Jurgen Graf, GIANT With Feet of Clay. Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the "Holocaust"
This outstanding short study provides a merciless demolition of the central claims of the Holocaust thesis by way of a probing examina- tion of Raul Hilberg's canonical work The Extermination of the European Jews. By narrowing his focus to those pages in Extermination that deal directly with the plans, program, method, and numerical results of the alleged Nazi mass murder of the Jews, Graf relentlessly exposes the weakness and, often, absurdity of the best evidence for the extermination program, the gas chambers, and anything like the six million death toll. Giant is devastatingly funny in its destruction of Hilberg's flimsy attempts to portray mass gassing and cremation at Auschwitz and Treblinka; its focused brevity makes this book both an excellent introduction and a fine refresher course on the essentials of the revisionist case. 160 pp. pb, 6"x9", ill., bibl., index, $/€ 9.95-; £7.-
Jurgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy
The NS concentration camp of Stutthof (West Prussia) has never been studied by western historians. Heretofore only Polish communist writings existed, to be treated with caution. According to this literature, Stutthof was a 'makeshift' extermination camp.
Jurgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno have examined this view of Stutthof based on Polish literature and documents located in Russian, Polish, and Dutch archives, paying particular attention to mass transports to and from Stutthof in 1944. The authors prove that the Stutthof camp did not serve as a "makeshift" or any other kind of extermination camp, but that the room claimed to have been used as a homicidal gas chamber was never anything else but a de lousing chamber. Concentration Camp Stutthof also sheds some light on the fate of those prisoners who were deported to Auschwitz but were never registered in that camp. This is a milestone of research, that no serious historian can afford to ignore. 122 pp. pb, 6"x9", b/w & color ill., bibl., index, $/€15.-/£10.-
Jurgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek. A Historical and Technical Study
Little scientific investigation has been directed toward the camp Lublin-Majdanek in central Poland, even though orthodox Holocaust sources claim that between 50,000 and over a million Jews were murdered there. Until the appearance of CC Majdanek, the only works on Majdanek were written under Poland's communist regime. Mattogno and Graf have filled this glaring research gap with a monumental study that expertly dissects the evidence available on Majdanek. Based on exhaustive research of the primary sources and of the physical remainders of the former camp, this book strikes a death blow to the lie of homicidal gassings at Majdanek. The authors' investigations lead to unambiguous conclusions about the real history of the camp, which thoroughly destroy the official theses without excusing the abuses tolerated by Majdanek's wartime commanders. Once again Mattogno and Graf have produced a careful investigative work that sets the standard for treatments of Majdanek. 320 pp pb, A5, 6"x9", b/w & color ill., bibl., index, $/€25.-/£18.-
Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust. Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns With Holocaust Claims During And After World War One
Six million Jews threatened with imminent holocaust: this allegation was appearing in U.S. media - but the year was 1919! Don Heddesheimer 's substantive First Holocaust documents post-WWI propaganda that claimed East European Jewry was on the brink of annihilation, regularly invoking the talismanic six million figure. It details how that propaganda was used to agitate for minority rights for Jews in Poland, and for Zionism and Bolshevism in Poland and Russia. It also demonstrates how Jewish fundraising operations in America raised vast sums in the name of feeding Polish and Russian Jews, then funneled much of the money to Zionist and Communist "constructive undertakings" - including banks, unions, and kibbutzim - rather than to starving Jews.
The First Holocaust is a valuable study of American Jewish institutional operations at a fateful juncture in Jewish and European history, an incisive examination of a cunningly contrived campaign of atrocity and extermination propaganda, two decades before the alleged WWII Holocaust. An indispensable addition to every revisionist's library. ca. 140 pp. pb., 6"x9", ill., bibl., index, $/€9.95-/£7.-
Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The Case Against the Presumed Extermina- tion of European Jewry
The first book to treat the central questions of the Holocaust allegation with academic rigor, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century created Holocaust revisionism as a scholarly discipline with its first appearance in 1976. Few historians could have devised the brilliant strat- egy that is central to The Hoax: Butz's focus on information long available to the Allies on the operations of Auschwitz, a strategically important petrochemical center. The Hoax's chapters on the question of Allied knowledge of Auschwitz have busied orthodox experts for nearly three decades with trying to explain how mass operations could have gone unnoticed - to no avail. The Hoax remains at the center of revisionist inquiry, valuable even in those few areas in which it has been superseded by subsequent research: a book that, especially in this handsome new design, needs to be read and re-read by every serious revisionist. This new edition comes with several supplements adding new information gathered by the author over the last 25 years. 506 pp. pb, 6"x9", ill., bibl., index, $/€25.-; £18.-
C. Mattogno, J. Graf, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?
Holocaust survivors report that at least 700,000, and perhaps as many as 3 million people primarily of Jewish faith were murdered in the Treblinka camp, located in eastern Poland, between the summers of 1942 and 1943. Various murder weapons are claimed to have been used: mobile or stationary gas chambers; quicklime; hot steam; high voltage; machine guns; vacuum chambers; chlorine gas; Zyklon B; and diesel exhaust gas. According to the witnesses, the corpses of the victims were finally incinerated on pyres as high as a multi-story building without leaving any traces.
In the first part of Treblinka, the official account of the camp is subjected to a thorough critique of its historical genesis, inner logic, and technical feasibility. The authors' analysis reveals that the historical picture prescribed by penal law in many European countries is nothing more than an unbroken chain of absurdities. The second part of Treblinka reconstructs from painstaking analysis of the extant evidence Treblinka's actual function as a transit camp for Jews on route to other locations. 370 pp. pb, 6"x9", ill., bibl., index, $/€25.-/£18.-
Treblinka
■
Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History
Witnesses report that at least 600,000, if not as many as 3 million Jews, were murdered in the Belzec camp, located in eastern Poland, between Nov. 1941 and Dec. 1942. Various murder weapons are claimed to have been used: diesel gas chambers; quicklime in trains; high voltage; vacuum chambers. According to witnesses, the corpses were finally incinerated on huge pyres without leaving any traces.
For those who know the stories about Treblinka, this all sounds too familiar. The author has therefore restricted this study to aspects, which are different and new compared to Treblinka, but otherwise refers the reader to his Treblinka book. The development of the official image portrait of Belzec is explained and subjected to a thorough critique. In contrast to Treblinka, forensic drillings and excavations were performed in the late 1990s in Belzec, the results of which are explained and critically reviewed. These findings, together with the absurd claims by 'witnesses,' refute the thesis of an extermination camp. 140 pp. pb, 6"x9", ill., bibl., index, $/€12.-/£8.-
Belzec
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Volume 2 •Number 3 'August 2004
Imre Kertesz, Winner of Nobel Prize for Literature and Holocaust Liar
Star of David:
Origin of a National Symbol, p. 249
Soviet Space Bamboozle: Exposing a Communist Hoax, p. 250
Gypsies & the Third Reich: Yarns, Legends, and Facts, p. 254
Dachau - a German and a U.S. Camp: A Diary Comparison, p. 260
Crematoria Basements in Auschwitz: Morgues or 'Gas Chambers'?, p. 271
'Gas Chamber' Architects: On Trial as Defendants, p. 294 A Deathbed Confession, p. 296
^Childhood Delusions as Culture: Nobel Prize for a Liar, p. 297
Holocaust in North Korea?:
New 'Gas Chamber' Claims, p. 312
Anti-Semitism:
Is There such a Thing?, p. 316
J ews and the Soviet Revolution: J ews in the NKVD, p. 325 J ewish Bolshevism, p. 341 Solzhenitsyn onj ews in Russia, p. 342
The Revisionist •) ournal for Critical Historical Inquiry
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Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust. The Growing Critique of Truth' and 'Memory'
Dissecting the Holocaust is the blockbuster anthology that struck Holocaust orthodoxy a body blow from which it has never recovered. Dissecting marshals the work of 1 7 researchers to subject the conventional historiography of the Holocaust to careful, precise, methodical, and withering analysis. G. Rudolf on how chemistry weakens the case for gassing in Auschwitz; C. Mattogno and F. Deana on the crematory ovens of Auschwitz; R. Faurisson, M. Kohler, and C. Jordan on how testimony was coerced and convictions manufactured; F.R Berg, I. Weckert, C. Mattogno, and A. Neumaier on the technical absurdities of gassing claims for German mobile and stationary gas chambers; U. Walendy and J.C.Ball on analysis of photos alleged to depict the crimes or their locations; Rudolf on the evidence for Jewish losses during WWII; J. Graf on myths about concentration camps; and more. Dissecting'^ handsome design and format lend themselves well to the numerous illustrations, with which these leading revision- ists advance the wealth of evidence against the Holocaust myth. This is a book - the book - that every revisionist needs to own, and to read. 2nd, revised paperback edition! 616 pp. pb, 6"x9", b/w ill., bibl., index: $/€30.-, £20-
Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report Expert Report on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the 'Gas Cham- bers ' of Auschwitz
In 1988, American expert for execution technologies Fred Leuchter prepared an expert report about the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz. His conclusion: technically impossible. Ever since, Leuchter has been massively attacked. In 1993, Rudolf, at that time a researcher at a prestigious German Max-Planck-Institute, published a thorough forensic study about the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz which irons out the deficiencies and discrepancies of the Leuchter Report, but confirms its basic conclusion: technically impossible. The Rudolf Report analyzes all existing evidence on the Auschwitz gas chambers and exposes the fallacies of various failed attempts to refute Leuchter's and Rudolf's findings. The conclusions are quite clear: The alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz could not have existed. In the appendix, Rudolf describes his unique persecution due to his controversial studies.
455 pp. A5, b/w & color ill., bibl., index; pb: $/€30.-/£20.-; hardcover: $/€45.-/£30.-
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Contents
Revisionism is in Trouble - or is it? 242
By Germar Rudolf
On the Progress and Propagation of Holocaust Revisionism 243
By Germar Rudolf
Where Does the Star of David Come from? 249
By Dr. Israel Shahakf
The Great Soviet Space Bamboozle 250
By F. G. Kausch
Sinti and Roma - Yarns, Legends, and Facts 254
By Dr. Otward Miiller
Franz Olah, Key Witness against the Existence of Gas Chambers 259
By Thomas Ryder, Ph.D.
Two Times Dachau 260
By Ingrid Weckert
The Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau in the Light of Documents 271
By Carlo Mattogno
1972: A Somewhat Different Auschwitz Trial 294
By Dipl.-Ing. Walter Liiftl
Engineer's Deathbed Confession: We Built Morgues, not Gas Chambers 296
By Werner Rademacher
The New Face of the "Holocaust" 297
By Markus Springer
Weapons Industry: Source of Terrorism 300
By Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
The Holocaust, the Left, and the Warmongers 302
By Patrick S. McNally
Does North Korea have "Nazi Gas Chambers?" 312
By Paul Grubach
About Vampire Killers and Nincompoop 313
By Israel Shamir
On Anti-Semitism and Superhumans 316
By Israel Shamir
Pyrrhic Victory over Revisionism 322
By Claus Nordbruch, Ph.D.
Neo-Nazi Go to the Dogs! 324
By Yoke Satyr
The "Mommy" Mommsen Show 324
By David Brockschmidt Research News
Jews in the NKVD of Stalin 's Soviet Union, by Germar Rudolf. 325
From the Records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, Part 6, by Germar Rudolf 327
Book Reviews
On the Fate of Gypsies in the Third Reich, by Use Schirmer-Vowinckel 331
Marshal Zhukov: A Career Built on Corpses, by Dan Michaels 334
Simon Wiesenthal Exposed as a Fraud and Liar, by Francis Dixon 340
The Terror Did not Begin with Stalin, by Thomas Dunskus 341
The End of the Legends, by Wolfgang Strauss 342
Book Notices, by Francis Dixon 351
Letters to the Editor 353
In Brief 357
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 • No. 3 241
Revisionism is in Trouble - or is it?
By Germar Rudolf
"If Germar Rudolf is the future of revisionism, then re- visionism is in trouble. "
That was the response of a certain Richard A. Salzer to a statement in this regard by Dr. Fredrick Toben. I do not know this person, and I am sure that he doesn't know me either, therefore I can only wonder, how he drew this conclusion. When asked by Dr. Toben to elaborate on this, he did not re- spond.
I have heard similar stories before, but so far I have always managed to change peoples' minds, if only by meeting them in person.
Anyway, if revisionism can get in trouble just because of one single person, than revisionism is in trouble, no matter who that person is. If we do not think and act as a community, as persecuted and ostracized as we are, then things really look bad. Declaring a fellow revisionist as bad news for revisionism is not constructive criticism.
And by the way: if I am bad for revisionism, then evolution will replace me with something better, as the IHR under bad leadership was simply replaced by something better that evolved as the niche opened, as the need for something new arose.
* * *
"Piss Off!"
That was the response by David Irving to Dietmar Munier's story about him having some Jewish ancestry, about which I reported in an editorial in the last issue of this magazine. The reactions to this editorial were along the line of what I ex- pected. Instead of being curious as to whether or not it was true, and instead of seeing some irony and benefit in it, if it were true, I got a lot of scathing criticism for having written anything about it in the first place - even if it were true.
I must admit that I made three mistakes with this editorial: First, I did not ask David Irving for his comment, but I took the comment he allegedly made to Mr. Munier as sufficient. That was not a good thing to do. Secondly, I did not look up the fam- ily history pages he has on his website, which give lots of in- formation about his ancestry, but no indication of Jews being among them (denominations are mentioned nowhere). Thirdly, I should have gone to British governmental archives to find out through birth certificates about Mr. Irving 's ancestry instead of relying on hearsay.
All three things I corrected now. Mr. Irving says that Diet- mar Munier's claim about his alleged confirmation of Hoch- huth's claim about his mother having been Jewish is "rubbish," and the birth entries in the General Register Office of England do not give any information about religious affiliations, but it gives "Newington" as the maiden name of Irving's mother, which doesn't tell anything about her religious background. We leave it at that for now, unless I find any documentary proof.
Apart from being more cautious about chatter, there is an- other thing I learned for the future: revisionists are excited and delighted to learn and experience a development such as a Jew like David Cole became a revisionist and caught the Auschwitz
Museum off guard by interviewing them wearing his yarmulke; they are equally delighted to see the German Jew Joseph Gins- burg beat up on Zionists and Holocaust liars. However, the very same revisionists become infuriated if somebody suggests that a historian in line with their views could be Jewish. Can some- body explain this irrationality to me?
It would be psychologically devastating to the Holocaust myth if prominent Jewish historians were to share our revision- ist viewpoints. So why should it be any different if that promi- nent historian's name turns out to be Irving? Or Germar Rudolf, for argument's sake - although I am neither prominent nor a historian. And all of my grandparents had to deliver Arier Nachweise (proof of Aryan ancestry) in order to get a marriage license, so I am afraid I am only a non- Jewish subhuman, a German Sour-Kraut. ©
Is anybody paranoid about Jews here?
* * *
"You dummy! You obviously still think there might be
some merit to Provan 's horseshit. Go adjust your head. "
That was Friedrich Paul Berg's reaction to my decision to publish an article by Charles Provan on the question of whether or not victims of Diesel gassings would appear bluish.
I might sometimes be undiplomatic - the result of being overly sincere and straight forward - but at least I don't swear and cuss at people. So could we agree to let the steam out at home and cool off before we jot down these lines to people we are arguing with? That is good advice to follow for any social exchange, even and especially when we address our adversaries and enemies, because keeping a cool head makes anybody look superior in a discussion (I know, I should hear myself. . .).
To conclude this editorial, we revisionists are a community of idiosyncratic people. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, because if we were normal, we would never dare to think out of the box, never dare to fight the uneven, Sisyphus-like struggle against the Holocaust Moloch, never dare to swim against this torrential current of social hysteria surrounding all of us. As long as we keep in mind that although we do not have to love one another, we still ought to fight together in the same struggle we are caught in.
In this sense I would like to apologize for my idiosyncra- sies, which my defense lawyer in Germany as early as 1993 listed as my insuppressible tendency to write and speak as my mouth has grown, and not to stop even if I write myself know- ingly onto the gallows. That's the kind of matter true revision- ists have to be made of, be their name Salzer, Irving, Berg, Ru- dolf, or what have you. I love you all, guys!
Thus, I reach out to all of them and to all the others I might have offended or might offend in the future by saying that I do not mean it personally. I just can't keep my mouth shut and my scribbling pen off the paper, but that is more to the detriment of the Holocaust lobby then it can ever be to my fellow revision- ists, so I keep hoping that you will support all of us in our anti- Holocaust idiosyn-craziness . . . □
242
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
On the Progress and Propagation of Holocaust Revisionism
Speech held during David Duke's Homecoming Convention, May 29, 2004
By Germar Rudolf
Revisionism is not an ideology. It is a mere concept, a method. Revisionism is mainly about exactitude. Historical re- visionism is about the attempt to make the writing of history more accurate, to bring it into accord with the facts.
As boring as it sounds, there is some dynamite in it, even though what I just described is nothing else but the basic de- scription of any historiography. Fact is, however, that many normal, or should I rather say mainstream historians, do not abide by this rule when it comes to certain issues. The reason for that is very simple: It is called political power.
Every political system and every society exerts pressure upon its historians to write history in a way that is favorable to it. Dictatorships might do it more bluntly and brutally than so- called republics, but the difference is only gradual. Historical revisionism is the force that resists and fights this pressure. Though in and of itself apolitical, historical revisionism thus has a profound political effect. Because it is always directed against the powers that be, it is always oppositional, if not out- right revolutionary. However, we need to keep this in mind: The power of revisionism lies in the fact that it is scientific, that it abstains from any attempt to become political. Because only unambiguous, factual statements backed-up with hard evidence and free of any personal attacks and biased interpretation have the power to potentially convince everybody.
Let me now get a little closer to my real topic: Holocaust revisionism. This is only a small subsection of revisionism, al- beit certainly the most controversial one. Prof. Robert Fauris- son once stated that Holocaust revisionism is the intellectual atom bomb in the hand of the poor and powerless.1 He also said that the main sufferers under Holocaust propaganda, and thus the main beneficiaries of Holocaust revisionism, are the Ger- man people - but not its leaders - as well as the Palestinian people in its entirety. I think, however, that both statements are not very helpful, as they do not really show the whole picture. Let me therefore draw a more complete pic- ture by trying to describe first of all who the main beneficiaries of Holocaust propaganda are and why. I follow my own line of argu- ment as laid out in a contribution to a com- memorative booklet I published in January this year on behalf of Prof. Faurisson's 75th birthday.2 I divide the groups who massively benefit from the Holocaust myths into three groups:
a) Zionists. This includes most, but not all Jews, but also many Christians who have an irrational adoration for Jews as God's Chosen People. There certainly are more Zionist Christians in the world than Zion- ist Jews, though Christians are usually not as fanatic as Jews. Why Zionists benefit from the Holocaust myth is obvious, as it
b)
c)
NORMAN G. Fl NK EL5TEIN THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY
gives Jews an aura of being morally unassailable, which is the pole position to gain control over other groups of peo- ple, as Prof. Norman Finkelstein as so nicely described in his book The Holocaust Industry? Finally, most Zionist Christians are Zionist because they believe in the Holo- caust, which turned the Jews as such and the modern Israeli State with them into religious icons.
International capitalism has an interest in breaking down borders both politically/fiscally as well as culturally/ethni- cally, because every capitalist's profit rises if he can freely sell the same products everywhere in the world. The Holo- caust is usually depicted as the logical outcome of rightwing ideologies (like National Socialism), as the ultimate result of nationalism and ethnic exclusivism: Thus, the Holocaust Myth is the perfect weapon to fight any kind of national (speak: rightwing) independence, autarky, and protectionism, any kind of cultural and ethnic identity and exclusivism. All ideologues claiming that all humans are equal - I call them egalitarians - have a wonder-weapon in the Holocaust myth, as it is the ultimate - quote - proof - unquote - of the absolute evil of any ideology, which distinguishes between subsets of humanity. With the Holocaust as an argument, everybody dissenting with egalitarian views can easily be silenced by putting him into context with the gas chambers:4 "We all know where ideologies end, which claim
that people are not equal: they end in the gas chambers
of Auschwitz. "
Thus, the ideology of egalitarianism, which is the driv- ing force of leftist sociology and politics, becomes morally virtually unassailable. Although egalitarian ideologues are usually opposed to international capitalism, they effectively support each other, because the destruction of specific cul- tures and ethnic groups - identity against equality - is a goal of both ideologies. Leftist ideologies are also some- times opposed to altruistic values, as soon as it is considered to be opposed to self- realization and emancipation, because altru- ism requires a feeling of identity with a dis- tinguished group and self-sacrificial behav- ior in favor of this group - and consequently at least indirectly against other groups. In- ternational capitalism shares this intention to destroy identities and all ties to identifiable people, because the atomized consumer without identity, who has mere egoistic, ma- terialistic, hedonistic so-called values, but no altruistic ideals anymore, can be manipu- lated very easily to a lemming-like behavior, easy prey for any advertising campaign.
Demographics show that the indigenous populations of Europe collapse as a result of a hedonistic pandemic, which is flooding
The Revisionist ■ 2004 ■ Volume 2 ■ No. 3
243
that continent with an intensity that goes parallel with the inten- sity of Holocaust propaganda. In one hundred years, Europe will be depopulated of its original people, replaced by aliens mainly from Asia Minor and Africa. North America is facing a similar situation, but it may be seen as a mere 'reconquista' by mainly Mexican mestizos.
International capitalism brings the world to the brink of a worldwide ecologic exhaustion and economic collapse - and soon beyond - mainly driven by a progressive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich - both nationally and internationally - caused by a monetary system based on public debt and interest on interest. Social unrest, perhaps even revolution is unavoid- able in the long run. A way out seems impossible, as it requires radical, 'new' financial concepts, which had been successfully tested by... the unspeakable regime that is claimed to have in- vented the 'gas chambers.' So hush up everybody and keep running toward the cliffs!
In the meantime, Washington's Zionist lobby has started to wage an 'eternal' war in order to stabilize Israel, conquer Mid- dle East petroleum sources, and support the crumbling interna- tional capitalist system's backbone - the U.S. Dollar - by pure force and violence.5 It will all be in vain, as nobody can evade the mathematical laws of exponential functions lurking behind public debt and a gigantic U.S. trade deficit.
So what is the role of Holocaust revisionism? It is true that Holocaust revisionism cannot resolve any of the pressing issues just mentioned. What Holocaust revisionism does, though, is to challenge the moral and cultural hegemony of the dominant ideologies of western societies, whose deficiencies are the rea- son for the misdevelopments just outlined. If Holocaust revi- sionism succeeds, the moral and cultural hegemony of egali- tarianism, internationalism, and Zionism collapses, because competing concepts can no longer be vilified that easily, if at all, and because all those who took advantage of the Holocaust for their political ends will face a situation where this will back- fire if not even blow up right into their face.
Although Holocaust revisionism is neither left nor right, neither German nor Jewish, neither internationalistic nor patri- otic, it is always on the side of those who are suppressed: be they Palestinians, Iraqis, German patriots, or any other group struggling to preserve their identity or even their mere exis- tence. Tomorrow it could even be Jews, should their identity become threatened.
I understand that many people today are worried about the future of the cultural and ethnic heritage of their people. They insist on preserving the cultural identity of their respective countries and may even argue against intermarriage. Those people face massive opposition by the establishment. The rea- son for this is because such ideas oppose all three above- mentioned ideologies: internationalism, egalitarianism, and Zi- onism. As such, Holocaust revisionism can be helpful. But please be aware that Holocaust revisionism is no tool exclu- sively at anybody's disposal. It is also a potential tool of all the other nations and cultures of this world in their struggle against economic exploitation by internationalist capitalism, the driving force of which is the United States. In addition, it is a potential tool of all other ethnic minorities in any country to preserve their heritage and resist attempts of assimilation. And last but
not least: As an undermining force of the legitimacy of interna- tionalism, Holocaust revisionism is also a potential tool to de- stroy the new empire called the United States of America. This means in clear language: By using Holocaust revisionism to further any political goals, every American citizen saws on the branch of wealth he is sitting upon, because most of American wealth currently depends on economically and ecologically ex- ploiting the world. When this kind of new imperialism stops, American wealth will stop as well, and massive hardship will result for the majority in this country, at least until America has been restructured to a fairer, more social, and more altruistic society.
To close this section of my presentation, let me summarize by saying that Holocaust revisionism in itself is and must be apolitical. However, the potential political impact of Holocaust revisionism is global in scale and revolutionary in depth. This impact would not be to the benefit of just one certain group, but to the benefit of all those suffering under the powers that be, and this includes perhaps 95% of the entire world population, primarily in the third world, but also the poor and suppressed in the industrialized nations.
I say this here because for a political struggle everybody ought to keep the old Roman proverb in mind: divide et impera - divide and rule. If, however, you feel like you need to throw off the yoke of alien or hostile rulers, you need to apply the op- posite principle: unite and liberate. You need to unite as many allies for your struggle against the powers that be as possible; otherwise you will not succeed in liberating yourself. There- fore, you need to find common ground with other groups that suffer under the current situation. I have shown how Holocaust revisionism can potentially gain the support of 95% of human- ity - whites, yellows, reds, and blacks, American and foreign, Christian, Muslims, atheists, and even non-Zionist Jews. This way, we can win.
Now to the much harder question: How can Holocaust revi- sionism gain cultural hegemony in its field? My answer to this may surprise you, perhaps even upset you, but here it is: We can do precious little to achieve this, and if revisionism goes mainstream, it will not do this because of any of us. And here is why:
Two main characteristics of modern societies are:
a) They are highly structured, with each member having highly specialized tasks.
b) They are information societies, where the information is transported to a high degree by media controlled by the powers that be.
The effect of this is as follows:
To a) In a highly specialized society, the experts in a certain field determine what is perceived as true and what is not. Most people have no other choice than to rely on expert's advice, and rightly so. Therefore, as long as almost all western historians subscribe to the established mainstream version of the "Holo- caust", the western world will assume that this is the "truth".
To b) Modern media, dominated by TV, in combination with sophisticated psychological techniques, leads to the in- surmountable fact that the vast majority will always believe what the news will tell them. And there will never be a way for us to compete with those trillion-dollar heavy mass media.
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Each drop of information we bring to public attention will be drowned in an ocean of mainstream disinformation.
When David Duke asked me two weeks ago to present a handy summary of the most impressive and up-to-date argu- ments of revisionism, I thought to myself: why should I do this? The answer could be: either to convince you because you yourself aren't convinced, or in order to enable you to go out there and proselytize the world. However, my experience in many presentations I made before uninformed audiences is that I simply cannot convince a brainwashed crowd with scientific arguments presented in an hour or two, when they then simply go back home and expose themselves to twenty more years of uninterrupted massive Holocaust propaganda out of all chan- nels of all media. My experience is also, that only some two to three percent of any group of people is capable of critical out- of-the-box thinking. The majority will always run with the crowd. And when it comes to the Holocaust, the crowd will run as the media tells them, and the media will report what the ma- jority of historians write.
So does that mean we are stuck for ever with this gigantic
lie?
Nope, we are not. But the solution does not lie in us revi- sionists trying to convince ordinary people or by trying to make futile counter propaganda against the mass media. Of course, I keep trying this, too, because one never knows, and because it is also a necessary means of economic survival for me to have some customers who think I am right. However, I do not have the illusion that we revisionists ourselves will ever be able to turn this cart around. The solution lies somewhere else: In the only asset revisionism has:
And that is Exactitude.
If it is true that only those 2 to 3% of critical thinkers are promising candidates for our efforts, and if it is furthermore true that it is the experts to which the media and the crowd will listen, then we have to start with those 2-3% of critical histori- ans. And there is only one thing that is capable of convincing a critical historian: being so highly accurate and superior in fac- tual reporting of how it really was that they cannot help but to come around. And that is what I want to talk about now.
Over the last eight years I have heard over and over again that Holocaust revisionism has explored all that there is to ex- plore, that all relevant arguments have been made, that every- thing the other side says has been refuted a thousand times, that there is nothing left to do but to get it out into the open.
Such a statement is both true and false. Even though it is true that some really convincing blockbuster arguments have been around for many years, if not decades,6 it is untrue to claim that everything has been explored and that all arguments of the other side have been refuted. I tend to the other extreme: When I started to get involved in revisionism in the early 1990s, I was struck by the lack of works that meet scholarly standards. Having gone through ten years of ivy league educa- tion in sciences, I thoroughly learned what a scholarly work is supposed to look like. Hardly any of the revisionist works I read in those years met that standard. And if the standard was met by an occasional work, the topic treated by it usually cov- ered only a tiny area of the huge event called the Holocaust, which spans an entire continent in distance, five years in time,
and involved millions of individuals in hundreds of distinct places. How can anybody claim that a few monographs by a handful of authors could possibly cover the entire area?
It was not before the mid 1990s that research deserving the term scholarly really started: Research that was conducted in numerous archives and locations all over Europe, but mainly in eastern Europe, which had been inaccessible before. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of documents were and are being unearthed and analyzed. And it was not before 1998 that the first results of it were published in a series of papers and mono- graphs that I have both the duty and the honor to bring to life in my bilingual publishing company. And I might say that we have only just begun the enormous work of writing a meticu- lously documented series of monographs and anthologies of what did and what did not happen during the war with Europe's Jews.
To give you just one example: Let us look into just one of the standard works on the Holocaust, Danuta Czech's Kalen- darium of Events of the Auschwitz Camp.1 The first edition of this work of some 900 pages was published in the 1960s. It is based upon thousands of documents and eyewitness statements purportedly proving mass extermination in Auschwitz. There has been nothing on the revisionist side to appropriately address this work.8 So how can anybody claim we have refuted it, when we did not even properly address it? And that is exactly what is required in order to convince skeptical historians: a) refute the thesis of this and similar books and b) publish one that is so much more accurate, exact, and reliable that every critical his- torian has to change sides. We haven't done anything remotely like that yet. Since 2000, however, we are working on this gi- gantic task of addressing the Auschwitz camp with several au- thors, and I have invested tens of thousands of dollars into it, despite my own financial problems.
The first results of this research have been presented to the public in several papers that I published in my magazines, and while doing this research, we were able to come up with a se- ries of books on other camps as well, like Majdanek, Stutthof, Treblinka, and Belzec, which you can find in my book pro- gram. All of these works are groundbreaking, in that they set standards of thorough historical research never seen before on either side of this debate. The huge two volume, 2000 plus page book on Auschwitz, however, that will stand at the end of this project and will rely on tens of thousands of original documents and on lots of forensic evidence, will be published in perhaps three years, if we are lucky.
The reason for that is simple: Revisionism consists right now basically only of ONE full-time researcher. Yes, you heard me right: Just one person under six billion human beings! And no, it is not me, since I am only a publisher! The reason for this is also simple to name: persecution. Most people who did some research at some point were driven into personal and economic ruin by persecution and prosecution, as was I.
Some results of our ongoing research efforts can be found in the books that I published recently, in case anybody is inter- ested in it. It is written in a way to convince the skeptical expert historian, and I will show you now that this strategy works.
The first sign of that was a book published by German gov- ernment historian Joachim Hoffmann in 1995 on the German-
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Soviet War between 1941 and 1945. Al- though its main focus is elsewhere, Hoff- mann did discuss propaganda lies and exag- gerations by the Soviets, and by so doing more accidentally then systematically stum- bled over revisionist research which he dared to quote. I had the pleasure to publish the English translation of this work,10 and by so doing I managed to get an insight not only into the author's mind but also to learn what is going on in the circles of Germany's histo- rians: first of all, not a few of them are genu- inely afraid of German governmental perse- cution, but secondly, they are also aware of the fact that history as it is taught in Germany is hardly accurate. They might have only scratched the surface of lies, but they sure do smell the stench. Fear of persecution as well as lack of arguments hold them back still, though.
The second landmark I want to talk about is an article published in May 2002 by a lead- ing editor of Germany's leading newsmaga- zine Der Spiegel, the left-wing extremist11 Fritjof Meyer. This article12 made many con- cessions to revisionism, of which I would like to list only a few:
- Former Auschwitz camp commander Ru- dolf H6B was forced by torture to write his "confession"
- The cremation capacity of the Auschwitz crematoria has been greatly exaggerated.
- The only reliable work about the actual capacity was published by revisionists, and Meyer even quotes the book he relies on: Dissecting the Holocaust, my anthol- ogy on revisionism which was just pub- lished in its second English edition. Keep in mind that this book triggered one of the biggest house search and book burning actions in modern German history! Yet Meyer still quotes this work of the devil incarnate - to be sure, while distancing himself from the rest of the book, but still!
- Not one million people died in Ausch- witz, but perhaps only half as many.
- And most importantly: The rooms so far claimed to have been the main facilities for the mass murder in Auschwitz, certain morgues in the Auschwitz crematoria, were not really used as gas chambers at all, so Meyer!
This article resulted in an exchange be- tween Meyer and the head of the research department of the Auschwitz Museum, Fran- scizek Piper. In Meyer's rebuttal of Piper's attack, he relies even more on revisionist ar-
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guments, quoting tens of documents that our diligent researchers unearthed and published over the last years - although Meyer does not mention them with a single word. This ex- change with an analysis of all the conces- sions and errors made has been thoroughly documented in my journal The Revisionist}1*
Step three forward is a book by Gennan mainstream historian Prof. Werner Maser that was published just this April. It has the title "Forgery, Fairytale, and Truth about Hit- ler and Stalin."14 Although I have not yet read the book which is on its way to me, a German publisher friend of mine told me al- ready that Maser piggy-backs on Meyer's courageous semi-revisionism and goes even one step further: He dares quoting my Ger- man language magazine, apologizing for do- ing so, needless to say, but he claims that this is a magazine which publishes so many rele- vant documents that he cannot but quote it.
[In the meantime, after having read this book, I may announce a small revolution in historiography of the Holocaust. This book will be thoroughly reviewed in the next issue ofTRJ
See, here you have it: If you just provide enough exactitude and overwhelming scien- tific evidence, the critical ones within the community of historians will eventually come around. Slowly first, but they will come. And to be honest: I don't care if they make proper references to our works or not or if they even vilify us along the way, as long as they get the facts straight, that's all I am interested in for the time being.
What we can experience right now in Germany is the first phase of a reorientation, the preparatory phase of a historiographical revolution. And I am sure that it will spread, because I will dig my heels into the soil of this country in order to keep publishing in the new lingua franca so that the entire world can find out about the mother of all lies as cre- ated and abused by the powers that be!
So far I have talked almost exclusively about politics. However, since I do not want to disappoint those of you who expected to hear something about revisionism either, I will comply with David's wish to give you a guideline of how to approach the Holocaust issue when confronting others. And again it might not be what you expect, because I will not give you a handy summary of the most striking revisionist arguments on the Holo- caust here. One reason why I will not do this is because I came to understand that most people who are confronted with a massive
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broadside of revisionist arguments react opposite to what we want: they consider us zealots at best and evil Nazis at worst. However, if you really want to have a nice handout with a very concise summary of arguments, you can get our flyer "The Holocaust Controversy" back at my book ta- ble for free,15 or if you want it more tho- roughly, I recommend purchasing my book "Dissecting the Holocaust" instead.16
As I mentioned before, I have some experience with various attempts to get people to become more critical about what they are being force-fed by media, politics, and educational institutions, and ultimately to listen to revisionist arguments. The most successful approach so far stays completely away from the Holocaust itself, but instead reports about events in 1900, the year when Holocaust propaganda started. Yes, you heard me right: 1900. Not 1941, not 1933, no, One Nine Zero Zero.
What follows now I owe mainly to one of my authors, Don Heddesheimer, who researched everything I will talk about and whose book I had the honor to publish last year. Its title is The First Holocaust. Jewish Fund Raising Cam- paigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One.11 The title it- self explains a lot.
The question is basically the follow- ing: Since when do we know that Six Million Jews died during the Holocaust of World War Two? Just a few minutes ago I mentioned German mainstream Historian Hoffmann as the first to use Holocaust revisionist arguments. He also discovered that the Soviets used the Six Million Figure in their propaganda publi- cations already as early as December 1944, at a time when nobody could pos- sibly know the death toll yet. Heddeshei- mer has unearthed many articles mainly published in the New York Times between the End of World War One and 1927, which claim that at that time millions of Jews in Eastern Europe would face cata- strophe by starvation and disease if they would not receive massive aid. Buzz words like Holocaust, Six Million, and extermination were all there. I have re- produced some sentences from the NYT articles on the cover of Heddesheimer' s book. The most striking example, which is known already for quite a while, was published in the October 31 issue of the magazine The American Hebrew in 1919
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The Fi:
The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!
By MARTIN H. GLYNN
ATROCITIES FN SERBIA.
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. FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDED.
HO MR, \Upi\ny (fi 4 A p.m.). TTi* fkirrrnmfnt.ii uf the AU\H har* wrurrd rridenr» and Hm'iiiiwnta, which wilt nhnrt.ly t» pubtuhwl, proTirre that .Austria and Rnlj(irt* bir» b**>n fiii'Hy of hurnld* crime* ra rWbi», whim (he mi-vdrrf j committed irurp wan* than thw fvrpetrnted t>¥ Turkey in Armenia.
The Italian ftn»emment hivs to-daj pnbtii>hed thp twtimrnT nj two Italian prisoner! >hn
GERMANS MURDER 700,000 JEWS IN POLAND
TRAVELLING GAS CM AM HERS
-*"«' Mir ntuc«t4*tf ititwitrku
More than 700.000 PolM) ,Jcwm haw been slaughtered by the Germans in the greatest massacre in the world's history, in addition, :i system of starvation is feeing carried out in which the number nf deaths, on I he admission of the German,1! themselves, hids (air to be almost an large.
The moat gruesome del tils of miss Kilting, even rf. tin ute afpoisoi i gig, ■ re revealed I n ■ ret h irt m-i i t secret Iv to Mr, S, ZyK1f tbtfifn, Jewish npNMBUItvv im the Palish National Council m tendon, by «n Betiv<; |'iiiii]i in TVIanil II is strongly f-t" I T thnl action shuuht be taken \>* (Hfvent Hitler from i-atrvHU- imt his threat lUr nim;>n-^
by Martin H. Glynn, who had been governor of the State of New York at the end of World War One. In this article we read sentences like these:
'From across the sea, six million men and women call to us for help [...] six million human beings. [...] Six million men and women are dying [...] in the threatened holocaust of human life [...] six million famished men and women. Six million men and women are dying [...]" Heddesheimer also proves that these claims were all fraudulent. He even shows that as early as 1900 Zionists claimed that six million suffering Jews in Europe would be a good argument for Zionism.
You see, Holocaust propaganda is much older than World War Two. To make people realize this is such an eye opener that after such a revelation most people will accept the possibility that things may have been made up.
Another series parallel to a century of almost uninterrupted Holocaust propa- ganda is that related to gas chambers. Let me show you two newspaper articles about this. The first one was published in the British Daily Telegraph on March 22, 1916, page 7, that is, in the middle of World War One. It reads:
"Atrocities in Serbia
700,000 VICTIMS
According to reliable information, the victims of the Austrians and Bul- garians exceeded 700,000. [...] Women, children, and old men were shut up in the churches by the Austri- ans, and either stabbed with bayonet or suffocated by means of asphyxiating gas. "
It is today generally acknowledged that this was a propaganda lie created by the British. Now juxtapose this with an article that appeared in the very same London Daily Telegraph on June 25, 1942, p. 5, that is, five days before the Jewish owned and controlled New York Times reported about the alleged mass murder of Jews in German controlled Europe for the first time:
"GERMANS MURDER 700, 000 JE WS IN POLAND.
TRA YELLING GAS CHAM- BERS. [...]
More than 700,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the Germans in the greatest massacre in world history. [...]"
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IRAQIS HAVE GAS CHAMBERS FOR ALL JEWS
IRAQ HEARING TOTAL DISASTER
Now, if you think that it is obvious that nobody would make such outra- geous claims about what is going on in any country today, I have to teach you another quite astounding lesson: Let me bring up only two examples from a war that took place in 1991, almost 50 years af- ter the second holocaust propaganda started. It is about America's first war against Iraq to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The New York based Jewish Press, then calling itself "The largest independent Anglo-Jewish weekly newspaper," wrote on its title page on February 21, 1991:
"IRAQIS HA VE GAS CHAMBERS FOR ALL JEWS " Or take the front cover announcement of volume 12, num- ber 1 (spring 1991), of Response, a periodical published by the Jewish Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and distrib- uted in 381,065 copies:
"GERMANS PRODUCE ZYKLONB IN IRAQ (Iraq 's German-made gas ~chamber) " I hope that you get the idea: 1900, 1927, 1942, 1991... In 1991, it was all invented, for sure, as were the later claims prior to America's second war against Iraq in 2003 that Iraq possessed or was about to possess weapons of mass de- struction - the weapon of mass destruction called "Zyklon B" not being mentioned here, though. But as Israel's renowned newspaper Ha 'aretz proudly proclaimed on April 7, 2003: 18
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing Presi- dent Bush to change the course of history. " And just recently, on May 21, 2004, Senator Fritz Hollings has proudly proclaimed that of course this war was fought for Is- rael and for nothing else.19 Because, as we all know, the Jews in Israel deserve preventive protection from annihilation by weap- ons of mass destruction - Zyklon B or not, invented or not. . .
With just these arguments at hand, put down in one small paper back book which doesn't even touch directly upon the hot topic of "The Holocaust," you can go out there and open people's mind, to make them see that maybe not quite all claims referring to events between 1941 and 1945 are com- pletely true either. Maybe there is a chance after all that things were twisted, distorted, exaggerated, invented. And if they al- low this possibility in their own minds, they are open-minded enough to read for themselves in our highly informative litera- ture - which can all be accessed on the internet at www.vho.org - so they can find out who has the better arguments. I thank you for your attention.
© May 25, 2004
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Notes
This is the manuscript of the planned speech minus the introductory paragraphs meant only for this specific audience. The actual speech deviated from that script. To listen to the actual speech itself, please download the according mp3 file available online at www.vho.org/GB/c/GR/rudolf.mp3.
1 Robert Faurisson, "Die Fiihrer der islamischen Staaten sollten ihr Schwei- gen zum "Holocaust "-Betrug brechen", Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Ge- schichtsforschung, 5(2) (2001), p. 139.
2 G. Rudolf, "Revisionism in Cartoons", in: Robert Countess, Christian Lindtner, Germar Rudolf (eds.), Exactitude. Festschrift for Robert Fauris- son to his 75th Birthday, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2004, pp. 93-104; ; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=94
3 Verson, London/New York, 2nd. ed., 2003; ; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=106
4 This is an actual quote from the speech of a member of the Green Party in the Hessian Parliament, Wiesbaden, during a debate of educational politics in 1 990, which I attended as a visitor.
5 For this, see my article "On the Brink of World War Three," The Revision- ist, 1(2) (2003), pp. 124-130; www.vho.org/tr/2003/2/Rudolfl24-130.html
6 One indicator for this is Arthur R. Butz's book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which has been a revisionist standard work since 1976 and has just seen a slightly revised new edition (Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresurt.php?ID=85).
7 D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz- Birkenau 1939-1945. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg 1989. he first edition appeared as a series in the Hefte von Auschwitz, published by the Auschwitz Museum.
8 There have been several contributions criticizing isolated entries in Czech's book, first and foremost by Robert Faurisson, but no work as such that would systematically analyze Czech's work.
9 Joachim Hoffmann, Statins Vernichtungskieg 1941-1945, Verlag fur Wehr- wissenschaften, Munich 1995.
10 Stalin 's War of Extermination 1941-1945, Theses & Dissertations Press, Capshaw, AL, 2001; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=32
11 I define an extremist as somebody who is willing to use violence to further his political agenda. In a brief letter Meyer wrote on Feb. 12, 2004: "Con- sidering the recent dangers in Italy, France, Russia, and the USA [alleged anti-Semitic incidents], it must remain valid to beat the fascists wherever one meets them." The context of his letter makes clear that he also means us revisionists with this: http://www.idgr.de/texte/geschichte/ns- verbrechen/ fritj of-mey er/ meyer-0402 1 2 .php .
12 F. Meyer, "Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkenntnisse durch neue Archivfunde," in: Osteuropa. Zeitschrift fiir Gegenwartsfragen des
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Ostens, No. 5, May 2002, pp. 631-641; see also Engl, online at www.vho.org/GB/c/Meyer.html
See Germar Rudolf, "Cautious Mainstream Revisionism," The Revisionist 1(1) (2003), pp. 23-30; Carlo Mattogno, "Auschwitz. Fritjof Meyer's New Revisions," The Revisionist 1(1) (2003), pp. 30-37; Carlo Mattogno, "On the Piper-Meyer-Controversy: Soviet Propaganda vs. Pseudo-Revisionism," The Revisionist 2(2) (2004), pp. 131-139; online see the links at the end of Meyer's article www.vho.org/GB/c/Meyer.html.
Werner Maser, Falschung, Dichtung unci Wahrheit iiber Hitler, Olzog, Mu- nich 2004.
It can also be downloaded for free from the internet at www.vho.org/Intro/GB/Flyer.pdf; or for sale at www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=87
16 Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=38
17 Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003; www.vho.org/store/USA/bresult.php?ID=80
18 Ari Shavit, "White man 's burden," Ha 'aretz, April 7, 2003; www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279.
1 http://hollings.senate.gov/~hollings/statements/2004521A35.html
Where Does the Star of David Come from?
Surprising Revelations about the Origin of the States Symbol
By Dr. Israel Shahakf
In the year 1998 the modern State of Israel celebrated its fiftieth birthday. The Western world joined the celebration accordingly, including many practicing Christians. One could observe, especially in book stores, quantities of large Stars of David exhibited in the display windows as eye catchers in order to announce newly published books, which praise the history of the Zionist state. It is not the only point of criticism that Israel's history is explained rather one- sidedly in these books - especially by eliminating the fate of the eternal losers in the Middle East conflict, the Pales- tinians. Another critique deals with the fact that in western countries - fortunately - no one gets angry about adver- tisements using the Star of David, but that on the other hand public displays of Christian crucifixes in Israel will lead to violent protests and even measures by the legislation. This religious discrimination in Israel is not perceived outside of Israel, because the victims of the past are not allowed to be criticized today. The insight that it was the Catholic Order of the Jesuits that selected the Star of David as a Jewish symbol is rather amusing, if not downright ironic.
Facts about the question how the Star of David evolved and how it was accepted by the Jews as "their" symbol are found only in contributions by good Israeli historians, published in specialized Israeli historical magazines. First of all it is neces- sary to realize that the Hebraic as well as the Yiddish name for this symbol is actually "Shield of David." I don't know why it was finally called "Star of David."
It should be noted that during antiquity and the Middle Ages the Jews possessed neither a national nor a religious symbol, even though various symbols were occasionally used, mostly the seven-armed chandelier (the official symbol of Israel) and the mounting lion.
The history of the Shield of David begins in Prague in the year 1648. During that last year of the Thirty Years War, Pra- gue was besieged by the Swedish army. The town was mainly defended by Prague's citizens' militia, which included a Jewish unit. (This was the case until the days of Maria Theresa, who terminated the participation of Jews in the militia.) Because the Swedes did not succeed in taking the city, Gennan Emperor Ferdinand III decided to assign honor flags and other decora- tions to all units of the citizens' militia in accordance with their self-defined affiliations. This included the Jews. However, no one in Vienna knew what kind of symbol to put on the flag, which was to be assigned to the Jews. Even the family Open- haimer, the emperor's "court Jews," did not know what to do. In their helplessness they turned to the scholarly Jesuits in Vi- enna to find a Jewish symbol. They finally came to the conclu- sion that King David "must have had the first and the last letter
of his name, D, on his shield." They knew that the Jewish al- phabet transformed towards Aramaic around the year 400 BC, although the earlier alphabet was still used during festive occa- sions. Ancient Jewish coins, for example, are inscribed with these old letters, which are identical with the Punic letters. In this alphabet the letter D is a triangle, similar to today's Greek delta (A). Therefore they superimposed two triangles, which formed the Shield of David ($). This was then embroidered on the Jewish flag and presented to the Jews of Prague as an hon- orable distinction for their duty for the country.
The Jews in turn liked this symbol, and their scholarly rab- bis understood its meaning, since the transformation of the Jew- ish alphabet was also mentioned in the Talmud. So this new symbol began to spread to those towns, which had ties with Prague, and it was used in synagogues and during festive occa- sions. One of these towns was Frankfurt on Main, and when the Frankfurt family Rothschild was ennobled in the early nine- teenth century, they placed this Jewish symbol, already famous at that time, on their coat of arms. Since then the symbol has spread like wildfire to all Jewish communities, including the non-European, especially because the Rothschild family had a considerable reputation among the Jews at that time. It was even reported in remote communities that the shield had magic powers, and there were stories, for example from Yemen, in which the ancestor of the Rothschild family succeeded in exor- cizing the devil from the emperor's daughter, etc.
The Jews actually never heard of or used this symbol before the year 1648, with the exception of the time between 700 and
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400 BC, when it was used by Jews as well as non-Jews in magic spells. In any case, it is rather amusing to know that the Jewish symbol, which is today on the flag of Israel, was actu- ally given prominence by Viennese Jesuits, as demanded by the German Emperor.
It is not maintained today in Israel that this symbol has an antique origin, because many Israelis are interested in Jewish history and are active as hobby archeologists, and such an alle- gation would be quickly exposed as a lie. Therefore the origin of this symbol is simply ignored. Even the Zionist movement did not use the shield of David until the death of its founder Herzl; on Herzl's flag was the lion rampant, surrounded by
seven five-pronged stars. However, David Wolfsohn, the suc- cessor of Herzl, who paid more attention to Jewish sensitivity, created the flag which later was accepted by the State of Israel. The white background with the blue bands at the edges corre- lates to today's Jewish prayer scarf. The coloring originates, however, from the Roman toga, where the violet was replaced with blue, as this special blue is a preferred Jewish color for reasons unknown to me at this time.
First published under pen name Ysmael Rubinstein as "Woher stammt ei- gentlich der David-Stern?" in Vierteljahreshefte fiir freie Geschichtsforschung 3(2) (1999), pp. 181f. Translated by Fabian Eschen.
The Great Soviet Space Bamboozle
By F. G. Kausch
Communist propaganda has successfully turned black into white in most areas of human activity. Why then should the West uncritically believe Soviet claims concerning their space projects? The writer of the following article has spent many years in studying Soviet space claims, and his findings are that they must be treated with the greatest suspi- cion. It appears that even some Western scientists can be as gullible as Western politicians.
The tremendous ballyhoo about the meeting in space be- tween three American astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts in 1975 could not conceal the embarrassing fact that the Soviet Union was an inferior and rather make-shift space-partner to the United States. There is little to wonder, when the Western media soon cut short reporting about the "space detente."
In keeping with the West's policy of wholesale surrender everywhere, the Apollo craft had to go to meet Soyuz (certainly not only because the Russian craft was unable to do major ma- neuvering in space). In an icy scene, US astronaut Stafford had to go forward to shake hands with Soviet cosmonaut Leonov. Colonel Stafford, a veteran of Gemini 6, Gemini 9 and Apollo 10
T
Left: "Alexei Leonov's Spacewalk - A television picture of Alexei Leonov performing the first ever spacewalk. Good quality pictures from Leonov's walk outside the Voskhod 2 vehicle are not available because the camera mounted on the outside of Voskhod 2 could not be retrieved from the airlock, which was ejected before re-entry."
Thus NASA on its website.1 Right: Allegedly a similar scene from the same spacewalk - from a Russian website.2 The tubes run differently.
would likely have been much angered, if he had known not only more about Communist behavior, but also more about Colonel Leonov and his strange experience in Voskhod 2 in 1965.
Older readers still remember how the same media reported "the Soviet Union five..." or "...ten years ahead in the space race" during the 1960s. In March 1965, a few days before the start of the Gemini program, still relatively little was known about manned space flight. The world press had its sensation, when it reported the launch of a Soviet space ship called Vosk- hod 2, manned by two cosmonauts. Already on the second orbit one of them, Alexei Leonov, had allegedly left the spacecraft and floated in space. A film of exceeding poor quality was shown over all TV stations of the "first space walk," and the comments about this "Soviet leap ahead in space" were depressing indeed for many opponents of Commu- nism. All friends of the Soviet Union were delighted.
As a reward for their achievement, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov traveled to Western space conferences. What they told eager listeners was a bit here and there, yet very disappointing in technical details. Nothing at all was told about the technical features of the Voskhod spaceship (and to this day no pictures or technical data have been published). But over the years, when more and more in- terviews were published, one curious fact emerged: The stories Leonov told about his space walk differed substan- tially from each other, even contradicted themselves. He told interviewer Charles Gautier:
"When we were above Africa, I had begun with the preparations for the exit. Above the Mediterranean I was half out. Before Simferopol I left. I looked down: We flew somewhere above Kertch. I have seen the Black Sea, the Gulf Novorossisk, the cloud haze above the Caucasus. The
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Ural Mountains I did not notice: I made then some somer- saulting. I did also some filming. Then I saw the mighty Si- berian rivers Irtych and Yenissei. Above the Yenissei the commander ordered me to return.
The return was more difficult than the exit. I had to keep my time. It was clear to me that I had no right for any risks. I decided not to wrap the safety tether around my hand. This also was correct. I went quickly through the air lock and gave the sign. The commander closed the hatch, pumped air into the chamber and I floated into the cabin.
The commander worked on according to schedule, while I entered my impressions of my experience outside the space craft into the log book. I wrote about one and a half hours. " (emphasis added)
We note from this statement the remarkable short prepara- tion time required by Leonov. The time elapsed from his begin- ning over Africa to opening the hatch could not have been more than ten minutes.
Contradicting Versions of Space Walk
Apparently both easy and not easy was Leonov 's space walk when he told it the first time to the press. According to The Australian of March 24th 1965 Leonov stated:
"In an interview with the Soviet press Colonel Leonov said his plunge into space was not difficult - even simple. 'The ship shook and seems to lurch forward slightly from the push made by the movement ', he said. His return to the cabin was more difficult.
He said the earth looked flat, and its curve was noticeable only on the horizon. 'In front of me was black sky. I saw the stars were bright but they were not twinkling, ' he said. 'The sun had no halo and it seemed to be welded into a black velvety back- ground. '
Everything he did required tremendous effort and he got rather tired. Colonel Leonov discounted fears for his safety but admitted he was not used to work- ing in his suit" (emphasis added) Medical space researcher Dr. Herbert Pichler writes:
"In space suits pressures must be considerably reduced (to 0.24 at), because if the plastic layers would be filled with air of normal pressure, it would be too great a difference to the vacuum and cause stiffness. The effect would be the same as an inflated car tire. For a 'soft' space suit 0.5 at is the maximum. Higher values hamper the movement of the astronaut. However, as air at this pressure does not permit breathing, pure oxygen breathing is required. For this a changeover time of about one hour is neces- sary, in this time the nitrogen is flushed out of the body tissues. " (Pichler, Die Mondlandung, p. 245;
it was 0.4 at. And he reset it to 0.2 'A before climbing back [...] He confirmed that he [Leonov] had remained outside for about ten minutes, another ten minutes was spent inside the air lock - a total of 20 minutes in vacuum. " Dr. Pichler:
"The Soviet procedure has the disadvantage that any excursion into space takes a very long preparation time. " Who has been bamboozled here?
"In a review of the latest flight, TASS said during the night the cosmonauts slept in turns, rested and breakfasted. The news agency said the cosmonauts ' respiration rate was between 18 and 20 per minute and pulse rate 72 to 78 per minute. Cabin pressure was 1.2 atmosphere, temperature 18C and humidity 45p.c. TASS said, the cosmonauts sent greetings to the people of Australia as they flew over that continent. " (The Australian, March 20, 1965) Among uninteresting drivel we note that the official TASS statement alleged a cabin pressure 20per cent higher than on the ground! How could Leonov prepare himself in ten minutes without getting the "bends" or suffocating? What was the pur- pose in changing space suit pressure three times in ten minutes? Or can anyone imagine the problems in a small spaceship of purifying air with 80p.c. inert nitrogen at pressure higher than on the ground?
"In Geneva, a Soviet cosmonaut said today, he and his colleagues were not troubled with the sweating and breath- ing difficulties encountered by the American astronaut Richard Gordon on his space walk last week.
emphases added)
Leonov told Kenneth Gatland, vice-president of the British Interplanetary Society, something not mentioned elsewhere when he saw him at the 1965 Space Congress in Athens:
"Before he left the cabin [space suit] pressure was 0.27 atmosphere, when he stepped out into space
Top: Allegedly a picture of the Voskhod capsule, 2.3 meters in diameter - but where could the 2,3m long cylindrical capsule with the hatch possibly be?2
Right: schematic drawing of Voskhod 2. The space lock cylin- der was allegedly attached to one side, sticking out like an erected penis. But how can one launch such an object in the slender tip of a rocket?3
1 l'l J J i I
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Dr. Boris Yegorov, who took part in the three man So- viet space flight in October 1964, told a press conference the probable reason was that the Soviet spacemen worked in completely normal atmospheric conditions. " {The Aus- tralian, September 22nd, 1966)
As a scientist who boasts the acquaintance of the famous German-born rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and as space researcher, Dr. Herbert Pichler (and all the other self acclaimed space experts) should recognize the difference between fact and fiction in an instant. But he was no match for Communist Party member Alexei Leonov, when he met him at the 1968 astronau- tical congress in Vienna. The seasoned liar put the good doctor on his back quite effortlessly when he told him about his space walk in yet another version:
"The passing through the lock is exactly as that of a ship lock, however, the air lock is smaller, of course. It has cylindrical shape, one meter diameter, 2.3 meter long. At first the inner hatch is opened and pressure between cham- ber and lock equalized. When the pressure was the same as inside the cabin, I swam into the lock - one cannot say crept — and closed the hatch behind me. Through a valve the air of the lock vents off, and when the lock pressure was the same as outside, about 1/1000 millionth of normal pressure. I opened the outer hatch. Everything else was simple. I floated into space, walked around a little and returned. On earth and during flight all precautions had been met to give me a maximum of safety. All had expected there would be a sharp moment of emotion, accompanied by a raise of pulse and breathing frequency. However, I had no feeling of fear. I am, when I am working, a very serious person, I don 't want to say I have a nature of steel, but my pulse went up only by two beats a minute. The reason was probably I had the strong desire to carry out the experiment. " (Pichler, Die Mondlandung, p. 246, emphasis added) How can a man, locked in a bulky space suit inside a tube of one meter diameter, close the hatch above his head and then open the other below his feet? How can he do gymnastics in a space suit (or even without, for that matter) with only two heart-beats more than normal? How can a strong desire keep the heart rate down? Such mendacity was accepted, believed, and printed in the 1970s!
More Absurdities
This is not the only impossibility of comrade Leonov's space flight. For example, nobody knows anything about the air lock, in spite of Leonov's description. Dr. Pichler believes it was inside the cabin. But defected space journalist Leonid Vladimirov stated that the 'Voskhod' craft was the same as the previous ' Vostok' one-man-craft: a sphere of 2,3 m diameter. If that were true, then Leonov had to step into space in order to enter the lock! Vladimirov, who had picked up some bits from his masters, but by far not all secrets, believed, it was attached outside the craft, which raises the awkward question, how such a contraption could have survived the launch. The most idiotic suggestion I found in a book of a western expert, who thought "the airlock apparently being inflatable"! To such lengths west- ern writers are prepared to go before they dare to question the truth of Soviet propaganda!
Now let us see, if these tales about the 'Soviet space vet- eran' do not backfire! If there is no likelihood that Leonov did in fact walk in space, how much less likely were the Soviets to be "ahead in the space race"? Indeed, there are noted writers such as Lloyd Mallan, Leonid Vladimirov, or Professor An- thony Sutton, who doubted the Soviet capabilities of getting ahead in space and considered it all a gigantic propaganda hoax. How it was organized, will be revealed here for the first time.
A Disaster in Space - or...?
On Saturday, March 20, 1965, The Australian reported:
"A tracking station in Bochum, West Germany, heard the Soviet ground controllers tell the cosmonauts to make a parachute landing about 10.30 pm Eastern Australian Time, but Voskhod was still in orbit one hour later. Soviet ground controllers, using maximum force, beamed the landing in- structions almost without stop and pleaded for confirma- tion.
The ground controllers called Attention, attention, come in... come in... we are sending new instructions... confirm by telegraphic code. '
Signals which indicated the men had landed were heard about midnight EST. Before that, the Bochum trackers picked up signals indicating that Voskhod2 was still in or- bit, although it had altered its trajectory.
Then came new signals on the same frequency as the Voskhod transmissions, but of a different quality. At first the Bochum scientists believed they came from a second Soviet space ship. Further analysis lead to the presumption, they were sent during or after landing. "
Here are clearly some hints, as to what had been going on during Soviet space flights in the sixties. The trackers of Bo- chum University almost blew the whole hoax; they were very
The Absurd Landing Story of Voskhod 2
"On re-entry the primary retrorockets failed. A manually controlled retrofire was accomplished one orbit later (per- haps[sic\\\] with the backup solid rocket retropack on the nose of spacecraft - which did not exist on Vostok). The service module failed to separate completely, leading to wild gyrations of the joined reentry sphere - service mod- ule before connecting wires burned through. Vostok 2 fi- nally landed near Perm in the Ural mountains in heavy forest at 59:34 N 55:28 E on March 19, 1965 9:02 GMT. The crew spent the night in the woods, surrounded by wolves, before being located. Recovery crew had to chop down trees to clear a landing zone for helicopter recovery of the crew, who had to ski to the clearing from the space- craft. Only some days later could the capsule itself be re- moved. '
A wildly gyrating reentry sphere would burn up in the atmos- phere... Soviet cosmonauts were apparently equipped with skis, but their helicopters were not equipped with ropes to re- cover the astronauts from a forest. How did the rescue crew get there to chop down trees? What did Soviet helicopters do, when they had to rescue people from the ocean? Pump out the water?
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close to breaking the great secret of pre- tended Soviet manned spaceflights - had they only pursued the mystery with an unprejudiced mind.
- They had found signals, which indi- cated that 'Voskhod2' was still in orbit after it was due to land.
- They had noticed, that 'Voskhod2' had altered its trajectory.
- It had sent its signals on the same frequency, but of a different quality, so they at first assumed there was something in space beside or in place of 'Voskhod2'. The Soviets indeed worked overtime
in explaining to the world what went wrong with their spacecraft after Leonov's alleged space excursion. The two cosmonauts stated later, much later, that "the retro-rocket-system had failed" and they landed "manually." The Soviet sources also admitted that an antenna had been damaged at or before the landing. But that does not suffice to reconcile their problems with observa- tions: On March 24, 1965, The Australian reported again "that Voskhod was seriously off course at the end of the flight and in a potentially dangerous situation." (Emphasis added.)
Voskhod, like Vostok, was supposed to be like a "Mercury" space capsule, unable to maneuver in space. As Voskhod2 changed its trajectory (of which it was not capable by design), it must be denied, that Belyayev and Leonov were on board, for they knew or told nothing about the changed orbit. Their talk of landing "manually" is meaningless - they never explained how they aligned their spaceship, pushed a certain button, and mi- raculously the rockets fired after all. However, observation leaves no doubt that "Voskhod" made an unscheduled 1 8th orbit "seriously off course." Thus it must be excluded that the retro- rockets failed. They did work after the 17th orbit, only they fired in the wrong direction. The spacecraft thus altered its trajec- tory, and damaged antennae caused a change in transmission quality. Again, if cosmonauts had been on board this misshap- sticken space ship, they would have been doomed.
Soviet ground control was evidently in confusion and help- less: A disaster was not on the flight plan; improvisation was attempted, but the problem carried them away. No record of talk between the cosmonauts and ground control at this crucial moment exists. Why did the cosmonauts not report immedi- ately, or why were they silent in such a desperate situation? The cosmonauts were told to confirm "by telegraphic code"! For obvious reasons the message was aimed at western listeners with "maximum force," not to living men in a stricken space- ship. So, once again: Belyayev and Leonov did not answer, be- cause they were not in space with 'Voskhod2. '
Alexe'f Leonov
...a Gigantic Hoax Run!
What sort of Soviet craft had orbited the earth then, if it was not a spaceship with two cosmonauts on board? All stated contradictions and lies expose the secret of Leonov's "space flight": What Soviet propaganda called "Voskhod 2" was actually a tiny satellite that carried tape-recorded voices, heartbeats etc. and (faked) telemetric transmissions for a gigantic hoax!
We can understand now the absolute secrecy around the "manned Voskhod spacecraft" to this day: only drawings were published, without any resem- blance to a real spaceship. It did not ex- ist at all. We understand now Ye- gorov's statement, the "cosmonauts worked in completely normal atmos- pheric conditions," typical communist dialectic which means, they never left the ground! And the mystery, how the Soviets could blast a heavy spaceship into or- bit with two men and technically impossible equipment on board, while the rockets available to them at the time were not capable of achieving that, is thus also solved.
It is unlikely that the Soviet controllers succeeded in bring- ing down their hoax satellite after its retro-rockets changed the orbit. They probably blew it asunder by ground command. This was the fate of satellite Cosmos 57, launched four weeks before on February 22, 1965. And Cosmos 47 was recovered after 24 hours. "It was a trial run for Voskhod 1," Mr. Gatland tells us. Soviet satellites with tape-recorded voices have been observed on other occasions. The Americans have successfully landed satellites since 1960 and built tape recorders since 1959 - plenty of time for the Soviet espionage network to copy them. We now understand why the contradictions of this Soviet mas- ter-piece of bamboozling the West go on about every other de- tail. Some reported a landing in the Arctic, some in the Urals, some near Perm. Some said the cosmonauts were found a few hours later, some say after days, near a village or deep in the forest, where they had lit a fire to keep warm. (What foresight by their handlers to equip them with matches!)
All this would probably have been forgotten, had not Soviet propaganda on behalf of Party comrade Leonov brought him back to the memory of the world. Perhaps it was designed to bolster their great hoax after its near failure 10 years before. He was supposed to be not only a space veteran older than Staf- ford, but also "the first to walk in space" - an obnoxious insult aimed at the late Ed White, the really first free-floating space- man. Alexei Leonov, the Soviet "cosmonaut hero," is truly a remarkable sample of Communist deceit.
Notes
1 http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/space_level2/leonov_spacewalk.html
2 http://www.aprill2.de/voskhod/voskhodmain.htm
3 http://perso.club-internet.fr/molaire 1/cosmos/albleon. htm
4 http://www.astronautix.com/flights/voskliod2.htm
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Sinti and Roma - Yarns, Legends, and Facts
By Dr. Otward Muller
Media and politicians never tire of unsubstantiated allegations about the fate of gypsies during the Third Reich, such as "more than a million gypsies were murdered during the Third Reich" and "500,000 Sinti and Roma died in the Holocaust." This article will show that such allegations are incompatible with population statistics for these nomadic tribes, both before and after World War II - statistics which are readily available to the public. It will be proved that the official figures for wartime gypsy losses are grossly exaggerated.
1. A Capital Overflowing With Memorials
On August 7, 1999, the German press carried the following news release from the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (German Press Agency):1
"The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma has renewed demands for construction of a planned Berlin me- morial to Sinti and Roma murdered by the National Social- ists... The Central Council stated that the memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma Holocaust victims, approved as early as 1994 by the City of Berlin, Parliament and Federal Government, should now be constructed. However, a spokesperson for the Berlin City Council denied that Berlin had promised to build such a memorial. " The affair has reopened debate on the "500,000" number. This figure has to be re- examined, as has the justification for a me- morial. No real evidence exists of the 500,000 alleged victims. There is no credible documentation for this figure, and no scien- tific inquiry into the matter has ever been made. If anyone disagrees with my assertion, I request that he or she notify this magazine and provide documentation including author, title, publisher, year, ISBN number, etc. For over 20 years I have been searching for in- formation about competent investigations into this matter.
2. The Quest for Basis
The first question that arises concerns the basis for the claim of 500,000 victims. What is the origin of this number? In 1972, Donald Kenrich and Grattan Puxon wrote a book entitled The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies. Published in London, it was lauded as "the first scholarly history of this ancient people viewed as a Western minority" as well as an "important work of historical and social scholarship." In 1981 a German transla- tion was published by Tilman Zulch of the "Society for Endan- gered Peoples" in Gottingen. In this translation, the objective, matter-of-fact title was translated as Sinti und Roma - die Ver- nichtung eines Volkes im NS-Staat (Sinti and Roma: the Exter- mination of a People by the Nazi State). The English word "destiny," which means "Schicksal" in German, was rendered as "Vernichtung, " which means extermination.2,3 Someone really should do a scientific study of propagandistic translating!
Grattan and Puxon attempted to establish that 219,700 Sinti and Roma were killed.2'4 That was in 1972, when less docu- mentation was available than now. Today it is easy to demon- strate that the number is far too high. The various figures which
made up the estimated total were highly inaccurate, being often based on individual estimates which could not be documented at that time.5'6
It is noteworthy that from England to Central Europe the number of victims increased from 219,700 to 500,000, quite in- dependent of further murderous activity by "Nazis." Since that year, this number has been ceaselessly disseminated by Tilman Zillch and his "Society."
Now that we know the origin of the number "500,000" our next question is: "Where is it documented?" Every public state- ment has to have some documentation. The following is an ac- count of my attempts to find a documented source for this fig- ure, which have so far been unsuccessful.
3. Search Results: Zero
In 1980 I requested documentation of this number from the gypsy researcher Dr. Mark Mtinzel of the Museum for Folk Research in Frankfurt. His answer:7
"In particular I suggest you inquire with the Persecution Museum in Israel, which can be reached through Mme. Miriam Novitsch, c/o Etudes Tsiganes, 2 rue d'Hautpoul, F- 75019, Paris 19eme. "
The reply from Mme. Novitsch arrived from an address in Israel called "Ghetto Fighter's House". She wrote:8
"There is also an organization of Gypsies, they claim reparation from the Germans as it is true that about 500,000 Gypsies were killed"
Mme. Novitsch was kind enough to repeat the charge, but she neglected to produce the requested documentation and cited no source whatsoever. I wrote to her again, specifically repeat- ing the key question:9 "Or do you know the origin of this num- ber?" but this time I received no reply at all.
On 31s May 1980 I wrote to the Internationalen Suchdienst (International Tracing Center) in Arolsen and asked:
"To the knowledge of the International Tracing Center,
how many gypsies died as a result of atrocities committed
by the National Socialist regime? "
The organization most likely to have information about the allegation of 500,000 murdered gypsies answered:10
"Regarding your letter (Points 1-12), we wish to inform you that the International Tracing Center has no documen- tary material or other information whatsoever, that would enable us to answer your query. "
Please bear in mind that the International Tracing Service
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has in its archives millions of documents, card files, etc. from every concentration camp or related institution. Nevertheless it is unable to verify the alleged murders of even 20,000 German gypsies, much less 500,000. Apparently no one except me has ever attempted to document gypsy losses through the Tracing Service, yet every major newspaper knows the exact number: 500,000! Isn't that amazing?
Another organization from which we could expect accurate information is the official German Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (IfZ, Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich. However, Hellmuth Auerbach of the IfZ responded to my inquiry by re- ferring me to Kenrich/Puxton3 as well as a work by Christian Bernadac,11 who estimates the number at around 229,950. 12 The Auerbach letter is interesting for what it indirectly reveals: at least as early as 1980, the Institute for Contemporary History knew that no documentation existed for the figure of 500,000. Nevertheless, during the ensuing 20 years it made no attempt to inform press agencies, the media, politicians, the German Fed- eral Government, etc. that the stated figure of 500,000 was completely undocumented - snatched from thin air - and thus should not be used to the detriment of all Germans.
My inquiry with the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie) in Amsterdam was answered by E. G. Groeneveld as follows:13
"The total number of Gypsies killed by the Nazis is esti- mated at about 200, 000. "
He too gave Kenrick/Puxon3 as his source.14 Once again, a major historical institute had no evidence whatsoever for the al- leged figure of 500,000 victims and made no mention of stud- ies, which demonstrate that the figure of 200,000 is also incor- rect.5'6
Prominent historians, such as the British biographer of Churchill Martin Gilbert, are quite aware that the figure of 500,000 could not possibly be correct, as we read in his book The Holocaust.15 Gilbert, a member of Oxford's Merton College, is one of the most
when they are no longer coerced by the occupying powers.
When asked about the source of the numbers they keep toss- ing about, newspaper publishers reply with answers such as this response from the Welt-Archiv:16
"Please refer to the Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker
[Society for Endangered Peoples], Post Office Box 159,
Gottingen. "
Even the largest newspapers, employing hundreds of jour- nalists and possessing huge archives, whose mission includes an obligation to investigate serious accusations against their countrymen, have abandoned their responsibility. The leftist Der Spiegel, Germany's largest news magazine, answered my inquiry about the source of the disputed number as follows:17
"In response to your questions, we refer you to Tilmen Ziilch (Editor), "In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt" [Gassed at Auschwitz, Persecuted to this Day], Reinbek, 1979, p. 121." On page 121, Ziilch states:
"According to estimates by European Tsiganologists [specialists in gypsy studies], the Third Reich murdered around 500,000 men, women and children of this national group as part of its "Final Solution " although the full ex- tent of this genocide has still not been determined. " Unfortunately, the source for the statistics, which the Spiegel so uncritically disseminates, does not bother to identify its "European tsiganologists." The media never address the most important question! Der Spiegel's response does suggest another question for the logicians, however. After having been "gassed at Auschwitz" sixty years ago, how can a person or group
Romania
3 million
be persecuted today?
distinguished and versatile historians of England. He considers the number 500,000 to be a gross propagandistic exaggeration and expresses surprise that German politicians continue to deliberately
ss
ndinavian ecu- Not more than 50,
r- Britain
100.000
se
J
le Sen
. I r
Russia 1 million
France
500,000
I
-Spain and Portugal 750,000 Italy »
400,000 1 1
:echoslovakia
Almost 1 million
Former Yugoslavia
Mflfl 1.5 million
"Where They Now Live," New York Times, 27th September 1992, quoted by International Romani Union. disseminate misinformation in their official capacities even
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4. Sinti and Roma Demands
In 1980, the Union of Romani and the League of German Sinti published a manifesto addressed to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose introduction reads as fol- lows:19
"At least a half million European Roma/Sinti fell victim to the racist policies of the Third Reich. [...] We therefore consider the following steps appropriate for the Federal Republic of Germany: 1. In the name of the Federal Repub- lic, the present government must officially admit the fact of genocide committed by the German Third Reich against the European Roma/Sinti. "
History shows that when a Central Council demands some- thing, politicians in Bonn snap to attention. On November 7, 1985, during the 171st session of the German Parliament, during discussions on the "Situation and Demands of the Sinti, Roma and Related Groups," Chancellor Helmut Kohl stated:20
"On December 21, 1982, the government of the Federal Republic made this determination: The Sinti and Roma suf- fered severe injustice under the National Socialist dictator- ship. They were persecuted for racist reasons and many were murdered. These atrocities must be seen as genocide. " Thus, in 1982 the German Federal Government once more accused the German people of "genocide." In a speech given on November 7, 1985, Chancellor Kohl continued in the same vein: "Approximately 500,000 Sinti and Roma suffered vio- lent death under the Hitler dictatorship '. [...] These atroci- ties must be treated as genocide. "
In an open letter dated 1 1th February 1986, I requested that Chancellor Kohl
"offer the public some kind of verifiable documentation or material evidence that would clearly and unambiguously support your charge of genocide committed against 500,000 Sinti/Roma, more or less. [...] / trust that you will agree with me that, in a state under the rule of law, a prosecutor has some obligation to prove his charges. In your speech you also stated 'racial discrimination must never again happen on German soil. ' As long as you present no solid evidence for your grave allegations, these allegations con- stitute discrimination against the majority of Germans. I would be very grateful if you would inform me whether the federal German government possesses any verifiable evi- dence of the atrocities which you allege. " Thirteen years later, in 1999, the federal government has still offered no documentary evidence in support of those alle- gations, unless an essay by Michael Zimmermann can be con- sidered a response. Zimmermann' s essay, bearing the bombas- tic title "The National Socialist Policy of Extermination Con- ducted against Sinti and Roma," was printed as an insert in the official German government weekly Das Parliament?1 It dealt only with German gypsies, however, and contained no evidence for the alleged figure of 500,000. It also devotes a chapter to the parenthetical subject of "Sterilization and Prohibition of Marriage." A speech by German Federal President Dr. Roman Herzog, delivered on March 16, 1997, in Heidelberg and adopted word for word by the Sinti and Roma organizations, makes clear that the German government has no intention of proving, revising, or documenting its monstrous allegations.
5. German President Herzog Speaks
On March 16, 1997, in a speech marking the opening of the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, President of the Federal Republic of Germany Dr. Roman Herzog stated:22
"The exhibition that we are opening today illustrates how discrimination of long duration culminated in persecu- tion and murder. Almost 500,000 murder victims, of which over 20, 000 were German Sinti and Roma - that is barba- rism on a gigantic scale. "
Thank you, President Herzog, we now have 20,000 German and Sinti allegedly murdered. Next comes Donald Kenrich who lectures as follows:23
"When the National Socialists came to power in 1933,
around 20,000 gypsies were living within the borders of the
Germany of that time. "
There is a slight problem here because Grattan/Puxon in- formed us in 1979 that "The Sinti organization is concerned with the problems of the approximately 50,000 German born Sinti."24
On September 27, 1992, the New York Times stated on page E5 that there are now 200,000 (two hundred thousand!) gypsies in Germany.
So, here is a question for President Herzog: how can it be possible that the 20,000 gypsies who lived in Germany before World War II and who suffered 20,000 deaths through 1945 (20,000 - 20,000 = 0) had increased to 50,000 in 1979 and 200,000 in 1997? Please note that Puxon specifically mentions 50,000 gypsies as having been born in Germany and not having immigrated there. The only possible conclusion is that Herzog's politically correct statement that 20,000 German gypsies were murdered or sterilized cannot possibly correspond to the his- toric facts.
His assertion that "over 20,000 German Sinti and Roma" were murdered is disputed by the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well. On January 27, 1993, an article appeared entitled "Roma Exhibition in Mainz." It states:25
"Around 8,000 German Sinti and Roma are living in Rheinland-Pfalz today. Most of these families, according to Krausnick, can point to at least 300 years of documentation in church registries as proof of native status. " If 8,000 gypsies living in Rheinland-Pfalz in 1992 can point to "documentation in church registries as proof of native status," we can logically conclude that 1) they did not immi- grate to the area and 2) they were not murdered or sterilized during the Third Reich. We should consider that Rheinland- Pfalz is a small province in Germany, and similar situations will prevail in the other provinces. Thus it follows that Presi- dent Herzog's assertions cannot possibly be true.
We recall that on March 16, 1997, President Herzog men- tioned "approximately 500,000 murder victims."22 If we believe the figure contained in a letter to New York Times editor written by Roma activist Jan F. Hancock on August 20, 1990, Herzog was actually understating the number:
"Recent scholarship now indicates that more than a mil- lion Gypsies were murdered in the Third Reich, and that es- timate rises as our research continues [...]"
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The one million figure had also been published by the In- ternationaler Zigeunermission e.V. (International Gypsy Mis- sion), Post Office Box 410, Karlsruhe) in the periodical Stimme der Zigeuner and also distributed as a special "Holocaust" edi- tion. Here it says
"The fact was hardly mentioned that in addition to 6
million Jews, around a million gypsies were murdered in
the same way. "
Here is additional evidence that the number of victims in- creases in proportion to the amount of time passed since the al- leged murders. Let us now compare the newest "victim" figures to prewar population figures.
6. The President Contradicted
Grattan/Puxon estimates that in 1939 around one million gypsies were living in the countries involved in the World War II'2'3 The 1940 edition of Encyclopedia Americana estimates the number in all Europe at around 750, 000. 26 The 1968 edition of Americana (Vol. 13 p. 590) states:
"The number of Gypsies in Europe was estimated before
World War II at anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 or
1,500,000. "
Very well, let's say one million. Now, in order to show that the propaganda figures of half a million to one million are in- correct, let us compare the number of gypsies living in the parts of Europe occupied by Hitler in 1939 with the number of Sinti and Roma living there in 1992. Bear in mind the anti-German propaganda claim that those gypsies who were not murdered were sterilized! The figures for 1939 are found in the book by Kenrick and Puxon.2'3 Now consider the numbers for 1992, published by the New York Times on September 27, 1992.27 We can construct the following table for the numbers of Sinti and Roma in the subject European countries for the years 1939 and
1992:
Kenrick/Puxon |
New York Times |
|
1939 |
Sept, 1992 |
|
Belgium |
500 |
10,00028 |
Holland |
500 |
35,0002y |
Germany |
20,000 |
200,000 |
Czechoslovakia |
93,000 |
1,000,000 |
Bulgaria |
1,000,000 |
|
Baltic States |
7,000 |
50,000 |
England |
100,000 |
|
France |
40,000 |
500,000 |
Italy |
25,000 |
400,000 |
Austria |
11,200 |
|
Poland |
50,000 |
750,000 |
Rumania |
300,000 |
3,000,000 |
Yugoslavia (Serbia & |
88,500 |
1,500,000 |
Croatia) |
||
Spain & Portugal |
750,000 |
|
Scandinavia |
< 50,000 |
|
Hungary |
100,000 |
> 500,000JU |
USSR, Russia |
200,000 |
1,000,000 |
Total: |
935,700 |
10,845,000 |
Note that the New York Times gives no figures for Belgium, Holland, and Hungary; for these we rely on Grattan/Puxon.31 It
is obvious that the total gypsy population amounts to over ten million for the year 1992. Before the War the number was around 750,000 to 1,000,000. Note also that the New York Times lists as its source "International Union of Romani." In view of figures like these, how can anyone speak of "geno- cide"?
Let us return to President Herzog and his speeches:30
"Hitler himself ordered Himmler[321 to carry out, without exception, the deportations of all Sinti and Roma to the exter- mination camps. Then they were systematically murdered, fam- ily by family, everyone from small children to aged grandpar- ents. This occurred throughout the Nazi sphere of influence."
Such is the official version in the words of Dr. Roman Herzog. We note that these amazing remarks by the highest representative of the German Government were made five whole years after the publication of the New York Times article. Germany's leading politicians were still telling the public such claptrap at the close of the 20th century, in the age of com- puters, microprocessors, and trips to the moon!
Herzog's exact words:
"systematically murdered [...] everyone from small
children to aged grandparents [...] throughout the Nazi
sphere of influence "
What happens if we express his remarks as a simple mathematical formula? For Germany, Poland, and Czechoslo- vakia, his remarks can be expressed as follows:
Germany, 1939: 20,000-20,000 = 0= 50,000 Germany, 1992: 20,000-20,000 = 0= 200,000 Poland: 50,000 - 50,000 = 0 = 750,000
Czechoslovakia: 93,000-93,000 = 0= 1,000,000 The mathematical formulation of Herzog's statements proves that they cannot possibly be correct, although they accu- rately reflect his data. Nothing better demonstrates the scientific bankruptcy of official, politically correct history than the utter- ances of public officials such as German Federal President Herzog.
7. Research Just Began
Let us conclude with a quotation by gypsy researcher Dr. Streck:33
"It has not been possible to reconstruct a consistent plan of genocide directed at the gypsies, regarding either conceptuali- zation or implementation of such a plan."
"Real research is just now beginning" is the title of an arti- cle written by Bettina Schulte, as reported by the leftist German daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau on February 13, 1997. The subtitle is "Corrections to Goldhagen: Lectures on the Holocaust delivered at the University of Freiburg." The article gives us hope for the future:
"The empirical and positivist approach to this topic is made possible by the pioneering studies of quite young sci- entists. By means of a very exact study of original docu- ments, it is established that the numbers of Sinti and Roma victims were in fact far fewer than has been publicly stated. The numbers are around 50,000 rather than 500,000 (Mi- chael Zimmermann, Essen / Jena). "
Here again we encounter the old familiar "Holocaust exag- geration factor" of 10!
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It is interesting also that the Rundschau article appeared one month before the speech given by President Herzog. Obviously, presidential speechwriters make no attempt to stay abreast of contemporary historical research.
8. Conclusions
Our study has shown that:
1 . 59 years have now passed since the end of World War II, and in that time no one has come forward with any objec- tive or verifiable documentation supporting the "genocide" alleged to have resulted in the deaths of 500,000 gypsies.
2. The scientific historian can only conclude that there was no such "genocide." Perhaps the best evidence of this is the number of gypsies alive, well, and living in Europe in the early 1990s: 10.8 million. This is a tenfold increase over their prewar numbers.
3. The atrocity figures ceaselessly broadcast by the politicians and corporate media cannot possibly be true. They represent a propagandistic amplification of 1,000% in support of un- justified demands for reparations.
4. No justification for a Berlin memorial exists, and there is no reason to build one.
5. Politicians have no right to knowingly execute public policy on the basis of false and misleading data.
Observations in Passing
In this article we quoted President Herzog as saying:
"Almost 500,000 murder victims, of which over 20,000 were German Sinti and Roma - that is barbarism on a gi- gantic scale. "
So, "20,000 were German Sinti and Roma." We have to ask if President Herzog is aware that in the city of Pforzheim, on a single night in the spring of 1945, 17,600 German civilians - mostly women and children - were burned alive in the phos- phorus bombing raid carried out by the Allies?34 Or that 20,000 civilians were similarly murdered in Cologne? Or that hundreds of thousands of other civilians perished in the fire-bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and hundreds of other German cities, in blatant violation of the Geneva Accords? This was indeed "bar- barism on a gigantic scale." Unlike the atrocity stories con- cocted by Germany's enemies in the two world wars, the atroci- ties committed against Germans are fully documented. Are the citizens of Pforzheim, Koln, Hamburg, or Dresden demanding Holocaust memorials in Berlin? Would any German politician support such a demand?
Without a doubt, the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma have a right to promote the interests of German Sinti and Roma, but where do they get the right to represent all the gyp- sies of Europe? Since the number of Sinti and Roma who died during World War II is clearly far below 20,000, why build a memorial in Berlin for this particular subgroup, but not for German victims of far greater atrocities?
On August 18, 1999, Heinrich Wefing wrote an informative article in Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung article entitled "The Escalation of Memory" about the demands of the gypsy Central Council for a "memorial to the 750,000 Roma and Sinti mur- dered during the 'Third Reich.'" He pointed out that between 1997 and 1999 the number of gypsy victims magically in-
creased by another 50%, from 500,000 to 750,000. My correct- ing letter to the editor on the subject was not printed, however.
Further Reading
- Use Schirmer-Vowinckel, "On the Fate of Gypsies in the Third Reich," this issue, p. 33 1-334???.
- Carlo Mattogno, "The 'Gassing' of Gypsies in Auschwitz on August 2, 1944," The Revisionist 1(3) (2003), pp. 330- 332.
Notes
First published as "Sinti und Roma - Geschichten, Legenden und Tatsachen" in: Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 3(4) (1999), pp. 437-442. Translated by James Damon.
1 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, "Kurz gemeldet: Der Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti fordert [...]", New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (New York City Newspaper, in German), August 7, 1999, p. 6.
2 Donald Kenrick, Grattan Puxon, Sinti und Roma — die Vernichtung eines Volkes im NS-Staat, Pogrom Series No. 69/70, Gesellschaft fur bedrohte Volker, Post Office Box 159, Gottingen 1981, p. 135.
3 Dissertation, The Destiny of Europe 's Gypsies, Sussex University Press, London, 1972, p. 185.
4 Ibid.,pp. 183f.
5 Udo Walendy, "Zigeuner bewaltigen 1/2 Million," Historische Tatsachen (Historic Facts) No. 23, Verlagfur Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung. Vlotho, 1985.
6 Otward Miiller, "Zum Schicksal der Zigeuner Europas," Der Deutschameri- kaner, Chicago, June 1982, p. 5. Also: Deutsche National-Zeitung, Munich, Vol. 34, Apr. 27 to May 25, 1984, No. 18-22.
7 Letter to Editor, Jul. 14, 1980.
8 Letter to Editor, Sep. 24, 1 980.
9 Letter by this author to Mme. Novitsch, Oct. 26, 1980.
10 Letter to the author dated Jul. 7, 1 980.
1 1 Christian Bernadac, L 'Holocauste oublie - Le massacre de tsiganes, Ed. France-Empire, Paris, 1979.
12 Letter from Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Aug. 11, 1 980.
13 Letter to the author, June 9, 1980.
14 Letter to the author, June 27, 1980.
15 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Holt, Reinhard, Winston, New York 1985, p. 824.
16 Reply from Correspondence Division of Die Welt to this author, Bonn, Dec. 7, 1980.
17 Post card to the author, Dec. 9, 1980.
18 Tilman Ziilch, In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt, rororo 4430, Ro- wohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1979.
19 Donald Kenrick, Grattan Puxon, Tilman Ziilch, Die Zigeuner — verkannt — verachtet - verfolgt, Niedersachsische Landeszentrale fur politische Bil- dung, Hannover 1980, p. 125.
20 Helmut Kohl, "Rede des Bundeskanzlers zur Lage der Sinti und Roma. 171. Sitzung des Deutschen Bundestages am 7. November 1985," special print, distributed by the German Federal Chancellery.
21 B16-17/87, April 18, 1987, pp. 31-45.
22 Roman Herzog (Bundesprasident), Rede zur Eroffnung des Dokumentati- ons- und Kulturzentrums Deutscher Sinti und Roma in Heidelberg am 16. Mdrz 1997 (Speech Delivered at Opening of Documentation and Culture Center of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, Mar. 16, 1997). Bulletin, Presse- und mformationsamt der Bundesregierung, Mar. 19, 1997, No. 234, p. 259.
23 See footnote 19, p. 37.
24 Grattan Puxon in T. Ziilch, Footnote 20, p. 33.
25 Rene Wagner, "Sagen, was gewesen ist - Roma Ausstellung in Mainz," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 Jan 1993, p. 7.
26 "The number of Gypsies in Europe has been roughly estimated at 750,000" entry "Gypsies," p. 591, Vol. 13.
27 Stephen Kinzer, "Germany Cracks Down; Gypsies Come First, " The New York Times, Sep. 27, 1992, p. E5.
28 T. Ziilch, op.cit. (note 18), p. 45.
29 Ibid., p. 44.
30 Ibid., p. 54; see also "Hungary's Gypsies form self-government," Daily Ga- zette (Schenectady, NY), Apr. 1 1, 1995:
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"According to legislation on minorities, Hungary has an estimated gypsy population of almost half a million but unofficial estimates put the popu- lation at twice that. "
31 Grattan Puxon, in T. Ziilch, op.cit. (note 18), pp. 44f, 54.
32 See also Klaus Sojka, "Wo ist der 'Himmler-Befehl?'", Deutsche National-
Zeitung, Aug. 13, 1999, p. 10.
13 Zeitschrift fur Kulturaustausch, Vol. 31, 1981, Issue 4, p. 418, Stuttgart.
4 Maximilian Czesany, Alliierter Botnbenterror. Der Luftkrieg gegen Euro- pas Zivilhevolkerung, Draffel, Leoni amSeel987,p.650.
Franz Olah, Key Witness against the Existence of Gas Chambers
By Thomas Ryder, Ph.D.
Who is Franz Olah?
Franz Olah was born in Vienna in 1910 and became a pro- fessional piano manufacturer. At an early age he was involved in Austria's labor union movement. When a civil war broke out in Austria in 1934, Olah went underground. On March 12, 1938, he was arrested and brought first into the Dachau concentra- tion camp and later into other camps as well. He was released only at the end of the war.
He subsequently occupied a leading position in Austrias' centrally organized Labor Union, and together with the con- struction and woodworkers' union, he managed to suppress a communist putsch in the Soviet occupation sector of Austria. (Note: Today's Zeitgeist historians usually downplay Olah's role despite better knowledge!). In 1959, Olah became presi- dent of Austria's Federal Labor Union, and in 1963 he became home secretary (minister for the interior). But the Marxists within the Social Democratic Party of Austria as well as influ- ential freemasons lobbied for his dismissal. After an extraordi- nary defamation campaign, he was finally sentenced to a one year imprisonment and lost his party membership. In later years he was completely rehabilitated and spent the rest of his life as a mentally active pensioner and well-renowned citizen in Ba- den close to Vienna.
In 1995, Franz Olah wrote his memoirs {Die Erinnerungen, Amalthea, Vienna/Munich/Berlin 1995). Despite his incarcera- tion in several concentration camps for more than seven years, he never mentioned gas chambers in the very detailed accounts of his memoirs. Franz Olah was not just like any inmate, of whom one could claim that he simply didn't know better.
Benedikt Kautsky, who also spent seven years in German camps during the war as a (Jewish!) inmate, did not know any- thing about gas chambers from his own experience either, but in contrast to Olah he succumbed to the Zeitgeist pressure by including a passage that he had heard about them from others. Another sincere prominent Austrian inmate, Viktor Frankl, at least wrote that he would not write about gas chambers because others had already written about it! As if an impressive experi- ence like an encounter with an instrument of mass murder could be left unremarked by anybody!
Even in the concentration camps Olah was a "doer," a man who pulled the strings and who maintained a wide net of infor- mation, a person who turned into a communist hater due to the communists' behavior in those camps.
Olah did not mention anything about gas chambers. Why not? Because there were none! If they had existed, Olah would have mentioned them as the well-informed person he was.
How Does Olah Turn into a Key Witness?
How can one turn this key testimony of silence into a key testimony of speaking? Very easily! Tell all those anti-fascists, those morally superior Ubermenschen, and those politically correct individuals, in brief, tell all those who support the gas chamber lie: There were no gas chambers, because if there were any, Olah would have mentioned them in his memoirs!
Then these circles will approach Olah to make him distance himself from such statements. But because Olah is an honest, sincere, and fearless person, he will not do it.
Because he is allergic to being put under pressure, he would most likely tell the truth. And who would dare to prosecute a man who was persecuted for four years by the Austro-Fascists and seven years by the National Socialists, who, as a fearless patriot, suppressed the communist putsch under the very eyes of the Soviet occupational authorities in 1950? Who would ac- cuse Olah, who simply spoke the truth, of violating paragraph 3g, h of the Austrian Prohibition law, a censorship law that out- laws everything, which is not derogatory of National Socialism and its historical era, and that violates not only the United Na- tions' human rights declaration but even the Austrian constitu- tion itself? Prosecuting Olah, who only a few years ago called his political opponents "political garden dwarfs" on an Austrian TV documentary dedicated to him?
If threatening and blackmailing doesn't help, those anti- fascists and their ilks might try to depict him as a senile person or as being no longer mentally fit. But who ever experienced this great man during the above mentioned TV documentary knows: Whatever Olah says, he says under full control of his mind.
Therefore, Olah is a key witness against the gas chambers, whether he talks or whether he stays silent. The truth is indi- rectly included in his book Die Erinnerungen. One only has to read it and to interpret it properly regarding the "prima causa."
First published as "Franz Olah, Kronzeuge gegen die Existenz der Gas- kammern" in Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 4(1) (2000), p. 103.
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Two Times Dachau
By Ingrid Weckert
The following article appeared first in 1997 in the German language in issue no. 2 of the small Berlin periodical Sleipnir. As a result of this and similar contributions, that particular edition of Sleipnir was confiscated and burned by the County Court of Berlin-Tiergarten.1 The author as well as the publisher responsible for this magazine, Andreas Rohler, were subsequently prosecuted for "inciting to hatred." Rohler has repeatedly been the target of such illegal per- secution by prosecution since 1995, because he gave right-wing intellectuals an opportunity to voice their peaceful, though sometimes highly controversial views. The publishing offices of this publisher were repeatedly subjected to house searches and confiscation of all computer equipment. In 1998, Andreas Rohler even had to undergo psychologi- cal examination, because the public prosecutor suspected him to be insane. The investigating psychiatrist, however, could find nothing wrong with Rohler.
As unfathomable as it is to Americans, Frau Weckert' s crime consisted of nothing but the comparison of two dia- ries, the memoirs of two men who were both incarcerated in the Dachau camp: one of them before the end of the war, the other one after the war. Such a juxtaposition is doubtlessly very interesting and important, and commenting of the differences discovered unavoidable. However, some prosecutors and judges in Berlin must have gotten the impression that the way Mrs. Weckert picked her quotes from these diaries and how she commented upon them constitutes some- thing like an illegal act of "incitement to hatred."
In contrast to this, we are convinced that the important and objective work done by Mrs. Weckert deserves the predicate "scholarly precious" and thus must be protected by the civil rights of freedom of speech and freedom of scholarly inquiry. The fact that merely quoting and commenting upon two older publications, which have never been subjected to any censorship measures by the German authorities, can lead to criminal prosecutions against both the au- thor and the publisher, shows clearly the pitiful state of affairs in Germany, a country that has gone far astray from a righteous path of securing the most basic civil rights.
We publish this contribution not only because of its scholarly validity and importance, but also as an act of solidar- ity to both the author and the initial German publisher - and of course in order to undermine and thwart the censorship efforts of the German dictatorial government.
There is really no shortage of literature about the concentra- tion camps. Eyewitness reports, novels - the inquisitive reader can occupy himself with this subject on every literary level. In the following two diary abstracts are presented, both of which were written by inmates incarcerated in the Dachau camp. The authors were not criminals who lost their freedom temporarily for justified reasons. They only had different political views or supported a different political system from the present power elite who ordered their incarceration into the camp at Dachau; therefore, two innocent persons were caught by an unjust or vengeful judicial system.
Both diary authors are of the same age, have the same cul- tural or intellectual background, similar educations, and consid- erable writing skills, which enabled them to describe the things clearly and interestingly. This is one of the reasons why it is appealing to compare or contrast the two diaries.
The name of the first author/inmate is Arthur Haulot, born 1913 in Liege/Belgium, a journalist by profession and manager of the Belgian Generalcommissariat for Tourism since the Sec- ond World War, communist, member of the resistance move- ment during the war in Belgium. He was arrested on December 27, 1941, by the Gestapo. For the first six months he was incar- cerated in St. Gilles and Forest, then four months in Mauthausen. There, a typhus epidemic broke out, and Haulot became seriously ill. Together with other seriously ill inmates he was transferred to Dachau on November 8, 1942.2
The other author/inmate is Gert Naumann, German, also born in 1913, group captain of a group of reconnaissance air- planes, later a major within the General Staff of the German Luftwaffe. He was wounded when he came into American cap- tivity and was imprisoned first in Aibling, then from October 1945 until February/March 1946 and again from May until Oc- tober 1946 in the American internment camp in Dachau - yes, the US forces as well used the Dachau camp as a concentration camp! -, together with other members of the Wehrmacht and the SS.3
Both authors kept a diary during their stay in Dachau. In the preface both assured the reader that they did not change their notes, but used them literally in order not to reduce their docu- mentary value.
For both, arrival in Dachau was apparently an improvement over the conditions they experienced before. However, things changed very rapidly, in one case for the better, in the other for the worse. Already the reception in the German concentration camp in 1943 was quite different from the one in the American prison camp in 1945. Haulot:
"After my arrival in Dachau, I lived the life of a 'new- comer ' (newly admitted) in the camp, first in Block 1 7, then Block 25 ' [In a note on February 13, 1943, he describes his arrival in Dachau as his 'greatest joy'.] 'I became familiar with real camp life, with all that is known today about it. German and Austrian comrades helped me by having me
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transferred to the hospital on January 6, 1943. [...] My re- port starts with the 'submerging ' in the sick station and the access to writing material. I did not change a word of the notes in order to preserve their documentary value. " (p. 129)
The "submerging" should not be taken literally, because un- til the very end of his captivity Haulot occupied official func- tions and was considered as a representative of the Belgian in- mates, who negotiated with the camp administration as well as the representatives of the Red Cross. During the liberation by US Troops on April 30, 1945, he was one of the three leaders of the "International Camp Committee," which took over the rep- resentation of the inmates and negotiated with the American of- ficers who were from then on responsible for the camp. Naumann:
"We are in the concentration camp! On the right is a small, inconspicuous looking building, a wooden barrack, low, dark, featureless. American soldiers come out and lead the first ten men of us into the house. They come out again after a short time, and it seems to me that some stagger. One has a bleeding nose. The next ten are taken. I am part of the third group. There is a large room inside the barrack. Large photos of concentration camps hang at eye 's height at the walls, awful pictures of starved concentration camp inmates, piles of corpses, tortured creatures. We have to post ourselves very close in front of the pictures. Behind us walks an American soldier from one to the other and hits each with the fist from behind in the neck or on the head, so that everyone hits the picture wall with their face. 'Let's go!' We go back in line outside. No one says a word. " (p. 139) These imprisoned German officers, who had absolutely nothing to do with the events inside Dachau! Furthermore, pic- tures of piles of dead bodies are no proof of any atrocities. Hau- lot writes about this:
"Since December 1944 a typhus epidemic [raged], with over 10,000 dead and heaps of dead bodies all over, which the Americans were to discover on April 29, 1945. " (p. 131) Naumann writes about the accommodations in the camp Dachau:
"We are now in the notorious concentration camp Da- chau and apparently are better off than in the American camp Aibling... Of course it is very tight here, but the bar- racks are built solid and clean, the walkways dry with gravel, and the sanitary installations: washrooms with large sinks! Toilets with seats and with running water! It is almost comfortable here! "
This was to change soon. Shortly after their arrival they had to move out of their solid barracks and transfer into a wooden barrack erected by the Americans. Naumann:
"We looked at this barrack suspiciously for quite a while, because it was especially shoddily hammered to- gether and could in no way be compared with the solidly built former concentration camp barracks." (p. 160) "It rained through the roof in all places, the floor was im- mersed in water by several centimeters. Furthermore the in- terior is ice cold, since the board walls show gaps of up to 2 cm. There is no light, the few windows are tiny and are of opaque glass so that one cannot look through. When Colo-
nel Schoch, spokesman for the German officers group, wanted to talk to an American officer about the unaccept- able new quarters - the order for the transfer was brought by a soldier - he was immediately arrested and punished with two weeks incarceration. Reason: He (the colonel!) did not obey immediately the order of an American soldier (!). " (p. 162)
Naumann writes about Colonel Schoch' s return from his in- carceration:
"Colonel Schoch returns from the arrest the next morn- ing. I pay him a visit. He has a small, tight separate room for himself in the invalid barrack - the former concentra- tion camp brothel. I am shocked when I see him. He aged years in those 14 days. He was neither examined for whether he could physically withstand the incarceration nor was he granted examination by a medical doctor at his ur- gent request while he suffered angina pectoris. He was to- gether with three other inmates in a one-man cell, so that there was not sufficient space to move or to turn. During the first week he only received daily 1/5 bread and 1 liter water. But he could not find out why he was incarcerated; this he only learned from us now. "
Let us continue now with the diary entries of Haulot, which were mainly about the food rationing. However, this was soon no problem for him. Haulot:
"January 13, 1943. How to escape psychosis from star- vation! I ask myself this with impatience. I keep track of what I eat. It is much more than what I received in the block. [...]/ have to accept that everybody else has sufficient time to eat: 6 o 'clock, 9 o 'clock, 13 o 'clock, 15 o 'clock etc. This led again to the psychosis, from which I escaped for a couple of weeks. [...] There are people who cannot finish their food rations. [...] Especially an old Czech, who re- ceives wonderful food parcels from the outside and more bread than he needs. "
Haulot went into the hospital on January 6, 1943. The offi- cial literature teaches us that the food rations for the sick were considerably smaller than for the workers, that they were prac- tically starved to death. However, Haulot writes the opposite, i.e. that he receives much more than in Block 25, where he was before.
The food parcels he mentions here play an important part in all his entries. Evidently, through these parcels from friends, relatives, and the IRC, a large number of inmates had not only sufficient provisions, but more than enough to feed himself and his comrades, including delicacies, which were unknown to the German population during 1943-1945. According to an "offi- cial history" of the camp Dachau, the inmates only had permis- sion to receive parcels since November 1942,4 the arrival date of Haulot. Haulot:
"January 14, 1943. A miracle this morning. I received shortly, one after the other, three meals [...] semolina por- ridge [...] soup [...] potatoes [...] / receive almost daily [...] from one or the other a piece of an apple. The food supply is therefore excellent and I hope that I can quickly gain above the 6 kilo which I regained since my arrival in Dachau. " Haulot arrived in Dachau on November 8, 1942, sick and half starved. According to his own statements, it was still bad in
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Blocks 17 and 25, and he did not get enough to eat. He was in the sick bay only since January 6, where he finally got enough to eat daily and often had leftovers, which he could pass on to others. He gained 6 kg after two months in Dachau. According to this the food rations could not have been that bad in the blocks either. Haulot:
"January 16, 1943. I am [...] stuffed with food. The only
real problem is to learn whether my stomach is up to this
uninterrupted digesting work. "
The German prisoners of war have the opposite experience two years later: Their food rations are steadily cut down. Naumann writes:
"The American camp administration ordered today an- other ration cut back. Soup in the evening and — off and on - chocolate, are deleted. Still, the food rations are better than in Aibling. We have in the morning 'A liter soup thick- ened with flour, for lunch 1 liter bean soup, 'A rye bread, 30 gfat or 1/10 of a can of meat and 'A liter coffee-substitute. " (p. 146)
"Another cut of food rations today. [...] According to it we have only a thin soup three times daily, 18 g margarine and five slices of bread. " (p. 151)
"If only there was not this continuously nagging hunger feeling! Our food rations daily are now only two liters of thin soup 'enriched' with some individual sauerkraut threads, or a few white beans or unpeeled potato pieces, five slices of bread and two tiny portions of greasy marga- rine each the size of a sugar cube. [...] We feel how we are losing more and more weight daily. " (p. 156)
"The food ration was again reduced some: instead of margarine or cheese we have daily a teaspoon of jam. " (p. 164)
The Americans have their fun off and on with the helpless German prisoners of war under their command. Naumann:
"Today is some American holiday. We don 't know which one,[5]for us is November 22 a day like any other. Or not?? - We receive together with the soup for lunch half a bar of chocolate (and no bread spread instead!), but the joy is great anyways. But only for a short time: The chocolate is full of mildew and completely crumbled. " (p. 168) Two years earlier in the Dachau camp. Haulot contracts a typhus infection in February 1943. He is immediately placed on a strict diet, which he keeps, although it is difficult for him be- cause everybody around him "stuffs" himself. Only at the end of February do regular blood and fecal tests indicate that the ty- phus is overcome. He lost during this time 2.5 kg, which he quickly regains. Haulot:
"February 13, 1943. I had the greatest joy in a long time yesterday. I can only compare it with my arrival in Da- chau: Louise and my parents received my letter! " Louise is his wife. Haulot calls his arrival in Dachau, a Ger- man concentration camp, as one of his "greatest joys"! Haulot:
"February 20, 1943 (I was indifferent to the usual par- cel distribution last night). [...] It is astounding to observe that even in a concentration camp the chances [...] are so unevenly distributed.]... .] While some can supplement their camp rations with substantial parcels, others have to be sat- isfied with it.
February 23, 1943. I need sugar, butter, fat, light food, fruit, eggs. It is all still available, since around me every- body is eating. But at least for the present I am excluded (Typhus diet). [...] Finally an unexpected visitor [...] brought me a piece of marvelous light cake. How wonder- ful!
March 4, 1943. About the food: I 'organize ' [filch] more and more. The present hospital diet agrees much better with me than the one I would receive in Block 11, i.e. a normal ration of an ordinary diet.
March 15, 1943. 15 people were transferred to Block 11. The unnecessary beds were removed. The remaining sick will leave sick bay at the weekend. I have to make maximum use of the remaining days. Special diet for lunch and supper.
March 16, 1943. Andre is released together with 51 other inmates. [...] My first parcel arrives. Sugar, grits, crackers, cake, jam, goose liver, condensed milk, pasta, fresh eggs, butter, garlic, soap. Wonderful! [...] All in best condition. "
There were also discharges from the concentration camp, Haulot talks about this in further entries. He receives regularly parcels from now on, all apparently complete, maybe even un- opened.
The German prisoners of war two years later receive also parcels, if not regularly, but occasionally. Naumann:
"Suddenly someone calls my name, outside in front of the barrack. 'Naumann! At 17:00 o 'clock to the post office to pick up a parcel! ' Me? A shock goes through me. A joyful shock. A parcel, for me? I cannot comprehend this. But from whom?? Who could have thought of me?? I run through the rain, a storm of joy in my heart. A parcel! A first, a unique case. I cannot comprehend it. I can hardly wait until 17 o 'clock. A guard drives me to the post office. A soldier asks me from whom the parcel is. I don 't know this. He gives it to me anyway. It is packed loosely in wrapping paper. But I can decipher the sender: It is from [...] my friend 'Mathes '! I open it in our barrack, in it are a woolen shirt and two underpants, no letter, no greetings. But the parcel was doubtless censored and opened. Some was probably removed; judging by the volume of the wrapping it was evidently larger. Well, my joy knows no limit!" (pp. 150)
"On and off someone or other will receive a parcel from relatives or friends. Of course these packages are opened and censored; anyway, each written greeting or letter is removed. What else is 'removed' we can only guess. Today Colonel-lieutenant Mahlke received a parcel, and he cele- brates this event by inviting Colonel Hollidt, Colonel Pet- zold, Major Rungius and myself for 'afternoon coffee '. We place a small, self-made table somewhat off into a corner, and on it a handkerchief as a table cloth, some twigs of ev- ergreen from the parcel, with a small red candle standing in the center in a red apple. [...] Mahlke toasted bread with cheese on it. It tastes divine. Hollidt invites us to his last pack of Italian cigarettes. We always share and make the best of everything. " (pp. 164) Haulot:
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"March 18, 1943. 72 new discharges are announced for tomorrow.
March 21, 1943. Visit from Otto. Cake, apple, and spe- cial sugar. [...] Two visits which are especially joyful for me: Philipp and Hans. Hans has honey for me, Philipp promises a pullover.
March 22 1943. I weigh myself: I gained 6 kg in 22 days. I am what is called here 'well organized. ' Only yes- terday I found a new source for food. The head of the x-ray department, whom I know in passing, asks me what I am al- lowed to eat and brought bread and butter [...] Met today again the young Frenchman Roger. [...] He has room ser- vice in Block 13/4. He gained a lot of weight, it is a pleas- ure to look at him. If I continue this way, I will soon look like him too.
March 24, 1943. This morning I weighed myself before breakfast: 1 kg gained in two days! At 10 o 'clock Adolphe brings my second parcel! Cake, oranges, apples, lemons, crackers, saccharine, sugar, jam, grits, pasta, salt, ovo- maltine, tomato juice, butter, cigarettes, nothing is missing. [...] I forgot to mention: crackers, smoked herrings, tea, bouillon and six herring filets. "
March 29, 1943. I receive the normal diet starting to- day. It begins with mashed potatoes! I would like to work, but when I start, nothing comes. My laziness is scandal- ous. "
By "work" Haulot means here "write." He writes poems, stories, letters, and his diary. Concerning the diet that Haulot mentioned, it has to be realized that this occurred in a concen- tration camp in the year 1943! A concentration camp, in which people allegedly were only exploited for work, who were either starved to death or killed in some other way when they could no longer work. Haulot did not have to work a single day since his admission on November 8, 1942, almost five months now, but was nursed back to health. Haulot:
"March 30, 1943. What I was afraid of happened this morning: Transfer to Block 11. 'Rejection from paradise'. The life here will probably be more like the one in the Block. [...] New surroundings. Triple bunk beds, personal items like clock, dishes, knifes, spoons, electric hot plate, nothing there. Also, no flowers. It seems that food can be cooked on the stove. "
Block 1 1 is the sick bay. Before that, Haulot was in Block 3, which was arranged as a sick room. Judging by the items he is missing now (clock, electric hot plate) it is obvious what he had available for himself up to now. Flowers in a sick room of a concentration camp - where do the usual "eye witness re- ports" talk about this? Haulot:
"March 31, 1943. Spent a good night. The bed is better than in 3. [...] / don 't believe that I will be hungry here, [...] this morning for breakfast 'A normal bread. I received addi- tionally [...] a third bread with a large piece of margarine. If this continues, all will be well.
April 19, 1943. The 'organization' runs at full speed. [...] Concerning myself, I will go tomorrow to 27. Eifler brings this morning completely clean and exact fitting zebra striped clothing and a pullover.
April 21, 1943. Transfer. After lunch we are moved to
Block 27, which is headed by Erwin. I received brand new
clothing and a matching cap with it.
April 29, 1943. I now visit the light station daily where
my left shoulder, in which I have no strength, is treated. "
The medical care of sick inmates is extraordinary good, as can be seen also in later entries. The situation two years later is quite different. Naumann writes:
"The wound in my thigh is still festering and does not
heal. I go once more to the sick bay. But there is no more
ointment, no more bandages [...] / have fever and pain in
the area of the liver. Only don 't get sick here!! " (p. 1 74)
Haulot:
May 13, 1943. I started to work today. Transport of bread and food. A hard day, but only because my feet hurt. Sufficient food. Heavy work. But I am in excellent shape and very happy to be able to use my muscles. In the afternoon an everyday stroke of luck: A trip to Dachau in order to fetch a couple of containers. This gives me the chance for a wonderful outing through a park, a fir forest, the town. I come in touch with a thousand things which I've forgotten in six months: brooks, fish, swans, different trees [...] sweet smelling flowers [...] well-dressed women in cute dresses [...] children of any age, happy couples [...] stores, restau- rants, in short the whole real and pulsing life! [...] And I re- turn to the camp full of joy with a flower between my lips. " Only now, after more than seven months in hospital rooms is Haulot assigned to work. He can make a trip into the town of Dachau already on the first day. This proves that the concentra- tion camp Dachau was a normal penal- and work camp without hidden secrets, otherwise the inmates would not have been permitted to walk through the town. Haulot:
"May 14, 1943. Philipp had an accident, which forces him to drive to Augsburg on Monday. " According to this, sick inmates are even treated in special clinics in case of emergency - in Dachau in 1945 the conditions under the Americans were somehow different. When the wound in Naumann' s thigh started festering the doctor tells him:
"The best thing would be for you to go into a hospital. But this is not possible, because nobody is permitted to leave the camp. Only in case of the greatest danger to life does the camp administration give permission, but then it is mostly too late. " (p. 1 66) Haulot:
"May 16, 1943. I have a problem: the man whose sub- stitute I was disappeared, and I have no work.
May 20, 1943. Still no work. I rest until tomorrow. " The resting lasted now already five days. And this in a con- centration camp, where the inmates allegedly had to work until they dropped. Haulot:
"June 1, 1943. I am working now, and how: 14 hours a day. I can stand it without too much exhaustion. But I don 't have any free time left, except on those two days when work is finished at 4 o 'clock. [...] This week a parcel came. I am now provided for better.
June 13, 1943. Time passes frightfully fast. I find no time to even write the shortest notes. But although the work takes up almost all weekday hours, this does not prevent me from thinking. On the contrary; never before did such men-
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tal activity obsess me in Germany. [...] Physically I feel at my best. Sure, the work is hard, but it helps me to develop muscles which I never had before. Sometimes I am filled with an animalistic joy [...] about how strong and alive I am. [...] I sang and laughed all day. [...] " "The time passes frightfully fast" - What a strange com- ment by a prisoner! Haulot:
"July 7, 1943. A good week. A parcel on the 29th. Won- derful. Saturday and Sunday theater. Excellent things. [...]/ feel queasy. Slept all morning. "
July 7, 1943 was not a Sunday, but a Wednesday. Certain inmates could therefore simply take off a whole or half day, if they "felt queasy ". Haulot:
"July 13, 1943. The week was dominated by two events: the wonderful performance on Sunday and a parcel on Monday! [...] Received yesterday a parcel which was sent on June 13. Undamaged. Perfect. Inside a wonderful pipe [...]
August 27, 1943. 1 was in bed yesterday with the flu. To- day rest. All goes well. "
German civilians were not allowed to stay at home because of the flu during the war. Work had to go on. Haulot:
"October 12, 1943. Received news from home yester- day. What joy! [...] Italian concert last night. Beautiful voices, great music, good jazz. It is great. " Jazz - disapproved of during the Third Reich - possible in the concentration camp! The cultural life in the concentration camp Dachau offers above all else theater performances and concerts. Two years later the Americans occasionally allowed their prisoners a visit to the camp vaudeville. Naumann:
"Interlude after lunch: Report for duty! 'Five men in a row! ' We are led through the general camp to the front of the barracks complex - to the camp-vaudeville 'Karussell. ' A little pop music, some forced jokes and clowning, a little Eugen Roth, a little kitsch. The art of humor is too great and difficult to be mastered by those who feel more like cry- ing, actors as well as spectators. We plod back to our spe- cial camp in a long line, discouraged. " (pp. 148) An essential part of intellectual-cultural inspiration however came from a regular educational operation which the German officers established. Naumann:
"We now organized the whole educational operation like a university with lectures and practical exercises. I my- self signed up for 5-6 hours of lectures; with the following 'homework' I now find on purpose no more time to think about our fate. Make it or break it, but don 't give up.
In the evenings some general educational recitations: Colonel Koninger: 'Chats about a Far-Eastern Journey, ' Professor Lehmann: 'The Continental Sliding Theory of Al- fred Wegener, ' 'Changes of the Earth Crust. "' (p. 156) On the subject of mail: Already early entries make clear that Haulot received mail from his relatives often, if not regularly. The American liberators had different views on this matter. Naumann is "searched" immediately at the time of his arrival in Dachau. An American soldier takes his wallet and confiscates a post card, the last sign of life from his mother (p. 139). Later it is "strictly forbidden to write letters and to possibly pass these on to outside work commandos. It is also forbidden to
even possess letter paper, envelopes of any kind, or even to possess letters from relatives. Severe penalties are an- nounced. " (p. 155)
"If, despite the ban, a prisoner would write a letter and smuggle it somehow to the outside, the recipient (!) of such a letter would be punished with imprisonment for up to six weeks! Who writes a letter to the outside [...] will be pun- ished with a week arrest in a bunker with water and bread. Then he has for one week to march daily for eight hours with 50 pounds of packages. After this he has to stay for an- other week in the bunker with water and bread. There is no doubt that many of us would not have been able to sustain such a torture. " (p. 171)
"Again some parcels arrive. Of course without any writ- ten greetings. So far no one has received any message from loved ones, no answers to the Red-Cross-card of October. " (p. 173)
It is permitted for a short time in the middle of 1946 to write and send mail. But new tormenting regulations soon spoil the joy of the prisoners. Naumann:
"Starting immediately, prisoners are only permitted to write one letter per week on the known 19-line forms and one post card. All incoming and outgoing mail will, in the future, be rigorously censored. " (p. 259)
"The letters that we were permitted to write before the new rigorous regulations a few days ago are being returned to us. We have to rewrite them and can only use the 19-line form. [...] The letters are again returned to us. The address and sender have to be written with printed letters. A letter cannot be written with pencil. Abbreviations and underlin- ing are forbidden. Forbidden is also the use of numbers; a letter is returned because the writer wrote at the end: "1000 greetings; " that is a number and therefore not allowed. It is also forbidden to write about a third person. This means that we cannot inquire about children, parents etc. Forbid- den is any description about the conditions in the camp. Someone wrote: 'We are five in one room; ' the letter was therefore returned to him. It is also forbidden to write the date of the letter on a separate line, which exceeds the per- missible lines. These are certainly minor harassments, but they are effective. They grate on the nerves, which is proba- bly the purpose. " (p. 260)
"Again letters are returned to us by the censor. Some- one wrote by mistake one more line than the allowed and prescribed number of lines. He receives his letter back with the instruction to write again. Someone else pre-lined the rows neatly with a pencil; his letter is also not sent. " (p. 263)
The stay in the American internment camp gradually weak- ens all prisoners and even drives some to commit suicide. At best one can distract oneself by participation in scientific and cultural events and attempt to displace the awful present.
The development in Haulot's case however is positive. Hau- lot:
"October 26, 1943. In 12 days I complete a full year in Dachau. My health is back to normal, also my ability to think and work is similar to what it was before. [...] In how many months or maybe weeks can I take my loved ones in
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my arms? I only have to wait with my head up and a strong heart. In this way only can fate be overcome. And the future is great and wonderful. "
"November 8, 1943. I am here now one year. [...] One year. I arrived here sick, wounded, finished, only the shadow of a human being, someone who is called in the pic- turesque camp slang as 'cretin ' or 'Muslim ' [emaciated person]. ' / am now as healthy and strong as before and filled with mental and physical vitality. " What he sums up after living for one year in the concentra- tion camp is indeed surprising. His euphoric ambience shows a strength of character, but it would have hardly arisen if condi- tions in the camp had been approximately as oppressive as is always assumed - and how they were two years later in the American POW camp Dachau. Naumann:
"Whenever I get the growing paralyzing feeling that I cannot stand this any longer, I get out and jog between the barracks back and forth. The possibilities for running around are limited, but it is necessary to keep moving. The hoarfrost changes, as through magic, even the fence of barbed wire into a fairy tale picture of white, glistening tenderness. Behind the frosted fir tops at the end of the nursery shines the evening glow in yellow and red and threatening green.
I ask myself whether life still makes sense at all. Natu- rally I fight against such thoughts and their logical conse- quences. No, no, I am not that far gone yet! But I feel right- eously tired and empty.
I would like so much to do something meaningful. I would like to write something, but I have no more paper and the pencil is at its end. " (p. 171) Haulot:
"November 10, 1943. I return to sick bay. My heart has been overstressed for several days. The work is too long and hard. Maybe a little rest will suffice to bring everything back to order. "
Haulot writes in a later edited preface about this entry:
"Compare also the 'heart disease ' with which I justified my return to the sick bay on November 10, 1943. In reality, since the theft of food in the Kitchen Kommando One be- came impossible, I decided to give it up. I also wanted to be well rested in order to celebrate my birthday on November 15 in a dignified manner. " (p. 131)
Does this fit the general picture of a concentration camp? A concentration camp inmate could pretend to be sick a week be- fore his birthday in order to be rested for this holiday! Haulot:
"November 15, 1943. Today I am 30 years old. Impor- tant moments. The youth is over, at least what concerns vi- tality and spontaneity. The young man becomes a human being. I feel strong, ready to wrestle with my fate, my future. But who knows what will come tomorrow.
December 1, 1943. I become an assistant nurse. Unfor- tunately not in Block 7, as I hoped, but in 3/3.
December 2, 1943. The work is easy and pleasant. I study the textbook for nursing. Great problems with the vo- cabulary. But it will work.
December 6, 1943. I again change beds. Gave mine to the Czech professor. But I continue as a room nurse. I think
that I can handle the work quite well. [...] Last year in Block 25 I had terrible homesickness. At that time there was only my misery and my memories. Today I have again solid ground under my feet. I am again strong, resistant, and sen- sible, in general respected by the others, loved by some, and hated by very few.
December 25, 1943. The Christmas holidays are over. I spent them quite nicely. Last year about this time I was weak and helpless, left with only myself [...] Here and now I am not only healthy and strong, I also hold a position which satisfies me morally and it is possible for me to care for the spiritual welfare of my fellow people. [...]
Christmas Eve, which was celebrated in my room, was wonderful. [...] My 'patients' were enthusiastic about the celebration. The tree was appreciated by everyone and even the poorest had a good time. For me it was a remarkable dinner in excellent society.
Today rest, theater. [...] The cultural barrack, which was erected in record time with day and night work, was inau- gurated. The brothel is still incomplete, but the theater hall is completed. A victory of the mind. There is something moving in the attempt of men who live under totally abnor- mal conditions to maintain the illusion of a normal exis- tence. Attempts 'to live despite it all, ' to preserve the self, escape the dullness and preserve human dignity. Our life here is more or less influenced by all of this, and sometimes, only for short moments, a feeling of uplifting greatness de- velops out of this — or an endless sadness [...]
/ think of course of my loved ones. But quietly, without fear or sadness. [...] But why should I complain? I refuse to do this. I am strong, healthy, powerful. My family is appar- ently well. We are therefore still privileged. One has to make a good face to a bad game and not be ungrateful to fate. "
"The Christmas holidays are over. I spent them very well, " writes Haulot at the beginning of this entry. Our American "lib- erators" soon taught the Germans to give Christmas extra char- acter through special measures. Two years later in Dachau, which was then used by the Americans as an internment camp for the SS and members of the German Wehrmacht, it looked like this - Naumann:
"Two more days until Christmas. We have to line up outside in front of the barrack on this side of the fence. The sky hangs with deep dark gray clouds above the camp. The prisoners of the other barracks of the special camp are also called outside. We stand in three long rows behind each other, with short distances between the barrack groups. For a while nothing happens. The two guards outside on the camp street throw snowballs at each other. A peaceful pic- ture. We wait behind the fence feeling chilly. Several of us who are getting too cold 'sneak' backwards back into the barracks; the guards don 't notice anything.
A jeep comes up the big camp alley. With a trailer be- hind! Bags with mail are recognizable! And parcels! We stretch our necks, push forward. The jeep comes to us, stops outside the fence. Three American soldiers jump off, run to the back, turn over the trailer: the mail lies in a big pile in the snow. An American goes to the front, gets a can of gaso-
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line out of the jeep and pours it over the pile of our mail. The other American places his lighter to the pile, snap! The yellow flame blazes, blazes, blazes - we stand in shock. The burning pile gets smaller. The wind blows away a few par- tially burned paper pieces. All turns to ashes - 'Everybody back into the barrack!'" (p. 176)
One could think that Haulot already saw such an inhuman time approaching. He writes on December 28, 1943:
"How long will the thought repression last? Sometime I get scared at the idea that this may not stop, even after the end of the war. That another regime could prohibit freedom of thought. Then why all these sufferings and sacrifices to- day? Are we on the way to unfolding mankind or degenerat- ing it? The drama of the future, even worse and more tragic than the present, is already noticeable. " Naumann's diary entry reads like a commentary to this:
"The new edition of the 'Silddeutsche Zeitung ' [Munich daily newspaper] passes from hand to hand. Reading it one feels tortured by the illogicality carried by hate. Actually everything is so exaggerated that it should be obvious even to the naive reader.
The American general explains: 'Militarism is the deadly enemy of every democracy. ' But on the next page is an article: 'The USA introduce the general compulsory military service. ' It says in one column: 'It is the greatest duty to support the deplorable concentration camp inmates, who were kept prisoners for months, years, only for politi- cal reasons. ' Right next to it a big slogan: 'Good news: 700,000 Nazis imprisoned! ' Two columns further one can read: 'Dr. S. and Dr. A. also suffered the inconceivable fate of being dismissed from their offices by the Nazis in 1933, because they were against Hitler. ' On the same page on the right it says: 'Of course in the future no Nazi shall occupy a position in the government or in the free economy, except as an inferior manual laborer. '
Or: 'Max Weber, the poor architect persecuted by the Nazis for political reasons, designs an artistic memorial. ' (By the way of abysmal tastelessness!) And it says already in the following article: 'On the blacklist of those who are not allowed to work artistically are Furtwangler, Gie- seking. ' A bold title says: 'Democracy and freedom are the highest goal of Germany! Everybody works without consid- eration of race, social standing and party affiliation for the peaceful reconstruction! " And then it says immediately fol- lowing: 'Nazis are not allowed to vote! ' 'Nazi-activists and military officers can only find work as peons. ' Nazis have to evacuate the apartments! ' Nazi property confiscated! '
And it goes on and on like this. One gets nauseous read- ing it. It is not about having pity for those who are really guilty, about real parasites of the system. It is about the fact that lust for revenge and reprisal spread with blind rage. It is about the creation of new injustice, which hurts almost physically.
The newspaper talks about 'a new free law. ' According to it nobody will be incarcerated or kept prisoner without a trial before a court and the ability to defend himself freely. Yes! And we here? Am I not kept prisoner for six months under partially inhuman conditions without any hearing,
without anybody having expressed the slightest trace of in- terest in myself or all the other comrades?? Surely we are the losers, the vanquished. The power of every arbitrariness is with the victors. That seems to be irreversible. But why these hypocritical, rhetorical newspaper tirades? " (pp. 153) Haulot as well as Naumann later are thinking about the forced community in which they live. Haulot:
"March 31, 1944: The camp presents a very strange so- cial framework. [...] as a group of people held against their will, planned and only made functional by the relatively voluntary cooperation of these people, it has the essential characteristics of every spontaneously and freely organized society. The formation of classes, castes, diverse hierar- chies, the existence of laws, habitual laws and prejudices on the whole succeed in creating the illusion of an almost nor- mally functioning social community. The concentration camp is a substitute society, and the life in it a substitute for the human existence.
January 19, 1945. To what extent shall we, when we get out of here, still be ourselves? Only a year ago I could still answer this question positively. I had the feeling of matur- ing, of a human enrichment. Today something has changed. I discover that I have become rude and extremely irritable. The animal in man gains the upper hand. One does not live outside the norm that long unpunished. [...] Some [of us] decided to behave for one day like gentlemen, as if they lived a normal existence. When the evening came, none of them kept it up. Although they tried very hard, the despica- ble habits, the 'extortions ' within the camp, keep the upper hand. I personally become more and more offensive on cer- tain occasions, a reaction which can in large part be attrib- uted to the desire for solitude which can never be satisfied. To live in a group, from evening to morning and from morn- ing to evening, without ever having the possibility of being alone for a quarter hour, is a hard test. [...] Even the fellow- ship can become a disturbing factor. Numerous people in my vicinity take the fact that I once did them a favor for a pretext to impose themselves on me. [...] " Naumann has similar experiences:
"Sometimes I begin irritably to be beset with a distaste for my comrades. The reason for this is mainly the closeness in which we are all forced to live; this emphasizes clearly the human weaknesses of the neighbor. Since there is no chance to be occasionally alone, really alone, even for only one hour, we get on each other's nerves. [...] And if one gets out, because one believes to be unable to stand any more the restlessness and noise of the severely over-crowded room, then at the next barrack corner one meets comrades again, who stay close to one.
Then there is the group of egoists. They go 'their own way, ' reject any fellowship, do as they please according to their mood, help never and nowhere, and think only of their own well-being. [...]
Then there is the group of the non-approachable intro- verts. With tight lips and without attracting attention they sneak to all lectures, write down everything they hear; learn, strive, and work. [...] You never see them laugh. [...] They are absolutely quiet during discussions. [...]
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But most unpleasant is the group of the 'in any way un- teachables. ' They stride with swinging steps - in under- pants! - to the toilet, of course to all questions they offer their inflexible point of view. [...] They wear gloves when they sweep the room, and somehow still always stand on a command hill, a monocle in the eye, and each piece of newspaper is always a 'situation map ' to them.
Oh, how I find all of them disgusting, their voices, their subjects, their bad smells. " (p. 147) Another problem develops during the time for Haulot:
"March 9, 1944. The good nutrition causes disquieting results. The sexual need awakens, and since it cannot be satisfied, it has to be steered into other directions.
March 21, 1944. A parcel!
March 31, 1944. Received yesterday the parcel from February 26.
April 27, 1944. Three parcels: one from the Red Cross, two from Louise. "
They did not have such problems due to the good nutrition two years later in Dachau. Naumann:
"The last edition of the 'Neue Zeitung' is passed around. I read how well off the POW's are here in the camp Dachau. The article with the heading: 'Old Camp in new Light' talks about 'the comfortable furnished rooms in the barracks with easy chairs, lamps, window curtains, and flowers '[...] 'Special vegetables are grown in large gardens for the prisoners' [...] It does not only report of an 'excel- lent camp library ' and a camp vaudeville, but even that a normal daily kitchen menu is printed. According to it we re- ceive: 'In the morning cheese and butter, bread, coffee, milk, and sugar; for lunch mashed potatoes, boiled toma- toes, meat stew, pudding and bread, milk and sugar. ' Why these thick lies? In the morning we have a thin porridge, for lunch hot water, in which float cut up potatoes and - if we are lucky - a couple of corn kernels. For supper we have again a thin soup with turnip or beets or old Wehrmacht soup from a can.
On the plan it still says as always: 2576.2 calories or 2671.6 calories. Who believes it... nothing of this in the press.
The food continues to wane. The soup becomes thinner. Also the teaspoon of jam with the small piece of bread is not sufficient. We are practically starving. Whoever jogs half an hour around the barrack collapses on his bunk, dead tired, as if he did heavy physical labor. " (p. 167)
"Of course, food is 'subject No. 1; ' it is the central theme of all discussions. Everyone notices almost daily weight loss on himself. It is frightening. At night we dream of food. ' I also had a dream last night about a large plate of wonderfully smelling lamb chops in front of me. [...] Then I woke up - from hunger. This is probably caused by the di- arrhea, which seriously weakens the body. " (pp. 170) Haulot notices that he suddenly finds young men as attrac- tive as he found women earlier, but he fights it and finds a way out. He visits the barrack for sick women and socializes with the young German woman who is in charge.
"As senior nurse of the section for typhus I took the privilege to [...] visit a barrack for sick women. During this
occasion I had a relationship with a female SS-supervisor, which proved quite useful since she was also the secretary of the commandant. We received through her a copy of the order from Himmler to evacuate the camp one hour after this order arrived in Dachau. " (p. 13 1)6 When Haulot maintained that his lady friend was not only a senior nurse in the women's camp, but at the same time the sec- retary of the German camp commandant, one has to ask oneself whether such a job combination was possible at all. Maybe he had relationships with two different women, a senior nurse and a secretary. This relationship is anyway so intense that it keeps him deeply occupied for the whole year of 1944 and hinders him from writing in his diary.
After the war he talks about this "flirt" as an "adventure of the intelligence service type" (p. 131) and characterizes it as a purely tactical maneuver. That he attempted to describe this loving relationship, which was evidently too open in order to be kept secret, not as "moral" but as "tactical," is only too under- standable. His entries however show that he was emotionally seriously engaged.
Additionally he goes through a phase of an inner estrange- ment from his wife. She sent him a photo of herself, which just about shocked him. Haulot:
"April 27, 1844: Picture of Louise. [...] The two years left a mark on her. The photo [...] makes the features sharper and lets the face appear older.
May 1, 1944. This picture which brutally uncovers the truth upsets me deeply. [...] Why do I feel myself so young, so strong and vital, so full of lust for life, while my compan- ion was taken over by time to such an extent? Oh, the hard law of nature, to which women are subject, which destroys their charm and their beauty. [...] Never will the affection, the total attraction, which I feel for my wife, change. But I also know quite well that I will not be satisfied with a sexu- ally empty, cold life, less tomorrow than yesterday. Never before was I physically as strong as today. " Over and over in the following notes are indications of this love affair. He makes no further entries from June 1944 to January 1945, apparently being that occupied with this relation- ship. When the typhus epidemic breaks out in January 1945, he comforts himself in the middle of the danger. Haulot:
"January 24, 1945. But there are possibilities to distract oneself." (p. 184)
During the last typhus epidemic, in the middle of the piles of corpses, he writes a poem. Haulot: "January 27, 1945: Contrast.
My heart walks on Wallonian paths
up to the sky, following the flight of a lark.
It answers the joyful call of the weathercocks,
which the fresh Walloon wind flatters.
However with grotesque grimaces waiting,
piled on the ice,
wave yellow, green, blue dead
with their thin fists
weakly to the living
who follow falteringly their traces:
Well, I will live
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when I see your face of the wild lioness, oh death, who plays with little bones. " Naumann also expresses his longing occasionally in verses: "Longing.
Oh, to walk again on a quiet forest path, alone, hear, alone! - And not to see people, always only people — but rather trees, strong and big! No more day in, day out the sound of people 's voices in the ear, but the joyous singing of birds and the sound of the tree tops and the song of the cricket in the moss -
And to drink walking the blessing of the spirited quiet- ness!
Maybe to stand on a mountain and watch the day go down,
the land without borders at the feet - And not to have to breathe the dull closeness of the hut, forced into the monotonous complaining fate of the crowd,
banned to a tortured look at fences, walls. Oh, to hold your hand in mine once more And feel now, how unknown forces give our souls the same tone and courage. And not to live on without sense like animals, but to work in peace, to be with you lovingly, and to be able to be cheerful with you: World you are good! "(p. 144)
The last outbreak of typhus of the concentration camp, in which over 10,000 people fell victim, placed insurmountable tasks before those responsible. Haulot is fully employed as a paramedic. It is admirable that he still finds time for diary en- tries. He writes in the preface of his diary:
"I speak three times of typhus. The first two cases of January and December 1944 are actually stomach typhus. There were about 300 dead. The third case since December 1944 was actually a typhus epidemic with more than 10,000 dead and piles of corpses everywhere, which were discov- ered by the Americans on April 29, 1945. " (p. 131)
"January 24, 1945. In the last week an even more tragic situation than the one two years ago has developed. The ex- tent becomes frightening. [...] Dozens of friends are af- fected.
January 31, 1945. On Sunday we undressed the dead, the largest number of corpses which I have ever seen. My room was yesterday practically transformed into a typhus section. The race between disease and war continues. For many it is already decided.
February 6, 1945. 1 drown in work. The dance is deadly. My assistants are sick. At least 80 new admissions in the death chamber are expected every day. " A note inserted later by the author says:
"Typhus spreads in the whole camp. [...] The dead are piled up in the streets between the blocks. The barracks for the sick are flooded with the sick.
February 6, 1945. We performed blood transfusions on the recovered. "
Even in February 1945, shortly before the obvious end, there was still the possibility of blood transfusions in the con-
centration camp Dachau. In contrast to this, in most German military hospitals at this time the medical provisions for the wounded were reduced to a minimum. Even before necessary operations and amputations, only placebos were administered. An aspirin was already considered a pain medication. Blood transfusions could no longer be performed normally. Haulot:
"February 10, 1945. Death itself does not grant a delay. The number of victims grows steadily. Yesterday old Charles Jay died. When I wanted to visit Declerq, the repre- sentative of the Belgian Red Cross, his corpse was just wrapped in a cloth. "
The Red Cross had also free access to Dachau in February 1945 and had unrestricted contact with the inmates. Haulot:
"February 18, 1945. On Sunday a very interesting visit with the prison camp driver. Object of the visit: The regula- tions for handling the Red Cross parcels. Since then every- thing runs normally. Otherwise nothing has changed. Ducks, as much as you want. [...] Concerning the epidemic, it goes its way. "
Evidently the food situation for the healthy inmates is excel- lent {"Ducks, as much as you want"). In the later written pref- ace Haulot dates his visit with the camp commandant on March 25, 1945. Haulot:
"My discussion with the camp commander on March 25, 1945, was in such a surrealistic atmosphere that it is worth reporting about. At this time the Belgian Red Cross sent off a large load of food parcels to Dachau. My comrades and I myself felt it to be unfair that the Belgians overeat while other prisoners starve to death. Decision: the excess will be distributed, especially to the 'Spain fighters, ' who did not receive any help from the outside. But under camp regula- tions any act of solidarity is sabotage. I asked to be allowed to talk to the commandant. On Sunday morning I got per- mission. [...] / wear a wristwatch (forbidden) and have shoes on my feet which are 'borrowed' from SS supplies. And to top it all, I have long hair. My explanation for this: I get a cold when I have it cut off '[...]! Indignation, scream- ing, then the waves smooth out. The commandant [...] calls a man from the office and has him fill out in my presence the necessary permission form to wear long hair. And I leave with permission to share the parcels. " (pp. 132)
"April 1, 1945. To furnish a new block under the given circumstances requires a considerable effort. I did it with joy and with success, as I can attest myself. I am now at the top of a section of some 500 sick, half of them typhus sick, half are 'internal cases. ' A good paramedic, good doctors. Everything works great. "
Haulot's records give valuable evidence for the last days be- fore the Americans arrived, as well as the taking-over and the dissolution of the concentration camp Dachau. Haulot:
"April 6, 1945. One feels the end so near that it is ex- pected every minute. There is a heart-breaking contrast be- tween the relative peace of the camp and the terrible, wild noisiness on the outside and the extent of the mess into which the liberation discharges us.
April 21, 1945. The situation changes. [...] The camp at- mosphere changes from hour to hour, from extreme optimism to the blackest pessimism, concerning the following subjects:
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1. Food: Parcels have not been distributed for two weeks. No reason is given for this. It is assumed that this is to build for the camp a food reserve in case it has to exist on its own, without any other food supplies. [...] The daily food ration is reduced to a minimum in the meantime.
I finally succeeded today in distributing one parcel per man.
2. Evacuation. The most diverse false rumors are circu- lating. Mass deportation to Tyrol. Or to Switzerland. [...] Against this is the opinion that Dachau stays where it is and will officially be handed over to the Allies.
3. Liquidation. The biggest pessimists talk of course of a liquidation of Dachau according to classic procedures. Mass executions or gas chamber. [...]
On the other hand: [...] Departure in direction of Tyrol of several honored prisoners like Blum [...], Schuschnigg [...] etc. I don 't know who up to now has left the camp. [...]
/ personally am still involved unswervingly in a fling, which will not have any consequences, but is actually quite exciting and serves the purpose of saving my emotional bal- ance by diverting me from the general madness.
I fight doggedly to obtain as many parcels as possible
from the post office for my comrades in the block, run my barrack and try to get information. According to the latest news this morning, it is possible that I will be together with Tom and a couple of English men on one of the next loads, which are destined for the [...] 'little forest. ' [...] A pity, to maybe die 10 km away from freedom. But what can one do against it? I gambled, gambled well, and maybe I will lose! But not completely. Maybe I will not be there to taste suc- cess. So what. What counts is not to be present after the brawl, but to have led it or at least started it. What comes afterwards concerns the successors. [...] And maybe it is better like that, not to know about the disappointments, which will follow this war like the previous one. Peace is a horrible gravedigger illusion! [...] In my opinion the peace
for Europe will not be beautiful! "
Note to 1. Food. The building of a food reserve is quite a plausible explanation for holding back the parcels.
Note to 3. Liquidation. Haulot even calls the planned liqui- dation of the camp a pessimistic rumor. In the preface written later he maintains, however, that he learned from his lover about the alleged Himmler order for the liquidation of the camp. The order, an alleged telex, is according to the Holocaust literature dated April 14 and 18, 1945, and has the following content:
"The handing over is out of question. The camp has to be immediately evacuated. No inmate may fall alive into the hands of the enemy. The inmates behaved atrociously against the civilian population in Buchenwald. Signed: Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS. " On April 2 1 , the date of the above quoted entry by Haulot, he should have known about this, because he alleges in the later written introduction that he learned of this order from his lover "one hour after this document arrived in Dachau."
As already mentioned, an investigation by Stanislav Zamec- nik, a Czech historian in Prague, comes to the conclusion that this order, if genuine at all, could in no case have been intended
for the camp Dachau, but at the most for Flossenbiirg.6
The "gas chamber" mentioned by Haulot in the section "liquidation" is the only mention in the whole diary - with the exception of an entry after April 29, 1945. A certain room was possibly indicated to him as a "gas chamber". But he knows nothing about this from his own experience. How else can it be explained that he is quiet about this in his notes, which were to chronicle the events in the concentration camp Dachau? Haulot reports in the introduction that in his notes, he "talked neither about the malaria experiments nor of those with mescaline", al- though these were known to him (p. 131). He did not give a rea- son for this. But here would have been the place to mention also a gas chamber - if there was such a thing in Dachau. Haulot:
"April 23, 1945. The excitement grows. [...] The crema- torium and the pay station are mined. [...] The crazies are liquidated. The Jews are assembled for transport. The de- parture must take place because the frequency of dive- bombing attacks has accelerated.
April 26, 1945. The Germans and Russians leave the camp. [...] 7,500 have to leave tonight, the rest tomorrow.
April 27, 1945. I observe people leaving. [...] The depar- ture of the Jews still has not started. The wagons are still outside the fence. [...] Last night I was called in order to be introduced to the Swiss delegate of the Red Cross. He brought 5 trucks full of parcels for the western people. " Haulot does not talk of "death marches", but of regular de- partures with the railroad. The Red Cross has access to the camp up to the last and can supply the inmates with parcels. Haulot:
"April 29, 1945. Last night an international inmate committee secretly formed, which was instructed to enforce calm in the hours that followed and which was to take over management after liberation.
We notice in the morning that the camp-SS left. Two fighting troops take their place and take over the guard.
The fighting begins in the afternoon. [...] One guard af- ter another waves the white flag. [...] The soldiers in the last watchtower surrender. [...] The SS-men caught on the other side are publicly ridiculed. If they would fall into our hands, we would tear them apart. The SS-officers are executed the same afternoon. At night the soldiers suffer the same fate. The Americans say: 'Since we saw the first camp, we have known. We understood that we were not engaged in war against soldiers and officers, but against criminals. We treat them like criminals. '7
May 2, 1945. Visited the crematorium. Up to 2,000 corpses, piled up, stinking. The icy horror of the gas cham- ber. The train in which the Jews were transported, is over- loaded with the dead. It is clear that the liberators shoot down anyone wearing an SS-uniform without mercy. " The crematorium could not handle the cremation of the ty- phus dead. Here is proof that it was not possible to burn thou- sands of people in one hour, as can be read in any of the Holo- caust literature. If the cremation ovens could have handled that, there would not have been any piles of corpses. The cremato- rium was later prepared as a showroom and proof of the horrors of which the Germans were accused. About this a note by Naumann:
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"Everything in the crematorium was left as the Ameri- cans found it when they came, only the corpses lying around are replaced with wax puppets. An outspoken Bavarian who had to clean up in the crematorium said: 'Yes, you know, the Americans build their great tradition here. Before they even took it seriously themselves, but now they laugh about it!'" (p. 142)
Haulot did not say which room he described as a gas cham- ber. Possibly the small shower room between the disinfection rooms and crematorium, which is even today described as "gas chamber - never used".
Haulot thinks, like other witnesses of those days, that the corpses in the train at the camp are those of the Jewish prison- ers who were to be transported out of Dachau.8 Others maintain that they were inmates from Birkenau or Buchenwald who were sent to Dachau.9 The Dachau concentration camp memorial plea is for Buchenwald, which is based on witness testimonies, camp files, personal diaries of camp inmates, et al. Haulot:
"May 4, 1945. Penned up in the blocks, the people die in masses. An order from Eisenhower: typhus quarantine.
May 15, 1945. The camp administration is now officially in the hands of the American commandant Rosenblom. [...] However, I make decisions about the affairs of the inmates and the International Prisoner Committee. [...] Many Frenchmen fled, especially doctors. The very weak and poorly functioning American leadership increased these dangers even further. When people saw that nothing hap- pened [...], they decided to free themselves. More than 2000 have disappeared this way. The sanitary situation is awful. Of 120 people 100 still die daily. Dysentery, typhus, weak- ness. "
Haulot stays in Dachau until the dissolution of the camp, which lasts until June 1945. Later he returns once more, in or- der to participate as a witness and reporter in the trial against the Dachau staff beginning in November 1945.
Haulot disclosed further details from Dachau during an in- terview with the Suddeutsche Zeitung, especially matters about the social composition of inmates. It is customary today to con- sider anyone who claims to have been in a concentration camp as a martyr or someone for whom to feel sorry. It is completely forgotten that the majority of concentration camp inmates con- sisted of legally sentenced criminals. Haulot explained in this interview:
"The most unbearable were the moral conditions under which we had to live. The living together with criminals of all types, with anti-socials, criminals, bandits. " He says further:
"The liberation itself brought a ticklish situation. The American fighting troops had to move on and left the camp
to itself. Taking into account the thousands of criminals, the almost 10,000 sick, and the difficulties of obtaining sup- plies, it takes a lot of courage, discretion, and leadership to maintain a certain order and to avoid further victims. " In order to avoid any misunderstanding, we have to con- clude with an added comment. The above abstracts of the Da- chau diary of Haulot are not to give the impression that a stay in a concentration camp was something like a recuperation rest. Even if this was the case for Haulot himself at times - espe- cially because of the bad health condition in which he was when he arrived - there were thousands of inmates who did not make out like this. In the meantime, however, based on investi- gations and witness statements, the impression prevails that Dachau was a milder form of camp as compared with other pe- nal camps. But how the individual adjusted to the camp condi- tions depended mainly on his personality and his capability to survive in an anti-social system. It was also very important to avoid an unfavorable Kapo, and to attempt to have a leading position within the camp hierarchy as soon as possible. Haulot succeeded excellently. His personality and therefore also his notes are in no way representative of the fate, which thousands of innocents had to suffer at Dachau.
Notes
1 Amtsgericht Tiergarten, Ref. 352 Gs 3367/97.
2 Abstracts from his diary were published in: "Arthur Haulot, Lagertagebuch. Januar 1943 - Juni 1945", Dachauer Hefte. Studien und Dokumente zur Ge- schichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, on commission of the Comite International de Dachau, Brussels, edited by Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, vol. 1, 1985, issue 1, "Die Befreiung," December 1985, pp. 129-203.
3 His diary entries of Dachau are in: Gert Naumann, Besiegt und "befreit". Ein Tagebuch hinter Stacheldraht in Deutschland 1945-1947, Druffel, Leo- ni 1984, pp. 139-199,239-281.
4 Paul Berben, Dachau 1933-1945. The Official History, London 1975, pp. 67f.
5 It was "Thanksgiving," which is unknown in Germany.
6 To the alleged Himmler order about the evacuation of the camp compare the essay by Stanislav Zamecnik: "'No inmate shall fall into the hands of the enemy.' About the existence of the Himmler-order of April 14/18, 1945," Dachauer Hefte, Vol. 1, p. 219-231. In it Zamecnik proves that such an or- der never existed for the camp Dachau. Therefore it is not possible that the lover of H. had told him of a Himmler order.
7 Howard A. Buchner as an American eyewitness reports in detail about the execution of the last German guard, Dachau. The Hour of the Avenger. An Eyewitness Account, Metairie, Louisiana 1986. Cf. also Ingrid Weckert, "Dachau - Tag der Rache," in: Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 35(2) (1987), pp. 14-20.
8 E.g. Nico Rost, Goethe in Dachau, Frankfurt/M. 1983, pp. 229, 237, 245.
9 Birkenau: HA. Buchner, ibid. (note. 7), p. 89; Buchenwald: Hans Carls, Dachau. Erinnerungen eines katholischen Geistlichen alls der Zeit seiner Gefangenschaft 1941 - 1945, Cologne 1946, p. 198; Dachauer Hefte, 1, pp. 10, 19, 20, 22; Hermann Langbein, ...nicht wie die Schafe zur Schlachtbank, Frankfurt/M. 1980, p. 382.
One of the best-known German historical researchers and writers, Ingrid Weckert is best known for her book on the events leading up to the 1 938 Pogrom against Jews in Germany "Flashpoint. " She has been subjected to police raids, during one of which Ernst Zundel was arrested in her apartment in Munich. A former tourist guide for travel agencies, she reads and speaks Hebrew. She knew Menachim Begin and other Jewish leaders personally and frequently visited Israel. In 1998, she was tried, convicted and fined DM 3,500 ($2,000) for the present article.
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The Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau in the Light of Documents
By Carlo Mattogno
In the historical expert opinion drawn up for Deborah Lipstadt in the libel trial launched against her by David Irving (January 1 1 to April 1 1 , 2000), Robert Jan van Pelt, when he was unable to find any proof of the reality of the extermination of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz, amassed all the available "traces," most of them already gathered by J.-C. Pressac, raised them falsely to the higher level of "proof," and later invented a "convergence of evidence" essentially based upon a systematic disfiguration of the documents. Also, all documents that did not lend themselves to such an operation of disguise were simply ignored by him. In his report, van Pelt accuses the revisionist historians of not yet having undertaken the task of "revising history" and adds:1
"True revisionist history not only destroys an inherited view of the past, but provides an alternative. [...] Up to today holo- caust deniers have been unable to produce, in forty years of effort, a counter-narrative to the inherited history of Auschwitz. " As far as I am personally concerned, I have for years been offering a "counter-narrative" in my writings, both in articles and in books, the latest of which - Special Treatment in Auschwitz - Origin and Meaning of a Term - presents a positive and docu- mented story of Auschwitz with respect to "special treatment" and to "special action" based on documents, which van Pelt either ignores or is unaware of. And it is not an accident that van Pelt, be it in his report or in his recent book The Case for Auschwitz. Evidence from the Irving Trial3 (which is an enlarged version of the report) does not even quote me a single time!
In this study I shall present another positive contribution to the central topic of the Auschwitz historiography: the alleged homi- cidal gas chambers of the crematoria at Birkenau. It goes without saying that the rich documentation on which my conclusion is based has been systematically ignored by R.J. van Pelt.
I. The Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau within the Framework of "special measures for the improvement of hygienic installations" in Birkenau
1. Himmler's visit to Auschwitz on July 17/18, 1942, and the new functions of the PoW camp at Birkenau
On the occasion of his visit to Auschwitz on July 17 and 18, 1942, Himmler decided to enlarge the PoW camp Birkenau for a capacity of 200,000 detainees. The Central Construction Of- fice (central construction office) went into operation immedi- ately and, on 3 August 1942, its head, SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Karl Bischoff sent to Amt CV (central building inspectorate) of SS WVHA a new lay-out - a modification of lay-out Nr. 1453 of 8 July 1942 - which took into account the enlargement of the camp towards the new capacity. Bischoff s letter of transmittal referred explicitly to Himmler's visit:4
"The enlargement of the project has been viewed by the Head of Amt C, SS-Brigadefuhrer und Major General of the Waffen-SS Dr.-Ing. [doctor of engineering] Kammler on the occasion of the visit by the Reichsfuhrer [i.e. Himmler] on July 17 and 18, 1942 [...\"
On August 15, 1942, the Central Construction Office drew up another "Situation map of the PoW camp Auschwitz O/S," which indeed foresaw a strength of 200,000 detainees.5 On Au- gust 27, Bischoff sent to Office C of the SS Main Office of Economic Administration (Wirtschaftsverwaltungs-Hauptamt, WVHA) a letter with attachment of a "Situation map, M: 1 :2000, 2 copies," in which he confirmed:6
"The enclosed situation map takes into account the re- cently decided enlargement of the PoW camp towards a strength of 200,000 men. "
In the succeeding months, the strength of PoW camp Birke- nau was reset at 130,000 to 140,000 detainees, but the reason for its enlargement remained unchanged.
On September 15, 1942, a meeting was in Berlin held be- tween Reich minister Speer and SS Obergruppenfuhrer Pohl, head of SS WVHA, in which another five officials took part, including SS Brigadefuhrer Kammler, head of Office C of SS WVHA. The next day, Pohl wrote a detailed report of the meet- ing for Himmler. The discussion had centered on four main points, the first of which was the "enlargement of barrack camp Auschwitz due to eastern migration." On this topic, Pohl notes:7 "Reich minister Speer has fully approved the enlarge- ment of the barrack camp at Auschwitz and has set aside an additional building volume of 13. 7 million Reichsmark.
This building volume covers the erection of some 300 barracks together with the corresponding utility and service plants.
The necessary raw materials will be assigned during the 4th quarter of 1942 and the Is', 2nd, and 3rd quarters of 1943.
Upon completion of this additional project a total of 132,000 men can be housed at Auschwitz" Pohl then notes that:
"All present were in agreement that the workforce available in the concentration camps should now be used for large-scale armament tasks. "
In order to bolster the workforce other plants, Pohl stressed the necessity to withdraw civilian German and foreign person- nel from armament works, whose workforce would thus be in- sufficient. The missing workers, so Pohl, should be replaced with detainees from the concentration camps. Pohl went on to say:
"Reich minister Speer, in this way, wants to assure the supply of an initial number of 50,000 able-bodied Jews in self-contained factories with available housing.
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
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We shall screen out the workforce necessary for this purpose at Auschwitz from the eastern migration, in order to assure that our existing plants will not be adversely af- fected in their performance and their construction by a permanent change of personnel.
Thus, the able-bodied Jews destined for the eastern mi- gration will have to interrupt their journey and will have to serve in the armament plants. "
The "eastern migration" (Ostwanderung) was the deporta- tion of Jews to the east. In this context the last sentence obvi- ously means that those Jews who were unfit for work would not interrupt their eastern migration, but continue their "journey" to the east - and would thus not stop at Auschwitz.
On the day of the meeting, September 15, 1942, Kammler wrote a letter to the Plenipotentiary for the Organization of the Construction Industry concerning "special construction tasks for concentration camp Auschwitz," by which he informed him of the decisions taken on the subject of Auschwitz:8
"With reference to the meeting between Reich minister Prof. Speer and SS Obergruppenfuhrer und General of the Waffen-SS Pohl please find below [the description of] the additional building volume for the special program of K.L. Auschwitz:
1. ) Summary of the additional buildings required, to- gether with the corresponding volume.
2. ) Summary of building materials and barracks re- quired.
The work will, for the most part, be executed by detain- ees. A duration of 50 weeks has been set out for the whole project. Aside from the detainees an average of 350 profes- sional and auxiliary workers will be needed. This results in 105,000 man-days. "
In October of 1942, the construction project "PoW camp Auschwitz" assumed the official name "execution of special treatment," which thus confirmed the new function of the camp. This task consisted of a vast construction program that was to transform it into a source of manpower for the industries, which had already sprung up or were to spring up in the vicinity of Auschwitz.
The aim of this change in the function of the camp - de- cided on by Himmler when he visited Auschwitz - was very clearly explained by Rudolf H6B in a speech he gave at Ausch- witz on May 22, 1942, in the presence of the head of Office Group C of the SS WVHA, Kammler, and other officials, and in which he outlined the history and the development of the in- stitutional tasks of the camp:9
"The Auschwitz camp evolved in 1940, in the triangle between the Vistula and the Sola [its tributary] rivers, after the evacuation of 7 Polish villages, by the enlargement of the area of an artillery barracks and through many addi- tional constructions, reconstructions or changes. Much building material resulting from demolitions was reused in the process. Initially, it was to be a quarantine camp, it later became a Reich camp resulting in a new objective.
In view of the general situation which at times became critical, its location at the juncture of the Reich and the Government General proved to be very useful on account of the fact that replenishment of the camp with manpower was
thus assured. An additional factor that has recently arisen was the solution of the Jewish question, which necessitated solving the problem of housing for a first load of 60,000 de- tainees, to grow to 100,000 shortly. The detainees in the camp are, for the most part, destined for the major indus- trial projects which are taking shape in the vicinity of the camp. Within its territory of interest the camp comprises various armament factories for which manpower must be furnished on a regular basis. "
Hence, the "solution of the Jewish question" did not require extermination installations, but rather housing construction pro- jects for 100,000 detainees, and the alleged extermination func- tion was thus not only a minor issue, but was totally absent.
AuBoiiwits, flan is, Raj 4 J.
Sft».fe,j 23651/4 VJWsehni. .
B^e' r l u h t
uher die Arbeit wiHtelluns tsim S&fart- prosrejnn In K, o. E, a-u a o h wi t-s. <
Eel Art am h^itigeii Tafje ctat ttfufundBnon Tie aprnn hunff i!b#r <tj & Arbeit fieintei lung buiw. Sof or tprcRTHiran 1m KBL, pfardc vom Dieaat- etelltmlcrl Let t ^StuTmbannffthrsr Eieaitoff, .PylLfende-H "bfi- stijiiiarti
- 3 -
hob der Aufbereitungsstation einEusetsen, ; Bagger der Fa. Brand Ijleibt est Vorfiutgraten fiir des BA III und der ICruppenunterkunft.
Diesel-Bagger der Deutsche]! Bau-AG. hat sofort mit dem Aushut fur die prov. Erdklarbecien an der Klaranlage BA II au beglnnen*
Samtliche vorgenonnaenen Arbeiten sind im Einvernehinen mit dem Bauleiter des EGL. , .#-tTnter3turmftiiirer J a n i s c h ' ^ durchBufuhren, Haftlingsanforderusgen sind dureh die Bauleitung £GL. einaureiohen 9» ZA. J&hrling hat den Einbau von Keseeln und Boi- lern in den Wasehtaraeken durchzufuhren, desgleiohen die Biausen im Auskleideraum des Krematoriums Hi. Wegen-der Brausen wixd jf-stiirmljaiinfuia-er Bisettoff noch mit dem Lagerkommandanten, f/-Oberstm:mbarmfuhrer HSU, Riiek- sprache nsnmen.
Fur die EntwesungsiSf en wird vom if-V/.V.H.A. nosh eine 01- Eeichnung sugesandt. 'lo. Wegen dar Stromver sorgujag im BA II., instiesondere Instal- lation dex H^ftlingsiznterkUnf te , hat sioh ^-Itoterschar- fuhrer 5 w o % o d a Bit #-Uirter£turmfuhrei; J a n i s a h ins Benehmen au setaen. 11. -if-TJiitei-schavfUhi-er W i : k hat sofort die Bestellffing von 4 ooo Stck. Kloaettteeken ohne Spulung aufEugeben und Kir die sclmellste Aalieferung derseloen^brge au tragen.
Der J^_t*r der Sentralbauleitung
'// - Gturmljannfuiirer
Showers are to be installed in Krematorium III; RGVA, 502-1- 83, p. 338
272
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At the end of October, the Central Construction Office drew up the general project for the PoW camp in conformity with the directives given by Speer and Pohl. The corresponding file was entitled:10
"Project: PoW camp Auschwitz (carrying out of special treatment). Master of works: Reichsfuhrer SS; SS Main Of- fice of Economic Administration, Office Group C. Berlin- Lichterfelde-West, VIII Up a 2"
The project had an overall budget of 13,760,000 RM and contained among other things a situation plan for Birkenau covering 140,000 detainees.11
However, at the beginning of January 1943, the total strength of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp had not even reached 30,00012 detainees. The reason was essentially the extremely high mortality registered since the summer of 1942, caused by a terrible typhus epidemic, which had broken out in July that year, and by the inadequate hygienic and sanitary conditions at the Birkenau camp. By the end of April 1943, the strength of the camp had gone up to 53,000 de- tainees13 but was still far below target.
2. Expanding the Birkenau Cremation Installations
The enlargement of the Birke- nau camp, together with the terri- ble typhus epidemic that ravaged it and the high mortality rate among the detainees resulting from this caused the SS authorities to set out on an adequate enlarge- ment of the cremation plants in the Birkenau camp. It is well known that, in the beginning, a single crematorium (the future cremato- rium II)14 had been planned for this camp.
In the letter of August 3, 1942, mentioned above, Bischoff said:15 "Furthermore, the site for the new crematorium, next to the quarantine camp, was de- cided on. "
Therefore, as late as August 3, 1942, the head of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office knew of only one crematorium.
In a file memo written by SS Untersturmfuhrer Ertl on August 21, 1942, in connection with the visit of Kurt Prilfer (chief engineer of Topf & Sonne, transl.) to Auschwitz on the 19th, one can read:16
"Regarding the construc- tion of a 2nd crematorium with 5 triple muffle ovens, the re-
sults of the negotiations with the Reich Security Main Office about the assignment of [material] contingents, now under way, must first he ascertained. "
Therefore, the decision to build crematorium III had not yet been taken.
The same document informs us that Prilfer' s proposal to transfer two ovens with 8 muffles from Mogilev to Auschwitz was accepted on August 19. This proposal (as results from a hand-written note in the margin) was approved by WVHA on August 24. This signifies at least that up until then the number of muffles for the ovens in crematoria IV and V had not yet been decided upon.
August 1 942 was the month with the highest mortality rates ever in the history of the Auschwitz camp. Altogether 8, 600 17 detainees died during this month alone, nearly twice as many as had been the case in July (some 4,400 detainees). The first trace of the decision to build the other three crematoria appears on
';-rfV..
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cur t .
i' ■ £.ur-_ Q.s., p loo Br=u.:
en.
%iriOe.u '
Boiler ±pr gen Bau [iiegrlf ifeneii - rain-. 311 Jder.-^cjis rarecJes abs- ' ' 3 i stop s r a"tur. s-A .'■ jjv'i; 1 . . JLo h s r aana rung ' fer 1 h gJi.n;r- - e iae s .grossec 2 ; si r ~ e"b e- s;-; ',<ti? & ghbe^en ssntspr'ec'fcer.a.e •- ■ien 17-. 5'.sit~z~ ;a ex.
35
14 . j .
Urgent request for estimate to install 1 00 showers and water heater in Krematohum III; APMO, BW 30/34, p. 40
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August 14 (date on the drawing 1678 of crematorium IV/V). Up to the day before, over 2,500 detainees had already died, the average mortality being 190 deaths per day. Between August 14 and 19 (the day to which the discussion summarized in the file memo of August 21 referred) the mortality was even higher: some 2,400 deaths, about 400 per day on average. The climax occurred on August 19, when more than 500 deaths were registered. On August 1 , the strength of the male camp stood at 21,421 detainees. Until the 19th, 4,113 detainees died, an average of 216 each day, with 1,675 dying between August 14 and 19, an average rate of 279 per day. The average strength between August 1 and 19 was about 22,900 detainees.
What would have happened if another typhus epidemic had broken out at a time, when the camp had reached its planned numbers of inmates of 200,000? The reason for the decision to build three more crema- toria was, therefore, due solely to worries, more than legitimate, with respect to hy- giene and sanitation.
"General description by garrison physician, stating that the maintenance of the health of the detainees, destined for the important tasks ahead, appears questionable on account of the poor conditions of latrines, an unsatisfactory sewer system, a lack of sick bays and separate latrines for the pa- tients, together with a lack of possibilities for washing, bathing, and disinfestation.
For an improvement within the PoW camp it is sug- gested that the latrines be equipped with seats and lids, and that to counter the repeated failures of the sewage systems a number of adjacent pits be installed, which would be emp-
3. The "Special Measures for the improvement of Hygienic installations" in the Birkenau camp.
In early May 1943, the authorities in Berlin and the SS administration at Ausch- witz, in their effort to realize the program decided on by Himmler at the end of July 1942, were therefore confronted by two se- rious interrelated problems: a scarcity of manpower caused by the high mortality among the detainees and the serious situa- tion in the field of hygiene and sanitation that was its cause. It therefore became im- perative to improve the hygienic installa- tions of the camp.
On May 7, 1943, SS Brigadefuhrer Kammler, head of Office Group C, Con- struction, of the SS WVHA, met with six high camp officials at Auschwitz: SS Ober- sturmbannfuhrer H6I3, commander of the camp, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Mockel, head of SS garrison administration, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bischoff, head of Central Construction Office, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Casar, head of agricultural units, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Wirths, SS garrison phy- sician, and SS Untersturmfuhrer Kirschnek, chief civil engineer of the construction of- fice of the Waffen-SS and Police Ausch- witz, to which the Auschwitz main camp was attached. Two days later, Bischoff wrote a file memo on the topics discussed. In this document, he summarizes the state- ments of the SS garrison physician with re- spect to the installations under his authority in the following way:19
-.: ;;^ff.fc^A»BcJiw*$»." ...
.. r™i ™ '"5t"»"f*H. .-fcafiati en-slam ' %
: ..r : . " ' 5, '5, 4, ~4p>: ' 18" ' :
.5.,Mnd file ufen artefetrtY *i«i<»r? " ....... ...... „
..;W:6^Sb^S^?"wiaviei? ;
5. fjge&ft file Atisase t«Sffiff« *?SW*!i&*, L "
.6. ^fiaden sich-^ur Zoit crea i» sW ..... f.0*^ . ; Vt . , . . :
d) j*rt«^sSM&« .../
e) ^i^iao?
^■ii»t>cn'fla4()o daft
•■ . *>) G^Steil^' begrlffea:' ».i«rtTT ' ' '
del* ^Saff.ea-SS imcE jeais-ei Ausciwits .;■ f]
Questionaire about use of crematory exhaust gases to heat water for showers in Krematorium II and III; RGVA, 502-1-312, p. 8
274
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tied from time to time and the contents removed and put at the disposal of the agriculture. Regarding this, the head of the Central Construction Office recommends to install a sluice gate upstream from the sewer network and to counter-flush the latrines by means of pressurized water.
He opposes the system of pits, as the high water table would cause an infection of the ground water, and the nec- essary separation [from the ground water] by means of ba- sins is difficult and cannot be undertaken at the present time. A gross estimate of the amount of night-soil leads to the conclusion that this material cannot be disposed of at all in the vicinity of the camp. The principal difficulties could only be overcome by a complete conversion of the sewer system to a pipe network complete with pumping sta- tion for which, unfortunately, the necessary equipment is unavailable.
The Brigadefuhrer takes note of the particular urgency of these questions and promises to help in any way whatso- ever within the limits of his possibilities in order to improve the situation. He is, however, surprised about favorable re- ports from the competent medical staff regard- ing sanitary and hygienic conditions, whereas immediately afterwards, contradicting reports are presented to him. Head of Central Con- struction Office is ordered to prepare for Head of Office Group C, by May 15, 1943, proposals for the alleviation of the problems, together with a scheme for the proper effluent treatment, leaving aside any present difficulties of supply, which he will handle himself.
The garrison physician qualified as inade- quate the [conversion of] stables into sick-bays. He criticizes the absence of lighting and water in the building section of the Swiss barracks. Furthermore, the number of barracks is insuffi- cient so that the installation of further barracks in this sick-bay section must be investigated. The deficiencies observed, on closer inspection, always turn out to be interactions between the difficulties mentioned initially; the necessity of a separation from all other questions of con- struction and of finding a special solution be- comes apparent.
As a permanent solution for the delousing in the PoW camp, the garrison physician sug- gested to create, for each subsection of the building project (10 altogether), complete dis- infestation facilities including the possibility of bathing. On the other hand, the head of Central Construction Office indicated that the large disinfestation unit of the PoW camp is already under construction and should be finished first. Excluding further difficulties with respect to the availability of qualified workers, this should be the case by the end of August. A defi- nite date could not be set by SS-Stubaf Bischoff As an intermediate measure until that date, Brigadefuhrer will furnish, by way of a loan, a
new short-wave delousing train. "
On May 8, at 18:05 hours, a telegram addressed to "com- mand of concentration camp Auschwitz" arrived from the con- centration camp GroB-Rosen, worded as follows:20
"SS Stubaf Bischoff and man in charge to report to SS
Brigadefuhrer and Major Generalof the Waffen-SS Dr.-Ing.
Kammler on Monday, May 10, 1943, at 11 hours bringing
all documents, plans, material contingents for water supply
and drainage PoW camp 200,000 men. "
The telegram was signed by SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Wilhelm Gideon, vice-commander of KL GroB-Rosen.
On his return journey back to Berlin, Kammler had passed through GroB-Rosen and had decided there to have Bischoff come to Berlin, ordering Gideon to convey the message to Auschwitz. For greater safety, he had also conveyed the convo- cation to his Berlin office; thus, at 20:05 hours, the telex service (FS-Dienst) at Auschwitz received another telegram from SS- Oberscharfuhrer Schiirmann at the office of the Adjutant of Of- fice C/I of the SS WVHA. The message, addressed to Bischoff personally, said:21
'4
A™<rtmitB, am 16,5.1943
Gelde^lma^orB der .
BS,t.r. i sorxleraa&onax-j&e tils- die '^e'rfcesssruiig ftsr .hygienl-
SSEug! BefeSl flea .ft-ScissideiUtaeTB tt Srsffen-^ J)r.ln;.s. Koranic r
. AnSfiVt i Beriolit ".
1 Bate*ial£nf ateXLong. , ■ ;i jietailplaii itlper die "erUesseriuig der AboEtba- radcea im US! •
- g»gfat8efaftMfag»ai*«ine»wiiBgtaiirt ' -' .'
ArtsgrtlfipeBElief Ci - 4^BriBaiefiilirer a, Geaeralnajor der 1iflff«a-# s
K » v> s> 3- 9 X " :\
Unter den Ziehen 125-155
In' tier Amlage wir& eln lerieiit Blasr- file bisher .gstoaffaaen.aaea^bmsB SfiSr .*erbe«»«'run< 4er 1W" -' :gieriisbiieE EiHrlohtiingen in 231. » so'wle cine Material- aiifetelluBg t»er die far die 'BarcbiOkcrag diesfer Jjv' beiten umgeitendet Seniftigten Saterialien wi& sine Zelo&mtng nir die VerbsSBeriais . :deT testehendeii Abort- ,%a*a6ken im Sfil alt. der-'Bii-fce im tanntniBnahrna to ■ Vorl&ge gebrachtb' ■
' jyx EistarialiEn warden lisixStigtt
Supfer ,
Blei^Kiim-tee Kiekel- .
351 is 54,40 Us 1 145.7o kg
155:. 00 Jig
7,2,0 kg o.2o Xg- 744.4o kg
' ier-:¥affefi-W:
f geritralfcauleitung Eo.lisei AttscJiwitB
i 'JjajiSsltte ■ . 1 ' £i i: tr , go'nde
^StiirBbaJioffifcrer
"Special measures for the improvement of hygienic installations in the PoW camp Auschwitz", RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 311 (report on next page.)
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
275
"SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen-SS Dr.-Ing. Kammler has ordered you to appear in Berlin on Monday, May 10, 1943, in the morning, with all plans and calculations for water supply and drainage of PoW camp Auschwitz. "
This started a vast program of improvement in the field of sanitation at the PoW camp (the Birkenau camp), labeled vari- ously in the documents as "immediate program," "special measure," "special program," "special construction measure," and "special action."22
The corresponding written order was transmitted by Kammler to the Auschwitz commander on May 14.23
4. The "Special Measures for the Improvement of Hygienic Installations" and the crematoria of Birkenau
From the beginning of its realization, the crematoria entered into the program of improvement of the Birkenau camp.
On May 13, 1943, Bischoff wrote a "report concerning the division of work for the immediate program at PoW camp
Auschwitz," in which each officer, non-com, and civilian em- ployee of the Central Construction Office was charged with specific tasks within the scope of this program. The tasks for the civilian employee Jahrling are outlined as follows under item 9 of this report:24
"Civilian employee Jahrling has to carry out the instal- lation of heaters and boilers in the wash barracks, as well as the showers in the undressing room of crematorium III. Concerning the showers, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bischoff will consult with camp commander SS-Obersturmfuhrer Hofi.
SS WVHA will transmit an OT-drawing [OT = Organisa- tion Todt, German national construction organization] for the disinfestation ovens. "
Two days later, on May 15, Bischoff sent the following tele- gram to the Topf company:25 "Urgent telegram! Address: Topfwerke Erfurt.
Text: Bring along Monday estimated project for hot wa- ter supply to 100 showers. Provide for installation of heat-
's
r 1 e ii ■t
ttber die getroffenen KaSnahmen fiit- die Durohftlhruae dee dareh (S-BrigaaafBhi'sr und Generalinajor der Waffen-S Br. Ing. ganimler angeordneten Sonderprogramnies
Hit den Torarbeitan far die DureafUhrang dee Sonderpra- grammea wird? sofort am fJittwooii, dam 12. Hal 194 J, begonnen. ' Im heeondsreo Burden folgenae Arbeiten in Angplff genonsnens 1.' Klajsfllaqen. ■ '■■
Css die Abwieser fiir ate Kait der Bauarbeiten me. IBniae- graben uria betm Sirolistlcii abzuhalten unfl epilterhin Eleichzeitig Ms sm Sertigstelluflj; der 0.8rarilagen eine enteprechende Klsrang der Abwasser zu sehsffen, warden eowohl beim Klarbaoken im BA I alg auoh bei der Kl&ranlage im BA II prwiBOriecrie Srdklarbeeken ei-richtet. Mr diese .Arbeiten warden Z Badger zuefrtzlicli einge- BN3izt«
a. Itarckatioh dee EBnigagrabenB znr ffeiefisel.
Die 3/brarbeiten und Vermes Erungearbelten sind durdigefuia-t. Hit den Arbeitsn an Uurohetich durcb. HSftlinge wird am Kontag, den 17. fiai 1943 s begonnen, 3o Abortbarackep.
Me offenen Abortkarcgle warden mit einer 5 era Etsrken KiBenbatoaplatte abgedeekt, in walefle die Brillen eingebaut und mit holzernan Beokeln irerEahlossan warden, auagefUhrt, 7,-as- Be- seiiignng fies GeFueh^ee werden in Sader Baraeka ie Kanal 2 Stiielt stejgieitungen aais lonrohrea liber Dacli gaftl.-irt. Am Ende der Kanal- grub.en werden vor den SJbsrtretea in dao Rohreystem Je 1 Bechen und 1 Kolaeohiaber anseordnet, van elneraeits die YeratopfiMSBgefahr zu verminflern mid anderarseite Hittele ^rB3erer ffasserraenren eine JJurcbBjitiluHg su erm'dglichen, Fernsr werden zu dieses Zwecke nooh zusatzliche Erunnen #iir 3ede Abortbarackenreihe angeordnet.
An den I6ng»wanden der Abor-tbarEeiteirererden haiserne mit Pappe, auegelsgte PleBrinnen angsordjiet, wglcHs in die Kanal- sruben eatw^esert werden.
- 2
Kur TergrSSerung Sea (JeBEatgef alias wiM mit der TErleswig ■ etnas araitan HauptJcanalrDhretranEea auSerHttlb der WesoU- and ' Abortbarauken atss !onrohs?M hegonnen, in welehen jeweils. die ifaseer einBr ffaecn* und einer Abortfearaoke zuBammen einssffihrt werdan. Bie Abf^BBer von dieeem tiSerliegendea Kanal werden mittels SOhlammpaDSjen in die bestehenden Klaranlagen sepumjit. Pfe die airehfHhrung dieaer Arbgiten wnrden alle varffigbaren Eiifilf irraen ©ingeeatzt. .
4 c. WaBchbar-aoken.
Bamlt zum waaohen immar friBOhee Waaser but VarffllguBg stent, sind obertialb der HBlaarnan WaaohtrSge durohlHcberte Stranlrohre verlegt. Solange die tfaaaeraufbarsitunsBaniage noeh nioht in Betrieb genomman werden feann, Bind im weBtlicllen Eeil dee BA.II far die WaHohbaraolten pro-risoriaohe Eieenbatonwaeaer- behalter iiergestellt worden.
5. Wasaeraufbereitun^eanla^e .
ffii-t den Erdarbeitea f(ir die Waeseraufberei'ttmgaanlage 1st begonnen worden. >..
6. Entweatu^aanlapB .
'itar Sntweaung dar Baftlingeileider 1st Jewells in den einzelnen. Teillagern dee BA II eine Of-aitweemigsanlaae Torge- eehen, . Um eine einwandfreie KSrperentlauaung ftir die HMf tlinge durehftihren eu konnen# vrerden in den beiden bea-tehanden Haft*- lingBbadern im BA I HeizkeBsel una Boiler einaeSaut, damit ftlr die bestehende BrauBeanlage wanaee Ifaeser to VerfttactnE ateht. Welters let geplant, .im Krematoriun III ■ in dem RillTerbrenirangB- oi'en HeisBpliIangen einzubauen, urn durch diese dae Faeeer fiir eine im teller dee Krematoriums III zu erriohtendE. Sraileeaolage eh gewinnen. BezSiglieh DurchJUhrung der Konstruktionfilr dieee Anlage wurde ait der Firm Sopf & 3Sluie( Erfurtj vsrhandelt.
7. ^eichBel^raben.
Hit den Bauarbeiten am Weichselgraben , weloher die Vorflut ftir die Iruppenanterkunft darBtellt, wird aefort naoh den zuraelt in Sang befindliehen Abeteckungsarbsiten begonnen, Auoh ftir dies® Arbeiten boII ein weiterer Bagger eingesetzt werden. Aufgeatellti
AllBeiiwltz, den 16. Mai 194 J. Der l»elte'r der Zentralbauleitung
Ja/U.
' r. A h .
der faffen-ii and Pollaei Auaehwitz ii*-StTirflb6nnf Uhrer .
"Report on measures taken for the realization of special program ordered by SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen- SS Dr.-Ing. Kammler for PoW camp Auschwitz": sewage plant, drainage system, toilets, wash rooms, drink water treatment plant; RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 311
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The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
ing coils or boilers in waste incinerator under construction at crem. Ill or flue- gas duct for exploitation of high exhaust temperatures. Necessary increase of oven level to accom- modate large reserve tank would be possible. Please furnish such drawing to Mr. Prufer by Monday, May 1 7. " On May 16, Bischoff sent to Kammler a "report on meas- ures taken for the realization of special program ordered by SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen-SS Dr.-Ing. Kammler for PoW camp Auschwitz," in which we read under item 6:26
"6. Disinfestation plant. For the disinfestation of the clothing of detainees, each subsection of BAII will have an OT-disinfestation unit. To ensure a faultless delousing of the detainees themselves, the two existing detainee baths of BAI will be equipped with heaters and boilers to provide hot water for the existing showers. Furthermore, it is planned to install heating coils in the garbage incinerator at cremato- rium III thereby to provide water for the shower installation to be built in the cellar of crematorium HI Concerning the design of this unit, negotiations have been carried out with Topf & Sohne of Erfurt. "
The project of setting up shower facilities in the basement of crematorium III was quickly extended to crematorium II as well. On June 5, the Topf Co. sent the following letter to the Central Construction Office at Auschwitz, with reference to "Krematorium II and III waste incineration furnace":27
"Enclosed please find drawing D 60446 concerning the incorporation of boilers into garbage incineration furnaces. Our site-engineer Wilh. Koch has been sent the same draw- ing. In case you agree with the execution of the unit accord- ing to this drawing, please inform Mr. Koch.
Please forward also to us your agreement in this matter, in order to allow us to establish the corresponding change- order. "
The extension of the project to crematoria II and III is confirmed by a questionnaire concerning the Birk- enau crematoria, undated, drawn up by Bischoff in June of 1943. The head of Central Construction Office replies to the first four questions say- ing that there were 18 ovens28 in crematoria II - V with a total of 46 muffles, that they had been built by the Topf company in the years 1942- 1943, that they were coke-fired, that all of them were non-mobile, that they had a total of 6 chimneys, 16 m high and that the chimneys were not equipped with forced-draft blowers. To the fifth question, "are the ex- haust gases being used?," Bischoff replies "planned but not realized," and to the following question "if yes, state purpose," he answers "for bath installations in crema. II and III."29
The project of installing 100 showers in crematorium III (and an-
other set of showers in crematorium II) could not have been aimed at the personnel of the crematoria, because at that time only 54 showers had been planned for the central sauna, the disinfection and disinfestation unit for the entire camp, as Bischoff had written on June 4, 1943, to the head of Office C/I ofSS WVHA:30
"The shower section for the detainees contains 54
showers, fed by 2 boilers of 3,000 liters each. The unit has
been laid out for continuous use. "
Actually, the "shower room" of the central sauna was equipped with only 50 showers,31 but it is thus clear that the "bathing facilities in Krema. II u. Ill" referred to in the ques- tionnaire mentioned were to serve the detainees of the entire camp.
On June 24, 1943, crematorium III was handed over by the Central Construction Office to the housing administration of the Kommandantur. In the inventory for the basement, attached to the corresponding transfer statement, 14 showers32 are men- tioned for morgue 1, which have an obvious relationship with the project discussed. No showers are mentioned33 for the in- ventory of basement of crematorium II, handed over officially on March 31, 1943, precisely because the shower project was started only in May. Of course, 14 showers may have served for the personnel of the crematorium only. They were probably in- stalled by the camp workshop.
The initial project was left pending for two reasons. Primar- ily because in each of the two disinfestation units of construc- tion section I (buildings 5a and 5b) 50 showers34 were installed. Those works began at the end of May, as we can learn from the "construction report concerning special measures at PoW camp," which Bischoff wrote on May 30, 1943:35
"Installation of hot water supply was started in 2 lousing barracks (baths for detainees). "
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Use of exhaust gases of furnaces of Krematorium II through V"; RGVA, 502-1-313, p. 11
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
277
By July 13 the two units were already in operation, as we can gather from the "progress report concerning works for spe- cial measures at PoW camp and main camp," which Bischoff compiled on that date:36
"Hot water supply in the two delousing barracks (baths for detainees) of construction section I is operational. " In parallel, the construction of the "disinfection and disin- festation facility" (the so-called central sauna) moved ahead diligently, and its termination was scheduled for the beginning of September.37 Eventually, the unit went into operation - albeit "during the day and for some hours at a time" - in early De- cember,38 to be handed over to the Auschwitz administration a month and a half later.39
Still, the project of showers resurfaces on March 25, 1944. On that day, SS Obersturmfuhrer Werner Jothann, who had succeeded Bischoff as head of Central Construction Office on October 1, 1943, sent a letter to Topf on the subject "PoW camp Auschwitz, Kremat., exploitation of exhaust gases," in which he wrote:40
"You are asked to send soonest offer with pictorial rep- resentation and calculations plus detailed explanation. Crematoria II and III, possibly also IV and V are being con- sidered. "
In a listing of Topf dated April 13, 1943, referring to an un- known letter with the reference "24674/43/Ro-Pru/Pa," it is written:41
"2 Topf dis infestation ovens for crematorium II at PoW camp, Auschwitz. "
There is also an invoice from the firm Vedag Betriebe Schlesien, dated July 28, 1943, on the subject of "Auschwitz- Krematorium" which concerns "sealing works done on the dis- infestation plant."42 It is known that the "2 Topf disinfestation ovens" had been ordered from Topf on February 11, 1943, (or- der no. 148) for building 32, i.e., for the central sauna.43 There is also an "individual invoice" from Vedag with date and text identical to the one already mentioned, in which there is an ex- plicit reference to "BW 32 - disinfestation facility."44
These two documents, even if they contain erroneous refer- ences, do confirm the general atmosphere with the crematoria being used for sanitary purposes as described in this section.
As J.-C. Pressac has written correctly:45
"It is obvious that PoW camp Birkenau cannot have had
at one and the same time two opposing functions: health
care and extermination. "
Since the planning of the sanitary installations in the crema- toria at Birkenau is based on irrefutable documentary proof whereas the existence of installations for mass exterminations, according to J.-C. Pressac's own admission, is founded solely on "traces," it is quite obvious what the real function of the cre- matoria was.
Notes
First published as "Die Leichenkeller der Krematorien von Birkenau im Lichte der Dokumente" in Vierteljahreshefie fur freie Geschichtsforschung 7(3 &4) (2003), S. 357-380. Translated by Thomas Dunskus. For quotes and terms in their original German language see the German version, online at www. vho.org/VffG/2003/3 .
1 R. J. van Pelt, The Pell Report, p. 22 1 . An electronic version of this expert report can be found on the Internet at
www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/evidence/vani.asp.
Soon to be published by Theses & Dissertations Press; the Italian original
appear under the title "Sonderbehandlung " ad Auschwitz. Genesi e signifi-
cato, published by Edizioni di Ar, Padova 200 1 .
Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2002.
GARF, 7021-108-32, p. 37.
Published by J.-C. Pressac in: Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. New York 1989, p. 203. GARF, 7021-108-32, p. 41.
Pohl's report to Himmler dated September 16, 1942, concerning "a) Rus- tungsarbeiten. b) Bombenschaden." BAK, NS 19/14, pp. 131-133. GARF, 7021-108-32, p. 43.
Aktenvermerk dated May 22, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-26, p. 85. VHA, Fond OT 31(2)/8. The reference "VIII Up a 2" was the "G.B. Bau Kennnummer" (i.e. the ID number of a building project within the list of the building industry of Reich minister Speer) of the construction project PoW camp Auschwitz.
Ibidem, Lageplan des Kriegsgefangenenlagers Auschwitz O/S. Entwasse- rungsplan. Plan No. 1782 of October 28, 1942.
On January 1, 1943, the total strength was 29,630 detainees, of whom 24,263 were men and 5367 women. AGK, NTN, 134 (Auschwitz trial vol. 52), pp. 279, 282.
On April 30, 1943, the total strength of the camp was 53,436 detainees, of whom 34,777 were men and 18,659 women. AGK, NTN, 134 (Auschwitz trial, vol. 52), pp. 281,285.
Situation map of PoW camp Auschwitz of June 6, 1942, in : J.-C. Pressac in: Auschwitz: op. cit. (note 5), p. 195. GARF, 7021-108-32, p. 37. RGVA, 502-1-313, p. 159.
The figures are based on a statistical analysis of the data contained in the Death Books of Auschwitz, cf. Die Sterbebiicher von Auschwitz, Saur, Mu- nich 1995.
Plan published by J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz..., op. cit (note 5)., p. 393. Aktenvermerk by Bischoff dated May 9, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-233, pp. 36- 37.
RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 339. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 320.
Cf. in this respect my study "Sonderbehandlung" .... op. cit. (note 2), pp. 73-81.
Aktenvermerk von Jothann dated October 5, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 77. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 338. APMO, BW 30/34, p. 40. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 311. RGVA, 502-1-336, p. 104.
The furnaces with 8 muffles of crematoria IV and V were considered to consist of 4 furnaces RGVA, 502-1-312, p. 8. RGVA, 502-1-336, p. 107.
Inventory of transfer negotiation of "Desinfektions- und Entwesungsanlage" (central sauna) dated January 22, 1944. RGVA, 532-1-335, p. 3. RGVA, 502-2-54, page number illegible RGVA, 502-2-54, pp. 77f.
Transfer negotiation of building 5a, delousing facility, inventory. RGVA, 502-2-58, p. 129. Plan Nr. 2948 of delousing facility FL Bw. 5a dated Oc- tober 6, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-230, p. 174. Cf. also drawing of Central Con- struction Office 2540 dated July 5, 1943 in: J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: op. cit. (note 5), p. 58. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 281. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 119. RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 10.
Letter from SS garrison physician to head of Bauinspektion der Waffen-SS undPolizei "Schlesien " dated December 9, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-336, p. 84. Transfer negotiation of this plant is dated January 22, 1944. RGVA, 502-1- 335, p. 1.
RGVA, 502-1-3 13, p. 11. APMO, BW 30/34, p. 47. RGVA, 502-1-316, p. 431 e 502-1-323, p. 137.
Final invoicing of Central Construction Office for Topf Co. dated October 19, 1943 concerning "Einrichtung einer Entwesungsanlage im K.Z.L. (Mas- sivbau) BW 32 bestehend aus 2 Ofen und 4 Kammern." RGVA, 502-2-27, p. 24
RGVA, 502-1-316, p. 430.
J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz:..., op. cit. (note 5), p. 512.
278
The Revisionist ■ 2004 ■ Volume 2 ■ No. 3
II. The Use of the Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau in 1943 - 1944
1. Jean-Claude Pressac's Thesis
As is well known, Jean-Claude Pressac's fundamental thesis on Auschwitz is the assumed transformation of the two morgues no. 1 of crematoria II and III into homicidal gas cham- bers from the end of 1942 onwards. He also claims that the morgues of crematoria IV and V initially served as corpse stor- age facilities for the bodies of those gassed in the so-called "Bunkers" of Birkenau, and later as corpse storage facilities for the bodies of those gassed in the homicidal gas chambers in- stalled in these crematoria themselves.
One of the major arguments of this thesis is based upon drawing 2003 of the Central Construction Office, dated De- cember 19, 1942, which is a re-issue of the preceding drawings 932 and 933 and which addresses the "relocation of basement access to the roadside."1 Pressac notes that in the de- sign of the basement of this building, a corpse chute - an inclined cement plane which al- lowed the corpses to be slid down from the outside into the basements of crematoria II and III - is now missing, and he comments:1 "Replacing a chute designed to take
corpses by an ordinary stairway defies all
logic - unless the future corpses entered
while they were still alive and were able
to walk down the stairs. "
Later Pressac came back to this argument with the same claim:2
"On December 19, Dejaco produced a
new drawing - Nr. 2003 - for the base- ment, and made a major 'architectural
blunder ' at the same time. If we follow the
indications on the new drawing, the
northern stairway was now the only pos- sible access to the morgues, which meant
that the dead would have had to walk
down those stairs! "
Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork later took over Pressac's argument with the following comment:3
"He [Dejaco] canceled the planned
corpse chute, which in the earlier plans
had been the main access to the basement
morgues. Live human beings descend
staircases. Dead bodies are dropped
through a chute. The victims would walk
to their death. "
Of course, the chute for the corpses was not eliminated,4 but the assumed transforma- tion of the morgues in the crematoria into "undressing rooms" and homicidal "gas chambers" implied an important effect: the absence, within the crematoria, of morgues for the corpses of the registered detainees who died a "normal" death in the camp.
Robert Jan van Pelt has noted this and stated:
"In fact, the situation was much worse,[6] because in February 1943 all the morgues in crematoria 2 and 3 had been redesigned and were being equipped to function as undressing rooms and gas chambers, while the morgues in crematoria 4 and 5 were to destined [sic] as undressing rooms. By the time the crematoria were finished, Auschwitz had virtually no permanently dedicated morgue capacity. " (emph. in original)
This would have entailed serious problems of sanitation and hygiene, because one could not have scheduled in advance the cremation of registered detainees who had died in the camp and
W J.A.TOPF&SCfHNE ERFURT
TAG - ELATT
empfsnger Z&ntralbaiileittmg der Waffen SS and Pollasi , Auschiitz O.S. {/| ^L-
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'Be-und Entliif tungsanlage des Ereata. II im E.fi.Ii. jJLuscawita ' jo. 2 CE, Q.7 kg Zn, 6,8 kg Ala, 1 ,4' kg Ztt-Al
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33, ^ kg Cu.. 4,8 kg; Ms, p.? Sg Sn-Bz , o,3 kg Zn g,o sk gp-AI. 6.Q te. On-left, 5,o kg Aid
Beta, i ifa. 34674/4 VRo-Rnu/Fa. '
2 To:of 5fotv:esu:igs6f en fur dafi'Xrema II im Krie^sfieiaiigeneii- lager tAuschv*itz .
25. -ks; AI. 15, -kg Z.1-A1. 8 .-kg Ms, Beta.: 24679AVRo-grii;- fa.
Er^veiterung dez Be~und Eatliif tungsanlage(WarmliiftsLjfulirujig) des-ICrema II im K.Q.L. AuscJwi**.
5,5 Kg Cu, o,1 kg Zn. 1,4 kg Al, o,6 kpr. Zn-Al
Erfurt, den 15.4.1 943
13- APS. I943
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Listing of metal requirements for, i.a., two disinfestation ovens for Krematorium II of PoW camp Auschwitz; APMO, BW 30/34, p. 47
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
279
who would thus have had to wait for days or even weeks7 on end for the crematoria to be freed from the victims of the al- leged homicidal gassing operations. If Pressac's thesis were true, the documents referring to the storage of corpses of de- ceased detainees in the morgues of the camp and to their trans- port to the crematoria would have had to contain explicit refer- ences to the dangerous sanitary and hygienic situation that would have arisen. First and foremost, references to protests and proposals to solve this problem by the SS garrison physi- cian would be expected in the documents. What do the docu- ments say about this?
2. Documents Regarding the Use of Morgues in the Crematoria at Birkenau
On March 20, 1943, the SS garrison physician of Ausch- witz, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Wirths, wrote a letter to the camp commander (we shall discuss this letter in the next section) on the subject of the enlargement of the hospital facilities for the detainees, in which he states:8
"For the removal of the corpses from the detainee sick- bay to the crematoria 2 covered hand carts must be pro- cured, allowing the transportation of 50 corpses each. " The reference concerns crematorium II, which had been put into operation at a reduced throughput on February 20 and which was still the only crematory functioning by March 20.
On July 20, 1943, the SS garrison physician wrote the following letter to the Central Construction Office:9
"Those camp sections of construction phase II already in use are still lacking corpse chambers made of concrete or brick; it is essential that they be provided urgently.
The wooden sheds currently used for this pur- pose are strongly subject to rat attacks; on removal of the corpses there is hardly a corpse that does not show signs of this. The rats are strongly attracted by the corpses and are proliferating at a rate, which makes any control measures practically fu- tile. The rat flea is a carrier of the plague. Any case of plague within the camp can have unimaginable consequences for our men as well as for the detain- ees of concentration camp Auschwitz. This can only be avoided by a hygienically satisfactory conserva- tion of the corpses, accompanied by intensive rat control measures.
Therefore, the Auschwitz SS garrison physician makes the urgent request to build the necessary corpse chambers immediately, even if simple means have to be employed. "
The type of corpse shed then in use was otherwise in conformity with the directives of the Main Office for Budget and Buildings) of November 25, 1941. 10 Bischoff replied to Dr. Wirths on August 4 by the fol- lowing letter:11
"With reference to the above-mentioned letter, please be informed that based on the discussion on Saturday, 31 July 1943, in which SS Standartenfuhrer Dr. Mrugowski, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr. Wirths and
the undersigned took part, the construction of dedicated morgues in the individual subsections of the PoW camp, as per the aforementioned request of the SS garrison physician will not be carried out.
SS Standartenfuhrer Mrugowski has decreed during the discussion that the corpses are to be removed twice daily, in the morning and in the evening, into the morgues of the crematoria; in this way, the separate construction of morgues in the individual subsections can be avoided. " In early 1944, the SS garrison physician succeeded in hav- ing one brick-type corpse shed built, which became building 8a.12 However, in May 1944 Dr. Wirths again raised the prob- lem of solid corpse sheds for construction phase II at Birkenau, turning to SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bischoff, head of Construction Inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien. The latter wrote to SS Obersturmfuhrer Jothann, head of Central Con- struction Office at Auschwitz, and informed him of the request.
In this letter, dated May 15, 1944, Bischoff expressed him- self as follows:13
"SS garrison physician Auschwitz has requested the construction of a solid morgue for construction section II — CC II Auschwitz.
Central Construction Office Auschwitz is ordered to plan the construction in cooperation with Auschwitz local
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"Immediate hygienic measures in PoW camp Auschwitz, erection of corpse halls in every subsection"; RGVA, 502-1-170, p. 262
280
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
SS administration and to request immediately the means of construction as well as GB-permission.[U]
As justification, letter from SS-Main office of Economic Administration dated May 12, 1944, - copy attached - is to be annexed at top of request.
On account of urgency of execution, works are allowed to be started as of now. "
On May 22, a meeting was held at Auschwitz grouping SS Obersturmbannfuhrer H6B, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bischoff, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Baer, who had been appointed Kommandant of Auschwitz I on May 11, 1944, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bisch- off, head of Construction Inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien, and SS Obersturmfuhrer Jothann, head of Central Construction Office. The latter wrote a file memo, in which he summarized the results as follows:15
"The meeting was called in order to define the location and the size of the c[orpse]-halls requested. It became evi- dent that an inclusion into the present lay- out is problematic. If enough space for the construction of the c[ovpse]-halls is to be made available, at least part of the toilet and washing barracks would have to be dismantled. It is however difficult to do without these barracks under the present circumstances.
SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Hofi points out that in accordance with a presently valid order, the daily load of c. [corpses] is to be removed daily in the morning by means of a dedicated truck; if this order is carried out, an accumulation of c. cannot arise and therefore the construction of the above- mentioned halls is not imperative. SS Os- tubaf. Hofi therefore demands not to under- take the construction of the halls under dis- cussion. "
But Dr. Wirths does not stop there and on
May 25 comes back with a letter addressed to
the senior garrison SS officer:16
"On July 20, 1943, I brought to the at- tention of the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz the fact that in the women 's camp of Auschwitz II and in the camps of construction section II concrete and brick morgues are still missing and that their construction is ur- gently required in view of the fact that the available wooden sheds are absolutely un- suitable for the conservation of corpses be- cause of the danger of epidemics and be- cause of rat attacks. Improperly stocked corpses will always attract many rats.
In the sick-bays of the camps at cc Auschwitz II a certain number of corpses accumulate daily on a regular basis. While their transportation to the crematoria has been organized and takes place twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, it does
happen that on account of the scarcity of vehicles and/or fuel the corpses are not taken care of for 24 hours.
For reasons of hygiene and as a prevention of epidem- ics, any hospital has a corpse chamber for the short-term storage of bodies as they accumulate. Normally, in common hospitals the number of beds does not exceed 500, whereas in the various sick-bays for the detainees the number of beds amounts to 3-4,000 on average. In my opinion it is therefore patently evident that proper storage space for the numerous bodies must be available.
In my note of July 20, 1943, and in all preceding notes to the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Po- lice Auschwitz I have requested only the provision of corpse chambers, never the construction of corpse halls in dedi- cated buildings or sheds; I request steps for the provision of such corpse chambers to be undertaken immediately on ac- count of the urgency of the matter. Otherwise I shall have to
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"Erection of corpse halls in construction sections II, camp II Birkenau"; RGVA, 502-1-170, p. 260
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
281
advise my superior commander in order to avoid a most se- rious risk of epidemics for the whole camp caused by the present hygienically unsatisfactory storage of the corpses.
I enclose a sketch showing a corpse chamber. Such chambers are urgently required in the inmate sick-bay of the women 's camp, of building section II, subcamps a, b, e and f. These chambers can be either built within the out- patient barracks or attached to them on the outside. " This letter, even though it was addressed to the camp com- mander, concerned also the head of Central Construction Office who wrote to the head of Construction Inspectorate of the Waf- fen-SS and Policei Schlesien on June 12, attaching his own file memo of May 23, postdating it May 30, as well as the letter from Dr. Wirths of May 15 with the sketch of a corpse chamber attached to the letter of May 25. Jothann declared himself ready to undertake immediately - upon their approval - the construc- tion of the corpse chambers in the form requested.17
3. The Significance of these Documents
The documents presented in the preceding section refute to- tally and radically Pressac's interpretation of the transformation of the Birkenau crematoria in a criminal sense.
There is not even the slightest hint of an improper (criminal) use of the morgues in the crematoria in the letters of the SS gar- rison physician. Such improper use would have raised im- mensely the hygienic and sanitary problems that he evoked. The morgues of all crematoria, on the contrary, appear to be available at any time and unconditionally. I say at any time, be- cause there is no mention whatsoever, in any of the known documents, of a temporary unavailability of the morgues on ac- count of a reason other than the temporary storage of the bodies of registered detainees. I add unconditionally, because the use of a morgue for the purpose of storing corpses is never subject to a different use in any of the known documents.
And if Pressac's thesis were true, it is obvious that the au- thorities of the Auschwitz camp would at least have organized the cremations by assigning one of the smaller crematories - or one or several of the morgues in the smaller crematories - to the bodies of the registered inmates who died at the camp, which however was not the case.
All this demonstrates that the essential function of the morgues in the crematoria was exactly what morgues normally provide, as results already from the letter of Dr. Wirths dated March 20, 1943, the day of the alleged gassing of 2,191 Jews from Greece,18 whose cremation would have taken a whole week. The first gassing, of 1,492 victims in crematorium II is said to have taken place on March 14. Their incineration would have ended on March 19 and would thus have made impossible the alleged second gassing operation, said to have occurred on March 16, 19 because there would still have been 900 corpses left in the alleged 'gas chamber' of the crematorium.
Dr. Wirths, for his part, is only concerned with real dead and requests two hand carts to take them from the camp hospi- tal to the crematorium.
Dr. Wirths' letter of July 20, 1943, shows how dangerous the storage of corpses of detainees deceased in the camp really was from the point of view of hygiene, all the more with re- spect to an outbreak of the plague that had been evoked. If
Pressac's thesis were true, the risk of an epidemic would have increased enormously, because the bodies of registered detain- ees would have been lying around in inadequate morgues within the camp for a much longer time, their number would have been greater, and the rats would have multiplied beyond all measure.
But Dr. Wirths never makes even a veiled reference to this hypothetical situation, which could have occurred, if Pressac's thesis were true. Dr. Wirths proposals concern always and ex- clusively the real conditions in the camp, and are not suspect in any way. Bischoff s letter of August 4, 1943, mentions the or- der given by Dr. Mrugowski on July 3 1 to transport the corpses "into the morgues of the crematoria" twice a day, in the morn- ing and in the evening. The order concerned all the crematoria and had to be carried out twice daily, which implies the total availability of the morgues concerned. If Pressac's thesis were true, this order would have been foolish, because on the day it was given, preparations for the transports of the Jews from the ghettos of Bendsburg and Sosnowitz to Auschwitz were being made, and would have resulted in the gassing of 28,000 per- sons20 in the crematoria of Birkenau between August Is' and 12th. Dr. Mrugowski, who was the head of the hygiene institute of the Waffen-SS, could not have been unaware of such prepa- rations, in the same way as Dr. Wirths could not have been un- aware of them, and Jothann could not have been unaware of them either.
Therefore, the proven and normal fact that the corpses were taken twice a day to the morgues of the crematoria refutes cate- gorically the hypothesis of mass gassings that have allegedly occurred in these crematoria.
And that we are dealing with an proven fact results un- equivocally from Jothann's file memo of May 23, in which it is said that the camp commander, in the meeting of the previous day, had spoken of the existing order of removing the corpses in the morning by means of a suitable truck. Even more explic- itly, Dr. Wirths, in his letter of May 25, 1944, declared that transportation of the corpses to the crematoria was regulated and took place twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. Hence, there is not a shadow of a doubt concerning the fact that, during the second half of May 1944, this order was valid and was observed, within the limits of the availability of trucks and fuel.
However, the second half of May 1944 is also the time of the beginning of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Ausch- witz, something that no one could have been unaware of, least of all Rudolf H6B. The first transports reached Auschwitz on May 17; by May 22, the day of the meeting mentioned above, more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews had already arrived. If we follow the traditional historiography, over two thirds of them, some 41,000 are said to have been gassed and the crematoria at Birkenau,21 all of a sudden, had turned out to be so inadequate for this task that several trenches had to be dug for the incinera- tion of the corpses in excess.
If that hypothesis were true, the morgues in the crematoria at Birkenau during that period would have been permanently occupied by victims: but then how could Rudolf H6B have calmly recalled the order we spoke of, namely to take the bod- ies of the registered inmates who had died in the camp to the morgues in the crematoria twice a day?
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Therefore, in this case, too, and I would add, even more strongly, the proven and ordinary fact of transporting the bod- ies twice a day into the morgues of the crematoria, refutes cate- gorically the hypothesis of mass gassings of Hungarian Jews al- legedly carried out in those crematoria.
In conclusion it can be said that the documentation regard- ing the utilization of the morgues in the Birkenau crematoria demonstrates that, from their very origin in March 1943 on- wards, they were not - nor could they have been - used as 'un- dressing rooms' and 'gas chambers' within the framework of an alleged mass exterminations by means of gas. Such a thesis is historically unfounded.
Notes
1 J.-C. Pressac in: Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. New York 1989, p. 302.
2 Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes , Piper Verlag, Miinchen-Zurich 1994, p. 81.
3 D. Dwork, R.J.van Pelt, Auschwitz 1270 to the present. W. W. Norton & Company, New York-London 1996, p. 324.
4 The Rutsche of crematoria II and III, 6.8 m long, was built by Huta - Hoch- und Tiefbau Aktiengesellschaft of Kattowitz at a cost of 37,40 RM. Huta report concerning "Ausgefuhrte Bauarheiten d. Krematoriums 2 " dated 7 May 1943 (APMO, BW 30/26, p. 36) and Rechnung Nr. 2 also dated 7 May 1943 concerning "Ausgefuhrte Bauarheiten des Krematoriums 3 It. Angebot vom 13. 7.42 " (RGVA, 502-1-306, p. 3 1). The Rutsche of crematorium II is moreover clearly visible on drawing 21 97(a)(r) E 2197 (b) (r) attached to documentation of Ubergabeverhandlung for the crematorium (J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz:..., op. cit. (note 1), pp. 311-312) and is explicitly described in the corresponding "Gebaudebeschreibung" (RGVA, 502-2-54, p. 78).
5 The Pelt Report, p. 210. Author's italics.
6 The reference is to the reduction of the capacity of the Birkenau morgues asserted by van Pelt a few lines before.
7 In crematoria II and III, the incineration of a load of 2000 victims would have taken almost one week, in crematoria IV and V about ten days.
8 Letter from SS garrison physician to commander KL Auschwitz dated March 20, 1943 concerning " Haftlings-Krankenbau - Kriegsgefan- genenlager. " RGVA, 502-1-261, p. 1 12.
9 Letter from SS garrison physician to Central Construction Office dated July 20, 1943 concerning "Hygienische Sofortmafinahmen im KL." RGVA, 502- 1-170, p. 263.
10 Letter from HHB to Central Construction Office of Lublin and of Ausch- witz dated 25 November 1941 concerning "Leichenschuppen." RGVA, 502- 1-170, p. 249.
" Letter from Bischoff to Wirths dated 4 August 1943 concerning "Hygieni- sche Sofortmafinahmen im Kriegsgefangenenlager: Erstellung von Leichen- hallen in jedem Unterabschnitt." RGVA, 502-1-170, p. 262.
12 Erlauterungsbericht zum Ausbau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen- SS in Auschwitz O/S. Errichtung von 1 Leichenbaracke (Effektenkammer) massiv. February 20, 1944. RGVA, 502-1-230, pp. 201-203. Letter from head of Bauinspektion der Waffen-SS und Polizei "Schlesien " (Bischoff) dated March 30,1 944, concerning "Bauantrag zur Errichtung einer Lei- chenbaracke (Effektenkammer) im Kriegsgefangenenlager Auschwitz." RGVA, 502-1-230, pp. 200-200a. The drawing of the barrack and a sketch of its location have been preserved. RGVA, 502-1-230, p. 206.
13 Letter from Bischoff to Central Construction Office Auschwitz dated May 15, 1944, concerning "Errichtung einer Leichenhalle im KL II Auschwitz." RGVA, 502-1-170, p. 259.
14 GB: Generalbevollmachtigter fur die Regelung der Bauwirtschaft - pleni- potentiary for regulation of construction industry, Albert Speer.
15 Aktenvermerk by Jothann dated May 23, 1944, concerning "Errichtung von Leichenhallen im Bauabschnitt II, Lager II Birkenau." RGVA, 502-1-170, p. 260.
16 Letter from SS garrison physician to SS-Standortdlteste dated May 25, 1 944 concerning "Bau von Leichenkammern im KL Auschwitz II." RGVA, 502- 1-170, p. 264; Rudolf H6B was "SS-Standortaltester, SS- Oberstumbannfuhrer und Kommandant."
17 Letter from head of Central Construction Office to head of Construction In- spectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien, dated June 12, 1944 con- cerning "Bau von Leichenkammern im KL. Auschwitz II." RGVA, 502- 1 - 170, p. 251.
18 D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz- Birkenau 1939-1945. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg 1989, p. 445.
19 Ibid, p. 442.
20 Ibid, pp. 560-572.
21 Cf. in this matter my article "Die Deportation ungarischer Juden von Mai bis Juli 1944. Eine provisorische Bilanz," in: Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung, 5(4) (2001), pp. 381-395.
III. The Undressing Room of Crematorium II at Birkenau: Origin and Function
1. Undressing Room - for the Living or for the Dead?
In section I I mentioned the project to install "showers in the undressing room of crematorium III" discussed in Bisch- off s report of May 13, 1943. In this section, we will explore the origin and the function of the "undressing room" of the Birkenau crematoria. According to the thesis of Jean-Claude Pressac, which was completely adopted by Robert Jan van Pelt, crematorium II of Birkenau was designed and built as a normal hygienic and sanitary installation, however: 1
"towards the end of October 1942 one hit upon the idea, quite logical, actually, to move the gassings from Bunkers 1 and 2 into a room in the crematorium, where a mechanical ventilation was available, in the very same manner that had been employed in the morgue of crematorium I [of the main camp] in December of 1941. "
The idea, according to Pressac, took on a concrete form when "the SS construction office decided to set up gas cham- bers in the crematoria."2
The first trace of this decision - as we have already seen - is, in Pressac 's view, drawing 2003 of December 19, 1942, "re-
location of basement entrance to roadside," in which the corpse chute is said to have been removed.
This interpretation, according to which a crematorium, de- signed and built as a normal hygienic and sanitary installation, would have later been transformed into a mass extermination unit with total abandonment of the possibility to store corpses in its morgues and burn them in its ovens, appears quite un- founded, if we only look at the documents discussed in section II.
What is important in this case, however, is the date: accord- ing to Pressac, the decision to carry out the gassings in the cre- matoria was taken on December 19, 1942, and henceforth put its traces on the projects of the Central Construction Office. As only the morgue no. 1 was equipped with a ventilation system having aeration and de-aeration equipment, it is clear that this room was to become the homicidal gas chamber. And as it was intended to carry out mass exterminations, it is also clear that morgue no. 2 was destined to become the undressing room of the future victims, in keeping with the procedure already tested - according to Pressac - in crematorium I.
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Hence, the decision to transform morgue no. 1 into a homi- cidal gas chamber implied the decision to transform morgue no. 2 into an undressing room, and the two decisions were taken at the same time. It is correct that in certain documents morgue no. 2 of crematorium II is labeled "undressing room" or "un- dressing cellar," and for Pressac this designation is a "criminal trace" in favor of the thesis about alleged extermination activity of this cremation unit, which appears for the first time in Bischoff s letter to Topf of March 6, 1943, in which he writes, with reference to morgue no. 2:3
"Furthermore, request is made for the supply of a sup- plemental offer regarding the changes in the de-aeration in- stallation for the undressing room. "
But did this "undressing room" really designate an undress- ing room for the victims of the gas chambers?
2. Origin and Function of the Undressing Room in Crematorium II at Birkenau
Two documents unknown to Pressac, concerning the origin of the decision to create an "undressing room" in the basement of crematorium II allow this question to be answered once and for all.
On January 21, 1943, the SS garrison physician wrote the
following letter to the camp commander:4
"1. SS garrison physician Auschwitz requests the dissecting room, planned for the new con- struction of the crematorium at Birkenau, to be split into two rooms of equal size by means of a partition and to have 1 or 2 wash basins installed in the first one, because it is to be used as dissect- ing room proper whereas the second room is needed for anatomical preparations, the storage of files, writing materials, and books, for the preparation of colored tissue slides and for mi- croscope work.
2. Furthermore, it is requested to provide for an undressing room in the basement rooms. " The most highly important conclusions for our
topic result from this letter.
1. The decision to create an "undressing room" in the crematorium was taken neither by the Kom- mandantur (H6I3) nor by the Central Construction Office (Bischoff), but quite simply by the SS gar- rison physician.
2. The SS garrison physician attributed no particular importance to this matter and presented it as something of an afterthought to the purely hygi- enic and sanitary request for the dissecting room.
3. The crematorium was attached, from the point of view of hygiene and sanitation as well as in re- spect of medical-legal matters, to the SS garrison physician who, was fully informed about the rele- vant projects and, when the occasion arose, inter- vened with the Central Construction Office de- manding modifications. The letter quoted proves that the SS garrison physician was completely un- aware of the alleged project to transform the morgue no. 2 into an undressing room for the vic-
tims of gassing actions: he requests the installation of an "undressing room" somewhere "in the basement rooms" without mentioning specifically morgue no. 2 and without excluding, for this purpose, morgue no. 1. But in view of his position, he could not have been unaware of the decision, supposedly taken two months earlier, to make morgue no. 2 into an "undressing room," because if he did not know about it, such a decision could, in fact, not have been taken. What results from the above document is that the idea of an "undressing room" was conceived by the SS garrison physi- cian in January of 1943 and transmitted to the Auschwitz command on January 2 1 .
On February 15, 1943, SS Untersturmfiihrer Janisch, Head of the Construction Office of the PoW camp (Birkenau) an- swered the letter of SS garrison physician by a hand-written note which said:5
"Re 1.) has been launched
Re 2.) for undressing a horse-stable barrack has been
set up in front of the cellar entrance. "
What was the purpose for an "undressing room" in the cre- matorium? And why was a barrack built for such a purpose?
Pressac has noted that a horse-stable barrack in front of cre- matorium II, at a location announced by Janisch, i.e. "in front
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of the cellar entrance," does indeed appear on the "Situation map of the PoW camp Auschwitz O/S." of March 20, 1943. Pressac writes in this respect:6
"The drawing confirms the erection of a hut of the sta- ble type in the north yard of Krematorium II in March 1943. We know little about this hut, except that after serving as an undressing room for the first batch of Jews to be gassed in this Krematorium, it was quickly dismantled - only a week later according to the Sonderkommando witness Henryk Tauber. The first mention of an access stairway through Leichenkeller 2 found in the PMO archives, BW 30/40, page 68e, is dated 26/2/43 (Document 7a). As soon as this en- trance was operational, the undressing hut was no longer required. "
Pressac then comes back to this argument but offers a dif- ferent explanation:7
"On Sunday 14th March [1943], Messing continued in- stalling the ventilation of Leichenkeller 2, which he called 'Auskleidekeller Il/Undressing cellar II. ' In the evening, about 1,500 Jews from the Cracow ghetto were the first vic- tims to be gassed in Krematorium II. They did not undress in Leichenkeller 2, still cluttered with tools and ventilation components, but in a stable-type hut temporarily erected in the north yard of the Krematorium . " Later, he goes back to his first interpretation:8
"This Bauleitung source confirms the erection in mid- March 1943 of a hut running south-north in the north yard of Krematorium II, which was used, according to Henryk Tauber, as an undressing room, apparently because the ac- cess stairway to the underground undressing room (Lei- chenkeller 2) was not yet completed. " Pressac refers to the following statement by Henryk Tauber:9
"These persons [the assumed victims] were herded into a barrack, which at the time stood perpendicularly to the crematorium building on the entrance side of the yard of crematorium II. The persons entered this barrack through a door located on the side of the entrance and descended [into the basement] by means of steps which were to the right of the Muhlverbrennung [sic], This barrack was used as an undressing room at that time. But it was used for more or less one week and was then dismantled. " Pressac publishes the complete drawing 2216 of March 20, 1943, but with illegible notes.10 He refers, though, also to an- other version of this drawing (from another negative of the Auschwitz museum), in which the notes are clearly visible.11 Here, the barrack in front of the crematorium II is represented by an empty rectangle - a symbol which corresponds neither to a barrack "completed," which is represented by a dark rectan- gle, nor to a barrack "under construction," which is represented by a rectangle with oblique hatching, but to a barrack "planned." This shows up even more clearly in another detail of the drawing published by Pressac.12
There is, by the way, another map of Birkenau, immediately preceding the one referred to by Pressac, in which the barrack in question does not appear at all. That is the "lay-out plan for the construction and enlargement of concentration and PoW camp, drawing no. 2215," dated March 1943. 13 As it is num-
bered 2215, it precedes the one numbered 2216 and was there- fore established on March 20, 1943 or earlier.
It is not clear why this barrack appears only on drawing 2216. It does not appear at all14 on drawing 1991 of February 17, 1943, which also shows the barracks planned, under con- struction and completed in the Birkenau camp, in spite of the fact that it had already been set up on February 15. This obvi- ously results from its stop-gap and temporary character. It is un- known when the barrack was set up. What is certain is that this barrack had nothing to do with the alleged homicidal gassings.
Pressac's first explanation that the barrack had been set up because the access to morgue no. 2 was not yet ready, does not make much sense. With respect to crematorium III Pressac ac- tually states:15
"On 10th February [1943], work began on piercing the opening for and building the western access stairway to morgue 2 (future undressing room) of Krematorium III, un- der the supervision of Huta foreman Kolbe. This was done in six days, being completed on 15th (PMO file BW 30/38, pages 25 to 27). It is not known when this operation was carried out for Krematorium II. The only mention of its re- alization dates from 26th February, or eleven days after that of Krematorium III was completed. "
On March 20, 1943, the day on which drawing 2216 of the Birkenau camp was done, SS garrison physician for Auschwitz, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Wirths, as we have already seen, writes in his letter to the commander:16
"For the removal of the corpses from the detainee sick- bay to the crematoria, 2 covered hand carts must be pro- cured, allowing the transportation of 50 corpses each. " In this way, the question becomes definitely clear. The SS garrison physician was worried about the poor conditions of hygiene and sanitation, in which the corpses of the detainees were kept, due to the inadequacy of the existing corpse cham- bers - simple wood sheds that could not prevent the rats from feasting on the bodies - with the risk of an outbreak of the plague. He states this clearly in his letter of July 20, 1943, which describes a situation that obviously existed already in January. The SS garrison physician therefore wanted to deposit the corpses in a hygienically safer place, and the best place was obviously constituted by the two morgues of crematorium II which, at the time, were in an advanced state of construction. On January 21 he asked to set up an "undressing room" for these corpses "in the basement rooms" of the crematorium. On January 29 Bischoff replied that the corpses could not be kept in morgue no. 2, but that this was of no importance because they could be taken to the "Vergasungskeller" (gasification or gassing cellar, see further down).
On February 15, Janisch informed the SS garrison physician that "a horse-stable barrack in front of the basement entrance" of crematorium II had been set up for the undressing of the corpses of the camp. Hence, this barrack was set up some time between January 21 and February 15, and for that very reason it could not have served any criminal purpose.
This is confirmed by the fact that crematorium II went into service on February 20, 1943. A report by Kirschneck, dated March 29, 1943, states, in fact, the following as regards this crematorium:17
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"Brickwork completely finished and put into operation on Feb. 20, 1943."
Hence, the crematorium went into operation even before ventilation was installed in the morgue no. 1, and it received corpses even before this room could theoretically have been used as a homicidal gas chamber.
But why was an outside barrack needed at all? The answer is simple: In January of 1943, morgue no. 2 was unserviceable.
In the "Report no. 1" Bischoff sent to Kammler on January 23, 1943, with reference to "Krematorien PoW camp, state of construction" we read with respect to crematorium II:
"Cellar II. Concrete ceiling finished (removal of form- work shuttering dependent on weather conditions). " In his report dated January 29, 1943, Topf engineer Prilfer confirmed:19
"Shuttering cannot yet be removed from ceiling of morgue because of frost. "
On the same day, SS Obersturmfiihrer Kirschneck confirms in a note for the file:20
"Morgue 2 has been completed except for removal of shuttering from ceiling, which requires temperatures above freezing. "
Finally, in the letter addressed to Kammler on January 29, 1943, Bischoff writes:21
"Crematorium II has been completed - save for minor constructional work - by the use of all the forces available working day and night shifts, in spite of unspeakable diffi- culties and freezing temperatures.
The ovens were fired up in the presence of the chief en- gineer, Mr. Priifer of Topf & Sdhne Co., Erfurt, the contrac- tor, and operate perfectly.
The concrete ceiling of the morgue could not yet be freed from the shuttering because of frost. This is, however, of no consequence, because the gassing cellar can be used for this. "
During the first two weeks of February 1943, there were at least 10 days at Birkenau when the morning temperatures were between -1 and -8°C, overnight minima were even lower, and maximum afternoon temperatures varied between -3 and +6°C,22 which makes it highly probable that morgue 2 re- mained unusable because of the impossibility of removing the shuttering from the concrete ceiling of the room.
The only document on the subject of the realization of an outside access to morgue 2 dates from February 26, 194323: the work probably started that day or a few days later and was probably finished within a week, as in the crematorium III. On March 8, 1943, the Topf technician Heinrich Messing began mounting the de-aeration duct in morgue 2, which he regularly calls "undressing cellar" in his weekly reports.24 The work ended on March 31, 1943 ("de-aeration equipment for undress- ing cellar installed."25
Accordingly, at the latest by March 8 the Central Construc- tion Office, upon the request of the SS garrison physician, had decided to create an "undressing room" in the basement of cre- matorium II, more specifically in morgue 2. For its part, morgue no. 1 was operational from March 13 ("aeration and de- aeration equipment cellar I went into operation").26
On March 20, the day reported to have seen the gassing of
2,191 Greek Jews, the SS garrison physician worried only about the transportation of the corpses of detainees from the camp hospital to crematorium II without even the slightest hint at alleged gassings.
We have thus answered the two questions we asked initially.
1. The "undressing room" was used for the corpses of regis- tered detainees who had died at the camp. During the Bel- sen trial, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kramer, commander of the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau) from May 8, 1944, onwards, declared on this subject:28
" Whoever died during the day was put into a special building called the mortuary, and they were carried to the crematorium every evening by lorry. They were loaded on the lorry and off the lorry by prisoners. They were stripped of their clothes by the prisoners in the crematorium before being cremated. The clothes were cleaned and were re-issued where the people had not died through infectious diseases. "
2. A barrack in front of the crematorium was built initially as an "undressing room" because morgue 2 was not yet ser- viceable on January 21, 1943, the day the SS garrison phy- sician requested an "undressing room."
3. The "Gassing Cellar" of Crematorium II at Birkenau
Even before Pressac, the official historiography had taken the term "gassing cellar," which appears for the first time on January 29, 1943, in Bischoff s letter to Kammler, as discussed in the preceding section, to be a trace, if not an outright proof, of the existence of a homicidal gas chamber in crematorium II. What is of interest to us here is, above all, the context, in which this expression appears, and the significance of the entire sen- tence.
Bischoff says here that it had not yet been possible to re- move completely the shuttering from the concrete ceiling of the morgue no. 2 because of frost, but that this was of no conse- quence because "for this" one could use the "gassing cellar." Practically speaking, the "gassing cellar" could take over the function of morgue no. 2. If we do assume that the function of morgue no. 2 was that of an undressing room for the victims and that the "gassing cellar" functioned as a homicidal gas chamber, how could a homicidal gas chamber function as an undressing room at the same time?
One can argue that the homicidal gas chamber could also be used as an undressing room, but then why - if we follow Tauber and Pressac - did the Central Construction Office alleg- edly build a barrack in front of the crematorium as an undress- ing room for the victims?
It is essential to stress here that the matter had a strictly temporary character and was of interest only as long as "morgue" 2 was unavailable: the "gassing cellar" could be used "for this," i.e., as a morgue, on January 29, 1943, and the days immediately thereafter. At a time when, as Bischoff tells us in his letter, the Topf company had not yet shipped "the aeration and de-aeration equipment" due to freight restrictions. There- fore the "gassing cellar" could not be operational as a homi- cidal gas chamber.
The interpretation by the official historiography - the un- dressing room for the victims is not operational but that does
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not matter because the homicidal gas chamber can be used in- stead - is therefore all the more nonsensical: considering that the alleged homicidal gas chamber was unserviceable, for what purpose would the victims undress? And the victims of what, if the homicidal gas chamber did not work? In conclusion, the victims could not undress in "morgue 2" because this room was not available; they could undress in the "gassing cellar," but could be gassed neither in the "morgue 2" nor in the "gassing cellar."
It is thus evident that the explanation of Bischoff s letter is quite different: "morgue 2" could not be used as a morgue or undressing room for the bodies of registered detainees who had died in the camp of "natural" causes, because this room was unavailable, but that was of no consequence, because the corpses could be placed into the "gassing cellar." One last point has to be elucidated: why was "morgue no. 1" called a "gassing cellar"?
The alleged criminal transformations of the basement of crematorium II began at a time, when the typhus epidemic that had broken out at Birkenau in July of 1942 had not yet been brought under control. The death rate among the inmates, though clearly dropping, was still high: some 8,600 deaths in August, some 7,400 in September, some 4,500 in October, some 4,100 in November, some 4,600 in December, and some 4,50029 in January 1943. On January 9, 1943, Bischoff wrote a letter to the head of Office Group C of the SS WVHA, SS Bri- gadefiihrer Kammler, on the subject of "hygienic installations at CC and PoW camp Auschwitz," in which he listed all instal- lations of disinfestation and disinfection that existed at the time: five installations at CC Auschwitz and four at PoW camp Birk- enau. He ended his letter with the following observation:30
"As can be seen from the foregoing, the need for hygi- enic installations has largely been fulfilled; once the screen- ing barrack for civilian workers is operational, it will be possible, at any time, to delouse and disinfest a large num- ber of people. "
However, over the following days the hot air unit of block 1 in the main camp (built by Topf & Sonne), the hot air unit "in the men's and women's disinfestation barracks at the PoW camp," i.e. in the debusing barracks 5a and 5b (built by the Hochheim Co.), and finally in the "military disinfestation sta- tion" went out of service on account of fires.31 These failures occurred at a time when the typhus epidemic that had broken out in July of 1 942 had not been reined in.
On December 17, 1942, Bischoff wrote to the "Military reg- istration office, department W" at Bielitz:32
"Concerning your inquiry of Dec. 8, 1942, Central Con- struction Office informs that camp quarantine can probably not be lifted over the next three months. While all available means of fighting the epidemic are being put to work, new cases have not yet been completely eradicated. " The same day, Bischoff wrote as follows to the camp com- mander:33
"Pursuant to order of SS garrison physician, the first delousing and/or disinfestation of civilian workers is to be carried out on Saturday, Dec. 19, 1942. On account of this it is necessary that the disinfestation units in CC be made available. The same goes for individual delousings from
Dec. 22, 1942, for the civilian workers. Your approval is requested. "
In the "garrison order no. 1/43" of January 8, 1943, the Auschwitz commander informed:34
"Head of Office D III has informed by radio message that the camp quarantine for CC Auschwitz will remain in force as before. "
On January 5, 1943, several cases of typhus were identified at the Myslowitz jail (a town some twenty kilometers north of Auschwitz) and were rapidly spreading among the inmates. The president of provincial civil administration, whose seat was at Kattowitz, proposed to send the patients to Auschwitz. In a let- ter addressed to the camp commander, he wrote:35
"I do recognize furthermore that these prisoners may in- troduce new cases of infection into the Auschwitz camp. On the other hand, as typhus at the Auschwitz camp is still rampant and considerable sanitation measures have been set up there as a countermeasure, I feel entitled to make such a request. [...]"
On January 13, Rudolf H6B replied that while "some cases of typhus" still occurred at the camp, it was no longer an epi- demic ("the typhus epidemic no longer exists"), he refused this proposal, because the arrival of these sick inmates would greatly increase the resurgence of the typhus epidemic ("be- cause in this way the risk of a new outbreak of a typhus epi- demic would become very great").36
However the Police President at Kattowitz decided that the bodies of inmates who had died of typhus at Myslowitz would be taken to Auschwitz by hearse for cremation, after having been treated with a delousing agent and placed in a coffin ("for incineration the departed will by transferred to Auschwitz by hearse").37
Sanitary and hygienic conditions at Auschwitz were not as reassuring as Rudolf H6B had described them. On January 25, in "internal order no. 86," Bischoff announced the following:38 "On account of an order emanating from the SS garri- son physician of CC Auschwitz, all SS personnel of the Cen- tral Construction Office billeted at the Construction Office housing barrack will be subject to a 3 week quarantine. " During the course of January of 1943, a resurgence of the typhus epidemic took place, which culminated in the first ten days of February and prompted SS Brigadefuhrer Gliicks, head of office Group D of the SS WVHA, to order drastic measures, as seen from the letter Bischoff wrote to Kammler on February 12, 1943, on the subject of "increase in typhus cases":39
"In view of the rapid increase in cases of typhus among the members of the guard unit, SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen-SS Gliicks, has ordered a total quar- antine for CC Auschwitz. In this connection, starting on Feb. 11, 1943, all detainees are being disinfested and are not allowed to leave the camp. As a consequence, the build- ing projects, to which detainees had predominantly been as- signed, had to be stopped. Resumption of work will be an- nounced by the Central Construction Office. " Let us return to the "gassing cellar." In the context outlined above, it was most reasonable that at the end of January of 1943, in order to overcome the loss of the disinfestation units that were out of commission due to fire, the SS authorities
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planned to utilize as temporary gas chamber employing hydro- cyanic acid the morgue 1 of crematorium II. The name "gassing cellar" was evidently taken from the gas chamber employing hydrocyanic acid of buildings Bw 5a and 5b, which was also called "gassing room."40
The initiative came, most probably, from Office Group C of the SS WVHA, because Bischoffs letter of January 29, 1943, addressed precisely to the head of Office Group C, SS Brigade- fiihrer Kammler, which uses the term "gassing cellar," takes for granted that the addressee knew perfectly well what it was all about. This is confirmed by the fact that at the end of January, Office C/III (Technical questions) of SS WVHA had requested from the Hans Kori Co. of Berlin an estimate for a "hot-air dis- infestation unit" for the Auschwitz camp. The Kori Co. an- swered on February 2 by a letter to the office in question con- cerning an "delousing unit for Auschwitz cone, camp.,"41 an "Listing of iron requirements for a hot-air delousing unit, Auschwitz concentration camp" for a total of 4,152 kg of metal,42 and a "cost estimate concerning a hot-air delousing unit for the Auschwitz concentration camp" totaling 4,960.40 RM.43
That same day, February 2, 1943, SS Hauptsturmfiihrer Kother, head of Office C/VI of SS WVHA (commercial ques- tions) carried out an "Inspection of disinfestation and sauna units at CC Auschwitz." In the corresponding report by SS Standartenfuhrer Eirenschmalz, head of Office C/VI of SS WVHA, on the subject of "disinfestation units" it is said that the hot-air units had been originally conceived for a disinfesta- tion by means of hydrocyanic acid, which required a tempera- ture of 30°C, but had been used for a hot-air disinfestation, which necessitated a temperature of 95°C and had therefore been "overloaded:"44
"The ever increasing arrival of many detainees leads to a corresponding utilization of the equipment, and the wear of the latter under such constant employment can only be countered by the installation of air-heaters based on coke. In order to counteract impending failures of the units, cast- iron hot-air heaters have been envisioned here for the exist- ing disinfestation plants. Having checked with the supplier, these will be made available for supply within three weeks so that the necessary measures against epidemics can be undertaken. The fires having occurred are for the most part attributable to overheating, which makes it imperative to observe the respective directions when such plants are be- ing utilized"
The idea of using the morgue no. 1 of the crematorium II as an emergency disinfestation chamber was then extended also to the other crematoria, and the corresponding documentary traces were later interpreted by Jean-Claude Pressac as "traces" or "slip-ups" referring to homicidal gas chambers. After little more than three months of planning at the Central Construction Office, Kammler changed his program of "Special measures for the improvement of hygienic installations" in the Birkenau camp, and suddenly all projects aiming at the use of the crema- torium rooms as emergency disinfestation chambers were thrown out.
At the end of July 1943, disinfestation and disinfection units for 54 000 detainees per day existed or were on order within the complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau.45
But as early as May of 1943, the documents of the Central Construction Office stop making any reference to the use of rooms in the crematoria as emergency disinfestation units, and thus, according to Pressac, to any kind of "trace" or "slip-up" hinting at an alleged criminal activity going on in the cremato- ria.
Already in 1994 I had underlined that, as far as the cremato- rium II at Birkenau is concerned, no "criminal trace" has a date later than March 31, 1943, the day of the official hand-over of the crematorium to the camp administration. Therefore, for the more than 20 months of use of this crematorium for alleged ex- termination activities there is not even one miserable "trace," and that goes for the other crematoria as well 46 No official his- torian has ever wondered about the reason for this strange state of affairs, which is certainly not due to a lack of documents: it can be explained only and completely by the fact that the pro- gram of improving the normal disinfection and disinfestation units, launched in May of 1943, rendered absolutely needless any kind of plan to install emergency disinfestation units in the crematoria. From this project one moved, in fact, to the plan of installing emergency showers for the detainees in the cremato- ria, which was given up in turn because the 100 showers of buildings 5a and 5b functioned regularly and because - as we have seen in section 1 .4. - completion of the central sauna was now close.
Notes
1 J-C. Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmor- des, , Piper Verlag, Munchen-Ziirich 1994, p. 75.
I Ibidem, p. 83.
3 J.-C. Pressac, Technique and operation of the gas chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. New York 1989, pp. 432-433.
4 RGVA, 502-1-3 13, p. 57.
5 RGVA, 502-1-313, p. 57a. After having written this article, but before it was published in no. 3&4, December 2003, of the Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung (pp. 357- 380), I became aware of a mistake I had made when reading this document. As I had initially come to a wrong conclusion because of this error, I immediately rewrote the paragraph on the origin and the function of the undressing room of crematorium II at Birke- nau, but by an unfortunate misunderstanding the new, corrected section was not substituted for the initial text that thus came to be published with the German version of this article. I use this opportunity to rectify the matter and present my excuses to the reader. Carlo Mattogno.
6 J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz:..., op. cit. (note 3), p. 462.
7 Ibidem, p. 227.
8 Ibidem, p. 492.
9 Deposition by H. Tauber dated 24 May 1945. H6B trial, vol. 1 1, p. 136.
10 J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: op. cit. (note 3), p. 226.
II Ibidem, p. 462.
12 Ibidem, p. 256.
13 RGVA, 502-1-93, p. 1.
14 Cf. reproduction of the drawing in: J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: op. cit. (no- te 3), p. 220.
15 Ibidem, p. 217.
16 Letter from SS garrison physician to commander KL Auschwitz dated March 20, 1943 concerning "Haftlings-Krankenbau - Kriegsgefangenenla- ger. " RGVA, 502-1-261, p. 1 12.
17 "Tatigkeitsbericht (activity report) des SS-Ustuf. (F) Kirschneck, Bauleiter fur das Schutzhaftlager und fur landwirtschaftliche Bauvorhaben. Zeit 1 . Ja- nuar 1943 bis 31.Marz 1943," dated 29 March 1943. RGVA, 502-1-26, p. 59.
18 RGVA, 502-1-3 13, p. 54.
19 APMO, BW 30/40, p. 101.
20 APMO, BW 30/34, p. 105.
21 APMO, BW 30/34, p. 100.
22 "Tagesberichte of W. Riedel & Sohn (Co.), Eisenbeton- und Hochbau, at
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Bielitz;". APMO, BW 30/28, pp. 96-1 12.
23 APMO, BW 30/34, p. 68d.
24 "Arbeitszeit-Bescheinigung" (work hours sheet) of Topf Co. for the period 8-14 March 1943. APMO, D-ZBau/2540, p. 26.
25 Ibidem, p. 23.
26 Ibidem, p. 26.
27 D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz- Birkenau 1939-1945. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbeck bei Hamburg 1989, p. 445.
28 Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial). William Hodge and Company, Limited. London, Edinburgh, Glasgow 1949, p. 731.
29 Statistical analysis of Sterbebiicher (death books) of Auschwitz.
30 RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 46-46a.
31 Letter from Bischoff "an den Kommandanten des KL Auschwitz - SS- Obersturmbannfuhrer H6B" dated January 18, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-28, pp. 256-258.
32 RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 113.
33 RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 47.
34 Norbert Frei, Thomas Grotum, Jan Parcer, Sybille Steinbacher, Bernd C. Wagner (ed.), Standort- und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationsla- ger Auschwitz 1940-1945, K.G. Saur, Munich 2000, p. 208.
35 Letter from Regierungsprasident in Kattowitz to commander of KL Au- schwitz dated January 9, 1943. APK, RK 2903, p. 10.
36 Letter from commander of Auschwitz to Polizeiprdsident in Kattowitz dated January 13, 1943. APK, RK 2903, p. 20.
37 Letter from Polizeiprdsident in Kattowitz to Regierungsprasident in Katto- witz dated January 21, 1943. APK, RK 2903, p. 22.
38 RGVA, 502-1-17, p. 98.
3' RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 108.
40 "Erlauterungsbericht zum Vorentwurf fur den Neubau des Kriegsgefange- nenlagers der Waffen-SS, Auschwitz O/S," RGVA, 502-1-233, p. 16.
41 RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 15-15a.
42 RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 18
43 RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 20-21.
44 RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 37-37a.
45 "Aufstellung liber die im KL. und KGL. Auschwitz eingebauten Entwe- sungsanlagen, Bader und Desinfektionsapparate," compiled by civilian em- ployee Jahrling on July 30, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 9f.
46 The latest criminal "trace" dates from April 16, 1943. It concerns the re- quest for "4 gas-tight doors" for crematorium IV.
IV. The Detainee Sick-Bay of Construction Section III at Birkenau
1. The comments of Jean-Claude Pressac
In his first study of Auschwitz, which appeared in 1989, Jean-Claude Pressac has shown a drawing of construction sec- tion III of Birkenau (plan no. 2521) drawn in Berlin on June 4, 1943.1 On this document, which carries the designation "CC Auschwitz - construction section III. Detainee sick-bay a. quarantine sec." Construction section III is subdivided into two quarantine camps, one for men and one for women, for 4,088 persons each and two hospital areas, one for men and one for women, for 3,188 persons each. The two hospital areas contain two barracks for "surgery," 2 barracks for "X-ray and treat- ment," 2 barracks for "pharmacy," 4 "barracks for freshly oper- ated cases" and 4 "barracks for the seriously ill."1 Pressac shows, moreover, the drawing (plan no. 2417) of a "sick-bay barrack for detainees" for CC Auschwitz, done the following day, in which we find 6 rooms, 2 for 30 beds, 2 for 24 beds, and 2 for 18 beds.2
The French historian has commented on these documents in the following manner:1
"The drawing on Photo 20 (that of 4 June 1943) is a real godsend for the revisionists. Concerning the initial ar- rangement for the third construction stage at Birkenau (Po W camp Bauabschnitt III), it formally states that this was to serve only as a mixed quarantine and hospital camp. There is INCOMPATIBILITY in the creation of a health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to official history, people were exterminated on a large scale. Drawing 2471 of a barracks for sick prisoners planned for BA.III (Photo 21) showing in detail the ar- rangement of the bunks supports this demonstration. The two drawings date from June 1943, when the Bauleitung was completing the construction of the four new Kremato- rien, and it is obvious that PoW camp Birkenau cannot have had at one and the same time two opposing functions: health care and extermination. The plan for building a very large hospital section in BA.III thus shows that the Krema- torien were built purely for incineration, without any homi-
cidal gassings, because the SS wanted to 'maintain ' its con- centration camp labour force.
This argument seems logical and is not easy to counter. The drawings exist, and what is more they come from SS Economic Administration Head Office in Berlin, so it was no local humanitarian initiative. " (Capitals in the original) Pressac, however, stated that he had found a document con- tradicting "this plausible, but theoretical, reasoning":1
"The decisive argument proving that drawing 2521 was only a PROJECT, is to compare it with an overall plan of Birkenau, drawing 3764 of 23/3/44 (Photo 22), where BA.III no longer has 16,600 occupants as planned, but 60,000, i.e. the occupancy rate of the barracks has in- creased fourfold, the degree of crowding now being compa- rable to that of BA.II. Under these circumstances it becomes nonsense to talk of 'hospital barracks. ' " (capitals and bold- face in the original)
But is this really a decisive argument? And did the hospital camp really remain only a "project"? Many documents un- known to Pressac allow us to give an exhaustive and unequivo- cal answer to these questions.
2. Genesis and Realization of the Camp Hospital Project of Construction Section III at Birkenau
As we have seen in section I, SS Brigadefuhrer Kammler officially transmitted the written order to the Auschwitz com- mander concerning "special measures for the improvement of hygienic installations" in the Birkenau camp on May 14, 1943.
Within the scope of these measures, Kammler ordered con- struction section III of the Birkenau camp to be turned into a hospital for the detainees on May 17, 1943, 3 as can be seen from a letter written by Bischoff to the SS garrison physician on July 15, 1943, which starts with these words:4
"On May 17 [1943] the construction of a hospital for
detainees in construction section III of the PoW camp was
ordered by SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the
Waffen-SS Dr. -Ing. Kammler. "
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The project was entrusted to Office C of the SS WVHA, more specifically to SS Sturmbannfuhrer Wirtz, head of Office C/III - technical questions, and to SS Untersturmfuhrer Birkigt, head of division hospitals and sick-bays, who were also the per- sons signing the drawing 2521 of June 4, 1943, 5 in collabora- tion with Obersturmfuhrer Grosch, head of main department C/III/ 1 , civil engineering. In a memo dated May 28, 1943, Birkigt, speaking of himself in the third person, writes:6
"As ordered by the head of Office Group C it is urgently required to have SS Ustuf Birkigt start soonest with the elaboration of the total sanitary installations at Auschwitz in cooperation with the Central Construction Office and the garrison physician. The camp is to be equipped with a spe- cial quarantine area for 8,000 to 12,000 patients. Within this number, 2,5[00] to 4,000 are to be permanent, the re- mainder as movable enlargement possibility as already planned for Lublin. "
On June 1, Bischoff sent Kammler a letter concerning "Im- mediate measures in PoW camp for improvement of hygienic installations," in which he requested the approval of the pro- jects so far elaborated, among them:7
"Planning of construction section III as hospital section for 8 - 10,000 detainees, complete with isolation section and quarantine, separately for men and women. " Between May 31 and June 2, Birkigt was at Auschwitz to discuss with the local staff the "special measures in PoW camp Auschwitz." In a note dated June 4 he writes:8
"As ordered by Head of Office Group C, SS Ustuf (F) Birkigt held local discussions with Head of Central Con- struction Auschwitz, SS Stubaf Bischoff, and the engineer in charge, SS-Ustuf Janisch, in order to clarify the basis for the special measures planned for PoW camp-Auschwitz" Birkigt then lists the decisions taken with respect to the camp hospital:
"Detainee Hospital
The lay-out of construction section 3 was discussed, and was sketched out by myself.
An inspection on-site yielded that the first three rows of barracks and part of the fourth have already been set up.
According to the Central Construction Office, only 89 barracks are available for the hospital area. Therefore, Head of Central Construction wishes that at least the 16 special barracks be taken from the 1000-bed hospitals east. These will then have to be adapted to the standard size of 42 x 50 (There is a problem in that, for transportation of these barracks, some 120 -140 freight cars will be needed. It ap- pears possible to revamp the RLM^^ barracks. This will be taken care of by C II.
A sketched proposal for the revamping of an RLM bar- rack was handed over to Central Construction Office; num- ber of beds 150 in case of double bunks " On June 1, the Polish detainee Stefan Millauer (ID no. 63003) had already prepared for Central Construction Office the drawing of a "wooden housing barrack (Luftwaffe type) sick-bay barrack" for construction section III.
As we have seen above, on June 4 Wirtz and Birkigt pre- pared drawing no. 2521 "CC Auschwitz, construction section III, detainee hospital and quarantine area," and on June 5 they
did drawing no. 2471 "sick-bay barrack for detainees."
Drawing 2637 of Central Construction Office - undated, but no doubt done in June of 1943 - represents the lay-out of the men's area "detainee sick-bay in Construction section 3 of PoW camp." It shows in detail the barracks for freshly operated pa- tients (6a) and for the seriously ill (6b). 11
An "listing of the barracks needed for carrying out the spe- cial measures in the PoW camp," dated June 11, 1943, men- tions a total of 183 barracks for "construction section III (de- tainee hospital)" 1 83 barracks, (plus another two for the "guard hospital") among which:
4 special barracks12 6a (freshly operated patients)
4 special barracks 6b (seriously ill)
2 special barracks 2 (X-ray and treatment)
2 special barracks 1 (surgery)
111 barracks for normal patients13
Construction work started at the end of June. By July 13th 26 barracks were already erected, and the work on the circular sewer as well as on a temporary settling basin14 had started.
On July 19 Bischoff protested because the firm Deutsche Ausriistungswerke had taken over two barracks of construction section III without authorization:15
"In order to carry out the erection of a detainee hospital in construction section III as ordered by SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen-SS Dr.-Ing. Kammler on May 15, a utilization during the construction phase is not possible. The erection of the hospital has already started and, as is known, each barrack shall be equipped with sani- tary installations (washing and toilet facilities). " By July 3 1 another 6 barracks had been set up. Furthermore, two circular sewers had been dug and work on the enclosure had started.16 On the same day, the SS garrison physician com- plained to Bischoff that "individual drawings" of 8 types of barracks were still missing "in the general plan of the detainee hospital and the quarantine section."17 In his "Explanatory re- port on the enlargement of the PoW camp of Waffen-SS at Auschwitz, Upper Silesia" which Bischoff wrote on September 30, 1943, the sector of construction section III of the camp was described as follows:18
"Construction section III BW 3e 114 barracks for patients BW 4c 5 utility barracks BW4e 2 utility barracks type 260/9 BW 4 f 13 storage and laundry barracks type 260/9 BW 4f 4 storage and laundry barracks type 501/34 BW 6c 4 dis infestation barracks type VII/ 5 BW7c 11 barracks for medical staff (Swiss type) BW 12b 12 barracks for seriously ill patients 501/34 BW 12d 2 barracks for block leaders type IV/3 Transformation of an existing house for special meas- ures
BW 33a 3 barracks for special measures type 260/9 " On September 25, brick work was going on in barracks 68, 70, 71, 74, 89, 91, 92 and 93, carpentry work in barracks 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 94, 128 and 146.19
On October 1, 1943, Jothann, who had just succeeded Bischoff as head of Central Construction Office,20 elaborated a "cost estimate for the enlargement of the PoW camp of Waffen-
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SS at Auschwitz," in which the estimated cost was calculated for each building, built or planned. For construction section III, designated "detainee hospital," which comprised the buildings listed in the explanatory report mentioned above, the cost esti- mates were as follows:21
"BW 3e 114 barracks for patients 4,542,216 RM
BW4c 5 utility barracks 138,150 "
BW4e 2 utility barracks 167,304 "
BW4/13 storage and laundry barracks 241, 618 "
BW 4f 4 storage and laundry barracks 127,500 "
BW 6c 4 disinfestation barracks 80,940 "
BW7c 11 barracks for medical staff 103,488 "
BW 12b 12 barracks for seriously ill patients 515,625 " BW 12d 2 barracks for block leaders 16,240 "
Transformation of an existing house for special measures 14,242 "
BW 33a 3 barracks for special measures 55, 758 "
Total 6,003,081 RM"
On October 5, Jothann wrote as follows about the state of advancement of the work on the "hospital for the detainees":22 "As the most urgent items, barrack types 1-2^ — 6a and were erected. In total, there are 12 for the section of seriously ill patients, as well as surgery and X-ray barracks. Except for one, all of these barracks have been erected as a shell. For 9 barracks, all inner walls and the chimneys, to the extent that they had to be erected in addition, have been executed in brick. On 4 of them, plastering has already been started on these walls. The erection of connecting passages between these barracks is complete. Eight barracks of type 7[25] have been erected as a shell, and brickwork has started on walls and chimneys. Furthermore, since March (sic) 43, 4 laundry barracks of type no. 9, 3 kitchen barracks of type no. 12, and 20 sick-bay barracks of type no. 7, i.e. alto- gether 47 barracks have been erected as a shell. " Jothann then mentions the state of advancement for the en- closure, for roadworks (access roads, camp roads, and connec- tions), drainage, leveling, and sewage treatment, for which 4 sedimentation basins had been nearly completed. In a file memo of October 11, Jothann refers to the visit to Auschwitz by Mr. A. Knauth, owner of the Dresden company of the same name, from which the remaining barracks for the camp hospital of Construction section III had been ordered 26
"Mr. Knauth, from Dresden, was introduced to the de- partment head, Obersturmfuhrer (F) Jothann, and an in- spection of the works was ordered. On site, it was found that the special barracks (sic) for operated (patients) had been completed and could be commenced right away. The following was agreed on, among other things:
"For the housing barracks which occur 111 times, prices were reduced considerably, because the order is large and a single one; a new offer thus became neces- sary. "
In a report of October 30, Jothann announced:27
"So far, 47 barracks came to be erected. On these, the interior works, i.e. brick and plaster works, are being exe- cuted at present. Furthermore, the pole gridwork has been completed for another 7 barracks and erection of the bar- racks is to begin within the next few days. "
The later reports, up to the end of November, mentioned the advancement of erection of the barracks and ancillary works for the construction of the "detainee sick-bay" of construction sec- tion III.
On February 24, 1944, Jothann transmitted a request for metal from the Knauth company to the construction inspector- ate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien, explaining:28
"This concerns the allotment of 1844.4 kg of zinc- aluminum and 87.8 kg of brass for the valves and other fit- tings needed for construction section III of the detainee hospital and quarantine camp of the PoW camp. [...]
Justification of the amounts requested is based on the fact that BA III of the PoW camp will comprise a total of 180 barracks including kitchen, operating, treatment, sick- bay and quarantine barracks. "
In his "Report on state of construction works at CC Ausch- witz including employment of detainees" dated March 25, 1944, Jothann writes the following:29
"In construction section III of the PoW camp, only the
two middle sections have been started for the time being.
Almost all barracks have been erected, the internal works
have started. "
On March 31, 1944, 700 detainees were working in Con- struction section III. The sites, as ordered by Kammler, were to stop working for three days, and the detainees were instead to be employed in construction section I and II.30
On the day the Birkenau drawing 3764 was made, to which J.-C. Pressac refers, March 23, 1944, the Central Construction Office was still working on the realization of the planned "de- tainee sick-bay" of construction section III. Let us examine how the apparent contradiction between the drawings 2521 and 3764, that the French historian has noted, can be explained.
In 1944, the Central Construction Office defined all the bu- reaucratic practices that applied to the camp hospital. On May 25, Jothann wrote an "Explanatory report regarding the enlargement of the PoW camp of Waffen-SS at Auschwitz O/S. Erection of 1 1 1 barracks for patients," in which we can read:31 "The works were started on March 15, 1943.132] 37 bar- racks are finished and the interior work partly done. "
The corresponding cost estimate that Jothann drew up the same day states a total sum of 3,799,000 RM.33 Both docu- ments show the "preliminary verification" stamp of the con- struction inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police "Schlesien" (dated June 27, 1944) and the "verified" stamp of Office C/II of SS WVHA (dated July 13, 1944). On August 10, 1944, the head of Office C/V (central construction inspectorate) of SS WVHA, who had received the above-mentioned documentation on June 26, emitted retroactively - in keeping with bureaucratic practices - the corresponding construction order:34
"Based on the documents submitted, I hereby give the
order to erect 111 barracks for patients in PoW camp, camp
II, Auschwitz, BA III, BW e3 and 3f. "
On the subject of the state of the works, the letter, addressed to construction inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police "Schlesien" states:
"Because of the urgency, work has already started.
Regular reports are requested concerning advancement and
state of works. "
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The construction request for the "12 barracks for seriously ill patients" was sent by Jothann to construction inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police "Schlesien" on August 12, 1944.35 The documentation comprised an "explanatory report [...] Erection of 12 barracks for seriously ill patients," which said that the works had started on July 15, 1943, 36 a "budget esti- mate" of 373,000 RM,37 and an "attachment to cost estimate for 12 barracks for seriously ill patients"38 on the subject of the la- bor cost involved. On October 31, Office C/V of SS WVHA gave the corresponding construction order39 and also acknowl- edges the "construction request for the erection of 1 1 barracks
for medical personnel" submitted by Bischoff on October 9, 1944.40
On May 31, 1944, 63 barracks existed in construction sec- tion III.41 The deportation of the Hungarian Jews caught the Central Construction Office completely unprepared and upset the projects regarding the camp hospital.
In early June, construction section III, in spite of the fact that it was still uninhabitable, was transformed (together with camp BIIc and parts of camps Blla and Bile) into a "transit camp" for unregistered Jews destined to be moved to other camps. On June 2, Kammler ordered Jothann to relinquish 14 barracks of construction section III to house these Jews, but the head of Central Construction Office refused. Asked by Kammler to state his reasons,42 Jothann explained that it could not be done "for reasons of hygiene and sanitation."43 Jothann obviously had to follow suit, and on June 2, 1944 the com- mander of CC Auschwitz II, SS Hauptsturnjv.hr er Kramer, yielded the 14 barracks.44
On June 16, 1944, "The hygienist with construction inspec- torate "Schlesien,") SS Obersturmfuhrer Weber, sent to the head of this construction inspectorate and, for information, to the "Reich physician SS and Police. Supreme Hygienist" in Berlin a report on the subject "PoW camp - construction sec- tion III," which opens with these words:45
"In connection with an inspection of the well gallery at Birkenau, a visit was made on June 15, 1944, to the newly occupied construction section III of PoW camp Birkenau. The first transport of detainees arrived on June 9, 1944. Presently, the construction section is occupied by 7,000 de- tainees (Jews).
From the point of view of construction as well as hy- giene, this construction section is in no way ready for occu- pancy, because it lacks even the most primitive sanitary in- stallations. "
According to the report, the detainees lived in rather pre- carious circumstances:
"The housing barracks, according to information sup- plied by medical orderly SS Oberscharfuhrer Scherpel, are occupied by 800 to 1,000 detainees. Covering of the bar- racks with roofing felt is still incomplete, and the connect- ing camp roads are still under construction. In the absence of bedsteads the detainees are sleeping on the floor. " After having described the absence of water supply and sewage installations, the report speaks about the quarantine measures:
"As the detainees of construction section III are to be rapidly used for work, a proper quarantine is not carried
out. If major delays with respect to the employment are to be avoided in case of an epidemic, it is necessary to subdi- vide the camp into 4 separate fields by means of enclosures, in place of the usual quarantine measures. In this way, at least part of the detainees can be continued to be employed or moved away in case of an epidemic. " Weber concludes his report as follows:
"Due to the occupancy of construction section III before completion of the construction works there is an immediate risk of an epidemic break-out due to the absence of the most basic hygienic conditions. "
As I have explained elsewhere,46 the enormous arrival of Hungarian Jews caught the Central Construction Office com- pletely by surprise. The Central Construction Office was not even able to furnish decent housing for a large number of the future forced laborers of the Reich, and this goes all the more for the alleged extermination installations. On September 23, the project of a camp hospital at Birkenau was definitely aban- doned, as results from a letter Jothann wrote to the construction inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien on the sub- ject "Erection of 12 barracks for seriously ill in BA.III-BW 12b" dated December 6, 1944:47
"On the occasion of the meeting with Head of Main of- fice, the abandonment of work on BA III of Po W camp was ordered, and dismantling of the 12 barracks for seriously ill patients was begun. "
What remains to be explained is why, in spite of the fact that works were still in progress on the hospital camp of con- struction section III, the Central Construction Office drawing 3764 of March 23, 1944, shows this part of the camp to be in- tended for 60,000 detainees. The explanation of this apparent contradiction is quite simple and concerns the working proce- dures of the construction bureau of the Central Construction Office, where the technical drawings were made - for the most part by engineers, architects, and draftsmen from among the de- tainees.48 To save time and materials, copies were made from each drawing, on which later modifications of the project were marked. This also goes for the "Situation plan of the PoW camp" no. 3764, drawn by Polish detainee Stefan Millauer (ID no. 63003) on March 23, 1944, and countersigned by Jothann the next day. This drawing was done to show the positions of the 111 "barracks for patients" of construction section III, in which the rectangles representing the barracks were shown in red.49 According to the procedure, this situation plan shows three stamps: the one - already mentioned - for the preliminary verification by the construction inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien (dated June 27, 1944), the one of the final verification by Office C/II of SS WVHA (dated July 13, 1944), and then the one showing its registration in the list of drawings "entered in plan distribution book" dated May 22, 1944.
As can be seen from the three stamps, this situation plan was part of the documentation Jothann had sent to the construc- tion inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien on May 25, 1944,50 i.e. the "Explanatory report on the enlargement of the PoW camp of Waffen-SS at Auschwitz, Upper Silesia. Erection of 111 barracks for patients" and the corresponding cost estimate. These three documents - explanatory note, cost estimate, and lay-out - were actually indispensable, if approval
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for the construction of any sort of building was to be ob- tained.51 The explanatory note, in fact, refers explicitly to this situation plan:52
"The arrangement of buildings in the area available re- sults from the attached situation plan. " A copy of this situation plan was later used to show the po- sitions of the 6 corpse chambers (BW 3b and 3d), i.e., it was at- tached as a situation plan for these buildings to the "explana- tory report for the enlargement of Lager II of Waffen-SS at Auschwitz O/S. Erection of 6 corpse chambers," drawn up by Jothann on June 12, 1944, and verified by construction inspec- torate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien on August 28, 1944,53 the same date is shown in the stamp "verified" of the construction inspectorate placed on the situation plan no. 3764. The stamp of registration in the "plan distribution book" has the date of July 18, 1944. The 6 corpse chambers were to be built in construction section I and II, and precisely below these, in the situation plan in question, there appears unmistakably:54
"The corpse chambers to be included are marked in red on the situation plan. "
Let us look at the copy of situation plan 3764 published by J.-C. Pressac: on this copy we can read "Construction section-3 for 60,000 pris." The document does not show any verification stamp, only the stamp of registration in the "plan distribution book," dated Dec. 7, 1944. It is thus clear that it refers to a pro- ject later than that of the 1 1 1 barracks for patients and to that of the 6 corpse chambers. It thus undoubtedly dates from the au- tumn of 1944.
In conclusion, because the camp hospital was planned and partly realized and because Pressac's "decisive argument" to the contrary is worthless, what he has written remains fully valid:
"There is INCOMPATIBILITY in the creation of a health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to official history, people were extermi- nated on a large scale...
The plan for building a very large hospital section in BA.III thus shows that the crematoria were built purely for incinera- tion, without any homicidal gassings, because the SS wanted to "maintain" its concentration camp labor force.
Abbreviations
AGK Archiwum Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu Instytutu Pamieci Narodowej (Ar- chive of the central commission of inquiry into the crimes committed against the Polish people - national museum)
APK Archiwum Panstwowe w Katowicach (Kattowitz state ar- chive)
APMO Archiwum Panstwowego Muzeum w Oswiecimiu (Archive of the national museum at Auschwitz)
BAK Bundesarchiv Koblenz (German federal archives)
GARF Gosudarstvenni Archiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (State archive of the Russian federation), Moscow
RGVA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii Vojennii Archiv (Russian state archive of the war, ex TCIDK - Tsentr Chranenija Is- toriko-dokumental 'nich Kollektsii, Center for the conserva- tion of historico-documentary collections, Moscow)
VHA Vojensky Historicky Archiv (War history archive), Prague
Notes
1 Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas chambers, Beate-Klarsfeld-Foundation, New York 1989, p. 512.
2 Ibidem, p. 513.
3 According to letter from Bischoff dated July 19, 1943, on May 15, 1943. Cf. below.
4 RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 115.
5 The drawing was countersigned by SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Wirths, SS garri- son physician of Auschwitz to show his approval of the project.
6 Memo by Birkigt dated May 28, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 270. On the subject of hygienic installations at the Lublin-Majdanek camp cf. the report by SS Untersturmfuhrer Birkigt dated March 20, 1943, published in: J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, pp. 62f.
7 RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 133.
8 RGVA, 502-1-83, pp. 267-268.
9 RLM = Reichsluftfahrtministerum, ministry for air.
10 RGVA, 502-2-1 10, p. 5.
11 "Hafflingsrevier im Bauabschnitt '3' des K.G.L. Lageplan des mannlichen Teils," RGVA, 502-2-1 10, page number illegible.
12 Barrack number on drawings 2521 and 2637.
13 RGVA, 502-1-79, p. 100.
14 "Bericht iiber den Fortgang der Arbeiten fur die SondermaBnahmen im KGL. und im Stammlager" written by Bischoff on July 13, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 119.
15 RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 111.
16 "Bericht fiber den Fortgang der Arbeiten fur die SondermaBnahmen im KGL. und im Stammlager" written by Bischoff on July 31, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 100.
17 RGVA, 502-1-332, p. 196.
18 "Erlauterungsbericht zum Ausbau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen- SS in Auschwitz/OS," RGVA, 502-2-60, p. 81.
19 "Bericht iiber den Fortgang der Arbeiten fur die SondermaBnahmen im KGL. und im Stammlager" written by Bischoff on September 25, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, pp. 215-216.
20 Bischoff became head of Construction Inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Police Schlesien.
21 "Kostenvoranschlag zum Ausbau des Kriegsgefangenenlagers der Waffen- SS in Auschwitz," RGVA, 502-2-60, pp. 86f.
22 "Meldung iiber den Stand der Bauarbeiten im Haftlingalazarett K.G.L. Bau- abschnitt III, Stichtag 1. Oktober 1943," written by Jothann on October 5, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, pp. 396-397.
23 Barrack type 1: "Spezialbaracke 1 (Chirurgische)" = surgery; type 2: "Spe- zialbaracke 2 (Rontgen- und Behandlung)" = x-rays and treatment.
24 Barrack type 6a: "Spezialbaracke 6a (Frisch Operierte)" = freshly operated; type 6b: "Spezialbaracke 6b (Schwere Innere)" = serious inner (injuries).
25 Hospital huts.
26 File memo by Jothann dated October 1 1, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 395.
27 "Bericht iiber den Fortgang der Bauarbeiten fur die SondermaBnahmen im KGL," written by Jothann on October 30, 1943. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 198.
28 RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 158.
29 RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 38.
30 Letter from Bischoff to Jothann dared March 31, 1944. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 34.
31 RGVA, 502-2-1 10, pp. 1-la.
32 Error for May 15, 1943.
33 RGVA,502-2-110,p. 3.
34 RGVA, 502-1-281, p. 49.
35 RGVA 502-1-261, p. 117.
36 RGVA 502-2-1 10, pp. 38-38a.
37 RGVA, 502-2-1 10, pp.40-41.
38 RGVA, 502-2-1 10, pp. 42-43.
39 RGVA, 502-1.281, p. 47.
40 RGVA, 502-1-281, page number illegible.
41 Aerial photograph of Birkenau dated May 31, 1944. National Archives, Washington D.C., Mission 60 PRS/462 60SQ, Can D 1508, Exposure 3056.
42 Telex from head of Office C of SS WVHA to Central Construction Office dated June 2, 1944. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 5.
43 Telex from Jothann to Kammler dated June 2, 1944. RGVA, 502-1.83, p. 2.
44 Letter from Jothann to Construction Inspectorate of the Waffen-SS and Po- lice Schlesien, dated June 2, 1944. RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 3.
45 RGVA, 502-1-168, pp. 6-6a.
46 "Die Deportation ungarischer Juden von Mai bis Juli 1944. Eine provisori-
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sche Bilanz," in: Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung, 5(4) (2001), pp. 387f.
RGVA, 502-1-261, pp. 1 15-1 15a.
In February 1943, there were 96 detainees in the construction office, RGVA, 502-1-256, pp. 171 -173. RGVA, 502-2-1 10, p. 13.
In the registration stamp of "Planausgabebuch" there is an erroneous entry of "22.5.44" instead of 25.2.44.
Cf. in this respect my study La "Central Construction Office der Waffen-SS und Polizei Auschwitz. " Edizioni di Ar, 1998, p. 32; soon to be published by Theses & Dissertations Press in English under The Central Construction Office.
'2 RGVA, 502-2-1 10, p. la. 3 RGVA, 502-2-95, p. 10a. i4 RGVA, 502-2-95, p. 14.
1972: A Somewhat Different Auschwitz Trial
Contractors of Auschwitz Tried in Vienna
By Dipl.-Ing. Walter Liiftl
During the years 1964/65, a giant Auschwitz trial took place in Frankfurt, Germany. Almost all defendants accused of hav- ing participated in the crimes claimed to have been committed in this camp were eventually sentenced.1 Even though the Frankfurt court dealt with one of the largest mass murders ever committed in mankind history - if one believes the charges - the judges of this trial did nothing to find out if the claims made by witnesses were based on facts; the court did not investigate the alleged murder weapons, did not try to find any trace of the dead or of its victims, and did not hear experts to critically as- sess the witnesses' claims. Not a single forensic expert report was asked for or provided.
The trial against Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl was a little different. It took place before the Superior Criminal Court in Vienna between January 1 and March 10, 1972, under the pre- siding judge Dr. Reisenleitner.2 Both defendants were officers of the Waffen-SS during the war and as such were at times in- volved in the design, construction, and maintenance of the cre- matoria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Because according to today's official historiography these buildings served for the mass murder of European Jews, both were accused by the Aus- trian public prosecutor of having at least indirectly participated in the planning and execution of this crime.
Walter Dejaco (left) and Fritz Ertl (right): The contractors of the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thanks to an expert report they were acquitted.
The trial files are allegedly no longer accessible in the Vi- enna courthouse. However, a short review of this trial will be attempted, based on newspaper articles. Judging by these re- ports, this trial was in line with the other trials about actual or alleged violent NS-crimes regarding external circumstances as described by Kohler:3
- The accused were prejudged as "contractors of the mass murder,"4 and the trial against them was called a "a monster trial."
- The press reported untruthfully:5
"A construction drawing by Dejaco of both large gas chambers with his signature exists. "
Plans of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were displayed in the courtroom, in which
"clearly the crematoria, the gas chambers, the barracks and the infamous ramp [...] "5
were allegedly drawn, although no plan has yet been found, on which the words "human gas chamber" are written or from which use as gas chambers could be indirectly construed.
Several witnesses appeared during the trial to report actual or alleged horrible conditions in the camp. Thus, they spread an atmosphere of horror and prejudice against the accused, but they did not contribute to the clarification of the actual accusations.6
- The witness Hermann Langbein, chairman of the Interna- tional Auschwitz-Committee and plaintiff against the ac- cused, can be shown to have attempted to influence wit- nesses, based on a letter which he sent to potential wit- nesses:7
"Dr. Obenaus, the defense lawyer for Dejaco, submitted part of a letter, which Langbein allegedly wrote to former inmates of Auschwitz. It says: 'It is in my opinion unimpor- tant whether an inmate can say anything positive about De- jaco. But when he can say that he participated in the build- ing of the crematorium, this can be perceived as participa- tion in the murder, and his punishment can be achieved. ' The attorney explains that several former inmates were up- set since they could only say good things about Dejaco, and several engaged in correspondence with him through let- ters. "
The historical expert Dr. Hans Buchheim, who was called by the court, reported about the organization of the SS and
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about a possible necessity to obey orders by the accused; however, the expert was evidently not asked how the allega- tions of witnesses about the alleged crimes committed with the claimed murder weapon purportedly built by the defen- dants could be in agreement with other types of evidence (documents, physical evidence).8
In his plea the state's attorney made long statements, apro- pos of nothing, about his view of history and the alleged or actual horror of the NS Jewish persecution in general.9 The accused did not contradict the orthodox historiography about the camp Auschwitz, which should not be surprising in light of the fact that any attempt to do so would have been utterly hopeless and would have led to intensified pun- ishment. However, Walter Dejaco claimed that during the planning and construction of the crematoria10, he did not know anything of their alleged future utilization as tools of mass murder, while Fritz Ertl stated that he attempted to de- lay the completion of the crematoria through inner resis- tance.11
Contrary to many other trials against so-called National So- cialist violent crimes, the media's interest in these trials was relatively minor. Thus, the Vienna newspaper Die Presse evi- dently did not report about it, and the trial itself took place be- fore a mostly empty court room.12
Several interesting statements by the press, the accused, the witnesses, and the court should be mentioned in addition:
- The number of murder victims of Auschwitz was stated by the press at the time to be 3 million,13 contrary to the fact that the historiography at that time accepted a total number of about 1 million.
- According to the indictment14
"The gassing of the victims [...] were especially cruel. The killing procedure in the gas chambers lasted 10 min- utes. During this time the victims had to suffer unspeakable agonies. "
"After the gassing, the victims ' gold teeth were pulled and their hair cut in 'Kanada ' [correct: in the storage of ef- fects...]."5
However, the witnesses mostly agreed in reporting that this was allegedly done directly inside the crematoria, otherwise the murdered would have to be transported to the storage part of the camp from the crematoria, and then afterwards returned to the crematoria to be burned.
To the notion that four crematoria for 150,000 people in the camp should have caused suspicion, Dejaco answered that at that time there were typhus epidemics. This fact suffi- ciently explains the capacity of the Birkenau crematoria, but is today mostly neglected.15
The witness Langbein had to register 300 deaths every day in day and night shifts. This number agrees with the horren- dous documented death rate due to the typhus epidemic in the camp in the summer of 1942. 16
- The accused Fritz Ertl reported that he was among others working on a plan of the "garden layout." This highlights the fact that the alleged "extermination camp" Auschwitz had areas for the recreation of the inmates.
The "key witness" Kaplonek could not identify Dejaco and admitted to knowing of him only through hearsay.17
Although several witnesses accuse Dejaco of murder and mistreatment of inmates,12 he was acquitted of these accusa- tions based on exonerating testimonies.18 A construction expert testified before the court that the plans submitted during the indictment are identical to the original construction plans of the crematoria in Auschwitz from Poland, as submitted to the court.19 This last piece of information is quite interesting, since it indicates that the revisionist allegation that criminal courts never use material evidence is false. At least in this trial a con- struction specialist was requested for his expertise. This con- struction expert who testified during that trial got in touch with the author of this article and informed him that he had ex- plained more than just the identity of the original plans with the copies, which were in the public prosecutor's hands. He had to answer basically two questions put to him by the court:
1 . Do the plans indicate that these were gas chambers? His an- swer was: No.
2. Could the accused infer from the plans that they could be transformed later into gas chambers? Here also was the an- swer: No.
Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl were thus acquitted. The public prosecution did announce an appeal,20 but did not follow through with it. Despite protests no further measures against the two acquitted architects were taken. In the Vienna Auschwitz trial a well known construction specialist prepared an expert opinion. The material evidence did not indicate mass killings with poison gas.
Question: Is this the reason why the files of the trial de- scribed here cannot be found?
Notes
First published under pen name Michael Gartner as "Vor 25 Jahren: Ein anderer Auschwitz-ProzeB" in Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 1(1) (1997), pp. 24f.; translated by Fabian Eschen.
1 See the verdict by the Frankfurt Jury Court, Ref. 50/4 Ks 2/63, reprinted in I. Sagel-Grande, H. H. Fuchs, C. F. Riiter (eds.), Justiz unci NS-Verbrechen, vol. 21, University Press, Amsterdam 1979, pp. 361-887.
2 Ref. 20 Vr 6575/72 (Hv56/72). Robert Van Pelt quotes in his "Van Pelt Re- port": 20 Vr 3806/64 and 27 C Vr 3806/64), which however, is a case opened in 1964; Pelt Report, p. 135 n. 59; introduced in evidence during the libel case before the Queen's Bench Division, Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London, David John Cawdell Irving vs. (1) Penguin Books Limited, (2) Deborah E. Lipstadt, ref. 1 996 I. No. 1 1 3 .
3 M. KOhler, "The Value of Testimony and Confessions Concerning the Holocaust" in, E. Gauss (ed.) Dissecting the Holocaust, 2nd ed., Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003, pp 85-131.
4 Kurier, Jan. 19, 1972.
5 Wiener Zeitung, Jan. 19, 1972.
6 Kurier, Jan. 27, 1972, Wiener Zeitung, Feb. 4, 1972.
7 Wiener Zeitung, Jan. 26, 1972.
8 Ibid, Jan. 29, 1972.
9 Ibid, March 10, 1972.
10 Ibid, Jan. 19 & 20, 1972.
11 Ibid, Jan. 22, 1972.
12 Kurier & Wiener Zeitung, Jan. 19, 1972.
13 Kurier, Jan. 18, 1972; Wiener Zeitung, Jan. 19, 1972.
14 Wiener Zeitung, Jan. 19, 1972.
15 Ibid, Jan. 20, 1972.
16 Cf. J.-C. Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, Piper, Munich 1994, Appendix.
17 Wiener Zeitung, Feb. 1 1 , 1 972.
18 Ibid, Feb. 10&23, 1972.
" Niederosterreichisches Volksblatt,Mnvch2, 1972. 20 Wiener Zeitung, March 1 1 ., 1972.
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Engineer's Deathbed Confession: We Built Morgues, not Gas Chambers
By Werner Rademacher
Who is Walter Schreiber?
Walter Schreiber was born in 1908 and died in 1999 at the age of 9 1 in Vienna. He studied civil engineering at the Techni- cal University in Vienna and worked first on the construction of the alpine high altitude road "GroBglockner-HochalpenstraBe" as assistant to the construction manager. After an extended pe- riod of unemployment he emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 and worked on the construction of refrigeration buildings and alcoholic beverage factories in Bryansk, Spassk, and Pet- rofsk until 1935. In 1936 Schreiber went to Germany, where he worked first for the Tesch Corporation and then, from 1937 to Aug. 31, 1945, for the Huta Corporation. Schreiber was em- ployed as a senior engineer in the branch office in Kattowitz from Jan. 11, 1943, until the evacuation of Upper Silesia in 1945.
After the war Schreiber worked for the Municipal Construc- tion Office Directorate {Stadtbauamtsdirektion) Vienna, the Austrian Danube Power Plants Society (Osterreichische Donaukraftwerke AG), the Jochenstein Danube Power Plant Society {Donaukraftwerk Jochenstein AG) and the Verbundge- sellschaft Vienna. After well-deserved retirement he lived in Vienna, mental capacity fully in tact, until his death.
Why is Schreiber Interesting?
What is so interesting in the professional life of this Aus- trian civil engineer? He worked as a senior engineer in the branch office in Kattowitz for the construction activities of his firm and was also responsible for constructions in the concen- tration camp Auschwitz and its sub-camps.
He was interviewed about Auschwitz in the year 1998 by Dipl.-Ing. Walter Luftl, who had been President of the Austrian Society of Civil Engineers until 1992. Answers that are of in- terest for historiography are found in the following:
Luftl: In which areas were you active?
Schreiber: As senior engineer I inspected the civil project of the Huta Corporation and negotiated with the Central Con- struction office of the SS. I also audited the invoices of our firm.
L.: Did you enter the camp? How did that happen?
S.: Yes. One could walk everywhere without hindrance on the streets of the camp and was only stopped by the guards upon entering and leaving the camp.
L.: Did you see or hear anything about killings or mistreat- ment of inmates?
S.: No. But lines of inmates in a relatively poor general condition could occasionally be seen on the streets of the camp.
L.: What did the Huta Corporation build?
S.: Among other things, crematoria II and III with the large morgues.
L.: The prevalent opinion (considered to be self evident) is that these large morgues were allegedly gas chambers for mass killings.
S.: Nothing of that sort could be deduced from the plans made available to us. The detailed plans and provisional in- voices drawn up by us refer to these rooms as ordinary cellars.
L.: Do you know anything about introduction hatches in the reinforced concrete ceilings?
S.: No, not from memory. But since these cellars were also intended to serve as air raid shelters as a secondary purpose, introduction holes would have been counter-productive. I would certainly have objected to such an arrangement.
L.: Why were such large cellars built, when the water table in Birkenau was so extremely high?
S.: / don't know. Originally, however, above-ground morgues were to be built. The construction of the cellars caused great problems in water retention during the construc- tion time and sealing the walls.
L.: Would it be conceivable that you were deceived and that the SS nevertheless had gas chambers built by your firm with- out your knowledge?
S.: Anyone who is familiar with a construction site knows that is impossible.
L.: Do you know any gas chambers?
S.: Naturally. Everyone in the east knew about dis infesta- tion chambers. We also built disinfestation chambers, but they looked quite different. We built such installations and knew what they looked like after the installation of the machinery. As a construction firm, we often had to make changes according to the devices to be installed.
L.: When did you learn that your firm was supposed to have built gas chambers for industrial mass killing?
S.: Only after the end of the war.
L.: Weren 'tyou quite surprised about this?
S.: Yes! After the war I contacted my former supervisor in Germany and asked him about it.
L.: What did you learn?
S.: He also only learned about this after the war, but he as- sured me that the Huta Corporation certainly did not build the cellars in question as gas chambers.
L.: Would a building alteration be conceivable after the withdrawal of the Huta Corporation?
S.: Conceivable, sure, but I would rule that out on the basis of time factors. After all, they would have needed construction firms again, the SS couldn 't do that on their own, even with in- mates. Based on the technical requirements for the operation of a gas chamber, which only became known to me later, the building erected by us would have been entirely unsuitable for this purpose with regard to the necessary machinery and the practical operation.
L.: Why didn 'tyou publish that?
S.: After the war, first, I had other problems. And now it is no longer permitted.
L.: Were you ever interrogated as a witness in this matter?
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S.: No Allied, German, or Austrian agency has ever shown an interest in my knowledge of the construction of crematoria II and III, or my other activities in the former Generalgouverne- ment [German occupied Poland]. / was never interrogated about this matter, although my services for the Huta Corpora- tion in Kattowitz were known. I mentioned them in all my later CVs and recruitment applications. Since knowledge about these facts is dangerous, however, I never felt any urge to propagate it. But now, as the lies are getting increasingly bolder and con- temporary witnesses from that time like myself are slowly but surely dying off, I am glad that someone is willing to listen and to write down the way as it really was. I have serious heart trouble and can die at any moment, it 's time now.
We are grateful to this contemporary witness, who asked us to wait to publish his testimony posthumously.
Other contemporary witnesses, like the SS-leader Hottl who also died in 1999, took their knowledge about the origin of the six million lie with them into the grave, without even caring whether the truth they held would at least be made known post- humously.
We will keep Herrn Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Walter Schreiber in honorable memory.
First published as "In memoriam Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Walter Schreiber" in Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 4(1) (2000), p. 104f.
The New Face of the "Holocaust"
By Markus Springer
As is generally known, crematoria are designed in such a way that even during intense activity neither smoke nor flames escape from their chimneys, and they also do not produce objectionable smells. Nevertheless, in a book, for which the "Holocaust survivor" Imre Kertesz received the Nobel prize for literature, one reads of smoking crematorium chimneys in German concentration camps, from which allegedly a "real firework of flames and sparks" escapes and which spread an unpleasant smell. Kertesz also reports untruthfully that poisonous gas came out of shower heads onto the heads of the victims, although such an application with the allegedly used gas (Zyklon B) is technically not possi- ble. And on top of all that it turns out that Kertesz possibly plagiarized one of his scenes from a famous "Holocaust" liar. What is the Nobel prize for literature worth when it is awarded to confirmed liars exactly for their cock-and-bull stories? And what about a civilization that celebrates such?
On December 10, 2002, the one hundred sixth anniversary of the day Alfred Nobel died, the Hungarian- Jewish author Imre Kertesz received the Nobel prize for Literature for his work entitled Fateless.1 As in the novel Kaddish for a Child Not Born and the anthology A Moment of Silence while the Execution Commando Recharges, the author elaborates about his experiences in the concentration camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Kertesz depicts his familiar milieu in Budapest on the occasion of his father's conscription to work duty, his arrest in the summer of 1944 by the Hungarian police, his deportation to the concentration camp Auschwitz, and after only four days, further to the camp Buchenwald. The fifteen year old describes his time as a forced laborer in the outstation Zeitz and in the sick bay of the camp. He finishes with a philosophical dialogue after his return to Budapest.
Although Kertesz 's fate has many parallels with the Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel's, his literary elaboration is no- tably different. While Wiesel's work Night groans of pathos, Kertesz recounts from the perspective of an astounding child, apparently without judgment and without bitterness. Almost none of the narratives of the harassments and molestations of the camp conclude without adding "this I could understand" or "yes, of course." The calculated docility finally culminates in the following sentence at the end of the book:2
"Yes, of this, the bliss in the concentration camps, I should tell you, when you ask me the next time. " The naivety of his narrative style let the author appear free of exaggerations, but behind the mask of innocence Kertesz spreads all the familiar horror fantasies of the "Holocaust": the gas chambers, the smoke- and fire-belching chimneys of the crematoria, the selections and murder of those unfit to work, and the planned genocide of the so-called extermination camps.
Kertesz's description of the murder of people with gas is vague. Only at the end of his novel does he focus on this crime. However, right from the start he includes narrative elements that belong obviously to the forensic context of the "gas cham- bers". He frequently mentions an unspecified "chemical", which was allegedly contained in the water and air of the camp Auschwitz:3
"A sign next to it warned with red letters: 'No Drinking Water ' - but obviously this could not hold us back at that moment. The soldier was quite patient, and I can say this, that no water had tasted that good to me for quite some time, even though I had a peculiar, sharp and disgusting chemical aftertaste in my mouth. "
A little later Kertesz returns to this "chemical" that alleg- edly escapes from the chimneys of the crematoria:4
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"At this time we became aware of the smell, quite seri- ously now. It would be difficult to describe it precisely: sweetish and somehow gluey, also with the now known chemical, so that I was almost a little afraid the bread that I mentioned would come up again. It was not difficult for us to determine the source: One chimney was the culprit, on the left hand side in the direction of the highway, but much further away... Actually - as I gradually realized, without knowing how - the chimney was not really a leather factory, but a 'crematorium', i.e. the chimney of a cremation oven, as the term had been described to me. Then I looked at it a little closer: It was a short, rectangular chimney with a wide opening; the top had a chopped-off appearance. Ex- cept for a vague unease - and, of course, the smell, in which we were trapped, as if in mud or a swamp — I did not feel much. But then, to our surprise, we could see another in the dis- tance, then another, and then at the edge of the illuminated sky still another chimney from which smoke was escaping as from ours... and maybe those, from which the distant smoke wafts rose behind a puny forest, aroused slow suspicion, and seemed to justify the question, whether the epidemic was of such an extent, that there were so many deaths. " The word "Krematorium" is printed in the text in italics and with quotation marks, probably to sug- gest to the reader that these build- ings were not cremation installations but "gas chambers."
Wiesel did without the smell of chemicals in his description of the "smoking" crematorium chimneys:5 "He only asked us: 'In three days I will not live anymore... say Kaddish for me. ' We prom- ised: Should there be chimney smoke in three days, we would think of him. We would call up ten of us and hold a special memorial. " The "fire belching" chimneys of the crematoria are a fixed component of the "Holocaust" literature. Writes Kertesz:6
'And then I also saw for the first time - because the night still found us in the same location - the color of the night and one of its sights: the Bengali fire, a true fire work of flames and sparks over the left side of the sky. Around me many whispered, murmured and repeated: 'The crematori- ums!' but, if one wants to say it, somehow with the sense of marvel one has for a phenomenon of nature. " Wiesel also described the "flaming chimneys" of the crema- toria with similar emphasis:7
"Suddenly we heard terrible screaming: 'Jews, look! Look at the fire! The flames, just look! ' The train stopped
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and this time we saw the flames that belched into the deep night from a tall chimney. Mrs. Schachter became silent by herself. Silent, apathetic, absently she sat again in her little corner. We looked at the flames in the night. A repugnant smell was in the air. "
The mass murder in the "gas chambers" is at first a rumor with Kertesz. He works skillfully with the instruments of hear- say and the incredulity of a child, which moves the horror into the unimaginable:8
"There, on the other side, are burning at this moment our travel companions from the railroad, all of whom wanted to go with us in the car, and all of whom the doctor found unfit because of old age or other reasons, like the children and the mothers and the mothers-to-be, where it was already obvious. They also went from the railroad sta- tion to the bath house. They also were informed about the coat hooks, the numbers, the procedure in the bath, exactly like us. Hair dressers were there also - as was maintained — and also soap was handed to them. And then they were also led into the bathroom, where, as I heard, were also such pipes and shower heads: except that not water but gas was discharged on them. All this I did not learn at one time, but rather gradually, always with new details, of which some were doubted and others confirmed, yes, even supple- mented with additional information. In the meantime - I heard — they were quite friendly to them, they were affectionately cared for, the children sang and played ball, and the place where they were gassed was a beautiful location between lawns, trees and flower gardens: therefore I had finally the impres- sion that it was some kind of a prac- tical joke, something like a student trick. "
Kertesz appears to have been aware of the scarce evidence of the "gas chamber" already during the thirteen years' work of his novel. In the last chapter is the following dialogue between the homecomer and a doubting Hungarian:9
"He was curious to know - about which I had to smile - whether I saw the gas chambers. I said: 'Then we would not now be talking to each other. ' 'Certainly ', he said, but were there really gas chambers, and I said, but yes, among others there were also gas chambers, of course, and it all de- pended on what the practice was in the particular camp. For example in Auschwitz their existence was certain. But I, on the other hand — I said - came from Buchenwald. 'From where? ' he asked, and I had to repeat: From Buchenwald. ' 'So, from Buchenwald', he said, and nodded, and I an- swered: 'Yes. ' Whereupon he said: 'But, a moment, please ',
nth i,
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and this with a rigid, strict, almost schoolmasterly face. 'Therefore you, Sir ', and I don 't know why, but somehow I was touched by this serious, if not to say somewhat solemn address, 'were told about gas chambers ' and I said again: 'But yes. ' 'Therefore you did not ', he continued still with this rigid face, to create at the same time order and clarity in these things, 'personally, with your own eyes make sure of this ', and I had to admit: 'No. ' Where- upon he said: 'Aha ', and walked on, rigid, straight, upright and, as it appeared to me, somehow also satisfied, unless I was wrong. " Neither did Wiesel make concrete state- ments about the "gas chambers":10
"According to Jewish belief the death of a creature belongs only to him alone. It is better that the gas chambers stay closed from curious eyes. Also the imagi- nation should halt before them. We shall never know what happened behind the steel doors. "
Kertesz's concoction does not only show parallels to Elie Wiesel's novels, but also to the notorious, freely invented "autobiography" of Binjamin Wilkomirski.11 Fragments is similar to Fateless, written from the perspective of a child, in the style of a fragmented evolving into awareness of traumatic horrors. Wilkomirski's book, which first appeared in 1995, in- cludes a scene that is so similar to the sequence of the text of Fateless that it is possibly plagiarized. In the chapter entitled "The Brothers" Wikomirski writes:12
"Soldiers were standing around. One stood next to me,
and curious, I checked him. 'What kind of funny rifle do you
have here? ' I asked him. I pulled at an object hanging from
his belt. Lightning fast he turned around, lightning fast his
arm was raised with that strange object in his fist, and
something so burned
my face that I thought
it had been cut in two.
This way I learned
what a whip is and I
understood: The grey
one lied - Majdanek is
not a playground. "
It is typical for Kertesz not to describe this scene as an act of cruelty, and thus he maintains the illu- sion of childlike inno-
13
cence:
"Everyone had a rifle on his side, and that was quite natural, after all they were sol- diers, one understands. But as I saw, many Holocaust Liar Imre Kertesz
, .. , ■ Nobel Prize Winner
also carried a stick in , , ., , „„„„
for Literature in 2002
THE WILKQMIHSKI AFFAIR
A STUDY IN BIOGRAPHICAL TRUTH
lumm
STEFAN MAECHLER
Exposure of a Fraud
their hand, an ordinary walking cane with a rounded end, and that surprised me some, since they were all men in full possession of their strength and ability to walk. Then, from a closer distance, I could examine this object more accurately. I became suspicious when one man a little further up, with his back half turned towards me, took that thing horizon- tally behind his hips, holding it at both ends and began to bend it up and down with bored movements. I moved closer to him within the group, closer and closer. And then I saw that the object was not of wood, but of leather, and was not a stick but a whip. That was a strange feeling — but I could not see any sign that it was used... well, there were all the many prisoners around, this I under- stood. "
In the first Yiddish edition under the title Un di velt hot geshvign Wiesel formulated his urge for revenge: "Early in the morning Jewish boys ran to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes" and literally: "un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses." - "and to rape German women." Kertesz stays also vague on this question:14
"'You probably saw a lot, my boy, much horror', he thought, and I said nothing. 'Well', he continued. 'The main thing is that it is over and out. ' His face lightened, he pointed to the houses we just passed and asked what I felt to be back home again, looking at the town I had left at that time. I said' 'Hate. ' He was silent for a while, but then re- marked that he unfortunately understands my feelings. Apart from that, 'depending on the circumstances, ' he opined, even hatred has its place, its role, 'yes its useful- ness, ' and he assumes, he added, that we would agree on this, and that he knows well who I hate. I said: 'Every- body. "'
The "Holocaust" is a discursive system that started with propa- ganda announcements and was established in political show trials, entered into the public consciousness with the help of cinematic concoctions, and has meanwhile become omni- present by way of the me- dia, education, and cultural establishments. In Kertesz's literature the "Holocaust" receives a new face. He does not come full of anger as Elie Wiesel does, but quietly, reserved, courteous, al- most humble. But still, they are the same lies, raised now to the rank of Holocaust Liar Bruno Doesseker wor\d literature aka Benjamin Wilkomirski - ex- posed and shunned
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Notes
First published in Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichisforschung 7(1) (2003), pp. 40-43; translated by Fabian Eschen.
1 Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1992. The quotes are trans- lated from the German edition of this book: Roman eines Schicksallosen, Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin, 4lh ed., 2001.
2 Roman eines Schicksallosen, p. 287.
3 Ibid., p. 102.
4 Ibid, pp. 120 ff.
5 Elie Wiesel, Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa, Bechtle Verlag, Munich 1 962, p. 88. Engl, edition: Night, Bantam Books, 1982.
6 I. Kertesz, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 130f.
7 E. Wiesel, Die Nacht, op. cit. (note 5), p. 42.
8 Kertesz, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 124f.
9 I. Kertesz, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 263f.
10 Elie Wiesel, Alle Fliisse Jliefien ins Meer. Autobiographic, Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1997, p. 1 14; Engl.: All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Schocken Books, 1996.
" See in this regard Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Bio- graphical Truth, Schocken Books, New York 2001; cf. also Arthur R. Butz, "Historical Past vs. Political Present," Journal of Historical Review 1 9(6) (2000), pp. 12-25, here esp. 18-23; Steven L. Jacobs, "Binjamin Wilkomir- ski (Fragments) and Donald Watt (Stoker): When the Holocaust Story Is a Lie," CCAR Journal, Spring 2001, http://ccarnet.org/journal/601sj.html
12 Binjamin Wilkomirski, Bruchstiicke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948, Suhr- kamp Taschenbuch Verlag, Baden Baden 1998, p. 37; Engl.: Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Schocken Books, 1997.
13 I. Kertesz, op. cit. (note 1), p. 96.
14 Ibid., p. 270.
Weapons Industry: Source of Terrorism
By Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
At this stage in history, the weapons industry has emerged as the worst source of terrorism that ever existed in the past six thousand years of recorded history. The lethal weapons it has developed over the past fifty years alone have killed more peo- ple than were massacred in total over the past 2,500 years, back to the time of the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. What is amazing is not the fact that such an industry has become the greatest terrorist organization in the world, but that it success- fully hypnotizes intelligent people from every walk of life and profession into believing that its product contributes to the pro- tection and security of our respective nations.
Warranty of Death
Such a lethal industry constitutes a warranty of death. Tens of millions of people every year incur cancer because of toxic waste it produces, which poisons our air, our water, and the land where we grow our food. As though this isn't enough, sev- eral groups at the grassroots level work constantly like devils to create regional conflicts in order to justify the continued manu- facture and sales of weapons of destruction. Their main tactic is creating fear, which has led many people to panic and which has haunted most government officials of the world's leading nations. The weapons industry is determined to survive in its business until the end of time. The only way to assure its sur- vival is the continued creation of local, regional, and global conflicts.
What is the difference between the massacre of 5,000 inno- cent civilians by a lawless group of virtually unknown origin and the death of 5,000 innocent civilians massacred by a le- gally-existing agency known as the military? As far as the lives of these innocent people are concerned, it does not make any difference at all. However, as far as our government officials are concerned, there is a great difference. In fact, U.S. govern- ment officials referred to the innocent civilians killed in New York and Washington, D.C., as "victims," while they view the innocent civilians killed by American weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq merely as "collateral damage!"
In other words, when the killing of the innocent is the re- sponsibility of an unauthorized group, then we attribute that to an act of terrorism. On the other hand, when the killing of the innocent is the responsibility of an authorized group such as the military, then we call that an act of duty and patriotism! The fact remains that when politicians fail to get what they want through political means, they resort to the military, which is given the green light to perform any act of savagery and terror- ism in the most brutal way one can possibly imagine.
What is amazing is the fact that highly-respected and intel- ligent professionals remain silent in countries where this lethal and satanic industry exists. They hardly ever even dream of raising their voices to defend the helpless and the poor whose lives are being truncated mercilessly by lethal products of the weapons industry. Why are the medical doctors not talking loudly and boldly about the tremendous hazards the weapons industry is causing to the health of countless millions of people?
Abdication of Responsibility
Why are the lawyers not proposing to the courts the con- demnation of such weapons of destruction and having those re- sponsible for the manufacture and sales of such weapons de- clared criminals for their outrageous crimes against humanity? Why are the church and religious leaders not condemning as immoral and sinful the manufacture and sales of military weap- ons? Why are our teachers at all levels of instruction not bring- ing to the attention of their students the weapons industry as the greatest source of terrorism in our earthly society? Why is it that the parents of our nation's children do not discuss ways to solve this problem for good?
Why is it that our businessmen, other than those involved in weapons, do not get together and pool funds to educate people from every walk of life and profession about the dangers the weapons industry is imposing on them? These questions need a quick answer followed immediately by positive and construc- tive actions. The philosophy of the weapons industrial complex has hypnotized intelligent people from every walk of life and
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profession. Most of these people carry advanced degrees in al- most every branch of knowledge. We are all familiar with the philosophy which most of us, quite unfortunately, hold as the absolute truth:
We need a strong military that is equipped with the most sophisticated weapons available. We need to replace old weapons with new ones. We need to equip our allies with such weapons as well so that they could defend themselves in case they are attacked.
Of course, such statements are a blatant lie. In the first place, the weapons industrial complex, as pointed out by the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C., does not exist for the defense of any nation. It exists merely for profit made through the sales of weapons. Salesmen will say anything imaginable, regardless of the truth, to sell their product. After all, that is the only way to make money, which they view as the highest goal of their lives. If we were watching a stage-show in a large auditorium of 5,000 people, which of the following al- ternatives would make us feel safer:
If each one of us is carrying a loaded gun for "self- protection, " or if no one at all is carrying a loaded gun? The answer is clear and we do not need to elaborate. If we study the tactics of the weapons industrial complex since the end of World War II in 1945, we will discover some- thing curious which happens regularly and virtually without ex- ception. This demonic industry has always had agents who go from one global area to another for purpose of creating civil strife within the same nation and/or with neighboring countries. The goal is always the same: to instill fear in each faction or group, and then to offer each one of these factions or groups all the weapons needed to "defend themselves" from a possible at- tack by the enemy.
Making Money as Main Objective
What outrageous lies!. The weapons industry sells weapons to anyone who gives the right price, friends and enemies alike. Such an industry, as stated earlier, does not care about the safety and sacredness of human life. Yet, the people of the na- tions where weapons are manufactured and sold (above all the United States) cannot see how they themselves are victims of brainwashing and indoctrination that is sponsored, very often, by the government itself. We need to raise a serious question:
How is it that the nations of the world, which manufac- ture and sell weapons, claim that the military is the only ef- fective means available to solve all the problems of the world?
As we know from history, the military may be described as a brutal organization licensed by legitimate governments to massacre people indiscriminately without any investigation or trial. The policy of the military is not to reach solutions of mu- tual interest through conversation or dialogue. Its policy is vio- lence, which explains why all soldiers are equipped with weap- ons of destruction instead of books of learning, food to feed the hungry , and medicine to cure the sick. This is the real picture of the military even though the government tries to hide this re- ality by presenting the military to the general public performing marches with flags and a band.
We are all familiar nowadays with the way the United
States reacted to the acts of terrorism in New York and Wash- ington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. It did not consult any of its thousands of civic, educational, and religious organizations. It responded by committing similar or even worse acts of ter- rorism in Afghanistan and Iraq under the guise of getting one man known as Osama bin Laden, who was presumed to be di- recting these acts of terror. Thousands of innocent people died in New York and in Washington, D.C., and thousands of inno- cent people died in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. This was the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" philosophy we find in the Old Testament. Ironically, the USA is a predominantly Chris- tian nation whose Master Teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, viewed this philosophy as vicious and evil.
After the United States bombarded Afghanistan and Iraq and destroyed virtually their entire infrastructure, , it has set as a priority the creation of an Afghan army that will include 60,000 soldiers, 8,000 airmen, and 70,000 personnel in para- military roles instead of deciding with most of its self- proclaimed allies to rebuild a demilitarized nation. The present government in Afghanistan has already earmarked $235 million dollars for military spending in 2002 alone.
Groundwork of Future Military Dictatorship
Thus, the United States is setting the groundwork for a fu- ture Mobutu of the former Zaire, a future Pinochet of Chile, a future Suharto of Indonesia, a future Abacha of Nigeria, a fu- ture Mao of China, a future Stalin of Russia, a future Hitler of Germany. The question that needs to be raised here is this:
Why does the USA contribute systematically toward the
creation of dictatorial regimes that prove afterwards to be
so brutal and merciless?
To turn insult into injury, nine other nations promised to provide arms and military training to Afghanistan, this war- ravaged country of central Asia. These other nine nations are Britain, Germany, Italy, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran, China, and Turkey. The whole world needs to write to the em- bassies of these nations, especially to that of the United States, and demand a reversal of this militaristic policy. What the Af- ghani people need is not a strong military that will exploit them in due time, but the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the na- tion. The people need new schools and hospitals equipped with the best of modern technology. They need houses for the home- less as well as food and medicine. They need freedom of wor- ship and the ability to feel safe at home without having to bother about future military coups.
In addition to the nine countries mentioned above and the United States, Japan and Saudi Arabia promised to give finan- cial assistance as well in order to help "build the nation," which simply means to help build "a strong military power." We are all familiar with the concept, History repeats itself as former British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill often stated. If that is the case, this is a vivid example of how the weapons in- dustrial complex uses the U.S. government to plan present and future wars on a constant basis merely to keep its lethal product profitable. This explains why the only thing that really matters to the United States and its self-proclaimed allies is building a strong Afghani military power in order to guarantee the contin- ued destabilization of the region in the future. In view of what
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has been stated, we may now fully realize and comprehend why the weapons industry may be viewed as the greatest source of terrorism in the world today.
Charles Mercieca is Executive Vice President of the International Associa- tion of Educators for World Peace NGO, which is working together with the United Nations (ECOSOC) UNDPI, UNICEF, UNCED & UNESCO. He edits the United Nations News and is professor emeritus of History and Philosophy at the Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, AL.
The Holocaust, the Left, and the Warmongers
Germany's Place in the Manifesto, the Popular Front Sellout, and the "Vietnam Syndrome"
By Patrick S. McNally
If one breaks The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels down according to its own internal logical flow, one finds two distinct blocks to the pamphlet, each con- sisting of two chapters, the second block shorter than the first. The first block of two chapters consists of general philosophiz- ing about history and sociology. The second block consists of an attempt to lay down a specific program for the point in time and space at which Marx and Engels were placed.
The first block discusses stages of history, with the declara- tion:1
"From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the char- tered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to naviga- tion, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. "
Here the pamphlet has briefly touched upon questions that would continually rock the later left-wing movements built around it back and forth. To what extent do there exist certain 'natural' stages of history which every society must be able to pass through, in a 'natural' way? To what extent does colonial- ism, an outgrowth within certain technologically advanced so- cieties of the 'natural' stage which they are passing through, al- ter the 'natural' stages of other parts of the world that have not yet reached the same 'natural' stage of history? Although these questions would promote many political divergences and splits in the future, the form in which these questions were ap- proached was frequently influenced by the pamphlet's second block.
The most significant conclusion of the second block was:2
"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Ger- many, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more ad- vanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than what existed in England in the 17th and France in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution. " Here the authors have laid out what would later give birth
among the Russian Mensheviks to the Theory of Two-Stage Revolution.3 According to this theory, two revolutions happen consecutively, a bourgeois revolution and a proletarian revolu- tion, with the proximity of these two events being inversely proportional to the degree of technological development al- ready in place under feudalism at the time of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Mensheviks theorized that there could be a significant time-gap between these two developments in Russia, and a narrower time-gap in Germany in accordance with the Manifesto.
However one may assess the general theory presented in the pamphlet, the central conclusion of the second block had al- ready had a wrench thrown into it by the close of the 1 9th cen- tury. Otto von Bismarck's unification of Germany was de- signed as a highly conservative bourgeois revolution,4 one which explicitly set up a constitutional monarchy, and enacted a measure of labor reforms through this procedure of constitu- tional monarchy, with the aim of achieving a secure bourgeois revolution with royal throne preserved. The picture which had been drawn for many readers of the Manifesto, of a German bourgeois revolution superseding the English and French revo- lutions in its radical development, seemed to be undercut. This triggered a wave of political splinterings, even as many who had stridently believed in the Manifesto tried to explain the new context.
Leon Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution was an outgrowth of this, returning to the interaction of colonialism with 'natural' development and posing a new formula. Accord- ing to this theory, the 'natural' stages of history within a coun- try such as Russia were hopelessly corrupted by the failure of Russia to achieve a bourgeois revolution on the historic time- table would have placed Russia in synchronization with Eng- land, France and the USA. Instead, the birth of Russian capital had been altered by the Czar's relations with more developed capitalist societies and the importation of capital from the de- veloped imperial powers to the underdeveloped world. This was then seen as giving birth to a Russian bourgeoisie that was permanently corrupted by its own manner of development, one growing up around the monarchy and unable to fulfill its his- toric mission because of its dependency on being fed by foreign investment. The conclusions drawn by the Theory of Permanent Revolution were:5
a) "In our view, the Russian Revolution will create con- ditions in which power can pass into the hands of the work-
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ers — and in the event of the victory of the revolution it must do so - before the politicians of bourgeois liberalism get the chance to display to the full their talent for governing. "
b) "If the Russian proletariat, having temporarily ob- tained power, does not on its own initiative carry the revo- lution on to European soil, it will be compelled to do so by the forces of European feudal-bourgeois reaction. " Although this captures the general theme of Trotsky's con- cept that a would-be Russian proletarian revolution must spread beyond Russia by virtue of the inability of Russian liberals to serve their theoretical function, one basic theme is blurred here that would arise again and again later. This is that the general phrase of "European soil" which Trotsky uses here does, in his own way of thinking, attach a high priority to Germany specifi- cally. This assessment by Trotsky is determined by the techno- logical development existing in Germany at the time; the geo- graphical proximity of Germany to Russia; and a close reading of the Manifesto, read with an awareness that its classical con- clusion of a German bourgeois revolution reaching further than any other was then in a state of flux. Only in such a context can one understand a title such as "Germany, the Key to the Inter- national Situation."6
In a letter to the Politburo of July 6, 1921, Lenin cites a re- port from the Jewish Department from Belorussia:
"the Jewish population is gaining the impression that the Soviet government is not capable of defending the civil- ian population from bandits. [...] Jewish farmers in Kovshits advise that neighboring peasants believe that the attacks and pogroms against the Jews are made with the knowledge of the Soviet government and this contributes to an increase in the number of bandits. " In response, Lenin asserts:7
"the Jewish population is being systematically extermi- nated and compelled to attend to its self-defense under the leadership of elements that are politically and socially alien to us (Zionists, Tseirei-Tsion [Young Zionists]). " What should stand out the quickest from this letter (though the Zionist Richard Pipes doesn't note it) is that Lenin uses the phrases "systematically exterminated" in describing "pogroms against the Jews" which no historian today, regardless of poli- tics, would ever assert did in any way amount to being "syste- matically exterminated." Since Lenin quite explicitly notes the Zionists as "politically and socially alien" it would make little sense to say that he is simply parroting this for the ADL, a de- scription that would fit many people today. Rather, a more ra- tional explanation is that the atheistic Communist Lenin has re- tained some imprint of a religious influence.
From Benjamin Blech, The Secrets of Hebrew Words* we know of an ancient Jewish prophecy which promised the Re- turn to the Promised Land of the Jews after a loss of six mil- lion. By June 11, 1900, The New York Times was running a speech of Rabbi Wise:
"There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering argu- ments in favor of Zionism. "
This story appeared again in WWI and ran as late as Octo- ber 31, 1919, in The American Hebrew:
"From across the sea six million men and women call to us for help. "
Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust, provides much relevant information on this WWI propaganda.9 During this time of WWI, political splits broke out across the political left when the German Social-Democrats voted for war credits in the summer of 1914. 10 Simple revulsion against WWI11 would leave many with an aura of the "worker's paradise of the Soviet Union" for years thereafter, even as new evidence accumulated which would discredit this new myth. The general propaganda of WWI was viewed by many such as James Patrick Cannon in the way that Cannon would later assert, to Rose Karsner, that WWII propaganda should be viewed. It is then possible to pick out some intriguing signs of the future from this WWI era.
That Lenin would retain some religious influence is in itself hardly surprising for anyone familiar with the Hegelian phi- losophy that Lenin strongly believed in. The precepts of Hege- lianism would, if anything, predict that the "atheistic Commu- nist Lenin" may be able to make a formal break from religion in a way which facilitates a larger historical process, but that in practice he should be ultimately found to have echoed his envi- ronment of the time. This raises pertinent flags, however, for anyone who might wish to assess Trotsky's statement of De- cember 22, 1938, (and others like it):12
"It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews. "
Does this actually represent a specific insight into the world of the future by Trotsky, or does it reflect an echoing of reli- gious influence similar to Lenin's "systematically extermi- nated" (which is recognized as overblown)?
If one temporarily blinds oneself to the factors that would have theoretically influenced someone from Trotsky's back- ground, it may seem hard at first to grasp in what way Germany would be perceived as such a specific "key" for that time. The Nuremberg Laws enacted policies of racial separatism, but the USA had a fair share of such laws already. Although many members of the USA left (whether Stalinist, Trotskyist, Social- Democrat, or some other form influenced by the early Com- intern) campaigned during that era on behalf of black rights,13 the response by all sectors of the left to Hitler and the Nurem- berg Laws carried a higher ideological content to it. Around the world, the vision of Germany as the place where the proletarian revolution was meant to truly begin allowed many Stalinists to willingly endorse Roosevelt's campaign of capitalist-preserva- tion-via-social-reform, while being sharply critical of Nazi statements that they were not against capitalism per se but be- lieved that its worst features needed to be tamed.
Though one can make the argument that Nazi initiative in introducing racial laws to Germany caused these to be more fully identified with Hitler than Roosevelt was with the racial laws that already existed in the USA, that argument has its weaknesses as well. The Nuremberg Laws were welcomed and encouraged by Zionists with the planned expectation that this would encourage Jews who had become integrated to instead look towards Palestine.14 The long term effect certainly worked that way, yet until 1938 many European Jews showed a prefer- ence for Germany over Poland. While the stream of immigra-
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tion out of Germany in this time was real enough, it is difficult from an abstract perspective to see why anyone would have so sharply re-ordered the emphasis from Poland (where a full campaign to drive Jews out preceded the German campaign) to Germany (which moved in the direction of Poland after 1938).'5 During this time period, as Germany moved in the Pol- ish direction, the only flag that was permitted to be flown side by side with the Swastika was the Star of David.16
The closest one can come to a parallel in the USA for this would be Roosevelt's taking a flag from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam and hanging it next to the Stars and Stripes, while seeking to promote Elijah Muhammad's notion of a 're- turn to Africa.' Although many of the leftists of that era often had well-deserved criticisms of Marcus Garvey and black na- tionalism, a different attitude was generally taken that is hard to account for outside of the framework set by the second block of the Manifesto and the various derivations from it which empha- sized the significance of a German revolution. The Stalinist CPUSA willingly endorsed an election campaign for Roosevelt, while still taking up such cases as the "Scottsboro Boys" as a way of upholding a theoretical position that went back to Lenin's "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination."17
With the Stalinsts there is, of course, the added point of their subordination to Stalin's foreign policy in the '30s. Trot- sky's perspective deserved some highlighting simply because, as a skilled writer, he more clearly spells out the theoretical rea- soning that motivates him. However, from the point of view in Moscow at this time, Stalin was sharply against the idea of for- eign Communist parties seizing power in the manner of Mao Tse-Tung and then posing as rivals in the personality-cult.18 Victor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann19 have confirmed that Stalin was interested in carving out a wider domain that in- volved invading Germany, and that Hitler was perceived from Stalin's perspective as one who would inadvertently, willingly or not, upset the international order in a way that was meant to play into Moscow's hand. However, Stalin remained sharply suspicious of anyone who might be able to place themselves in a revolutionary role independently of Moscow. As such, the CPUSA was specifically counseled by Moscow away from anything that would upset the political order of things in Wash- ington too far and instead steered towards acting as lobbyists for a Moscow- Washington alliance.
Roosevelt, to be certain, had his own reasons entirely for pushing war ahead. Joseph Kennedy has been noted for at- tempting to arrange an Anglo-American gold loan of 0.5-1.0 billion dollars to Germany in the spring of 1939, at a time when James Mooney of General Motors was claiming that Hitler was indicating a willingness for disarmament.20 Regardless of how anyone might wish to guess at Hitler's real intent in this offer, it is crucial to understand that Hitler's real crime in the eyes of Washington was that he took Germany away from the gold standard. This measure of capitalistic reform had worked more successfully than Roosevelt's New Deal efforts.
The US Department of the Treasury posts the description of the Fort Knox Bullion Depository:21
"The Depository was completed in December 1936 at a
cost of $560,000. It is located approximately 30 miles
southwest of Louisville, Kentucky, on a site which was for-
merly a part of the Fort Knox military reservation. The first gold was moved to the Depository by railroad in January 1937. That series of shipments was completed in June 1937."
In this context alone, Roosevelt and others like him were eager to tear Germany apart. The South African economist and gold mining executive Sir Henry Strakosch, in his 1935 study The Road to Recovery: With Special Reference to the Problem of Exchange Stability and the Restoration of the International Gold Standard, commented:22
"Substantial progress in this direction has already been achieved in America. [...] The German situation, on the other hand, remains hopelessly confused, not so much be- cause her problems are fundamentally so very different and so much more difficult, but because of the manner in which they are being faced. "
The main historical ambiguity which has been posed in re- gards to Strakosch is in his biographical background. Arthur Butz traces Strakosch' s birthplace back to Hochenau, Austria, on May 9, 1871, with several documentary source citations. Butz also finds little to hold up the reference to Strakosch as Jewish. David Irving simply throws out the comment:23
"Bracken 's South Africa friend Sir Henry Strakosch, the Gold mining millionaire and chairman of Union Corpora- tion Ltd., agreed to pay off Churchill's debts.45 Strakosch was a Jew born in Moravia, Czechoslovakia. Chartwell was withdrawn from the market, and Churchill campaigned on. " The specific footnoting of the first sentence and not the small paragraph indicates rather that Irving has no specific source available for either the stated birthplace of "Moravia, Czechoslovakia" or the asserted ethnic-cultural background. As Butz notes:22
"Thus Strakosch died a nominal Christian. That does not exclude the possibility that he was partially of Jewish descent or converted from Judaism, but neither David Ir- ving nor anybody else has been able to provide hard evi- dence in that respect. [...] Strakosch should, rather, have been described as 'a South African gold miner campaigning for restoration of the international gold standard. ' [...] Ir- ving 's treatment of Strakosch, however, has the unintended effect of camouflaging a very important dimension of the background to the Second World War. " The only thing which deserves to be added is that Irving has already been noted as someone who censors revisionists over 9/11. 24 For all of these reasons, barring further evidence to the contrary, we will discount Irving's description of Strakosch as sloppy, at a minimum, and potentially deliberate disinforma- tion.
The slogan "No War for Oil," which has appeared at many anti-war rallies since Washington began to occupy Iraq, had a natural analogy in Roosevelt's time, "No War for Gold." It simply wasn't treated in the same way. On this failure, the most immediately relevant factor to the left of that era was the Comintern line from Moscow and its endorsement of Roosevelt as a capitalist reformer seeking to preserve capitalism from in- ternal economic crisis via reform. Also pertinent, however, was the influence which even those expelled from the Comintern such as Trotsky had retained from the final conclusion of the
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Manifesto, that Germany should be where the proletarian revo- lution at last begins to genuinely take root and flower. These political and ideological influences clouded the ability of many who often showed sharp critical capacities when the context was shifted elsewhere. The self-admitted willingness of A. J. P. Taylor to swallow certain propaganda myths in relation to Germany which he openly repudiated later is just one of the better known cases.25
When the US did enter the war, the Smith Act first fell against the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, a case which set the legal precedent for later applications of the Smith Act.26 By this time Trotsky had been assassinated under Stalin's orders and the SWP saw itself as upholding the thesis put forward by Trot- sky that the war between the capitalist states was inter-imperialist in nature, while any defeat of the Soviet state by any capitalist power was resolutely opposed. This was a sharp enough depar- ture from Roosevelt's push for war alongside Stalin that the Smith Act was brought out. Serving his sentence at Sandstone on 9/21/1944, Cannon wrote back to Rose Karsner about the 9/16/1944 issue of the SWP's newspaper The Militant?1
"We read in the The Militant, September 16, that the re- ports of the slaughter of 1,500,000 persons in one camp at Lublin 'have been confirmed by independent observers. ' We have never doubted the inhuman brutality of Nazism, but we don 't believe this story - the 1,500,000 part, we mean - and we believe our press not only should treat any story coming from Stalinist sources with the utmost reserve, but also should look for the political implications of their lies. The atrocity propaganda in general must be regarded as the moral and political preparation for a harsh peace whereby the German masses will be indicted for Hitler 's crimes. We should not believe anything that is said in the war camps as long as we have no knowledge of the facts. Our task and our duty is to distrust all the propaganda of the enemies of mankind and to teach this distrust to the readers of our press. But what about the 'independent observers'? I'll tell you what about it. To see such a queasy liberal journalist locution in our press just once had a bad effect on our blood pressure. "
Though Cannon is frequently cited today among various Trotskyite groups, and his clear rejection of fascism as a na- tionalistic philosophy to be counter-posed to his view of inter- national communism is frequently emphasized, the most central point is generally buried. The only time Cannon can be found to have put a statement down on record which somehow per- tains to 'Nazi death camps' was when he immediately rejected this figure of 1,500,000 for Lublin. Furthermore, this part of Cannon's views has already been 'officially confirmed' in that by 1948 the figure had been changed to 360,000 and by 1992 to 235,000. Though these lower figures are also sharply contested on technical grounds,28 the 'official figures' do themselves al- ready give the lie to the "the 1,500,000 part, we mean," and discredit authors such as Lucy Dawidowicz, who gives a figure of 1,380,000 for Lublin-Majdanek.29 In the abstract, one might very well expect many of the different Trotskyite splinter fac- tions that exist to point to this verification of Cannon's state- ment as evidence of his foresight. Instead, the mute silence treatment is given.
Further questions are raised by Trotsky's 9/25/1939 com- ments:30
"If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletar- ian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. [...] If, however, it is conceded that the pre- sent war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the fur- ther decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. [...] The historic alter- native, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin re- gime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society, or the Stalin regime is the first stage in the development of a new exploiting society. [...] However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world prole- tariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mis- sion placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program, based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia. It is self-evident that a new 'minimum' program would be required - for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society. "
The picture that shows through in such a passage is primar- ily one of a person fighting demoralization in seeking to hold onto his view of the coming proletarian revolution. But also, one is obligated to ask, "how would Trotsky have responded to the same report from Lublin which his protege Cannon scoffed at?" More fundamentally, "what type of long-term problem might Trotsky have posed for the post-war Holocaust propa- ganda enterprise which Moscow and Tel Aviv jointly imple- mented?" Whatever someone's assessment of Trotsky, every- thing that is known about his personality indicates that over the long run he would have become a troublesome sore for those putting across the story of the 'Holocaust,' if only just out of political rivalry with Stalin.
Victim numbers of German concentration camps have al- ways been a matter of propaganda. Robert Faurisson has pub- lished a list of such exaggerated numbers and their inventors for the Auschwitz camp.31 How many inmates really died in that camp has yet to be established. Since it is claimed that those victims were incinerated in crematories erected for that purpose, one approach is to determine an upper limit by calcu- lating how many corpses those crematories could have cre- mated at most. Carlo Mattogno's research is at the cutting edge of science in this regard,32 which is acknowledged even by his adversaries.33 Based on a thorough study of documents and technical issue, Mattogno concludes that not more than 162,000 corpses could have been cremated in Auschwitz - in contrast to post-war propaganda figures claiming that 4 million or even more inmates were killed and incinerated.
A deeper look into one of the most (in)famous Auschwitz eyewitnesses, Miklos Nyiszli,34 is also worthwhile here, be- cause when reading it carefully, it indirectly confirms Mat- togno's assessments, although Mattogno himself went at length - and quite successfully so - to show that Nyiszli 's testimony is
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a fraud otherwise. Miklos Nyiszli's testimony had already been looked at cautiously by Paul Rassinier, who in April 1951 wrote a letter in regards to the early extracts of Nyiszli's writ- ings published in French translation by Le Temps Modernes, only to receive an indirect answer the following October in the form of a letter from "Nyiszli" transmitted by Tibere Kremer. Rassinier was later informed that Nyiszli had died well before the initial French translation of his testimony was published, sometime around 1949-50. This did, for a time, set off a wave of speculation as to whether such a person had ever existed.36 Eventually questions shifted to the disappearance of the "real Nyiszli." Also pertinent, though, is the query as to why so little interest was shown in Nyiszli by the official handlers of his book. The difference in style between Yehuda Bauer's fore- word to Filip Miiller's propaganda37 novel38 Eyewitness Auschwitz'' versus Bruno Bettelheim's foreword and Richard Seaver's introduction with regards to Nyiszli is apparent. Bauer presents some brief sketchy outline of Miiller's post-war life:40 "He returned to his Czechoslovak home after the war. A summary of his testimony was included in a book on Czechoslovakia in 1946 (published in English in 1966 as The Death Factory, by O. Kraus and E. Kulka). He was moved to write again by the effect of his testimony at the Auschwitz trial' at Frankfurt, in 1964. Afterwards he be- gan writing up what he had jotted down, had it translated into German, then looked for a publisher. " No similar sketch is provided by Bettelheim or Seaver. Rather, they each combine amateur philosophy with references to Nyiszli's claimed war-time experience. Nor do they refer to any question hanging in the air of unknown post-war details. The closest thing to a biographical detail, produced by Seaver, is the reference to "his city, Oradea-Nagyvarad."41 This raises some flags, if only just because the final page of a dissertation written under this name of Nyiszli claims that "I, Nicolaus Ny- iszli, was born on June 17, 1901 in Simleul-Silvaniei," a locale that is distinctly to the northeast of Oradea-Nagyvarad. In addi- tion, the book's first appearance seems to have been in the Bu- dapest newspaper World from February 16 to April 5, 1947, with repeated references to a Hungarian doctor from Nagyva- rad.42 This blurring of 'where is he from and where did he go?' would normally excite curiosity from purported academics, yet it has clearly been buried as an issue in the various 'introduc- tions' and advertisements.
On July 28, 1945, according to the records of the Nurem- burg Tribunal, a deposition entitled "Deposition: Miklof Nyifcli A Physician from Nagyvarod in Hungary" was written by someone.42 Though major doubts have been cast on the validity and the source of the Nuremberg Documents, we are generally meant to assume that this "Physician from Nagyvarod in Hun- gary" was, in fact, the same person with "Place of birth: Sim- leul, Rumania." Alternatively, if one was to cast dispersion on this early document as a possible fabrication by the Nuremberg Tribunal, then the query would have to be 'At what point did Nyiszli himself become a part of the project leading to the later book that came after the deposition, given that purported friends of his did claim to have witnessed him writing the book personally?' With this in mind, there's no denying that such an origin for the original document would explain much about the
seeming errors in it. This would also explain such testimonial comments as "From the prisoner's doctors, of which we had several ones, I only knew Dr. Niczly by name. He was an im- posing presence, a bit fat" by Milton Buki of Poland; and "a companion, who was helping with the carrying of the corpse, commented she had recognized Dr. Nyiszlit Miklos, a deported physician, as she said, she knew Nyiszlit still from Nagyvara" from Mrs. Jozsef Sabo of Hungary. This recurring of "Nagy- vara" as a consistently recalled detail, even as the spelling of "Miklos Nyiszli" fluctuates, is highly consistent with a quick manufacture of evidence by a bureaucratic machine such as the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Even so, Nyiszli's book has been held up on many an occa- sion as a powerful example of "Holocaust testimony" and, as such, deserves to be noted. Some pertinent details to note are the following. When describing an alleged attempt by "860 members of the kommando to try and force their way out of the camp" on October 6, 1944, Nyiszli asserts:43
"The plans seemed all the more feasible to me for the simple reason that the only crematorium working was num- ber one. And even it would knock off work at 6:00 P.M., which meant that the Sonderkommando night shift would not go on duty that evening. "
Although made in the manner of an out-of-the-way com- ment, this would seem to reflect, even in a novel produced for political propaganda purposes, the reality that a 12-hour operat- ing shift had been recommended on March 17, 1943, and that the crematoria were going dead nevertheless. In other words: Mattogno's maximized cremation figures are probably too high, because the crematories did not operate 24/7 - with some interruption for cleaning, maintenance, and repairs - as he as- sumed. According to Nyiszli, there was no need to have the crematories work around the clock. . .
Charles D. Provan is self-classified as being
"a revisionist and an exterminationist [...] who believes in the gas chambers. [...] Intrigued by the numerous criti- cisms of Dr. Nyiszli in the revisionist literature, I decided to undertake a study of his book to determine if it could be substantiated. I got more than I bargained for. " Provan can therefore not be called an 'official handler' of Nyiszli. Provan was able to contact his granddaughter Monica and obtain "Information about Nyiszli's subsequent life":42
"Dr. Nyiszli and his wife Margareta had one daughter, Susanna, born in 1929, while Dr. Nyiszli was attending medical school in Breslau. Susanna had indeed married a gentile, a Romanian cavalry officer, in 1952, and their daughter (and Nyiszli's granddaughter) Monica was born in 1955. Miklos Nyiszli passed away on May 5, 1956; his daughter Susanna passed away in 1983. Before his death, the Romanian secret police placed Nyiszli under investiga- tion for 'cosmopolitanism, ' perhaps in part because of his correspondence with people in the West. About fifteen years after Nyiszli 's death, when Monica was around sixteen, the secret police confiscated some of his papers, including a map he had drawn of Birkenau. It was not returned. " This raises some questions in itself, since Nyiszli's harass- ment by the Rumanian secret police was never widely publi- cized in the manner of the Raoul Wallenberg legend,44 not even
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during the Cold War at a time when Rabbi Meir Kahane re- ceived funding from the CIA's Jay Lovestone and the Syndi- cate's Meyer Lansky.45 This was an era when the Holocaust Memorials across the United States were built with falsified versions of the Martin Niemoller quote,46 falsifications which served the Cold Warriors and Zionists alike. One might easily have expected a campaign around Nyiszli's fate by Elie Wiesel. Instead, on the contrary, the introduction by Tibere Kremer in March 1951 gave the impression of a Hungarian Jew, not a Rumanian.47 Even where the history of territorial shifts in World War I and the possession of what is now northern Ru- mania by what was until 1918 Austria-Hungary, is taken into account48 as a technical point, it doesn't explain the absence of quick elaboration on this query of 'was Nyiszli Hungarian or Rumanian?' One would expect a brief commentary, similar to Bauer's note on Miiller, to intersect Nyiszli in Rumania in the foreword and introduction to Nyiszli's assumed book.
Yet one possibly pertinent statement is furnished by the tes- timony of Grace Pratt, or rather of her friend. The latter has supposedly asserted:49
"Six days after Jack Ruby 's funeral was publicized in the press, Grace called me very excited and said, T was just watching the news. They turned the TV camera on a ramp up to a plane loading for Israel from New York, and who do you think went up the ramp? I screamed to George in the other room, calling him and saying, 'Come quickly! Jack Ruby is boarding that plane! ' ' At the top of the ramp he stopped, turned around, and looking straight into the cam- era he tipped his hat and entered the plane. " However one wishes to ultimately assess this story, it points towards at least one plausible explanation in regards to Nyiszli. If Nyiszli really had become alienated from the Jewish commu- nity in his region after his record as a war-time collaborator with the enemy of that era, then he certainly would have had incentive to seek redemption. In the general time-frame for Ny- iszli's death that was given originally to Rassinier, between the writing of Nyiszli's post-war manuscript and the initial French translation, Stalin was still going through a political motion in regards to his attitude towards Zionism. Starting with a secret Czech arms deal,50 which supported the Zionist settlers in Pal- estine in the 1948 war, Stalin moved towards the "Doctor's Plot."51 But this political shift did not occur overnight. Al- though the version of Nyiszli being placed under the watch of the Rumanian Stalinist police for "cosmopolitanism" fits per- fectly well within 1956, the image of Nyiszli, or someone writ- ing in his name, being offered around 1949-50 a trip from East- ern Europe to Israel as part of an agreement that his book would support the general popular-frontist line of Moscow, and that Tel Aviv would help to market the book, is just as consis- tent as many another given explanation. To really answer these two related questions, of what happened to Nyiszli and why did the World Jewish Congress and related organizations treat the matter as they did, will require a much more detailed probing that has not yet been done.
On February 14, 1947, advertisements for the soon-to-be- published serialized book of "Dr. Miklos Nyiszli of Nagyva- rad" began appearing in the Budapest World newspaper. By April 10, Nyiszli was responding to reader's criticism, "In the
Communist Party, of which I am a member, they call me 'Com- rade Doctor,' and that's the way it should be." One would as- sume here that the Rumanian Communist Party is what is meant, even with the serialization being promoted in Hungary rather than Rumania. Yet again one must ask 'why this specific promotion in Hungary rather than Rumania?' Certainly a plau- sible conjecture would follow from the hypothesis that "Miklos Nyiszli" had, in fact, been assigned the job of legitimizing something that was originally written in his name by the Nur- emberg Tribunal, so that the new task required specifically pub- licizing the book in those areas that were identified by the ear- lier deposition statement. On September 30 it was announced by World newspaper that the author of "the extremely interest- ing novel" had been summoned by the Soviet delegate to the Nuremberg Tribunal, E. E. Minskoff. With this summons, the card catalogs of the Nuremberg records now describe Nyiszli as "Dr. Nicolae Nyiszli, born [...] in Simleul-Silvanei, requested [...] by Minskoff."42 The difference here between "Miklos" and "Nicolae" is much more along the lines of a translation between languages than some of the other divergences of the name "Miklos Nyiszli" which are very similar to simple typographi- cal errors. Yet, somehow, the effect of this identification of Ny- iszli's locale of birth doesn't seem to be reflected in later publi- cations, which relentlessly return to the emphasis on "his city, Oradea-Nagyvarad" without an attempt at biographical detail or explanation. The card listing "Simleul-Silvanei" faded quickly, perhaps, in part, because Nyiszli was not actually called to tes- tify on this summons, despite his taking a trip to Nuremberg.
This hypothesis is in some ways further encouraged by the evidence that there likely were at least two "Lee Harvey Oswalds." The number of selectively consistent yet broadly conflicting reports of Oswald sightings prior to November 22, 1963, has pointed to this as a likely explanation.52 If one trans- lates the same phenomenon to Miklos Nyiszli, then many of the apparent inconsistencies between stories of Nyiszli being dead by 1950 versus alive until 1956 could be resolved. With such an assumption made, the question would be posed as to whether both "Nyiszlis" died at the indicated dates, one in 1949 and an- other in 1956, or whether something else happened with one of them.
Let us now go back to the Trotskyite left and the important issue of what exactly happened with it in the post-war era. Cannon was more of a labor union organizer than a theoreti- cian. When the post-war era made clear that Trotsky's forecast of the imminent collapse of Stalinism under the force of prole- tarian revolution had not materialized, the Fourth International tended to split organizationally and politically in two directions. The first direction was set early by Max Shachtman, who had already in 1940 been formally expelled from the Fourth Inter- national. The second was oriented around Michel Pablo.53 Al- though one could go through the various theoretical somer- saults which the different factions engaged in, the bare essen- tials of this split were that Shachtman moved increasingly closer towards the CIA and in the '70s campaigned for Richard Nixon, while Pablo headed steadily into uncritical echoing and endorsement of Stalinism. In such a context, the framework for arguments about what form should an 'independent left' take was increasingly guided by this Shachtman-Pablo paradigm.
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Political splits which took place among the left in the coming decades were generally about some faction being attacked for either leaning to close to Shachtmanism or to close to Pabloism. In such a context, any serious debate about what actually hap- pened in WWII was effectively buried.
Meanwhile, the policy in Moscow, and among the various Comintern-born parties which still maintained an allegiance to Moscow, was determined by the division of power in the post- war era. While Moscow took over Eastern Europe, Stalin acted to isolate guerillas in Greece who were still fighting the UK and US after WWII;54 the French and Italian Communist Parties were directed to give up arms to the occupation forces and work with the occupation governments;55 the Vietnamese were pressured by Moscow and Peking into accepting a North-South division of Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu had nearly brought about the collapse of colonialism in Indochina.56 This way of seeking to divide up spheres of influence necessitated that the Popular Front strategy of the CPUSA required a continued maintenance of the 'Nazi death camp' legend. The reason for this was that Moscow's efforts to carve out power-splitting deals for its own purposes required that a Comintern member be prepared to accept something like the counter-insurgency campaign in Greece waged by London and Washington without putting on too much of an 'anti-war' air. A safer form of post- war Comintern propaganda was, rather, to place primary stress on the way that 'America and Russia fought together against the Nazis, we can all be friends again,' while being prepared to downplay questions about CIA coups in Iran or Guatemala.
A new wave of political splits began occurring on the Sta- linist front after 1956 and Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech. Some of the splits from the Stalinist left moved instead towards some brand of anarchism, pacifism, or even Trotsky- ism,57 others moved across further to the right and became Zi- onists. Of course, to go from being a Moscow-oriented Stalinist to a Tel Aviv-oriented Zionist gave no major reason for altering the Moscow-line about 'genocide in the Nazi concentration camps.' It simply involved a political shift in one's present-day leanings. Those elements who moved away from Stalinism but didn't consign their left-wing orientation to the dustbin of his- tory were, instead, quickly drawn into the Shachtman-Pablo paradigm that had overwhelmed the Trotskyist Fourth Interna- tional. Again, this only inhibited critical inquiry of what actu- ally occurred in WWII.
At the same time, the aura of 'diversity of opinion' which all seemed to willingly accept, on the surface, gave the WWII propaganda a higher credibility than anyone would have as- signed to the propaganda of WWI. Yet for the duration of the 1950s, the story of 'six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis' mainly survived within explicitly Stalinist or Zionist sources. Jean Paul Sartre, aligned in the '50s with the French CP,58 came out promoting Miklos Nyiszli's variation of an 'Auschwitz memoir,' a book that was sharply critiqued by the French So- cialist and former Dachau prisoner Paul Rassinier. When James Cannon spoke on May 30, 1943, of "the betrayal of the prole- tariat in the Second World War, first to Hitler and then to Roo- sevelt and Churchill"; on March 9, 1956, of "the Stalin-Hitler pact, which precipitated the Second World War";59 and on various occasions in these decades of the '40s and '50s, it was
not to recall any 'Nazi death camps with gas chambers.' The one recorded comment by him about this remains his note to Karsner in 1944 where he rejected the story around Lublin.
Within the strategic planning centers of Washington, the perspective was somewhat parallel, although sharply different in formal political orientation. After a wave of post-war trials based on evidence that would never be considered admissible in any other context, many sectors of the US Establishment (in- cluding even Zionist Cold Warriors such as James Jesus Angle- ton, the CIA head of Counter-intelligence) were prone to sim- ply shift the language of the 'Good War' into the Cold War framework with a re-aligning of formal enemies and priori- ties.60 However, the historical link between the war-time OSS and the post-war CIA was such that no one among the CIA of the '50s would have felt much inclination to suggest that the forced confessions used at the Nuremberg Trials should be given a serious review. Instead, it was assumed that the matter would quietly fade.
There are several indicators showing that the claim of an in- dustrial extermination of Jews in homicidal gas chambers by National Socialist Germany was not as manifested a dogma in the United States as it is today. For example, in November 1944, George Gallup ran a poll across the US:
"Do you believe the stories that the Germans have mur- dered many people in concentration camps? "
The response was: 76% Yes, 12% No, 12% No Opinion. Asked for estimates on the numbers which they felt had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, the poll response was:
36%: 0- 100,000
14%: 100,000+- 1,000,000
16%: 1,000,000+ -6,000,000+
33%: No Opinion.
A common fallacy is to distinguish WWII atrocity stories from those of WWI by characterizing the latter as being luridly related to a fantasy world, and attempting to contrast this with WWII stories. In fact, the precedent for all of this set by Martin Glynn in 1919, and the religious connotation of the "6,000,000" figure noted in the 1919 context, underscores the relation of WWII propaganda to a fantasy world. On December 9, the cap- tured concentration camp of Natzweiler was inspected by Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully of the American 6th Army Group. Shown a space "allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber," they characterized it as the "so-called le- thal gas chamber."61 Given that the establishment history of Dawidowicz lists 6 out of 7 of the Polish camps (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka; Stutthof left out) as the "annihilation camps" with gas chambers, we can see the vindication of the cautious attitude of Kirk and Gully.62
In the type-written portion of his diary, John F. Kennedy wrote on June 30, 1945:63
"General Eisenhower has taken a great hold on the hearts of all the British people. [...] He was heard to say [...] 'To think that I, a boy from Abilene, Kansas, am the Commander of troops like those! ' He never lost that humble way and therefore easily won the hearts of those with whom he worked. Montgomery, on the other hand, while holding a unique position himself, won it the other way. Shortly before
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he went to take over the Eighth Army in the desert, Mont- gomery was heard to say, A military career is a hard one - you win a battle and you are a hero - you lose one and you are disgraced. ' The man with whom he talked said, 'Cheer up, General, you should do well -you have good troops and fine equipment. ' 'But, ' said Montgomery with some sur- prise, T wasn 't thinking about myself, I was thinking of Rommel. ' The Duchess said that the slaughter in the first war was extreme. Of seventy-five young men that she had known in 1914, seventy were killed in the war. [...] This tremendous slaughter had its effect on British policy in the 30 's when Chamberlain and Baldwin could not bring them- selves to subject the young men of Britain to the same hor- rible slaughter again. "
This diary entry betrays an element of sympathy for a de- feated enemy, weighed in the context of what suffering allies have gone through. It also shows an early sense of empathy for Eisenhower, who would one day as President be caught in a major political contest with Israel. In a 1960 interview with Hugh Sidey, JFK expressed a general contempt for older mili- tary minds against a modern nuclear context, figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Basil Henry Liddell Hart, but exempted George Marshall, Douglas MacAr- thur, and Dwight Eisenhower with the comment:
"It 's amazing that this country picked those men to run things. [...] Never underestimate democracy. " At the time of Kennedy's inauguration, Sidey recounts Ei- senhower pointing to southeast Asia on a map:
"This is one of the problems I'm leaving you that I'm not happy about. We may have to fight. " Sidey further elaborated:
"As he rode to the Capitol, Kennedy listened to Eisen- hower at his side. The retiring president told him that somehow he had felt the Russians never would start a war if this country remained firm enough. "
This is of general significance, since one of the conse- quences of the propaganda film JFK, which Warner Brothers and Oliver Stone put out in 1 99 1 , was to push the heroic image of JFK as someone in principled conflict with the whole of the US power elite and all its caretakers.64 Warner Brothers was acquired in 1967 by Meyer Lansky's Mossad-laundering Seven Arts Productions and became Warner-Seven Arts with "major blocks of stock" owned by Bernard Cornfeld's alternate face of the Mossad, Investors Overseas Service. Despite the overin- flated image of JFK as a grand new frontier man that is put across in the Mossad-Stone PSYOP film, it is essential to un- derstand the continuity of flow that went from Eisenhower to Kennedy, and the troubles which Eisenhower had already had.65
On August 1, the same type-written diary of John F. Ken- nedy carried:66
"After visiting these two places, you can easily under- stand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most sig- nificant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambitions for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and
grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made. "
This passage is mainly of significance in illustrating that JFK could easily see through the Holyhoax propaganda that was just in its early stages at this point. Whether or not he actu- ally had any "insider's" knowledge to the Holyhoax is another matter, though at this time his position in the US Government was close enough to the propaganda machine that he very well may have.
Possible hopes by the US intelligence community that their own post-war propaganda stories would eventually fade away were upset by the 1960s. As Moscow's credibility went down after de-Stalinization, while the onset of the Cold War ended the original basis for Moscow ordering its political allies to back Roosevelt, waves of protest against the new war in Viet- nam and racial segregation on the homefront began breaking out, especially heavily among college students who had grown with an image that somehow WWII had been a grand fight for high ideals. Elie Wiesel's career was launched in this frame- work. In 1968, when French students protesting the attempted deportation of Daniel Cohn-Bendit raised the slogan "We are all German Jews," Wiesel quickly labeled this with the mantra of 'Holocaust insensitivity.' It became clear to the upper layers of the power elite in North America that basic measures of propaganda had to involve playing upon the myth of the 'Good War' which was made with the blessings of Dear Old Uncle Joe, yet in such a fashion that Cold War anti-communism would be bound to WWII anti-fascism, while communism, anti-anti-communism, fascism and anti-anti-fascism would all be deliberately tied together.
One of the crudest but earliest efforts in this direction was the late-'60sTV sit-com Hogan's Heroes. The biggest weak- ness in this initial effort was that it too heavily (and honestly) echoed the Nuremberg Tribunal atmosphere. The Nuremberg Tribunal had been able to charge defendants with using atomic bombs so that "20,000 people were eradicated almost instanta- neously, and in such a way that there was no trace,"67 even as Miklos Nyiszli presented an 'eyewitness testimony' which por- trayed temperamentally stupid Germans. Hogan 's Heroes fol- lowed in this path of presenting very stupid Germans who somehow managed to provide sabotage work for prisoners who could have escaped anytime.68 This type of imagery could sell easily after WWII, but it was getting stretched by 1971.
The next really major move to rehabilitate the 'Good War' came in April 1978 with NBC and The Holocaust.69 Although this came in for a ritual denunciation from Elie Wiesel, some of the cruder aspects of Hogan 's Heroes were cleaned away. At the same time this TV series fell within a sequential pattern that launched the post- Vietnam era with Star Wars (overtly non- political, despite comparisons with 'Cowboys and Indians' films), continued on to The Holocaust (politics begin to enter, but this is placed in the framework of the 'Good War'), began in- troducing Vietnam with The Deer Hunter, and finally graduated to out-and-out Cold War propaganda with Rambo. Out of this se- quence, the one that carried some overt politics and was most successful in achieving its propaganda aim was The Holocaust.
It was in such a context that Jimmy Carter announced a commission to create a national memorial to "the six million
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who were killed in the Holocaust." From here on the promotion of Holocaust literature, films, and museums became a steadily growing industry, one which many of the various left-wing groups that had grown out of the '50s and '60s felt very hesi- tant to challenge in any direct way, as they often had with other branches of American capitalism. This fact alone guaranteed the Holocaust Industry a solid place at the table set by Ameri- can monopoly capital. It is unavoidable to note that the launch- ing of the Holocaust Industry in the '70s, though at times rais- ing the issue of Christian anti-Semitism, did, in fact, also corre- spond with the growth of the Christian Coalition during the same time-frame of the '70s and '80s. Yet many groups that formally placed themselves on the left-wing of American poli- tics during this period tended to still buy up to the notion, put across by Stalin in the immediate post-WWII era, that 'Re- membering the Holocaust is a way to fight the right.'
To really grasp this correspondence in the political growth of the Holocaust Industry and the Christian Coalition it is worthwhile to recall Benjamin Blech's assertion that the Holo- caust as a premonition for the re-birth of Israel was a type of ancient religious prophecy. In general, people who leave relig- ion of any type behind and either shift to a different religion or become atheists are influenced in this choice less by any spe- cific sins they may see around them (since almost every relig- ion contains some concept of sin as something that is in some way to be not only expected but even forecast) and more by what seems an apparent failure of prophecy. Although the Holocaust Industry has periodically projected the image of 'Christian sin,' the fact that it is possible to align it with a spe- cific prophecy would, if anything, make it into a political mag- net for the Christian Coalition.. The actual events square quite well with this hypothesis. Yet as a source of right-wing propa- ganda, the Holocaust Industry was frequently marketed to the political left under the guise of anti-anti-communism (if Uncle Joe helped to fight this, then he wasn't all bad).
As a political maneuver in fighting what Norman Podhoretz called the "Vietnam syndrome," "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,"70 the Holocaust Industry clearly played a key role. The fact that numerous groups which 'will- ingly acknowledged' the claims of the Holocaust Industry (whether out of a self-perceived 'honest investigation' or a reminiscence for Dear Old Uncle Joe or some other reason en- tirely different) also attempted to resist the rollback of the "Vietnam Syndrome" doesn't alter the basic direction which was served by this industry. Nor did the end of the Cold War. If anything, the sudden disappearance of the "Evil Empire" and the opportunities for military expansion into the Persian Gulf which it opened up, together with the sudden expectation of a "peace dividend"71 by large sectors of the US public, only rein- forced the stress on the 'Good War' by US Establishment propaganda.
Since 1945 there has been a slow steady growth of literature which sheds light on WWII that was once thought impermissi- ble to look at.72 Yet the long-term intellectually crippling ef- fects of so-called revolutionary groups being unable to look ra- tionally at this piece of the past have been devastating. At a time when the "Vietnam Syndrome" has shown itself to be very much alive, many remain stuck in the past in ways that only aid
those who would wish to rollback the "Vietnam Syndrome" once and for all.
Notes
1 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 9-10, (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1973).
I Ibid., p. 44.
3 Georgi Plekhanov, "Socialism and the Political Struggle," "Second Draft Programme of the Russian Social-Democrats," Selected Philosophical Works, Vol I., p. 44, (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1974).
4 F. Engels, "Bismarck and the German Working Men's Party," Labour Stan- dard, No. 12, July 23, 1881; A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History, (New York, New York: Capricorn Books, 1962).
5 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, pp. 63, 108, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970).
6 L. Trotsky, "Germany, the Key to the International Situation," November 26, 1931, Ernest Mandel, (ed.), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971).
7 Richard Pipes, (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, pp. 128-9, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1996).
8 Germar Rudolf, "Holocaust Victims: A Statistical Analysis," in: Germar Rudolf, (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, (Chicago, Illinois: Theses & Dis- sertations Press, 2003).
9 Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust, pp. 91, 135, (Chicago, Illinois: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2003).
10 Leon Trotsky, My Life, pp. 236-7, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973).
II Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1970).
12 Leon Trotsky, On the Jewish Question, p. 29, (New York, New York: Path- finder Press, 1994).
13 James P. Cannon, "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," The First Ten Years of American Communism, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980).
14 Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, pp. 84, 236, 258, (New York, New York: Bantam Books, 1981).
15 Germar Rudolf, (preface), in D. Heddesheimer, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 11-13.
16 Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the age of the dictators, (Westport, CT: Croom Helm, 1983).
17 Vladimir Lenin, "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination," Lenin Col- lected Works, V. 20, p. 393-454 (London, England: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977).
18 Leon Trotsky, Leon Trotsky On the Jewish Question, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996).
19 Joachim Hoffmenn, Stalin 's War of Extermination, (Capshaw, Alabama: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001).
20 Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, p. 68, (Boston, Massachusetts, and New York, New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1998).
21 www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/currency/fort-knox.html
22 Arthur Butz, "Was Churchill's Gold Bug Jewish?," Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, (Costa Mesa, California: Institute for Historical Re- view, January /February 2002); see also the updated version "Sir Henry Strakosch 'a Jew'?", The Revisionist 1(4) (2003), p. 412-415.
2j David Irving, Churchill's War: The Struggle for Power, p. 104, (London, England: Arrow Books Limited, 1989).
24 Salvador Astucia, "David Irving, Another False Prophet (?)," www.]' fkmontreal. com/ dirvingemails . htm.
25 A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, (Greenwich, Con- necticut: Fawcett Books, 1961).
26 James P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1997).
27 James P. Cannon, Letters from Prison: A Revolutionary Party Prepares for Post-WWII Labor Battles, pp. 172f., (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1994).
28 Jiirgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek: A Historical and Technical Study, pp. 1 If., (Chicago, Illinois: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2003).
29 L. Dawidowicz, op. cit. (note 14), p. 200.
30 Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, pp. 48-50, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995).
31 Robert Faurisson, "How many deaths at Auschwitz?", The Revisionist, 1(1) (2003), pp. 17-23.
32 Carlo Mattogno, "The Crematoria Ovens of Auschwitz," in G. Rudolf, (ed.),
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op. cit. (note 8), pp. 373-412, here p. 407.
Fritjof Meyer, former chief editor of the Hamburg news magazine Der Spiegel, used Mattogno's results in his paper "Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkenntnisse durch neue Archivfunde" (The Number of Auschwitz Victims: New Revelations Through New Archival Discoveries), Osteuropa. Zeitschrift fur Gegenwartsfragen des Osiens, No. 5, May 2002, pp. 631-641. The article is available in English online at http://www.vho.Org/GB/c/Meyer.html; editor's note. Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor 's Eyewitness Account, (New York, New York: Arcade Publishing, Co., 1993); original Hungarian edition: Bon- coloorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i krematdriumban, Vilag, 1946. Carlo Mattogno, "Medico ad Auchwitz" : Anatomia di un falso, Edizioni La Sfinge, Parma 1988; editor's note.
Paul Rassinier, The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses, p. 246, (Costa
Mesa, California: Institute for Historical Review, 1978), pp. 248f.
See Jiirgen Grafs analysis in Auschwitz. Tdtergestandnisse und Augenzeu-
gen des Holocaust, Neue Visionen, Wiirenlos 1994, witness, no. 18; editor's
note.
J.-C. Pressac classified Miiller's story as a novel, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. New York 1989, p. 181; editor's note.
Filip Miiller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1979). Y. Bauer, (foreword), Miiller, op. cit. (note 39), p. x. Richard Seaver, (introduction), M. Nyiszli, op. cit. (note 34), p. 6. Charles D. Provan, "New Light on Dr. Miklos Nyiszli and His Auschwitz Book," Journal of Historical Review, Volume 20, Number I, pp. 20-35, (Newport Beach, California: Institute for Historical Review, January- February, 2001).
M. Nyiszli, op. cit. (note 34), pp. v-xviii, 5-10, 156, 167. Robert Cherry, "Holocaust Historiography and the Cold War," Science and Society, Volume 63, Number 4, pp. 472-4, (New York, New York: The Guilford Press, Winter 1999-2000).
Robert Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane - From FBI In- formant to Knesset Member, pp. 66-7, 144, (Brooklyn, New York: Law- rence Hill Books, 1990).
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 221, 337n(58), (Boston, Massachusetts and New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999).
P. Rassinier, op. cit. (note 36), p. 244.
Corelli Barnett, The Great War, pp. 14, 181, (New York, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1980).
Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assas- sination Conspiracy, p. 182f, (Washington, D.C.: The Wolfe Press, 1995). Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploita- tion of Jewish Suffering, p. 25, (New York, New York: Verso, 2000). Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 802-7 (New York, New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 1989).
Richard Popkin, The Second Oswald, (New York, New York: Avon Books, A Division of The Hearst Corporation, 1966).
James P. Cannon, Speeches to the Party: The Revolutionary Perspective and the Revolutionary Party, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980).
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy - 1943-1945, pp. 53-4, 443-4, (New York, New York: Pantheon Books, 1990).
Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power, pp. 223-4, (New York, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972).
George McTurnan Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam, p. 60, (New York, New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1986). Robert Alexander, International Trotskyism: 1929-1985 - A Documented Analysis of the Movement, p. 473, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1991).
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, p. 48, (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1988). James P. Cannon, Speeches for Socialism, pp. 107, 149, (New York, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971)..
Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany - A Pledge Betrayed, (New York, New York: Granada Pub- lishing Limited, 1983); John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, (New York, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1994). Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, pp. 9-10, 14, (New York, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
L. Dawidowicz, op. cit. (note 14), p. 200.
Deirdre Henderson, (ed.), Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy - Summer 1945, pp. xxv, 16-7, 92-3, (Washington, Dis- trict of Columbia: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1995).
Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Po- litical Culture, pp. 35-6, (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1993). M.C. Piper, op. cit. (note 49), p. 280. D. Henderson, (ed.), op. cit. (note 63), p. 74.
Carlos W. Porter, Made In Russia - The Holocaust, (Brighton, England: Historical Review Press, 1988). www.geocities.com/lrampey/hogan.htm P. Novick, op. cit. (note 46), pp. 133, 209-1 1, 216. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, p. 148, (New York, New York: Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws [America 's Search for a New Foreign Policy], p. 9, (New York, New York: Hill and Wang, A Divi- sion of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
Harry Elmer Barnes, (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, (Newport Beach, California: Institute for Historical Review, 1993); Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit, (New York, New York: The Free Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 2000).
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Does North Korea have "Nazi Gas Chambers?"
By Paul Grubach
Investor 's Business Daily is a widely read and very influen- tial mainstream financial publication in the United States. In the February 11, 2004, issue, p. A 14, there is an editorial about the North Korean Communist regime of Kim Jong-Il. The story it tells is strikingly similar to the "Hitler-Nazi gas chamber" leg- end of WWII.
The editorial claims that his government has apparently adopted the "Nazi gas chamber" method of mass murder. Sup- posedly, Kim has a secret "murder camp," Camp 22, set up in North Korea's northeastern corner. There also seems to be a somewhat similar North Korean counterpart to the German Ru- dolf H6I3, once commandant of Auschwitz who, according to legend, supervised killings in the Hitler gas chambers. This counterpart goes under the name of "Kwon Hyuk," and he al- legedly was "chief of management" of the camp. He supposedly escaped to the west and told his story to the western media. In a BBC documentary Kwon Hyukclaimed:
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. [...] The parents, son, and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till their very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing. "
In terminology that vaguely mirrors the "eyewitness" de- scriptions of the "Nazi gas chambers." Hyuk explained:
"Normally a family sticks together, and individual pris- oners stand separately around the corners [of the gas chamber]. " He added:
"Scientists observe the entire process [the mass gassing] from above, through glass. "
Just like the German scientists and SS men that allegedly looked through the "peepholes" in the Majdanek and Ausch- witz "gas chambers"!
The article claims that Kim "gasses to death" opponents of his regime and Christians, as well as their relatives, just as the Nazis "mass gassed" Jews and opponents of National Social- ism. The article adds:
"Reports indicate that those political prisoners who
aren 't killed by gassings are killed more slowly through
forced labor. "
The Investor's Business Daily editorial also states that documents smuggled out of the country "show" that prisoners are transferred to "murder Camp 22" for the purpose of human experimentation with liquid gas for chemical weapons. (An- other mirror image of the Josef Mengele saga?)
Recently, the ADL has urged the United Nations to take ac- tion. Their press release reads as follows:1
"ADL urged U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to take action on recent reports from the head of a North Korean Prison Camp that the North Korean government is using gas chambers to conduct experiments on political prisoners. 'Sixty years after the Holocaust, it is inconceivable that an- other totalitarian regime has begun to utilize gas chambers on its political enemies, ' Abraham Foxman wrote to the
Secretary General. 'The international community cannot remain silent in the face of these reports. We urge you to take the lead at investigating this horrifying report. Aside from the BBC documentary, the Investor's Business Daily editorial, and the ADL press release, I have not read or heard any more about this in the U.S. media. Revisionist scholar Dr. Robert Faurisson has informed me that in his native France there is very little press coverage of the whole issue. It is as if journalists do not really believe the story.
In regard to this North Korean "Nazi gas chamber" issue, revisionist publisher and publicist Bradley Smith commented:
"This is a good, dangerous story. Who knows what it might suggest? "
He has "hit the nail on the head," as there are two ways to look at it.
On the one hand, the Bush administration views this North Korean Stalinist regime as a threat to world peace and security. It very well could be that the CIA and other western intelli- gence organizations are simply recycling the propaganda myths from WWII that reaped benefits for the Allied powers. That is, this may be part of a "propaganda offensive" before the U.S. and other western nations take diplomatic and/or military action against North Korea. These intelligence organizations may think that if they can make the masses of people believe that the North Koreans are using gas chambers to commit mass murder, then this will help build up public support for diplomatic and/or military action against Kim's regime.
To cut a long story short, the North Korean "Nazi gas cham- bers" could indeed be propaganda inventions of western intelli- gence organizations like the CIA.
But on the other hand, consider this: Holocaust revisionists have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the WWII homi- cidal "Hitler gas chambers" are indeed a propaganda myth. Yet, this does not necessarily mean that the story of the North Ko- rean gas chambers is also a myth. The totalitarian regime of Kim seems to be a carbon copy (but in miniature) of the brutal and evil Communist regime of Joseph Stalin. Just as the Soviet dictator Stalin and his murderous cronies killed masses of peo- ple in their Gulags, it is certainly conceivable that Kim has cop- ied Stalinist methods and does have some type of program to murder dissidents and opponents. It is indeed possible that the North Korean Communists are murdering their opponents through starvation, forced labor, and exhaustion in their North Korean prison camps, just as Stalin murdered innocents and his opponents in the Soviet concentration camps.
It has never been stated, however, that the North Koreans copied "Nazi gas chamber technology" and are using Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, the exhaust from Russian tanks, or bottled carbon monoxide for their "gas chambers." It could be that the North Koreans are testing some type of new, modern-day mili- tary gas that could be used in a future war. It is at least possible that some evil and mad group of North Korean scientists built a gas chamber with modern day technology, and are using it to test some unknown type of gas on dissidents.
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My conclusion is this: Since this story has some obvious implications for the revisionist movement, we should follow it closely. It could very well turn out to be a modern-day case study of how atrocity propaganda is created and used for politi- cal and military purposes. But then again, maybe there is a ker- nel of truth to the whole thing. We revisionists should remain very skeptical of this North Korean "Nazi gas chamber" story, but we should also retain an open mind. We should demand hard evidence before we accept any of these atrocity stories. If western governments really do have good reason to believe that
North Korea is guilty of atrocities, then they should show their people the evidence so we may take appropriate action. But they should not embellish the truth with lies for the purpose of drumming up support for their political and military policies. The only thing this does is undermine the people's confidence in the western democratic system of government.
Note
1 Online: http://www.adl.org/HEADLINES/headlines_20040212.html
About Vampire Killers and Nincompoop
By Israel Shamir
Vampire Killers
Folk stories about vampires provide readers with various remedies to the calamity of a ghoulish attack. A fistful of graveyard dirt is favored, garlic is beneficial, and the cross is most efficient. But these remedies don't always work. In Ro- man Polansky's hilarious horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers, the hero tries to scare off a Jewish vampire by a sign of the cross. The Jew smiles at him with a kind, understanding smile straight from Fiddler on the Roof and bares his fangs. The cross does not ward him off. Polansky's work comes to mind as I follow the new wave of Holocaust controversies.
The revisionist historians, who are considered by their ad- versaries to be "Holocaust deniers", meet at conferences in or- der to compare their notes on Nazi genocide. The American Jewish establishment, including the Zionist Organization of America and the Anti-Defamation League, demands a ban on such conferences, and they were successful with this in Beirut in 2001 and again in Sacramento in 2004. The ZOA is not against revisionism as such. This organization pioneered the art of denying history and published, at the expense of American taxpayers, a booklet called Deir Yassin: History of a Lie.
Deir Yassin was a peaceful village the Jewish terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi attacked on the 9th of April 1948, mas- sacring its men, women and children. I do not want to repeat the gory tale of sliced off ears, gutted bellies, raped women, torched men, bodies dumped in stone quarries or the triumphal parade of the murderers. Existentially, all massacres are similar, from Babi Yar to Chain Gang to Deir Yassin.
ZOA revisionists have utilized all the same methods as their adversaries, the "deniers": they discount the eye-witness ac- counts of the survivors, the Red Cross, the British police, Jew- ish scouts and other Jewish observers, who were present at the scene of massacre. They even discount Ben Gurion's apology, since after all, the commanders of these gangs became in their turn prime ministers of the Jewish state. For ZOA, only the tes- timony of the murderers has any validity, that is, if the murder- ers are Jews. If the Jews are the victims, though, these same American Zionist organizations spare no effort in challenging revisionism.
This morally dubious position was no doubt of great com- fort to revisionists. By their flawed logic, if the Israelis are tell- ing a tall tale about what happened in 1948, perhaps the Jewish memories of the Holocaust are also flawed. It is misplaced en- ergy. Sure, they scored a few hits, and the tales of soap manu- factured from human fat and Wiesel's fiery furnaces were laid to rest. But these Revisionists also question the actual number of Jewish victims. If only a thousand Jews or Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis, it was a thousand too many. It is hardly an important issue, as the very definition of victim is based on interpretation.
A good example of "victim definition" was provided in last weekend's Haaretz, When the Gulf War ended in 1991, there was one reported Israeli victim of the war. Today, there are of- ficially one hundred Israelis who are recognized as victims of the Gulf War, and their dependents receive a pension at Iraqi expense. Some of the victims died of stress, some could not remove their gas masks and suffocated. The Haaretz article as- serted that many more claims were declined by the Israeli au- thorities. That is why Michael Elkins, the ex-BBC Jerusalem correspondent and an Israeli citizen, is correct in arguing that the number of victims, whether there were six or three million dead is not an issue.
The revisionists risked their lives and fortunes trying to un- dermine what they call "the Myth of the Holocaust". One can understand their interest. Nowadays, one may openly doubt the Immaculate Conception or (maybe) challenge the founding myths of Israel. Yet the cult of the Holocaust retains a unique, court-enforced prohibition against any investigation that might cast a doubt on its sacred dogma. Dogmas have a way of at- tracting critical minds. Still, behind this red muleta, the charg- ing bull's horns meet thin air. The arguments on gas chambers and soap production could be very interesting, but they are quite irrelevant. Where then is the matador?
A courageous step was taken by Dr Norman Finkelstein in his best-selling expose The Holocaust Industry,1 There is, how- ever, an important distinction between Dr Finkelstein and the "revisionist historians" gathered in Beirut. Dr Finkelstein, a son of holocaust survivors, stayed away from the possibly illegal
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statistical controversy and concentrated on the ideological con- struct of the Holocaust cult.
A fat lot of good it did him. A Jewish organization called "Lawyers without Borders" has already sued him in France. These lawyers were at perfect peace, when the Israeli legal ma- chine pronounced a six months probationary sentence on a Jew- ish murderer of a Gentile child. They did not move a finger when a 15-year-old girl, Suad, was placed in solitary confine- ment, refused legal aid and subjected to mental torture. They are visibly absent from Israeli military courts where a single Jewish officer can mete out a long imprisonment sentence to a Gentile civilian based on undisclosed evidence. Apparently, these lawyers are aware of certain borders.
Finkelstein set out to explore the secret of our discrete Jew- ish charm, a charm that opens American hearts and the coffers of Swiss bankers. His conclusion is that we do it by appealing to European and American guilt feelings.
"The Holocaust culP^ has proven to be an indispensa- ble ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horren- dous human rights record, has cast itself as a victim state, and the most successful ethnic group in the US has acquired victim status. "
Finkelstein carries out a brilliant analysis of the Holocaust cult, and comes to a startling discovery: it is but a shabby con- struct of a few cliches stitched together by the sorrowful voice of Elie Wiesel in a limo.
Finkelstein is not aware of the magnitude of his discovery, as he still believes that the Holocaust cult is a great concept, second only to the invention of the wheel. It solved the eternal problem of the rich and influential, warding off the envy and hate of the poor and exploited. It allowed Mark Rich and other swindlers to cheat and steal, it allowed the Israeli army to mur- der children and starve women with impunity. His opinion is shared by many Israelis. Ari Shavit, a well-known Haaretz writer, expressed it best in 1996, when the Israeli Army killed over a hundred civilian refugees in Kana, Lebanon:
"We may murder with impunity, because the Holocaust
museum is on our side. "
Boaz Evron, Tom Segev and other Israeli writers have ar- ticulated the same notion.
One can sum up Dr. Finkelstein's thesis as follows: The Jews succeeded in squaring the circle, solving the problem that has befuddled the aristocracy and run of the mill millionaires. Namely, they disarmed their opponents by appealing to their feelings of compassion and guilt.
I admire Dr Finkelstein for his continued belief in the good heart of his fellow man. I trust he also believes in fairies. In my own estimate, compassion and guilt feelings can maybe get you a free bowl of soup, but not uncounted billions of dollars. Dr. Finkelstein is not blind. He noticed that the Gypsies, also vic- tims of the Nazis, received next to nothing from a "compassion- ate" Germany. The capacity of Americans to feel collective guilt towards their Vietnamese victims (5 million killed, one million widows, Coventry-style destruction laced with Agent Orange) was recently expressed by Defense Secretary William Cohen:
"There is no place for apology (let alone compensa- tion). A war is a war. "
Despite having all the facts at his disposal, Dr. Finkelstein grasps his cross and tries to frighten the vampire away.
What is the source of power that fuels the Holocaust Indus- try? This is no idle or theoretical question. The making of yet another Palestinian tragedy is now in high gear, with the slow strangulation of its cities. Every day, a tree is uprooted, a house is demolished, a child is murdered. In Jerusalem, the Jews cele- brated Purim by a pogrom of Gentiles, and it made page six in the local papers. In Hebron, the Kahane boys celebrated Purim at the tomb of the mass murderer Goldstein. This is no time to pussyfoot.
In the novel The Sirens, Bloom expresses the feelings of his creator James Joyce towards the bloody concept of Irish libera- tion by farting at the epitaph of an Irish freedom fighter. My grandparents and my aunts and uncles died in WWII. But I swear by their memory, if I thought that guilt feelings over the Holocaust cult caused the death of a single Palestinian child, I would turn the Holocaust memorial into a public urinary.
The shabbiness of the Holocaust cult and the ease of its vic- tories in sucking billions is solid proof of the real power behind this industry. This power is obscure, unseen, ineffable, but quite real. It is not a power derived from the Holocaust, but rather, the Holocaust cult is a display of raw muscle by those who wield real power. That is why all efforts of the revisionists are doomed. The people who promote the cult could promote any- thing, as they dominate all public discourse. The Holocaust cult is just a small manifestation of their abilities. This power would just smile in the face of Dr Finkelstein's revelations.
Nincompoop
"President Bush should be declared a Distinguished Zion- ist," quipped Tsahi HaNegbi, an Israeli thug-turned-Minister, when the words of the American president ceased to reverber- ate in the end-of-June heat of Middle East. "No, Bush should be co-opted into Likud caucus," parried the opposition leader Yossi Sarid. Israeli Labor leader Shimon Peres looked sillier than ever when Bush took away his favorite prop, 'a threat of American intervention'. Peres and Sarid have never advocated Palestinian human rights out of sympathy or common human- ity, but would rather hoodwink their supporters in the notori- ously nationalistic Israeli electorate:
"We would deal with Palestinians and their lands as ruthlessly as [right-wing] Likud, but we treasure our special relations with the US. Americans would not allow it; that is why we are forced to behave like human beings. " Now their forced interpretation collapsed. Americans do not mind. They do not mind anything at all, and now Israel may continue its uninterrupted slide into fascist nightmare.
With a wry smile, I look through emails and articles of yes- teryear, when Bush, Jr. was elected President. Many right-wing pundits expressed an opinion that the Jews had lost their stran- glehold over American policy. "Jews in Bush's Cabinet? Don't Hold Your Breath" lamented Phillip Weiss of the Observer. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was gleefully pleased with what appeared as a Jewish setback. Just a few months later, they learned: the regained Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States was but a mirage. By astutely providing funds for both Republicans and Democrats, for practically all candidates
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of left and right, the Jewish leadership is able to influence the choice of the candidates they prefer. Maybe they can't order a specific person for this or the other position, but they are able to influence the shortlist, when the final choice wouldn't matter at all. They know what they want: they prefer nincompoops, peo- ple of limited intelligence, competence, willpower and doubtful morality, whether they are called Bush or Gore.
"Choosing a weak ruler" is a name of the game for an ethnic or religious minority takeover, applied whenever the populace is not yet ready to accept its true rulers. In Babylon-5 and other SF movies, the aliens prefer a weak-kneed Terran man as their stooge. They learned it from history. In the second half of the first millennium, a large Eurasian state of Khazaria was a sub- ject of a similar takeover.
Indigenous Khazars were governed and protected by Turkic warrior nobility, headed by their elected Khan, the king. In the 6th - 8th centuries they received a few waves of Jewish refu- gees, at first from Sasanid Persia, later from Abbasid Iraq and Byzantium. Benevolent and tolerant Turkic khans believed they had acquired useful, clever, and diligent subjects, but in no time at all, the new arrivals took over Khazaria.
For a while they preserved the facade of traditional aristoc- racy rule and enthroned an increasingly weak Khan. In 803, Obadiah the Jew became the real ruler of Khazaria, while Khan the Goy was still shown to people once a year as a proof of le- gitimacy of Obadiah' s power. Eventually, the last Gentile Khan was discarded, and the fiction of Khazar rule came to an end, while a Jewish Beg openly assumed the power in Khazaria.
It is often claimed that the Jewish rulers caused mass con- version of Khazars into Jewish faith. Arthur Koestler, a Jewish novelist, thought modern Jews were the descendents of these Khazar converts,3 but two leading Russian scientists, archae- ologist Artamonov and historian Leon Gumilev,4 came to the
Editor's Remarks
In my review of Finkelstein's book on The Holocaust In- dustry1 I showed that the "Holocaust" - contrary to Finkel- stein's opinion - was not discovered as late as the 1960s as a weapon for moral blackmailing, but had already been used dur- ing the First World War, as Don Heddesheimer recently dem- onstrated very thoroughly.2 I therefore agree with Israel Shamir that Finkelstein's approach to the "Holocaust" as the explana- tion of the power of the Jews falls short. However, it is wrong if Shamir assumes the truth regarding the Holocaust to be irrele- vant.
Even though it is correct that the Holocaust cult has such a huge influence because Jewish lobby groups are so powerful, it should not be overlooked that only those Holocaust claims turned the accusation of anti-Semitism into the lethal weapon it is today. Prior to World War Two, ideological, religious, ethnic or even racial opposition to Jews was still socially acceptable in western societies. Only since the invention of the morally lethal "argument" of the "Holocaust" has every resistance against Jewish claims to power and influence become impossible.
It should also be clear whose reputation is primarily in dan- ger of being tainted, should it turn out that the "Holocaust" is indeed the biggest lie of mankind's history ever to be invented,
conclusion that ordinary Khazars haven't been converted into Judaism. The Jews were the ruling class in Khazaria; they didn't share the Covenant or important positions with outsiders, according to Gumilev. Khazars became subjects of an ethni- cally and religiously alien rule. They had to pay for the army and police, and for adventurous foreign policy. In the end, they had lost their country.
The ruling Jews had it very good but very briefly: within a hundred years after full takeover, the Khazar Empire disinte- grated totally. Such setups do not last, as they destroy their own power base. Khazars did not mind: they had no share in the Empire's fabulous wealth. They became Tatars, Kazaks, and other nations of the steppe. The neighbors did not miss the Em- pire, as it was prone to genocide and slave trade. The Jews wandered out of the devastated Caspian basin into the deep- freeze of Poland and Lithuania and dropped out of history for a thousand year slumber.
The Jews of Khazaria needed a nincompoop for a Khan, be- cause their power was far from complete, and only a nincom- poop would surrender to their demands. The Middle Eastern speech of Bush proved that this scion of a wealthy and power- ful family behaves like a rabbit caught in the lights of a car. The countdown for the American Empire demise had started.
Notes
Reproduced with friendly permissions by Israel Shamir.
1 2nd ed., Verso, New York 2003 ; available from Castle Hill Publishers.
2 Dr. Finkelstein distinguishes between "holocaust", the historical event, and the Holocaust, the ideological construct. I took the liberty to rename it "the Holocaust cult" in the interests of lucidity.
3 Cf. A. Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, Random House, New York 1 976; available from Castle Hill Publishers.
4 Leon Gumilev, Drevniaia Rus ' i Velikaia Step ' (Old Russia and the Great Steppe, Russian), 1989; cf. the abundance of sources at www.khazaria.com; editor's note.
enforced, and exploited. This would not only end the moral un- assailability of the Jews, but it would discredit them to such a degree that the psychological basis of their current power - the claim to moral superiority - would turn into its opposite. The Holocaust would turn from a hot-air balloon that allows the Jews to do anything and go anywhere, to a millstone around their neck. In this regard it is very important whether or not the "Holocaust" claims are true.
Needless to say, the number of victims is crucial as well. I do not mean in the context of moral statements like "already one victim is one to much" - as morally correct as this state- ment may be - but in the context of scientific research, which is inevitable, and for which exact numbers are a necessary and de- sirable goal! If it does not matter whether six million Jewish victims died or only one, why then does almost everybody get upset if revisionists claim there were significantly less victims than six million? It sure does matter to most people. For some it is so important that they are ready to kill revisionists in defense of this symbolic figure, while others are satisfied with milder forms of persecution.
It is furthermore untrue when Shamir claims that revision- ists would argue, "if the Israelis are telling a tall tale about what happened in 1948, perhaps the Jewish memories of the Holo-
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caust are also flawed." To my knowledge no revisionist ever claimed that Jewish accounts on the Holocaust are untrue be- cause other Jewish accounts about different historical events are untrue as well. What revisionists do maintain is that if a witness - Jew or Gentile - makes claims in contradiction to su- perior evidence (logic, forensics, documents), then his credibil- ity is so undermined that any other statement of such a witness needs independent documentary or physical corroboration be- fore it can be accepted as true. This is nothing but common sense, applied in every court of law in the entire world.
Shamir's comparison of Holocaust revisionists with "Deir Yassin" revisionists is invalid for several reasons:
1 . Eyewitness Statements of Survivors
While survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre had to expect some form of punishment when publicly stating anything that was detrimental to Israel, it has always been the inverse regard- ing the "Holocaust" where it was those who could not come up with incriminating testimonies or who dared to make exonerat- ing statements about the perpetrators who could expect pun- ishment.
2. The Red Cross and the British Police
As Arthur R. Butz has shown in his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century? omnipresent, independent organizations like the Red Cross, the Catholic Church, diplomatic representa- tives, and Jewish and other aid organizations did not report any- thing about the "Holocaust" during the war and acted as if noth- ing like this was happening.
3. Jewish/German Spies and other Observers
Let us assume that during World War Two there were Ger- man spies equivalent to the Jewish spies at Deir Yassin. Fact is that there are no known reports made by any German spies about the "Holocaust" as it was unfolding! I do not mean the occasional reports of German soldiers about reprisal excesses at the eastern front, but reports of systematic extermination in so- called extermination camps. The testimonies penned down by Germans after the war are again not comparable to the Jewish reports after Deir Yassin. While Jews reporting about Jewish atrocities had to (and still have to) expect acts of vengeance from their fellow Jews, Germans had to (and still have to) ex- pect massive punishment if they did or do not either "confess"
or at least testify against their former superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, or today against their ancestors. In other words: Germans are punished if they do not confirm German atrocities, whereas Jews are punished if they do confirm Jewish atrocities. Thus, Germans - and everybody else! - confirming German atrocities (summarized as the "Holocaust") are likely to lie, whereas Jews denying Jewish atrocities are likely to lie - a per- fectly inverse situation!
4. Ben Gurion's Apology
Shamir's analogy is flawed, because there are no apologies or confirmations by Hitler or Himmler. To the contrary: All de- fendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, that is, all top politicians of the Third Reich still alive at war's end, insisted that they did not know and learned about the "Holocaust" only during the trial!
5. Documentary and Physical Evidence
Shamir's way of arguing is typical for someone who is not familiar with historical research. If we depended on eyewitness statements to write about history, we could only write the his- tory of the last few generations. Such a historiography would remain on a par with stone-age fairytale tellers. Statements by witnesses must be backed up by documents and physical evi- dence. It is unknown to me to what extent the claims about the events at Deir Yassin were or could be supported with docu- mentary and physical evidence. But it should be obvious that a gigantic undertaking such as the "Holocaust" purports to have been - spanning an entire continent, lasting four years, and en- compassing six million people - must have left behind huge amounts of documentary and forensic evidence. But this ap- proach of exact historical research, which is the main focus of revisionist research, does not even cross the mind of the jour- nalist Shamir.
Germar Rudolf
Notes
1 Cf. Vierteljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 4(3&4) (2000), pp. 435-438.
2 D. Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust. Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One, Theses & Disser- tations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003; available from Castle Hill Publishers.
3 Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, IL, 2003; available from Castle Hill Publishers.
On Anti-Semitism and Superhumans
By Israel Shamir
Children of a Lesser God
In Berlin, the high and mighty, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, German President Johannes Rau and Is- rael's president, Moshe Katsav, gathered for a Conference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) dedicated to the struggle against anti-Semitism. They
proclaimed that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is serving as a cover for worldwide anti-Semitic sentiment" as Ha'aretz re- ported today. I was not invited to this gathering, but if I had been, I would have presented them with the following talk.
Your Excellencies, this conference is indeed an extremely important, historic event, to be compared with Constantine's
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Edict of Milan or with the Nicene Council of the Church. I am not sure that all of you fully understand what you are doing, What is the meaning of the code-words 'Struggle against anti- Semitism'.
Let us say first what it is not. Your "struggle against anti- Semitism" is not a defence for a persecuted small nation; if it were, you would defend the besieged Palestinians. It is not a struggle against racism, for you support racist apartheid in Pal- estine. It is not a struggle against anti- Jewish discrimination, for there is none, and from Moscow to Paris to New York, Jews occupy the very pinnacle of power.
It is not defence of Jewish life, for the only Jew wounded of late in Europe cut himself with his own kitchen knife in an at- tempt to incriminate a Muslim. It is not defence of Jewish property, for Jews are the only people on earth who have re- gained every piece of property their ancestors ever claimed from Berlin to Baghdad. Your "struggle against anti-Semitism" has nothing to do with long-dead historic anti-Semitism or anti- Jewish racial theory. There are Semites and descendants of Jews on both sides of the battle.
Your 'struggle against anti-Semitism', theological in con- cept, relates to the centuries-old dilemma: "Are all people born equal, equally important and equally close to God? Or are Jews a cut above, special in God's eyes, designating the rest of hu- manity as the children of a lesser God?" The first alternative was affirmed by St Paul. The second was the banner of Caiaphas. St Paul was 'anti-Semite' in the eyes of Caiaphas for he denied Jewish superiority.
Today, Excellencies, you made your choice, and as Pontius Pilate in his time, you preferred to stand by Caiaphas. It does not matter that the Palestinians are being immured alive behind the 25-foot concrete wall or that the olive groves are erased and wells demolished; what is important is that "Israel or its leaders should not be demonized or villainized" in the words of your colleague, Colin Powell. It is not a question of policy anymore, but of theology, for belief in Jewish superiority is the official faith of Pax Americana, like Christianity was that of the Roman
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The new religion brought over to Europe from across the ocean, with American tanks and dollars and movies, the neo- Judaic religion of a Chosen few, of man-made landscapes, of economic freedom; of alienation and uprooting, of denying solidarity and sacrality to non-Chosen. The Judaic ideas and values are the foundations of the New World Order.
http://www.israelshamir.net/shamirlmages/Shamir/Berlin.htm
Empire in the days of Constantine the Great. To stress the point, you forbade using Nazi symbols in connection with Is- raeli policies, but allowed superimposing the swastika onto the Cross of Christ.
In your eyes, it does not matter that the Palestinians are be- ing immured alive behind the 25-foot concrete wall; that the olive groves are erased and wells demolished; what is important that "Israel or its leaders should not be demonized or vilified".
You submitted to the new religion brought over to Europe from across the ocean, with American tanks and dollars and movies, to the neo-Judaic religion of a Chosen few, of man- made landscapes, of economic freedom; of alienation and up- rooting, of denying solidarity and sacrality to non-Chosen. You proclaimed today that the Judaic ideas and values are the foun- dations of the New World Order you are committed to uphold rather than the Christian ideal of solidarity and equality. You brought Europe back into the Arian heresy defeated at Nicaea, and demeaned Christ. Your excessive and abnormal care for the wellbeing of Jews is a symbol of your submission.
Probably you consider yourselves 'realists and pragmatists' who care little for this religious mumbo-jumbo. If you were re- alists and pragmatists, you would consider what this acceptance of Jewish superiority means for you, if you do not care for Pal- estinians or Iraqis. I open the Jerusalem Post of April 22, 2004, and read the words of your new superiors. Matti Golan, former editor-in-chief of the leading Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, and of the Globes, the paper for the Jewish economic elites, writes: "My problem is not only with Germany. It is with every- thing German, anywhere. I neither argue nor get upset. I
have simply wiped Germany and its people off my globe. "
Matti Golan is not a firebrand; he is not one of the Jewish religious fanatics who deny goyim even descent from Adam. Indeed, I could fill hundreds of pages with similar - and worse - quotes from Khabbad books or Cabbala wizards. But Golan is not a Cabbalist or extremist but one of the sane, non-religious mainstream influential Jewish intellectuals. When this article was discussed on IsraelForum.com on the internet, a typical Jewish response was this:
"Matti Golan is a prominent journalist and columnist.
He represents ideas held by the vast majority of Israeli Jews
in this subject. My opinion included. "
If I were a German, I would have second thoughts before providing Matti Golan' s country with nuclear-capable subma- rines lest he 'simply wipe Germany and its people off our globe.'
In my view, Golan sounded a call for racist hatred and genocide. You could discuss it; but you would rather condemn Mahathir or a peace activist who fights for equality in Palestine. Your colleague, German President Johannes Rau, said:
"Everyone knows that massive anti-Semitism is behind
criticism of the Israeli government's politics over the last
decades. "
He said it a week after four-year-old Asma suffocated of Is- raeli tear gas inside her room in Gaza on April 23, 2004 and a year after Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. Whoever says 'anti-Semitism' agrees with the murder of Asma and Rachel?
You cause contempt, and it is dangerous for you. In a mass- circulation Israeli daily Maariv (April 24, 2004), Dan Margalit,
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a superstar of Israeli journalism, writes of the man who tried to warn you of the grave danger of Israeli nuclear potential:
"Vanunu posed himself as suffering Mel Gibson, a new Jesus, who suffers in jail for his conversion to Christianity. I must admit he was discriminated on religious grounds, but positively discriminated. Vanunu remained alive for his treason, spying and baptism notwithstanding, Israel treated him as a Jew. Everyone knows what the Israeli Mossad would do to him if he were a German nuclear technician on a service of an Arab state - The names of those sorts are carved on gravestones in the cemeteries of Europe. " (Do not look for this sentence on the Maariv English- language website: it is sanitised.)
Its message is clear: blood of a goy, especially of a German goy, is of less value than blood of a Jew. And you brought it upon yourselves.
Israel boasted that her assassins murdered German techni- cians and scientists - but Germany never complained. A brave and noble American Jew, John Sack, published a book on Jew- ish atrocities committed against innocent ethnic Germans in late 1940s - but Germany did not investigate the grave accusa- tions and did not demand the trial of the criminals; the first edi- tion of Sack's book in Germany was even destroyed right after it came from the printers as a result of political pressure on the publisher. Jews admitted mass poisoning of German POWs and an attempt to murder millions of German civilians - Germany did not investigate it, but transferred more money and military hardware to Israel.
You accepted your second-class status of children of lesser god. Not today - but when you elevated Auschwitz and dis- dained the fiery holocaust of Dresden. When you wept over de- portations of Jews and ignored deportations of ethnic Germans by the Zionist-ridden governments of Poland and Czechoslova- kia. When you pushed for disarmament of Iraq and supplied nuclear equipment to Dimona. When you locked up and extra- dited Palestinian fighters but did not demand extradition of Is- raeli citizen Solomon Morel who tortured and killed thousands of Germans. When you tried publishers of Norman Finkel- stein's Holocaust Industry and allowed agents of ADL (Anti Defamation League) to march streets of Berlin with Israeli flags and portraits of Bomber Harris. You agreed that your blood is
German Blood will flow, as soon as the supplies of Palestinian blood stop!
cheap. Do not be surprised if it will flow after the supply of Palestinians will dry up.
Personally, I am rather grateful for what you did. Until now, the struggle for equality in Palestine was hindered by well- meaning women and men who did not question the Jewish su- premacy in Europe and the US but were horrified by the geno- cide of Palestinians. While fighting against the Wall, or against devastation in Gaza, they were worried by accusations of 'anti- Semitism'. They thought the argument against Israeli apartheid was legitimate in the New World Order. Now you have re- moved this obstacle by proving that what happens in Palestine is not a local aberration but the foundation stone of Pox Americana.
Let them both fall together - the local and the global scheme of Judaic supremacy - so Jews and Gentiles will be able once again to live like equals in Palestine and elsewhere.
Dogs and Foxes
When the red-jacketed British gentlemen ride after fox upon green hills of Surrey, they call "yoicks" to encourage their dogs; the Jews cry "anti-Semitism" to encourage theirs. "Yoicks" terrifies the fox; "anti-Semitism" terrifies the oppo- nents of the New World Order. It is their equivalent of a Papal bull proclaiming the crusade against heretics.
Like a contagious disease, their hate spreads farther and far- ther afield. Iraqis supported Palestinians, and their country was invaded. The Zionists' latest enemy is France, for the French dared to object to their plans of taking over Iraq. On the tree- lined street I live on, a big, parked Chevrolet carries the sticker "After Iraq, Chirac." Israeli newspapers are full to the brim with dozens of anti-French reports and features. And whenever the Jews do not get what they want, they raise the spectre of their adversaries' "anti-Semitism."
Now the riders received an unexpected support from a noted Cuban intellectual, Lisandro Otero.1 One would expect that a writer from the Island of Freedom would call for solidarity with the people of Palestine, Iraq, and France. He should understand that the talk about French anti-Semitism is orchestrated by the same forces that just a few months ago led their anti-Cuban campaign.
But Otero preferred to pursue with the dogs, rather than run with the foxes. In an article disseminated by Cuban media, the ex-dissident writer repeats the standard accusations of Zionists against France. After paying standard left-Zionist lip service to "the policy of extermination of the Palestinians practiced by bloodthirsty Ariel Sharon," he writes:
"The attacks against the Jews have increased in an
alarming way in France. Many of these acts of aggression
are carried out by Muslims, of which there are in France
between four and five million. "
This is not very politically-correct, but a rather outright rac- ist generalisation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky correctly stated:
"Anti-Arab racism is so widespread as to be unnotice- able; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate. "
So legitimate that Otero uses it without noticing.
Just in case the Cuban writer Otero is a sincere man who was misled by the Zionist media, we shall briefly refer to his charge. No Jew was killed or severely wounded in France over
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the past ten years, though in the same period of time Zionist pa- ramilitary gangs of Beitar2 established by Mussolini-worship- ping Jewish fascist Jabotinsky attacked and wounded dozens of anti-Zionists and Muslims on the streets of Paris and Marseille. In France, hundreds of Muslims were wounded and killed in racist attacks often led by the Zionists' fascist allies.
In the Jewish state, Muslim Palestinians are prevented from worshipping in the holy site of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; Christian Palestinians were prevented from coming to the Holy Sepulchre this Easter by the Jewish army. But in France, not only is Jewish worship protected; French Jews even celebrate the bloody 'achievements' of the Israeli army.
The mosques in France and elsewhere in Europe are fre- quently raided by police and 'anti-terrorist' squads; it would be a bloody miracle if the synagogues would provide total immu- nity for the Zionists. It could happen if the synagogues would stick to their religious practice and avoid political involvement, but the Jewish community centres and synagogues in France are used by Zionists as their recruiting grounds. There they col- lect moneys to build the Wall, and there they mobilise the French Jews to fight for the Jewish state and to support the US intervention in Iraq.
Lisandro Otero could read the revealing article A Happy Compromise by the Jewish Canadian philosopher Professor Michael Neumann,3 who compares media coverage of attacks on Jewish property and attacks on non-Jews:
"On March 16th, when Jewish homes were spray- painted with slogans. You had to notice because The Globe and Mail put the story on about a third of page one, with a photo taking up over half the space above the fold. The story continued on page 8, where it was tastefully paired with two articles on possible antisemitism at a Toronto golf club. [...]
On March 25th, a [sic] Islamic centre in the Toronto area was spray-painted with slogans and set on fire. Tables were destroyed and chairs thrown outside. The story (March 26th) made the bottom of page 12. (The top con- tained a much longer story, with photograph, about a hair- dresser who'd won an African-Canadian Achievement Award.) [...]
On April 6, a front-page story about the start of the Shia revolt in Iraq was utterly dwarfed by another: at 2:30am, the United Talmud Torah elementary school in Montreal had been firebombed, and its library heavily damaged. [...] The two stories and accompanying photograph about this event occupied the entire front page above the fold, and about a quarter of the page below the fold. The headline is a large banner across the whole top, something the Globe and Mail doesn 't do very often. It has the Prime Minister proclaiming: 'This is not our Canada'. (If he proclaimed anything about the Pickering arson, we never heard about it.) The stories continue on page 8, occupying the entire print area, about 7/8 of the page above the fold. " Neumann concluded: the reports on hate crimes against
Jews and other ethnic groups imply that the Jews are important,
the rest are not.
In other words, the hullabaloo of 'French anti-Semitism' is
made with mirrors, with the magnifying and distorting mirrors
of the heavily Jewish media. Nothing new about that: a hundred years ago, amidst a storm of 'Russian anti-Semitism' reports, a Russian writer Alexander Kuprin, a friend of Jews, wrote in a letter to his fellow-writer:4
'A ten-thousand-strong native tribe in the Far North cut their own throats for their deer died. Peasants of Samara eat earth out of starvation. Poland has been devoured, charming Crimea turned into a whorehouse, the ancient ag- riculture of Central Asia ruthlessly devastated, but amid this ocean of evil, injustice, violence and sorrow we, the Russian writers, scream about limitations imposed on Jew- ish dentists ".
Lisandro Otero ventures to sum up two thousand years of Jewish-Christian relations according to the Zionist gospel:
"With accent of Christianity, Emperor Constantine pro- hibited Judaic practices under penalty of death. Justinian prohibited the construction of synagogues. The triumph of Christianity in Europe institutionalised the racial segrega- tion of the Jews ".
Be reasonable, Lisandro! The Church squashed in blood Albigensian and Arian heresies, destroyed Druids and other non-Christian cults in Europe, baptized Slavs and Baits by fire and sword; do you think it wouldn't have been able to eliminate the Jews if it wished to do so? The concept of 'racial segrega- tion' was totally foreign to Christianity, and many Jewish con- verts became bishops and saints of the Church, from Torque- mada to St. John of God. On the other hand, racial segregation is a precept of Jewish faith, which forbids its adepts to mingle with non-Jews. We see it in the Jewish state, where non-Jews are walled up beyond Sharon's Wall and intermarriage is not permitted.
The Zionist idea of 'endless persecutions of Jews' was in- vented in order to subdue the descendants of the medieval Jew- ish caste and to mobilise them for the goals of the Jewish elites. It caused paranoid tendencies among Jews. If you are a friend of Jews, do not encourage this paranoia. Anti-Semitism does not exist, Lisandro. The Jews are safe everywhere, as safe as anybody else on this unsafe planet; as safe as you are in block- aded Cuba, much more safe than Palestinians in Palestine, Iraqis in Iraq and Arabs in the US or France.
The Jewish fate does not worry me, for it is safe. Cuba's fu- ture worries me much more. Your letter is a scary sign of the Cuban intelligentsia's readiness to submit to the New World Order. I saw this in Gorbachov's USSR, where the dismantling of socialism began with talk about 'anti-Semitism'. Promoters of this paradigm had built relations with Israel, with the Jewish establishment in the US, and eventually brought Yeltsin to power. Western journalists based in Moscow had barraged their readers with reports of 'growing anti-Semitism' and of forth- coming pogroms. The Soviets could not even understand the accusation, for the USSR never knew racism of any sort. But the Soviet Jews were scared by the baseless but constantly re- peated reports. Over a million of them formed a beeline in front of the Israeli embassy; now they build the wall to imprison the children of Bethany. Their flight facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and gave the national wealth of the Soviet people to the gang of predominantly Jewish Mafiosi in full liaison with their American kin and kith.
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The same phenomenon was observed in other East Euro- pean socialist countries. A Mossad agent of influence, media lord Robert Maxwell, supported their cultural elites. At first, they talked about anti-Semitism, then about the holocaust; in the end their privatised national assets were bought by George Soros, Marc Rich and Vladimir Gusinsky, while their soldiers were sent to kill Iraqis in Faluja.
Anti-Semitism talk is not about Jews at all: it is the dominant ideology of Pax Americana. A Cuban who speaks about anti- Semitism paves the road for the triumphal return of Meyer Lansky's heirs to his island. You, Lisandro, left Cuba for a while as a political emigre and later came back, for you understood the misleading sophistry of Western media campaigns and said:
"From afar, one sees better how things really are: the
small things are small, and the big ones are big".
Have you changed your mind again? Do you wish your country to become another Haiti or Guatemala, a floating bor- dello off the shores of Miami? Visit the former Soviet repub- lics, and you will find the end of the road that begins with talk of anti-Semitism. Even if you do not care much for the fate of workers and peasants and care only about intellectuals, you will learn that in these impoverished countries, writers and film- makers can't survive unless they obtain a grant from the Soros Corporation.
The life of intellectuals in the socialist states is much better than that of their brethren in the 'privatised' Third World. A good hairdresser, masseur, car repair me- chanic or indeed a whore may look forward with hope towards post-Castro Cuba. For a writer, scientist, thinker in the Pax Ameri- cana there is no hope - you will queue for American visa or sell bootlegged cigars. Instead of being called a dissident, you will be called 'a terrorist.'
Your misplaced concern for the Meyer Israel Lansky and Mort Zuckerman, Bernard- Henri Levy and Cuban Zionist Jacobo Machover friends of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres will bring a new Batista to your island, unless stopped by some latter-day Barbudos.
The time will come, rather sooner than later, when the American Empire will be defeated and dismantled, and with it, the paranoid talk of anti-Semitism will be gone for good. Then the descendants of Jews will live in peace and harmony with descendants of Spanish hidalgo, American rednecks and Palestin- ian fellahin. Your task, and the task of the Cuban intelligentsia, is to bring the good ship of independent socialist Cuba into the safe harbour of future. For this purpose, steer clear of Zionist rocks.
Son of Dogs & Foxes
With great anticipation I waited for a response from Lisan- dro Otero. I waited for a clear answer to why the Cuban writer repeated accusations against France and French people voiced by enemies of Palestine and Cuba, from President Bush to the head of ADL, Abe Foxman. Why did he subscribe to Zionist- led pro-American discourse of 'growing anti-Semitism'? And he replied, but, alas, Socrates would dismiss Otero from his feast for lack of logic in his reply.5
1 . 1 told him there is no anti-Semitism and that Jews are safe everywhere. He replied that Jews suffered in the days of Ca- ligula. In a similar way, if I would tell him there is no slavery in Cuba, he could reply that there were thousands of slaves just two hundred years ago.
2. Otero rolled out familiar Jewish martyrologue from Ro- man days to Isabel the Catholic to Hitler. It is truth, but not the whole truth; and half truth is as bad as a lie. Jews knew hard days, yes; for being human, Jews lived on this earth and suf- fered as much as anybody. Less than natives of Cuba and other Caribbean islands who were exterminated. Probably less than their neighbors, ordinary Spaniards or Poles, for Jews were al- ways free, usually prosperous and never knew slavery or bond- age; but certainly they suffered too. Just take it in proportion: Jews did not suffer more than any comparable group of people.
Jews as a rule belonged to the exploiting classes; that is why Jewish Quarters are located next to the Royal palace in Seville and Paris. From time to time they suffered from the fury of ex- ploited classes or their competitors. So did aristocracy. Thou- sands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during the peasant wars or the Great Terror of 1793. Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917.
Many of them were innocent, for class war can be as cruel as any war. Why does not Otero bewail them?
Jews fought wars like anybody else. If Jews were killed in Alexandria, in the same time Jews massacred non-Jews in Jaffa and Antioch. Friends of Jews were often fiends for the rest of population: Cromwell brought Jews to England, but in the same time he massacred Irish peasants and en- slaved Ireland.
Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, but Moors were expelled too at the same Shamir occasion. Why does Otero not lament the
bitter fate of Alhambra and Giralda's builders? Jews actually fared much better: those that remained were fully integrated, married into the best Spanish families and occupied positions of prestige and power in Spain.
And now to the capital H. During World War Two, millions of Russians, Germans, Poles, Japanese perished. Among them, there were Jews, civilians and soldiers, too. Thus my Jewish uncle Abraham was killed by a German bomb during the de- fense of Leningrad next to his Russian buddy Ivan. Auschwitz was inhuman, indeed, but so was Hiroshima. But for a Jewish ideologist such a comparison is sacrilege for it compares the divine people of Israel with subhuman Japanese.
3 . The Jewish discourse of unique martyrdom and victim- hood is based on a racialist denial of the full and equal human- ity of non-Jews; that is why Jewish ideologists are obsessed with counting Jewish victims and discounting suffering of non- Jews. We see the result of this approach in Palestine, where every Jewish victim of war receives a place of honor on the front page of newspapers, while non- Jewish victims are hardly mentioned at all. Everybody, including Otero, knows and refers to Jewish victims; but hardly anybody - and again it includes Otero - has heard, for instance, the names of Mona and Chris-
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tina, two little Palestinian girls murdered recently by Jewish soldiers.
Dorothy Naor, an enlightened Israeli woman, writes:
"Today 's killing of a 34 year old Israeli woman and her 4 daughters is indeed tragic. Of the English language newspapers that I have checked, it has been reported widely— in the USA by the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Herald Tribune; in England by the Independent, and the Guardian; in Aus- tralia by the Sidney Morning Herald (May 3); and in To- ronto by the Globe and Mail. By contrast, of the above newspapers, only today 's New York Times reported yester- day 's killing of an 8 year old Palestinian boy by the IOF. Every such death is tragic. But today 's killing of an Israeli woman and her children has to be seen within the context of the Palestinian child killed yesterday, of the Palestinian mother of 10 killed last week and of the statistics that I cited a few days ago: i.e., April saw 59 Palestinians killed and 345 injured. "
The US fully adopted the Judaic discourse; that is why American Jewish-dominated media exploded with fury when four American professional killers were killed by people of Fa- luja and ignored the killing of thousands of Iraqis. In full agreement with Judaic doctrine of massive retaliation Ameri- cans massacred six hundred civilians of Faluja. Judaic inspira- tion is very dangerous for us.
On the other hand, during the Crusades, the Muslim warri- ors and Christian knights made friends between the battles and actually liked each other. Don Rodrigo was called by the Moor- ish name of El Sid; Torquato Tasso made a beautiful Muslim woman, Clorinda, a heroine of his Gerusalemme liberata. At the siege of Kerak, Saladin ordered a cease fire during the wed- ding in the castle; while the queen mother sent him a slice of wedding cake. Thus Muslim and Christian attitudes are very different from the Judaic: people may fight, it is human; but they should treat each other as fully human and equal.
Otero's problem is that he swallowed the Jewish discourse hook, line and rod and took it for a true description of reality instead of what it is: an ideological propaganda tool aimed at stopping and reversing the normal process of Jewish assimila- tion and keeping descendants of Jews in fear of the goyim and subservient to Jewish elites. He even adopted the racialist Jew- ish point of view, and calls Marx, Mendelsohn and Heine - Jews (though born of Jewish parents, they were baptized, did not consider themselves Jews and would not be allowed to set- tle in Israel, by Zionist laws). Indeed, Lisandro: if Marx were a Jew, would he have said: 6
"What is the worldly reason of Jewry? The practical need, self-interest.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly God? Money.
Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money that is, from practical, real Jewry would be the self- emancipation of our times.
An organization of society, which dissolves the prere- quisites and the possibility of haggling, would have ren- dered the Jew impossible. His religious awareness would dissolve like a stale mist in the reality of the air of life of the
society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes this his practical nature as invalid and would work on its dissolu- tion, he works from within his past development for human emancipation itself and turns against the highest practical expression of human self-alienation.
Thus, in Jewry we recognize a general present anti- social element, which was driven to its current height by a historical development, to which the Jews have diligently contributed in this bad relation, onto a height, where it has to dissolve itself inevitably.
The emancipation of the Jews in their last meaning is the emancipation of humanity from Jewry. " Rosa Luxembourg equally hated to be considered Jewish. This misunderstanding of the Cuban writer is revealed when he writes "old plague of mankind, anti-Semitic racism". Far from being 'an old plague' it did not exist until the second half of the 19th century, and lasted considerably less than hundred years. Paradoxically, it was caused by the proliferation of Jew- ish racialist discourse. Now, Jewish attitudes were and remain racialist, for Jews - like Indian Brahmins - believe in their in- born high qualities. Until Jewish influence emerged as a power- ful keynote of modernity in the mid- 19th century, the racial ap- proach was quite foreign to Europeans. The Church was never racist towards Jews; and every descendant of Jews could be- come a Christian and a full member of society.
The Church's fight against the Jews was a fight between the ideology of equality versus the ideology of racism. The Jews fought the Church, too, but when they had an upper hand - for instance in AD 128 and in AD 614 in Palestine - they were not satisfied with expulsion but slaughtered every Christian they could get their hands on. But Otero does not understand this and claims that anti-Judaic attitudes were 'racist.' He says there are good and bad Jews; little he knows that even this trite statement is considered anti-Semitic in present climate. A Jew- ish American journalist, Klinghoffer wrote in Forward:7
"A writer who wants to divide us [Jews] in half some for praise, others for scorn, may not be an antisemite - but he 's not our friend either. " Beware, Lisandro!8
About the Author
Israel Shamir (50) is a Russian-Israeli intellectual, writer, translator, and journalist, and a father of two sons.
A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Pal- estine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a jour- nalist and writer.
He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels
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with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japa- nese classics.
After returning to Israel in 1980, Shamir wrote for the Is- raeli daily newspaper Haaretz and the newspaper Al Hamish- mar, and worked in the Knesset as the spokesman for the Israel Socialist Party (Mapam). He translated the works of S.Y. Agnon, the only Hebrew Nobel Prize winning writer, from the original Hebrew to Russian.
As the first Palestinian Intifada began, Shamir had left Israel for Russia, where he covered the eventful years 1989-1993. While in Moscow, he reported for Haaretz, but was sacked for publishing an article calling for the return the Palestinian refu- gees and the rebuilding of their ruined villages.
In response to the second Palestinian Intifada, Shamir has abandoned his literary occupation and resumed his work as a
journalist. In the midst of the endless talk of a "Two State solu- tion", Shamir, along with Edward Said, has become a leading champion of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution in all of Palestine/Israel.
Notes
Reproduced with friendly permissions by Israel Shamir.
1 Cf. www.israelshamir.net/shamirlmages/Shamir/Lisandro.htm.
2 Beitar was founded by Mussolini-fan Jabotinsky.
3 www.counterpunch.org/neumann04 1 52004.html
4 www.pycckie.com/word/kuprin.htm www.rebelion.org/palestina/0405021is.htm
6 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 372f; www.mlwerke . de/me/meO 1 /meO 1 347 .htm
7 www.forward.com/issues/2002/02. 12. 27/oped3. html
8 The last two points of Shamir's response were not reproduced here, because they do not add much to what has already been said.
Pyrrhic Victory over Revisionism
The International Revisionist Conference in Sacramento was not permitted to take place
By Claus Nordbruch, Ph.D.
In April 2004 the European-American Culture Council (EACC) had planned to hold a conference in Sacramento, the capital of California. It was going to be the most impressive conference of recent years. The gathering was sponsored by the Australian Adelaide Institute, conducted by Dr. Fredrick Toben. Aside from some well-known historians, all of whom were rep- resentatives of historical revisionism, some notable figures from politics, law, journalism, and economics were announced. The courageous as well as prestigious assembly of speakers promised a release from fixed and inflexible mental attitudes and a new way of thinking. In total, no fewer than 1 6 speakers from all over the world had been invited. Among them were Dr. Fredrick Toben (Australia), attorney-at-law Horst Mahler (Germany), author Gerhoch Reisegger (Austria), historian Dr. Dariusz Ratajszak (Poland), leading German revisionist Germar Rudolf (USA), director of the Institute for Historical Review Mark Weber (USA), politician Dr. Tom Sunic (Croatia), author Barry Chamish (Israel), and the writer of this article from South Africa1. The presentations' breadth of topic was promising: the latest discoveries and developments in research on the so-called Holocaust; historiography of German colonialism; the putative and real global danger of terrorism; the circumstances of the at- tacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001; and legal action against thought crimes in the alleged "free world." Fur- thermore, a charity auction was scheduled to take place in order to raise funds for political prisoner Ernst Zilndel, who has been detained in a Canadian prison for more than 15 months at the time of this writing.
From the very beginning the responsible organizers did not work in secret, but indeed made their planning of this interna- tional scientific assembly public, above all via the internet. In doing so, they were, however, so conscientious in updating their webpage and releasing newsletters they even announced some internal information not really meant for the eyes of the
general public. This slip delighted both envious colleagues and bitter opponents of the conference. Among the latter, the infa- mous Jewish Defense League (JDL) needs to be mentioned. This organization left no doubt about its intentions and methods of action. As early as November 25, 2003 the conference or- ganizers informed their readership:
"The JDL is considered a terrorist organization, after two of its leaders were arrested for conspiracy to bomb Muslim mosques and the offices of California congressman Darrell Issa. "
One might have expected this in the Federal Republic of Germany, but definitely not in the "country of unlimited possi- bilities," the haven of free speech Shortly before the conference actually began, it had to be canceled! The organizers then had the sad obligation of informing as quickly as possible the in- vited speakers and guests, many of them already on their way to Sacramento, that the lessor of the book conference site un- conditionally gave in to the demands of Jewish agitators. He simply withdrew the rental contract on short notice, leaving the organizers without the necessary location to hold the confer- ence:2
"The Sacramento Turnverein caved in to the massive pressure of the Jewish community and cancelled our facil- ity. "
The historic German Turnverein in Sacramento is one of the oldest buildings in the town. In a press release signed by an Ira L. Jacobson on April 19, he claims in a politically correct man- ner of supposed civil courage:
"We are relieved that we were able to act in time to
thwart this unseemly attempt to use our space as a platform
for hate. Hate and historical 'revisionism ' have no place in
our community, our State, or our Country. "
According to the press release, the reason for this abrupt de- cision was that the organizers had hidden their "genuine iden-
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tity." This allegation, however, quickly proved to be just a cowardly protective statement since the organizers, in fact, did everything but hide and pretend. They mentioned who they were, whom they invited, and what subjects they were sup- posed to talk about. In fact, the organizers from the EACC were honest and frank from the very beginning. In various an- nouncements and interviews, they left no doubt about what they intended to hold And since the American press was tremen- dously interested in the event, a couple of forthcoming press conferences had been planned, too.
Furthermore, the pathetic statement by the Turnverein was also shown to be a lie in a "confession" by the Jewish Defense League. On April 20, in a malicious letter to the organizer of the conference, the chairman of the JDL, Bill Maniaci, ac- knowledged:
"I cannot describe the joy that I felt in my heart when I read today's press release from the Sacramento Turn Ver- ein advising that they had canceled your meeting. [...] Just to let you know, we had been diligently working behind the scenes to facilitate just such an event. Today has been a very good day for the Jewish Community of Sacramento who will not be forced to live with your insults during Yom Ha Shoah, and for the Jewish Defense League who can add another battle star to our banner. Once again, good has tri- umphed over evil. " Quod erat demonstrandum.
No doubt exists that the conference would have been a highly interesting mental contention led by international intel- lectuals. Barry Chamish, Israeli journalist and author of Who
Murdered Yitzhak Rabin and The Last Days Of Israel, for in- stance, admitted:3
"I was supposed to be flying in two days to the Sacra- mento Holocaust Deniers ' Conference. I was going to deny the deniers and maybe do my little part in stanching the phenomenon. "
According to Chamish, neither the financial loss nor the waste of time was the biggest tragedy caused by the cancella- tion, but rather the missed chance to argue with philosophical opponents:
"But the biggest loss of all was the off chance that I could contribute to the diminishing of anti-Semitism. It was a tricky act but it was worth trying. "
Without considering here whether it is reasonable to assume "anti-Semitism" would have had a chance to sprout during a scientific gathering, it is a fact that the Adelaide Institute, which was sponsoring the conference, had been publishing Chamish' s contrary points of view on their internet site for many years. This is especially worth mentioning because Chamish represents a viewpoint "which totally undermines the beliefs of the deniers," as he claims. The Institute's head, Dr. Frederick Toben, considered Chamish' s findings challenging and invited the Israeli to speak at the conference in Sacramento. Dr. Toben insisted that dialogue is the only way to approach truth and knowledge (Erkenntnis). It is hard to cast serious doubt on this perspective, especially if one keeps in mind that Dr. Toben means what he says. Owing to his intellectual con- victions, Dr. Toben was persecuted by the Federal German au- thorities a couple of years ago.4 He held, and still holds, a dif-
ferent opinion of the criminal yet legally-secure German laws claiming that certain "historical facts" are considered to be self- evident (offenkundig) and, thus, need not be proven any longer. In fact, to achieve the elementary aim of truth and knowledge, the only viable approach is to follow the scholastic axiom of audiatur et altera pars. This is exactly what the conference was going to do.
To the advocates of censorship and the apologists of thought prohibition (Denkverbote), this attitude is obviously much too elaborate. Not so for the Israeli author Chamish, who clearly understood the profound meaning of this basic assump- tion and consequently admitted:
"The organizers of the Sacramento conference, Freder- ick Toben and Walter Mueller, were honest to me. They in- vited me because they believe in dialog. They invited a proud Jew and Israeli to address their people knowing I would be giving a message of opposition. " This circumstance very nicely demonstrates that both the organizers and this orator evinced the courage of their convic- tions in the true meaning of Zivilcourage. In times dominated by political correctness, however, this term is permanently mis- used and reversed to an opposite meaning.
Finally, what is the effect of the conference's cancellation, beside the tremendous financial loss for guests and speakers, sponsors and organizers? Well, at least one question emerges: What influence do Jewish organizations, or rather, organiza- tions pretending to represent Jewish interests, actually enjoy? If it is possible for an organization with a questionable reputation, like the Jewish Defense League, to terminate an academic con- ference that was scheduled in a sovereign nation, and to do so just on the grounds that it does not like the participants or the assumed content of the scheduled speeches, what could those people achieve who possess real power? There are many or- ganizations who belong to this powerful category. It is not hard to imagine a list as diverse as Jewish Central Councils, Com- mittees, and Leagues, not to forget B'nai B'rith, Shin Beth, and Mossad.
And still another question comes to mind: How many peo- ple now ponder to what extent the conference must have threat- ened the powers that be? What was wrong, i.e., dangerous, in the accomplishments and arguments of those - mainly aca- demic! - speakers who were prohibited to speak? Factually, there is no doubt that the cancellation of the conference turns out to be only a Pyrrhic victory for the opponents of freedom of speech and freedom of research. Just like the campaign against Mel Gibson's movie epic, The Passion of the Christ(which campaign, by the way, was also led by another influential Jew- ish organization, the Anti-Defamation League), sooner or later their actions and their methods of will ultimately backfire on these opponents. And this will be for freedom's sake.
© 6/2004 www.nordbruch.org
Notes
1 To read the planned speech by Dr. Claus Nordbruch, please consult www.nordbruch.org/artikel/Sacramento.pdf
2 Newsletter by the organizers April 20, 2004.
3 http://www.barrychamish.com
4 Consider Claus Nordbruch, Sind Gedanken noch frei? Zensur in Deutsch- land, Munich, 2nd ed. 2001, pp. 279.
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
323
Neo-Nazi Go to the Dogs!
By Yoke Satyr
13 Months Imprisonment for Being Feebleminded
Roland T. suffered severe brain damage during an accident in 1995. Ever since, he has been provoking his environment with wild but harmless threats, running around in Berlin, Ger- many, with his right arm stretched out, shouting "Sieg Heil" and "Heil Hitler." He even taught his dog Adolf to lift his right paw when he shouts the command "make the salute!" Now he has been sentenced to 13 months imprisonment on probation by the County Court of Berlin-Tiergarten. Being feebleminded is no excuse for the use of symbols to which German society re- acts like a Pavlovian dog, the court argued (Tagesspiegel, Feb- ruary 6, 2004).
are now being trained in a secret Westerwald camp to shout out Hitler slogans, while innocent-appearing songbirds are being instructed in whistling the opening bars of the forbidden Nazi hymn, the Horst Wessel song. Our sources indicate that special American-trained democratic cats will be imported into Ger- many to counter the bird menace.
The year-long investigation has uncovered the fact that the leaders of this new and militant National Socialist movement are Guido K., a respected television director; Lother M., a high level member of the Bundestag; Karl R., an evangelical bishop from the Reeperbahn District in Hamburg; Marta G., writer of children's sex-education books; and Manfred Z., an assistant at- torney general and a director of a major Swiss bank.
German authorities have promised swift arrests in the Nazi- dog scandal and announced that many of the brain-washed animals that have been captured while giving the forbidden Hit- ler salute in public places will either be euthanized (by gas, of course! Not Zyklon B, though, as its expiration date is over) or retrained for what Berlin has called "Special Actions" against Turkish workers.
The rebels now have their own internet site called "Adolf- bleibtreu" and keep in touch with their clandestine membership via so-called sex implement advertisements placed in Stern magazine.
Editor's Remark
Of course, this is a satire - although the newspaper report about the poor feebleminded guy, who got 13 months for threatening the German constitutional order, and his dog with the loose right paw are REAL! Poor Germany!
German Republic authorities in Berlin have released an ex- plosive report that exposes a neo-Nazi plot to resurrect the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.
According to the German State Attorney's office in Berlin, a powerful Nazi underground based in Switzerland has been se- cretly training what the authorities termed a "huge army" of German Shepard dogs to give the dreaded and forbidden Nazi salute!
This is known as "Unternehmen Blondi" or Operation Blondi, a clever reference to Hitler's own dog, and has been tracked by German law enforcement officers for nearly two years.
These brainwashed Nazi dogs have also been trained to uri- nate on synagogues and campaign posters for Chancellor Schroder as well as defecating in copious amounts on the steps of Israeli diplomatic offices throughout the Republic. German officials have also not discounted persistent rumors that parrots
The "Mommy" Mommsen Show
By David Brockschmidt
Starring
- Professor Hans Mommsen of Bochum University, Ger- many, as himself
- Peter Monteith as the Grinning Clown
- David Brockschmidt as the Crusading Revisionist
- Plus
- Peter Monteith's Overweight Bodyguard
- Peter's two Goons with clubs and handcuffs
- The Mystery Screamer
- Twenty intelligent students (rumor has it, they exist)
It was 10:55 a.m. on the crisp Adelaide winter morning of 12 July, 1999. Lecture room number 723 at Adelaide University was filling fast. Germany's second most-famous historian was re- hearsing his lines. Today's show was "The Holocaust and Ger- man National Identity" - both terms being interchangeable.
Scene 1
Peter Monteith, locally-famous historian, wheels into the room a certain Professor Hans (Mommy) Mommsen, Ger- many's second most-famous historian. Suddenly Monteith sees the dreaded face of revisionist crusader David Brockschmidt, who is holding the even more dreaded Adelaide Institute pam- phlets. The dignified local historian grabs the elderly Professor (Mommy) Mommsen, wheels him into a side room, and slams the door. Then Peter Monteith, thinking the old boy forgot his hearing aid in Germany, shouts:
"Professor Mommsen, that is David Brockschmidt in the
lecture room. He is a Holocaust Denier. "
A loud, piercing, womanish shriek emits from a unidentified throat. The Professor is not familiar with the Brockschmidt name. Monteith shouts again,
324
The Revisionist ■ 2004 ■ Volume 2 ■ No. 3
"You must have heard of the Toben case? " Germany's second most-famous historian replies,
"Yes, indeed, I am familiar with the Toben Case. " The locally-famous historian begs,
"Is it possible to defer your lecture to another time and room? "
He adds that Security has been called. Professor (Mommy) Mommsen, not wanting to return an- other time, creeps back into the lecture room. I introduce my- self by handing him my Adelaide Institute business card and some revisionist material. I tell Professor Mommsen I came to see if he will bridge the gap between historical fact and public belief. I add that the locally-famous historian lied when he said I was a holocaust denier. I invite him to my home for a private conversation. He does not accept my offer.
I begin passing out historical material to the students, much to the chagrin of Peter Monteith's overweight bodyguard, who is squeezed into an Adelaide University shirt and tie. He vainly tries to block the students from accepting our material and gasps: "This is not university material. This is not our mate- rial. "
But the receptive students accept the material and respond with comments like:
"I've never heard about this before "
and
"This is from official historical sources, not just revi- sionists. "
I advise the students to maintain their right to question offi- cial versions of history and to protect this right as laid down in
the Magna Charta and the Imperial Bill of Rights.
"Don 't let Talmudic law take away your right to free- dom of speech in Australia. Dr Toben's imprisonment in Germany is a warning to all that the enemies of freedom of speech are active in Europe and Australia. "
Scene 2
As I leave the building, two university security guards head up. They are outfitted with police clubs, handcuffs, and what appears to be poison capsicum gas. I can't resist mocking them and say that six big neo-Nazis are up there with baseball bats and one of them is reading from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
"Shit, they told us it 's only one Nazi. " - says one guard.
I add that the intruders are hiding in the women's toilets. I say the fellow with the Adelaide University shirt and tie is the gang leader.
The point of my joking is that one can say anything about valid historical revisionists, and many people unquestionably believe it. But the tide is turning. The intelligent students were receptive to our material. They are seeing through the absurdity of the politically-correct Holocaust History as promoted by government historians such as Peter Monteith and Professor Hans (Mommy) Mommsen.
It is 11 :20 a.m. and I walk out into the sun. It is a beautiful morning in Adelaide. The sun shines into my eyes and into my heart. But I feel pity; pity for the burnt-out University profes- sors who publicly trot out a "Holocaust History" which in pri- vate they admit is untrue.
Research News
Jews in the NKVD of Stalin's Soviet Union
By Germar Rudolf
In celebration of the Golden Calf called political correct- ness, a "No-No word of the year" is chosen in Germany at the beginning of each new year (Unwort des Jahres). In 2003, the word chosen was "Tdtervolk", which means "perpetrator peo- ple" or "perpetrator nation". This term is usually used to refer to the German people as the perpetrators of 'the Holocaust'. Using this word in this context does not normally lead to reac- tions in Germany, since many Germans feel morally superior when they collectively accuse their own people. However, when this word was used in the context of Jews as the main perpetrators of Bolshevist crimes in the early Soviet Union, all hell broke loose.
This happened in October of 2003, when German Member of Parliament Martin Hohmann, during a speech entitled "Jus- tice for Germany" (Gerechtigkeit fur Deutschland), pondered the question, whether it was justified that Germany is still today treated like a criminal among nations for what happened two generations earlier.1 He stated that this special treatment is based upon a concept of hereditary guilt, which is in opposition to all Christian and modern Western values. He rejected the no-
tion that Germans are a "perpetrator people" just as he rejected the notion that Jews should be held collectively responsible for what some ancestors of Jews did during the Soviet revolution. Neither the Germans nor the Jews, he summarized, are Tatervolker.
That comparison was enough for him to get publicly ostra- cized, thrown out of Parliament and out of his political party (the Christian Socialist CDU), and vilified by the media. How- ever, a criminal prosecution against him for "inciting to hatred" had to be stopped after it turned out that he really didn't say anything wrong. As a result of this, Hohmann' s infamous use of the word "Tatervolk" led to this word being the No-No-word of 2003 chosen by an obscure, non-democratic prize committee.2
This event may be taken as an opportunity to investigate the issue of disproportionately high Jewish involvement in the So- viet terror apparatus a little more thoroughly.
In 200 1 , Nikita Petrov published an article that sheds some light into this topic. Petrov investigated the "Tendencies of Change in the Consistency of the Cadre of the Organs of the Soviet State Security during the Stalin Era."3 Although the time
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
325
Table 1: Number of Leading NKVD Staff Members - by Nationality
(absolute numbers and percentage of total, listed by dates)
Nationality |
10. July 34 |
1. Oct. 36 |
1. March .37 |
1. July .37 |
1. Jan. 38 |
1. Sept. 38 |
1 . July 39 |
1. Jan. 40 |
26. Feb. 41 |
Russians |
30(31.25%) |
33 (30.00%) |
35 (31.53%) |
38 (33.63%) |
58 (45.31%) |
85 (56.67%) |
102 (56.67%) |
1 1 1(64.53%) |
118 (64.84%) |
Jews |
37 (38.54%) |
43 (39.09%) |
42 (37.84%) |
36 (31.86%) |
35 (27.34%o) |
32 (21.33%o) |
6 (3.92%o) |
6 (3.49%.) |
10 (5.49%o) |
Ukrainians |
5 (5.21%) |
6 (5.45%) |
6 (5.41%) |
5 (4.42%) |
4 (3.13%) |
10 (6.67%) |
19 (12.42%) |
29 (16.86%) |
28 (15.38%) |
Poles |
4(4.17%) |
5 (4.55%) |
5 (4.50%) |
4 (3.54%) |
1 (0.78%) |
1 (0.67%) |
|||
Latvians |
7 (7.29%) |
9(8.18%) |
8(7.21%) |
7(6.19%) |
5 (3.91%) |
" I |
1 (0.55%) |
||
Germans |
2 (2.08%) |
2 (1.82%) |
2 (1.80%) |
2 (1.77%) |
2 (1.56%) |
1 (0.67%) |
|||
Georgians |
3 (3.13%) |
4 (3.64%) |
5 (4.50%) |
4 (3.54%) |
4(3.13%) |
5 (3.33%) |
12 (7.84%) |
12 (6.98%) |
12 (6.59%) |
Armenians |
1 (1.04%) |
1 (0.91%) |
1 (0.90%) |
1 (0.88%) |
1 (0.78%) |
1 (0.67%) |
2(1.31%) |
2(1.16%) |
2(1.10%) |
Aserbaijanians |
1 (1.04%) |
1 (0.91%) |
1 (0.90%) |
1 (0.88%) |
|||||
Belorussians |
3 (3.13%) |
2(1.82%) |
3 (2.70%) |
3 (2.65%) |
2(1.56%) |
3 (2.00%) |
1 (0.65%) |
3 (1.74%) |
4 (2.20%) |
Others |
1 (1.04%) |
1 (0.91%) |
1 (0.88%) |
1 (0.78%) |
3 (2.00%) |
1 (0.65%) |
1 (0.58%) |
3 (1.65%) |
|
No data |
2 (2.08%) |
2(1.82%) |
3 (2.70%) |
1 1 (9.73%) |
15 (11.72%) |
9 (6.00%) |
10 (6.54%) |
8 (4.65%) |
4 (2.20%) |
period covered by Petrov, as far as it is of interest here, covers only the years from 1934 to 1941, the data obtainable from documents stored in Soviet archives still allows us to come to some definite conclusions.
Table 1, as taken from Petrov' s paper, lists the number of leading staff members of the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD, predecessor of the later KGB) accord- ing to their nationality. Until the outbreak of the Great Purges in 1937/38, Jews apparently had a huge proportion in the lead- ing positions of the Soviet terror machinery. Petrov explains in this regard:
"Of course, the presence of so many Latvians, Poles, and especially Jews in the leadership of the NKVD is ex- plained by the nature of restrictions prior to 1917, to which they were subjected. With its romanticism of blurring na- tional borders, the bolshevist regime opened all venues to numerous representatives of these nationalities. They justly viewed the new state order as 'theirs, ' as one to which they belonged unconditionally. Many representatives of the na- tionalities mentioned became active in political and social live and successfully pursued their careers after October 191 7. The leading cadre of the NKVD reflects this tendency in concentrated form. "
Although Jews were not a larger majority in the Soviet Un- ion than, for example, Germans, Poles, or the Baltic people, their dominance in the Leadership of the NKVD is tremendous: They represented the biggest single group, even before the Rus- sians, who numbered more than 30-times as many people as the Jews. It can be assumed that the over-representation of Jews in leading positions of the USSR in general and the NKVD or its predecessors in particular may have been even greater in the years prior to Stalin's rule; at least it can be assumed that the initial enthusiasm of members of ethnic or religious minorities for the new Soviet regime, as it was described by Petrov, de- creased with the years between 1918 and 1934, that is, during 17 years of uninterrupted terror. Such a reduction of the Jewish portion will have resulted only for statistical reasons, simply because of the sheer numbers of Russians, it was more likely that a Russian would occupy an available position rather than a Jew.
One should keep in mind, however, that this applies only to leading positions of the NKVD. Petrov relates in this regard:5
"Jews were not as strongly represented when consider- ing all staff members of the state security. On March 1, 1937, 7% of all employees of the state security system were Jews, and on January 1, 1941, this percentage shrank to 4%. During the years before the war, the principle used to select the cadre members for the nomenklatura lead to a massive change of the ethnic make-up of the NKVD appara- tus. At that time, no specific politics to remove especially Jews from the state security existed as yet. That changed be- tween 1950-1953, when the persecution of the MGB system was directed exclusively against Jews. Already in 1950, Jews made up only 1.5% of the entire strength of the operat- ing cadre. "
To illustrate this, Table 2 shows the various nationality per- centages of all employees of the state security system. Al- though even here Jews were still overrepresented in early 1937, it is not nearly as drastic as in the leading positions.
Thus, if at the times of the Red Terror members of an ethnic group representing 80% of the population (Russians) were re-
Table 2: Nationality of all members of the State Security Services of the USSR4
Nationality |
1. March 37 |
1. Jan. 41 |
30. Nov. 50 |
Russian |
65% |
66% |
77.1% |
Ukrainian |
11% |
16% |
11% |
Belorussian |
4% |
2.7% |
1.9% |
Georgian |
1.2% |
1.3% |
1.0% |
Armenian |
1.8% |
1.8% |
1.3% |
Aserbaijanian |
0.4% |
||
Kasakhian |
0.8% |
||
Usbekian |
0.3% |
||
Latvian |
1% |
0.3% |
|
Lithuanian |
0.3% |
||
Estonian |
0.2% |
||
Turkmen |
0.1% |
||
Tajikian |
0.1% |
||
Kirgisian |
0.1% |
||
Karelian and Finish |
0.1% |
||
Moldavian |
0.1% |
||
Jews |
7% |
4% |
1.5% |
Other Nationalities |
3.3% |
||
"Foreign" Nationalities |
1.2% |
0.1% |
326
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
sponsible for 30% of the terror, and in turn members of a group representing 1.8% of the population (Jews) were responsibly for almost 40% of the Terror, then the following relation re- sults:
=22.2^0.375 = 59.26
This means that statistically, the Jews of the Soviet Union bear 59 times as much responsibility for the Red Terror per capita than the Russian population. Even that does not justify demands for collective guilt, collective responsibility, collec- tive shame, or accusations of being a "perpetrator people" as are often and unjustly imposed on the German people. But it makes understandable, why a German Member of Parliament might touch upon this issue in his speech.
Whoever claims that Martin Hohmann made false state- ments when he explained that Jews bore a disproportionately
huge responsibility for the Red Terror can only claim ignorance of the facts as an excuse.
Notes
1 Hohmann referred to the book by Rogalla von Bieberstein as reviewed in this issue of TR. For a complete reproduction of his speech and a discussion of the subsequent "scandal", see Vierteljahreshefte fiir freie Geschichtsfor- schung 7(3&4) (2003), pp. 417-421; online: ww.vho.org/VffG/2003/3/Hohmann417-421.html
2 Siiddeutsche Zeitung, 20 Jan. 2004.
3 Nikita Petrov, "Veranderungstendenzen im Kaderbestand der Organe der sowjetischen Staatssicherheit in der Stalin-Zeit", Forum fiir osteuropdische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, 5(2) (2001), wwwl.ku- eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/foram/docs/petrow.htm
4 Petrov gives as sources: "This table was compiled using archival material: GARF, holding 9401, IL. 8, file 43, sheets 33-34; ibid., file 64, sheet 24; CA FSB, holding 4-os., IL. 8, file 11, sheets 310-341."
5 Ibid., footnote 16.
From the Records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, Part 6
By Germar Rudolf
Unfit for Labor in Auschwitz1
"Since I now was no longer fit to work, I feared that I would be gassed. It had become general knowledge that all those unfit for work were gassed. "
This is from the statement by witness Rajzla Sadowska (p. 657), who thus follows the usual claims. Auschwitz inmate Mrs. Sadowska had been injured during a working accident, but instead of being gassed after she had been picked out during the selection that followed her accident, she was transferred to the sick-bay of the camp, where she was nursed back to health. Af- ter seven days she was subjected to another selection, this time by the notorious Dr. Mengele. She claims that Dr. Mengele subsequently subjected her to various rather painful experi- ments. Even though she claims to have been a human wreck af- ter this - there is no trace in the investigation files about a fo- rensic examination of the traces these alleged medical experi- ments must have left - and although she claims that she was ut- terly unfit for any labor after this, she again was not only not gassed, but once more nursed back to health (p. 684). Despite these gruesome experiences by Germans in Germany, Mrs. Sadowska preferred to settle in Germany after the war, because she could not cope with the climate in Israel (p. 676).
Another selection that Mrs. Sadowska claims to have wit- nessed right after her admission to the camp fits into the same scheme: Mrs. Sadowska and all the other inmates deported with her to Auschwitz were kept for three months in quarantine. Af- ter this effort was made by the SS to make sure they carried no infectious diseases, but were of good health, all women unfit for labor were selected out, relocated to other inmate huts and later loaded on trucks and driven away, at which time those women are supposed to have sung a "final song". From this and from the fact that she did not see these women anymore there- after, Mrs. Sadowska concluded that these women had been killed (p. 678f). However, if the SS really intended to kill those
unfit for labor, they would have spared themselves the effort of feeding them through three months of quarantine.
Similarly paradoxical is the account by witness Hugo Brei- den, who claimed during his second interrogation that an eleven year old boy - who despite his young age was apparently not gassed on arrival in the camp, contrary to the generally held view - was nursed back to health after he contracted a danger- ous typhus infection, only to be selected afterwards, allegedly in order to be killed with a lethal injection (p. 701).
Hugo Breiden, Second Installment
The credibility of this witness can be assessed by consider- ing what he claimed during his second interrogation: because of a derogatory remark about the Western Wall - Germany's de- fence structure in the West prior to WWII - he claims to have been arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. He thus claimed to have been a political prisoner, although the files of the German prosecution clearly show that Breiden had commit- ted an uninterrupted series of crimes since 1928, his last prison term of 18 months resulting from criminal pimping.2 Whereas he gave the impression, during his first interrogation, to know from his own experience, which activities the inmate Jakob per- formed during the shooting of inmates at the infamous "Black Wall," during his second interrogation he stated this:
"I cannot describe his activities. But the stories had it
[...]. "(p. 695)
Thus, knowledge and hearsay are mixed. What, then, is to be thought of Breiden's story that an SS man had forced an in- mate
"to climb on a high fir tree. His two sons subsequently had to saw down the tree, so that the father fell down with it. " (p. 698)
This is truly a time-consuming, material-wasting way of killing somebody. In such a manner the SS would still be work-
The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
327
ing today to carry out their "duty" of killing six million by slowly de-foresting the forests of Europe; time and material to wage a war and produce weapons would not have been left over either . . .
Or how about the radio singer from Sofia, who, according to Breiden, was forced to go swimming in a pond, where her breasts were torn to pieces by a dog (as if swimming dogs could do such a thing), followed by a stone-throwing SS man, who finally managed to sink the lady (p. 689f). Such stories are called "Holo porn."
Rogner and his Friend
Sheets 703 to 732 of the files contain the protocol of an- other interrogation of the witness Adolf Rogner, who I charac- terized earlier as the "greatest liar in all the land."3 In this inter- rogation Rogner listed more than 504 alleged crimes that he claims to have witnessed himself and about which he claims to be able to testify in detail. I'll spare myself and the reader the time to analyze the web of lies told by this congenital liar, but I must state that it is not the witness Rogner who is the primary problem here; the much greater problem lies with the German prosecutors (collectively the German "Nazi hunter" authority Zentrale Stelle der Justizverwaltungen), who interrogated this witness once again, without showing the slightest capability of a critical approach.
In this context, the statement by witness Emil Behr, who stated on March 21, 1959, that he worked in Auschwitz in the electricians unit under the Kapo (inmate foreman) Adolf Rogner, is of interest. He related:
"After I was told about several incidents, which are
claimed to have been committed by the political department
and partly by Boger, I cannot tell more details. I did not
hear about these events.
[...] After I had been told that experiments were made
with women in this Block 10, I must say that I did not know
this.
It was known in the camp that shootings were performed in large amounts and almost daily by the political depart- ment at the Black Wall. But I do not anything more specific about it. Individual events are unknown to me. [...]
[...] / sure did see how inmates were mistreated by SS men. " (p. 756)
"However, I cannot remember obvious killings. I also do not know about particular cases, where inmates died af- ter their mistreatment by members of the SS. " (p. 756f.)
"I was never present during selections of newly arrived transports. I have only heard and thus assume, that selec- tions were performed at all transports. I have never seen the crematoria and the gas chambers. I do not know either, which SS man were on duty there. " (p. 758) Here we have a witness with a similar horizon of experi- ences as the witness Rogner, who worked in the same unit. In contrast to Rogner, however, Behr was not a "professional wit- ness" after the war, did not work for an association of former inmates, did nor stockpile files and literature about German wartime camps, and was also not sentenced for perjury or other similar crimes, as was Rogner. Accordingly Behr has some knowledge about occasional mistreatments of inmates, but any-
thing else is either totally unknown to him, or he "knows" it only from hearsay ("known in the camp", "only heard"). He exaggerates his insistence on his lack of knowledge, however, when he claims that he never saw the crematoria, since they really could not be missed. Perhaps he meant that he never saw the crematoria from the inside.
Such a degree of ignorance was expected to provoke a reac- tion from the interrogating officer, who was used to much bet- ter performances by other witnesses. Even though the merely summary protocol does not mention any skeptical remarks or questions by the officer, Behr's defensiveness indicates that his statement had been met with disbelief:
"I must admit that it appears almost incredible that I can say so little, even though I had been rather independent as an electrician and got around a lot in the camp. About this I must state that we could walk freely without guards only within the main camp. " (p. 758)
Of course, this is true also for Rogner, but that did not pre- vent him from "remembering" everything and everybody. All in all, the documentation of Emil Behr's testimony is a slip-up that shows in a crystal clear way the difference between an un- influenced witness, who is asked to remember certain events af- ter 20 years, and a witness who has manipulated his own mem- ory in an outright pathological way.5
Boger's Confessions
On April 8, 1959, the main defendant Wilhelm Boger was interrogated a second time by the German public prosecution. Some of the more interesting points of his statement are sum- marized in the following:
- All inmates admitted to the camp were registered by the po- litical department and entered into a registry. Only non- German inmates had their inmate number tattooed (p. 790).
- Every member of the SS had to sign a declaration of honorthat prohibited them from physically mistreating pris- oners (p. 796). Boger was in charge of investigating both SS men and inmates, who had committed crimes against in- mates or had otherwise broken the law; among his cases was also one where an SS man had a dog attack an inmate (pp. 787, 791, 794f).
- Punishments of inmates included corporal punishment (up to 25 beatings), incarceration (simple, severe, special labor unit, standing bunker), or penal transfer (to be ordered by the WVHA). Aggravated interrogations (torture) had to be authorized by the RSHA. They were performed by beating with a rod or whip, partly on the "swing," the effect of which had been tested by Boger and Broad during self- experiments:
"Once Rottenfuhrer Perry Broad and I hung our- selves onto the swing and did not perceive the mere hang- ing as a particular ordeal. " (p. 798). 6
He claims that bleeding injuries had never been the result of
such mistreatments, (pp. 796ff.)
- Killings never occurred arbitrarily, but a) at attempts of es- cape, b) following verdicts by a court of law, or c) by order from higher up (mostly RSHA). Executions were performed partly by shooting into the neck with a Mauser small-bore rifle at the "Black Wall" (capital punishment due to crimes
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committed outside the camp) or by hanging (crimes com- mitted within the camp), (pp. 798-801.)
- Auschwitz was the execution site of all death penalties handed down in the Government General (occupied Po- land). Prisoners on death row were transferred to Auschwitz but executed only after all legal recourses were exhausted, including an appeal for mercy with the General Governor Hans Frank. As a result, these inmates were often in Auschwitz for more than a year before they were executed. Inmates unaware of these death penalties might have be- lieved these executions were arbitrary (p. 809).
- SS members could enter the camp only with special permits (p. 795). Boger had no permit to enter the crematoria (p. 803).
It goes without saying that Boger's statements about the al- leged homicidal gas chambers are of special interest here, so I will quote his statements in this regard more thoroughly:
"After I had been at the political department of Ausch- witz for some 4 to 6 weeks, I heard for the first time that gassings were performed. These gassings must either have been conducted in the small crematorium and [sic] in Birk- enau. I do not know anything more specific, because I never participated in a gassing. I heard for the first time from a newspaper article that gassings or gassing experiments are said to have been conducted in Block 11. This was in De- cember 1958, when reports about the memoirs of Hoess were published in the context of my prosecution.
Generally every inmate had to work. Whoever was un- able to work due to sickness, malnourishment and similar thing, was transferred to the inmates ' sick-bay. I do not know what happened next with them. In any case, I have no knowledge that inmates were sent into the gas chamber just because of their unfitness to work. Of course many came to Birkenau, but that was due to the fact that the inmates ' sick- bay in Birkenau was much larger than the one in the main camp. " (p. 801)
"Those fit for labor were registered, those unfit for la- bor were brought to Birkenau, and I assume that they were gassed there immediately. I am not sure about that, because I was never present there. [...] To my knowledge, women and children went directly to the gassings. [...] Never did I myself go with inmates, who were at the ramp and intended to be gassed, to the gas chamber. Thus, I also know nothing from my own knowledge about what happened there. It was, however, known to the inmates and also to me that the in- mates intended to be gassed had to undress, allegedly in or- der to be bathed and deloused, that they then had to walk into a room equipped as a shower room, that it was then locked tight. I do not know what kind of gas was used. Every crematorium, at the end there were four - had its respective gassing rooms. [...]" (p. 802)
"I cannot give very exact details about the events, be- cause the crematoria including the gassing rooms were fenced in and particularly guarded, and even we SS mem- bers were not allowed to enter these areas. Not even my special permit allowed me to enter the crematorium. " Before analyzing his statements, I want to mention Boger's response to the interrogator's quoting of the statement of wit-
ness Filip Miiller,7 according to which Boger had ordered and attended executions in the crematoria II and III of Birkenau. Boger responded to that as follows:
"In Birkenau no executions were conducted. " (p. 806) One may ask what mass gassings are to be called, if not executions, which Boger admitted just a page earlier had taken place in Birkenau?
Furthermore, I would like to briefly examine a statement made by Boger during an interrogation conducted by U.S. oc- cupational forces on July 5, 1945, in Ludwigsburg. Boger had been arrested on June 19, 1945, by the Americans and after several stops was finally brought to Dachau, from where he was supposed to be extradited to Polish authorities on Nov. 22, 1946. However, Boger managed to flee (p. 786). It is not known if Boger was a defendant or a forced witness during the show trials staged by the Americans in Dachau during those times, but it seems likely that Boger, as a former Gestapo offi- cer active in Auschwitz, wasn't treated any better by the Americans than the majority of other Germans who ended up in this American torture machine.8
The interrogation protocol on July 1945 is interesting for two reasons: first, because Boger refers to one of his inmate secretaries as a witness for his defense (p. 823), and secondly he reports the following - in a rather disconnected way:
"When the mass dying of ^4w.[schwitz] - the Auschwitz SS staff itself had, allegedly due to epidemics, but in reality for transparent reasons, a camp quarantine for over PA years! The grey inmates before the wire [fence] / — came to the knowledge of the world over the heads of the clueless German people during the fall of 1943, suddenly the leading positions in the camp and at the State Police Kattowitz (criminal police) were restaffed by the Reich Criminal Po- lice Office, on behalf of the Highest SS and Police Court, on order of Reich Leader SS Himmler an investigation was ini- tiated! A ridiculous theater, which thus had according suc- cess! Under strictest secrecy [...] the special commission of the infamous Highest Judge (on special request) and repre- sentative of the prosecution, SS-Stubaf. Dr. Morgen with 6- 8 manned [sic...] 4 months in Au. active to investigate 'cases of corruption and murder. ' " (p. 824) Boger claims that the head of the political department of Auschwitz Grabner had been put on trial on Oct. 13 and 14, 1944, because of unauthorized killings of inmates. Boger claims that he appeared during this trial as a witness for the prosecution (p. 825).
Regarding homicidal gassings, Boger declared this summa- rily:
"The total of all inmates killed in Auschwitz by means of gassings, shootings, hangings, and epidemics and also of members of the SS will never be determined exactly, but certainly exceeds the cautious estimate degrees [sic] by SS Oberscharfuhrer Erber (former Houstek), who was active in the 'registry, 'four (4) millions by far! " Thus, not even two weeks after he was captured by the Americans, Boger already parroted the propaganda lie of four million victims as spread by the Allies since early 1945. What should one think about the independence and trustworthiness of such a witness? And what about the methods of his interroga-
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tors, not to mention the utterly incoherent language, which in- dicates he must have suffered mentally under his interrogators.
Let us keep in mind: According to Boger's statement, his department was in charge of registering all inmates admitted to the camp; it was illegal to mistreat these inmates; severe pun- ishments and in particular killings occurred only following or- ders from higher up and were administered by Boger's depart- ment; Boger was responsible for investigating transgressions of law and order in the camp.
The question thus arises, how can he at the same time seri- ously claim he had either no knowledge about gassings (that is, mass executions) or knew about them only from hearsay? We know how the Frankfurt Jury Court answered this question: Boger did not tell the truth, because he must have known more about those gassings than he admitted.
I agree with the court that Boger did not testify truthfully, but from a different perspective: From his first interrogation right after the war, we can clearly see that the Americans sub- jected him to a treatment, after which he willingly parroted the lie of four million Auschwitz victims, a number which is today generally rejected as atrocity propaganda. His entire statement of 1945 reads as if it was written by a person not involved in the claimed events of Auschwitz, by someone who accuses the Gestapo and SS of terrible crimes in a style that is to be ex- pected by a victim or prosecutor of such crimes! Such a dra- matic and theatrical prosecutorial style against himself and written in the third person is typical for "confessions" made by defendants in Stalinist show trials.
Brainwashed in such a way, Boger managed to flee his cap- tors, but as a consequence of the steady and steadily increasing exposure to Holocaust propaganda without any antidote, he started to believe and consider as his own knowledge what was suggested to him in 1945-1946. But how do we distinguish his own knowledge from alien knowledge?
There is, first of all, the internal coherence of Boger's later statement, which can also be proven to be correct by war-time documents: As Gestapo officer he investigated crimes (however that was defined in those times); he tortured, punished and exe- cuted on the demand of court orders; he accurately describes the structure of his department, the names, ranks and responsi- bilities of superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; he describes the treatment of sick inmates and those unfit for labor properly and reports about the terrible typhus epidemic leading to a total quarantine of the entire camp. All this can be proven with documents and results in a consistent picture.
The only thing that does not fit into this image are those ominous gas chambers - unsupported by documentary evidence - which he claims he never saw and about which he has no ex- act knowledge, even though his department was responsible for executions, for investigations of transgressions, for registering inmates, and even though the concept of gassing inmates unfit for labor contradict his statement - which is supported by
documents - that inmates unfit for labor were nursed back to health in the inmates' sick-bay at Birkenau.
What is the truth? It is clearly visible in front of our eyes, yet the Frankfurt judges were apparently blind.
Pery S. Broad
One of the more often quoted witnesses for alleged homi- cidal gassings in the old crematorium of the main camp Auschwitz is Pery S. Broad. Broad was Boger's assistant (p. 791), and several witnesses accused him of crimes similar to the ones they accused Boger of committing.9 J.-C. Pressac has pointed out that Broad's "confession", which he is claimed to have made voluntarily in July 1945 while in British captivity, is even more riddled with theatrical accusations against the SS - that is, against himself - than Boger's "confession" of the same month.10 This fact in and of itself speaks volumes. Apparently due to his donkey-work as an "assistant prosecutor" after the war, he was neither prosecuted nor extradited to Poland, but he nevertheless ended up in pretrial detention in 1959 - probably indirectly as a result of his own post-war statements - and then in front of the Frankfurt judges. (How did that saying go? Frankfurt loves treason, but not the traitor?) We will discuss Broad in more detail in a later installment of this series.
Notes
1 If not indicated otherwise, all volume and page references refer to: Public Prosecution at the District Court of Frankfurt (Main), "Strafsache beim Schwurgericht Frankfurt (Main) gegen Baer und Andere wegen Mordes," Ref. 4 Js 444/59; vol. 5, pp. 651-835, and vol. 6, pp. 836-986.
2 File memo of the interrogating police office Haug, vol. 2, p. 221; regarding the first interrogation of H. Breiden see. TR 1(3) (2003), p. 354.
3 TR 1(3) (2003), p. 355.
4 Only the first 19 pages of this protocol are legible (until p. 721, 52 crimes until then), so that the entire 30 pages of this protocol could very well con- tain some 75 alleged crimes Rogner claims to have witnessed.
5 A similarly untrustworthy witness was interrogated on March 18, 1959, in the German embassy in Paris: Zlata Dounia Wassersztrom. In her statement she repeatedly indicates that she has her knowledge from hearsay, from "experience literature," and through contacts with associations of former inmates, pp. 762, 763-767, esp. 767. Instead of asking more detailed in or- der to separate first hand experience form hearsay, diplomatic counsel Knatz did the exact opposite:
"The embassy refrained intentionally from asking her for further details [...], since the witness visibly had a hard time to keep control over her ex- citement. She probably presented the essentials already in her publica- tions and repeatedly referred to the material of the International Ausch- witz Committee [...]" (p. 762)
6 Boger describes it again as he did before, cf. TR 1(3) (2003), p. 353.
7 Vol. 4, p. 496.
8 For a description of the methods used see m. Kohler, "The Value of Testi- mony and Confessions Concerning the Holocaust," in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dis- secting the Holocaust, 2nd. ed., Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, pp. 85-131, in particular pp. 91-96.
9 E.g. Hugo Breiden, p. 699; Adolf Rogner, p. 705.
10 Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas chambers, Beate-Klarsfeld-Foundation, New York 1989, p. 128; Pery Broad, "Erinnerungen", in: Auschwitz in den Augen der SS, Krajowa Agen- cja Wydawniczna, Katowitz, 1981.
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The Revisionist ■ 2004 • Volume 2 ■ No. 3
Book Reviews
On the Fate of Gypsies in the Third Reich
By Use Schirmer-Vowinckel
State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.), Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau / Gedenkbuch. Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau / Ksiega Pamieci. Cyganie w obozie Koncentracyjnym Ausch- witz-Birkenau, in collaboration with the Cultural and Documentation Center for German Sinti and Roma in Hei- delberg, trilingual edition English, German, Polish, 2 vols., Saur, Munich, 1993, xlvii+1674 pp., $265.-
Conflicting Numbers
On December 16, 1992, German newspapers, radio, and television reported on a commemorative ceremony in the Berlin Parliament marking the 50th anniversary of an alleged edict is- sued by Himmler on December 16, 1942. Various media re- ports stated that, as a result of this alleged edict, Gypsies from all Europe were deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz- Birkenau, where 30,000 perished by the end of the War. They reported that during the memorial service, a list of names of Gypsies murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau was presented to Representative Renate Schmidt of the Bavarian Socialist Party. (They intended to say that a copy of the Memorial Book was presented.) On the very same day, December 16, 1992, puzzled viewers and listeners in Germany were informed that 500,000 Gypsies had been murdered in "Nazi Concentration Camps."
Since that time, I have been attempting to reconcile this crass self-contradiction. Which number is correct, and what were the sources on which the numbers were based? I have been unable to answer the first question, but I shall now attempt to deal with the second.
After several years had passed, it seemed that an answer to my question might be near. The BBC broadcast a report on the Nuremberg Tribunal, in which the so called "Principal War Criminals" were blamed for murdering 12 millions Jews and 500,000 Gypsies. Radio Television Luxembourg repeated the broadcast on January 18, 1998.
For several years the Reichenbach Publishing Firm has of- fered undated offset reproductions of the official proceedings of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which were first published in 1947. The title page of my copy has this remark:
"Released under auspices of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), by the Secretariat of the Tribunal, under the authority of the Supreme Control Commission for Ger- many. "
The first of the 23 IMT volumes, the Introductory Volume, contains the entire list of the military tribunal's charges. Under Charge Four are listed "Crimes against Humanity" and under Section B "Persecution for political, racist and religious rea- sons, in execution of and connection with the 'Common Plan' mentioned in Prosecution Point 1 ." The IMT goes on to charge that "opponents of the German government were murdered and persecuted. The persecutions were directed at Jews." There is
no mention of Gypsies. Gypsies are mentioned in Charge Three, Group A, where several pages are dedicated to enumer- ating every conceivable kind of murder. The number of 500,000 is not mentioned, however. Neither Jews nor Gypsies are mentioned under the heading "Auschwitz" - only the esti- mated number of victims, "around 4,000,000." (p. 51)
1 found one source for the extensively reported 500,000 number. That is Simon Wiesenthal's memoirs, Recht nicht Rache (Justice not Revenge), published by Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin, 1992. On page 272 he writes:
"[...] hardly anyone knows that probably a half million Gypsies also died in the extermination camps of the Third Reich. "
He offers no documentation in support of his allegation. Obviously the "Holocaust Industry" is not going to part with that 500,000 number.
The 30,000 number
The 30,000 number was first named in conjunction with the Memorial Book which, interestingly, contains around 21,000 names. Gypsies were interned in other camps as well, however. According to Romani Rose/Walter Weiss, smaller collection camps were established exclusively for Gypsies outside the concentration camps, as for example in Frankfurt am Main. Re- fer to Rose/Weiss, Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich. Das Pro- gramm zur Vernichtung durch Arbeit (Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich. The Program of Extermination through Work). Lamuv, Gottingen, 1991. Rose/Weiss mention the number 500,000 on page 7, but they do not elaborate or return to it again.
The number 30,000 appears as well. It is mentioned on page 19 in a neutral context, as the authors are reporting on a confer- ence directed by Heydrich on 30th January 1940:
"At this conference it was decided that 'as part of the last transport, all Jews in the new Eastern regions as well as 30, 000 Gypsies from the Reich and Austria should be de- ported to the General Government [Poland.] The authors name the German Federal Archives as their source, but that is the only identification they give. They make no attempt to identify documents in the archives.
Let us return to the memorial ceremony at the German Fed- eral Parliament. I have before me several reports from various press services which covered the event:
1. Deutsche Presse Agentur Basisdienst Hamburg (German Press Agency, Hamburg)
2. Deutscher Depeschen Dienst (German Dispatch Service) -
2 reports
3. Evangelischer Presse-Dienst (Evangelical Press Service), Frankfurt am Main - 3 reports
4. Katholische Nachrichten Agentur (Catholic News Agency), Bonn - 3 reports.
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The Report Written by the German Press Agency (DPA)
The DPA states that the memorial ceremony was dedicated to "the more than 500,000 murdered Sinti and Roma" and that speeches were given by the chairperson of the German Central Council of Sinti and Roma, Romani Rose; by Minister of the Interior Schnoor of the German province of Northrhine- Westphalia; by Mayor Diepgen of Berlin; by German Member of Parliament Renate Schmidt; and by president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany Ignatz Bubis. It describes the presentation of the Memorial Book containing the names of 10,849 Gypsy women and 10,094 Gypsy men allegedly mur- dered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and claims that an edict issued by Himmler provided for the deportations of racial minorities from 11 European countries to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were to be murdered. It states that of 22,000 murdered Gypsies, 10,000 had come from Germany, and that preparations for genocide had begun as early as 1939. It concludes with the statement:
"In the course of this racist genocide, over 500,000 members of this ethnic minority lost their lives. "
Reports by the German Dispatch Service (DDD)
In the first report, Renate Schmidt repeats warnings about persecution and reminds us of the 500,000 murdered Gypsies. The second report quotes Romani Rose as saying that violence in the streets (against foreigners) is disquieting, but public ap- plause and political apathy toward violence is terrifying. It quotes an Auschwitz survivor as saying "It is frightening that, 47 years after the end of the terror of the Third Reich, a compa- rable terror again reigns." Referring to Himmler's alleged Auschwitz edict, it states:
"Gypsies from 12 European countries were transported to Auschwitz, where most of them died in the gas cham- bers. "
Reports by the Evangelical Press Service (EPD)
The first of the EPD reports expresses pronounced remorse because:
"The suffering of the 500,000 Sinti and Roma murdered in the Nazi camps during the Third Reich was ignored for many years. "
In describing the presentation of the Memorial Book to Renate Schmidt, it states that the book
"contains the names of almost 21,000 Sinti and Roma murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The original list of names had been hidden by Polish prisoners before the planned demolition of the camp in August of 1944. " The second EPD report states:
"The background to this was Himmler's Auschwitz Edict of December 1942, which introduced the final phase of the planned total extermination of the Sinti and Roma. All together, 500,000 members of this minority fell victim to the genocide. "
Reports by the Catholic News Agency (KNA)
The report by the Catholic News Agency in Bonn is more cautious than the others. It qualifies the 500,000 number as "according to Rose" and explains that the Memorial Book refers
to families that were deported to Auschwitz, not families that were murdered. In a later report the KNA, like the other agen- cies, states that approximately 21,000 Sinti and Roma had been "registered in order to subsequently be murdered at Auschwitz- Birkenau." It does not, however, state that the 2 1 ,000 were ac- tually murdered, as this does not necessarily follow.
The KNA is the only agency that quotes a significant part of Berlin Mayor Diepgen's speech which the others left out. It quotes Diepgen as saying:
"The Germans are obligated to show the surviving Sinti and Roma 'a sense of our common humanity, a sympathy with our fellow citizens which overcomes those difficulties that are sometimes unavoidable in encounters between dif- fering ways of life. ' He stresses that both sides must prac- tice the conduct and tolerance required by citizens of the same country and he dares to advocate 'respect for the or- derly inclinations of the majority social group. "'
The Memorial Book
Most of the Memorial Book presented to Renate Schmidt is written in three languages: German, English, and Polish.
Volume 1 contains introductory chapters along with an eight page overview entitled "The History of the Camp for Sinti and Roma at Auschwitz-Birkenau." This is followed by the "Principal Book of the Gypsy Camp for Women," 680 pages long. Volume 2 consists of around 600 pages entitled "The Principal Book of the Gypsy Camp for Men." It is a register of names, birth places, survivors' accounts, a calendar of persecu- tions, and documents. The postscript lists the names of the "SS Members of the Camp for Sinti and Roma at Auschwitz- Birkenau."
There are several problems concerning prisoner identifica- tion numbers. The women's list is consecutively numbered from 1 to 10,849 while the men's list likewise begins with 1 and continues to 10,094. It is alleged that these are the prison- ers' ID numbers. To me this seems unlikely, since it means that all the numbers would have to have been issued twice.
Furthermore, the story of the rescue of the principal books is implausible. We are told that a Polish clerk and two prisoners from the Gypsy camp had stolen them near the end of the War, wrapped them in clothing, buried them in a bucket between two barracks in July of 1944, and exhumed them in 1949. Here the authors were quite careless. They give the names of two of the participants as Ireneusz Pietrzyk, ID No. 1701, and Josef Pe- nuzilka. The latter had already died in July of 1 943 .
Most likely, the story unfolded as follows. The lists do in- deed contain the names of former prisoners of Auschwitz- Birkenau, both those who died and those who survived, but the names were not taken from a bucket that had been buried for five years. They probably came from the documents of the Gypsy collection camps where these persons had been regis- tered before deportation, as the KNA reported. The lists pre- sented by the Central Committee of Sinti and Roma were com- piled before the 46 death registers of Auschwitz were made available for research, either in 1989 or 1992. The official death rolls had been seized by the Red Army at the end of the War and taken to Moscow. Lead publisher Jan Parcer refers to them on page xxxviii, Volume 1 of the Memorial Book.
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The Alleged Himmler Edict of 16 December 1941
None of my inquiries with the German Sinti and Roma Cen- ter for Documentation and Culture at Heidelberg, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, or the Federal Archives of Germany have yielded proof of the existence of such an or- der. There is simply no "Himmler Edict" in any of these ar- chives. This does not mean that such an edict never existed, of course. I did receive photocopies of a suggestive five-page Schnellbrief (priority letter) from the very helpful Institute for Contemporary History. Dated 29th January 1943, it originated with the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Headquarters, Department of Reich Security) in Berlin and contains the heading
"Transfer of Persons of Mixed Gypsy Blood, Roman
Gypsies and Balkan Gypsies to a Single Concentration
Camp. "
The first sentences read as follows:
"By authority of the Reichsfiihrer of the SS: dated 16th December 1942 / Order No. 12652/42 Ad./RF/V. In the com- ing weeks, Persons of Mixed Gypsy Blood, Gypsies from Rome, and non-German Gypsy tribes from the Balkans are to be segregated according to certain criteria and trans- ported to a single concentration camp: Auschwitz Gypsy Camp. "
In contrast to the usual allegations concerning deportation of Gypsies, there is no mention of any order to exterminate Gypsies. Also in contrast to the usual assumptions, many Gyp- sies were excluded from involuntary transfer. The letter lists ten points as guidelines for excluding detainees from transport, the first four of which are:
"1. Pure blooded Sinti and Lalleri Gypsies;
2. Mixed-race Gypsies who, within the Gypsy context, are considered to be of good character;
3. Gypsy-like persons who are legally married to Gyp- sies of German blood;
4. Gypsy-like persons evincing habits of social integra- tion, who were employed on a regular basis and who had a permanent residence before the general detention of Gyp- sies. "
Point 6 is especially interesting:
"Gypsy-like persons serving in the armed forces, or who in the present war have been disabled or discharged with distinction, are also exempt from deportation. " Point 10 is also of especial interest. It exempts all
"Gypsy-like persons who can prove possession of citi- zenship in a foreign country. " This is followed by a noteworthy remark:
"Exceptional treatment will not be granted for Gypsies
or Gypsy-like persons who have a severe record of felo- nies. "
The term "Exceptional treatment" (similar to "special treatment") is clearly used here in a positive sense, that of a privilege not granted to convicted felons. The Schnellbrief sup- ports conformist assumptions about one aspect of the treatment of Gypsies. Part III directs that, in cases other than 1 and 2 ("pureblooded" and "good" Gypsies), all other Gypsies not de- ported to Auschwitz-Birkenau will be asked to voluntarily ac- cept sterilization. This includes both adults and their children. The question immediately comes to mind: what if they do not voluntarily submit? In that case, "after consideration of the rea- sons, the criminal police will make the decision." This sounds very bad, even though we do not know what decision the criminal police would make.
Part IV included long winded and highly detailed instruc- tions regarding preventive custody, that is, detention before de- portation. A positive aspect is the instruction that families should remain together and not be separated. It also stipulates that identification papers and food ration cards should be sur- rendered and all material possessions "left behind and secured in an appropriate manner until further notice." Cash, stocks, and bonds were to be surrendered after being inventoried "by lists, stating all personal details pertinent to the owner. These lists and receipts are to be delivered to the appropriate deposi- tory, the central criminal police station." We would like to know whether these lists were returned to the survivors after the war, or whether they are still in existence.
This is followed by two pages of detailed instructions about placing Gypsies under arrest, including three enclosures: Sam- ple patterns for forms and catalog cards. Children's names were to be entered on the catalog card of the mother and a card was to be completed for each child as well. Duplicate receipts for prisoners were to be sent to a special branch of the German na- tional criminal police headquarters, Reichszentrale zur Bekamp- fung des Zigeunerunwesens (Reich Center for Combating Gypsy Mischief) at Berlin C2, Werderscher Markt 5/6.
Further Reading
- Carlo Mattogno, "The 'Gassing' of Gypsies in Auschwitz on August 2, 1944," The Revisionist 1(3) (2003), pp. 330- 332.
- Otward Milller, "Sinti and Roma - Yarns, Legends, and Facts," this issue, pp. 254-259.
First published as "Zum Schicksal der Zigeuner im Dritten Reich" in Vier- teljahreshefte fur freie Geschichtsforschung 3(4) (1999), pp. 464-466. Trans- lated by James Damon.
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Marshal Zhukov: A Career Built on Corpses
By Dan Michaels
Viktor Suworow, Marschall Schukow — Lebensweg iiber Leichen, Pour-le-Merite, Selent, Germany, 2002, 350 pp., €25.80
Prologue
Every war produces genuine military strategists and heroes, many of whom die on the battlefield or whose exploits go un- recognized. Decorated "Hero of the Soviet Union" four times, Marshal Georgi Zhukov was indisputably the most honored military figure in the Soviet Union. During World War II he rose to the position of deputy supreme commander and, after Josef Stalin, was the USSR's most popular figure. Viktor Suvo- rov, arguably the foremost revisionist of the Russo-German War, attempts in his most recent book1 to show that Zhukov was neither a genuine hero nor a great strategist. Not only, Su- vorov contends, was Zhukov the only gen- eral in world history to be honored for los- ing more than five million of his men in combat, but he was also an unscrupulous commander who squandered the men serv- ing under him through gross incompetence and callousness. As to the character of the man, Suvorov argues that Marshal Zhukov was by no means an honorable soldier, but, as the Russians say, a "soldafon"— a crude, loud-mouthed martinet.
The entire history of the Soviet Union, Viktor Suvorov writes in his latest book, is a fabrication based on lies and propaganda. With the exception of the Russian people themselves, whose courage and stoicism deserve every acknowledgment, there were no genuine Communist heroes during the entire Soviet regime, especially not those designated by the ink and electronic media
Lebensweg Lifter Leichen
..Scfrplcr" von Berlin H''iii dur Sowjetunlon
Pour Ic Merits
most frequently used to describe Zhukov are erode, brutal, sa- distic, vainglorious, obtuse, morbidly narcissistic, overrated. They also employed the terms butcher, drunk, braggart, career- ist, fraud, and the like. Nor were these epithets simply a matter of professional jealousy. Unfortunately for Zhukov, first Stalin and later Khrushchev concurred in this evaluation.
Writing today, Russian military historian Pavel N. Bobylev of the Russian Ministry of Defense Institute of Military History admits that "in his memoirs Marshal Zhukov concocts a mainly self-serving, self-exonerating version of what actually occurred in mid- 1941 and on the eve of the war."3
Marshal Zhukov was not, as the media has depicted him, the master strategist and architect of most of the Soviet battlefield victories. He was, instead, one of Stalin's brutal executioners - a ruthless individual given plenipotentiary powers to ensure that the military strategies and tactics de- veloped by Stalin and the Supreme High Command (Stavka) were successfully exe- cuted, regardless of the cost in men or ma- teriel. At times the marshal used to weep uncontrollably for no apparent reason.
Suvorov compares Zhukov 's role and responsibilities to those of the secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who received credit for supervising the building of the Baltic- White Sea Canal in which countless thou- sands of slave laborers perished. Yagoda was the slave master who ensured the la- borers were on the job, but had nothing to do with the planning, engineering, and sub- sequent operation of the canal. So it was with Zhukov, who drove his men into bat- tle without himself having developed a strategy that would yield victory with the least number of casualties. As to Zhukov's
under the direction of the propaganda directorate (Agitprop). Suvorov takes the case of four-times "Hero of the Soviet Un- ion" Marshal Georgi Zhukov as a prime example of such fabri- cated heroism.
The legend of Zhukov's genius, Suvorov states, was an in- vention of the Communist Party and the marshal himself in his memoirs.2 It was propagated throughout the world by Commu- nist political commissars and propagandists like General David Ortenberg, chief editor of the military newspaper Red Star, and Boris Polevoy (ne Kampov), chief editor of Pravda. The legend was echoed and magnified in the Western media by fellow travelers and innocent dupes alike. By 1970 one benighted cleric even proposed that Zhukov be made a saint in the Rus- sian Orthodox Church.
Essentially a crude and unprofessional soldier, Zhukov was held in low regard by his fellow Soviet marshals: Bulganin, Va- silevsky, Yeremenko, Konev, Zakharov, Golikov, Rokoss- ovsky, Timoshenko, Biryuzov, and others. Suvorov cites de- scriptions of Zhukov by these colleagues, and the adjectives
modus operandi, Marshal Rokossovsky wrote:4
"Zhukov much preferred to give orders than to lead his
men. At difficult moments no subordinate could expect any
support from his side - the support of a comrade, leader, or
an encouraging word of friendly counsel. "
Suvorov reviews Zhukov's career chronologically from his early undeserved "victories" to his final, fully-deserved disgrace.
Battle of Khalkhin-Gol
Zhukov's first major command, in which he won his first Hero of the Soviet Union award, was in the Battle of Khalkhin- Gol in Mongolia in the summer of 1939, considered by many the dress rehearsal for the planned Soviet attack on Germany in 1 94 1 . When the decision was taken by the Kremlin to teach the Japanese a lesson while at the same time trying out the Soviet war machine, General Zhukov was chosen to head the opera- tion and was given a free hand to request as many men and as much military hardware as he wanted. According to Suvorov, General Zhukov did not himself devise the sudden, Soviet
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steamroller encirclement operation that was executed with overwhelming forces.
While the accounts of the battle highlight the names of Zhukov, the political commissars assigned to the operation, and even those of individual heroes among the troops, no mention whatsoever is made of the key officers - the chief of staff and the chief of operations - who were most responsible for the conduct and outcome of the battle. In his research Suvorov found that most of the important data on the operation are still classified and inaccessible. He did, however, eventually find the name of Zhukov' s chief of staff in the little-publicized memoirs of Marshal Matvei Zakharov. It was Brigade Com- mander M. A. Bogdanov, the best in the Red Army at the time, who must be credited with developing the strategy used so suc- cessfully at Khalkhin-Gol, not General Zhukov.
Admiral of the Fleet Nikolai Kuznetsov, who was later purged by Marshal Zhukov personally, commented on Zhu- kov's role in the battle:5
"After it was over, he [Zhukov] did everything he could to
take credit for every success in the battle with the Japanese. "
Prelude to World War II
After his return from the successful campaign in Mongolia in late 1940, Zhukov found the map of Europe changed to re- flect Stalin's advance into Finland, the Baltic states, and Bes- sarabia, as well as Hitler's invasion of Western Europe. In Sep- tember 1940 Stalin ordered all his major military commanders and the entire Politburo to attend a ten-day conference in Mos- cow, beginning on December 23, to discuss possible strategies in the event of war with Germany. Ostensibly, the conference was to address the problem of how best to defend the Soviet Union in the event of an attack by Germany. Actually, Suvorov notes, most of the reports delivered by the attendees discussed methods of how best to attack Germany.6
General Zhukov, who was then-commander of the Kiev Military District, was - owing to his unique experience in Mongolia - assigned to deliver the main report, "The Character of a Modern Offensive Operation." Because, he claimed, he was very busy with his other duties, Zhukov delegated the writ- ing of his report to a then little-known but gifted officer, Colo- nel I. Kh. Bagramyan. Bagramyan, Suvorov notes, later rose to the rank of marshal in World War II and authored the Soviet 1944 summer offensive that broke the German front in the cen- tral sector.
Suvorov lists other reports read at the conference, e.g., "The Air Force in an Offensive Operation and in the Fight for Mas- tery of the Skies" by the head of the Main Air Force Admini- stration, General P. V. Rychagov; and "The Use of Mechanized Units in a Modern Offensive Operation and the Insertion of a Mechanized Corps in a Breakthrough" by General D. G. Pav- lov. When General F. N. Remizov, addressing People's Com- missar of Defense, Marshal S. K. Timoshenko, made the com- ment, "Comrade Commissar of Defense, by modern defense we mean..." Timoshenko cut him off sharply: "We are not talking about defense."
The reports outlining the offensive deployment procedures to be followed to accomplish a sudden, steamroller attack against Germany similar to that used against the Japanese in
Mongolia, were well received. All participants in the confer- ence were sworn to absolute secrecy about the proceedings. However, in his memoirs published in 1969, Zhukov falsely stated that the conference was concerned with the defense of the Soviet Union in the event of a German attack.
Prewar Maneuvers
In January 1941, immediately following the conference, large-scale strategic operational maneuvers were held to test the theoretical discussions at the conference. Stalin and the entire Politburo observed. The People's Commissar of Defense, Mar- shal Timoshenko, directed the war games.
According to Marshal Zhukov, he and some twenty-one other generals commanded the "Western (Blue) forces," i.e., the invading German forces, while General D. G. Pavlov with twenty-eight generals commanded the defending "Eastern (Red) Russian forces." Zhukov, by his own account, miracu- lously deployed his forces in precisely the manner the Germans did in their attack a year later. Writer Ivan Stadnyuk has sarcas- tically described Zhukov's brilliance:7 "His talent was so bril- liant that he could merely glance at the map to evaluate the situation. Putting himself in the place of the German command, he almost faultlessly divined the decisions that the Germans would take."
As a youth at the time of these maneuvers, Suvorov had wondered why the Chief of the General Staff, General Kirill Meretskov, had not himself directed the defense, as important as it was to the survival of the state. In reality, but concealed by Marshal Zhukov in his memoirs, there were not one, but two war games conducted in January 1941. 8 The first ran from 2 through 6 January during which the "Germans" launched their attack from East Prussia, while the second ran from 8 through 1 1 January, with the "Germans" attacking from Romania and Hungary. In the second war game, Zhukov commanded the So- viet forces, while Pavlov commanded the "Germans." Despite the legend that the Germans attacked in Operation Barbarossa with superior forces, Suvorov points out that even in these ma- neuvers the Western forces had only 3,512 tanks and 3,336 air- craft, while the Russians had 8,811 tanks and 5,652 aircraft. In the actual war, the Germans had even fewer tanks and aircraft, while the Russian had more.
In these war games, Suvorov continues, the Soviet forces had two options for attack: a direct strike north of Polesya against East Prussia, Konigsberg, and Berlin, which would have destroyed the entire German army; or south of Polesya, toward Budapest and the Romanian oilfields. Stalin himself chose the second option.
International Situation
Soon after the January 1941 maneuvers, Zhukov was ap- pointed Chief of the General Staff. In that position, Suvorov as- serts, Zhukov should have warned Stalin that the advances made by Soviet forces in Finland, the Baltics, and Romania in the past two years had left Hitler no choice but to attack before Germany was totally cut off from her raw material suppliers.
Germany was fully dependent on Sweden for iron ore and on Finland for nickel and timber. First, the Soviet Union in the preceding years had built up her Baltic Fleet to the point where
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it alone had more naval assets than Germany to defend against the combined British and American navies in the Atlantic. (For example, at that time Germany had a total of 57 submarines in its entire navy, while the USSR had 65 subs in the Baltic Sea alone.) Second, the Soviet Union had successfully invaded Finland and could now easily block the Gulf of Bothnia. Third, the Soviet Union had occupied the three Baltic states of Esto- nia, Latvia, and Lithuania. None of these measures had needed to be taken for defensive reasons. They were obviously taken to cut Germany off from her raw materials supplies.
Similarly, when the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and threatened Germany's only major oil source, Zhukov should have known that Germany could not possibly tolerate that situation for long, and warned Stalin of a possible attack. Zhukov did not.
The better strategic course of action on the Soviet side in the case of the Romanian oil fields, in Suvorov's opinion, would have been either to seize the Ploesti oil- fields outright or else not do anything in that regard. Most of Germany's military assets at the time were committed to the Western front; the Eastern front was wide open. By tak- ing the halfway action of seizing Bessarabia and Bukovina, the Rus- sians succeeded only in baiting the German tiger and throwing Romania into the German camp. Boxed in a corner, the tiger could only attack. Stalin made those political decisions, but Marshal Zhukov could and should have recommended against them on strategic grounds.
June 22, 1941
When, on June 22, 1941, the German tiger attacked the Soviet Un- ion, stunned indecision paralyzed the Stavka. As Suvorov recounts, it was not because the USSR was unpre- pared for war: they were armed to the teeth and almost ready to attack in an offensive war of their own design. The code name for the So- viet attack on Germany and Europe was "Groza," or "storm." Very detailed invasion plans had been distributed to all com- manders at the front in red packets that were only to be opened when the signal was given. Commenting after the war, Marshal Vasilevsky wrote:9
"There were very detailed operational plans, just as there were mobilization plans. Mobilization plans had been given to literally each unit, including the secondary rear units. [...] The calamity was not in the absence of opera- tional plans but in our inability to use them in the situation that had developed. "
The Stavka had prepared absolutely no plans for a defensive war. The operational plans in the red packets were never opened. Josef Stalin and Marshal Zhukov were responsible for this.
Marshal Georgi Zhukov: painted fame
Moreover, the main thrust of the Germans was north of Polesya, while Zhukov, who had claimed to know precisely what the Germans planned to do, had deployed his main forces somewhat south of Polesya. Because Zhukov's own plans had been upset, his first directives to the Soviet armed forces were impromptu and confused.
On June 22, the day of the German attack, Zhukov distrib- uted Directive No. 1 which ordered Soviet forces not to respond to any provocative actions. Directive No. 2 followed later in the day, after the Germans had already penetrated Soviet defenses. When Directive No. 3 was issued on June 24, it sealed the fate of the front line troops of the Red Army by unrealistically call- ing upon the Red Army in the Suvalka region to attack, encircle the enemy, and destroy him. The reverse occurred.
Two months later in August, Suvorov recalls, Zhukov was faced with another strategic decision. General Guderian's tank units had earlier seized the strategi- cally important town of Elnya, situ- ated on a high-ground salient just 300 kilometers from Moscow. In August the German High Command was undecided whether to use Gud- erian's forces for a push on Moscow or to turn south, meet up with Gen- eral Kleist's forces, and encircle the Soviet armies around Kiev. Zhukov decided to make a frontal assault on the German salient at Elnya. Zhukov eventually took Elnya, but his losses in men and equipment were so great that it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Unfortunately for Zhukov, Gud- erian's main forces managed to slip by and elude detection by the Sovi- ets. Before moving south, however, the Germans thoroughly mined the area around Elnya. Zhukov's forces attacked the now abandoned Elnya salient and suffered heavy casualties on the minefields. Meanwhile, Gud- erian's forces had joined up with Kleist's southern group, encircled six Soviet armies, captured 665,000 Russian prisoners, 884 tanks, 3,178 field guns, and much am- munition and fuel.
The legend of Marshal Zhukov's genius, Suvorov recalls, attributes to him the successful defense of Leningrad, the re- pulsing of the Germans at the gates of Moscow, the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, and the taking of Berlin.
To stabilize the front after the disastrous rout of his armies, Stalin - one week after the German attack - acted quickly by ordering the gifted strategist, General Andrei Yeremenko, who at the time was commander of the Far East Army in Kha- barovsk, to take charge of the European theater, restore order, and slow the German advance. This Yeremenko, not Zhukov, accomplished in hard-fought battles around Smolensk and Bryansk.
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Leningrad
Since tsarist times Leningrad has been so heavily defended on land and at sea as to dissuade any attempt to attack it. With the guns of the Baltic Fleet providing artillery support, the de- fense of the city was formidable indeed. Only a madman, Suvo- rov says, would waste forces merely to take the city as a trophy. Not being that madman, Hitler decided to leave the city to its misery and move his now depleted and exhausted forces to a more important objective: Moscow. Consequently, Suvorov comments sarcastically, Zhukov saved a city that the Germans had no intention of storming.
Moscow
While it is true, Suvorov concedes, that the Germans were stopped at the gates of Moscow, Marshal Zhukov had little to do with it. First, the German forces had been depleted and ex- hausted after five months of uninterrupted combat. They had also exhausted their supplies, especially fuel, and had yet to re- ceive winter clothing. In many cases unit strength was at 40 percent or less of initial authorized strength. Second, Stavka, not Zhukov, had transferred 39 more battle-ready divisions and 42 brigades from Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan to the Western front.
Soviet defenses along the Lama River, running just west and northwest of the Soviet capital, proved particularly difficult to overcome. For the first time in the Russo-German war, So- viet defenses and men were managed with consummate skill. The Russian commander who had accomplished this was given no credit. That general's name was Andrei Vlasov, and he later defected to the German side.
German losses were indeed grave in the battle for Moscow, and in many sectors of the front they were forced to retreat. Marshal Zhukov, according to Suvorov, then falsely exagger- ated to Stalin German losses and the extent of the German re- treat. Zhukov convinced Stalin that a major offensive along the entire Western front would completely rout the Germans. How- ever, instead of concentrating their forces into a fist and smash- ing the main German force strength, the Soviets attacked all along the front, like the fingers on a hand. Red Army losses were staggering as the German lines stiffened. Zhukov lost three more armies and two corps. "Nicht kleckern, sondern klotzen" - "Don't piddle away your strength; concentrate it for smashing an important target!" is a famous German adage that Zhukov was apparently not familiar with.
Despite the failure of the Soviets to drive the Germans out of Russia in the first winter of the war (the Russo-German war would last another three-and-a-half years), Stalin praised Zhu- kov and awarded him new honors. It was the practice of Stalin, Viktor Suvorov observes, to lavish awards on his bloodiest po- litical henchmen. Thus, for example, Stalin also made Lev Mekhlis, Lavrenty Beriya, Nikolai Bulganin, and other political murderers into generals and marshals, praised them, and gave them the highest awards.
Stalingrad
The legend of Marshal Zhukov' s genius also gives him credit for the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Suvorov points out that Zhukov had spent very little time in Stalingrad. His first
visit was on August 31, when he proposed counterattacks. After two weeks he returned to Moscow. His last visit to Stalingrad was on November 16. The main Soviet encircling offensive be- gan on November 19, without Zhukov. The marshal was mostly concerned with launching unsuccessful offensives in other sec- tors of the front, especially in the direction of Sychevka, Rzhev, and Vyazem. For these failed operations, Zhukov was provided more men and materiel (ten armies, plus five more under Mar- shal Konev) than were allotted to the successful Stalingrad op- eration, which initially Zhukov thought of lesser importance.
According to Suvorov, neither the Stavka nor Zhukov be- lieved that the Germans had committed 22 divisions to the Stalingrad operation. Believing that only about 7-8 German di- visions were entrapped, Zhukov and the Stavka were planning a broad-front, deep-penetration (600 km) offensive in the direc- tion of Riga, Vitebsk, and Minsk. As it turned out, that major planned offensive advanced only 37 km and suffered very heavy losses.
When the magnitude of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad was realized, Marshal Zhukov was in a position to entrap the entire southern wing of the German advance in the Caucasus. Had the Soviets captured Rostov, which would have cut off the Germans in the Caucasus, the war might have ended that year, Suvorov speculates. However, Zhukov failed to seize the opportunity.
Zhukov had absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet victory in Stalingrad. Most of the credit for the successful Soviet encir- clement of the German 6th Army must again, as in the case of the Fall 1941 checking of the German advance on Moscow, go to General Andrei Yeremenko, the strategist who was ordered by Stalin in early August 1942 to establish a Southeast Front that would include Stalingrad and the Caucasus. General Alek- sandr Vasilevsky was the responsible commander of the Stalin- grad forces. General Vasili Chuykov commanded the famed 62nd Soviet Army in Stalingrad.
Operation Mars
The successful Stalingrad operation surprised both Zhukov and Stalin. When the Stavka planned its Fall 1942 offensive, it had in mind several major offensives named after the planets Mars, Uranus, and Saturn. Operation Mars, also known as the "Rzhev-Sychevka Offensive" and situated about 400 km west of Moscow, was primarily General Zhukov' s responsibility; Operation Uranus, the Stalingrad encirclement, was under the command of General Aleksandr Vasilevsky; and, finally, Op- eration Saturn was intended to be a drive to Rostov. All three simultaneous operations, the Soviets hoped, would result in the total collapse of German Army Group Center.
The forces allotted to Zhukov were about equal to those as- signed to Vasilevsky. Mars began on November 29, Uranus on November 19. To Operation Mars Zhukov committed about 670,000 men and 2,000 tanks, while Vasilevsky could commit about 700,000 men and 1,400 tanks to the Stalingrad encircle- ment. Stalingrad, of course, was a major Soviet success and a turning point in the war. Operation Mars, under Zhukov, was a total failure. Zhukov failed to break the German defense line and lost most of his tanks and 200,000 dead in the attempt. To cover this failure, Stavka later claimed that Mars had only been carried out to divert forces from Stalingrad. In reality, Stavka's
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original plan placed its greatest hopes on Zhukov. Because of this failure, the German Army Group Center managed to re- group and hold the line for another eighteen months.
This little known battle has been referred to as "Zhukov' s greatest defeat." David Glantz, an American military historian specializing in the Russo-German war, has written a solid work on this one battle.10
Kursk
Precisely the same sequence of events occurred during the great tank battle at Kursk. As Suvorov tells it, Zhukov had al- most nothing to do with either the preparations or conduct of the battle. He visited Soviet headquarters on the eve of the bat- tle, after all preparations had been made, and departed for an- other sector of the front four hours after the battle had begun. Two well-prepared Soviet fronts - the Central Front under General Rokossovsky and the Vo- ronezh Front under General N. F. Vatutin - awaited the German at- tack. Marshal Vasilevsky supervised from Moscow.
The Soviets had been fully in- formed of German plans by the Eng- lish, who by this time were reading Enigma signals and sending a selec- tion to Soviet intelligence. As a backup, Soviet intelligence had their agent John Cairncross working at Bletchley Park to provide more de- tailed information. After the victory Zhukov paraded about boasting of his new victory. Years later Marshal Rokossovsky recalled:11
"Comrades who had partici- pated in the Kursk battle have
come to me with questions: Why
has Marshal Zhukov distorted
history in his memoirs, claiming
credit for things he never did?
He shouldn 't be permitted to do
that!"
Marshal Georgi Zhukov: The smile of a mass mur- derer.
Berlin
Marshal Zhukov 's final claim to fame on the battlefield was the storming of Berlin. Called to Moscow by Stalin in January 1945, Marshal Zhukov was put in charge of the 1st Belorussian Front, Marshal Konev in charge of the 1 st Ukrainian Front, and Marshal Rokossovsky of the 2nd Belorussian Front. Stalin en- couraged rivalry between Zhukov and Konev to take the Ger- man capital; Rokossovsky, being of Polish descent, was shunted somewhat to the sidelines because Stalin wanted a Russian to take the German capital.
In the final battle for Berlin, the city was defended by rem- nants of various Wehrmacht units, the Volkssturm, and small units of French and German SS. With an advantage of ap- proximately 10:1 in men and arms; with the addition of Polish and Romanian units; and with the U.K. and U.S. air forces pounding Berlin, Dresden, and other cities in the Russian
path, Russian forces finally took Berlin in the first week of May. To take Berlin, Zhukov' s forces suffered a third of a million casualties and lost two tank armies. For him it was a typical victory with Russian casualties far higher than they need have been.
Occupation of Germany
After the war Stalin had ten marshals from whom to choose his military adviser in Moscow. Having little regard for Zhu- kov's intelligence, he assigned the popular marshal to Germany to restore order and put an end to the marauding, looting, rap- ing, drunkenness, and general anarchy that was besmirching the image of the Red Army and the Soviet Union. For his personal adviser, Stalin chose Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, perhaps the most talented of Russia's generals.
In charge of the German occupation, with headquarters in Wiinsdorf, Zhukov gradually re- stricted the lower ranks to barracks life. He indulged his own greed, however. Of course, to do this he needed accomplices, of whom many were to be found among the higher ranks, especially of the political se- cret police officers (NKVD). NKVD General Ivan Serov, himself a Hero of the Soviet Union, and NKVD General Konstantin Telegin organ- ized most of the looting for the mar- shal and his friends. Zhukov be- came, as Suvorov puts it, Russia's first oligarch by looting things of value (jewelry, furs, carpets, paint- ings, rare books, etc.) and shipping them home or presenting them as gifts to friends in high places who might be of use to him one day.
Suvorov 's search of the archives revealed that in August 1946 Gen- eral Bulganin reported to Stalin that "seven train cars containing 85 crates loaded with furniture belong- ing to Marshal Zhukov were being held up in the Yagoda customs. "
To indicate how the racket was run, Suvorov also quotes several statements made by General Aleksei Sidnev, NKVD commander in Berlin, at a hearing held in Moscow in 1948:
"1) Zhukov sent me a crown that by all indications once belonged to the wife of the German Kaiser. The gold had been removed from the crown to decorate a piece of jewelry Zhukov wanted to give his daughter on her birthday. "
2) Serov ordered me to send him all the gold objects di- rectly. In carrying out his directive, I, at various times, sent Serov 's organization about 30 kilograms of gold. Besides me, other sector chiefs sent Serov lots of gold objects. " Stalin, fearing that the behavior of his marshals, troops, and political officers was soiling the image of the Communist Party, took action against Zhukov. In June 1946 Generalissimo Stalin stated:12
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"Marshal Zhukov, having lost any sense of modesty and obsessed with personal ambition, considers that his services have been insufficiently appreciated. He, in conversations with subordinates, claims to have led all the major opera- tions in the Great Patriotic War, even those in which he had not the slightest connection. "
However, when Stalin in that same year proposed to his leading military figures that Zhukov be relieved of all his commands, imprisoned, and possibly shot, the generals and marshals unanimously advised against it. According to Suvo- rov, they feared that if Stalin purged Zhukov, they might well be next in line. They all remembered the purges in the 1930s. As it was, Stalin reduced Zhukov in rank (up to that time the marshal had been second only to Stalin in power), and assigned him to command the Odessa Military District.
Hearings and courts were set up to try the worst offenders. Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov investi- gated the looting operations of Zhukov and Telegin. Zhukov at- tempted to defend himself:13
"Accusing me of collaborating with Telegin in looting is slander. I can 't say anything about Telegin. I assume he ac- quired the furniture improperly in Leipzig. I spoke to him about this. I don 't know what he did with it. " Conveniently for the defendants, Zhdanov died in 1948; Stalin followed in 1953. The impending purge never took place, and Marshal Zhukov would remain Minister of Defense for a few more years.
In 1957, when Khrushchev, who unlike Stalin did not mur- der the opposition, was in power, the generals and marshals unanimously agreed that Zhukov should be relieved of all his offices and commands. And so he was.
Zhukov's Love of Medals and Disdain for the Lives of his Men
Part of the Communist-generated legend was that Zhukov's troops loved the marshal, and that he loved his troops. Marshal Zhukov used and wasted his men like so many sacrificial lambs. There is no evidence that Zhukov ever tried to spare the lives of his men or reduce casualties on the battlefield by bril- liant tactics or subterfuge. Those that did not willingly go to the sacrificial altar were simply shot. Of some 6.5 million Russians who died on the battlefield and are known to be buried, the names of only about 2.3 million have ever been found. Mass graves were the norm for the fallen. In many cases the fallen were not even buried, but left where they fell. The profligacy and indifference with which Zhukov wasted lives and his disre- gard and disrespect for the fallen simply reflected the Commu- nist Party's attitude toward the individual.
Suvorov, however, points out how well the marshals and the political commissars took care of themselves. During and after the war Zhukov's entire upper torso was replete with medals and awards of every sort. The marshal was especially fond of those that were decorated with precious stones. At the same time, most of the common soldiers who did the fighting and who won the war, had to be content with a simple badge "Za otvagu" ("For valor"). In 1991, some 3.2 million medals and awards that had been intended for the lower ranks were found in a warehouse in Moscow. Marshal Zhukov, who was minister of defense after the war, never found the time to award those
medals, although he often awarded himself a new one.
The ultimate mockery of wartime medals, Suvorov notes, was made by the Communist Party secretary and head of state Leonid Brezhnev, who awarded himself a new Hero of the So- viet Union medal on each of his birthdays in 1966, 1976, 1978, and 1981.
Nuclear Test in 1954
A particularly graphic example of Zhukov's vaunted "love" of his homeland and the soldiers under his command, Suvorov reveals, occurred in September 1954 in a military exercise re- ported decades after the event. For the purpose of studying the effects of a nuclear blast on ground forces, an experiment was conducted at 0953 hours on September 14, 1954. Under the di- rection of Marshal Zhukov, a bomber flying at an altitude of 13 kilometers dropped a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb (the explosive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined) timed to detonate at a height of 350 meters over 45,000 maneuvering troops (blue forces defending, red forces attacking). At the time, the medical facilities in the Soviet Union had no means whatsoever of protecting against or treating the consequences of exposure to a nuclear blast. At the instant of the blast, Suvo- rov recounts, some 45,000 young men were rendered sterile, countless numbers suffered radiation sickness, bloody flux, leukemia, and other debilitating and fatal diseases. The troops involved in the experiment were sworn to secrecy. Most were subsequently released from the army as unfit for military ser- vice. Zhukov chose as the site for the experiment the Totskoye test range situated in the Southern Urals Military District - an especially fertile agricultural area between the Volga River and the Urals on the Samara River. The farming folk who lived in the surrounding area were not evacuated before the experiment and suffered the same dire consequences as the troops. Marshal Zhukov was commended for his bold leadership. Some pro- posed he be awarded a fifth Hero of the Soviet Union medal.
Epilogue
After permitting Marshal Zhukov to head the victory parade in Moscow atop a white stallion, Stalin quickly had him reas- signed to the distant Urals and kept out of sight. In the political struggles after Stalin's death, Zhukov aligned himself with Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the next Soviet leader. As a reward for his support, Khrushchev appointed Zhukov de- fense minister. After Khrushchev's departure Zhukov was soon forgotten again until the mid 1990s, when President Yeltsin permitted statues to be built in his honor.
To conclude, Victor Suvorov argues forcefully that a gen- eral who lost 5.3 million men, 6.3 million rifles, 20,500 tanks, 10,300 aircraft, and 101,100 field guns in the first year of the war and that number again in the remaining years of the war; a general who had no regard for the lives of his men; a general who needed an advantage of 5-10:1 just to stay even with the enemy; a general who awarded himself medals; a general who enriched himself by looting a defeated enemy; in short, a gen- eral like Marshal Zhukov cannot possibly be considered a mili- tary genius or a great strategist. Zhukov's was a career based on stacks of corpses, mostly those of the men under his command. Like almost everything and everyone in the former Soviet Un-
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ion, Zhukov was a fabrication. In reality, he was more one of Stalin's willing executioners than he was a professional soldier. He was the master of what the Germans refer to as leading your soldiers to the slaughter (Soldaten im Kriege verheizen).
It is not at all surprising that many former Communist offi- cials have simply transferred their Zhukovian traits-namely, their lack of ethics, criminal instincts, fondness for privilege, predilection for looting, and deficiency of professionalism— to Russia's brand of capitalism. Zhukov himself would have made excellent Mafia material. His technique of surrounding himself with loyal stooges while sharing his looted goods with influen- tial people in high office continues in "capitalist" Russia. To- day, it is called "krysha," or protection.
In Russia's military establishment today, the brutality and criminality practiced by Zhukov in his various high military of- fices through the years is still reflected in the merciless training of new recruits, called dedovshchina. Recruits are so brutalized and hazed by their superiors during basic training that many de- sert the army, and some even commit suicide. Needless to say, many more young men do their best to avoid military service because of this cruel tradition.
As has been reported in past years, the iconoclastic investi- gative reporting of Viktor Suvorov has caused a sensation in Europe and especially in Russia. So incisive has been his re- search that some Russians believe that British intelligence must have provided him much of his material. Even if that were true, his critics still find it difficult to deny the validity of his argu- ments.
Aside from Suvorov' s first few books, neither this nor his other works have been published in English. One can only hope that his research finds its way into the hands of American histo- rians and American officers studying at West Point, the Army War College, and other such facilities. Suvorov is a major, per- haps the major, revisionist of World War II.
Notes
1 Russian title: Ten ' pobedy (Victory Shadows). Suvorov's first three books on World War II have been reviewed in The Journal of Historical Review. The first two, Icebreaker and MDay, were reviewed in Nov.-Dec. 1997 Journal (vol. 16, no. 6), pp. 22-34. His third book, The Last Republic, was reviewed in the July- August 1998 Journal (vol. 17, no. 4), pp. 30-37.
2 Georgi Zhukov, Reminiscences and reflections. May be obtained through the IHR under the title From Moscow to Berlin: Marshal Zhukov 's Greatest Battles.
3 Pavel N. Bobylev, Otechesvennaya istoriya, no. 1, 2000, pp. 41-64.
4 Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, no. 2, 1990, p. 50.
5 Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, no. 1, 1992, p. 76.
6 Suvorov's source on the conference is titled: Nakanune voyny. Materialy soveshchaniya vysshego rukovodyashchego sostave RKKA 23-31 December 1940 (Moscow: Terra Publisher, 1993) ("On the Eve of War. Materials from the Conference of the High Governing Staff of the Red Army, 23-3 1 De- cember 1940.")
7 Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, no. 6, 1989, p. 6.
8 Izvestiya, June 22, 1993; Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, no. 7, 1993.
9 Znamya, no. 5, 1988, p.82.
10 David M. Glantz, Zhukov 's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army 's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1999.
" Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, no. 3, 1992, p. 32.
12 Order of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR Armed Forces, No. 009, June 9, 1946.
13 Russian Military Archives, No. 1, 1993, p. 243.
Simon Wiesenthal Exposed as a Fraud and Liar
By Francis Dixon
Gerd Honsik, Fiend and Felon (translated from Schelm und Scheusal by Medea deSculda), Taby, Sweden, undated, 404 pp., hardcover, photos, bibliography, index. $20.- This book can be ordered from Castle Hill Publishers.
Now that professional "Nazi"-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has added knighthood by the British crown to the numerous honors that have been heaped upon him, Gerd Honsik' s recent Fiend and Felon is just the book to put the seedy Galician conman back in his place. While there have been many shorter revision- ist exposes of Wiesenthal, this one offers the dual advantage of numerous photos and documents, elucidated by easy-to-read, large-type text that traces Wiesenthal's shady career from his contradictions and evasions on his wartime experiences (Soviet functionary? Red partisan? German collaborator? Or all of the above?) to his postwar misrepresentations (the Polish-born arch-Zionist claimed to have been a postwar German expellee!) and of course Wiesenthal's career as a "Nazi hunter."
As an Austrian, author Honsik has a strong grasp of the politics - governmental and media - of Wiesenthal's Austrian base and provides details of Wiesenthal's manipulations there that have hitherto received little notice in English-language media. Among them is documentation of Wiesenthal's scurri- lous campaigns against Austrian politicians who have proved
insufficiently loyal to the canonical Holocaust and to the inter- ests of Israel, from Austria's Jewish chancellor Bruno Kreisky (who called Wiesenthal's bluff by accusing him of having been an informant for the Gestapo during the war) in the 1970s to Jorg Haider in the 1990s. Honsik' s knowledge of the Austrian political and legal milieu also proves of advantage in gaining access to documents and records missing from other treatments, whether friendly or adversary, of Wiesenthal's life and times. Thus, Fiend and Felon includes a lengthy consideration of a letter alleging a shady business deal between Haider's family and a Third Reich Gauleiter, and the letter's exposure as a for- gery by Austrian police, as well as accounts of his vicious cam- paigns against such Austrian revisionists as the prominent en- gineer Walter Luftl.
But the heart of Fiend and Felon is quite properly its treat- ment of the "Nazi"-hunter's most famous prey, from Adolf Eichmann to John Demjanjuk, and including considerations of Wiesenthal's roles in the cases of such alleged monsters as Josef Mengele, Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, and Wal- ter Rauff, one of the numerous alleged inventors of the mythi- cal gas van. Readers who look for exhaustive rehashings of the charges, trials, or even Wiesenthal's role in the "hunt" for these and a good dozen other alleged wartime "perpetrators" may be disappointed. Yet each vignette offers solid rebuttal to the key
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aspects of the charges against the accused as those charges re- late to the Holocaust - something all too often missing even in accounts by self-styled revisionists.
Fiend and Felon is anything but a dispassionate account of its subject's life and work. Author Gerd Honsik, a committed Austro-German nationalist as well as revisionist, has crossed swords with the old fraud more than once and currently lives in exile at least partly as a result of Wiesenthal's ability to convert the moral dross of his actual past into a fool's gold, with which
to dazzle, threaten, and tyrannize the gentiles among whom this self-proclaimed Zionist has always chosen to live. Its English is not always perfect, but is quite passable throughout, and it in- cludes hundreds of photographs, many of which will be new to American and British readers, and scores of documents - with English translations in a handy appendix. All in all, Fiend and Felon is an unsparingly accurate portrayal of Simon Wiesen- thal, for what he is worth, for all that he's worth.
The Terror Did not Begin with Stalin
By Thomas Dunskus
Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Jiidischer Bolsche- wismus. Mythos und Realitat (Jewish Boshevism. Myth and Reality), Edition Antaios, Dresden 2002, 312, €29.-
"There is hardly any myth that is more important and which has more consequences than the one about 'Jewish Bolshevism
Prof. Dr. Ernst Nolte, Preface
In a major work published a few years ago, Alexander Solshenizyn analyzed in great detail the problems that charac- terized two centuries of Jewish life in Russia from the moment Russia took over a considerable part of eastern Poland at the end of the 1 8th century to the downfall of the Soviet Union. He expounds the reasons that caused many Russian Jews to emi- grate to the West - not least to Germany - and that led others to an espousal of the idea that only a violent overthrow of the ex- isting social structure could free them once and for all from persecution and oppression, even if it meant that, in the process, they themselves would give up their religious identity.
Those of us who cannot take the time to go through the thousand or so pages of Solshenizyn's two-volume book now have the possibil- ity of reading a similar analysis in Ger- man: Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein' s book, Jewish Bolshevism. Myth and Real- ity.
The author recalls, for the benefit of the younger generations, what an enor- mous and immediate threat Bolshevism had been from its very beginning for the rest of the western world and what horri- fying deeds punctuated the consolidation of its power in the 1920s and 1930s. The threat was all the more real in that the Soviet government and its international arm, the Komintern, were able to operate in other countries through countless local followers who had either embraced Bol- shevik ideas voluntarily or who had been delegated by Moscow to the countries where they lived. In his book, "Les en-
Jotunncs RngalU von Bieberstein
„ Jiidischer Bolschewismus
Mythos und
Realitat
fants de papier", Didier Epelbaum states that the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to France from eastern Europe in the early part of the last century were "either Zionists or com- munists," and it is not surprising that the European peoples came to identify the ideas that came from Moscow with the ac- tivists who spread them.
The question of whether or not Hitler can be imagined with- out Bolshevism, which was a hot issue among German histori- ans a decade or two ago, is irrelevant when it comes to the rea- sons that caused greater parts of the populations of western Europe to fight the spread of communism by any means avail- able. These peoples were much closer to what was happening in the young Soviet Union, they had so much more direct informa- tion about that country, and they were much more exposed to a direct military threat than, for example, the U.S. or even Brit- ain. When the threat became a reality during the Spanish Civil War, it was a confirmation for many that their fears were justi- fied.
Rogalla von Bieberstein analyzes the considerable presence of Russian Jews in the Bolshevik movement from its beginning until Stalin's purges in the late 1930s. Their activity in the party and its organizations was far greater than one would expect on the basis of mere numbers. Whereas some 2 or 3 million persons in the vast Russian empire claimed to belong to the Jewish people, more than 30 of the top 100 officials of the secret police in the early 1930s (OGPU, GPU, NKVD...) were Jewish, as stated by other authors.
This unusually high proportion of Jews in the ranks of the Bolsheviks was no doubt due to the often traumatic ex- periences many of them had suffered in the earlier decades, e.g., the pogroms at Kishinev or Odessa, or to the restrictions that had been imposed on them with re- spect to residence or professional activity. In shedding both their own Jewish iden- tity and destroying the structure of Rus- sian society, many of them were hoping to bring about a better world for every-
1
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one. These immediate aims were their justification for the in- troduction of what Salcia Landmann once called "the silliest" economic system, and for the annihilation of anything and any- body standing in its way.
When Hitler set up concentration camps for his opponents, he met with violent hatred from all sides, although it can be ar- gued that by the beginning of the Second World War his vic- tims numbered one for every thousand that had been killed in the Soviet Union. Apparently, the world had by then come to terms with the regime of terror in the USSR. The reader may in turn conclude that moral judgment of such events is based on the kind of victim or the method of killing, rather than on mere numbers.
The present generation may be quite surprised to read the earlier writings of apostles of the Bolshevik world order, like Lukacz or Bloch, who wanted to achieve their aims "only by force" (Lukacz), or who called the Germany of 1918 "nothing but a sinister machine of death with the Devil in its center"
(Bloch), but who still became very much respected academics in later life. Even Lev Kopelev, after he had left the Soviet Un- ion for asylum in Germany in the 1980s, declared that his for- mer aim, world communism, had required that "...for its sake, one had to be ready, nay, one was obliged to lie, to steal, to kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of people ... the notions of Good and Evil, human kindness or the lack of it were for us mere abstractions, devoid of any meaning."
The political issues of the 1920s and the 1930s have almost passed into oblivion, together with the civil and real wars insti- gated by the Soviet side and with the people who were involved in these turmoils; these aspects, however, are fundamentally in- dispensable if we want to understand what followed. Rogalla von Bieberstein's book ought to help the Germans to come to grips with their past. If it is ever translated into other languages, perhaps it will shine some light into that period of history which Piers Brendon has so rightly called "the Dark Valley."
The End of the Legends
By Wolfgang Strauss
Alexander Solschenitsyn, "200 Jahre zusammen." Die russisch-jiidische Geschichte 1795-1916 (200 Years Toge- ther. The Russian-Jewish History 1795-1916), Herbig, Mu- nich 2002, 560 pp., €34.90; "Zweihundert Jahre zusammen, " Die Juden in der Sowjetunion (200 Years Together. The Jews in the Soviet Union), ibidem, 2003, 608 pp., €39.90.
It may be said without hesitation that Alexander Solzhenit- syn's 200 Years Together. The Jews in the Soviet Union is one of the most important books on the Russian Revolution and the early Bolshevik period ever to appear. After publication of this work with its many revelations about the role of the Jews dur- ing the Leninist period, the history of the Bolshevik October putsch will have to be rewritten, if not completely, then with substantial additions.
The book title might have been even more appropriately called "The End of the Legends." For example, the legend that there ever existed an independent "Russian" Social Democracy Party is questioned. Founded in Minsk in 1898, the Russian So- cial Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) derived, with respect to personnel and organization, from the Allgemeine jildische Arbeiterbund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. It might be said that the Jewish Arbeiterbund midwife service officiated at the birth of the Russian Social Democracy Party. Legends without number are examined.
Solzhenitsyn emphasizes, "Many more Jewish voices than Russian are heard in this book". Jewish voices, not Russian, speak of Jewish dominance in the anti-monarchial movements in the period before the war. In an article entitled "The Jewish Revolution" in the 10 December 1919 issue of the Neue Jiidischen Monatsheften, published in Berlin, was the sentence: "Regardless of how extremely the anti-Semites exagger- ate it, and how so nervously the Jewish bourgeoisie deny it,
the large Jewish contingent in today 's revolutionary move- ment stands fast. "
The writer, whom the publicist Sonia Margolina calls a "pa- triarch" in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, the last Russian prophet, rejects decisively, almost passionately, all theses of collective guilt. The chronicler of the Gulag holds that neither the Russians nor the Jews can be held separately responsible for the emergence of the reign of terror. He characterizes the rela- tionship between Russian and Jews as a "burning wedge." In his book he tries to see the wedge from both sides. In so doing, the legends dissolve.
Perhaps the most persistent legend, now dissolved, used to go like this: Long before the last Tsar left the throne, the old Russian Empire was in decline, the revolution was coming, the apocalypses of February and October 1917 could not have been prevented. They were determined as if by a world court. Only a legend, Solzhenitsyn says, and this chapter in his book, a noir- thriller, illuminates 18 September 1911 - a day that heralded the approach of the Great Terror in that it dimmed the last op- portunity to prevent it.
They had tried to assassinate Petr Stolypin eight times. Various terrorist groups had attempted to murder Stolypin and his family, but they had never succeeded in killing the man who had set governmental direction in the decade before the war nor in tarnishing his reputation and charisma. The "Russian Bis- marck," as he was called, had, as an unassuming Christian and self-confident first servant of the Russian Empire, led his coun- try into the modern age by introducing agrarian reforms and representative self-government that made individual enterpris- ing farmers out of the backward villagers. The eighth attempt, however, on 18 September 1911 in the Kiev Opera, succeeded in ending the life of the great reformer who had served his country as minister president and minister of the internal af-
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fairs. Ninety years later Solzhenitsyn was to write:
"The first Russian premier minister, who had honorably set the task of establishing equal rights for Jews and had even opposed the Tsar in attempting to realize it, was killed at the hands of a Jew. Was it an irony of history? " (p. 43 1) The assassin was Mordko Hershovich Bogrov, a university student, grandson of a liquor concessionaire and son of a mil- lionaire. When he fired his Browning at Stolypin, Bogrov was 23 years old. Those shots brought the process of Russian ref- ormation, including Stolypin's measures to lift anti- Jewish re- strictions, to a fateful end by their own hands. Among the grave consequences of 18 September was a radical change in world politics. Stolypin had opposed Russian foreign policy that had been hostile to Germany and friendly with France and Britain. Solzhenitsyn asserts that under Stolypin Russia would have never entered World War I. The ultimate beneficial con- sequence for the Russian people would have been that they would have been spared the February revolution, which was triggered by the defeats in the First World War.
Whether Bogrov acted alone or as a
member of the Bolshevik, Menshevik, or
anarchist underground remains unknown.
Solzhenitsyn provides no answer. But the
Nobel Laureate does not doubt that
Mordo Hershevich was an agent of the
Okhrana, a spy in the pay of the Tsarist
secret police. In August Nineteen-
Fourteen, the first volume of The Red
Wheel cycle, 233 pages are given over to
the 'Jewish Question' by a partially
documentary and partially literary presen- tation of Stolypin's person and his re- forms. There, too, is a characterization of
the assassin and a psychogram of
Bogrov 's motive:
"Stolypin had done nothing di- rectly against the Jews, he had even made their lives easier in some ways, but it did not come from the heart. To decide whether or not a man is an en- emy of the Jews, you must look beneath the surface. Stolypin boosted Russian national interests too blatantly and too in- sistently, even provocatively about Russian international in- terests. [...] the Russianness of the Duma as a representa- tive body, the Russianness of the State. He was trying to build, not a country in which all were free, but a nationalist monarchy. So that the future of the Jews was not affected by his goodwill toward them. The development of the country along Stolypin 's lines promised no golden age for the Jews. Bogrov might or might not take part in revolutionary activ- ity, might associate with the Maximalists, Anarcho- Communists, or with no one, might change his Party alle- giance and change his character a hundred time over, but one thing was beyond all doubt: his exceptionally talented people must gain the fullest opportunity to develop unim- peded in Russia. " (p. 592 in August-Fourteeri) Because of this passage, fifteen printed lines in all, Solz-
ALEXANDER SOLSCHENIZYN
Die russisch-pAsche Geschichte 1795- 191B
»Zweihundert Jahre zusammen
henitsyn has been accused of anti-Semitism - not by the Rus- sians but in the American press. The unusually gifted people re- ferred to in the passage are the Jewish people.
After the deadly shots of Kiev, the shots fired in Sarajevo three years later destroyed the peace of Europe. Kiev and Sara- jevo belong together as turning points in the history of man- kind. The depiction of Stolypin's assassin belongs among the highpoints in Solzhenitsyn' s career, who to this point had evoked no positive echo in the (West) German media - which regrettably was to be expected. In any case, the Frankfurt, Mu- nich, Hamburg, and Berlin reviews have become like a hotbed of hedonism that is the most inappropriate reception imaginable for ethical and aesthetic ascetics like Solzhenitsyn.
Gerd Koenen of the Welt newspaper (12 October 2002), who calls this great Russian a "moral overlord," believes it would be "an unreasonable intellectual demand" to be forced to read his work. Nonetheless, Koenen attributes a "patriarchal sternness" to the Russian in a tone that is not accusatory or virulent, but rather "deliberately concilia- tory." That Sonia Margolina of all people, the daughter of a Jewish Trotskyite, of whom she remains proud today, that of all people, this nostalgic Red can accuse Solzhenitsyn's enlightened spirit of "al- ways looking backwards" should be laughed at as a joke in a feuilleton world. Every truth lives within a time nucleus. The truth about the October Revolution in which the Bogrovs, Bronsteins, Mandel- stams, Auerbachs, Rosenfelds, Brilliants, and Apfelbaums played an essential role, is being vomited up ten years after the end of the failed experiment of Commu- nism.
Herhig
The Dirty Revolution I
If it is true that it was neither the planned economy nor the absence of de- mocracy that landed bolshevism in the dustbin of history, then the question of just when the downfall set in and what caused it must be answered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, deemed the greatest conservative writer of our times by many, cites 1 9 1 8 as the date Red Terror was born.
A terrorist named Apfelbaum proclaimed the mass death sentence:
"The bourgeoisie can kill some individuals, but we can murder whole classes of people. "
In that year the non-communist intelligentsia saw Medusa's head. Apfelbaum, who entered the history books as Zinovev, wanted to send ten million Russians (ten out of each one hun- dred) to the smoldering ovens of the class war. German history- ian Prof. Dr. Ernst Nolte states that this pronouncement of 17 September 1918 sounds almost unbelievable in its monstrosity; Apfelbaum formulated this holocaust sentence:
"From the population of a hundred million in Soviet Rus- sia, we must win over ninety million to our side. We have nothing to say to the others. They have to be exterminated. "
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In this, his latest book, Solzhenitsyn writes of the "dushiteli Rossii " (stranglers of Russia,) the "palachi grasnoy revolyut- sii" (hangmen of the dirty revolution.) Who does he mean ex- actly? On page 89 he writes, "Bol'sheviki yevrey" the "Jew Bolsheviks." In another place he uses the term "Bol'shevististkiye Juden" (Bolshevistic Jews). Superordinate to these is the key expression - "Yevreyskiy vopros" (the Jew- ish Question). After 1918 the Communist censors in no way forbade this expression, even with regard to Jew Bolsheviks the Jewish question was not a taboo. On the contrary, the Jewish question became the central theme of the Party ideology, which had become a secular religion. Lenin himself set the example in 1924 with his famous instructive paper "On the Jewish Ques- tion in Russia," published in the Moscow Proletariat Publishing House (cited by Solzhenitsyn on page 79).
Given the factual revelations in this book, the history of the 20th Century ought to be revised, especially that of the Soviet Union with particular reference to the col- lapse of the great ideological fronts in the pre-revisionist period. What is new in this work is Solzhenitsyn' s graphic depiction of a phenomenon about which the (West) German his- torians' establishment has kept ab- solutely mute about, namely, that the historically unprecedented cru- elty exercised in the seizure of power, the Russian Civil War, and wartime (WWII) had a clearly de- fined ideological and anthropologi- cal source. As mentioned above, the codeword Solzhenitsyn uses is "Jew Bolsheviks."
"Before the October Revolu- tion, Bolshevism was not the numerically strongest movement among the Jews. " (p. 73) Solzhenitsyn recalls that imme- diately before the Revolution, the Bolshevistic Jews Trotsky and Ka- menev concluded a military alliance with three Jewish social revolution- aries - Natanson, Steinberg, and Kamkov. What Solzhenitsyn is saying is that Lenin's military putsch, from the purely military point of view, relied on a Jewish network. The collaboration between Trotsky and his coreligionists in the Left Social Revo- lutionary parties assured Lenin's success in the Palace revolt of October 1917. As crown witness, Solzhenitsyn cites the Israeli historian Aron Abramovitch who in 1982 in Tel Aviv wrote:
"In October 1917 the Jewish contingent of soldiers played a decisive role in the preparation and execution of the armed Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd and other cities as well as in the following battles in the course of suppress- ing rebellions against the new Soviet power. " The famed Latvian Rifle Regiment of the 12th Army, Lenin's praetorian guard, had a Jewish commissar, Nachimson, in charge.
Alexander Solzhenitzyn
bear. Those are crimes that break through the last protective wall, crimes like the psychocide of a civilized people. Most educated Russians sensed in October the emergence of a de- structive reordering principle. 'October' became synonymous with a deadly threat to their existence. In 1924 the Jewish histo- rian, Pasmanik, wrote:
"The emergence of Bolshevism was the result of special aspects of Russian history. However, Soviet Russia can thank the work of the Jewish commissars for the organiza- tion of Bolshevism. "
Solzhenitsyn cites this key passage on page 80 in which the word "organization" is in quotes in the book text.
The large number of eyewitness reports from the early pe- riod of Soviet rule is astounding. In the Council of People's Commissars, the writer Nashivin simply notes: "Jews, Jews, Jews." Nashivin avers that he was never an anti-Semite, but
"the mass of Jews in the Kremlin literally knocks your eyes out." In 1919 the famous writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was close to the Social Democrats and who had pro- tested against the pogroms in Tsarist Russia, made the following entry in his diary:
"There are many Jews and Jew- esses among the Bolsheviks. Their main characteristics — self- righteousness, aggressive tactless- ness and presumptive arrogance - are painfully evident. Bolshevism is found contemptible in the Ukraine. The preponderance of Jewish physi- ognomies, especially in the Cheka, evokes an extremely virulent hatred of Jews among the people. "
Chapter 15 of Solzhenitsyn' s book opens with the words:
"Jews among the Bolsheviks is nothing new. Much has already been written about it. "
This for Solzhenitsyn is further support for his cardinal thesis, namely, that Bolshevik Jews were the indispensable power brokers in the victory of Bolshevism, in the Russian Civil War, and in the early Soviet Regime.
"Whoever holds the opinion that the revolution was not a Russian, but an alien-led revolution points to the Yiddish family names or pseudonyms to exonerate the Russian peo- ple for the revolution. On the other hand, those who try to minimize the over-proportional representation of Jews in the Bolshevik seizure of power may sometimes claim that they were not religious Jews, but rather, apostates, rene- gades, and atheists. "
According to rabbinical law, whoever was born of a Jewish mother is a Jew. Orthodox Judaism requires more, i.e., recogni- tion of the Hebraic Halacha scriptural laws and the observance of the religious laws of the Mishna, which form the basis of the
There are crimes that the descendents of the victims cannot Talmud. Solzhenitsyn then asks:
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"How strong were the influence, power, fascination, and adherence of secular Jews among the religious Jews and how many atheists were active among the Bolsheviks? Can a people really just renounce its renegades? Does such a renunciation make any sense? "
Solzhenitsyns's attempt to answer these questions on the ba- sis of historical facts concentrates on several factors, namely, the behavior of Orthodox Jews after October, the relative numbers of Bolshevik Jews before and after October, the ascendance of Bol- shevistic Jews in the cadres of the Red Army and the Cheka, Lenin's Jewish strategy, and finally, Lenin's own heritage.
"The Bolsheviks appealed to the Jews immediately after the seizure of power. And they came; they came in masses. Some served in the executive branch, others in the various governmental organs. They came primarily from among secular young Jews who in no way could be classified as atheists or even as enemies of God. This phenomenon bore a mass character. " (p. 79)
By the end of 1917 Lenin had not yet left Smolny, when a Jewish Commissariat for Nationality Questions was already at work in Petrograd. In March 1919 the VIII Party Congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) undertook to establish a "Jewish Soviet Russian Communist Bund."
In this matter Solzhenitsyn again relies on Jewish historians. Leonard Schapiro, living in London in 1961, wrote:
"Thousands of Jews streamed to the Bolsheviks whom
they saw as the protectors of the international revolution. "
M. Chaifetz also commented on the Jewish support of Bol- shevism:
"For a Jew, who came neither from among the aristo- crats nor the clergy, Bolshevism represented a successful and promising new prospect to belong to a new clan. " The Chaifetz article appeared in 1980 in an Israeli journal for the Jewish intelligentsia arriving from the USSR.
The influx of Jewish youths into the Bolshevik Party at first was a consequence of the pogroms in the territory held by the White Army in 1919, argues a certain Schub. Solzhenitsyn re- jects Schub's argument as a myth:
"Schub 's argument is not valid because the massive en- try of Jews into the Soviet apparatus occurred as early as 1917 and throughout all of 1918. Unquestionably, the Civil War situation in 1919 did hasten the amalgamation of Jew- ish cadres with the Bolsheviks. " (p. 80) Solzhenitsyn traces the rise in Judeophobia, among other things, back to the brutal Bolshevistic suppression of peasant and citizen uprisings, the slaughter of priests and bishops, espe- cially the village clergy, and finally, the extermination of the nobility, culminating in the murder of the Tsar and his family.
During the decisive years of the Civil War (1918-1920) the secret police (Cheka) was controlled by Bolshevistic Jews. The commandants of the various prisons were usually from Poland or Latvia.
Exclusively Jews occupied the Party, Army, and Cheka command positions in Odessa. Jews constituted the majority in the Presidium of the Petrograd City Soviet. Lazar Kaganovich directed the Civil War terror in Nizhny Novgorod, while Rosalia Salkind-Semlyachka commanded the mass executions by firing squads in the Kremlin. In 1920 the farming areas of
West Siberia were turned into a Vendee when grain-commissar Indenbaum through his confiscation campaigns caused mass starvation. During the winter in the steppes, rebellious farmers were forced to dig their own graves. The Chekists doused the naked bodies with water; those that tried to flee were machine- gunned. The peasant uprising in Tyumen entered the history books as the "Iskhimski Rebellion".
By virtue of the sheer numbers liquidated and the radicalism and motivation of the perpetrators, the mass executions of Rus- sian Orthodox priests assumed a genocidal character. The intel- lectual elite of Eastern Christendom in Russia was literally slaughtered. Lenin provided the impetus. On 27 July 1918, shortly after the murder of the Tsar and his family, the Soviet government ordered the liquidation of all pogromists; every priest was by law considered to be a pogromist. As Lunachar- sky recalls, Lenin composed the text of the law by his own hand, and Lenin ordered that the clergy could be executed (vne zakona) outside the law and the courts. That meant, Solzhenit- syn comments, they could simply be shot out of hand.
It was Lenin, not Stalin, who on 17 July 1918 let loose the demons (p. 15). It was the Party, Army, and Cheka apparatus under Lenin's command during the early Bolshevik period that characterized the ideology of crimes against humanity. (Ernst Nolte writes about 'an ideological extermination postulate.') "The key to the decision was in Lenin's hands," Solzhenitsyn asserts in his chapter on Bartholomew's Night in Yekaterin- burg. Lenin exhibited neither doubt nor compromise in this matter. "He had no reservations about exterminations." To de- story and exterminate was his intend.
For this destruction and extermination, Sverdlov, Dzerzhin- ski, and Trotsky were his most powerful allies. None of them was Russian. Lenin's executioners in Yekaterinburg and the Ural governments were not Russians. The bloody careers of Goloshekin and Beloborodov, the Party terrorists and Ural ma- fia killers, are described on pp. 90-91. Yankel Yurovsky, who boasted "it was my revolver that knocked off Nicholas on the spot," certainly was not a Russian. In 1936 Stalin's Chekists executed Beloborodov in Lubyanka, whether as a Jew, a cos- mopolitan, or as an enemy of Stalin's Russification policies. Goloshekin met death in the Fall of 1941 as German tanks ap- proached Moscow.
Is Russia a land of criminal perpetrators? Solzhenitsyn de- nies it as strongly as he rejects the concept of collective guilt in general, and the rejection pertains to both the Large People (the Russians) as well as the Small People (the Jews). And who were the victims? The overwhelming majority were Russians. Those shot in cellars, those burnt to death in the cloisters, those drowned in river boats, those hanged in the forest; officers, peasants, aristocrats, proletariats, the anti-anti-Semitic bour- geois intellectuals - Russians mostly, but others as well. The "hangmen of the Revolution," the crimes they try to justify with internationalism, transformed their "dirty revolution" into what Solzhenitsyn calls an "antislav" revolution. No, the Nobel Lau- reate Solzhenitsyn emphasizes, the Cheka-Lubyanka-Gulag holocaustic perpetrators could not possibly be a Slavic people (p. 93)
On page 233 of Nolte 's Der Kausale Nexus is an early con- firmation of Solzhenitsyn' s theses. The German historian is
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convinced that the term "Jewish Bolshevism" is not simply an invention made for crude political purposes, but that it is histori- cally well-founded and not to be expunged from history "regard- less of how terrible the National Socialist consequences were". Nolte draws a parallel to the other contrary, ideological postulate: "Only when it has not been excluded and made a taboo beforehand can 'Auschwitz' escape the danger that now threatens it, namely, that by being isolated from 'Gulag' and the conflict between the two ideologically driven States (Germany and the Soviet Union) it becomes not a lie, but a myth that contradicts history. "
Is Solzhenitsyn the first historian to examine the dark year of 1918 scientifically? About a decade ago, the Russian Jewess Sonya Margolina, daughter of a Bolshevik of the Lenin-Stalin era, wrote about the crimes committed by the Bolsheviks and the part the Jews played in them. The horrors of the Revolution and the Civil War are "closely bound to the image of the Jewish commis- sar," she writes in Das Ende der Liigen (The End of the Lies), pub- lished in 1992 by Siedler Publishers in
Berlin. Her book bore the shocking I n I f I
subtitle The Russian Jews — Perpetra- tors and Victims at the Same Time. Sentences appear in the chapter "Jews and Soviet Power" whose validity Solzhenitsyn now confirms. "In the first years after the revolution the Bol- sheviks and the Jews at their side ruled Russia with the cold sweat of fear on their brows," Margolina writes. One thing remained very clear in the minds of the actors: if the red hangman's rope around the neck of the people were ever to be loosened, "the Jewish Bolsheviks would be the first candidates for the scaffold."
Where was God in Lubyanka? In Kolyma? On the White Sea Canal project? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the sense of one of Dostoyevsky's God-seekers a homo religious, does not even ask that question. He wants
to know, as does Margolina, why Russia's Jews were both the perpetrators and victims alike during the Bolshevik century? At the onset of the third millennium this 84-year old - the public conscience of Russian culture - understands the first precept of historical revisionism in a Russia unsullied with political cor- rectness, namely, he who breaks through the fire wall surround- ing the 'Jewish question" is sovereign.
The Dirty Revolution II
"Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way. "
In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of east- ern Poland occupied by the Red Army - Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals - all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the
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Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne. Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belo- russians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.
Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that with- out the high Jewish presence among the leaders and execution- ers of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin's newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Po- land, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin's secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slo- gan "Revenge for the Soviet Occupation"? Solzhenitsyn:
"In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, espe- cially the younger generation, wel- I m ■ 'fl coined the invading Red Army with
frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of So- viet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically sup- porting the establishment of Commu- nist rule. " (p. 329)
In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophe- sized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Un- ion, warned:
"Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia. " (p. 310)
Shoot Anti-Semites on the Spot
And as for the next aspect examined, why was it that in 1918 the victorious Russian worker class supported, not just an underground, but also an openly aggressive - even Party-based - broad anti-Semitism taking the form of Jew-hatred?
Although on 27 July 1918 Lenin had issued an ukase order- ing that any active anti-Semite could be shot without going through any court procedures, a new, extremely militant form of anti-Semitism, which had even gained influence in govern- mental layers of the monopoly Party, was rife in the mid- twenties.
"This wave of the 'new anti-Semitism ' included the cul- tural cadres and educational inspectors of the Russian
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worker class and reached into the Komsomol and the Party", (p. 200f.)
To explain the reasons for this, Solzhenitsyn cites exten- sively and without commentary from the newspapers of the day. According to the newspapers, the 'Jew Bolsheviks' had captured and occupied the Soviet State; they were in the top ranks of the Red Army. Soviet power had been converted into Jewish power, and the Jews pursued Jewish, not Russian goals, (p. 201)
In 1922 exiled Social Revolutionaries E. Kuskova and S. Maslov, both Jews, reported:
"Judeophobia has spread throughout present-day Rus- sia. It has even spread to areas in which previously no Jews had even lived and where there was never a Jewish Ques- tion. [...] Bolshevism today is - without any doubt - identi- fied with Jewish rule. " Or colloquially expressed:
"Aron Moiseyevich Tankelwich today walks in the place of Ivan Ivanov. "
Kuskova and Maslov reported further:
"New slogans have appeared on the walls of the high schools - 'Smash the Jews, Save the Soviets'; 'Beat the Jews Up, Save the Councils ' ".
In other words, the revolutionary jargon of that day wanted to keep the Soviets and the Soviet rule, but without Jews.
" 'Smash the Jews ' was not the slogan of the Black Hun- dreds from the pogroms of Tsarist times, but the battle cry of young Russian communards five years after the Great October. " (p. 229)
On the eve of the XII Party Day 1923, the Politburo con- sisted of three Jews and three non-Jews. The ratio in the Kom- somol Presidium was three to four. In the XI Party Day, 'Jew Bolsheviks' constituted 26% of the Central Committee mem- bership. Because of this foreign invasion and anti-Slavic trends, prominent Russian Leninists decided upon an "anti-Jewish re- bellion."
May 1924
Shortly before the opening of the XIII Party Day, veteran Russian revolutionaries Frunze, Nogin, and Troyanovsky called for the expulsion of the 'Jewish leaders' from the Politburo. The opponents of the purge reacted quickly. In no time, Nogin died after an operation on his esophagus, after which Frunze went under the knife, (p. 207)
In Solzhenitsyn' s opinion, the main reason for this outbreak of new anti-Semitism is to be found in the hostility towards Russians inherent in the extreme Jewish internationalism. Unlike the Jewish intelligentsia who greeted the revolution of 1918 with great passion, the Russian proletariat was not fasci- nated by the idea of a Russian-led internationalism. After 1918 the Jews spoke consistently of "their country." (p. 218)
To support his thesis Solzhenitsyn cites Party ideologue Ni- kolai Bukharin, who was executed after the last Moscow show trial. At the Leningrad Party Conference in early 1927 Buk- harin had criticized the 'capitalistic' nature of the Jewish mid- level bourgeoisie who had come to power and had taken the place of the Russian bourgeoisie in the main cities of the USSR (p. 209), and "whom we, comrades, must sharply condemn."
Former chief Bolshevik theorist Bukharin concluded by saying that the Jews themselves were responsible for the new anti- Semitism.
It was part of Stalin's tactical game not just to tolerate Jews in his own entourage, but also deliberately to place them in leading positions so that later he would have plausible grounds for turning them over to the executioner on grievous charges. Such was the case in the murderous collectivization program in 1928-1933 to which the names of prominent 'Jew Bolsheviks' were attached. Stalin was well aware of the hate city Jews had for everything related to the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry. They spread terror, killing the peasants and destroying the vil- lages, eventually causing the famine that took the lives of at least six million Ukrainians. The Jewish commissars in charge of the anti-kulak program, which was tantamount to genocide, were literally the masters over life and death.
In 1936, after the slaughter of the peasantry "at the hands of the Bolshevik Jews," the death bell began to toll for those who had been responsible for the carnage. For the first time in a Russian historical work, their names are listed: Ya. Yakovlev- Epstein, M. Kolmanovich, G. Roschal, V. Feygin. (p. 285) The books covering the crimes in the first twenty years after Lenin seized power fill many meters of shelf space. With this one Solzhenitsyn volume, the subsequent reckoning with the Slavic peasant holocaust has only begun.
Bread and Knowledge, Stomach and Brain
There were also reasons for the outburst of proletariat anti- Semitism in two other sensitive areas. The Russian working class young people were getting nowhere in their quest for ad- vancement on the educational front. In 1926, 26% of university students were Jews who had enjoyed a bourgeois background, (p. 202). Mostly Jews, between 30 and 50%, occupied the main positions in the domestic and foreign trade commissariats. Their empire included rural and urban store chains, restaurants, business canteens, prison and barracks galleys, cooperatives, and consumer goods production. Management of the Gosplan (State Plan) and the five-year plans was exercised by Rosen- holz, Rukhimovich, Epstein, Frumkin, and Selemki; they con- trolled the nation's food supply. In 1936 they themselves be- came fodder for the execution chambers in Lubyanka.
Despite the enormous bloodletting in 1936-37, millions of Jews still served the Stalinist regime with cadaver-like loyalty; they remained enthusiastic, unshakable, almost blind defenders of the cause of Socialism. Solzhenitsyn writes:
"Cadaver-like obedience in the GPU, the Red Army, the diplomatic service, and on the ideological front. The pas- sionate participation of young Jews in these branches was in no way dampened by the bloody events of 1936-38. " (p. 281)
The world spirit, Hegel says, assists the lowest creatures to realize its impenetrable intentions. In the realization of the so- cialist experiment the world spirit did not just serve the lower creatures. Nikolai Ostrovsky, crippled and blind, wrote his autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Hardened as an ide- alist. Others belonged among the lowest creatures, and Solz- henitsyn enumerates them in the chapters concerning the secret police. (In the book reviews published in the German news-
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magazine Der Spiegel and the German daily Frankfurter All- gemeine Zeitung, these bloody chapters were ignored.)
Gassing Trucks and Poison Chairs
From the very beginning the secret police was under the control of the 'Bolshevik Jews.' Solzhenitsyn revealed their names in the most interesting chapter of his book called The Nineteen Twenties. They are the biographies of the mass mur- derers at their desks in the Cheka, the OGPU, and the GPU. But they were not just sitting at their desks. Uritzki, Unschlicht, Katznelson, Bermann, Agranov, Spiegelglas, Schwarz, Asbel, Chaifetz, Pauker, Maier, Yagoda, personally participated in the tortures, hangings, crucifixions, and incinerations. Dzerzhinski, the founder of the Cheka, had three deputies from this guard of iron Bolsheviks - Gerson, Luszki, and Yagoda. An elite of Bol- shevik Jews! Years later, when the Gulag Archipelago was be- ing expanded, they were again to be found in the front line of executioners. Israel Pliner was the slave master of the Moscow- Volga-Canal; Lazar Kogan, Zinovey Katznelson, and Boris Bermann directed the forced labor genocide at the White Sea Canal project. The Great Purge became their graveyard.
Solzhenitsyn comments: (p. 293)
"One cannot deny that history elected very many Jews
to be the executors of Russia 's fate. "
Commissioned by the NKVD, the Jewish designer of execu- tion systems, Grigori Mayranovsky, invented the gas chair. When, in 1951, Mayranovsky, as the former head of the NKVD Laboratory Institute, was himself incarcerated, he wrote to Beria: "Please do not forget that by my hand hundreds enemy- pigs of the Soviet State found their deserved end. " The mobile gassing truck was invented and tested by Isay Davidovich Berg, head of the NKVD Economics Division in the Moscow region. In 1937, a second highpoint in the Great Purge, prisoners were sentenced to death in conveyor-belt fash- ion, packed into trucks, taken to the places of execution, shot in the back of the neck, and buried. In the economic sense, Isay Berg found this method of liquidation inefficient, time- consuming and cost-intensive. He, therefore, in 1937 designed the mobile asphyxiation chamber, the gassing truck (Russian: dushegubka, p. 297). The doomed were loaded into a tightly sealed, completely airtight Russian Ford; during the drive the deadly exhaust from a gasoline engine was directed into the section containing those sentenced to death. Upon reaching the mass gravesite, the truck dumped the corpses into the burial ditch.
The Dirty Revolution III
History sheds blood. The history of Bolshevism shed the blood of at least sixty-six million, according to the calculations of statistician Prof. I. A. Kurganov, cited by Solzhenitsyn in his Novy Mir essay "The Russian Question at the End of the Cen- tury," Moscow 1994. The crimes against humanity of the Bol- shevik genocide up to 1937, i.e., in the first twenty years of the permanent terror, amounted to twenty million victims. In his scientific probing, Solzhenitsyn does not ignore the moral im- perfect; he does not fail to connect the uniqueness of the Bol- shevik holocaust with the exorcistic destructive hate of a par- ticular ethnic-religious group in old Russia. This may well be
the reason why this second volume of Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together has been given the silent treatment or has been distorted, not in Putin's Russia, but rather in Ger- many's establishment media. (An honest translation of this work by Solzhenitsyn would constitute a major contribution to historiography.)
Schirrmacher and Holm: Refuted
The motives and obsessions of the left-oriented intellectual class recall the Cambridge Spy case (Philby, Maclean, Blunt, Burgess). Specifically, in the BBC sentimentalized story, in which one of the decadents proclaims:
"To fight Fascism, you have to be a Communist. " German reviews concerning the crimes of the Soviet secret police state sympathetically that in the final analysis at least the Jews in the GPU, NKVD, and KGB were fighting against Hit- ler. "Russians and Jews fought together against Hitler," Ms. Holm writes in the Schirrmacher review. (Many reviews read like news reports from the Soviet Union!) In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 29 January 2003, she writes:
"After the October Revolution, the author explains, the high Jewish presence in the young Soviet state was found acting with great innovative agitation and drive in fields of State service, among the people's commissars, and in the top ranks of the Army. "
That, however, is not Solzhenitsyn's interpretation! On the basis of document analysis, Solzhenitsyn states that Lenin had three reasons for elevating young secular, revolutionary-minded Jews to the State's elite, in effect replacing the Tsarist bureauc- racy. First, because of the deadly hate the young Jews had for Russian traditions, religious rites, historical models, hate for everything Russian and Russia itself. Second, their willingness to cross the last taboo borders in morality. And third, their readiness to physically liquidate the enemy.
"Mixed Blood Mestizo"
Lenin, the internationalist, was no friend of Jews who were Zionists. In 1903 he expressed the opinion that there was no such thing as a Jewish nationality; the concept was a monstrous invention of a moribund capitalism. Stalin, along the same lines, considered Jewry a "paper nation" that would over time "disappear in an inevitable assimilation."
For Solzhenitsyn, Lenin himself was "a mixed blood mes- tizo." (p. 76) A grandfather on his father's side was an Asian Kalmuck; the other grandfather, Israel Blank, was a Jew from Volhynia, who after converting to the Russian Orthodox Church took the first name of Alexander. His grandmother on his father's side, Anna Johanna, had German and Swedish blood; her maiden name was Grossschopf. Solzhenitsyn:
"Initially Russians did not consider Lenin to be an en- emy of the Russian people, although at certain times his be- havior became anti-Russian. Many Russians considered him a product of another race. Despite that, we as Russians cannot completely renounce Lenin. " (p. 76)
A Bestseller in Russia
In a Russia free of literature-policing Solzhenitsyn's book of historical revelations has achieved the status of bestseller.
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The first hundred thousand edition of the second volume was sold out shortly after it appeared. Solzhenitsyn's expression "a century of crimes" has become widely used among writers. Crimes with consequences to the 22nd century, because "never before had Russia stood so close to the historical abyss, separat- ing her from the void," the poetess Natalia Ayrapetrova writes in Literaturnaya gazeta (22 January 2002). Solzhenitsyn has set an avalanche loose. A new book, The Enemy Within. Geneal- ogy of Evil (576 pp., Feri Publishers, Moscow), by the historian Nikolai Ostrovski has just appeared. Ostrovski became famous for his Holy Slaves and Temple of the Chimeras, discourses critical of Judaism that do not permit the author to be banished to the dead end of conspiracy theories.
In contrast to the general Russian acceptance of Solzhenit- syn's second volume, the German-language edition has been met with silence and misrepresentation, and in most cases with a touch of Russophobia. Der Spiegel (7/2003) provided an in- terpretation that contradicted the facts. For example, Der Spiegel's reviewer wrote that under Stalin many Jews were alienated from Soviet power and that there was a reduction in the number of Jewish 'collaborators' in the Party and the secret police.
An interpretation of a critical chapter in Solzhenitsyn's book vacillates between trivialization and obfuscation. Spiegel uses the word 'collaborators' instead of accomplices in the various phases of Stalin's rise. In the mid nineteen twenties until the mid thirties the Jewish component in the leadership functions of the Party and State apparatus in the Ukraine amounted to 22.6% (in the capital Kharkov it was 30%), in Belorussia it was 30.6% (in the capital Minsk it was almost 40%) and in Moscow city it was about 12%. Six and a half times more Jews occupied cadre positions in the Soviet ruling class than existed in the total Jewish population, which was 1.82% in 1926.
"The greatest influx of Jews to Soviet government of- fices took place in the cities and metropolitan areas of the Soviet Republics, "
Solzhenitsyn observes (p. 199), and it is characteristic of Der Spiegel's and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's lack of objectivity and philosemitism that they deny their German readers the most important data and numerical comparisons given in Chapter 18.
Even in the purge year of 1936 one still sees a dispropor- tionately high representation in the "People's Commissariat of Jews:" Litvinov-Finkelstein, Yagoda, Rosenholz, Weizer, Kal- manovich, Kaganovich. In the same government Sozhenitsyn observes whole groups of people's commissars (ministers) with the names Solz, Gamarnik, Gurevich, and Ginzburg. These are only a few of the hundreds. A predominance of 'Jew Bolshe- viks' is noted in the cultural fields, the brainwashing section, and the new-speak department. In the nineteen twenties the Jewish internationalists purged the history books. Radical ideo- logical reeducation by race haters like Goykhbarg, Larin, Radek, and Rotstein began by deleting and forbidding such concepts as 'Russian history' and 'Great Russian,' putting them on the black list of counter-revolutionary terminology. In the Moscow Party press Jewish writers advocated blowing-up the Minin-Posharsky Monument on Red Square (p. 275).
But to come back to the left-oriented German media: The spirited derussification program conducted by the 'Jew Bolshe- viks' during the nineteen twenties is not mentioned at all, nei- ther by Uwe Klussmann nor by Kerstin Holm. Nor do the terms Cheka and GPU appear in the German reviews.
The Cheka - the bulldozer locomotive of State terror, the bulldozer for sixty-six million corpses, and the gas turbine for the Bolshevik holocaust - does not exist in Schirrmacher's daily newspaper and Augstein's successor Holm, chief editor of Der Spiegel, as a shorthand symbol for death. Is it simply the rejection of the truth, or shame, or fear of exposure because many liberal humanists have so long stood beside Stalinist hu- manism? In any case, ethical and physical degenerates do use the word when it is buried in history as a unique chapter on the Cheka/GPU under the laurels of the anti-Hitler war.
Name Lists Betray Everything
Solzhenitsyn lists the names of about fifty mass murderers, desk criminals, and murderers of prisoners, (p. 300f.) Their first names betray the ethnic origin of these monsters. Moise Fram- ing, Mordichai Chorus, Josef Khodorovsky, Isaak Solz, Naum Zorkin, Moise Kalmanovich, Samuel Agurski, Lazar Aronstam, Israel Weizer, Aron Weinstein, Isaak Grindberg, Sholom Dvoy- lazki, Max Daitsh, Yesif Dreiser, Samuel Saks, Jona Jakir, Moise Kharitonov, Frid Markus, Solomon Kruglikov, Israel Razgon, Benjamin Sverdlov, Leo Kritzman. . .
"Here and now we are making an end to synagogues
forever, "
the new foreign minister Molotov is reported to have said in the Spring of 1939 as he undertook to purge his own ministry. (Litvinov-Finkelstein took revenge in 1943 when he gave Roo- sevelt a personal secret list of Stalin's pogroms.) In comparison with the foreign ministry, the official pogrom in the ministry of internal affairs was much more dramatic. Between 1 January 1935 and 1 January 1938, Jewish dominance in the ministry of internal affairs fell from about 50% of ministry members to about 6%. Solzhenitsyn writes:
"The rulers over the fate of the Russian people believed
that they were irreplaceable and invulnerable. All the more
terrible for them when the blow fell. They had to face the
collapse of their world and their view of the world. "
Also in this section Solzhenitsyn reveals the names of the butchers who once bossed the secret police. They once headed the Lubyanka, now they themselves ended in the corridors of Lubyanka: pistol-flaunting Matvey Berman, Josef Blatt, Abra- ham Belenki, Isaak Shapiro, Serge Shpigelglas, Israel Le- blevski, Pinkus Simanovski, Abraham Slutski, Benjamin Ger- son, Zinovi Katsnelson, Natan Margolin - an almost endless list of 'Jew Bolsheviks.' These names are not mentioned in Ger- many, the "land of the perpetrators." Salpeter, Seligmann, Ka- gan, Rappoport, Fridland, Rayski-Lakhman, Yoselevich, Fay- lovich... prominent names in Stalin's list for execution after 1936. The Jewish Menshevik, S. Shvarts, who emigrated to the United States, noted in 1966 in a documentation of the Ameri- can Jewish Worker Committee:
"The purges resulted in the physical disappearance of
almost all Jewish Communists who had played an important
role in the USSR. ". (p. 327)
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Hebrew or Yiddish
The early Stalin believed in the eventual assimilation of the Jews under the dogmas of the "proletarian revolution." Innately opposed to this, most of the Jewish Bolsheviks fiercely rejected assimilation, i.e., their disappearance as a special ethnic group in Socialism (by assimilation they understood a mortally feared Russification). From the beginning these Jews fought in the Jewish Commissariat (Yevkom) and the Jewish Section within the Russian Communist Party (Yevsek) for the "preservation of the Jewish people" in the Socialist state, and even for the crea- tion of a "Jewish Soviet Nation in the USSR." The historical recreation of these events is a service of Solzhenitsyn. Natu- rally it found no mention in the German book reviews.
The promotion of Yiddish as a State language was a way of establishing the Jewish Soviet Nation; it was recognized by law for the first time in Belorus in 1920. That recognition meant not only a 'no' to Zionism, but also to the expansion of New He- brew (Ivrit). In the early 1920s Ivrit was officially forbidden, while Yiddish was recognized as a "Language of Soviet Prole- tariat Culture." (p. 255). Marc Chagall and Ed Lisizki were considered in the vanguard of a Yiddish-Communist culture - the New Man from Vitebsk.
A political setback came at the end of the twenties when Yevkom and Yevsek were abolished. The younger generation of Soviet Jews accepted this without protest, Solzhenitsyn re- ports. Without protest, without rebellion, and without a "Kron- stadt." The abandonment of Yiddish occurred with the triumph of an international atheism, and internationalism without na- tionalities, without national identities, but with one single ex- ception: "The Soviet People!" An artificial construct, sacrificed to the hecatombs of proletariat blood, the blood of Slavs, Baits, Moslems, and Caucasians; the Soviet people, a drawing-board product, a Frankenstein monster, was created in Gulagism, whose existence without the enforcers from the ranks of the 'Jew Bolsheviks' would not be conceivable. Alexander Solz- henitsyn documents this on almost 600 pages of text. When near the end of the war Stalin ordered the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and proceeded to murder their intellectual leaders, as well as programming the end of Yiddish as a separate culture, the Bolshevik solution of the old Russian 'Jewish Question' came to a bizarre conclusion, i.e., on the ramps to the Gulag.
Final Comments
"Our history is one of tragedies and catastrophes," writes Svetlana Alekseyevicha thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn' s Gulag Archipelago appeared in the West thirty years ago. The Main Directorate of Camps (Glawnoje Uprawlenije Lagerei = GULag), which lasted for half a century, was one of the saddest catastrophes in the two thousand year history of Russia. Looking back today, one can say with good reason that Solzhenitsyn's reportage on the bloodiest crimes against humanity in modern times belongs among the spiritual turning points that represented the begin- ning of the end of the Red Imperium.
Solzhenitsyn's chronicle from hell prompts the question of why today the historical reality of the Gulag is much less widely and passionately remembered than is the persecution of
the Jews under National Socialism. There can be no rational an- swer to this. The reproach is that a work like the Gulag Archi- pelago exceeds the powers of imagination and that - based on the laws of classical aesthetics - it ought not be produced at all because it inundates the reader with unrelieved pictures of dis- gust and revulsion. But then, by the same logic, a play like Macbeth might also be considered too off-putting. In his third volume Solzhenitsyn depicts the slaughter of five thousand women and children in the Kingir slave labor camp in June 1954 (only thirteen years after Babi Yar).
The opinion that the Gulag, unlike the killing of the Jews, has yet to find a Hollywood director of the caliber of Steven Spielberg to film it, is negated by the fact that Russia, herself, has highly talented, even brilliant film producers, dramaturges, and screenplay writers whose work can easily stand comparison with that in the West. The showing of the play / Will Repay by Serge Kuznetsov in the Maly Theater in Moscow, for example, always plays to a full house - standing room only for months on end! The play recreates the last tragic moments of the Tsar's family. For Russia's Orthodox, but also for Russian revisionist historians, 16 July 1918 was the ultimate ejaculation of Gulag thinking. The role of the Bolshevik Jews is handled directly in this stage play as when Botkin, the Tsar's physician, says to one of his guards:
"The time will come when everyone will believe that the
Jews were responsible for this and you will be the victims of
the revenge. "
For the lyricist Stanislav Kunyayev, chief editor of the liter- ary magazine Nash Sovremennik, the murder of the Romanovs was the product of "depraved intellects and a satanic will." Kunyayev is one of a group of seventy leading Russian intellec- tuals who have signed their names to a letter, in which they hold Communist Jews responsible for the murder of the Tsar, the Bolshevik putsch, and the mass murders that followed it. In the case of Kunyayev it is clear why the filming of the Gulag era would be unthinkable in a Western country for the time be- ing. Or, to put it differently: Why the Jew Steven Spielberg shies away like Belshazzar from the handwriting on the wall. It is not just the sheer magnitude of the crimes that block Spiel- berg's undertaking a film of the Gulag, it is much more the ta- boo question of the unspoken complicity of secularized Jews in a unique breach of civilized behavior that resulted in the execu- tion chambers in Lefortovo, the stone quarries of the White Sea Canal project, and the gold mines of Kolyma.
In Germany, the land of the Adornos and Friedmans, the dreadful accusation of anti-Semitism is held in the ready for anyone who wants to use it at anytime; it is omnipresent and inexpensive, and packs a deadly explosive force socially and professionally. The left-liberal review in the Frankfurter All- gemeine Zeitung of 26 June 2003 published an allegedly lost story of the Bolshevik writer, Isaak Babel, who was shot In January 1941 in a Bolshevik forced labor camp. The previously unknown story, Esfir 's Ring, aesthetically and morally without any reference to Russian literature, eulogizes the death of the Jewish secret policeman, Esfir Rubenblum, "Commissar of the Special Department of the Kiev Cheka," who died "a hero's death in the struggle against enemies of the revolution." Origi- nal quotations of Isaak Babel were written a few years before
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the "hero's death" of the Civil War Chekist Babel.
This world-famous Bolshevik (the evaluation of Frank Schirrmacher, chief editor of the Frankfurter) confirms in one of his last contributions the Jewish leadership in the execution squads of the secret police in the Lenin period. Dr. Schirr- macher found no reason to go into Babel's Chekist past. In Germany the deadly threat of the anti-Semitism shibboleth pre- vents an objective discussion of the anthropological roots of the theme Solzhenitsyn has illuminated.
On the occasion of his receiving the left-wing German Ludwig-Borne-Prize for outstanding performances in literature, the American- Jewish scholar George Steiner said in his thank- you speech:
"In my opinion there can be no higher honor, no higher nobility, than to belong to a people who has never engaged in persecution. Since my childhood I have been proud not to have that arrogance. I belong to the highest race because it does not persecute others. We are the only ones; we never had the power to do so. Alleluia!" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003)
Never persecuted others? Never held power?
"The Jewish commissar with the leather jacket and Mauser pistol, often speaking broken Russian, is the typical image of revolutionary power. "
This statement comes from Sonya Margolina, who is proud to be "the daughter of a Jewish Bolshevik." Margolina today li- ves in Berlin. Her book Das Ende der Liigen: Rutland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Siedler, Berlin 1992), from which the above passage is cited, follows it with these words:
"The tragedy of Jewry is that there was no political op- tion to escape the vengeance for the historical sin of the Jews, namely, their enthusiastic cooperation with the Com- munist regime. The victory of the Soviet regime saved them for a while, but vengeance still lurked ahead. "
© Oct. 3 1/Nov. 7, 2002 / Jan. 30./3 1 2003/Sept. 1 7./30, 2003 First published in Vierteljahreshefte filr freie Geschichtsforschung 7(3&4) (2003), pp. 451-460. Translated by Dan Michaels.
Order the following books or any other book from Castle Hill Publishers*.
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Book Notices
By Francis Dixon
1 1 ;i o (ACK TO
James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Free- dom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, NY: Pal- grave, August 2004, 448 pages, pb., $16.95
A devastating attack on President Bush's Justice Depart- ment and the similarly misnamed Patriot Act, Terrorism and Tyranny has been hailed by sources as disparate as the Washington Post and Pat Bu- chanan's American Conserva- tive for its lucid and objective reporting. Bovard catalogues the government insults, large and small, to Americans' liberty and dignity that have multiplied across the country since 9/11: the daily abuses visited on Americans at the airport, the li- brary, the post office, and a thousand other places. Yet Ter- rorism and Tyranny is more than excellent (and infuriating) re- portage. Bovard shows that these growing infringements of our liberties are intimately connected with an imperialist foreign policy that threatens to turn American citizens into subjects even as it promotes "democracy" abroad. Priceless for its demolition of President Bush, Attorney General Ashcroft, and Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, Terrorism and Tyranny offers facts and footnotes rather than shrill polemics on matters of central importance to every American — a thinking man's (and woman's) Fahrenheit 9/11 in book form, despite its au- thor's predictable skittishness on the Israeli factor.
n II II "Jr"1 *N" p
TYRANNY
JAMES BOVARD
I.I.M >.'.<: »: i. i. i "i
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Se- crecy, and the End of the Republic, NY: Metropolitan, 2004, 400 pages, he., $25.-.
One of America's ablest as well as most courageous aca- demic historians offers a devas- tating account of his country's contemporary drive to world rule. Chalmers Johnson, an ex- pert on modern Asia, examines the massive impact of the U.S. abroad, above all, he revisits that of the American troops stationed around the world "to ensure that no part of the empire slips the leash." Johnson analyzes the rise of today's American empire in the light of America's (some- time) imperialist tradition, and
compares the current U.S. imperial reach with that of the Brit- ish, French, and Soviet empires. Sorrows of Empire offers a learned, passionate critique of the perils of interventionism and imperialism for the traditional American republic and its citi- zens. A book that brims with facts (our soldiers staff 725 bases in 120 countries), insights (e.g., how America's surging mili- tary power is spurring other countries to acquire nuclear weap- ons), and warnings (our imperial path is heading America to- ward economic ruin and, possibly, Soviet-style collapse), and it should be required reading for every concerned American.
The Revisionist ■ 2004 ■ Volume 2 ■ No. 3
351
Order these books or any other book from Castle Hill Publishers]
ph: 1-877-789-0229 fax: 1-413-778-5749; PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625 (cc, checks, MOs accepted)
Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber, Weapons of Mass De- ception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, New York, NY: Tarcher/Penguin, 2003, 256 pages, pb., $11.95.
Totalitarian regimes have their ministries of information to justify their invasions to the pub- lic; as Weapons of Mass Decep-
WEAPONS OF MUSS
DECEPTION
fJr nn ff topumlf Ji In) itmttkn
tion shows, the Bush administra- tion, true to its free-market ten- ets, hired America's top advertis- ing and public relations firms to deceive America into invading Iraq. Reporters Rampton and Stauber document the role of pro- fessionally manufactured propa- ganda by PR firms on contract to the Pentagon before and during the war: from the lies of the Gulf War (including the by now notorious "incubator" incident) to the creation of the Iraqi National Congress (headed by shady "neoconservative" favorite Ahmed Chalabi) and such front groups as American Muslims for Understanding by PR firms on contract to the Pentagon. They demonstrate how the invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people by marketing profession- als in what the White House termed a "product launch" and such wartime incidents as the staged toppling of Saddam Hus- sein's statue in central Baghdad, the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch, and much more. An indispensable book for revisionists con- cerned with understanding and countering an interventionist propaganda that is increasingly scripted in line with the most modern marketing techniques.
Anthony Amove (ed.), Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Im- pact of Sanctions and War, updated edition, Boston, MA: South End Press, 2002, 264 pages, pb., $16.-
Overwhelmed by the charges and counter-charges over Iraq's alleged pre-war "weapons of de- struction," many Americans have forgotten that for over a decade before the war, the United States spearheaded a partial occupation of Iraq and enforced a ruthless program of sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, most of them children. Iraq under Siege includes contri- butions by numerous scholars and journalists describing how a formerly prosperous nation, with flourishing educational and health systems, was reduced to virtual beggary by a health and hunger blockage that recalls the victors' blockade of Germany following World War I. The books also offers a detailed treat- ment of how U.S. and British planes patrolled and bombed large parts of Iraq's territory at will for years before the 2003 "preemptive war," and how the U.S. abetted the secession of
UNDER SIEGE
THE DEADLY IMPACT OF SANCTIONS AND WAR
EDITED BY ( KTHORY ARHOUE
GHOST WARS
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m In lUft IIMIW U Wl • w ',' I > T4
urrruiti n mi iTETE :ul
Iraq's Kurdistan region. This should be required reading both for placing U.S. propaganda about the crimes of Saddam into perspective and for a sobering reevaluation of the ethics of such American leaders as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who described the deaths from starvation and disease of half a million Iraqi children as "worth it."
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sep- tember 10, 2001, New York, NY: Penguin, 2004. 720 pages, he., $29.95.
An in-depth account of how U.S. support for the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan - above all the CIA's arming of fanatical Islamists - helped bring the fundamentalist Taliban, which sheltered Osama bin Laden, to power there. Experi- enced Washington Post reporter Steve Coll, who spent three years in southern Asia observing the rise of the Taliban, relates how U.S. policy makers in four ad- ministrations - Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II - underes- timated the hostility of the anti- communist Islamists to pro-Israel, profane America; and how, once the Soviets had left Afghanistan, American intelligence officers were gulled by their Saudi and Pakistani allies into sup- porting those countries, rather than America's aims. Ghost Wars is a case study in U.S. interventionist stupidity that fills in the indispensable historical background to an Afghan occupa- tion that more and more resembles the earlier British and Rus- sian disasters.
Ramzy Baroud (ed.), Searching Jenin. Eyewitness Ac- counts of the Israeli Invasion 2002, Introduced by Noam Chomsky, Seattle, WA: Cune Press, 2003, 286 pages, he.: $29.95; pb.: $17.95.
While America's leaders were fulminating against Islamic "terror and evil" in April 2002, the Israeli Defense Forces in- vaded the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, leveling homes and slaughtering children, the aged, and the infirm;then, using time-tested tactics of obfusca- tion and intimidation, wheedled this twenty-first century war crime down the memory hole. Searching Jenin reclaims the awful truth about Jenin: houses bulldozed to rubble with families inside; midnight house searches by IDF troops; Israeli snipers shooting civilians, then picking off anyone going to their aid; IDF troops denying the wounded and women in labor access to medical care; and the people of Jenin thirsting for water seized from them by the IDF.
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Searching Jenin establishes the facts of these as well as other crimes and abuses of the Israeli occupiers, puts the events of Jenin into the broader context of nearly four decades of Israeli occupation, and gives voice to the Palestinians of Jenin in nu- merous moving interviews. Praised by Norman Finkelstein for
its definitive answer to the question, "What really happened at Jenin?" Searching Jenin makes a valuable contribution to the growing dossier of Israeli crimes against humanity and offers a rare opportunity for Westerners, and Americans in particular, to hear the Palestinians' side of the story.
Letters to the Editor
General Remarks
Allied War Crime and Catacomb Revisionists
Dear Mr. Rudolf!
It is always commendable to commemorate the victims of injustice. In this regard I may report about an incidence, which occurred parallel to the liberation, or better transfer (this event happened peacefully, as is known), of the concentration camp Mauthausen. On May 4, 1945, around 9 AM I witnessed an al- lied war crime - and I was fortunate to have been the only one to survive it without injuries. On that day I experienced as a lit- tle boy of 1VA years of age at Grossendorf (between Sattledt and Ried in the county of Traun of the then Gau Upper Da- nube), how three approaching U.S. fighter planes of the P51 type attacked a group of persons clearly marked as non- combatants with machine guns firing explosive ammunition from a short distance.
I commemorate those who died in that incident: Alfred v. Liebler-Ardelt (born March 25, 1919, residing at Neustiftgasse 150a, Vienna VII), Alfred Ptacek (born Dec. 9, 1899, residing, Reindorfgasse 42/2/8, Vienna V.), Hildegard Kraus (born April 27, 1924, residing Vienna X.), and Alfons Wannginsky (born Oct. 27, 1905, probably from East Prussia). Two women were seriously injured. One had a stomach wound, no bone hit, thus the bullet exploded outside her body, and another one was hit at her ankle. Still today I see the busted skulls of Mr. Ptacek and Miss Kraus in front of me. Their blood spilled over me like a fountain, so that helpers could not believe that I was the only one in that group that remained unhurt by this terrible war crime.
I got away only because first of all I knew this type of air- plane and secondly because I knew the old soldier wisdom due to my pre-military training: "an approaching fighter will shoot," which is why I sought cover right away.
Sometimes today I still see the brains of the victims gushing out of their skulls: I had to cope with that without psycho- therapy! Ever since I asked myself: where was the Nuremberg trial of the others? Why are these pilots not prosecuted as war criminals? They even praise their deeds in their memoirs (Chuck Yeager, Yeager, Bantam Books, New York: "We 'switched off civilians."), but remark as an excuse, that they had been ordered to do this. The instigators and masterminds of these murders against civilians could certainly still be located today.
And by the way: I still can hear in my head those screams of the women of the peaceful village of Selzthal, who were raped
in May 1945 by invading Soviet Soldiers.
I have to think about this now that we are reminded to commemorate the victims on occasion of the 59th anniversary of the pleasing event of the liberation of the Mauthausen camp, while simultaneously huge allied war crimes unfolded.
When will official Austria also commemorate these vic- tims? I, for my part, will keep Liebler, Ptacek, Kraus, and Wannginsky in my memories. According to my research, they now rest in peace as war victims on the war cemetery in Jahns- bachtal near Freistadt. My swift reaction prevented me to from lying there as a "war victim" as well.
And besides, why is it that the suffering of victims of the Second World War is divided in two groups? Nowadays there is one group, who is to be pitied in a special way, and there are others, who appear to have been murdered by the wrong side. Is such an unequal judgment not unjust if viewed from the vic- tims' perspective?
I was very intrigued by HM's letter to the editor in the last issue of this magazine "Walter Luftl defeats Pavlov". There you can see how we can create proselyte revisionists, or how they come into being, and be it by pure coincidence! I call them "catacomb revisionists," because like the early Christians in Rome, they, too, can survive only in catacombs, but due to their example, spread by a chain letter system, they constantly cre- ated new proselytes. HM is such a catacomb revisionists as well, an anonymous one, who became a revisionist due to my writings on cremations.
You will not believe how many people I already have con- verted into catacomb revisionists over a nice glass of wine. But when they want to spread the knowledge they gained after they started to learn more following their conversion, they all subse- quently encounter problems in their families and social circles, because most people cannot distinguish between "belief and facts." This is why I chose that title back in 1991 (The Journal of Historical Review 12(4) (Winter 1992-93) pp. 391-420). I was well aware of this. For example, during the three years 2001-2004 I managed to "turn around" a member of the Aus- trian parliament of the Green Party (Architect Sauermilch). I also "turned around" Prof. Dr. Ernst Nolte. Initially Prof. Nolte wrote for example that he cannot imagine that a German officer would make false confessions. After corresponding with me he changed his view, and in his book Der kausale Nexus he finally wrote some clear words about the field of tension between ex- act sciences and the humanities.
Cordially
Dipl.-Ing. Walter Luftl
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Secret Speech by Heinrich Himmlers of Oct. 4, 1943
Dear Mr. Rudolf!
The so-called Posen speech of RFSS Heinrich Himmler from Oct. 4, 1943, is often regarded as a forgery by revisionist. I may add a technical aspect to this discussion not mentioned so far, which I would like to present for further discussion.
The speech played back to the audience at the Nuremberg Tribunal had been recorded with the so-called needle technol- ogy on a so-called shellac disc. Records made of PVC were in- troduced to the market only around 1950. A shellac disk had not more than 15 minutes of recording time. It appears that there was only one disk, which could, of course, only hold a small part of the entire speech.
During the years 1939-1940, the German electrical com- pany AEG had perfected the magnet audio technique for market introduction, that is, a technology allowing the recording of spoken words or music on a plastic tape coated with ferro- magnetic particles. The decisive step was the invention of high frequency pre-magnetization by Braunmuhl and Weber in 1940. This new method allowed a sound quality many dimen- sions superior to that of all prior methods. At the same time, the recording device was more robust, easier to handle and less sensitive. The new technology spread quickly. By the end of 1940 all German radio stations were equipped with it, and 70% to 80% of all German radio transmissions may well have been played back from such tapes. This figure rose to 90% around 1950. These high-value AEG tape recorders were also used as a supporting device to prepare verbal protocols during highly im- portant conferences.
Nothing comparable existed during the war in England and the US. British radio stations had introduced the tape recording method by Blattner and Stille, which was vastly inferior to the AEG system. I do not know what was used during those years in the US. Perhaps another reader can help to find out.
Can one imagine in such a situation that a German sound technician in Posen, at that time a major German city, records a speech of an important National Socialist personality, after all the second most powerful man in the nation, with a technology that must have appeared prehistoric in his eyes? I cannot be- lieve this.
The victorious powers, however, who played back Himm- ler's alleged speech from a shellac disk, had no other choice. They could not handle the German tape technology yet; it was of course impossible to play an English sound tape. Thus, the shellac disk was the only option for them, since at that time it was still a mass product in Germany, because the consumers still had the playing devices for them. That the sound quality of the shellac disk was much inferior to the AEG tape, was very much welcome by the forgers. A voice imitator can simulate any person; only when it comes to the details, to the side fre- quencies, a forgery can be discovered. And these side frequen- cies can be established only from a high quality sound tape.
By the way: Despite its high sound quality, this AEG tape was not allowed as evidence in German courts of these days. Yet for the Nuremberg tribunal, the much inferior shellac disk sufficed.
Ch. Muller
Re.: Mohammed A. Hegazi, "Palm Trees Never Lie," 77?, 2(1) (2004), pp. 83f.
Hello G. Rudolf!
I would like to indicate that there is a possible explanation available for the fact that there might have been yellow dates on palm tress as late as December, the date of the alleged photo of Saddam Hussein's capture. I found the following text on an internet site, which carries many interesting papers and links regarding the controversy surrounding Saddam's capture (http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ATW3 1 2A.html): "The Yellow Unripe Dates!
Regarding the rumours raised about the unripe dates seen at the site of the arrest of Saddam (please see my arti- cle; The Unripe Dates, 1 7 Dec 2002), some reporters have visited Al Door area and met the farmers. Asharq Al Awsat newspaper tried to enter the site where Saddam was ar- rested but [were] prevented from going inside by an Ameri- can patrol. They then went to the neighbouring farms. The farmers affirmed that plenty of yellow dates exist now and will remain so until the end of March. They explained that the lack of fertilisation hampered the process of ripening by which the dates converted from hard yellow to a brown soft. The unfertilised dates called (Shees) or unripe dates. It will remain yellow for long time until the end of March. This was the case in the tree near Saddam 's hiding place. It was like many other trees ignored (not been fertilised) due to the war. The usual process of fertilisation in Iraq carried out manually by taking the seeds dust from the males and put it in the flowers of the females. This process carried out indi- vidually from one tree to another by one person or more. The farmers added that the members of the previous regime ignored their farms due to the war so remained unfertil- ised. "
The report that yellow dates are plentiful in Iraq in Decem- ber was published in an Arabic newspaper located very close (a suburb?) to Washington D.C. in the USA: Asharq Al-Awsat 5252 Cherokee Avenue, Ste 105, Alexandria, VA 22312. How- ever, the article did not show any photos of these alleged yel- low dates. I have also not been able to find other pictures of yellow dates in Iraq in December.
Sincerely
Eric Harvey Richardson, Victoria, B.C., Canada
Re.: C. Mattogno, "On the Piper-Meyer-Controversy," 77? 2(2) (2003), pp. 131-139.
Dear Mr. Rudolf!
1 . For quite a while now I have been visiting your website, and by now I know most of the files posted there, except for those files also available in English, of which I read the original German version, and for files written in other languages. In case you analyze your server's access data, which I assume, you may have noticed that somebody gets access to your site sometimes several times a day from the university of [...]. I am that person. The university's computer center does not seem to bother, at least so far they put up with my "evil" doings. Just recently I finally ordered a trial copy of your magazine, and I
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am fascinated, to put it mildly. This really is a scholarly maga- zine and not one of those many gossiping newsletters. S9.50 per issue (for students) is appropriate in my eyes, since your maga- zine does not live from advertisements, as so many others, which gives a a great deal of independence. I find your letters to the editor particularly pleasing, which do not spare with criticism. This shows once more that you are interested in pro- gress toward truth and better science, not in enforcing dogmas and ideologies. As Jurgen Graf stated correctly, Holocaust revi- sionism will evolve further, even if no big surprises are to be expected anymore, except perhaps regarding the problems of the Einsatzgruppen and the possible verification of Steffen Werner's theses of the "Second Babylonian Captivity" (see http://vho.org/GB/Books/tsbc).
2. The situation of Holocaust revisionism may not be per- fect, but there are some encouraging signs. It appears that the exterminationists have to address our arguments after all, even if with some delay and if only half-heartedly and concealed as done by Fritjof Meyer. From his footnotes one can conclude that he is well aware that the established historical image is un- tenable and quite rotten. As Carlo Mattogno remarked cor- rectly, with Meyer's paper, which no longer deduces the Auschwitz victim number by way of witness account (witness of what?) but by way of crematory capacity, the first step was taken toward the demise of the established version. Those cre- matories simply did not have the capacity as assumed by Meyer.
Furthermore, the anti-revisionist persecutorial measures [in Europe] show that one takes revisionism extremely seriously, because if let loose freely, they know that it would quickly ac- complish an overdue break-through.
For your Rudolf Report (www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr) you surely will be celebrated as a hero by the Germans one of these days, I am absolutely sure about this! You might not get the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for your Rudolf Report, but perhaps the Nobel Prize for Peace for your efforts on reconciliation be- tween the nations and for defeating vile, hateful atrocity propa- ganda (together with Butz, Faurisson, and others more). I am already looking forward to the day when you can end your days of asylum abroad and come flying in to Frankfurt/Main! I sure will be coming to the airport, together with hundreds of thou- sands of other Germans, in order to celebrate this appropriately. Then only Prof. Benz will sit around in his Berlin Institute of Lies (Institute for Research on Anti-Semitism), looking rather glum.
By the way, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution still celebrates Dr. Bailer's counter-report as a refutation, really ridiculing itself by so doing! (See www.vho.org/GB/Books/cq/critique.html) All that is needed now is that they fall back onto the level of the Polish counter- report of the Cracow institute by claiming that iron blue could not have formed, which is why they did not bother looking for it in the first place (see vho.org/GB/Books/trr/8.html#8.4.2.). Particularly funny is the remark of the German State Protectors that already your German edition of Dissecting the Holocaust (Gmndlagen zur Zeitgeschichte) proved that your analyses were incorrect. Why don't they put a link to your book in their report? That those State Protectors try to support their claims
with a book that has been banned and burned in Germany is more then strange.
I am dead certain that Holocaust revisionism will have a breakthrough, because it is not the likes of Deborah Lipstadt, suffering under severe and probably incurable monopercep- tosis, who uphold the Holohoax, but it is mere force of arms that does it.
The war currently waged by the USA - or better by the forces that have high-jacked the government of this nation - are a sign of decay in my opinion. If it wouldn't have been so des- perately necessary to wage this war, they would have let some grass grow over the invasion of Afghanistan. But instead, they commenced the next campaign right away in this world war go- ing on since 1914, and this in such a blatantly obvious way that the U.S. has lost all support everywhere in the world. The USA has over-expanded its sphere of influence and probably has al- ready massive problems to keep its occupational territories on German soil under control. Anyway, I think that the end of the current U.S. power politics is in sight.
With the collapse of the USA as a super power, the Holo- hoax will collapse as well. It can also not be excluded that a re- volution might take place in Germany in the near future. In the meantime, some 30 million people are running around in that country with their fists clenched. They might know what Heinrich Heine maintained long time ago: the German thunder might be slow in coming, but when finally unleashed, it can still be heard in the farthest corner of Africa.
All criticism against the United States aside, one has to give them credit that they allow you to stay in their country. The Americans won't let anybody mess with their First Amend- ment, and heartland Americans are very sympathetic anyway, indigenously conservative. Measured by federal German stan- dards, even left-wing Americans would be considered "right- wing extremists" in Germany.
DR, Germany
Re.: CO. Nordling, "What happened to the Jews in Poland?", TR, 2(2) (2004), pp. 155-158.
It is strange to note the amount of hyperbole associated with inflating the numbers of Jewish victims. If we follow Jewish author Stefan Szende, then only a single Jew survived the per- secutions in Poland according to his book Den siste juden fran Polen (The last Jew from Poland).
By the way: According to statements by his publisher, Szende is one of the best informed persons on eastern Europe, and he is supposedly aptly suited to write a book on the exter- mination of the Jews in Poland. In this book, however, Szende did not write anything about gassings. And Auschwitz is men- tioned by him only once - and only in passing.
It is thus noteworthy that "Lieutenant General Sir Frederick E. Morgan, Chief of the UNRA department Europe, reported that thousands of well-nourished und well-dressed Polish Jews poured into the American occupational zone [of Germany]. The trains are full of Jews from Lodz and other Polish Cities." (Svenska Dagbladet, Jan. 3, 1946)
This report from the Svenska Dagbladet is confirmed by a similar one in the Munich newspaper Siiddeutschen Zeitung from Nov. 13, 1948:
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"Until June 1946, approximately 5,000 Jewish refugees (from Poland) reached the American zone every month. In the subsequent three months alone, some 70,000 Jews sought refuge from Polish anti-Semitism. "
Georg Wiesholler, Ottobrunn by Munich
Re.: CD. Provan, "The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp - and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning", 77?, 2(2) (2004), pp. 159-165.
Dear Germar,
What was your purpose for publishing that essay by Pro- van? Do you think there is any merit to what he has written? You dummy! You obviously still think there might be some merit to Provan 's horseshit. Go adjust your head. You should have seen through Provan' s drivel the moment you read it.
My answer to Provan is almost ready - but it is still too long. When it is ready, it will go out on the internet as fast as possible to try to undo the damage you have done to my credi- bility.
The Jews have never been so dumb as to publish Provan 's work before - and I doubt that they would have been dumb enough to publish it now. But, if they had - that would have been perfect. It would have been another chance to embarrass them. But now, it is you who will be most embarrassed indi- rectly - and from past experience, I know the confusion in our ranks, such as they are, will probably last for years.
As to giving my answer to you to publish. Never again. The unauthorized changes you made in my diesel text were just too, too much. Don't call either!
Friedrich Paul Berg
Editor's Remark
When first confronted with Provan' s paper earlier this year, Mr. Berg strongly suggested not to publish it, since in his eyes it was mere "rubbish." This not being a scholarly answer to a challenge - also because from a toxicological point of view Mr. Provan is not completely wrong -, I asked Mr. Berg if he would write a refutation, which he refused to do. After several months of pondering over this issue, and after Mr. Provan indicated that he will have his paper published elsewhere with the remark that revisionists refused to discuss his theory, I decided to run the paper. However, at that time Mr. Berg could neither be reached be Email nor by phone, so the paper ran without his immediate response.
A true revisionist ought to be invigorated by the prospect of discussing and possibly refuting an exterminationist's views. As soon as we learn about Fritz Berg's refutation, we will in- form you, and since I co-authored the most recent version of Fritz Berg's paper on Diesel gas chambers and have some for- mal education in toxicology, I will also give my comments on this issue in the next issue.
Apart from this, the unauthorized changes made to Mr. Berg's article on Diesel gas chambers in my anthology Dissect- ing the Holocaust (to which he frequently offered me to appear
as co-author due to my considerable contributions) are re- stricted to the exchange of the term "Nazi gas chamber" by the term "National Socialist homicidal gas chamber," an editorial last-minute decision to eradicate polemic terms in the book, like "Nazi," and to clarify unclear terms like gas chamber (which could mean both delousing chamber as well as execu- tion chamber). By so doing, Mr. Berg's catchy phrase of "Nazi gas chambers did not exist" became somewhat bulky, losing some of its pedagogical impact. I apologized to Fritz Berg for this change quite a while ago and promised to reverse it in the upcoming third edition, which originally he had accepted.
Re.: R.H. Countess, "A Provocative History of the Aryan Race", TR, 2(3) (2004), pp. 227-229.
Dear Mr. Rudolf!
Please allow me to make a few remarks in addition to the above mentioned article: The (in)famous H.F.K. Giinther has written histories of various white people: Lebensgeschichte des Hellenischen Volkes (History of the life of the Greek people), Pahl 1956, and Lebensgeschichte des Romischen Volkes (His- tory of the life of the Roman people), Pahl 1957. Both books investigate the racial changes of these peoples. They can be found only as second hand items nowadays.
Experts currently discuss the cultural leap which occurred when the Mediterranean Sea broke through the Bosporus. In this regard I am currently writing an essay on Atlantis:
In 2003, Jiirgen Zimmermann wanted to merge several theories of various fields. The Black Sea was a freshwater lake with a water table some 120 meters below of its current level. The Mediterranean water broke through the Bosporus around 5600 to 5200 B.C. Subsequently the water level of the Back Sea rose some 15 cm every day, so that the current level was reached within two and a half years.
The residents of the lands on the bank of the Black Sea are said to have had a highly developed culture. After they had to leave their homes hurriedly, they reached Central Europe, China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The indigenous tribes in those areas lived in a state of cultural doze for thousands of years, but then suddenly rose to the top of civilization within a few years. This progress would be explicable due to the arrival of those former inhabitants of the Black Sea areas.
Maybe this theory will revive the discussion. But it is hard to imagine that the residents of the lands now covered by the Black Sea - forced to migrate by natural disaster - could have given such a tremendous cultural boost. Evidence for this should have been preserved underneath the water, whereas all the evidence on the shore could have been consumed by higher settlements of the descendants.
See Jiirgen Zimmermann, "Die Besiedlung des vorge- schichtlichen Agypten" (The Settlement of Prehistoric Egypt), Synesis 2003, no. 3.
Dr. Heinrich Wollsatz
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In Brief
Napoleon's Cause of Death Revised - the Cure Did it!
Although the official version claims Napoleon Bonaparte died age 51 of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, on St Helena, French research indicates that he may have been killed by a daily enema that slowly poisoned him. A lock of his hair ana- lyzed in 2001 found traces of arsenic, but according to an arti- cle in the British weekly New Scientist, forensic pathologist Steven Karch at the San Francisco Medical Examiner's De- partment states that Napoleon's death was by "Medical misad- venture." Napoleon would receive daily enemas: "They used really big, nasty syringe-shaped things." This, together with an- timony potassium tartrate to induce vomiting, would cause a potassium shortage, which in turn would cause "torsades de pointes," preventing a regular blood flow to his brain. How- ever, that alone would not have caused his death, but what did was a 600-milligram dose of a purgative mercuric chloride that would have lowered his potassium levels. Two days later he was dead. (Agence France Presse, July 22, 2004)
Chess Champ Bobby Fischer Seeks Asylum in Japan
After trying to leave Japan on an invalid passport for the Philippines, former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, was detained by Japanese officials at Narita Airport executing a US extradition order. Fischer is wanted in the U.S. for playing a rematch against Russian world champion Boris Spassky in Ser- bia in 1992, which was then under international sanctions. Fischer thus violated the International Economic Powers Act and Executive Order 12810. Fischer is also known for his viru- lent anti-U.S. stance. Commenting on the 9/1 1 tragedy, he said: "This is all wonderful news. I applaud the act. The U.S.
and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just
slaughtering them for years. Robbing and slaughtering
them ... Now it's coming back to the U.S. "
{Chicago Tribune, July 17, 2004; AP, July 22, 2004)
Media Liars: Jewish Confessions
Jewish student journalists proclaimed that they have to be Jews first, then journalists, when it comes to keeping criticism against Jews and Israel out of the media. (Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Nov. 23, 2001)
Israel's Wall: World Court Judgment and UN Resolution
The General Assembly voted 150-6, with 10 abstentions, and all 25 members of the European Union supported the decla- ration that Israel's apartheid wall was illegal. "Building of the fence will go on," Raanan Gissin, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told Reuters. He said Israel was not sur- prised by the nonbinding UN decision, calling it a "tyranny of the majority" in the General Assembly. Nabil Abu Rudeina, an aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, hailed the General Assembly's decision as a "victory for the Palestinian people. The UN Security Council must now take steps to implement the General Assembly's decision to remove the wall," he said. The resolution, like the World Court ruling, has only symbolic weight. {Jordan Times, July 22, 2004)
Holocaust Denial Overseas Will be a Crime in Israel
Holocaust denial committed overseas would be an offense under Israeli legal jurisdiction and serve as grounds for extradi- tion under legislation that is expected to pass a first reading in the Knesset this week. But the bill is unlikely to be anything more than declarative in nature. Countries that do not have laws against Holocaust denial are unlikely to extradite citizens to be tried in Israel for the crime, although Israel's protective meas- ure would not require such a law to be on their books, accord- ing to Justice Ministry officials. Another problem is the fact that Holocaust denial is a crime of expression, and most coun- tries treat such crimes liberally. {Jerusalem Post, July 19, 2004)
Anti-Semitism a Crime in Israel
Moves are afoot in Israel to create a special court that would try so-called anti-Semitic crimes. Politician Eliezer Cohen claims that the International Court of Justice in the Hague has failed to deal with anti-Semitism and any other crimes against the Jews. "The hatred of Jews today, which is being promoted by wicked incitement, is no less than during past generations", he said. Under this proposed law, anti-Semitic crimes would be prosecuted in Israel no matter where they were perpetrated. {Maariv International, July 21, 2004)
Ariel Sharon and S. Klarsfeld Urge Jews to Leave France
The alleged rise in anti-Semitism in France can best be thwarted by Jews leaving the country. "One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that even if you want to fight against a wave of anti-Semitism, the best [thing] is to leave if you can," Klarsfeld said during a visit to Israel. The French government sees the in- crease in attacks against the 600,000 Jews in France by mainly a second and third generation of violent Muslims, of which there are 6 million in France. Klarsfeld said history has proven it would have been best "had the Jews of Poland and the Jews of Austria left Europe when they could have." {Jerusalem Post, June 19, 2004) Klarsfeld' s comments were followed by a simi- lar statement by Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon a month later, which caused some diplomatic tension between France and Israel. {Daily Telegraph, July 19, 2004)
'Anti-Semitic' Attack Fabricated
A 23-year old French woman claimed on July 9, 2004, that a gang of six youths attacked her on a suburban train outside Paris, slashing her clothes and drawing swastikas on her stom- ach after mistaking her for being a Jewess. The woman later admitted to "having made knife cut marks on herself, cut off a lock of her own hair and drawn swastikas on her body," a po- lice report stated. Investigators said closed-circuit cameras at the station northeast of Paris where the woman said the attack- ers had left the train did not show the six youths. The woman has been placed in preventive detention for falsely reporting a crime. She could face up to six months in prison and a 7,500- euro (9,200-dollar) fine if tried and convicted. (AFP, July 14, 2004)
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British Tory Leader a Holocaust Liar
British Tory leader Michael Howard claims his paternal grandparents died in Auschwitz, and his aunt survived the gas chamber:
"While at Auschwitz she had been in a gas chamber three times and for various reasons - once they actually ran out of gas - had got out to tell the tale. " (Independent, July 3, 2004)
Michael Howard's tale resembles that of Moshe Peer who told a similar story of his six-fold survival of gassings as a child in the non-existing gas chamber of Bergen-Belsen camp (The Gazette, Montreal, August 5, 1993). Howard is either ignorant or a liar - but probably both.
Wall Street Journal: Little Forensic Evidence for Holocaust
The Auschwitz-Museum is about to turn the ruins of the Birkenau crematories, which have been forgotten and neglected since the end of the war, into memorials, for which these mate- rial traces refuting the Holocaust will have to undergo some kind of manipulation = tampering. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it
"[...] there is little forensic evidence proving homicidal intent. [...] The dearth of hard evidence has fueled a growth industry in Holocaust-denial.
The revisionists ' plaint is simple: They demand a pro- verbial 'smoking gun ' to prove that the Nazis deliberately and systematically designed an industrial system of exter- mination. They do not deny that millions of European Jews died from malnutrition, exhaustion and disease. They do not even deny that Zyklon B gas was employed at Auschwitz, but they claim it was used for delousing rather than homi- cidal purposes. " (Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2004) Revisionists do indeed demonstrate that not millions of Jews died in the area under German control, but hundreds of thousands. Revisionists further demand that material traces of a claimed crime are not tampered with and turned into memori- als, but are analyzed with state-of-the-art technologies to de- termine facts and dispel myths.
Christopher Browning's Latest Book: "Euphoria" Did it!
Neil Ascherson's review of Christopher Browning's latest book, The Origins of the Final Solution, is dated and redundant, as is Browning's own effort in explaining world history during 1933-45. This is because without a reference to Professor Kevin MacDonald's trilogy on Judaism, any explanation will remain unbalanced and follow the well-worn path of Judeo- centric victimology that placed Hitler's 'hatred for the Jews' as the motivational force that caused this world conflict. Natu- rally, as was also evident in the recent US reports on the 9/11 tragedy, the role of Judaism's aims and objectives is swept un- der the carpet, is claimed not to exist, and anyone daring to pos- tulate such is immediately branded an "anti-Semite" - not to mention those who prove that there was no such thing like "the Holocaust." No wonder Browning claims it was the abstract noun "euphoria" that caused what he calls "The Final Solu- tion." After Hilberg's mind-reading now Browing's euphoria. Where are you, euphoria? (Observer, May 23, 2004)
Wiesenthal Center's 'Last Chance' Hunt for 'Nazis'
The much publicized search for alleged octogenarian sol- diers who fought in World War Two is set to begin on Septem- ber 21, 2004. The Jerusalem-based head of the Wiesenthal Cen- ter, Dr Efraim Zuroff, is offering USS 10,000 for each 'war criminal' turned in. Similar actions will also run in Austria, Po- land, Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine and Argentina. The deputy head of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which oversees the prosecution of war criminals, Witold Ku- lesza, said Poland should not be included in "Operation Last Chance." He says the country has been consistently committed to prosecuting war criminals since the end of the war, and has successfully convicted a number of 'perpetrators' of the 'Holo- caust.' (BBC News Online, June 16, 2004)
'Nazi Hunter' Wiesenthal Given Knighthood
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has been given a honorary knighthood to for a "lifetime of service to humanity" by help- ing bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice, the UK Foreign Of- fice says. (Reuters, June 19, 2004)
USA to Deport 80- Year-Old Ukrainian
Jakiw Palij, who had come to the US after the war and ac- quired US citizenship, was recently stripped of it because he was a guard at the Trawniki labor camp. On June 9, 2004, US Immigration Court judge Robert Owen ordered Palij 's deporta- tion to Ukraine. Federal prosecutors from the OSI did not di- rectly accuse Palij of participating in any killings, but said his position as a guard made the killings possible. (Forest Hills Ledger, June 17,2004)
German Court: 95- Year-Old Man too Old for Prison
The German Federal Supreme Court in Leipzig, Germany's second highest court, overturned a 2002 conviction by the Hamburg district court and ruled that Friedrich Engel, 95, is too old for a new trial. He was charged with having been involved in a shooting of 59 Italian prisoners in a reprisal act for a bomb attack by partisans on German soldiers. Engel claimed he watched the execution on orders. (Reuters, June 27, 2004)
Estonian War Veterans Dare to Celebrate
On July 6 the Estonian Freedom Fighters Association or- ganized its 12th annual event in Tallinn, to which over 1500 Es- tonian World War II veterans attended and celebrated the 60th anniversary of their fight against Soviet Union forces. Usual Jewish groups, including a Rabbi from Russia, protested be- cause not one of the former SS soldiers has been prosecuted for allegedly committing crimes against the Jewish people. (Radio Free Europe, July 22, 2004)
Last German Prisoner of War Back Home
At age 80 the last German prisoner of war came back from Russia. Teacher Franz Steeg was taken prisoner in 1943 by the Soviets. In 1950 he married a girl he met in a Soviet forced la- bor camp. After his release, the Soviets refused to let him leave the country. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Steeg, then 70, did not dare to apply for a visa. It required the aid by German researchers who found documents about his case in Russian ar-
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Belzec Memorial in Poland
chives to initiate his repatriation. He came back in July 2002 together with his granddaughter Svetlana. (AFP, July 13, 2002)
Controversial Belzec Memorial Opened
Long forgotten and hidden in eastern Poland, the former Belzec transit camp has now its own memorial, where the death of up to 600,000 Jews is commemorated, who are claimed to have been killed there between 1942 and 1943 - even though forensic research conducted in the late 1990s has shown that these claims are exaggerated probably by the factor of 100,000 (see C. Mattogno, Belzec, T&DP 2004). Because the construc- tion of the memorial allegedly desecrates Jewish remains, the Polish government faces a lawsuit fded by some U.S. Jews. (JTA, June 3, 2004) The construction of yet another holy site of the HoloHoax sure destroyed some forensic evidence and will prevent any further future inves- tigation.
'Holocaust' Monument in Belarus
On July 18, 2004, a 'Holo- caust' monument was opened by a ceremony attended by the am- bassador of the U.S., Germany, French, and other nations. (AP, July 1 8, 2004)
Denmark Pressured to Investigate WWII Collaboration
60 years after the war the Danish government is under pres- sure to set up a "truth commission" to investigate German war crimes following publication of a book revealing the extent, to which ordinary Danes collaborated with German units slan- dered as "death squads" during the Second World War. (Inde- pendent, June 16, 2004)
'Holocaust Survivors' Sued for not Paying Commission
Holocaust survivors who signed up with a company submit- ting claims to Germany on their behalf are now being sued by Yaffa Golan Investments and Finances Ltd. for not paying the 10% commission it demanded for representing them. Eran Huppert, attorney for two of the defendants, claims the com- pany acted illegally and took advantage of the helplessness of his clients, who are in poor health. Yaffa Golan claims the de- fendants are "opportunists" seeking a chance to avoid paying the company's fee. And so it goes on... (Haaretz, July 16, 2004)
In- Vitro Fertilization Hampered by Hitler
Because of Germany's Hitler paranoia, German lawmakers and scientists do not dare doing reasonable research into ge- netic health and fertility issues. Futile attempts of coming to terms with a past that will not pass - the shadows of Third Reich eugenics, euthanasia and racial research - was also the issue of an address given at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Berlin by Profes- sor Rolf Winau. (BBC News Online, June 28, 2004) No wonder German science is falling by the wayside.
Cinema Advertisement with Hitler Painting
Japanese commercials advertising the Toshiba movie "Max" about a Jewish art dealer who was a close friend of Hit- ler during WWI lasted only a few days. Because a Hitler paint- ing was used in it, Jewish protest led to a quick cancellation. (Die Gemeinde, Vienna, March 2004).
Greek Journalist Accuses Jews of Muzzling Free Speech
Kostas Betinakis, a former foreign editor of Greece's largest newspaper Ta Nea, accused Greek Jews of being puppets of the Israeli government and of censoring criticism of Israeli policies. Jewish pressure groups accused Greeks of anti-Semitism be- cause of their critical stance against Israeli oppressive policies, which were also depicted in several drastic cartoons. As a reac- tion, Jewish groups threatened a boycott of the Greek Olym- pics. (JTA, May 24, 2004)
Jews Relentless In Pursuit of Internet Censorship
A highly recommended paper listing a growing series of Jewish attempts to censor the internet - a prospect of what is to come - was published by Jeff Hook in the National Vanguard (www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=3 1 49)
Irving's New Zealand Visit under Threat
The Jewish community has asked the Government to keep controversial author David Irving out of the country. (New Zea- land Herald, July 17, 2004) They succeeded.
Book Burning in Finland
Finish public prosecutors want to confiscate and burn the Finish translation of Robert Wilton's book The Last Days of the Romanovs, which includes revealing data about the Jewish ori- gin of the communist revolution in Russia in 1917/18 (you can order the English version from CHP). A new preface added to this Finnish edition is the reason for this act of censorship, since it sweepingly blames Jews for many calamities in man- kind's history. (Helsingin Sanomat, January 27, 2004)
Radio Station Closed by Canadian Authorities
Canadian authorities refused to renew the license of the Quebec City Radio Station CHOI, among others because the station's commentator Andre Arthur had remarked that many African students at Laval University are children of dictators. When the radio station brought forth evidence that this was true, they were told that truth is no defense.
Ztindel Case Reaches Crisis Point
One of the world's veteran Revisionists, Ernst Ziindel, im- prisoned since February 5, 2003, continues to languish in a cell in Toronto's Detention Centre. Proceedings before judge Pierre Blais have been marked by the judge's arbitrary decisions. De- fense counsel Peter Lindsay's various motions have been dis- missed, he has been excluded from privileged information emerging out of secret meetings, and the judge's final decision cannot be appealed. Defense counsel's move to contest this in Canada's Supreme Court may be set down after Judge Blais has made his decision on the matter thus making the Supreme Court action irrelevant. The last haring date set so far is on
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Sept. 15, which would enable the judge to send Ernst Zilndel to Germany the next day.
French Revisionist's Prison Term Doubled
In his appeal, the prison term handed down against French revisionist Vincent Reynouard, 34, for distributing the film The Tragedy of Oradour-sur-Glane: 50 Years of Official Lies was doubled from one year to two years on June 10, 2004, of which 18 are suspended (cf. 77? 1/2004, p. 118). The fine to be paid to survivors was reduced from €10,000 to €1,000. (The Scotsman, June 10, 2004)
German Lawyer Banned from Practicing
On April 8, 2004, the German County Court Berlin- Tiergarten banned German lawyer Horst Mahler from practic- ing law. Mahler is currently on trial in Germany for his revi- sionist views. Because he continued to make revisionist re- marks during his pleadings (incitement to hatred under German law) and due to his ongoing accusations against the German governmental system (denigration of the German constitution), the court decided that he is unfit to serve as a lawyer, (ref. 351 Gs 745/04) In the meantime, two con-spirators of Mahler (Ursula Haverbeck and E.O. Cohrs) have been sentenced to a fine of some $4,000 by the county court Bad Oeynhausen.
German Government Goes Nuts over Music CDs
German police raided 333 homes in Germany in search of music CDs containing outlawed right-wing music. A total of 342 persons are being prosecuted for this. (Stuttgarter Zeitung, March 25, 2004) A few months later, schools in the Germany were flooded with some 250,000 free CDs containing right- wing music with titles like "project schoolyard," "adaptation is cowardice," or "songs from the underground." The German government now floods German schools with leaflets to counter this music campaign.
Prosecuted for Wearing Military Decoration
In protest against the demolition of a WWII veterans' me- morial in West Germany, some old German WWII veterans as- sembled with their Military decorations. One of the veterans, Otto Riehs, had his home raided by the German police and is now facing criminal charges for wearing his "Ritterkreuz" (knight's cross), because there is a swastika on it. (Deutsche Stimme, April 2004, p. 1 1)
German Authorities Blind on the Left
Whereas German authorities claim they can do nothing to prevent a left-wing grass root initiative to collect and publish personal details of right-wingers (Die Welt, Feb. 3, 2004), a similar initiative by a right-wing organization to collect per- sonal details of left-wingers was swiftly declared illegal, the right-wing organization banned (Neues Deutschland, Jan. 26, 2004).
German Army can Fire Patriots
Since the German army depends on loyal soldiers, the Ger- man Federal Civil Court decided that it can exclude soldiers from service who are members of a patriotic party, in that case
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of the modestly right-wing Republikaner (loyal, Sept. 2003). Thus, if German soldiers are not allowed to be patriots, they all have to be traitors!
Berliner Zeitung Opposes German Censorship Law
The leading newspaper of Germany's capital Berlin criti- cized German law prohibiting Holocaust revisionism:
"This prohibition protects [...] a value which has been unknown in the history of law for good reasons: a historical image proscribed by the government. [...]
It does not serve the truth if the truth is put down in law books instead of in the heads of the citizens. Truth is not served if it must be believed, not because it is irrefutable, but because it is ordered. [...] if governments take charge of writing history, leaving historiography not up to society but stipulating it by penal laws, then this does not tell us any- thing about this historical truth, but everything about such governments [...]. "
In order to get away with such criticism, this article spreads the calculated lie by Jewish author Peter that revisionists would claim that Auschwitz never existed:
"The government intervenes a second time in the same
matter: first to build Auschwitz and to let it operate, and a
second time to punish everyone who claims that it did not
exist. "
This article also finds the exact determination of the Auschwitz victims with mathematical equations repulsive:
"[...] the mathematical equations used by paleo- and neo-Nazis to 'down-calculate ' the number of victims may be repulsive [...]"
It seems that the author of this article hates math, the ines- cabable logic of which he wants to escape by slandering those mathematicians as "neo-Nazis." It is the exact opposite: Those exaggerated, deceptive, untrue victim numbers of 9, 4, and 1.5 million, invented and spread by Poles, Communists, and Jews all over the world, are repulsive. (Berliner Zeitung, April 27, 2004)
German Army Professor Endorses Torture
Torture as an emergency measure against terrorists is le- gitimate according to professor Michael Wolffsohn, historian at the University of the German Army in Munich:
"We will fail if we use Gentleman methods to fight ter- rorism. [...] As one of the means against terrorists I con- sider torture or the threat of it as legitimate, indeed. " (AP, May 5, 2004, Spiegel, May 11, 2004)
The German penal law, however, outlaws the use of torture (§343). Prof. Wolffsohn is Jewish.
Herero Lawsuit against Germany Undeliverable
Washington has refused to deal with a lawsuit the Herero tribe in Namibia intended to file against Germany. They want to get 2 billion dollars in reparation for the quenching of the Herero uprising against their German colonial masters in 1904. Now the Hereros look for diplomatic support to enable them to sue Germany (Spiegel, Feb. 9, 2004).
Updated: July 27, 2004
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