not deny that the National
Socialist regime targeted Jews or that Jews suffered at their
hands, but he does deny specific, albeit key aspects of the
Holocaust narrative as we know it. His denial is limited to
three areas which should be clearly understood.
-
That there ever was an official plan on
the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime
systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in
Europe.
-
That there ever existed homicidal
gas-chambers.
-
That the numbers of Jewish victims have
been exaggerated.
Although unpopular enough itself, if Zündel
had stuck to Holocaust revisionism he might have
had an easier ride. But for Ernst Zündel revisionism is but a
means to an end. He cannot and will not relinquish his loyalty
and devotion, as he sees it, for his country, his people and
their history. For him, the revision of the Holocaust is not
just the pursuit of a truth, but the pursuit of a truth that
will set his people free. Germans stand accused of having
committed the worst crime in human history: the premeditated
attempt to coolly and efficiently annihilate every Jew in
Europe. Zündel rejects this. He is prepared for National
Socialist Germany to be held accountable for the crimes it did
commit but the attempted genocide of European Jews is, for him,
not one of them.
Some readers, even those who stand for free
speech, may now be reaching for their delete buttons. After all,
maybe Zündel should not be penalized for his beliefs, but that
doesn’t mean that his views must be disseminated, and it
certainly does not mean that we have to read them. But free
speech is not only the right to think, to speak and to write
freely, but also to be given a fair hearing without ridicule and
abuse or at least until a proper examination has been made. And
you never know, even those who generally find such views
repellent, if they were to hear them, even they might hear
something worth hearing. So, for those folk prepared to grant to
Ernst Zündel the same freedom they grant to themselves, for
those who have the curiosity and the courage to pause awhile,
this could be an opportunity rarely offered - an opportunity to
hear and consider another and hitherto unheard, point of view.
Everybody has a story and everybody has a
point of view, and in the matter of the events in Europe from
1933-1945 there are many points of view. The British have a
point of view, the Americans have a point of view, the Poles,
the Dutch, the Russians, the Serbs they all have a point of view
and the Jews certainly have a point of view. But the Germans,
too, have a point of view, even those Germans who once called
themselves National Socialists, even those Germans who still
call themselves National Socialists.
Dear Paul
Many WWII soldiers
(now very old) have told me that World War II - that is, the war
against the East - was really a preventive/defensive war against
Communism, which was Jewish. Europe was about to be overrun by
the Red Terror - Stalin had amassed his assault troops at the
border, and it was only a matter of weeks, so Hitler hit first.
Right now I am reading a book by a Swede, Juri Lina that is one
long, horrid accounting of the Bolshevik/Jewish horrors. I don’t
know how good his sources are - but he has certainly documented
them. Six million? Even if it were true, which we say it
isn’t, it was peanuts compared to the bloodbath in Russia,
starting with the 1917 Revolution, all of it laid at the feet of
the Jews. How much of that was known in Germany by the common
people, I don’t know. But it was certainly known by the
leadership. And the Jews were seen as subversives, rightly or
wrongly, more and more so as the war went on. Add to that the
Versailles Treaty that brutalized Germany financially, and the
corruption of the Weimar Republic, which brutalized it
spiritually, both of which were blamed on the Jews - and you
have cause aplenty, as that generation saw it.
Ingrid
How do those Germans now nearing the end of
their lives, feel when told that what seemed so right then and
perhaps even still seems so right, was in fact so wrong? And
how do those Germans today, born and educated in postwar
Germany, feel when told of the shame and disgrace of their
parents and grandparents? How might it feel, to be forbidden,
alone amongst the peoples of Europe, to recall your recent
history with anything but shame? Year after year all over the
western world nations proudly parade, remembering their
country-men and women and the contribution they made in the war.
At ceremonies they remember their dead and the sacrifices made.
But for Germans, only the atrocities are to be remembered - not
a word, nothing of the achievements and sacrifices of their
fellow Germans. Such was and is the price of ‘rehabilitation’
and the re-entry of Germany into the family of nations.
Of
wartime suffering we hear plenty. The British in the blitz,
Americans in the Pacific, French, Dutch and Danes under
occupation, Russians and Poles in the East and of course, Jews
in the Holocaust, but who hears about the suffering of Germans:
the terror-bombing of German cities with the deliberate causing
of firestorms, the only purpose of which was the mass slaughter
of civilians? In the 1940 bombing of Coventry around 550
civilians were killed, whilst in the 1945 bombing of Dresden
around 35,000 (the lowest figure I could find) were killed. And
our response is to twin Dresden with Coventry, which says all
you’ll ever need to know about ‘balance’.
Who cares or even knows about the
deportations of millions of Germans from their generations-long
homes in the East, the rape and pillage of Berlin and other
cities and the hunger and deprivation endured for years and
years after the defeat of National Socialism? Who remembers the
ten million Germans and Austrians who died in World War 2? Who
much cares about Germany post World War 1 – the injustices of
Versailles, the hunger, hopelessness, degradation and
humiliation? So who will try to understand how it might have
felt when a leader came along - a veteran of the war, a brave
soldier by all accounts (twice wounded; Iron Cross First-Class),
a fellow sufferer, one of their own, a man who promised peace,
stability and well-being and the restoration of pride and honor
- and, most incredibly of all, at that time kept his promises?
The Hitler we loved and why…
Ernst Zündel was once involved in the
publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why,
but Ernst Zündel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is
probably not the only German who still loves Hitler.
Millions of Germans loved Hitler, who for twelve years impacted
on them as no German has or probably ever will, and, though they
never say so, must, deep down still cherish his memory.
In his book Setting the Record Straight:
Letters from Cell #7 Zündel tells of a visit he made back to
Germany to his aged mother still living in their Black Forest
home. They were sitting there, at the table eating supper, just
the two of them. It was dark, the clock ticking away on the
wall as it had done for years, when his mother said to him,
“You know, Ernst, you would never have been
born if Adolf Hitler had not come to power.”
And she told him how because Hitler kept his
promises of bringing work, peace, stability and honour to a
ravaged German people, thousands of families who had felt unable
to have children, now felt able to have them.
“You are one of those children” she said.
Ernst Zündel the Holocaust denier is a German
nationalist and, by his own admission, a racialist. He is an
admirer of Hitler and is nostalgic for the National Socialist
period of German history. He is anti-Jewish. He is also
interested in UFO’s. So Ernst Zündel is easily dismissed as a
crank, a Nazi, or as Joel Finkel would have it, as ‘scum’.
But Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust denier
because he believes the Holocaust narrative falsely defames his
people and their history. He is a racialist because race, for
him - a cultural, emotional and spiritual, as well as
biological determinant - is vital and precious in the life of
human beings, and that his own white and German race, as he
would term it, is, as is every other race, something to be
cherished and preserved. He is a patriot who loves his country,
his people, their language, culture and history. He remembers
Adolf Hitler for the national regeneration he brought. He knows
that he committed terrible crimes but asks that he be judged as
any other historical figure like Stalin or Napoleon, no more, no
less, and that National Socialism be judged also on its merits
and demerits. He believes, as do many others (including many,
if not most, Jews), that there exists some kind of Jewish spirit
or sensibility, but further believes that this Jewish spirit, so
often creative and energizing can, if unchecked and unbalanced,
be damaging and corrosive to any society, and he grieves for the
damage he believes it has caused to the world he loved.
But Ernst Zündel does not hate Jews because
Ernst Zündel doesn’t hate anyone. Ernst Zündel has never
committed an act of violence, nor has he ever called on anyone
else to commit an act of violence. Ernst Zündel has never
discriminated against anyone, nor has he called on anyone else
to discriminate against anyone. Ernst Zündel has never stifled
anyone’s freedom of expression, nor has he ever called on anyone
else to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression. Ernst Zündel
looks on his enemies as they try to silence, prosecute,
imprison, bomb and burn him, with bewilderment, sorrow and some
anger because, as he has said, “sometimes I simply run out of
cheeks to turn”.
II. The War for
the Truth
The Revisionists
It bears repetition that the denial of the
Holocaust revisionists does not extend to the entire Holocaust
narrative. Revisionists do not deny
that the National Socialist regime brutally persecuted Jews.
They do not deny that Jews in Germany were discriminated
against, violently assaulted, dispossessed, imprisoned in camps
and expelled. They also do not deny that Jews in countries
occupied by Germany or within the German sphere of influence
were also pitilessly assaulted, dispossessed and subjected to
brutal deportations many to forced labour camps where many
hundreds of thousands died. Nor do they deny that many Jews
were executed by shooting in the East.
But they do deny the Holocaust narrative as
we know it in three specific areas.
·
They deny that there
ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other
part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to
eliminate every Jew in Europe;
·
They deny that there
ever existed homicidal gas-chambers;
·
They deny the figure
of six million Jewish victims of the Nazi assault and claim that
the actual figure was significantly less.
In making their claims, Revisionists have
offered a considerable body of work. To what degree they are
right, everyone must judge for themselves. Many will take the
view that Holocaust revisionism is but pernicious nonsense
motivated only by a hatred of Jews and a desire to rehabilitate
Hitler and National Socialism specifically, and fascism in
general, and therefore not even worthy of scrutiny. I don’t
agree, and those with sufficient curiosity
to wish to research the subject can visit the
website of the premier Revisionist
think tank, the Institute for
Historical Review,
locate the Journal of Historical Review
(4)
and its archive of articles and papers and
start reading. For an overview of the whole subject, they can
obtain a copy of Joel Hayward’s 1993 M.A. thesis “The Fate of
Jews in German Hands”
(5)
The Revisionist case is broadly as follows:-
·
There exists no
documentary evidence whatsoever that there ever was a decision
on the part of Hitler or the National Socialist state to
physically murder all the Jews of Europe. There is, however, an
abundance of evidence for the decision to persecute, disempower
and expel all Jews from Europe
·
There is no physical
evidence whatsoever for the existence of homicidal gas chambers
at Auschwitz or indeed anywhere else. There is, however,
abundant evidence for the widespread use of hydrogen cyanide
(Zyklon B) gas and gas chambers for delousing and disinfection
against typhus. No-one has yet been able to produce, draw or
describe a homicidal gas chamber or produce a photograph or plan
of one, because no-one has ever seen a homicidal gas chamber.
·
No-one has ever seen
a homicidal gas chamber because they did not exist. The gas
chambers shown to thousands of visitors to Auschwitz are, by the
admission of the museum authorities, post-war reconstructions.
Common images of gas chambers from other locations are either
disinfestation chambers or more commonly morgues, air-raid
shelters (often gas-tight) or crematoria. Common images of the
gassing of Jews – deportees boarding and disembarking from
trains, mountains of eyeglasses and shoes, piles of corpses,
crematoria chimneys are just that – people and trains,
eyeglasses and shoes, corpses, smoking chimneys, no more, no
less - they do not constitute evidence of mass gassing.
·
Not only is
there no physical evidence for the existence of homicidal gas
chambers, there is substantial physical, architectural,
topographical, geographical and forensic evidence against their
existence. The critical evidence is in three reports all
resulting from investigations at the site itself at Auschwitz.
The first and most famous of these was the Leuchter report
commissioned by Ernst Zündel in 1988. Acclaimed by
revisionists, this report was somewhat hurriedly put together
and, because of dispute about the interpretation of its
conclusions, must be regarded as revelatory but nonetheless,
inconclusive. However, Leuchter’s findings and conclusions were
refined and confirmed by a forensic
study carried out by German chemist Germar Rudolf and by a
forensic examination and report commissioned by the Auschwitz
State museum and conducted by Institute of Forensic Research in
Krakow.
·
The gassing and
cremation of the numbers claimed, in the time claimed and with
the facilities claimed, is simply not possible. Some of the
evidence for this conclusion comes from studies of individual
gas executions performed in the United States, any study of
which will show how hard it is to kill one person safely and
efficiently, let alone the hundreds claimed.
·
The numbers of Jews
killed by the Nazis, usually held to be around six million, is
grossly exaggerated. This is largely because of greatly
inflated pre-war Jewish population figures and underestimated
Jewish survival and emigration figures.
·
The context of much
of the evidence for the Holocaust narrative was the Nuremberg
Trials – an extraordinary and unprecedented set of trials of the
vanquished by the victors with little attempt to find or to tell
the truth. Without the evidence generated by these proceedings,
there would be no significant evidence that the extermination of
Jews took place at all. The legitimacy of the court itself was
questionable, its procedures were a disgrace with defendants
denied basic procedural rights and with much of the evidence
presented in the form of survivor testimony taken at face value
or confessions beaten and tortured out of the hapless
defendants. As a matter of record, the key confession of
Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Hoess, was obtained through torture
and coercion. (6)
·
Overall there is very
little evidence for the established Holocaust narrative. Hard
evidence is elusive, and what evidence as does exist is built
largely on eyewitness reports, confessions and hearsay. Witness
reports, notoriously unreliable anyway, are in this case totally
false. Many key witnesses have already been demolished in the
witness box and many noted ones, such as those by Rudolf Vrba,
Felipe Muller, Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Hoess, are now partially
or completely discredited.
·
Many key elements of
the Holocaust narrative have already been disproved to the
extent that even establishment Holocaust writers have conceded
their inaccuracy. Examples of these are the Jews-into-soap story
– the long disproved story of how the Nazis used the bodies of
gassed Jews to make soap - the use of “steam chambers” to steam
victims to death, and the existence of homicidal gas chambers at
concentration camps in Germany itself such as Dachau and
Buchenwald. All claims were made at Nuremberg, and all have
subsequently been quietly discarded. Most telling is the quiet
downgrading of the figures of victims illustrated by the removal
of nineteen signs at Auschwitz, which told visitors in nineteen
languages that four million Jews died in the camp. These have
now been replaced with signs claiming a million and a half
(still claimed by revisionists to be a significant
exaggeration).
Revisionist research seems to have been
carried out in a scholarly manner, is well supported by evidence
and is presented in a calm and restrained way. That some
revisionists (not all) have histories in far-right activism is
true. That some (not all) exhibit anti-Jewish sentiment is also
true, although this may in part be due to the assaults that many
have come under from Jews and Jewish organisations. Some (not
all) have, in the past, been affiliated to racist and
nationalist organisations, some (not all) speak fluent German
and some even are Germans. Such information should lead us to
look closely for signs of bias in their research; but not to
discount their findings per se.
“Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber…”
Robert
Faurisson
(7)
No-one
is able to show us, at Auschwitz or anywhere else, even one of
these chemical slaughterhouses. No-one is capable of describing
to us their exact appearance or workings. Neither a trace nor a
hint of their existence is to be found. Not one document, not
one study, not one drawing. Nothing. Nothing but some
occasional, pitiful “evidence”, which vanishes, like a mirage,
as soon as one draws near, and which the Jewish historians
themselves, in recent years, have finally been obliged to
repudiate.
Robert
Faurisson
(8)
For 15
years, every time that I heard of a witness anywhere, no matter
where in the portion of Europe that was not occupied by the
Soviets, who claimed to have himself been present at gas
exterminations, I immediately went to him to get his testimony.
With documentation in hand, I would ask him so many precise and
detailed questions that soon it became apparent that he could
not answer except by lying. Often his lies became so
transparent, even to himself, that he ended his testimony by
declaring that he had not seen it himself, but that one of his
good friends, who had died in the camps and whose good faith he
could not doubt, had told him about it. I covered thousands and
thousands of kilometers throughout Europe in this way.
Paul
Rassinier
(9)
Robert Faurisson, the
veteran revisionist scholar, has written that at the heart of
the Holocaust is Auschwitz, and at the heart of Auschwitz are
the gas chambers. He therefore urges those who wished to combat
the Holocaust myth to focus their efforts on that heart. It was
Faurisson who, in the mid seventies first thought of putting
Holocaust revisionism on firm ground by focusing on the material
and forensic evidence for or against the existence of homicidal
gas chambers. He visited a functioning gas execution facility
in the U.S. and saw for himself exactly what it took to
efficiently and safely (for the executioners at least) kill one
person at a time, let alone the many hundreds at a time claimed
by Holocaust writers, and he concluded that “for physical and
chemical reasons understandable to a child of eight” the
existence and operation of the Nazi gas chambers was
fundamentally impossible. But it was the activist Ernst Zündel
who, at the time of the second False News trial in 1988 had the
idea of sending to Auschwitz a forensic team to determine the
issue once and for all. According to revisionists, and despite
its flaws (most likely due to the speed under which it was
formulated), the findings of the Leuchter Report were clear –
the facilities held to have been homicidal gas chambers were
neither used for that purpose nor could they have been used for
that purpose.
Nothing seems to fit
about the gassing story. The numbers of victims crammed into
the space, the design and construction of the gassing
facilities, the lack of protection for the attendants, the
implausibility surrounding the rate of cremation, the huge
errors, omissions and disparities in eye-witness accounts – all
these and more, when added to the near total absence of hard
affirmative evidence, makes one wonder why anyone believed such
a story in the first place. No-one has yet been able to explain
how a gas chamber worked. No-one has been able to explain how
pellets of Zyklon B were poured into holes that do not and never
have existed. No-one has been able to explain how the Sonderkommando
(special detachment) of Jewish prisoner/attendants was able
to enter a gas chamber immediately, (even wearing gas masks
which do not offer anything like proper protection especially
when the wearer is active), after a mass gassing to remove the
bodies, even though such an environment would have been an ocean
of hydrogen cyanide. The deadly gas would have still been
everywhere and particularly in the soft tissue of the corpses.
In effect, no one has been able to take up the Faurisson
challenge: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!”
The established Holocaust
narrative can, and to a degree, has survived the successful
promotion of two of the three revisionist claims. The debate
between “intentionalists” and “functionalists” within the
establishment in effect concedes that there may not have been a
definite intention on the part of the German state to
exterminate all the Jews. Similarly by downgrading the
Auschwitz figures, the establishment has accepted at least the
possibility of downgrading the overall figure of six million.
But with the issue of the gas chambers there is simply nowhere
to go. To paraphrase Faurisson: no gas-chamber, no Holocaust.
The
Holocaust Establishment
Anti-revisionists,
Holocaust affirmers, exterminationists - the range of labels on
offer reflects the difficulty in naming the opposition. Even
the word “opposition”, like the phrase “anti-revisionist” itself
is misleading because it implies a reflexive, defensive
posture. Although establishment writers do often find
themselves responding to revisionist initiatives and do often
sound rather defensive, the words “opposition” or
“anti-revisionist” also suggest that they are the weaker party
or that they have not themselves taken the initiative. This is
not the case. Few narratives, true or false, have been promoted
more forcefully or more widely than the Holocaust, and few
lobbies have been stronger, better resourced and enjoyed such
complete dominance over the accepted discourse. The same holds
true for the term ‘affirmers’. The Holocaust narrative may well
turn out to require affirmation, but you would never know it
looking at the huge amount of ‘affirming’ material currently
available. Finally the term ‘exterminationist’, usually used by
revisionists to describe their opponents, though strictly
accurate, is rather sneering and demeaning in tone. So we will
adopt the relatively neutral term of ‘Holocaust establishment’.
For over sixty years there has been no
shortage of material promoting the establishment view of the
Holocaust - books, articles, films, plays, poems, TV programs,
academic studies, conferences, memorials, museums – all
supporting and promoting the established narrative, and it is
only recently that the establishment has felt the need to
respond to the claims of the revisionists. As before, for those
who wish to research the subject, the following starting points
are recommended:-
-
The ADL website
(10)
-
The Nizkor website
(11)
Many of the contributors to these sites are
known Jewish and Zionist activists, many with open and
established links to Jewish and Zionist activist organizations.
Again, this may lead us to view their findings with appropriate
caution, though not to discard them per se.
The establishment has attempted to respond to
specific revisionist claims, but only sporadically. They claim
that extermination and cremation facilities were indeed
perfectly capable of processing the numbers claimed, and that
all claims are well supported by hard evidence. Any reader can
study the evidence, which is freely available on the internet,
but the debate has degenerated somewhat into a yes-it-is,
no-it-isn’t squabble – one which could possibly be resolved by
the appointment of some kind of judicial body with powers to
call on expert witnesses.
But there still remains the problem that
there is just not all that much available evidence to support
the Holocaust narrative and what is available is often far from
satisfactory - documents are often “ambiguous”, witnesses are
often “confused” or “traumatized”, and buildings and
installations are often “demolished”. Instead of denying the
undeniable, the establishment has chosen rather to offer
explanations. The lack of documentary evidence is explained by
the fact that the final solution was top secret so not only were
written communications kept to an absolute minimum but were also
written euphemistically. Thus “special treatment” must mean
extermination and “evacuation to the East” must mean deportation
to a death camp. Similarly, no-one has yet been able to come
forward and take up Robert Faurisson’s challenge to show him or
draw him a gas chamber, because anyone who saw a gas-chamber
obviously did not live to tell the tale. The gassing facilities
at Auschwitz-Birkenau shown to so many visitors over the years
are now conceded to be “post-war reconstructions”, but only
because the original gas chambers were destroyed in 1944 to
remove the evidence in the face of the advancing Soviet forces.
Finally the statements of survivors and perpetrators, whilst
conceded to be confusing and contradictory, are so because of
the traumatic conditions under which these terrible events were
observed and the sheer quantity of these statements, and often
their poignancy as well, qualify them as acceptable evidence.
But whether because of the lack of evidence
or not, the establishment has, in the main, been less concerned
with refuting specific revisionist claims than with questioning
the right of revisionists to make them. For many Holocaust
writers, and indeed for almost the entire intellectual
establishment worldwide, the Holocaust happened and that is
that. In 1979 in response to Faurisson’s questioning of the gas
chambers, thirty four French intellectuals published an appeal
in Le Monde, the second sentence of which stated, “We must not
ask how such a mass murder was technically possible - it was
technically possible because it happened.” For most
establishment figures to even discuss the issues is to concede
to revisionism legitimacy it does not deserve.
If somebody came
along today and reported the calling of a scientific congress to
examine the question of whether the sun revolves around the
earth or the earth around the sun, he would either be ridiculed
or declared non-compos mentis. It wouldn't occur to anyone to
discuss the matter seriously... A similar thing occurs with the
propagandists of the so-called 'Auschwitz Lie' or 'Holocaust
Lie': their statements that there was no extermination of the
Jews, is so obviously false that it is basically unworthy of
serious scientific discussion.
(12)
Such is the view of Deborah Lipstadt,
Associate Professor of Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory
College. Lipstadt, to her supporters a scholar of the
Holocaust, to her detractors, a Jewish ethnic activist, has
written extensively about Holocaust revisionism. Jewish herself
and from a relatively orthodox background, Professor Lipstadt
has had a lifelong allegiance to, and has been active in Jewish
causes. She is a committed Zionist and is funded and aided by
many Jewish and Zionist organizations such as the Vidal Sassoon
International Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the
Hebrew University and the ADL – again, cause for scrutiny of her
claims but not outright rejection.
Rather then dealing with revisionist claims,
Lipstadt has focused on the revisionists themselves: their
credibility, qualifications, motivations, affiliations and
methods. In her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory, she traces the development of
revisionism from the late forties to the early nineties and aims
to demonstrate that the revisionists are overwhelmingly
anti-Semitic with long connections to fascist, white supremacist
and generally racist organizations, that their motivation is
nothing less than to rehabilitate the Hitler regime
specifically, and fascism and anti-Semitism generally, and their
scholarly veneer is just that; a cover for their racist and
intolerant views.
Those
who argue that the Holocaust deniers must be given a fair
hearing fail to recognize that the deniers' quest is not a
search for truth. Rather they are motivated by racism,
extremism, and virulent anti-Semitism.
…their
methodology is based on deception and falsification, and the
scholarly and restrained tone of most revisionist writings, are
merely window dressing to conceal their real character and
intentions.
Deborah Lipstadt
(13)
She maintains that the revisionists are not
only a danger to the validity and memory of the Holocaust itself
but also constitute a general danger to history and scholarship
itself and even to democratic life as we know it.
Holocaust denial should not be seen as an assault on the history
of one particular group. It repudiates reasoned discussion, the
way the Holocaust, itself, engulfed all civilization. Its
attack on Jewish history is, like anti-Semitism, an attack on
the most basic values of a reasoned society.
Deborah Lipstadt
(14)
For a long time Professor Lipstadt
chose to ignore the revisionist challenge, but the
ever-improving quality of revisionist scholarship does not go
unnoticed,
Lately, the deniers' work has become more virulent and
dangerous, in part because it has become more sophisticated.
Their publications, including The Journal of Historical
Review, mimic legitimate scholarly publications. This
confuses those who do not immediately know the Journal's
intentions.
Deborah Lipstadt
(15
)
So she now responds, but only insofar as to
challenge their credibility, she still refuses to either debate
them or to respond to their specific claims. For her there can
be no discussion of the essential truth of the Holocaust.
Despite the favorable balance of power and
their successes both inside and outside the courtroom, neither
Professor Lipstadt nor the rest of the Holocaust establishment
are actually doing all that well. Revisionism and its influence
has grown steadily and the revisionists exhibit a confidence and
sureness of touch whilst the establishment seems at times to be
somewhat rattled. And the revisionists are not without guile.
Identified as the eternal underdogs in this struggle, they have
adopted a devastatingly effective passive-aggressive posture – a
wide-eyed innocence in claiming that revisionism has no
ideological base and is simply a method for seeking the truth.
Nonetheless, whatever their ideological motivations, they have
in the main confined themselves to scholarly investigation
conducted in a responsible manner and have, with devastating
single-mindedness, piece by piece, proceeded to unpick the
hitherto sacred Holocaust narrative.
Take the case of Raul Hilberg. In 1961
Hilberg published The Destruction of the European Jews.
In this book, seen as a foundational text of the Holocaust,
Hilberg describes an undertaking personally supervised by
Hitler, who issued two effective orders to set the genocide in
motion. These orders were acted upon by various administrative
agencies, especially in the police and military which prepared,
organized and executed this vast criminal enterprise. For
twenty-five years this view remained substantially unchallenged
until in 1976 Arthur Butz published The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century and in 1978-1979 Robert Faurisson published two
articles in Le Monde claiming that the Nazi Gas chambers could
not have existed. A panel of experts was assembled to assert
that the gas chambers did exist, and among the experts was Raul
Hilberg. Just before the start of the proceedings Hilberg gave
an interview to the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur
in which he acknowledged there were no existing documents to
prove the existence of the gas chambers or that the
extermination of the Jews was conceived and planned by the
National Socialist regime. On February 22nd 1983 in
New York, at an event organized by the
Holocaust Survivors Foundation, Hilberg said,
What
began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in
advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no
blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures.
They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came
about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible
meeting of minds, a consensus - mind reading by a far-flung
bureaucracy.”
This was confirmed in
Hilberg’s testimony at the first Zündel trial in Toronto in 1985
and again in the same year in the revised edition of his book
which included the following:
In the
final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a
product of laws and commands, as it was a matter of spirit, of
shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronisation.
Apart from bewilderment at such a tale of
consensual genocide conceived and directed by mind-reading,
there must also be some acknowledgement that such a protracted
and agonizing volte-face could only have come about as a
result of the steady drip-drip of revisionist endeavor – and all
achieved whilst the revisionists were being prosecuted, fined,
imprisoned, assaulted and certainly shunned.
The Holocaust establishment has often
preferred to respond less with argument and more with power.
Largely due to pressure from Jewish organizations, Holocaust
revisionism is subject to legal penalty in Israel, France,
Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Belgium, Austria,
Sweden, Poland, and Spain. Laws in these countries make it a
crime for anyone, regardless of their credentials or the factual
basis of their views, to question or revise any aspect of the
history of World War II or the Holocaust in a manner that goes
beyond the standards established by the governments of those
countries. Also some countries punish revisionism without even
having such laws (USA, Great-Britain, Netherlands etc). In the
U.S. a California judge took against the IHR “judicial notice”
of the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. In France, in
1949-1950, forty years before the specific law of July 13 1990,
revisionists had been sentenced for their writings.
A person who, in
writing or by word of mouth, publishes any statement denying or
diminishing the proportions of acts committed in the
period of the Nazi regime which are crimes against the Jewish
people or crimes against humanity, with intent to defend the
perpetrators of those acts or to express sympathy or
identification with them, shall be liable to imprisonment for a
term of five years (16)
Historians, researchers, authors, and
publishers are being fined, imprisoned, placed under gag orders,
expelled from their native countries, and denied entry into
others. Revisionists facing prosecution have sometimes faced
the absurdity that any defense of a revisionist character, i.e.,
any claim that the revisionist position was actually correct,
would itself constitute a repetition of the offence; also, any
witness who gave testimony in support of the revisionist
position could, upon demand of the prosecution service, himself
be immediately charged.
In addition in these and most other countries
in the western world, even where not technically illegal,
revisionism has carried the risk of severe penalty including
loss of employment and social exclusion of many kinds. Finally
revisionists have been on the receiving end of much violence,
both threatened and real. All leading revisionists suffer legal
assaults, all suffer social and professional exclusion, and many
have suffered physical attacks. Holocaust revisionism today is,
quite simply, held as witchcraft was held in previous times - to
be a Holocaust denier is to place oneself on the outside of
civilized society on a level with a pedophile.
This exercise of power has yielded
victories. Revisionism has been kept out of the main media;
revisionists have been denied access to the discourse, and the
establishment has achieved a couple of stunning retractions such
as this one from Joel Hayward, who in 1993 wrote a thesis in
which he endeavored (and in my view, succeeded) to faithfully
describe the state of the revisionist/establishment conflict.
I now regret working
on such a complex topic without sufficient knowledge and
preparation, and hope this brief addendum will prevent my work
causing distress to the Jewish community here in New Zealand and
elsewhere or being misused by individuals or groups with
malevolent motives…..
I can now see
that I failed in my M.A. thesis to place adequate analytical
weight on the motivation of numerous authors on the Holocaust,
even though some were obviously writing with a view to attacking
Jews and rehabilitating Nazis.
Joel Hayward
(17)
And this statement from the young Jewish
revisionist David Cole, obtained through less than legal means
and faxed to Irv Rubin, then head of the Jewish Defense League,
is worth quoting in full.
This statement is
given in an attempt to set the record straight about my current
views regarding the Holocaust and Holocaust denial. As anyone
who follows the subject of the Holocaust denial knows, from 1991
until 1994 I was well known in the movement as a Jewish
Holocaust denier (a self-described "revisionist"). For the last
three years I have no longer been associated with this movement,
having realized that I was wrong and that the path I was taking
with my life was self-destructive and hurtful to others. I have
spent the last few years in silence on the subject of my time
with the denial movement, a silence caused mainly by my shame at
what I had done with my life and my desire to distance myself
from that life.
However, in that
shame-induced silence it has been brought to my attention that I
have not gone as far as I should have to make a clear and
complete public statement in order to set the record straight as
to where I stand. It is my great hope that this statement
accomplishes that task.
I would like to
state for the record that there is no question in my mind that
during the Holocaust of Europe's Jews during World War II, the
Nazis employed gas chambers in an attempt to commit genocide
against the Jews. At camps in both Eastern and Western Europe,
Jews were murdered in gas chambers which employed such poison
gases as Zyklon B and carbon monoxide (in the Auschwitz camp,
for example, the gas chambers used Zyklon B). The evidence for
this is overwhelming and unmistakable.
The Nazis intended
to kill all of the Jews of Europe, and the final death toll of
this attempted genocide was six million. This atrocity, unique
in its scope and breadth, must never be forgotten.
During my four years
as a denier, I was wracked with self-hate and loathing, a fact
that many of my critics were quick to point out. Indeed, this
self hatred was obvious to most, but I was too blind to see it.
The hate I had for myself I took out on my people. I was
seduced by pseudo historical nonsense and clever-sounding but
empty ideas and catch-phrases. When my eyes were finally
opened, thanks to several good, kind friends who refused to give
up on me even at my worst, I was horrified by what I had done.
My instinct was to flee and never look back, but I now
understand that I owe it to the people I wronged to make a
forceful repudiation of my earlier views. I also owe a very
large apology, not only to the many people I enraged, and to the
family and friends I hurt, but especially to the survivors of
the Holocaust, who deserve only our respect and compassion, not
re-victimization.
Therefore, to all of
the above people, let me offer my most humble and very, very
sincere apology. I am sorry for what (I) did, and I am sorry
for the hurt I caused.
And just as I must
set the record straight concerning my views, it is also
incumbent on me to set the record straight regarding the video
"documentaries" and media appearances I did from 1991 to 1994.
These "documentaries" are merely videotaped garbage filled with
self-hatred and pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My "media
appearances" were nothing but an embarrassment. My glazed look,
specious reasoning, and talking-in-circles during my talk show
appearances would have hopefully alerted any astute viewers that
this was a man not in touch with reality.
It has been brought
to my attention that Bradley Smith is still using one of my
videos in advertisements he is running on college campuses.
Therefore, I would like to make these additional points: This
video is being advertised without my consent, and I denounce
this video as being without worth. Bradley Smith is no
historian, and denial is no "historical field". Students on
college campuses should look elsewhere to find out about the
Holocaust. To these students, I would say, look to books like
Hilberg's "Destruction of the European Jews", Yahil's "The
Holocaust", and Dawidowicz's "War Against the Jews" for correct
information. If your school library doesn't stock these books,
have them order copies. Do not pay any attention to any "David
Cole" videos, except to rightly denounce them as frauds.
I am thankful for
being given the opportunity to make this statement. This
statement is made freely and under no duress, and is quite
willingly, even happily given to Mr. Irv Rubin of the Jewish
Defense League for the widest possible distribution. This
statement is the most current and accurate compilation of my
views, and it supersedes any previous writings, videos, or
statements. It is my hope that there will be no more confusion
as to where I stand. I thank you for letting me set the record
straight.
David Cole
(18)
Despite these victories it is still true that
there is remarkably little hard evidence to support the
established Holocaust narrative, and people are bound to ask how
such a vast and complex undertaking as the premeditated and
mechanistic extermination of such a huge number of people could
possibly have taken place without leaving a clear trail of
evidence, both documentary and physical. Also with regard to
tactics and strategy, Holocaust activists are in something of a
no-win situation. If they debate the revisionists they give
them credibility and concede that the Holocaust is a matter for
debate; if they refuse to debate with them, as in the main they
do, they lay themselves open to the charge that they have
something to hide.
And of course the internet has changed
everything. Revisionist material, previously unseen, is now
available at the click of a mouse and you don’t have to go into
some dubious bookshop to get it. Online booksellers who have
elected to stock revisionist materials have inevitably given it
a new respectability. E-mails and newsgroups have widened and
speeded up the debate. So much more can be said, so much
quicker and to so many more people and for the moment at least,
no-one can stop you saying it or reading it.
Reading the revisionist literature one senses
a confidence, not only that revisionists believe themselves to
be right but also that the future lies with them. In 1988, at
the time of the second Zündel trial and in reference to Ernst
Zündel himself, Robert Faurisson wrote:
“Zündel may once
again go to prison for his research and beliefs or be threatened
with deportation. All this is possible. Anything may happen
when there is an intellectual crisis and a realignment of
historical concepts of such a dimension. Revisionism is the
great intellectual adventure of the end of this century.
Whatever happens, Ernst Zündel is already the victor.”
But how could it be so?
This must surely be the establishment’s
strongest weapon - the sheer incredibility of the revisionist
proposition. How could such a deception have taken place? How
could all those survivors be so wrong in their testimonies? How
could all those perpetrators be so wrong in their confessions?
How could all those documents, unspecific as they are, have been
falsified? Arthur Butz called his groundbreaking revisionist
study “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”, but a hoax of
this size and nature just defies belief. Conspiracy theories
rarely convince, nor do those who propagate them, so surely the
sheer absurdity of the revisionists’ claim tells us all we need
to know. If revisionism is to have any credibility at all, it
must demonstrate how, if false, the Holocaust narrative, as we
know it, came to be.
The first reports of the mass slaughter of
Jews by the Germans were propagated in the spring of 1942 by
Jewish and Zionist agencies and published in the Jewish press.
These entirely uncorroborated reports received immediate and
unmatched credibility by being broadcast (on one occasion in
Yiddish) back into Poland by the BBC, and by repetition in the
American press, particularly the New York Times. They spoke for
the first time of extermination, but not only by gas. According
to these reports Jews were being steamed to death, suffocated to
death, pressed to death and electrocuted as well as being
gassed. It is only later in reports compiled by the Soviet
authorities, when they liberated the camps of Majdanek and
Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and 1945, that gassing emerges as the
main method of slaughter and even later, as just one element in
the shower-gas-cremation sequence which now lies at the heart of
the Holocaust narrative.
It is with these Soviet reports, plus others
from the World Refugee Board, that the now-familiar
extermination narrative emerges. The victims disembark from
trains for selection. Those designated for extermination are
taken to complexes designed to look like disinfection
facilities. There they are separated into sexes and led to
undressing rooms where they undress. Then they are led, 600-700
at a time, into huge rooms resembling shower rooms. When the
rooms are crammed full, Zyklon B pellets are dropped from
apertures in the roof and, as the temperature rises, hydrogen
cyanide gas is released. The victims take about five to fifteen
minutes to die, watched all the time through glass peepholes in
the doors by SS personnel. An interval of about half an hour is
allowed for the gas to clear, assisted by a ventilation system,
after which a Jewish Sonderkommando (special detachment)
enters with gas masks, rubber boots, gloves, hooks and hoses to
disentangle, hose down and remove the bodies. The bodies are
taken to mortuaries, where gold teeth etc. are extracted with
pliers, and they are then transported to crematoria where they
are burned to ashes. If the number of corpses should prove to
be too great for the cremation facilities, then those remaining
are taken to be burned in specially designed open pits.
But if such a narrative is false, it is
interesting to speculate as to how it took the form it did.
Possible answers may be found in the 50-100 year history of
Europe prior to the events under investigation. This period saw
huge movements of people westwards, many of them Jews and many
of them migrating to or through Germany. All over central and
western Europe, but particularly in Germany, there was a problem
with, and a fear of epidemics, particularly of typhus - and many
of the receiving authorities, and particularly the German
authorities, were intent of developing and implementing mass
disinfection and disinfestation procedures. These included
mobile and stationery mass steam and shower baths and mobile and
stationery facilities for the disinfestation of clothing by gas.
The gas used for disinfestation was of course hydrogen cyanide
gas in the form of Zyklon B pellets.
This use of gas for delousing and
disinfestation must be set against the background of the very
real use of poison gas as a weapon in the Great War and in
various other areas of conflict both real (such as by the
Italians in Abyssinia) and imaginary (as by the Martians in The
War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938). It should also be
noted how after the introduction of gas onto the battlefield in
1915, stories of homicidal gassings of civilians began to appear
in atrocity propaganda. In March 1916 the Daily Telegraph
reported that the Austrians and Bulgarians had murdered hundreds
of thousands of Serbians using poison gas.
At roughly the same time cremation was
increasingly being used for the disposal of bodies and
particularly for the mass disposal of epidemic victims.
Cremation as a means of corpse disposal was widely promoted by
the German National Socialist regime - a regime noted for its
modern attitudes to technology – and it was also universally
used in its euthanasia programme. One result of the use of
cremation in these euthanasia killings, was that it fed the
general suspicion that cremation was used to conceal the cause
of death by gas poisoning (deaths in the euthanasia programme
are now thought more likely to have been by lethal injection)
which was widely (and falsely) believed to cause disfigurement.
So cremation became associated with attempts to deceive the
population about the cause of death. In effect, all these
techniques of disinfection and cremation, considered to be at
the very cutting-edge of modernism by enlightened western
Europeans, were viewed by large sections of the European masses
- and particularly by immigrants, usually poor, conservative and
deeply superstitious, and even more particularly by the eastern
Jewish masses with their additional religious concerns about
mass undressing and cremation etc – with the deepest suspicion.
It’s not so crazy if you put yourself in the
shoes of a poor Jewish immigrant fleeing the conditions of
Tsarist Russia. You arrive exhausted and terrified together
with a mass of similarly exhausted and terrified folk at a
German border station where you are confronted with uniformed
guards and officials shouting at you in a language you barely
understand. They want to separate you from your men- and
women-folk, to undress you and to put you into large cold and
forbidding chambers. You’ve heard the stories as you stand
naked and shivering under the showerheads and wait for what you
have been told will be water, but for what a part of you fears
will be gas. An account from a surprising quarter illustrates
the point – Ingrid Rimland:
I remember fairly
clearly one such "experience" sometime in 1944. This was during
the Wehrmacht retreat from the Eastern front, when huge refugee
treks of ethnic Germans traveled westward with horse-drawn
wagons under German Army protection, experiencing horrendous
hardships from hunger and cold, the advancing Red Army ever in
our backs.
My family belonged
to German-descent Mennonites, a fundamentalist Christian
community who had come to the Ukraine in 1789, but we still
considered ourselves to be Germans and still spoke the German
language. Ever since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution - which
happened when my grandmother was still a young woman and my
mother was only four years old - my people had been savagely
persecuted by the
Communists. Many of
my cousins, aunts, uncles, more distant relatives perished in
waves of ethnic cleansings. This persecution started before I
was born and became deadly in 1938, affecting practically every
male age 14 and over. My own father was exiled to Siberia when I
was only five years old in 1941, and our entire family escaped
exiling only at the last moment, literally hours before the
German Army overran the Ukraine in September of that year - only
weeks after my father was taken from us forever
When the (for us)
voluntary retreat to Germany began two years later, in the fall
of 1943, there were four of us left - my grandmother, my mother,
my baby sister and I. The rest of our family had either been
exiled to Siberia, been killed, or simply disappeared in the
havoc of those horror years since 1917. Now we were running for
our lives from the Red Army - almost all of us women and
children.
We entered
Nazi-occupied Poland sometime in 1944 and were invited to be
officially naturalized as Germans. I remember the city as
Litzmannstadt (Lodz) but I cannot be sure.
But first we had to
be deloused. Naturally! As far as I know, this was routine for
everybody entering German-occupied territory and certainly
Germany proper, an obligatory health measure to control
epidemics such as typhus, a disease that was carried by lice.
Everybody who was coming from the East was infested with lice in
those days - Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews - soldiers and
civilians. There
was no way not to
have lice, unless you underwent delousing. We were made to
enter a long train. Whether that train took us to a building,
or if it ended in a building, I don't remember any more.
Somehow the rumor sprang up that we were going to be gassed. I
have no idea who started it. As a seven-year old, I do remember
how terrified I was.
We were all stripped
naked, had our hair shorn, and then, while we were all sitting,
old and young, in long rows of benches, water and soap, probably
mixed with insecticide, rained down on us from shower heads
above. I don't
remember the relief, only the fear. Similarly, the rumor sprang
up on that train that the Germans were looking for "yellow
blood", presumably Jewish, by clipping our ear lobe. I was just
as terrified of that one.
Ingrid Rimland
So these Soviet reports with their
now-detailed descriptions of the shower-gas-cremation procedure
of extermination, coming after three years of other terrifying
reports of exterminations of Jews and others by the Germans, and
also in the context of fears in Europe about the use of gas as a
weapon used against civilians and of cremation as a new and
unfamiliar method of the disposing of bodies, could possibly
have been instrumental in laying the foundations of the
Holocaust gas-chamber narrative as we know it. Certainly from
the time of those reports, the mere presence of showers,
disinfestation gas chambers and crematoria had become in itself
evidence of mass homicidal gassing.
So when the western armies came across the
German concentration camps at Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald
sites at which it is now known that there were no mass
extermination facilities, and saw the now familiar images of
skeletal, diseased inmates and piles of discoloured corpses and
discovered sealed rooms, showers and crematoria which we now
know had been used only for disinfection and disinfestation,
and encountered inmates who were prepared to tell them tales of
mass exterminations, they were both able and willing to
interpret it all in terms of what they had heard, rather than
what, in this instance at least, was the truth.
Whatever conditions might have been in the
German camps throughout the war, by 1945 and the final defeat of
Germany the system, and particularly the camp system, had
collapsed and conditions were catastrophic and it was the
results of this collapse which the western armies came across.
The Americans and the British saw these things, and, most
critically, filmed and photographed them, as clear evidence of a
planned genocide, rather than what they were: the result,
particularly in the form of typhus epidemics, of a breakdown of
Germany generally and the camp system in particular, under the
onslaught of the allied saturation bombing.
Although it cannot entirely be ruled out that
some of these authorities knew that they were propagating a
myth, it seems most likely that the Jewish authorities who first
spread reports of exterminations, were reacting only from a real
concern for their fellow-Jews, known to be under ferocious
assault by the Germans who, at the time of those first reports,
were ratcheting up their assault on the Jews by beginning brutal
deportations to the East. But what of the other authorities
involved – the Americans, the British and the Soviets? These
authorities surely would have been happy to accuse the Germans
of absolutely anything and possibly not averse to a little
falsification of the evidence if needed. After all, these same
authorities had been perfectly prepared to continue to accuse
the Germans of the massacre of over 4000 Poles at Katyn - a deed
they knew full well had been perpetrated by the Soviet NKVD. In
fact, the only cases where there is any evidence of contrived
fabrication occur at the liberation of the camp at Majdanek by
the Red army, at which time the Soviet authorities closed the
site for a month and then presented to the world some highly
questionable evidence of mass extermination of Jews. A similar
conscious fabrication may also have taken place at Auschwitz. In
any event, intentional or not, all was now ready for the story
to take off.
Any story, true or false, is easily spread if
there are fabricators, peddlers and believers, and this is all
the more so if all three are combined. The Holocaust had plenty
of all three. Moving down the chain of command we find plenty
of examples at the Nuremberg trials where the alleged crimes of
the vanquished were formalised by the victors. The Nuremberg
investigators, as they worked their way through the mountains of
alleged eyewitness testimonies, believed that there were gas
chambers as they strove to establish the truth. The army
interrogators, as they punched and pummeled their way through
the hapless defendants, believed that there were gas chambers
and that they were merely trying to get at the truth. The
lawyers, as they presented highly questionable documents as hard
evidence, believed that there were gas chambers and that they
were only trying to get at the truth. And the survivors of the
deportations, raw and traumatized, full of unimaginable feelings
including hatred and a thirst for revenge, were surely perfectly
capable of believing that there were gas chambers and that they
were only telling the truth. After all, was not all Europe,
including the camps, rife with reports of gas chambers and
anyway, had not so-and-so seen them? And as for the defendants,
many unsure of the truth themselves and possibly themselves
totally bewildered by the extermination claims, they may have
seen it in their best interests to go along with he what the
court had ready decided. Some may even have found some comfort
in their moment of world-class notoriety as they mounted the
gallows and anyway, stopping the pain was motivation enough: the
solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, the floggings, the
threats to family and loved ones and the constant humiliations -
perhaps it was just easier to confess.
Nor do we need much to persuade us that the
Jewish leadership might have been ready and willing to propagate
and believe such a tale. Jews suffered terribly under National
Socialism - nobody denies that, neither revisionist or
non-revisionist. They had been persecuted, expelled and
assaulted. They had been forcibly deported and incarcerated in
brutal labor camps where thousands upon thousands had died from
exhaustion, malnutrition and maltreatment. In the East many
Jews had been shot. Jews had little reason to love the Germans.
Nor would it be the first time that Jews have
accepted and propagated stories, true, false or a mixture of
both, of their suffering. The Holocaust is only the latest,
albeit the worst of a series of tragic calamities to have
befallen the Jewish people, and Hitler sits well with Pharaoh,
Amalek, Haman, Tomas de Torquemada and Bogdan Chmielnitski - all
enduring hate-figures in the Jewish martyrology. Nor would this
be the first time that Jewish chroniclers (or any other
chroniclers for that matter) have used some poetic license in
describing their suffering. The Talmud tells that at the time
of the destruction of the second temple – held in Jewish history
to be the one historical precedent for the Holocaust - the
Romans slew ‘four billions,” the blood of the Jewish victims was
so great that it became a ‘tidal wave carrying boulders out to
sea’, and staining the water for four miles out. The bodies of
the Jews were used as ‘fence posts’ and Jewish children were
“wrapped up in their Torah scrolls - and burned alive all 65
million of them.” In a context like this, the utterances of
Elie Wiesel, become a little more understandable.
Not far from us
blazed flames from a pit, gigantic flames. They were burning
something. A lorry drove up to the pit and dumped its load into
the pit. They were small children. Babies! Yes, I had seen it,
with my own eyes...Children in the flames (is it any wonder,
that sleep shuns my eyes since that time?). We went there, too.
Somewhat further along, was another, bigger pit, for adults.
'Father", I said, ' if that is so, I wish to wait no longer. I
shall throw myself against the electrified barbed wire fence.
That is better than lying around in the flames for hours." (19)
But for a story of this magnitude to be
spread, many more believers were needed, than a few over-mighty
politicians and soldiers and thousands of traumatized and broken
survivors, and, save for a few insightful cynics at the very top
of the British, American, Soviet and Jewish leaderships, believe
it they did. True, there was little hard evidence, but what
there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone
knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass
extermination of Jews therefore “special treatment” and
“deportation to the East” must be euphemisms for
extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium,
especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have
been a homicidal gas chamber.
Once momentum is achieved, all that is needed
is an extended game of Chinese whispers to result in a Holocaust
narrative, conceived in the real and terrible wartime suffering
of Jews, portrayed as imagined in newsreels and photo-reportage,
framed and formalized at Nuremberg and subsequent trials and
then, most critically of all, later turned into religious
dogma. Set all this in the context of a western world obsessed
by Jews and its own ambivalence about Jews and Jewish suffering,
a Jewish population traumatized by its very real and recent
suffering, an immensely influential Jewish culture which places
suffering at the core of its self-identity, and a Zionist
leadership desperate to win world sympathy for a Jewish state in
Palestine, and the idea of such a story, even if false, gaining
near universal acceptance, really isn’t that hard to believe.
After all, people once believed the earth was
flat and sat on the back of four elephants riding on a turtle.
They believed the earth was the centre of the universe and
persecuted skeptics with the same fervor and with about as much
justification as they do today’s Holocaust revisionists. People
today believe that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman with a
magic bullet. They believe in astrology and fortune telling, in
bodily auras and out-of-body experiences. They believe that the
Children of Israel were guided in the desert by a pillar of
smoke by day and of fire by night, that Jesus was born of a
virgin, died and was resurrected, and that the Prophet Mohamed
ascended to heaven after seeing Mecca and Jerusalem. Why, they
even believe that Palestine was a land without a people for a
people without a land! So what is so hard to believe about the
planned and premeditated slaughter of six million Jews by modern
industrial methods, loaded in their millions onto trains and
taken to industrialized killing centers where they are done to
death thousands at a time in huge slaughter halls, their bodies
burned to ashes and their bones ground into dust? People
believe in heaven and they believe in hell - so why not the hell
of the Holocaust?
III. The War for
the Spirit
A friend and colleague in solidarity with the
Palestinians wrote:
(Your writing)
ultimately serves the same forces of racism that allow Israeli
soldiers to kill Palestinians in cold blood. The Nazis not only
articulated – they took daily, direct action to implement --
their conception of a racial hierarchy. They killed people they
believed threatened Aryan racial purity and superiority -- the
physically and mentally handicapped; gypsies; homosexuals;
Slavs; Poles; Jews. Tinkering around trying to establish
whether or not millions were gassed or killed by other means
seems to me to be simply running away from the central political
point: that racist ideologies are fundamentally murderous, and
when people who espouse them get into power, they become
literally murderous. What else matters? Do you really think
that 'proving' that a few hundred thousand Jews/Slavs/Poles here
and a few hundred thousand there were shot rather than gassed,
will make any difference at all to how the state of Israel is
perceived, or how
Israelis perceive
themselves, to Europe's sense of culpability (displaced onto the
Palestinians, of course), or whether or not Europe and the US
decide to implement sanctions against Israel, or withdraw
financial support to Israel.
These are difficult questions. Does writing
about Holocaust revisionism give it a credibility it does not
deserve? Does revisionism give to National Socialist ideology a
credibility it does not deserve? Is Holocaust revisionism
inextricably linked to fascism, racism and anti-Semitism and if
so, should we then not investigate it? Is National Socialism
worse than many other ideologies such as Stalinist Marxism,
which we do deem suitable for objective investigation? Does
confirming the truth or otherwise of the Holocaust have any
bearing on the struggle of the Palestinians against Israeli
oppression?
For what they’re worth my views are: Writing
without prejudice about Holocaust revisionism must inevitably
give it some credibility but in my view, for reasons now
obvious, this is deserved. Holocaust revisionism is not
inextricably linked to fascism, racism and anti-Semitism, though
I can see how it might seem that way. Revisionist scholarship
inevitably gives increased credibility to National Socialism, in
that it allows the possibility that the National Socialist
regime was not quite as unspeakable as it has been painted.
Whether this is deserved or not depends on the result of the
scholarship. As for whether National Socialism is worse than
the many other ideologies that are considered worthy of unbiased
study, the answer is that I don’t know.
But we are entitled to search for the truth.
The real crime committed by the National Socialists – the
exclusion, disempowerment, deportation, enslavement, death by
omission and by commission and expulsion of a people simply
because they were that people – was a terrible one. One does
not need gas chambers to make the targeting of Jews, just
because they are Jews, extraordinary and unacceptable.
Nonetheless, if this targeting did not extend to extermination,
if there were no gas chambers and if six million Jews did not
die, then we should know it and, if necessary, address the
implications. If there is some reason why we should not
investigate this matter, then the onus is on those who would
deny us that right, to say why. Those who would deny us that
right have tried to say why, but in my view they have failed
miserably.
But what does it matter how many Jews were
murdered and in what way and with what intention? A murder is a
murder and one murder is one murder too many. What difference
will it make whether the Holocaust is proven or not? Will it
have any affect whatsoever on the status and attitudes of Israel
or on its behavior towards the Palestinians – issues on which we
pressingly need to focus?
But the Holocaust is not just murder. Nor is
it just mass murder. Nor is it even just genocide. There have
been plenty of murders, mass murders and even genocides, but
none have been memorialized like the Holocaust. The Holocaust
is held to be the worst crime in human history, and this is not
because more people were killed or because they were killed more
brutally or more senselessly. Three million Polish Jews are
held to have died in the Holocaust. Three million Polish
non-Jews also died in the same period of history - yet the Jews,
as evidenced by the memorialisation accorded them, are seen as
more important. Fifty million people died in the Second World
War, including twenty million Russians, ten million Germans and
Austrians and six million Jews. Yet only the Jews warrant a
“Holocaust”’.
Is this because it was only Jews who were
targeted for obliteration simply because they were Jews, and
because it was only Jews who were exterminated in such a cool,
premeditated and modern fashion by such an advanced, liberal and
enlightened nation in the heart of Christian Europe? If the
revisionists should prove their case that Jews were not targeted
for extermination, that there were no gas-chambers and there was
no six million, would there then be no Holocaust? Would Jews
become just more tragic victims of a tragic period of history,
on a par with the millions of other victims, including the
thousands upon of thousands of German civilians slaughtered in
the terror bombing of German cities by the western allies?
The revisionist community has probably said
just about all it can say and proved all it can prove and have
probably made the case sufficiently to at least cast doubt on
the veracity of the Holocaust narrative. Future historians may
well reject the Holocaust as history, but the Holocaust may yet
go on, no longer as history but as ideology and even theology.
Even though the evidence may lead us to accept that there never
was intent to eliminate every single Jew from Europe, or any
gas-chambers at Auschwitz, or anything near six-million victims,
this may not make one iota of difference any more than
archeological evidence might prove that there was no Exodus from
Egypt and medical science might throw doubt on the virgin birth.
Because there is another possibility - that
the suffering of the Jews is held to be the worst crime in human
history not because of the nature of the crime but because of
the nature of the victims. Maybe Abe Foxman had it just about
right when he wrote:-
(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”
(20)
Because it may be that the Holocaust is not
just special, it may be that the Holocaust is sacred. It may be
that speaking of the Holocaust alongside other atrocities is
like speaking of the Passion as being the crucifixion of one
troublemaker and two thieves. It may be that the Holocaust is a
narrative of suffering greater than just of one person on a
cross.
If Auschwitz is
something other than a horror of history, if it goes beyond the
'banality of evil', then Christianity totters on its
foundations. Christ is the Son of God, who went to the end of
the humanly endurable, where he endured the cruelest
suffering... If Auschwitz is true, then there is a human
suffering which simply cannot be compared with that of Christ...
In this case, Christ is false, and salvation will not come from
Him…… Auschwitz is the refutation of Christ.
Claude Lanzmann
So the Holocaust and Jewish suffering, no
longer history, now theology, have become a religious imperative
for Jews, and more critically for all Jews, even
for those Jews who regard themselves as secular, who haven’t
been near a synagogue since they were children, even for
those Jews who don’t much consider themselves Jews. Take ten
Jews today, maybe three will worship God, perhaps nine will
worship the state of Israel, nine-point-five may worship "The
Jewish People" but nine-point nine-nine-nine recurring will
worship Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. The Holocaust
resolves the great dilemma of modern Jewish life - how to be a
Jew when you no longer believe in the Jewish God. Secular Jews
have found many gods to replace the one they reject – Marx and
Trotsky, atheism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, human
rights, money and success, and of course, Zionism – there’s lots
to choose from but only one that serves as a catch-all for
everyone. And if you don’t believe it, try this - go find the
most educated, secular, progressive, enlightened, perceptive,
sensitive Jew you know - deny the Holocaust and then stand back.
But the Holocaust is not confined to Jews.
The Holocaust is not only the central martyrdom and therefore a
religious focus in modern Jewish history but also, if not in
world history, then certainly in American and European history.
All over North America and Western Europe: Holocaust museums -
cathedrals to the new religion with their own priests and
priestesses; Abe Foxman, Deborah Lipstadt, Elie Wiesel, Simon
Wiesenthal, abound – the biggest and best in Washington DC with
all the other symbols of American nationhood and power.
Holocaust Chairs at major universities, memorials, foundations,
conferences and symposia, books, magazines, films, TV
documentaries. The further we travel in time from the actual
events the greater the sacralisation. But these are only the
outward manifestations. The Holocaust, the ultimate in
suffering is a paradigm for all Jewish suffering and for all
intolerance, discrimination and hatred against Jews and this is
in itself is a paradigm for all suffering and all
intolerance, discrimination and hatred against all
people. That’s why a major Holocaust Museum in the U.S. is able
to style itself as simply “The Museum of Tolerance”, and that’s
why those who dare to challenge the Jewish claim to a
particularity of suffering are nearly always accused of
“intolerance” or of “promoting hate”. The Holocaust may be the
ultimate symbol of Jewish power, the most visible means by which
the Jewish will in this world is enforced and displayed to a
cowering non-Jewish world. It proclaims that Jews are suffering
and Jews are innocent so Jews can do what they like and, by
association the state of the Jews is also suffering, is
also innocent and can also do what it likes.
The Emperor’s new clothes
But the world doesn’t jump because it feels
sorry for Jews. As Israel Shamir says, compassion and guilt may
get you a free bowl of soup but not a lot else, and certainly
not the ninety billion deutschmarks paid in reparations by the
Federal Republic of Germany to the infant state of Israel, the
billions of dollars paid by successive US governments to
maintain that state, nor the free pass given to Israel by just
about everyone to do pretty much what it likes to the
Palestinians. The power of the Holocaust is not the power to
arouse pity and compassion in the rest of the world. Anyone can
see that Israel has no need of our pity or compassion and
neither have Jews. Israel is not weak and Israel is not
innocent and neither are Jews. What is harder to see is how
anyone could ever have thought otherwise. Could it even be the
same with the Holocaust? Is it not by now plain that there is
very little evidence to support the Holocaust narrative, that
the extermination narrative just doesn’t add up, and that the
issue of the gas-chambers could, as Ingrid Rimland reminded us,
be settled easily by forensic investigation.
I suggest that
forensic science ought to settle that disagreement about what
Germans did or did not do in World War II in an open public
forum
Why has this not been done? Everyone must
know that if the establishment could disprove revisionist claims
they would, so why haven’t they? And anyone can visit any
number of websites and find mountains of evidence against the
veracity of the Holocaust, so why don’t we?
The reason is the same reason why courtiers
have, since time began, acted as if a stark naked emperor was
beautifully attired - because they have to. The power of
the Holocaust is the same power as enabled a few thousand
Englishman to rule hundreds of millions of Indians; a few
hundred French aristocrats to rule a few million French peasants
and a Czar and a few hundred Russian nobles to rule millions of
Russian serfs. It is the same power that all over the world and
throughout human history has enabled the prosperous few to rule
over the impoverished many. It is the very essence of power in
this world; the power of bluff. As the unclothed Emperor can
force people to believe that he is clothed, so the Jewish and
Holocaust establishments can make us believe that black is white
in the Holocaust narrative and that Jews and Israel are
suffering and innocent. And if they can’t make us believe it,
they can at least make us say that we believe it. To the
wannabee dissenter, the power behind the Holocaust says this,
“Watch it! If we can enforce this we can enforce anything!”
But why should we care if Jews choose to
create for themselves such a mythology, even if that mythology
has been accepted by so many others? The answer is: we must
care because if the Holocaust is false, then there are those who
suffer under that falsehood. First, if the special status of
Jews is removed, then the equal status of every single non-Jew
who died in that same time, till now demeaned and denigrated, is
immediately restored to its rightful and equal place. And there
are other victims too. The German people stand accused and
found guilty of having committed the worst crime in human
history. The Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians etc. etc.
stand accused and found guilty of aiding, abetting and even
applauding the commission of the worst crime in human history.
Add to them the Catholic Church and the Pope, the Americans and
British who stand accused and found guilty of not having done
enough to prevent the commission of the worst crime in human
history. Add to them Christianity and Christians who throughout
the ages stand accused and found guilty of laying the
foundations for the commission of the worst crime in human
history. And finally you may as well throw in pretty much the
entire non-Jewish world accused and guilty of what amounts to
simply not being one of the chosen victims of the worst crime in
human history, and therefore condemned forever to hush their
voices whenever the word ‘Jew’ is mentioned and to stand
silently as the myth of Jewish chosenness in the Holocaust is
propagated.
The weapons of the poor…
There is one other victim: a present,
pressing, ultimate victim. The Palestinian people -denied,
denigrated and abused by a power which uses the Holocaust as a
shield behind which any and every atrocity may take place - are
surely the primary sufferers under the Holocaust.
On March 22 2001 Robert Faurisson wrote a
paper for the proposed Beirut Conference on Revisionism and
Zionism, which he knew would never be presented. He was right.
The conference was cancelled due to external pressure, largely
by Jewish groups. In his paper for the first time, Faurisson
addressed the Arab world. First he put it to them that an
intelligent adversary may say that they fear something when they
don’t, and that they don’t fear something when they do. Thus
their enemies’ firepower is deflected from those places where it
may do real damage to those areas where it can do little damage.
Then he listed those things that Zionists do
not fear: They do not fear military power – they’ve more than
enough of their own and anyway, they know that anyone who has
military power is far more likely to support them rather than
oppose them. They do not fear anti-Semitism – on the contrary
they feed on it to create sympathy for their cause. They do not
really fear denouncers of Holocaust exploitation – the Norman
Finkelsteins and the Peter Novicks – so long as they do not
challenge the Holocaust itself. After all, the fiercest critic
of something can (albeit often unwittingly) become its
staunchest guardian – (If Norman Finkelstein says it, it must be
true.) They do not even fear anti-Zionism since Zionism, like
Jewish power itself, has the wondrous ability to transform
itself into anything it wants – left/right, religious/secular,
one-state/two-state – all provide fertile ground for Zionism and
Jewish particularity. Nor do they much fear attacks on the
founding myths of Israel – that is, all of them except one.
Finally, they do not even fear being called Judeo-Nazis. On the
contrary, being labeled by one’s adversaries as a Nazi merely
affirms that ‘Nazi’ is the very worst thing imaginable.
He then told his audience what Zionists do
fear: They fear the weapons of those who have nothing left to
lose - the poor and the weak. They fear the stones and suicide
bombers of the Palestinian Intifada – and they fear the weapons
of that other Intifada - the words of the revisionists.
Zionists truly fear
the weapons of the poor (children's stones, their slingshots
like that of David against the giant Goliath, the suicide
attacks) and all that may endanger persons and business; they
fear a demeaning of their brand image.
But they are above all apprehensive of
"the poor man's atomic bomb", that is, the disintegration, by
historical revisionism, of the lie of the gas chambers, the
genocide and the six million; they dread this weapon that kills
no-one but that would not fail, if properly used to explode
their big lie like a bag of hot air…..to lose the
"Holocaust" is to lose the sword and the shield of Israel as
well as a formidable instrument of political and financial
blackmail; (21)
Despite their honourable intentions and
dedicated efforts, the solidarity movement, which includes many
Jews of conscience, has had little success in stopping the
Zionist juggernaut. The truth is that the only thing that has
stalled it has been Palestinian steadfastness and Palestinian
stones. Although they will never say so, Palestinians must know
that they are not just facing the might of the Israeli state but
also the power of organized world Jewry and its primary arm, the
Holocaust. Perhaps Palestinians should consider lobbing a few
stones in that direction. Perhaps we all should.
Paul Eisen
December 2004
paul@eisen.demon.co.uk
Postscript:
On March 2nd 2005 Ernst Zündel was deported to
Germany where he faces a five year
prison sentence for Holocaust denial.
(1)
http://www.nimn.org/Perspectives/americanjews/000308.php?section=American%20Jewish%20Voices
(2) Complaint under the Optional Protocol to the International
Covenant on Civil & Political Rights Against Canada - January 4,
2005
(3)
http://www.righteousjews.org/article10.html
(4)
http://www.ihr.org/main/journal.shtml
(5)
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay1.html
(6)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12pl67_Webera.html
(7) Robert Faurisson, Press Conference, Stockholm, March 1992
(8)
http://www.ihr.org/conference/beirutconf/010331faurisson.html
(9) Paul Rassinier, Le Drame des Juifs européens, Les Sept
Couleurs, 1964, reprinted by La Vieille Taupe, Paris, p. 79.
(10)
http://www.adl.org/holocaust/introduction.asp
(11) http://www.nizkor.org/
(12) Klara Obermueller Weltwoche series, "Auschwitz und die
'Auschwitz-Lüge'", 9, 16, and 23 December 1993, 3 articles.
(13) Deniers, Relativists and Pseudo-Scholarship – Deborah
Lipstadt. Published in Dimensions, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1991.
(14) ibid.
(15) ibid
(16) Extract from the Denial of Holocaust (Prohibition) Law
5746/1986 passed by the Israeli Knesset July 8th 1986 quoted in
Hayward P 25
http://www.resistance.com/Hayward/hay1.html
(17)
http://www.freewebs.com/joelhayward/thesisaddendum.htm
(18)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/5338/psa/cole.html
(19) Elie Wiesel, Night, 1960, in The Night Trilogy, 1985, pp.
40-43)
(20) Abraham Foxman quoted in Peter Novick “The Holocaust in
American Life” by Peter Novick, published by Houghton Mifflin
Co. 1999. Pp.195; 199.
(21) Paper written by Robert Faurisson for Beirut Conference on
Revisionism and Zionism – March 2001
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