The Holocaust
Wars
The virulently
anti-Semitic Zundelsite (www.zundelsite.org)
has posted his Jewish Power essay,
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
“Scum”
st recent the ideology of Adolf Hotler. occasions exhibit
hostilioty to Jews and to Jewish organisations - not not
commit. The “scum” to which Joel
Finkel refers are Ernest Zundel, 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 Zundel, his work and his
struggle. All day every day Zundel 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 Zundel
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), Zundel is a hands-on activist – 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, Zundel sometimes refers to himself as a
‘Swabian peasant’ and it’s true, he does have that about him.
But Zundel 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 Zundel 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 Zundel
Thus began Zundel’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 Zundel 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 Zundel 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 ordered a retrial.
This, the second Zundel trial in 1988, lasted for almost four
months. It was in this trial that
Zundel 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 heavyweights such as Robert Faurisson, Marc Weber
and David Irving who, having just read the Leuchter report, took
the opportunity of the trial to proclaim his conversion to
Holocaust revisionism, Zundel 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 Zundel after his
1988 conviction.
For the next few years
Zundel 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 Zundel 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
Zundel'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 Zundel out." Zundel lodged complaints with Toronto
police but nothing ever came of his complaints…On May 7, 1995,
an arsonist torched Zundel'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, Zundel suffered from severe anxiety, loss of memory,
and loss of concentration……At the end of May 1995, a powerful
pipe bomb was sent to Zundel 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 January 2000,
exhausted after the struggles of the eighties and nineties,
Zundel 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,
Zundel 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 Zundel 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
Zundel 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 Zundel
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 weiss 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?
Dear Paul
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 Zundel is a
Holocaust revisionist or, a ‘Holocaust denier’ as some would
have it. Like all revisionists, Zundel 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.
Although unpopular
enough itself, if Zundel had stuck to Holocaust revisionism he
might have had an easier ride. But
for Ernst Zundel 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. Zundel 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 Zundel 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 Zundel 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 Zundel was once
involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We
Loved and Why, but Ernst Zundel 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 “Letters
from Cell #7” Zundel 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 Zundel 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
Zundel is easily dismissed as a crank, a Nazi, or as Joel Finkel
would have it, as ‘scum’.
But Ernst Zundel 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 Zundel does
not hate Jews because Ernst Zundel doesn’t hate anyone. Ernst
Zundel has never committed an act of violence nor has he ever
called on anyone else to commit an act of violence. Ernst
Zundel has never discriminated against anyone nor has he called
on anyone else to discriminate against anyone. Ernst Zundel has
never stifled anyone’s freedom of expression nor has he ever
called on anyone else to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression.
Ernst Zundel 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”.
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 Zundel 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 Zundel 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 Niskor 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 Zundel 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, Denmark, 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 Zundel trial and
in reference to Ernst Zundel 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 Zundel 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?
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
On March 2nd 2005 Ernst Zundel 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)
"Jewish
Power” by Paul Eisen
(4) http://www.ihr.org/main/journal.shtml
(5)
The Fate
of Jews in German Hands”
(6)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12pl67_Webera.html
(7)
Robert
Faurisson, Press Conference, Stockholm, March 1992
(8)
Robert Faurisson
(9) Paul Rassinier, Le Drame des Juifs
europeans, Les Sept Couleurs, 1964, reprinted by La Vieille Taupe, Paris,
p. 79.
(10)
The ADL website
(11) The
Niskor website
(12) Klara Obermueller Weltwoche series, "Auschwitz und die
'Auschwitz-Luege'", 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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