The Fate of Jews in German Hands

An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism

by Joel S. A. Hayward

Chapter I
The Development of Holocaust Revisionism

It is now three and a half centuries since Galileo's well-known submission of intellectual autonomy to the orthodoxy of his day, and almost two centuries since the demise of the dreaded Inquisition which forced his acquiescence. One might think that challenging accepted opinions carries today no threat of punishment or death, except perhaps in less developed nations or totalitarian regimes. 'Freedom of expression' is heralded in the western world as an essential human right, comparable in importance to freedom from slavery or torture. However, challenging accepted opinion is often still considered a heresy — despite this much paraded freedom of expression — and may result in corrective measures which resemble in many ways the actions of the Inquisition. It will be argued in the following chapters that Holocaust Revisionists are now amongst the most despised of all 'heretics' or 'thought criminals' (to use Orwell's term) in the western world. They have encountered intense opposition for daring to dig below the surface of the sacred and taboo terrain of Holocaust orthodoxy. Of course, the present writer does not wish to suggest that they are the only victims of our present-day 'inquisitors', and is mindful that the case of Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most infamous example of a modern day heresy trial.

Perhaps like Rushdie in some ways. Holocaust Revisionists — by challenging accepted opinion on the Holocaust — have blasphemed about something considered inviolable to a great many people in the western world. Indeed, for many Jews the Holocaust has become an event not only of historical importance, but also of immense theological importance — an event almost comparable in its enormity to the revelation at Sinai. As such it is regarded by many as a sacrosanct subject, not open to legitimate private investigation, let alone public debate. Elie Wiesel, the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and perhaps the most prominent Jewish writer on the Holocaust, frequently describes it as holy history, and at one point even asserted The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word ['Holocaust'] [1] The imagery used here, and in very many

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other Jewish books on the Holocaust, is obviously borrowed from Exodus 3:2, the account of God telling a trembling Moses at the foot of Sinai, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standeth is holy ground. A number of Jewish philosophers and theologians have also written articles elevating the subject to the level of sacred history, at the same time even denouncing as sacrilegious the efforts of Jewish scholars who have attempted to treat it with a degree of scholarly objectivity.[2]

In Israel an annual commemoration day, Yom HaShoah, is observed on Nisan 27, although many religious Israelis prefer to commemorate it on Tevet 10 (a fast day, now called Yom HaQad-dish), the day on which the mourners' prayer is recited. Yom HaShoah was created in 1959 as a national day of mourning and commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. It has definite religious overtones and is becoming increasingly similar in nature to Tisha B'Av (on Av 9), the traditional day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples. It would also appear that it is being fully integrated into the Jewish religious calendar, followed by over ten million Jews around the globe. The present writer is not criticizing the way Jewish people mourn their dead, and wishes only to illustrate the fact that the Holocaust has become a sanctified subject, an integral part of Jewish religious identity.

Also in Israel is Yad Vashem, the huge memorial to the Jewish heroes and martyrs of the Second World War. The various buildings in this facility include one used as a shrine, complete with an eternal flame and other symbols of sacredness, which was purposely constructed to resemble a Nazi gas chamber. They are visited every year by hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists, very many of whom leave feeling tremendously moved by the experience, which is almost of a religious nature.[3] As well as containing immense archives and study facilities, Yad Vashem

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serves every year on Yom HaShoah as the gathering point for thousands of Israelis who come to offer prayers to God.

In a genuine and well-intentioned move to safeguard the memory of the very many Jewish victims of the Nazis, on July 8, 1986 the Israeli Knesset passed a new law: Denial of Holocaust (Prohibition) Law, 5746-1986. This has unfortunately resulted in presently accepted opinion on the Holocaust becoming official Israeli dogma, to which a major challenge will be treated not only as a heresy but as a crime. This law demands of Israeli historians of the Holocaust — and, indirectly, the rest of the population — the submission of their intellectual autonomy; the abolition of the freedom to perceive and describe that historical event according to their own understanding of the evidence. It states, inter alia:

A person who, in writing or by word of mouth, publishes any statement denying or diminishing the proportions of acts committed in the period of the Nazi regime which are crimes against the Jewish people or crimes against humanity, with intent to defend the perpetrators of those acts or to express sympathy or identification with them, shall he liable to imprisonment for a term of five years.[4]

In the United States — where almost half the world's Jews live — laws have not yet beenpassed making illegal any major challenges to accepted opinion on the Holocaust (it was illegal in Canada, under that nation's 'false news' laws). However, in the United States the Holocaust has sadly become a flourishing business, with novels, television mini-series and unfactual motion pictures on the horrors of life in the concentration camps being produced at a remarkable rate. It has also become a civil religion; an immense and horrific cynosure, unifying, motivating and giving identity to millions of American Jews (and many others, as will be seen). Jacobo Timerman, a well known Jewish writer, eloquently made these points when he wrote:

Many Israelis feel offended by the way in which the Holocaust is exploited in the Diaspora. They even feel ashamed that the Holocaust has become a civil religion for Jews in the United States. They respect the works of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and Marie Syrkin [who treat the subject with the desired reverence]. But of other writers, editors, historians, bureaucrats, and academics they say, using the word Shoah, which is Hebrew for Holocaust: There's no business like Shoah business. [5]

Indeed, in the United States alone there are nineteen major Holocaust museums, forty-eight research centres, thirty-four archives, twelve memorials and five major libraries, and still more are being constructed. Most are funded entirely by Jewish organizations, which have managed to keep the Holocaust unforgotten in the collective memory of the American people, but several of these institutions are funded either partly or wholly by the Unites States government. For example, in 1980 a unanimous vote of Congress mandated the construction of the United

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States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 1.7 acres of granted federal land in Washington, D.C.; the museum itself to be financed by private funds. Illustrating the fact that the Holocaust has been elevated to the status of great national importance, the new building (complete with a massive, temple-like Hall of Remembrance) will be situated on the National Mall — the very hub of American government — right in amongst the United States' most prominent and emblematic icons of independence, liberty and greatness: the Smithsonian buildings, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol and, of course, the White House.

The Congress and President Carter formed a government-funded public body, the 55-member U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, to manage the construction of the $147,000,000 museum, and to encourage and sponsor observances of an annual nationwide civic commemoration of the Holocaust known as the Days of Remembrance.[6] Indeed, the Council facilitates commemoration across the country in state houses, city halls and thousands of schools [in many of which Holocaust education is mandatory], libraries, churches and synagogues … [culminating] in the annual national civic observance at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda with the participation of leading Americans.[7] Included amongst these leading Americans have been Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush, and, naturally, the person appointed by President Carter as first chairman of the Council: Elie Wiesel, the aforementioned 'priest' of the Holocaust.

Many people consider it remarkable that the government of the United States has endorsed and aided so unreservedly this excessive emphasis on the Holocaust, especially when they consider that Jews comprise but three percent of the total population, that the Nazi maltreatment of Jews did not occur on American soil, and that it did not directly result in the death of a single American serviceman or civilian (although, of course, many died attempting to end it). This constant aggrandizement has had a considerable impact on American consciousness, a fact recognized by Michael Berenbaum, the Project Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and a professor of theology at Georgetown University, who stated with some pride: The Holocaust was [once regarded as a side story of the much larger story of World War II. Now one thinks of World War II as a background story and the Holocaust as a foreground story. [8]

Whilst this brief analysis has so far focused only on Israel and the United States, the present

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writer will argue in the following chapters that an excessive emphasis on the Holocaust exists in many other western countries, including Germany, Austria, Britain and Canada, and historical orthodoxy on the Holocaust has become an official dogma in those countries also. Thus, accepted opinion on the Holocaust — that is, that approximately six million Jews were purposely murdered, several million of them in gas chambers constructed for the task, by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state — has been championed by numerous governments. Additionally, it has become entirely inviolable, perhaps the only historical event for which it is considered totally unacceptable to express doubts about or demand evidence.

Presently there are very many Revisionist historians zealously wielding the battering ram of 'free inquiry' against the heavy steel gates of Holocaust orthodoxy — denting them and forcing them slightly ajar on occasions — allowing the Revisionists to catch fleeting glimpses of what they claim is the historical reality held captive behind, locked away for more than forty-five years. However, until the mid-1970s there were very few Revisionist troops involved in the siege, and the arguments most of them thrust forward — weak and often illogical — bounced like pebbles off those gates (constructed by the Allies at the International Military Tribunal and subsequently maintained and repaired by numerous governments).

The work of Paul Rassinier

The very first stone thrower and Holocaust 'heretic' was Paul Rassinier, a French professor of history and geography who published several pioneering works on the subject between 1948 and 1967, the year of his death. To his supporters Rassinier is now esteemed as being the father of Holocaust Revisionists, but is regarded by his many detractors as having been the father of Nazi gutter historiography, to quote Yehuda Bauer.[9] Another Jewish commentator described him in even harsher words: (He was] a teacher who came straight out of the anti-Semitic French tradition that culminated in the Dreyfus affair and is not much diminished today… [He was] perhaps the most rabid Jew-baiter of the post-war period.[10]

Although Rassinier was overtly anti-Zionistic — as were a majority of the French people, in

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his generation — the charge that he was anti-Semitic resulted only from his rejection of accepted opinion on the Holocaust, and not from a belief that Jews were racially inferior, or from any philo-Hitlerism. Indeed, a careful reading of all available evidence reveals that he was not a racist and that he had every reason to hate the Nazi regime, because in October 1943 he had been arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) for his central role in forming the Libre-Nord resistance movement, interned in Buchenwald concentration camp, and then in the subsidiary camp of Dora. When he was released in April 1945, he was in such poor physical condition that he had to be repatriated on a stretcher.

Having joined the SFIO (Section française de I'Internationale Ouvrière — the French Socialist Party) in 1934, after several years as a Communist, Rassinier had risen by 1940 to become the head of that party in the Belfort region. After France was occupied by the German army he helped form the Libre-Nord movement, which became involved in various forms of non-violent resistance, including the smuggling of Jewish refugees across the border into Switzerland in cooperation with the Swiss Jewish Committee. His activities eventually came to the attention of the German authorities, hence his arrest by the Sicherheitsdienst — who tortured him for eleven days — and subsequent deportation to Buchenwald. Upon his liberation in 1945 he returned to France and, after a period of recuperation, was elected to the Assemblée Nationale as a Socialist deputy, where he served for a year until it became apparent that his health would not allow continued service. For his work in the resistance the French government bestowed upon him the highest decorations given to resistance fighters, the Médaille Vermeil de la Reconnaissance Française and the Rosette de la Résistance, and, being unable to return to teaching, allowed him a small pension. Thus, the charges that he was 'anti-Semitic' or 'pro-Nazi', which abounded after the publication of his works on the Holocaust, were groundless and, some might argue, slanderous.

Almost immediately after the war Rassinier noticed that very many stories were circulating to the effect that almost all Nazi concentration camps — including Buchenwald — had homicidal gas chambers and other murder machinery, used to systematically exterminate millions of Jews and others. Indeed, when the Americans liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and Bergen-Belsen four days later, to their horror they encountered hundreds of unburied corpses, in various stages of decay, and thousands more living internees, many of them diseased and emaciated. Survivors told them spine-chilling stories of torture and atrocities, backing up their stories by showing the stunned GIs the gas chambers, crematory ovens, alleged torture instruments (such as batons and whips) and even physical proof that human skin was used by their sadistic captors to make lampshades, book covers, handbags and gloves. Media representatives and politicians from Britain, France and the United States were flown into Germany to see with their own eyes the

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horrors at the camps, which were filmed and photographed as evidence that Hitler had murdered the Jews. Having himself experienced life in Hitler's concentration camps, Rassinier believed that the stories former internees were telling contained a small degree of true and a very large degree of exaggeration and embellishment, and decided at once to write a factual account of his own experiences at Buchenwald and Dora. He later described that decision in these words:

Then one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists. The deportees — many of whom were Communists — had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence. And, at one sitting, without paying attention to literary style and in as simple as possible a form, I wrote my Le Passage de la ligne in an attempt to put things into proper perspective and in an attempt to bring people back to a sense of objectivity and, at the same time, to a better conception of intellectual honesty.[11]

In Le Passage de la ligne (The Crossing of the Line) [12], published in 1948, Rassinier described at length what life was actually like for internees at Buchenwald and Dora (Mittelbau). The former camp was a major concentration camp, whilst the latter was a labour camp for 'the tunnel', a massive underground network of factories where slave's were used to construct V-l and V-2 rockets and aircraft parts and frames. According to Rassinier, life in Buchenwald was not as unbearable as many portrayals have suggested. Nonetheless, he described an environment in which brutality was normal; internees were forced off their thin straw mattresses, on which they slept crowded together, at 4.30 a.m. every day, beaten with rubber truncheons if they were too slow to rise. Several hours every day were spent in roll-calls, even in mid-winter when they would have to stand in the chilling snow or rain, their ragged clothes getting soaked through. As the camp was a Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), and not an Arbeitslager (labour camp), the internees' work, which finished every night at around 9 p.m., consisted of maintaining and improving the facilities at the camp, and building new ones. Yet the work was often unpleasant and difficult, and many died every day of maltreatment, malnutrition, disease and fatigue. Escapers, criminals and trouble-makers were executed almost without exception. Cadavers were carried by the Totenkommando to the camp crematory and destroyed.

At Dora life was even worse for internees because the camp was an Arbeitslager, in essence

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a slave-labour camp. They worked for twelve to fourteen hours every day, often in horrendous conditions. For example, Rassinier wrote that the internees assigned to digging new galleries were veritable chain gangs whose members died like fleas, their lungs poisoned by the ammonia laden dust. [13] He also explained that security and discipline were rigidly enforced, to the point of callousness and brutality. During one particular roll-call, twenty-seven men were found to be missing. The Rapportführer ordered the Kapo of the Arbeitsstatistik to re-check his figures, but after an hour of doing so he returned with the same tally. At once another count was made, but twenty-seven were still found to be missing. A thorough search of the barracks and the tunnel was made (during which time the 10,000 other prisoners were still standing to attention) but none of the missing prisoners were found. By the time all internees were accounted for — after the Arbeitstatistik had repeatedly rechecked their figures, amending them several times when calculations errors were found — the internees had been standing for over twelve hours without food. When they were finally dispersed to their barracks, still without food, the Totenkommando carried away to the crematory the bodies of forty persons who were unable to endure the ordeal.[14]

Thus, it is clear that Rassinier attempted to present the concentration camps in a truthful manner, and his description of day-to-day life therein resembles in many ways the stories told by other former internees. However, his memoir differs substantially from theirs in that he stated that absolutely no genocidal activities were conducted in those two camps. He claimed that the very many deaths that did occur — amongst all races and nationalities, not just Jews — resulted principally from the policies and actions of other internees, and not from the actions of the SS guards or camp management.

To support this claim — which at first sight seems incredible — Rassinier persuasively argued that the SS-Führung (SS administration), out of the necessity to economize personnel, delegated almost entirely the day-to-day running of the camp to carefully-selected prisoner trustees. These trustees were mainly German communists, some of who were inherited from Weimar Republic jails. This practice of limited self-administration was called Häftlingsführung, and some of the people involved in this bureaucracy were Kapos (who headed Kommandos, or work details), Blockältester (block supervisors), Lagerschutz (prisoner police), and Lagerältester (camp supervisors). It was these people, and not the SS overlords, who caused the majority of deaths in the camps through their brutality, self-centred rationing of food and clothing, and management — or mismanagement, to be more accurate — of hygiene and medical resources and facilities. Rassinier provided several examples which certainly appear to support this conclusion, which was argued in a lucid, logical and dispassionate manner. Further, during his internment at

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Buchenwald and Dora he had come into contact with numerous internees who had spent time in other western (that is in Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia) concentration camps, and based on their evidence was able to conclude that the Häftlingsführung arrangement, and the massive problems caused by it, were essentially the same throughout the entire National Socialist concentration camp system. Lastly, Rassinier's thesis on the Häftlingsführung gains considerable additional support from source material which became available only after his death (see below, pp. 170-172).

Hence, Le Passage de la ligne was markedly different from the writings of his fellow ex-internees, whose works placed exclusive blame on the Nazis for all deaths within the camps, and made it appear as if almost all internees suffered alike at the hands of their sadistic and murderous captors. Rassinier's work, generally well-founded and thoughtfully written, concluded that a certain group of privileged prisoners themselves caused — by their brutality, self-centredness and mismanagement — very many of the atrocious conditions which resulted in so many deaths. As could be expected, the publication of his book caused quite a stir in France, a nation then trying to come to terms with its own acquiescence in German occupation. Many angry people — mostly Communists — stated that he was whitewashing the crimes of the Nazi regime and accusing the internee leadership of collaborating with the Nazis.

In 1950 he angered them even more when he published Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses)[15], a critical study of the evidence in support of the allegation that the Nazis exterminated around six million Jews during the Second World War as an act of state. This work provoked a very heated response from the French press, which repeatedly branded him a Nazi-apologist and an anti-Semite. Legal action was also taken to silence and punish Rassinier and his-publisher for their crime of the injury and defamation of the French resistance movement and (indirectly) the Jewish people[16]. Arguably, this was a spurious charge in the light of the fact that the book did not attack Jews or the genuine resistance movement, but exposed only the tendency of many Frenchmen to claim in the immediate postwar period that they had been patriotic members of the resistance when in fact they had never been associated with that valorous movement.

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At the first trial early in 1951 Rassinier and his publisher were acquitted. However, after a successful prosecution appeal they were convicted in November of that year in the Court of Lyon. They received suspended prison sentences, large monetary fines, an order to have all copies of the book destroyed, and an order that they pay damages to the National Federation of Deportees and Resistants (F.N.D.R.). Believing that state censorship was at work and that their intellectual independence was threatened, Rassinier and his publisher took the case to the French Supreme Court. On May 24, 1955 it set aside the previous judgement of the Court of Lyon, finding that Rassinier had neither attacked the F.N.D.R. nor any of its members, nor any one else specifically.[17] News of his legal victory was widely published in the major French newspapers.

In 1955 Rassinier combined Passage de la Ligne and Le Mensonge d'Ulysse and published them, with the addition of material increasingly critical of the gas chambers claim, as Le Mensonge d'Ulysse Second Edition. The most widely distributed edition was the fifth, published in 1961, the year he published Ulysse Trahi par les siens (Ulysses Betrayed by His Own) [18], a concise companion volume comprising three essays, the latter being the text of a speech he gave in a 1960 lecture series throughout Germany. In 1962 he decided to present as a whole the entire problem of concentration camps, alleged atrocities and war crimes trials, the result being his Le Véritable Procès Eichmann ou les Vainqueurs incorrigibles (The Real Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors) [19]. Two years later he attempted to examine the subject of Nazi anti-Jewish atrocities by examining the demographic evidence for and against accepted opinion. This book, Le Drame des Juifs européens, (The Drama of the European Jews) [20] was his final general work on the subject of the extermination of the Jews. However, in 1964 he published L'opération Vicaire (Operation Vicar) [21], a defence of Pope Pius XII, accused in Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy — and by several Jewish commentators — of having favored Nazism and not speaking out against the Jewish exterminations.

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We have argued that Rassinier's first book was, overall, quite well argued and thoughtfully (if not always eloquently) written, despite his own personal suffering at the hands of the Nazis. An investigation of his numerous other works reveals that, with some exceptions, he maintained the degree of even-handedness displayed in his first book. Several of his principal arguments were reasonable and supported by reliable evidence of a primary nature, although he also made very many errors of judgement and on several occasions quoted from clearly unreliable sources, or misquoted others. Rassinier began by challenging the reliability and credibility of both the inconsequential and important eyewitness accounts of genocidal activities within the concentration camps, and successfully exposed several of them as lies or exaggerations. He explained, by way of illustration, how he met up again after the war with Abbé Jean-Paul Renard, someone he was interned with at Buchenwald and Dora and who later published a well-received collection of poems on life in the camps. In one poem, J'ai vu, j'ai vu, et j'ai vécu (I saw, I saw, and I lived!), he had written: I saw going into the showers thousands and thousands of persons over whom poured out, instead of liquid, asphyxiating gases. I saw those who were unfit for work injected in the heart. Regarding the genocidal activities described in this poem, Rassinier wrote:

Actually, Abbé Jean-Paul Renard saw nothing of the kind because gas chambers did not exist either at Buchenwald or at Dora. As for the injections, it was not done at Buchenwald at the time he went through there. When I pointed that fact out to him at the beginning of 1947, he answered, Right, but that's only a figure of speech … and since those things existed somewhere, it is of no importance. [22]

Rassinier's reason for stating that no gas chamber(s) existed in Buchenwald appears reasonable: because of its physical necessities and the nature of its task a gas chamber could not be hidden or disguised. Thus, as he had never seen one or heard about one during his own internment there, despite the fact that he possessed an intimate knowledge of all the buildings in the camp and their functions, one could not have existed. However, at the time he wrote these words it was accepted in France — indeed, throughout the world — as an undeniable fact that Buchenwald had a homicidal gas chamber, in which thousands of internees were fatally asphyxiated. When the camp was liberated dozens of internees came forward to testify that there was a gas chamber (or chambers, as some insisted) in the camp. An official French government report submitted to the International Military Tribunal as a prosecution exhibit had, for example, stated that the railway line at Buchenwald had been lengthened by the Nazis so that the deportees might be led directly from the trains to the gas chambers, of which the floor of one allegedly tipped after the gas had done its job, so as to drop the bodies into the room with the cremation oven.[23] Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at that tribunal, himself declared in his closing address that

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murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Buchenwald, and several other camps.[24] In 1947, Georges Hénocque, a French priest interned in Buchenwald, published his widely-read book, Les Antres de la Bête. He claimed to have visited the inside of the Buchenwald gas chamber, and described it at length and in considerable detail. [25] Numerous other writers and historians, particularly in the 1950s, echoed these claims without making any serious attempts to analyse the evidence according to accepted methodological principles.

Nonetheless, it would appear that Rassinier was essentially correct after all, as today very few historians claim that gassings or other genocidal activities (as opposed to incidental murders and routine brutality) occurred in Buchenwald. In the August 19, 1960 issue of Die Zeit — a major Hamburg weekly — Martin Broszat, one of West Germany's leading historians (later director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and an expert on the Holocaust, stated that: Neither in Dachau, nor in Bergen-Belsen, nor in Buchenwald, were Jews or other inmates gassed. [26] Regarding genocidal policies or activities in the western camps, Simon Wiesenthal wrote in 1975 that there were no extermination camps on German soil.[27] This, of course, includes both Buchenwald and Dora, situated not far from Weimar in Thuringia, Germany. Professor A.S. Balachowsky, a member of the prestigious Institut de France, was more specific when he stated that: I would like to confirm to you that no gas chamber as such existed at Buchenwald [28], a point also conceded by Konnilyn Feig in her 1981 book. Hitler's Death Camps.[29] Many other researchers and scholars have quietly abandoned the opinion that Buchenwald had a homicidal gas chamber or conducted mass-murder. However, possibly to their discredit, none have chosen to comment on how and why so many witnesses — whose reliability and credibility they had previously insisted on — had earlier testified

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to the existence of one or more there. Finally, in basic agreement with Rassinier's thesis, it is now generally agreed that most of the very many deaths in the western camps resulted from disease and malnutrition, a direct but unintended consequence of the virtual collapse of Germany's communications, transport, food and public health systems caused by the Allied saturation bombing of German cities, industrial centres, roads and railways.[30] Accordingly, the horrendous piles of cadavers found by American forces at Buchenwald and the other western camps are no longer believed, except by a few die-hard anti-Nazis, to be 'proof (or even consequential evidence) of specific Nazi policies or actions of genocide or mass-extermination.

Rassinier continued by arguing that some of the authors who described the operation of gas chambers had themselves never actually seen them, but relied solely on what others had told them. For example, after investigating the claims about the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers found in Eugen Kogon's L'Enfer Organisé, still often quoted, he found that only one person was mentioned who had actually seen a gas chamber. Unfortunately, by a happy chance, he wrote, this eyewitness (Janda Weiss) lived in the Russian zone and could not be contacted for verification of his story.[31] Similarly, Rassinier claimed that David Rousset, author of L'Univers concentrationnaire — which contained a graphic description of the alleged gassing process — was not, actually, ever present at this scene of torture of which he gives so exact and so gripping a description. [32] On this point, one must concede that Rassinier was entirely correct; Rousset, like the other authors mentioned, had relied on hearsay evidence and had never seen the described events.

One important eyewitness account Rassinier considered too unreliable and incredible to be considered worthy of the historian's serious attention was Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's Médecin à Auschwitz. This memoir is allegedly based on Nyiszli's experiences as a Hungarian-Jewish internee and medical pathologist in Auschwitz.[33] Rassinier introduced his critique of Nyiszli's account with this carefully argued demolition of his evidence regarding the gas chambers:

… he gave the first detailed account of all the horrors that took place at Auschwitz, including the exterminations in the gas chambers in particular. Among other things,

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he claimed that in this camp was a gas chamber 200 metres long (width was not given), together with three others of similar dimensions. They were used to asphyxiate 20,000 persons a day, and four crematory ovens, each with fifteen burners, incinerated the victims as the operation proceeded. He added, in another connection that 5,000 other persons were, every day, done away with by less modern means in two immense open air hearths. And, he added again that for eight months he had been personally present at these systematic massacres. Finally (this is on page 50 of the Julliard edition) he stated specifically that when he arrived at the camp (about the end of May 1944 at the earliest) the exterminations by gas, at the rate cited above had been going on for four years.

From the aforementioned testimony, the following contradictions can be gleaned. First, this fellow did not know that if there were gas chambers at Auschwitz they had not been installed or made ready to work until February 20, 1943 (Document NO. 4463, already cited).

Second: he did not know that the area of the gas chambers, officially and respectively, was 210 square meters for the first (the very one lie mentioned), 400 square meters for the second, and 580 square meters for the last two. In other words, the gas chambers which he saw, and whose operation he describes so minutely, must have been only 1.05 meters wide. In fact, it must have resembled a long hall [way passage]. Since he states precisely that down the middle of the chamber there was a row of columns with holes from which the gas came out (these columns came up through the roof and into these openings hospital attendants wearing Red Cross armbands threw the tablets of Zyklon B), that there were along the walls on both sides for sitting (surely not very wide, those benches!) and that 3,000 persons (they were gassing batches of 3,000!) could move about easily in the room, I claim that one of two things is true: either this Dr. Miklos Nyiszli never existed, or, if he did exist, he never set foot in the places that he describes. Third: if the gas chambers at Auschwitz, together with the open hearths, exterminated 25,000 people a day for four and a half years (since according to this witness) they continued to exterminate for six months after his arrival) that makes a total of 1,642 days. And at the rate of 25,000 persons per day for 1,642 days, there would have been 41 million cadavers, a little more than 32 million in gas chambers and a little less than 9 million in the open hearths. I shall add that even if it had been possible for the four gas chambers to asphyxiate 20,000 persons a day (at the rate of 3,000 per batch as the witness says), it was absolutely not possible to cremate that many at the same time, even if there were 15 burners and even if the job took only 20 minutes, as Dr. Miklos Nyiszli also falsely claims. Taking these figures for a basis, the capacity of the ovens, all working together, could not have consumed more than 540 corpses per hour, or 12,960 for the 24-hour day. At this rate the ovens could not have been put out until several years after the liberation.[34]

Little additional commentary is needed, as Rassinier's arguments, which successfully refute Nyiszli's claims, are reasonable and based on reliable evidence. Nyiszli, if he ever did see the chambers at Auschwitz — and he claimed that for several months he slept in the Aufenthaltsraum für Häftlinge on the ground floor of the Krema II building — exaggerated their measurements and capacities by an average multiplier of over four. That is, every measurement or capacity he asserted was at least four times greater than in reality. For example, he stated that the Leichenkeller (the alleged gas chamber) in Krema II was 200 yards [600 feet, or 182.8 meters] long, Whereas the true length was only 100 feet, or 30 meters.[35] The Birkenau gas chambers of Nyiszli's curious memoir are, to make a comparison, almost identical in length (and width, if we use

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conservative ratio estimates) to the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. This juxtaposition should entirely dispel from any readers' minds the notion that Nyiszli's very many measurement errors do not severely weaken the overall credibility of his book. It is clear that his claimed statistics are not the result of poorly judged estimates; they are irrational inventions. He not only made errors of that nature, but also such mistakes as getting the colour of Zyklon B granules wrong (despite it being a very distinctive colour, and after him allegedly having seen it on many occasions being tipped into the gas chambers), and referring to it as chlorine. A medical pathologist, very familiar with chlorine and its properties, would not have confused it with Zyklon-B (hydrocyanic acid). Much more importantly, he invented physical details about the Krema II building that never existed, such as multiple corpse elevators and automatically-opening cremation ovens, he even described forests and playing fields that never existed, at least not in the areas of the camp he said that they did. Academic historians should have picked up on these obvious and major flaws. Yet Nyiszli's implausible account, which Rassinier called one of the most abominable piece's of trickery of all time[36], is unfortunately still being quoted or cited as reliable evidence by some incautious historians, including scholars of considerable reputation such as Martin Gilbert.[37] [38]

In similar fashion, Rassinier detected major defects in the postwar confession of SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, whose job it was to supervise the distribution of disinfestation and disinfection agents — including Zyklon B — to the concentration camps. This account was written shortly before his death in 1945 and describes exterminations by gas at Belzec and Treblinka. Rassinier pointed out many impossibilities and improbabilities within the German officer's statement (of which six contradictory versions exist), which was later accepted as a prosecution document at the International Military Tribunal.[39] Among Gerstein's more absurd claims, he insisted, was his insistence that twenty-five million persons had been gassed during the war; that in Belzec he saw 700 to 800 persons gassed into a chamber measuring only twenty-five square meters (about the size of an average living room)[40]; and that Hitler had himself inspected gas chamber installations at Lublin on August 15, 1942 (whereas at that time he was hundreds of kilometers

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away, at his Wehrwolf headquarters near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine). Although Rassinier did not mention them, Gerstein also made many other irrational claims, such as that in Belzec there was a pile of shoes measuring 35-40 metres in height (35 oder 40 Meter Höhe — the height of a ten or eleven story building), that in the German concentration camps at least twenty million persons (mindestens 20 000 000 Menschen) were systematically gassed, or that in Auschwitz alone millions of children were murdered by having a pad of hydrocyanic acid held under their noses (In Auschwitz warden allein Millionen Kinder durch Unterhalten eines Blausäuretupfens unter die Nase getötet.) [41]

It is strange that this seriously flawed document — critically appraised for the first time by Rassinier (who did make several minor errors) — was ever considered as evidence for the International Military Tribunal. It is even more strange that it was dragged out again in 1961 and presented as prosecution evidence at the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was, like the 'major war criminals' at the aforementioned Tribunal, hanged for his crimes. Most strange, however, is the fact that it has been (in its various forms) repeatedly cited and quoted by very many historians. Raul Hilberg, for example, quoted or cited the Gerstein confession ten times in his book. The Destruction of the European Jews, which is still considered a standard textbook on the subject. By presenting the Gerstein confession as credible and trustworthy these scholars leave themselves wide open to the charge that they have failed in their professional duties.[42]

If Rassinier had limited himself to this type of study, his principal theses would have been irrefutable (despite many inconsequential mistakes[43]). However, he also attempted to prove, on the basis of an extremely detailed statistical study, that nowhere near six million Jews died during the Second World War, but rather, that no more than 1,200,000 perished. In doing so he made

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several major errors, proving that he was not a skilled demographer. He relied on statistics from a variety of secondary sources, including American newspapers, which fluctuated widely in reliability. For example, Rassinier referred at length to the statistics quoted in the February 11, 1948 issue of the New York Times by Hanson W. Baldwin, the Times expert on Jewish population matters. [44] In fact, Baldwin, a staff writer for the newspaper, was very far from being an expert on Jewish demography, and his statistics were based on documents of questionable origin and reliability. Among the other newspapers cited by Rassinier was the American Mercury, a right-wing, America-first publication. That newspaper's political position, of course, does not in itself disqualify the evidence it puts forward, but it is worth pointing out that the editors based their own research on generally unreliable sources and illogical methodology. Rassinier, extremely critical of the pedigree of sources used by other historians to uphold accepted opinion, erred himself by incautiously quoting the demographic statistics of that and other newspapers. Consequently, his lengthy ramblings on the number of Jewish fatalities are filled with major errors and miscalculations, including at one point attributing to Raul Hilberg a figure of under 900,000 for the Jewish wartime dead, based on a misreading of the latter's book (Hilberg's overall figure was actually 5,100,000).

Nonetheless, one can now see why almost all Holocaust Revisionists hold Rassinier in high esteem; he was the first to openly challenge accepted opinion on the Holocaust, and he generally did so in a thoughtful and responsible manner. Whilst he made many errors — some major, most minor — it must be conceded that he successfully demonstrated that some of the evidence used to uphold accepted opinion is of dubious origin and lacking in reliability and credibility. It should also be recognized that today's Revisionists (and, of course, those who uphold accepted opinion) have a wealth of primary documentary evidence that was unavailable in the 1950s and 1960s to Rassinier, who was forced to rely partly on a combination of 'official' documents and secondary sources. Where possible he contacted the people involved to verify that their testimonies were based on real events and recorded faithfully, but this was only possible in a few cases. Thus, whilst only Rassinier's principal theses have been investigated, it has been shown that his arguments were not anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi in origin or nature, but were generally reasonable and dispassionate criticisms of some of the evidence for Holocaust orthodoxy.

After Rassinier

Rassinier's ground-breaking publications were followed by three books written in the 1960s by Josef Ginsburg, a Jewish-Rumanian author who chose to publish them under the

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pseudonym J. G. Burg. He and his family had been deported during the war from their home in Czernowitz, Rumania to occupied eastern territory, where Jews were 'concentrated' but not forced into camps. He claimed that in the autumn of 1945, after hearing the horrific stories of gas chamber exterminations, he visited several concentration and labour camps — including Auschwitz and Majdanek — and was able not only to inspect the sites at length but also to interview over one hundred ex-internees. Of these, he was unable to find even one with first-hand knowledge of the gas chambers, nor, to his surprise, was he able to find physical proof that such chambers ever existed.

In 1962 Ginsburg published Schuld und Schicksal (Guilt and Fate)[45], which was followed in 1967 by Sündenböcke (Scapegoats) [46] and a year later by NS-Verbrechen — Prozesse des schlechten Gewissens (National Socialist Crimes)[47], all three books denying the verity of accepted opinion on the Holocaust and the postwar trials of German war criminals. Ginsburg presented many arguments in keeping with present Revisionist theses, such as his claim (also made by Rassinier) that die Endlösung — 'the final solution' — was not a Nazi euphemism for 'extermination' but meant, when written in German documents about the Jews, their forced deportation to occupied territories in the east.[48] It was only after the war, he argued, that the phrase was intentionally perverted by the Allies to mean something far more evil than it originally did. He also correctly pointed out — quoting Israel's former Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol — that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of ex-Auschwitz inmates were then alive in Israel alone[49], proving allegations that almost no Jews survived the Auschwitz extermination process to he incorrect.

He did not rule out the possibility that gas chambers existed in some camps, although he found the evidence insufficient to conclude without reservation that they did exist. He insisted, however, that the Nazis did not have a policy of extermination, and that most Jewish deaths resulted from individual pogroms, the execution of subversives and partisans, overwork in bad conditions, epidemics and Allied air raids. A great many perished, he lamented, but the total number of Jews in the control of the Hitler regime that were killed, lost their lives, or died could be no more than 3,323,000. [50]

Despite a few sound arguments and judicious conclusions, Ginsburg, a Munich bookbinder by profession, wrote the books in a highly journalistic style, with his own opinions and value judgements — often supported by no other evidence than his own experiences — being present on almost every page. Further, he relied heavily on newspaper articles and other secondary sources, many of which were clearly unreliable. As a result, many of his arguments appear simply as unsustained assertions, seriously detracting from the books' overall impact and ability to persuade.

For example, he wrote at length on the subject of West German reparations to Israel, pointing out (albeit without merit) that that state was not even in existence when the alleged crimes were conducted. Further, it was primarily because the reparation payments for the estimated six million deaths were so beneficial to the struggling new state that international Jewry did not organize a thorough research programme to determine exactly how many Jews had died. If it did, he concluded, the resultant much-reduced figure would deprive Israel of a great deal of money.[51] He also insisted that many Jews involved in its formation were amongst the six million considered to have been murdered by the Nazis.[52] Little or no reliable evidence was provided to enable the reader to judge the veracity of these assertions.

Lacking the relative scholarship of Rassinier's far more detailed studies, Ginsburg's volumes have not been anywhere near as influential as the Frenchman's, which are still obtainable (and being frequently reprinted) in several nations. Nonetheless, Ginsburg was an early pioneer in a very unpopular field of study, and was the first noteworthy German Holocaust Revisionist. Revisionists also believe that his Jewishness is important, because it helps, they say, to dispel the notion that Holocaust Revisionism was invented by neo-Nazis and is necessarily synonymous with anti-Semitism. A Semitic anti-Semite, they logically argue, is a contradiction in terms.

Unfortunately, anti-Semite or not, for challenging Holocaust orthodoxy the elderly Jewish bookbinder was expelled from the Jewish Community of Munich, and (like Rassinier) was repeatedly abused and harassed. On one occasion, when he was laying flowers on his wife's grave in the Munich Jewish cemetery, he was set upon by several Jewish men and severely beaten.

Aside from the works of Rassinier and Ginsburg, the only other substantial attempted refutation

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of accepted opinion on the Holocaust in the 1950s and early 1960s was a single chapter of Louis Marschalko's The World Conquerors[53], first published in English in 1958, approximately one year after it appeared in Hungarian. This book of 296 pages was clearly intended by the author to be an expose of what he considered to be the heinous secret plans of international Jewry — the world conquerors — to gain domination over all peoples of the earth. It is unlikely that its central theses would be acceptable to persons whose Weltanschauung did not already contain a conspiracy theory of some description. The book is clearly not as sophisticated as some of the other early Revisionist publications, and was nowhere near as influential (it had almost no circulation in the United States, for example). Nevertheless, because of its treatment of several important issues, it does deserve to be discussed at this point.

David Irving, in his carefully documented but sensationalistic analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising[54], provided reasonable evidence that the freedom fighters perceived the government they were trying to topple as being Jewish, and that their anti-Semitism was as much a driving force as their anti-Communism. That is, they correctly recognized that almost all of the Communist leaders were Jewish, including Revai (propaganda chief during the Rakosi administration), Parkas (Minister of Defence in the same administration), Gero (succeeded Rakosi in July 1956 as general secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party) and Rakosi himself (general secretary from 1944 to 1956). Further, they correctly recognized that the Allamvedelmi Hatosag (AVH, the State Security Authority) was controlled almost entirely by Jews. The awareness of these facts, argued Irving. transformed the revolt into something of a pogrom, partly because of the popular belief in a covert Jewish conspiracy.

Marschalko, a Hungarian nationalist, wrote The World Conquerors only a year after that nation's dreams of freedom were pulverized into nothing by the clattering tracks of Soviet tanks, and his own feelings of disappointment and pique are evident throughout the book, as is his belief in the anti-Jewish arguments of his compatriots.[55] In his discussion of the uprising he made the same assertions: international Jewry, operating behind the grotesque mask of Communism, was trying to reduce the Hungarian people to an intimidated mass of slaves in accordance with the Formula of the Protocols [of the Learned Elders of Zion], and so to establish Jewry's dominion over them. [56] However, he did not limit himself to a discussion of that brutal and bloody conflict, and expressed his views at some length on a variety of historical events and epochs, including the Bolshevik revolution, the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials and the growth and spread of Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. One theme runs throughout his unscholarly discussion of these events: international Jewry had been conspiring to subject the Christian nations — indeed, the world — to a form of slavery.

Marschalko's chapter on the Holocaust, entitled What has become of six million Jews?, also contains the same anti-Jewish conspiracy theory: six million Jews were certainly not murdered by the Nazi regime, but this propaganda figure was needed to secure the sympathy of the world. By raising the number of martyrs world conquest was rendered easier and the Gentile peoples could be terrorised more. [57] Interestingly, whilst he provided nothing more than very weak racist arguments to support this claim that Jews are using the Fiction of the exterminations as an integral part of their international conspiracy to enslave, the world, the arguments he employed in challenging the view that the Nazis murdered six million Jews — the majority in gas chambers-are considerably more thoughtful and substantial. They cannot, therefore, be dismissed as easily as his other unpalatable views. Hence the inclusion of his book in this dissertation on Holocaust Revisionism.

His principal arguments against Holocaust orthodoxy can be summarized as follows: The figure, of 'six million' for Jewish fatalities originated in the torture-obtained confessions at the International Military Tribunal of several Nazis, and is entirely spurious. There is absolutely no reliable evidence that Adolf Hitler ever planned to exterminate Europe's Jews, despite some seemingly incriminating passages in his speeches Rather, the intention of Hitler and the National Socialist leadership was, before the outbreak of war in 1939, to encourage (or force) Jewish emigration from Germany. This is proven by the fact that had he [Hitler] cherished the intention to exterminate the Jews, these emigrants would never have been allowed to leave Germany. [58] After the war commenced, this policy of Jewish emigration became impractical, and when Germany occupied other nations with enormous Jewish populations, such as Poland, France and thc USSR, it became impossible. As a result, the Jews — primarily for reasons of security — were forced to live separately from the non-Jews under German control, and were made to dwell in ghettos and concentration camps. The ghetto was perhaps a humiliating social establishment, but was not an organisation for the destruction of a race. [59] Additionally, the Germans putting

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Jews in concentration camps was really no different from the British forty years earlier forcing tens of thousands of Boers — including women, children, elderly and the sick — into concentration camps (in which thousands died), or the Americans 'concentrating' their Japanese, Italian and German citizens into 'internment camps'. This situation with the Jews, of course, was not intended to be permanent, but until the war was won and they could he 'expatriated' from Europe — the Nazis' real aim — they would have to live under these conditions.

Unfortunately, continued Marschalko, many Jews did not like them and chose to fight on the side of the partisans, especially in the Ukraine, and when caught by the Germans they were killed. Additionally, Jewish hostages were taken to prevent, or as reprisals for, partisan attacks. Whilst that type of warfare was especially unpleasant, the Germans were not the only military power to conduct war in that fashion. For example, during the Korean war the Americans did the same thing, and razed entire villages to the ground because they suspected that they were hiding or even assisting partisans. That many Jews were killed in this war against partisans does not mean that there was any intention to exterminate European Jewry. On the contrary, until the Allied saturation bombing destroyed the transportation and communication system of the Reich, concentration camps were orderly, sanitary and well-kept places where internees were treated humanely and fed and clothed adequately. Because of the bombing, however, extreme difficulties in gaining food, sanitary necessities and medical supplies allowed epidemics to wage their own war on the internees, many tens of thousands of whom died.

After the German defeat, concluded Marschalko, the concentration camps were filled with new inmates, but they were no longer Jews but some of the defeated German people, the war criminals. [60] They were forced to rebuild shower rooms and dressing rooms so that they looked like the gas chambers of Allied propaganda, to create gallows and to dig mass burial pits. Not only were photographs of the very many cadavers of internees (of all races and ethnic groups) killed by epidemics falsely presented as concrete evidence of the Nazis' efforts to exterminate Jewry, but photographs of German cadavers, killed in the Allied saturation bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and other cities and placed in enormous piles ready for cremation, were used for exactly the same purpose.

It is not possible to analyse herein all of Marschalko's arguments, suffice to say that in general they were based on secondary source material of varying reliability, and contain very

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many errors of fact and judgement. It is also clear that in several places he formed conclusions to suit his own preconceived opinions on history and marshalled his evidence accordingly. For example, when describing conditions in concentration camps in east Germany, he cited an article from a 1944 issue of Shem (the underground newspaper of Jewish nationalists in France), which appears to support his opinion that life in most camps was hard, but not excessively so. He stated that the reports in that source must be considered reliable because they were given by Jews to Jews and they were based on direct experience.[61] This trust of Jewish sources is remarkable in light of his statement two pages later that this gigantic lie-propaganda was assisted by all Jewish official organisations, all Jewish world papers like the New York Times, etc., and all Jews, whether leading statesmen or small black-marketeers in the shady side streets.[62]

Nonetheless, despite this nonsense, some of Marschalko's arguments are entirely tenable, such as his claim that Hitler did not plan, prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, to exterminate Europe's Jews. There is still, in fact, insufficient evidence for an historian to prove conclusively that Hitler himself planned or sanctioned mass exterminations after that point, although there can be no doubt that many Jews were killed. Twenty years later, David Irving — a major British historian — advanced a similar thesis, for which he provided a reasonable amount of reliable supporting evidence.[63]

Also supported by evidence is Marschalko's claim that concentration camps were not amongst the evil inventions of the Nazis, but were in fact used both before and during World War II, for a similar purpose — the concentration of people who posed a security threat into prison-like areas that could he guarded — by a variety of nations, including the United States and Britain. In the Boer War (1899-1902) almost 120.000 non-combatant Boers and approximately 75,000 black Africans wore brutally forced by the British (under Lord Kitchener) into concentration camps. Close to 20,000 Boers, mostly women and children, died in those unhygienic camps from starvation, maltreatment and epidemics (including measles, the main killer of the infants).[64] During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the North, in addition to camps for captured soldiers, established numerous concentration camps for civilian populations considered 'threats' by the Federal government.[65]

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Very many of the internees died from the diseases which spread through these camps and the barbaric Confederate POW camps, such as Andersonville (Georgia). Those camps were not, unfortunately, the only concentration camps to be constructed on American soil. When the United States entered the Second World War after Pearl Harbor in December 1941 it began to intern Japanese, German and Italian immigrants. The War Relocation Agency, created in March 1942, erected ten large internment camps in seven western states and by September of that year the army had placed in those camps over 110,000 Japanese-Americans. One must now concede that those camps, circled with barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers, were nothing less than humanely-run concentration camps, as the U.S. President of that period incautiously admitted in a slip of the tongue. [66] Hence, it is clear that these concentration camps, similar in several ways to the infamous Nazi-run camps, were not established as places where genocide would be conducted. Therefore, the fact that the Nazis forced European Jews into them, and that a great many died therein, must not be seen as proof in itself of a genocidal Nazi intent.

Another of Marschalko's arguments supported by evidence was his insistence that in the immediate post-war period Dachau was intentionally misrepresented as having been an extermination complex which utilized homicidal gas chambers. Indeed, for over twenty years almost all scholars agreed that Jews and others were gassed in that camp, and ascribed to it a fatality total (from all causes) of 238,000, a figure which Marschalko totally rejected, and for a good reason:

… a memorial plaque was unveiled, the inscription on which says 238,000 persons were cremated here. But the crematorium had only two furnaces. In order to cremate the alleged 238,000 bodies, these furnaces would have to have been kept going for three years without ever stopping, and in this case about 530 tons of human ashes would have been recovered. [67]

Actually, because of the techniques available in the 1940s, it took a minimum of almost two hours to cremate a corpse. Thus, it would have taken 9916 days, or twenty-seven years, for the two cremation ovens to dispose of 238,000 bodies. Moreover, the present writer carefully calculated this on the basis that the ovens were operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week — something no cremation oven, even today, can do. [68]

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As Fred Leuchter, an American gas chamber engineer, pointed out when he inspected the Dachau 'gas chamber' in April 1989, the Americans (and subjugated Germans) at first insisted that two or more gas chambers functioned in that camp. This claim was incautiously accepted by many historians, but within a few years they had revised their thinking and stated that there was only one. The problem was, Leuchter explained, that it would have been physically impossible for the one room still shown to tourists as having been a gas chamber to have functioned in that capacity. [69] In his informed opinion, the 'gas chamber' was constructed after the camp was liberated by the Americans on April 29, 1945, and it was, prior to then, nothing more than a harmless shower room. Additionally, it is now almost universally accepted by scholars that no homicidal gassings took place in that camp, and that the fatality total was no more than 30,000, mostly caused by the raging epidemics — including typhoid, typhus, diarrhea and dysentery — which resulted from the chaos in Germany created by the Allied saturation bombing.[70]

Marschalko's claims regarding Dachau have thus been proven to be essentially correct. Nonetheless, he made the major mistake of intimating that because the gas chamber in that camp was a post-war fabrication, all the alleged gas chambers in the many Nazi-run concentration and labour camps across Europe — including Auschwitz — must also have been fakes. As a result of that error of judgement he dismissed the possibility that those other camps had genuine homicidal gas chambers, and provided no analysis of the evidence for or against their existence. Hence, the principal physical evidence he provided against the allegation that millions of humans were gassed to death in chambers constructed for that task was the existence of a fabricated gas chamber in Dachau. This is one of the weakest points in his entire chapter on the Holocaust, and detracts from several of his other arguments particularly his insistence that the infamous phrase die Endlösung meant forced emigration, and was not, as commonly believed, a euphemism for 'extermination'. That view, forcefully argued by many Revisionists in the following decades, is only possible if it can be shown that the Nazis did not plan and attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews in gas chambers (or by a similarly effective method of mass execution), something Marschalko did not do.

As noted, although Marschalko's book was read in rightist and nationalist circles when it was first published, it did not have anything near the influence of Rassinier's far more thoughtful writings, probably because it appeared too polemical and biased against Jews, something the

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Frenchman's writings were not.

Surprisingly, considering that Revisionism had long existed in the United States as an important and ultimately influential school of historical thought (despite its inconsiderable following or acceptance in academia), American Revisionists were slower than their European counterparts to challenge received opinion on the Holocaust. Rassinier had been active in that field of study since the early 1950s, and had published several major Holocaust Revisionist works before the end of that decade (all of a scholarly nature) and Marschalko's considerably less scholarly work was published in 1958. Yet the only American works published before the mid-1960s which seriously challenged the verity of the Holocaust as it was then presented were combative and unscholarly propaganda tracts, containing no evidence upon which a sound argument could be based. Rather, these tracts, many written or published by American Nazis, contained overt attacks on Jews, who had — it was argued — invented all stories of Nazi atrocities.[71] Because many anti-Revisionists now insist that these senseless neo-Nazi works were early Revisionist publications, thereby 'proving' that Revisionism was indeed Nazi-inspired, a brief analysis of them will be undertaken.

One example of these early publications is The Diary of Ann Fink (published in 1961), a small booklet distributed by American Nazi groups, which began with the following dedication:

This booklet is dedicated to the hours of planning, the days of designing, the months of writing, and the grueling years of staging, acting and promoting, expended by the Jewish Hollywood script writers, actors and promoters, whose propaganda genius lies created for the world the colossal myth of the six million gassed Jews. To each individually staged atrocity photo, to each tear-jerking line of testimonial, to each tattoo kit, to each rubber body, stage prop, plastic tooth and catsup bottle — to International Latex and Meyer Levin — and to each Jewish costume designer, director, writer and actor- without whose combined talents the myth would have been utterly impossible we respectfully dedicate this booklet.[72]

The Holocaust was nothing more than well-orchestrated atrocity propaganda, if we are to believe the booklet. The piles of corpses shown in photographs were really carefully-photographed rubber dummies: the emaciated bodies of living camp inmates were really stage makeup and latex; the testimonies of survivors just contrived scripts. Of course, the contents of the booklet contain absolutely no evidence to support these allegations, and clearly it is not the author's in-

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tention to persuade the unconverted — just to amuse the converted. The booklet consists only of a series of photographs showing scenes from concentration camps, with a 'humorous' caption under each written by George Lincoln Rockwell, the Commander of the American Nazi Party. For example, underneath a photograph (p. 13) of a very emaciated corpse protruding from the narrow mouth of a cremation oven, next to which are standing two prisoners, the caption states: I asked for a cheap pad … but this is ridiculous. Underneath another photograph (p. 14), showing eight almost skeletal Jewish males lying on their crowded barrack bunks of bare wooden slats, and staring out with a look of despair in their eyes, is the caption: Close the door you schmuck, you're letting out the gas!

In 1965 a tract entitled The Six Myths was published and very widely distributed on the east coast of the United States. Written by Elisabeth Shepherd, this 8-page tract attempted to expose six myths: 1) the myth that white people have oppressed the colored people of the world: 2) the myth that environment can make people progressive according to the opportunities it provides; 3) the myth that nationalism is the cause of wars: 4) the myth of anti-Semitism, and that the Jews are only a religious group; 5) the myth that Jesus was a Jew and that Christianity's roots are in Judaism: and 6) the myth that six million Jews were destroyed by Nazi Germany. Shepherd, in arguing that six million Jews were not murdered by the Nazi regime, provided no evidence but merely stated (in toto):

This is the greatest myth of all time. There is no authentic record of gas chambers built for the extermination of Jews. It is reported that between 14 and 16 million Jews have entered the U.S. illegally since the beginning of World War II. Most of those 6,000,000 Jews are in this country, many of them prospering in cheap, unstable construction in New York City. And while television, owned by Jews, shows films about Nazi criminals, not one word is said about the Jews' part in the Soviet Revolution and the murder of the Christian Czar and millions of White Russians.[73]

That Shepherd's arguments contain nonsense is obvious. Firstly, her figures for how many Jews illegally entered the United States in the twenty years since World War II are inflated by over twelve million. Secondly, and more importantly, there was in 1965 ample evidence for the existence, in the Nazi concentration camps, of crematoriums for burning human bodies, including those of Jews. Also, whilst the evidence for the existence of gas chambers was not as plentiful or reliable as that for the crematoriums (or as it is today), in 1965 one could still argue with

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sufficient evidence to build a sound case — which possibly would not stand in the light of recent Revisionist research — that homicidal gas chambers existed in several Nazi concentration camps to kill Jews and others.

Shepherd's tract was distributed by the National Renaissance Party, a National Socialist group based in Beacon, New York, and headed by James H. Madole, a Hitler devotee who had himself denied, since the early-1950s, that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Europe's Jews. For example, in the May 1953 issue of National Renaissance Bulletin he had written, in an article entitled Adolf Hitler, the George Washington of Europe that the Jews were to blame for Germany's pre-war woes and for her being thrust into a totally unwanted war. Additionally,

In a final burst of savagery and hatred the Jews manipulated the legalized torture and murder of Germany's top military, political and economic leadership at the infamous Nuremberg Trials … Although the World Almanac attests to the fact that fewer than 600,000 Jews ever lived in Germany, the Jews persisted in their monstrous lie that Nazi Germany had cremated six-million of their co-racials.

No evidence was provided by Madole to support any of his abhorrent anti-Jewish allegations.

The National Renaissance Party featured prominently in a House of Representatives report on neo-fascist and -Nazi groups[74], which wrote of the party that its program and propaganda… is virtually borrowed wholesale from the Fascist and Nazi dictators[75] Whilst these anti-Nazi government reports on un-American activities should be regarded with a degree of skepticism and caution, for the same reasons that one would treat the similar 'reds-under-the-beds' reports from the McCarthy era with caution, the reliable and plentiful evidence provided in the report's appendices (pp. 20-29) allows one to conclude with certainty that the National Renaissance Party was indeed a Nazi party with pro-white and anti-Jewish sentiments.

In the same report on un-American activities is an expose of Common Sense, the semimonthly newspaper published in Union, New Jersey from June 1947 (until April 1972) by Conde McGinley, Sr. and his son of the same name. It was in the May 1, 1959 issue of this anti-Communist newspaper that Benjamin Freedman's article Christians Duped by Unholiest Hoax in All History! Big Lie Technique Pushing U.S.A. to the Brink of World War III appeared. In

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this article Freedman, a Jewish convert to Christianity and in that period one of the most outspoken critics of Zionism and Judaism, attempted to expose three major hoaxes: 1) the Jews are God's 'Chosen People'; 2) Jesus was a Jew; and 3) six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime. However, Freedman provided nothing in the form of evidence to buttress his tendentious claims, particularly those regarding the non-existence of the alleged genocide. Whilst Common Sense was not a neo-Nazi newspaper, despite the conclusion to the contrary of the House of Representatives report, it did frequently publish articles of an anti-Judaic and anti-Zionistic (and even some of an anti-Jewish) nature.

Thus, despite the works mentioned only being a small percentage of those published, it is clear that Holocaust denial — the outright denial of almost all anti-Jewish atrocities by the Nazis, regardless of the weight of contradictory evidence — was the modus operandi of the authors. Some of these authors were neo-Nazis with the same hatred for Jews as many of the original Nazis. These worthless publications, however (and this is an important point), are entirely different in purpose, nature and style from the Holocaust Revisionist works of following years, which at least attempt to analyse rigorously and systematically all evidence for and against accepted opinion on the Holocaust. The latter works are revision on the basis of evidence, not denial on the basis of ideology.

In 1967 Holocaust Revisionism in the United States took a small step forward with the publication of The Myth of the Six Million [76] by an American history professor who chose to remain anonymous for fear of losing his teaching position. According to Willis Carto[77], who wrote the introduction to this work using the pseudonym E.L. Anderson, the 119-page book's author was Professor David L. Hoggan (1923-1988). Hoggan was the author of Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War)[78], the 1961 Revisionist classic on the origins of the Second World War which has to date undergone thirteen reprints. He gained his Ph.D in history from Harvard University in 1948, held several important academic teaching positions and wrote numerous success-

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ful historical works, most of them in German. Whilst he was politically conservative, there can be no suggestion that Hoggan was a Nazi, fascist or political extremist.

In The Myth of the Six Million Hoggan relied heavily on the writings of Rassinier and, aside from a rather detailed analysis of the position of Jews in Nazi Germany up to and during the Second World War, the book contains little that is original. As such, even a brief critique of it would be unnecessary, suffice to say that other Holocaust Revisionists have generally avoided quoting from it or citing it, whereas they frequently quote from or cite the works of Rassinier, several of which predate it by a decade. Further, whilst The Myth was reprinted in 1974, it has not been distributed for several years now by Noontide Press or, to the present writer's knowledge, any other publishers or book distributors.

In late 1973 a small, 38-page booklet entitled The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses, by Professor Austin J. App, was published and very widely distributed by Boniface Press, the author's own publishing company. App (1902-1984) gained in 1929 his Ph.D in English literature from Catholic university, Washington, D.C., before commencing an outstanding academic career in which he published more than one thousand articles, columns and reviews as well as several books which received critical acclaim. Born the son of German immigrants, throughout his life he felt a sense of love for the mother country, and was particularly upset by what he believed was a flood of anti-German propaganda following both world wars. His first Revisionist (but not Holocaust Revisionist) booklet was published in 1946, followed by very many more in the following decades. Additionally, he served from 1960 to 1966 as National Chairman of the much respected Federation of American Citizens of German Descent, after which he was honoured by being made the federation's permanent National Honorary Chairman.

His booklet The Six Million Swindle was the first work arguing against accepted opinion on the Holocaust to be published in the United States in the name of its author, who clearly was not afraid of being labeled an anti-Semite or racist. The booklet's basic theses are that the Nazis did not murder even one million Jews, let alone the accepted number of six million, and that the allegation they did is nothing more than anti-German atrocity propaganda exploited by Talmudic

Jews to gain indemnities and support for Israel. For example, App stated on page three:

The Talmudists have from the beginning used the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany into atoning with the twenty billion dollars of indemnities to a bastard state that had not even existed during the era of the Third Reich. But not only has Israel blackmailed West Germany into subsidizing it, Israel and World Jewry have also blackmailed it with the figure of six million into paying pensions and indemnities to every Jew who survived Nazi-occupied Europe and millions who

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after the war sneaked into West Germany from behind the Iron Curtain and then [p. 4] claimed to have suffered under the Nazis. Claiming such indemnities has probably produced the greatest heyday in history for Jews to commit perjury for one another, and for fraud and lying and cheating on a horrendous scale… One can assume that every one of the 500,000 Jews in Israel who claim to have been in German concentration camps is bleeding Germany for indemnities.

As evidence of this Jewish exploitation of their alleged suffering, App quoted reliable newspaper reports of several cases where Jews had acted dishonestly to obtain indemnities from West Germany. However, whilst there have been numerous unrelated cases of Jewish reparation fraud, to state that these frauds have occurred on a horrendous scale and as the result of a Jewish conspiracy to defraud the German government, is preposterous and totally unsupportable.

App's booklet was written in an emotive and journalistic style, and certainly could not be considered dispassionate scholarship, despite the author's academic background. His own biases and prejudices are visible on almost every page, and these and his unguarded language in several places greatly diminish the force of his arguments. For example, after insisting that the Nazis did not rape thousands of Jewish women before murdering them, as has been claimed, App stated that the allegation is such a shamefaced lie that anyone pronouncing it ought to choke on a wish-bone and die like a rat!.[79] In another place he stated that Jews who spread such vindictive lies [about the extermination of Jews] ought to strangle themselves in their own guts — and save the world their venom!.[80] Additionally, the evidence provided by App to support his arguments against accepted opinion on the Holocaust is weak and almost entirely of a secondary nature, being mainly quotes from various newspapers. It is quite inappropriate for the defence of such bold claims about recent historical events.

The most accurate and judicious way of summarizing his principal arguments is to quote his own succinct summary in toto:

First, the Third Reich wanted to get Jews to emigrate, not to liquidate them physically. Had they intended extermination, 500,000 concentration camp survivors would not now be in Israel to collect fancy indemnities from West Germany. Second, absolutely no Jews were gassed in any concentration camps in Germany, and evidence is piling up that none were gassed in Auschwitz. There were crematoria for cremating corpses who had died from whatever cause, including especially also the victims of the genocide Anglo-American air raids. Third, the majority of Jews who died in pogroms and those who disappeared and are

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still unaccounted for fell afoul in territories controlled by the Soviet Russians, not in territories while under German control.

Fourth, most of the Jews alleged to have met their death at the hands of Germans were subversives, partisans, spies, and criminals, and also often victims of unfortunate but internationally legal reprisals. One reason for my denouncing the Nuremberg prosecutors as lynchers is that they hanged Germans on ex post facto rules of their own!

Fifth, if there were the slightest likelihood that the Nazis had in fact executed six million Jews, World Jewry would scream for subsidies with which to do research on the question, and Israel would throw its archives and files open to historians. They have not done so. On the contrary they have persecuted anyone who tries to investigate impartially and even call him an anti-Semite. This is really devastating evidence that the figure is a swindle.

Sixth, the Jews and the media who exploit this figure have never offered a shred of valid evidence for its truth. At most they misquote Hoettl, Hoess, and Eichmann who spoke only occasionally of what they were in no position to know or to speak on reliably. Nor do the Jews themselves credit these witnesses as reliable even when they comment on what they could know, e.g., that the concentration camps were essentially work camps, not death camps!

Seventh, the burden of proof for the six million figure rests on the accusers, not the accused. This is the principle of all civilized law. Proving true guilt is easier than proving true innocence. It is hardly possible for a man accused of cheating on his wife to prove that he did not cheat on her. Therefore the accuser must prove his charge. This responsibility the Talmudists and Bolsheviks have not accepted, and the brow-beaten Germans have rather paid billions than to dare to demand proof!

Eighth, obvious evidence that the figure of six million has no scientific foundation is that Jewish scholars themselves present ridiculous discrepancies in their calculations. And honest ones, whom we recognize by the fact that their co-racialists smear-terrorize them, and even beat them up, invariably lower the six million estimate by at least fifty per cent, to three million casualties from all causes, not those limited to Nazi executions.

Clearly, many of these arguments are totally unsustainable; the most irrational being the claim that the majority of Jews murdered were partisans, spies, subversives or criminals. Regardless of whether one believes in the wartime existence of gas chambers, one is forced by the overwhelming weight of evidence to recognize that the National Socialist government planned and implemented the brutal policy of deporting Jews from all over occupied Europe to labour camps and ghettoes in the east and that a very large number, including women, children and the elderly, died in the process. Additionally, as the Einsatzgruppen moved into Soviet territory behind the advancing front line troops, they killed — in their efforts to establish a rough and ready form of order and security — thousands of men, women and children, a sizeable percentage of whom were innocent Jews. The evidence for this is, again, both plentiful and reliable.

Whilst it is true that many Jewish organizations and individuals have attacked those who have attempted to revise received opinion on the Holocaust, this is not really devastating evidence that they are trying to prevent those persons from uncovering a great and well-guarded secret — that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis. The often-vicious and violent response of these Jewish groups to Revisionists (further evidence of which will be given below), whilst totally inappropriate and injurious to their case, is at least understandable. A very large majority of Jews sincerely believe accepted opinion on the Holocaust and have seen no reason to doubt it. That six million of their people were murdered by the Nazis because of anti-Semitism appears to be an indisputable fact, having been documented very well by historians and survivors. Hence, those who deny or wish to revise the magnitude of this crime against their relatives, for whatever reasons, tire seen by Jews to be insisting that they have invented a monstrous lie from which to gain benefit. Not only do they feel distressed and outraged that enormous crimes against their deceased relatives are being denied, but they also believe that the charge leveled against them by Revisionists is essentially the same as the big lie accusation leveled at them by Adolf Hitler (and repeated to the present day by many opponents of the Jews) in Volume I, Chapter X of his autobiographical, historical and philosophical treatise, Mein Kampf.

.. in the big lie, [in der Größe der Lüge] there is invariably a certain factor of credibility; because it is always more easy to corrupt the great masses of a people in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or intentionally, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they fall victim more readily to the big lie than the small lie… It would never enter their heads to fabricate such untruths, and they would believe it impossible that others could have the great cheek [Frechheit] to twist the truth so infamously… From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can he exploited… But one of the greatest minds that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for ever with a statement which is a fundamental truth. He [Schopenhauer] called the Jew The Great Master of Lies' [die großen Meister der Lüge.]. Those who do not recognise the truth of that, or will not believe it, will never he capable of helping Truth to triumph in the world.[81]

Indeed, several Holocaust denial tracts — -as opposed to Revisionist works--of the 1950s and 1960s did quote from or cite Mein Kampf in order to argue that the Holocaust was the Jews' big lie, as can be seen in the titles of two already-mentioned discourses: The Big Lie: Who Told It? and Christians Duped by unholiest Hoax in All History! Big Lie Technique Pushing U.S.A. to the Brink of World War III. Curiously, several Jewish groups, realizing this, have turned the tables on Holocaust Revisionists by accusing them of using the propaganda technique of the big lie.[82]

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A reading of App's booklet makes two things apparent: 1) he clearly desired historical truth and an end to anti-German atrocity propaganda; and 2) he very much disliked the majority of Jews, and this frequently rendered him incapable of forming sound and impartial judgements on what constituted historical truths. Although he did laud the efforts of two or three honourable Jews who had challenged Holocaust orthodoxy, throughout the booklet he described Jews in extremely disparaging terms. On page five, whilst explaining why Bolsheviks Support [the] Six Million Swindle he casually noted that most of the most vindictive Communists are also Jews. Whilst it is true that a large number of Jews were amongst those who inspired and undertook the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and that very many rose to high positions in the Soviet Union in the decades after, to state that the Jewish Bolsheviks were the most vindictive of all Bolsheviks, without providing evidence, is indicative of a prejudicial and malevolent attitude towards Jews.

This prejudice manifests itself again on page ten where he declared, in an explanation of the situation of European Jews immediately after the war, When I visited Germany and Austria in 1949 I found them deluged with uncouth-looking Eastern Jews. They were arrogant to all Germans, they all seemed to engage in blackmarketing, and the German police seemed forbidden to touch them. They lied, cheated, and stole from Germans almost at will. Here it would appear that App was accusing Jews of an inherent dishonesty, an accusation he repeated two pages later, when he insisted This [the allegation that the Nazis wanted to murder all Jews] is the kind of monstrous, barefaced lying of which only Communists and Jews are capable! Vindictive Jews seem intent on proving Christ right when he denounced Jews in language far harsher than Hitler ever applied to them, You are of your father the devil … for he is a liar, and the father thereof (St. John, Ch. 8, V. 44). Nonetheless, lying and cheating are not the only Jewish vices, if we are to believe App: They now control the media and the money — and sex education and pornography… In short, they subvert our international standards and our Christian culture. (p. 13) Echoing this theme, he also published in the same year a small tract entitled Can Christianity Survive When the Jews Control the Media and The Money?

App's obvious biases do not, however, allow us to automatically discount his more rational theses on the Holocaust without at least submitting them to scholarly criticism. One could argue that doing so would be an act of academic prejudice, no better than App's religious/racial one.

App repeated his arguments against accepted opinion on the Holocaust in many other articles, booklets and books in the years before his death in 1984[83]. Additionally, from 1979 until

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his death he served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review, published quarterly by the Institute for Historical Review. In fact, his last major public speech in the United States was presented at the first International Revisionist Conference, sponsored by this institute. That he became an editorial advisor for its journal is surprising in the light of the fact that almost all of App's Revisionist writings have been of a journalistic — as opposed to scholarly — nature, containing mainly specious arguments based on secondary source of varying reliability. Whatever expertise he had in his own academic field, he was no historian.

Christophersen, Stäglich and German Revisionism

The publication of App's The Six Million Swindle was part of a totally uncoordinated global challenge of accepted opinion of the Holocaust, which occurred in the years 1973 to 1975. In March 1973 West Germany was shocked by the publication and wide distribution of Die Auschwitz Lüge: Ein Erlebnisbericht[84] ('The Auschwitz Lie: An Eyewitness Report'), a short book by Thies Christophersen. The author, a Wehrmacht officer, had been wounded in combat on the Western Front early in the war and was thereafter unfit for active military service. Rather than sit out the rest of the war without contributing to the national effort, he asked to attend a specialized agricultural school and did so in 1942 and early 1943. In the spring of that year he successfully applied to go to the Ukraine to raise india-rubber plants, but after the Ukraine was lost a few months later he was transferred to a branch of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut at Raisko, part of the Auschwitz complex. He arrived there, with the rank of Second Lieutenant, on January 15, 1944. According to his statements in Die Auschwitz Lüge, he stayed in Raisko near Auschwitz until December 1944, working with several hundred mainly Polish internees on a project to grow Taraxacum kok sagis, a type of dandelion — the latex in the roots of which contain india rubber.

The main line of argument in Christophersen's simply written book, which was translated into English by Ernst Zündel less than a year after its German publication, and later into Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese, is that he never saw any evidence of exterminations at Auschwitz during the eleven months he was there, despite this being the very period in which exterminations were allegedly being carried out at an appalling rate. He therefore concluded that the alleged exterminations had not occurred.

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He did not deny that many deceased internees were cremated, but argued that most were people who had unfortunately died of 'natural causes', including typhus, which claimed the lives not only of internees but also German personnel. These included, for example, the wife of his supervisor. Dr. Joachim Caesar.[85]

In his book Christophersen explained that Raisko was two kilometers from Birkenau — said to be the location of the gas chambers — and that he had visited Birkenau perhaps as many as twenty times during 1944 to select his workers or obtain materials. He thus became very familiar with the physical layout of the buildings and the treatment of internees therein. He also told of his complete shock and surprise at reading after the war of the allegations that four million Jews and others were murdered there in gas chambers or by bullets and their cadavers disposed of in crematories built for that purpose or on massive wooden pyres, which continuously belched flames, smoke and the foul stench of burning flesh. One must concede that Christophersen's argument against these claims contains a degree of logic: if these huge gas chambers, other murder machinery and burning piles of corpses existed in Auschwitz throughout the entire period he was there, he would certainly have seen them, smelt them and heard about them. Therefore, the fact that he did not see them, smell them or hear anything about them — and they could not possibly have been disguised — allowed him to conclude that they did not exist.

Unlike App, Christophersen did not attempt to place blame on the Jewish people for inventing what he believed was propaganda. Indeed, he commented warmly of the Jews under his supervision in Auschwitz, and made no statements that could be considered indicative of an anti-Jewish prejudice. However, in a brief discussion of Jewish losses in the Second World War, he mistakenly reasoned that they could not have been greater than 200,000. This figure he attributed vaguely to the United Nations. He also relied on secondary sources such as the World Almanac. the American Jewish Committee and the New York Times, without corroborating these sources with other evidence or submitting them to closer scrutiny.[86]

Regardless of these flaws, his main argument gains support from an analysis of aerial photographs of the entire Auschwitz complex, including the massive I.G. Farben synthetic petrol facility which was nearby, taken on random occasions throughout the spring and autumn of 1944 by USAAF reconnaissance aircraft. These very detailed photographs, made clearer by advanced

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computer-enhancement techniques, were first made public in February 1979 by two officers of the central Intelligence Agency, who had obtained them from the archives of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[87] In none of the photographs, from various months in 1944, can be seen any evidence of extermination. Despite the statements of many former Auschwitz internees that smoke and flame emanated continually from the crematory chimneys, and was visible for miles around, not one of the detailed photographs show any smoke or flames. Additionally, and more importantly, one cannot find in any of the photographs even one of the piles of corpses, large pyres, burial pits, or flaming fires that were often alleged to have been present in the camp, even though the photographs were sufficiently clear for one to see such details as vehicles, open gates and columns of internees queuing for registration.

Christophersen's arguments gain support from another important West German Revisionist article on the Holocaust: a short eyewitness account of wartime Auschwitz published in the October 1973 issue of the nationalistic West German journal, Nation Europa.[88] The author was a Hamburg judge, Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, who had served during the war as the Ordonnanzoffizier on the staff of the 12th Paratroop Anti-aircraft Detachment. This unit was stationed in Osiek, just outside Auschwitz, from July to September 1944. As the Ordonnanzoffizier, it was Stäglich's duty to liaise with the SS camp command, situated in the Stammlager (Main Camp), or Auschwitz I. In this capacity he entered Auschwitz I three or four times, once being as part of a camp inspection invited by the camp command. He did not, however, enter Birkenau. In his short published account of his experiences, which is consistent with Christophersen's, he recalled:

On none of these visits did I see gassing installations, crematoria, instruments of torture, or similar horrors. The camp gave one the impression of being well-kept and very well-organized. … On none of my visits did I find that inmates — at least the ones present in the camp, for example, inmates employed in the various workshops or on clean-up details — were badly, much less inhumanely, treated. … Finally, I can report that the German residents of Osiek were unaware of mass exterminations or other atrocities in the camp. At any rate they never spoke to me of such things.[89]

Stäglich saw no gas chambers, flaming crematories, pyres, burial pits or piles of decaying

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corpses. The camp was, he insisted, well-kept and very well-organized, and to the best of his knowledge no internees were murdered, tortured or barbarously treated. Further, most did not appear malnourished or unhealthy, and, in fact, worked productively in factories, workshops or on clean-up details.

Stäglich's testimony is weakened because he never visited Birkenau, where — according to accepted opinion on the Holocaust — two gassing bunkers and four large gas chambers functioned, and it was the victims' bodies from those facilities that were incinerated in crematories and on pyres, or buried in huge burial pits. It was there, and not in the Auschwitz Stammlager two kilometers away, that he would have seen evidence, if it existed, of the mass extermination in gas chambers of Jews and others. Accepted opinion is that only one homicidal gas chamber — in the old crematory building — functioned at the Stammlager and that ceased operating in the middle of 1943 (a full year before Stäglich arrived), when it was partially dismantled and converted into an air raid shelter. Former internees have described conditions in that camp as being deplorable and inhumane, and their treatment as hostile and cruel, but — if accepted opinion is correct — in the middle of 1944 Stäglich would have seen evidence of mass exterminations only if he had visited Birkenau. Thus, his recollection of the Auschwitz Stammlager provides some evidence that it was contrary to popular belief, relatively productively and humanely run, and in this respect his account agrees with Christophersen's, but it provides absolutely no evidence that the alleged exterminations in Birkenau did not occur.

It has been argued that the accounts of Christophersen and Stäglich are worthless as historical evidence because no-one else but Nazis would try to present the 'death camps' in a positive light; their aim must be to rehabilitate and absolve the guilt of the Third Reich.[90] However, if one accepts this line of argument and disregards their accounts, one must also disregard the testimony of all former internees, Jewish or otherwise, as they might have reasons for wishing to exaggerate their sufferings or the crimes of their former captors. Rather, the evidence of all eyewitnesses, from either side of the barbed wire or electric fences, should be examined by historians and objected to identical, impartial criticism before its credibility or reliability can be established.

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Unfortunately for the two Germans, the authorities in the western half of their divided nation chose not to treat their accounts dispassionately or tolerantly, and they soon found themselves the victims of what must he considered persecution and — in Stäglich's case — prosecution. The publication of Die Auschwitz Lüge horrified and outraged Jews in Germany, Austria and Israel, with newspapers in those and several other countries attacking the book as anti-Semitic or Nazi. In Germany, the July 13, 1973 issue of the influential Jewish weekly paper, Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, published a front page article on it, which carried the bold headline, Lügner am Werk (Liars at work), a reference to Christophersen and the booklet's publisher, attorney Manfred Röder, who had also written its introduction. The newspaper insisted that it was the worst example of anti-Jewish propaganda since the demise of the Third Reich, and one that would have made Hitler and Goebbels proud. The statements considered most objectionable were not in Christophersen's memoir — but in Röder's introduction:

The government of the German Reich was illegally removed from office. German officers, who had done nothing but their duty, and whose characters were far superior to those of the Allies passing judgement on them, were sadistically strangled, whilst no single soldier or partisan of the enemy was brought to court for war crimes. German jurisdiction and search for truth was made impossible. Only the victors were to sit in judgement and to write history … There is not one authentic document in existence which places the overall losses of the Jewish population during the last war higher than 200,000. During one single night, in Dresden, more defenseless, innocent Germans perished — children, women, old people and especially wounded men — than Jews have died in all the concentration camps in the years of the National Socialist regime!

In a letter of May 10, 1973, Simon Wiesenthal attempted to press the Präsidenten der Rechtsanwaltkammer into having Röder, a successful attorney, investigated by the ethics committee of that bar association, in the hope tint he would he disbarred. After some initial reluctance, they did disbar him and, on February 20, 1976 he was convicted in a Darmstadt court of insulting the Jewish people. He was sentenced to seven months imprisonment, three years probation and a fine of three thousand Deutschmarks.[91] The judge, explaining why he, and not Christophersen, was charged with the crime explained that We have freedom of speech, and anybody can write as he pleases, but your interpretation of Christophersen's report sounds anti-Semitic, and for this criminal attitude you are punished.[92] Nonetheless, his statement that Röder was being punished for a criminal attitude — as opposed to a criminal act — arguably suggests that West Germany did not have the claimed regard for freedom of expression. After protests by the Vienna-based Comité international des Camps, Austrian authorities totally prohibited distribution of Die Auschwitz Lügein that country, and confiscated all unsold copies. Insisting that the book should not be given added publicity, the West German Minister of the Interior (Maihofer) chose not to take similar action.[93]

After publishing his short article on Auschwitz, Stäglich suffered extreme persecution, and was even forced to resign from his position as a Hamburg judge after disciplinary proceedings were commenced against him. However, his resignation did not satisfy his many opponents, who sought to have his pension stripped as well. In this they were partly successful; the judicial authorities, intent on punishing him for publicly expressing doubts about the Holocaust, reduced his pension by twenty percent for a period of five years.[94] Although this action caused the Stäglich family some financial difficulties, it did not cause the now retired judge to stop writing on the Holocaust. On the contrary, it motivated him to explore the subject in more depth, and allowed him the time to do it. The result was the publication in 1979 of Der Auschwitz Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit? (The Auschwitz Myth: Legend or Reality)[95], a lengthy, detailed and generally well-written analysis of accepted opinion on Auschwitz/Birkenau. Because of the depth and seriousness of its arguments, this 457-page book was immediately recognized by Revisionists as a 'masterpiece'. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that this book and Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century now form the two testaments in the Holocaust Revisionist 'bible'. However, Stäglich's book, although focusing narrowly on Auschwitz, contains many of the same arguments as Butz's. Therefore, because the restrictions of this thesis prevent a detailed analysis of both books, we will only be investigating Butz's, which is wider-ranging.

Sadly for the former judge, West German authorities did not share the Revisionist enthusiasm for his book, and within three months of publication it was included on the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Scriften's index of censored books[96] This resulted in a severe limitation [aaargh: in the ?] distribution of the book, prohibition of any advertising of it, and its exclusion from sale on the open book market.

Things became worse for Dr. Stäglich on July 23, 1979 when the prosecution attorney's office in Stuttgart initiated criminal proceedings against him and his publisher, under sections 86 (distribution of propaganda material) and 130 (incitement of the populace) of the Criminal Code. Perhaps finally realizing that these charges were unsustainable, the public prosecutor dropped the charges eight months later. Nonetheless, the prosecutor's office was directed instead to commence proceedings in order to seize all copies of the book, and on July 31, 1980 the Stuttgart Landgericht (district court) ordered the sequester of the dangerous book and the seizure of the printing plates used for its production. This decision was upheld on January 26, 1983 by the Bundesgerichtshof, the Federal Supreme Court.[97]

On November 15, 1982, Stäglich suffered another bitter humiliation when the University of Göttingen initiated academic proceedings against him with the intention of depriving him of his Dr. Jur. (Doctor of Jurisprudence) degree, which it had awarded him in 1951. On March 29, 1983 the degree was officially withdrawn by virtue of a resolution of the Council of Deans, who felt that Stäglich was a Nazi-apologist who must he discredited. Academic persecution of this type had not occurred in a German university since the days of the Nazi regime, and, ironically (and perversely), the law used by the university to strip the former judge of his doctorate was a previously forgotten Nazi law — dated June 7, 1939 and personally signed by Adolf Hitler — designed for use against titled German émigrés who criticized the Reich from abroad.[98]

Stäglich was not the only West German in this period to suffer at the hands of those opposed to Revisionism. In October 1978, Dr. Helmut Diwald, the distinguished professor of history at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, caused an academic and public furor when he published Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans)[99], a general history of the German people from the tenth century to the present day. In his chapter on the Third Reich and the Final Solution he made several comments regarding the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people which were very much in harmony with the theses of Holocaust Revisionists. He wrote, inter alia:

Since the capitulation in 1945, Auschwitz has also served as the main vehicle to reduce the German people to complete moral degradation … Countless works have been written and claims made since 1945 which cannot be proven and which cynically add to the infamy. The most horrible events of modern times have been exploited through the use of distortions, deceptions and exaggerations … Thus, the victorious Allies claimed the existence of 'extermination camps' of which there was not a single one in Germany. For years visitors to the Dachau concentration camp were shown 'gas chambers' where as many as 25,000 Jews were allegedly killed daily by the SS. Actually the rooms displayed were dummy chambers which the U.S. military had forced imprisoned SS men to build after the capitulation … The deportation of the Jews took place as part of a general forced-labour programme for the war industry … During the war Jewish immigration was no longer possible and the expression total solution [Gesamtlösung] or final solution [Endlösung] was coined to refer [not to extermination, but] to the policy whereby all Jews were to be segregated from the German population, removed from central Europe, evacuated to the East, and relocated in new ghettos. This plan was outlined by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office on 24 June 1940. The central questions about what actually happened [to the Jews] in the subsequent years [was sich in den folgenden Jahren tatsächlich abgespielt hat] still remain unclear despite all of the literature.[100]

When copies of Diwald's book reached the bookstores an avalanche of opposition and hostility immediately thundered down upon the academic, threatening to engulf and suffocate him. Golo Mann, the eminent historian, exclaimed that these two pages… are the most monstrous that I have had to read in a German book since 1945.[101] His reaction, the evidence reveals, was typical of those of scores of academics and media pundits. Axel Springer, a very influential West German press baron, even dismissed the head of his publishing company, Propyläen, which had produced Diwald's horrendous book. Further, he ordered the pulping of the entire stock of unsold copies of the book (several thousand in all) and the publication of a new edition, in which all offending passages would be removed. The second edition would be — he stated before its release — rewritten to the point where it would he unrecognizable.[102] Diwald, aware that his book could face a total ban and that he himself could be prosecuted for his 'crime' or dismissed from his chair at the university, dutifully agreed to Springer's demands and rewrote the offending pages. The role of academic martyr was one that he did not wish to play.[103]

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Although we have focused our analysis of German Holocaust Revisionism on the works of Christophersen, Stäglich and Diwald, one point needs to be made before our focus moves to the more noteworthy Revisionist works in English: these German works were the most important and influential Holocaust Revisionist publications in Germany up until the late 1970s (hence the lengthy discussions of them), but they were by no means the only such publications. Very briefly we will look at one or two others.

In the late 1960s Dr. Franz J. Scheidl, an academic with three Ph.Ds (in Law, Philosophy and Political Science) self-published in Vienna a series of five volumes entitled Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands (History of Germany's Defamation). In several of these volumes the author attempted to prove that the Holocaust was exaggerated and that the Jews themselves were responsible for much of their wartime suffering. Perhaps because of their limited publication runs, these volumes have had very little influence in shaping historical opinion, Revisionist or orthodox, and do not appear in the bibliographies of any Revisionist works published after the late 1970s.

In the early-1970s Emil Aretz published a small and tendentious book entitled Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge (The Witches' Multiplication Table is a Lie), which underwent three printings. The most widely circulated edition was the third, published in 1973.[104] Although Aretz provided a slight amount of fresh evidence, his book appears to have been heavily based on the writings of Paul Rassinier, and failed to take the debate further.

Pamphlets and small booklets, similar in many ways to the shoddy American pamphlets mentioned above, also began circulating in Germany at this time.[105] Many of them can be traced to Heinz Roth, a German nationalist. Roth argued soberly that Germany was not solely responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, that not only Germany committed war crimes of

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enormous proportions, and that the Allied nations had no right to continue occupying a vanquished and divided Germany so long after the war. Yet his arguments against the verity of Holocaust orthodoxy, which were partly based on unreliable and often incorrect secondary sources, were much less convincing. Aside from Stäglich, who also frequently cited Scheidl, few Revisionist historians in the last fifteen or so years have cited or quoted Roth's booklets.

Mention should also be made of Udo Walendy, a graduate of the Institute for Advanced Political Studies in Berlin and a prolific and talented writer with a long history of involvement in right-wing, nationalistic organizations. For example, Walendy became an active member of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) after its founding in November 1964, and within a year had gained a position on the party's executive committee. Considered to be an intellectual and the rising star of NPD, he was often lauded in the party's newspaper, Deutsche Nachrichten.[106]

Between 1964 and the time of writing (February 1993), Walendy had penned over two dozen books or booklets, almost exclusively on aspects of the Second World War and the Holocaust. However, for the purposes of the present discussion only his major works up to the mid-1970s will be discussed, with an analysis of several of his later works being included in a germane section below. In 1964 he published his first book, Wahrheit für Deutschland — Die Schuldfrage des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Truth for Germany — The Guilt Question of the Second World War)[107], which was very well received and even ordered by the West German Foreign Office as a reference work for its embassies around the world. In 1966 and 1967 his two volume Europa in Flammen, 1939-1945 (Europe in Flames, 1939-1945)[108] was published, in which over 150 pages were devoted to the treatment of Jews during the Nazi regime. His arguments contained therein, although tenable and well argued, largely replicated those of his Revisionist precursors, notably Paul Rassinier and David Hoggan.

In 1973 he published Bild-Dokumentefür die Geschichtsschreibung?[109], later printed in English with the title: Forged War Crimes Malign the German Nation. Whereas many of Walendy's books are plausible if unremarkable, this 80-page book is amongst the more convincing Revisionist works of the period, in that parts of it seem quite irrefutable. The book's thesis is that many of the published Holocaust atrocity photographs, many allegedly taken by the Allies when they overran Nazi concentration camps, are complete forgeries or genuine photographs that have been altered or retouched to appear incriminating.

To support that thesis, Walendy presented a lengthy series of the more famous examples of photographic proof of the Holocaust, stated what publications the photos were published in, and then enlarged sections of them to reveal what he claimed was evidence of forgery. In some of the photos the forgery seems obvious; in a very clear magnification, for instance, of a photograph of a corpse lying amongst others on an open railroad wagon, one can clearly see that the careless forger had apparently drawn only three fingers on the corpse's right hand.[110]

In another photograph, allegedly taken in Mauthausen on liberation day, three rows of emaciated men are standing in front of a wooden fence and directly behind a large pile of equally emaciated cadavers, which obscures their feet and much of the foreground. This horrific photograph was presented by the prosecution as evidence at the International Military Tribunal, and has also been reproduced in several books on the Holocaust.[111] However, Walendy placed beside it a different version of the same photograph — only in this one the fence is not present, nor (more importantly) is the pile of corpses. Indeed, because the legs and feet of the standing men are shown in the second photograph (proving it is the original), there is no alternative but to conclude that the first photograph was faked, a photo-montage. A photograph of corpses was superimposed onto the photograph of the standing men.

Walendy published a famous photograph, reproduced in numerous books, of many corpses being burnt at Birkenau in the open air. It was allegedly taken from the door of the gas chamber in Krema IV by an internee named David Szmulewski. Walendy argued that this photo was falsified in a similar way.[112] A magnification of the cadavers does indeed reveal that at least some

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of them appear to have been drawn, and not even very accurately. The anatomical irregularities — which could not be actual physical deformities — of one 'corpse' are so physically impossible that the figure scarcely looks human.

Nonetheless, in many other photographs in Walendy's book the present writer was unable to see signs of alteration or falsification, despite the author's detailed and specific commentary, which actually contains in places several specious arguments. The only evidence Walendy offered, for example, that some photographs had been falsified or retouched were the slight anatomical oddities of some of the figures contained therein. If a person in a photograph had legs or arms too long for his body, Walendy would conclude that the person must have been drawn in. This disregards the obvious fact that many people do have unusually long or short legs or arms.

In all, Walendy analysed fifty-one different photographs (a small percentage of those published in books on the Holocaust), and in many cases other than those already mentioned one is forced by the weight of evidence to conclude that they had been altered or falsified. Walendy cautiously chose not to state whom he thought the forgers were, or even why in his opinion they had altered or falsified the photographs. Hence, despite several weaknesses, there is nothing in the book that could be identified as neo-Nazi, racist or anti-Semitic. Indeed, this provocative book is useful for historians in that it raises valid questions about the nature of photographic evidence, and casts some doubt on the usefulness of photographs as 'proof for various claims.

It has thus been shown that up until the mid-1970s, Holocaust Revisionism was predominantly a European phenomenon which had its genesis in the French writings of Rassinier, who remained its most prominent figure until his death in 1967. In the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, several German Revisionists strode to the forefront — notably Christophersen, Stäglich and Walendy — bringing their theses to the attention of the German-speaking public, which reacted with the same outrage as had the French public to Rassinier's books. Nonetheless, until 1974 the

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only Holocaust Revisionists publications in English were those already mentioned — by Marschalko, Hoggan and App — plus a few pages here and there in books on international politics and economics by politically conservative authors[113], and an unusual booklet written by an Australian Nazi, which was essentially a poor reworking of Rassinier's early writings.[114] Holocaust Revisionism made virtually no impact in the English-speaking world.

Harwood and Butz

This state of affairs changed dramatically in early 1974 with the publication and wide distribution of Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last [115], a 28 page, magazine-format booklet written by an Englishman under the name of Richard Harwood. According to a slender biographical note on the last page, the author was:

a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University of London. Mr. Harwood turned to the vexed subject of war crimes under the influence of Professor Paul Rassinier, to whose monumental work this little volume is greatly indebted. The author is now working on a sequel in this series on the main Nuremberg Trial. 1945-1946.

Indeed, the influence of Rassinier on this specialist is apparent; this thin Revisionist booklet is essentially a condensation of the Frenchman's main writings (almost to the point of plagiarism), combined with some commentary on Christophersen's experiences at Auschwitz and on Walendy's work on photographic fraud. Because almost, nothing within the book is original, a discussion of the contents would he superfluous, suffice to say that Harwood had combined the weightiest arguments of the above-named Revisionists to form a well-written but journalistic introduction to the (early-1970s) Revisionist position on the Holocaust, touching on most important topics and lines of argument.

In November 1974 British public reaction to Did Six Million Really Die? changed in a flash from smouldering displeasure into a blistering inferno of anger and opposition: the 'accelerant'

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being an article by Colin Wilson, a popular British author and well known personality, in that month's issue of Books and Bookmen. After reviewing two books on Adolf Hitler, Wilson, unaware of the reaction it would cause, provided a brief critique of Harwood's booklet, which he described in quite laudatory terms.[116]

Wilson wrote that whilst he expected a piece of violent antisemitic propaganda the booklet actually contained no overtly anti-Semitic or racist statements. Rather, it was written in a reasonable and logical tone. He also stated that he considered it correct of Harwood to demand evidence for the horrific events that allegedly occurred (Is there, then, any reason why we should be afraid to dig down until we get to the truth?) and to submit all such evidence to a systematic and impartial investigation. Whilst he did not deny that many Jewish people perished, Wilson then intimated that the Nazis may not have murdered six million Jews, and asked whether perhaps the claim that they did is another sign of the emotional historical distortions that makes nearly all the books on Hitler so far almost worthless?[117]

The reaction to Wilson 's review of Harwood's booklet was phenomenal. The editors of Books and Bookmen were deluged with letters from outraged readers and were still publishing them six months later. Undiluted vitriol flowed from the pens of almost all of these letter writers.

For example, in the April 1975 issue appeared a letter by Dr. R. Wistrich which began:

I was appalled to see Mr. Colin Wilson lending respectability to Richard Harwood's hideous whitewash of Nazism — Did Six Million Really Die? … The grotesque inaccuracy of Mr. Harwood's pamphlet is only matched by the mind-boggling spectacle of a well-known author praising its reasonable and logical tone … Why does Colin Wilson go to the lunatic fringe for his information, especially on a matter like this? … What Mr. Wilson has done is to turn the Nazis into innocent victims of a devilish Jewish conspiracy, which invented a fictional holocaust. Is there any assertion which could be more patently sick, perverted and evil, yet Colin Wilson finds it all reasonable and logical.[118]

A similar letter from the next issue reads in part:

To our knowledge, no intellectual of any standing in Germany, France, Britain or the United States has publicly associated himself with this Goebbelsian lie until Colin Wilson's defence of it in the columns of Books and Bookmen. Nor are we aware of any periodical or newspaper that is not openly propagating Neo-Nazi ideas or ever providing a forum for Neo-Nazi propaganda. It is therefore with a feeling of disbelief and horror that we find books and bookmen, a publication that would be the first to suffer in a Hitlerian regime, provide a forum for brazen and cynical propa-

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ganda aimed at whitewashing Hitler and the Third Reich.[119]

It was possibly hypocritical of the writers of that letter to intimate that fascist censorship of literature and literary appreciation is very wrong whilst they themselves condemned the editors of Books & Bookmen — an apolitical, areligious, and unationalistic literary guidance magazine — for publishing a review of a book that they personally felt to be objectionable.

However that letter, like many others, debated several points made by Harwood and provided evidence that his booklet contained a myriad of errors, such as attributing to the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl (in his 1896 The Jewish State), the conception of Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jewish people.[120] Harwood had continued by insisting that Herzl's plans for that already inhabited island had been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933.[121] It was correctly pointed out in several letters that Herzl had not mentioned Madagascar as a possible Jewish homeland in The Jewish State or any other publication. [122] Finally, the possibility of expelling Jews to Madagascar was not seriously investigated by the Nazi government until 1940, and was certainly not considered a main plank of the party platform even in that year. [123]

Another of the many errors pointed out was Harwood's misquoting of Benedikt Kautsky, an Austrian Socialist Jew who, according to Harwood, is supposed to have written on pages 272-3 of his book Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zurich 1946) that I was in the big concentration camps [including Auschwitz]. However. I must establish the truth that in no camp at any time did I come across such an installation as a gas chamber[124]. In actual fact, what Kautsky wrote on those pages was: I should like to include here a brief mention of the gas chambers. Although I did not see them myself, they were described to me by so many different people in a credible fashion that I have no hesitation in rendering the description herein. The difference

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between Harwood's quote and the original text are obvious. This inexcusable error exemplifies the Englishman's overall low standard of scholarship.

Despite the seriousness of the error it would appear, nonetheless, that Harwood did not intend to deceive his readers by misquoting Kautsky. In fact, he had probably never seen a copy of Teufel und Verdammte, and copied the incorrect Kautsky quote from the aforementioned book by Thies Christophersen, who had himself copied it from the books of earlier Revisionists who were responsible for the original misquoting.[125] On several other occasions Harwood made similar errors — copying quotations from secondary sources without actually seeing the originals. For example, he repeated the error Rassinier made in stating that Raphael Lemkin, in his 1943 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, made the first accusation against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war-time Europe.[126] Although the, errors (which do not in all cases affect his central thesis) indicate that the scholarship of Harwood and several previous Revisionist pioneers was very poor in places, they do not necessarily indicate malice or deliberate falsification of evidence.

After the first attacks on Wilson's intellectual freedom and integrity appeared in Books and Bookmen, Wilson felt a need to defend himself against the charges of neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, and he accordingly published a letter of defence in the February 1975 issue. Insisting again that the Holocaust was not a sacrosanct subject, but an alleged historical event that should be studied without bias or fear of persecution, he countered the defamatory allegations that he was anti-Semitic or neo-fascist by writing Now although I am certainly anti-Nazi, and in no sense anti-Jewish, I am, with all my instincts, deeply pro objectivity. [127]

His claims of objectivity, however, did not appease the offended letter writers. Even Simon Wiesenthal entered the war of words with a letter that appeared in the April 1975 issue of Books and Bookmen. It was in that short letter that he made his widely-quoted concession that there were no extermination camps on German soil. [128]

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One fact pointed out in most letters to the magazine was that Historical Review Press, the publishers of Harwood's booklet, had direct links to the National Front, a very right-wing British political party with pronounced pro-white, anti-immigration views. That 'discovery' was actually made (many months before Wilson chose to review Harwood's booklet) by Andrew Fyall of The Daily_Express in a highly critical expose of Harwood that appeared in that newspaper on June 17, 1974. Fyall had visited the publisher's address, only to find that it was just a forwarding address. Its absentee landlord was Robin Beauclair, an associate of the National Front, who allegedly stated (according to Fyall) that The story of six million Jews being slaughtered is a total myth. Our purpose is to sweep aside all the Jewish propaganda of the past. The Daily Express article also noted that whilst Harwood claimed to be at present with the University of London, that University had never heard of him.[129]

Indeed, as was later brought to light and widely publicised in an attempt to discredit him[130], Richard Harwood was a pseudonym used by Richard Verrall, a British journalist with connections to far right political organizations, who became — in February 1976 — the editor of the National Front's newspaper, Spearhead. Whereas Mark Weber (one of the most outstanding Revisionist Historians in the United States) testified at the 1988 trial of Ernst Zündel[131] that Verrall had graduated from the University of London with high honours[132], the university informed the present writer that they had no record of him either teaching or studying there.[133]

Notwithstanding, Harwood's theses should not be automatically disregarded because his

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political views are offensive to many. His theses should be studied and judged according to their merits or demerits, and refuted, if possible, in a thoughtful and scholarly manner. Few of Harwood's opponents[134], however, have shared these views. Instead, since the publisher's connections to the National Front were revealed in 1974 (even before Harwood's identity became known) his opponents have maligned him repeatedly for his alleged Nazism, pointing out many of his minor errors, but not attempting seriously to disprove his principal theses.[135]

The furor over his booklet was not limited to magazines, journals and academic circles. Almost as soon as it was published it became an underground 'best seller', causing Jewish organizations and disturbed and angry individuals — even some former concentration camp internees — to express their disgust publicly, such as by writing letters to Members of Parliament (who had each, incidentally, been sent a free copy by the author) and to the editors of local newspapers.[136] Regardless — or perhaps because — of the public controversy, the distribution of the booklet could not be stopped. By November 1979 hundreds of thousands of copies had reportedly been distributed in forty countries[137], and in languages including Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, French, German and Polish.

In Britain, after copies of Did Six Million Really Die? were posted to the heads of history departments and libraries, the Jewish Board of Deputies sent out a warning to every educational authority in the nation about the booklet's contents. Even the Under-Secretary for Education considered it necessary to involve himself in the controversy, condemning the booklet in Parliament. However, despite pressure from Jewish organizations, no legal action was taken in England to prevent the further publication and distribution of the booklet, because of the limitations of the now replaced Race Relations Act 1965, and because Sam Silkin, the Attorney General, insisted that a legal prosecution would only provide undesirable publicity for the author's unsavoury views.[138]

In South Africa the popularity of the booklet prompted the very worried South African Jewish Board of Deputies to seek to have it prohibited in that nation. In late 1976 the South African government agreed that the booklet was harmful, and placed a total ban on it. The Board of Jewish Deputies was not propped to rest at that, and a year later published a book that purported to refute Harwood's theses: Six Million Did Die: The Truth Shall Prevail, by Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond.[139] Another year later a second edition of this work was published.

This 139-page, illustrated book is to date the most detailed critique of Harwood's booklet, and superficially appears to be well researched and written. Almost all of the Englishman's errors were correctly pointed out, as they were by his previous detractors. However, when the book is carefully analysed it becomes obvious that the level of the authors' own scholarship is low. Many of their arguments in defence of accepted opinion on the Holocaust are weak and unsustainable. To provide just a few examples: they repeated the now-discredited testimony of Rudolf Vrba, a former Auschwitz internee who stated that he personally counted the number of Jews gassed at that camp to he 1.750,000 — of which 150,000 were French Jews. It is now accepted, however, that only 75,781 Jews were deported from France to all camps, very many of whom survived the war. They also quoted at length Nuremberg Document 3311-PS which states that the Germans murdered Jews en masse at Treblinka not in gas chambers, as is now stated by historians, but by steaming them to death in thirteen steam chambers. For many years no reputable historian has believed this strange tale, yet Suzman and Diamond presented it as factual. They also insisted — and presented as evidence testimonies that have long been discredited — that mass gassings occurred at camps where it is agreed by more cautious historians that no people were killed in gas chambers, such as Dachau. One must concede that, all in all, the well-intended book has almost no value as historical evidence and does not warrant a more detailed analysis.

In 1978 another Revisionist booklet — Nuremberg and Other War Crimes Trials[140] — appeared under Harwood's name. which caused further controversy in Britain. This 70-page booklet, however, whilst briefly touching on the subject of the alleged genocide of Jews, deals primar-

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ily [with] the cases of the main defendants at the International Military Tribunal and subsequent war crimes trials, including that of Eichmann in 1961. As large sections of this booklet appear to have been copied from The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a critique at this point is unnecessary.

Before our analysis moves from Harwood, another relevant point could be made. Although Richard Verrall was the first to use the pseudonym 'Richard Harwood', several other Revisionists in the late 1970s — Udo Walendy in particular also adopted that pseudonym to publish their books under. They knew that the large circulation of Did Six Million Really Die? guaranteed them a more receptive market for their publications. For instance, under that pseudonym Walendy published in 1977 his Der Nürnberger Prozess — Methoden und Bedeutung (The Nuremberg Trials: Methods and Significance)[141], a critical study of the International Military Tribunal and of the text of Herman Göring's purported letter to Winston Churchill written shortly before the former's suicide. This booklet by Walendy had the additional subtitle of Historische Tatsache Nr. 3 (Historical Fact No. 3), obviously intended to make it appear as if it is part of the same series as Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?, which carried the subtitle Historical Fact No. 1. Indeed, Walendy has written approximately three dozen books in the Historische Tatsache series, under his own name, many of them dealing with aspects of accepted opinion on the Holocaust.[142] Walendy's booklets were, and continue to be, widely circulated in German speaking nations. There Holocaust Revisionism is growing in acceptance, partly due to the efforts of Walendy, Stäglich, Christophersen and other Revisionists, but also to the efforts of several nationalistic newspapers and journals, including Deutsche National Zeitung and Nation Europa, which have

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chosen to champion Revisionism despite the risks of prosecution.

The cost of this growth in popularity, however, was the increased effort of the West German government to curtail it. More and more Revisionists were routinely slandered as Nazis and, even worse, anti-Semites. Increasingly more Revisionist works were placed — as had been Stäglich's — on the 'index' of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, thereby essentially robbing citizens of their right to form intellectually independent views on a period of their recent history. These books included the German translations of Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die? (Starben Wirklich Sechs Millionen?) and Professor Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century[143] ('indexed' in late 1978), and Udo Walendy's 1964 Wahrheit für Deutschland ('indexed' in 1979).

The publication in 1976 of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century created a controversy in the United States rivaling that caused by Harwood's in England over two years earlier, raising Butz to national notoriety. The author was and is still Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. His book is without doubt the most carefully researched and argued single work of Holocaust Revisionism and, as noted above, forms one 'testament' of the Revisionist bible (the other being Stäglich's The Auschwitz Myth). Due to the weight of the arguments contained within these two publications, they will be discussed in a separate chapter below.]

The Hoax of the Twentieth Century was initially published in Britain in May 1976, more than a year before its first American publication. The publisher was the aforementioned Historical Review Press (the nationalistic publishing house connected to the National Front), which had its printing done by the Brighton-based firm of Tony Hancock. Not only did the Hancock family — as detractors described this business — print Harwood's booklets, but they also printed Spear-

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head, the magazine then edited by Richard Verrall[144], and numerous other right-wing publications. John Kingsley Reed, an ex-chairman of the National Front who personally designed the original cover of Butz's book (showing a swastika bisecting a star of David) and was involved in at least some of its initial distribution, later stated that a copy of the book was sent to every member of the British House of Commons, the money for the printing and posting — roughly about £2-3,000 — coming from an Arab source.[145]

This does not necessarily mean, of course, that Butz himself possessed a fascist or anti-Semitic ideology, shared the political views of his book's publishers, or endorsed the activities of Reed and his associates (such as sending copies to MPs). The far-right publisher was not, it would seem, his first choice. The New York Times quoted him as stating: I had trouble finding a publisher for it, and finally went to Britain to the Historical Review Press in Richmond after I found out they had published a pamphlet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?. [146] Yet even if Butz was a fascist and anti-Semite, his sophisticated, seriously presented and meticulously documented arguments would still have to be investigated in a dispassionate, scholarly manner before his work could be discounted.

In Britain The Hoax of the Twentieth Century was treated by the public with the same disgust as had been Harwood's booklet, with angry letters being written and Jewish groups protesting at the publication of this latest example of anti-Semitism and hate literature. The London-based Institute of Jewish Affairs (an agency of the World Jewish Congress) published a disparaging article on the book in the November-December 1976 issue of Patterns of Prejudice, its journal devoted to the themes of multiculturalism, racism and anti-Semitism. Butz's book was also discussed in the aforementioned South African publication, Six Million Did Die, although the Jewish authors were clearly unable to refute his arguments as easily as they had Harwood's.

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Butz traveled extensively to promote The Hoax, including a European tour in 1977 which was partly sponsored by the nationalistic German organization, Deutsche Volksunion (DVU)[147], which arranged several speaking engagements for him. Early in the same year the (Deutsche) National Zeitung, the DVU's widely circulated weekly newspaper, serialized portions of Butz's book over several successive issues.[148]

However, it was in the United States that the 'Butz affair' was most prominent, particularly after the Daily Northwestern, the campus paper of Northwestern University (where Butz taught), published in January 1977 an expose of Butz's book, which had not yet even been published in that country. The campus newspaper article was based on an article that had appeared in the Jerusalem Post. Its appearance caused a flood of letters from students and faculty members, almost all of them sharply critical of the beleaguered professor and accusing him of anti-Semitism. Many even demanded his resignation. Petitions were circulated and signed by many students, faculty members and others, demanding that the university administration — which was highly embarrassed to discover that its professor of electrical engineering had written such a book — take disciplinary action against Butz. The furor was reported nationwide, and featured in an article in the influential New York Times, which inaccurately referred to the book as The Fabrication of a Hoax.[149] Raymond W. Mack, the university provost, was quoted in that article as stating that he agreed with students and colleagues who believed that Butz's book had constituted a contemptible insult to the dead and the bereaved. Further, he stated that under the First Amendment Butz had the right to publish his book, but lamented that its a shame when that right is used to insult survivors of concentration camps.

It is clear, however, that at least in the early days of this controversy very few of the outraged people, including university administrators (to their discredit), had even seen a copy of Butz's book, instead relying entirely on hearsay evidence. This suggests that they considered any challenge to accepted opinion on the Holocaust to be anti-Semitic and unacceptable. One example of this is a letter in the New York Times by a Professor Wolfe of New York University, who, displaying a total disregard for intellectual freedom, declared that Northwestern University should

[p. 81]

bring Butz up on charges of moral turpitude and academic incompetence for daring to write such a horrendous book as Fabrication of a Hoax.[150] If Wolfe had ever seen a copy of Butz's book, he would have known that the title was The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Obviously he had read the New York Times article of January 28, which had erroneously referred to the book as Fabrication of a Hoax, and had not seen the book itself. Thus, his own academic incompetence sadly became apparent.

The result of the controversy, which continued for several months, was a decision by the academic authorities at Northwestern University not to initiate proceedings against Butz. However, they did issue public statements denouncing his book and distancing themselves from any anti-Semitism. They also decided — partly to appease Jewish contributors [who] threatened to withhold their financial support[151] — to sponsor a series of lectures entitled Dimensions of the Holocaust, which presented accepted opinion on that event. Those lectures, delivered by three Jews and a philo-Semite[152], were organized by the history department of the university and the (Jewish) Hillel Foundation. The latter organization also sponsored a full page statement condemning Butz and his book, which was published in the Daily Northwestern.[153] This statement was signed by approximately half the university faculty, which can only be considered a disgrace in the light of the fact that almost none of them had seen a copy of the book or even read excerpts.

The controversy gradually died down, although the Revisionist professor has continued to exercise his right to express his views on the Holocaust, both at Northwestern university and elsewhere. An interesting offshoot of the 'Butz affair' was the furor that erupted in Australia in February 1979. It was discovered that John Bennett, a civil rights lawyer and secretary of the reputable Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, had sent to several academics in Melbourne a complimentary copy of Butz's The Hoax. An accompanying letter (not intended for a public readership) summarized what Bennett considered to be the book's thirteen principal arguments, and included an invitation for critical comment. After the letter was 'leaked', Bennett suddenly

[p. 82]

found himself accused of anti-Semitism by Rabbi John Levi, the honorary secretary of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.[154] This charge was echoed by numerous media commentators, who were further offended by Bennett's decision to champion the civil liberties of 3CR, a far-left Melbourne radio station. 3CR had broadcast anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian statements on several occasions, causing the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies to request the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal to investigate what they considered to be anti-Semitism. In response Bennett had written an article in the December 1978 issue of Civil Liberty, the newsletter of his civil liberties organization, and had a letter published in the January 22, 1979 issue of The Age. In both publications he argued that the Palestinian viewpoint was being suppressed, and noted that Australian Jews, by attempting to stifle all criticism of Zionism, Israel or Jewish interests, had imposed a form of political censorship. That censorship, he continued, effectively banned works revising accepted opinion on the Holocaust.

Bennett published in 1979 a small booklet on the Holocaust, and began distributing a pamphlet by Robert Faurisson, a French Revisionist. He also attended, in September of that year, the First International Revisionist Convention in Los Angeles. These activities, his defence of Butz, and his letter writing to newspapers caused an angry, at times almost hysterical, response. Publications across Australia[155] (and some in Europe and the United States[156]), when describing his activities, referred to him as a Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi, anti-Semite and other even worse titles. He was also featured on several television programmes, where he was generally criticized and condemned for his views. He thus became a liability to his civil rights organization. Although Dr. Alan Hughes, the President of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, initially defended his freedom of speech, in 1980 Bennett was suspended and removed from his position as Secretary of that organization, a position he had held since 1966, when the organization was formed. The irony is noteworthy: a defender of civil liberties and free expression was

[p. 83]

expelled from a civil liberties union precisely because he exercised his right to free expression.

In 1980 Bennett established the Australian Civil Liberties Union, of which he has been the president every year since its formation. He has continued to defend with zeal and sincerity the civil liberties of all Australians, and to publish annually Your Rights, a small and very widely read handbook on civil and legal rights, first published in 1970. He is also still reproached and insulted for his continued promotion of Holocaust Revisionism[157], and is considered (by both detractors and supporters) to be the foremost Revisionist in Australia. Further, by including since 1983 a small amount of Revisionism in each issue of Your Rights, he is the only author in the world to publish a book containing Holocaust Revisionism which is available throughout the year from most newsstands in the country.

To sum up briefly, it has been shown that Holocaust Revisionism had its origins in the postwar writings of Paul Rassinier, a left-wing libertarian who aided Jews during the war and suffered alongside them at the hands of the Nazis in two of their concentration camps. His writings contain a number of errors of fact and judgement, most of them minor but some major. He also produced several weighty arguments and sound conclusions, and these have served as the foundation upon which most subsequent Revisionists have built. Working ignorantly of each other, Revisionists in several countries began in the 1960s to challenge accepted opinion on the Holocaust with a few tenable arguments, which were, nonetheless, considerably weaker and less sophisticated than the Revisionist theses of today. Their works were mostly journalistic in style and lacked highly-developed analysis.

By the middle of the 1970s Holocaust Revisionism was beginning to flourish. As a result of the gradual refinement of the arguments of predecessors the standard of Revisionists' scholarship had improved slightly. Their publications, replete with appendices and footnotes to primary sources, at least appeared to contain impartial and thoughtful investigations of evidence. Many Revisionists were still overly reliant on Rassinier, and, by not submitting his sources and arguments to close scrutiny, some of them carelessly repeated the Frenchman's inaccuracies or misinterpretations (as well as making a number of their own). But they also investigated new sources

[p. 84]

and arrived at fresh — and often more plausible — interpretations, and thus managed to take the debate farther. In the next chapter, which focuses on the writings of Butz and Stäglich — who represent Holocaust Revisionism's 'coming of age' — we shall see just how far the debate has been taken.

Notes:

[1] L. Edelman, A Conversation with Elie Wiesel, in H. J. Cargas, (ed.), Responses to Elie Wiesel (New York: Persea Books, published in Cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1978), p. 18. Yeckel Eckstein used identical imagery before stating: To speak of the holocaust is to tread on terra sancta, holy ground. Y. Eckstein, What You Should Know About Jews and Judaism (Waco: Word Books, 1984), p. 182.

[2] For Jewish works condemning Jewish (non-Revisionist) academic investigation, cf. N. Podhoretz, Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance, Commentary, November 1962, pp. 201-208; N. Eck, Historical Research or Slander?, Yad Vashem Studies, vi, 1967, pp. 385-430; J. Robinson, Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum: Bruno Bettlheim and the Holocaust (New York, 1970), et al. For works on the relationship between the Holocaust and Jewish faith, cf. R. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, 1966); M. Wyschogrod, Faith and the Holocaust, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 1971, pp. 286-294; I. Greenberg, The Holocaust, The Need to Remember, Council of Jewish Federations General Assembly Papers 1977; M. Wyschogrod, Auschwitz, Beginning of a New Era?, Tradition, Vol. XVII, Number 1, Fall 1977, pp. 63-78; et al.

[3] The present writer was himself deeply moved when he visited Yad Vashem in May 1989, and still considers his visit to that memorial centre as something of a religious experience. He personally knows many others who felt likewise after visiting the centre.

[4] Passed by the Knesset on Tammuz 1, 5746 (July 8, 1986) and published in Sefer HaChukkimNumber 1187 of Tammuz 9, 5746 (July 16, 1986), p. 196. Italics added for emphasis.

[5] New Village Vintage? 1982 p15 (unable to read footnote from original)

[6] For The Dead And The Living We Must Bear Witness (information booklet published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington, D.C., 1990)

[7] Ibid.

[8] The Washington Times, January 10, 1991

[9] Y. Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (London: Sheldon Press, 1978), p. 38

[10] R. Kvam, Among Two Hundred Survivors from Auschwitz, Translated by Otto Reinert, Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Issue No. 111, Volume 28, Number 3, Summer 1979, p. 286. Most Jewish writers on Holocaust Revisionism have made similar claims about Rassinier's attitude towards Jews. Lucy Dawidowicz stated that he had flipflopped into a rabid anti-Semite. (Lies About the Holocaust, Commentary, December 1980, p. 33).

[11] P. Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, Translated from the French by Adam Robbins (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review), p. 109. This work is an English translation of the bulk of Rassinier's first three books on the Holocaust, Le Passage de la ligne, Le Mensonge d'Ulysse and Ulysse trahi par les siens. Rather than quoting from the French editions, all quotes herein will be from this English translation.

[12] Paris: Editions Bressanes, 1948

[13] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 73

[14] Ibid., pp. 76-77

[15] Paris: Editions Bressanes, 1950

[16] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 130

[17] Cf. P. Rassinier, The Real Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors, Third English Printing, 1983 (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review. First published as Le Véritable Procès Eichmann ou les Vainqueurs incorrigibles by Les Sept Couleurs, Paris, 1962), p. 25

[18] Librairie Française, 1961.

[19] Cited in footnote 17.

[20] Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1964

[21] Paris: La Table Ronde, 1965

[22] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 130.

[23] Nuremberg Document 274-F; IMT, Volume XXXVII, p. 148

[24] IMT, Volume XIX, p. 434; NC & A, Suppl. Volume A, p. 61

[25] G. Hénocque, Les Antres de la Bête (Paris: G. Duraissie, 1947), pp. 115-116

[26] Keine Vergasung in Dachau, Die Zeit, August 19, 1960 (No. 34), p. 14. For a discussion of Broszat's concession, see Gitta Sereny, The Men Who Whitewash Hitler, New Statesman, November 2, 1979, p. 670

[27] Letter in Books and Bookmen, April 1975, p. 5

[28] G. Tillion, Ravensbrück (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 231

[29] K. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, (London/New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), p. 100. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica, a good indicator of accepted opinion on most subjects, states in its latest edition (15th; 1988) that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald. (Volume 2, p. 596)

[30] See below, pp. 240-241

[31] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 158

[32] Ibid., p. 158

[33] Extracts from Nyiszli's memoir were first published in the March and April, 1951 issues of Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly review, Les Temps Modernes (although there may have been a Hungarian edition in 1946). In 1961 it was published as a whole in five issues (January/ February) of the Munich weekly Quick, under the title Auschwitz. In the same year it was published as a volume of 256 pages with the title Médecin à Auschwitz, Souvenirs d'un médecin deporté, published by Julliard Publishers, causing quite a sensation in France. An English translation, entitled Auschwitz, A Doctor's Eye-witness Account was published shortly after, and has gone through over a dozen reprints, making it one of the most 'popular' Holocaust memoirs.

[34] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, pp. 244-245

[35] See below, p. 113, n. 98

[36] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 244.

[37] Cf. M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), pp. 698-699.

[38] Nuremberg Document 2170-PS. Typewritten statement dated May 6, 1945.

[39] IMT, Volume VI, pp. 211, 225, 360-364. The confession, with some Zyklon invoices, became Document 1553-PS.

[40] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, pp. 250-258. To fit 700-800 persons into twenty-five square meters would require 28-32 persons per square meter (a space smaller than the average single wardrobe). This is clearly impossible.

[41] Rassinier was not aware of just how many contradictory versions of Gerstein's confession there actually were, and restricted himself to examining two versions presented by Leon Poliakov. Henri Roques, in his thorough 1985 doctoral thesis, Les 'Confessions' de Kurt Gerstein, proves that there have been six different versions. The above quotes are from the typewritten German text of 6 May 1945, a facsimile of which is in the National Archives, Washington.

[42] G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1953); L. Poliakov and J. Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (Berlin: Arani Verlag, 1955); S. Friedländer, Kurt Gerstein ou l'ambiguité du bien (Casterman, Tournai, 1967); L. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); G. Hausner, Justice à Jérusalem (Flammarion, 1976); M. Gilbert, Final Journey (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979); J. Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1979); et al.

[43] Such as stating that the first accusation against the Germans of the genocide of Jews was made in a book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. Cf. Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 288. The first serious extermination claims were actually made a year earlier by the World Jewish Congress.

[44] Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 294

[45] Munich: Damm-Verlag, 1962

[46] Munich: Verlag G. Fischer, 1967

[47] Munich: Verlag G. Fischer, 1968

[48] J. G. Burg, Sündenböcke, p. 74 ff.

[49] Ibid., p. 231. The lower figure is certainly closer to the truth.

[50] Ibid., p. 237. That figure was a maximum; he believed the true figure to be somewhat lower.

[51] Ibid., p. 223

[52] Ibid., p. 233

[53] L. Marschalko, The World Conquerors: the Real War Criminals Translated from the Hungarian by A. Suranyi (London: Joseph Sueli Publications, 1958)

[54] Uprising! One Nation's Nightmare: Hungary 1956 Second edition, 1986 (Bullsbrook, Western Australia: Veritas Publishing Co. First published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1981)

[55] Marschalko, The World Conquerors, particularly pp. 285 to 295.

[56] Ibid., p. 287-288

[57] Ibid., p.165

[58] Ibid., p.149

[59] Ibid., p.150

[60] Ibid., p. 155

[61] Ibid., p. 155

[62] Ibid., p. l59

[63] See below, pp. 263 ff.

[64] L. Amery (ed.), The Times History of the War in South Africa (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1907); Volume V (1907), pp. 252-253, 601f.; Volume VI (1909), pp. 24-25; Cf. also T. Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Cardinal, 1991. First published 1979), pp. 493-5, 501-502, 507-510, 554, 572, et al.

[65] M. Weber, The Civil War Concentration Camps, The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1981, p. 137-153

[66] For Roosevelt's statement (21 November 1944) about American concentration camps, see R. Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York/ Chicago/San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 154

[67] Marschalko, The World Conquerors, p. 156

[68] See below, p. 217

[69] See below, p. 239 ff.

[70] Cf. the Dachau entry in I. Gutman, (editor-in-chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990); F. Leuchter and R. Faurisson, The Second Leuchter Report, The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Ten, Number Three, Fall 1990, pp. 261-322

[71] Cf. The Big Lie: Who Told It? (Arlington, VA.: National Socialist White People's Party. 1961?) Meyer Levin was the Jewish author and playwrite who wrote the stageplay for the stage production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

[72] The Diary of Ann Fink (Arlington, VA. : Hoax Busters Press. 1961?), p. 2. The present writer's copy contains the (rubber stamped) name and address of the distributor: the American Nazi Party, 928 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia.

[73] E. Shepherd, The Six Myths (Printed by the National Citizens Union, New York, 1965. Distributed by the National Renaissance Party), pp. 7-8

[74] Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Hate Groups, December 17, 1954. Prepared and released by the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington. D.C.

[75] Ibid., p. 5

[76] Noontide Press, Los Angeles, 1969

[77] Letter from Carto to the present writer, dated January 26, 1992, also SZTR, 23-5732

[78] Der erzwungene Krieg (Tübingen: Verlag der Deutschen Hochschullehrer Zeitung, 1961). The book's main thesis that Germany was not solely responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 sparked off a rather heated and long-running debate in the letters section of The American Historical Review, with several scholars, unfamiliar with some of the source material cited by Hoggan, even accusing him of fabricating or falsifying his evidence. See the book's review by Gerhard L. Weinberg in AHR, Volume LXVIII (October 1962 to July 1963) and the reaction to it in the five subsequent issues.

[79] A. J. App, The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses (Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press, 1973), p. 29

[80] Ibid., p. 12

[81] A. Hitler, Mein Kampf: Zwei Bände in einem Band, Ungekürzte Ausgabe (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., GmbH, 1943), p. 252. Translated by [the] present writer.

[82] As can be seen, by way of illustration, in the title of Holocaust Revisionism, Reinventing the Big Lie (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1989)

[83] Cf. A Straight Look at the Third Reich: Hitler and National Socialism. How Right? How Wrong? (Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press, 1974); Footnote on President Ford's Visit to Auschwitz (Takoma Park, Maryland: Boniface Press, 1975): Hitler-Himmler Order on Jews Uncovered (Reedy, WVa.: Liberty Bell, 1978); Holocaust: Sneak Attack on Christianity, The Liberty Bell, March 1978, pp. 9-17. et al.

[84] Mohrkirch, Kritik-Verlag, 1973

[85] Ibid., p. 19

[86] Ibid., p. 4

[87] The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, Prepared by D. A. Brugioni, and G. Poirier, (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979)

[88] Volume XXIII, number 10, pp. 50-52

[89] From the English translation of Stäglich's article, published as Appendix II in W. Stäglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence Second Edition, 1990. Translated from German by Thomas Francis (Costa Mesa: Institute for Historical Review, 1986)

[90] For example, see E. Kulka, The Holocaust Is Being Denied, Translated by Lilli Kapecky (Tel Aviv: The Committee of Auschwitz Camp Survivors in Israel, 1977). Also, see R. Kvam, Nazism Resurgent: Among Two Hundred Survivors From Auschwitz, op. cit., p. 283-292. According to Kvam, The pamphlet, Die Auschwitz-Lüge, must be one of the ugliest examples in our time of the manner in which what happened to the Jews during WW II is so completely turned upside down that Nazis appear in angels' wings and the Jews as filthy moneygrubbers. (p. 287)

[91] Nazi Kampflieder im Gerichtssaal, Neue Insenburger Anzeigeblatt, February 24, 1976

[92] Quoted by Röder in the epilogue published in the American edition of Die Auschwitz Lüge(Reedy, Va.: Liberty Bell Publications, 1979)

[93] Jüdischer Pressedienst (Düsseldorf, 1975), Number 3/4, p. 28

[94] W. Stäglich, 'Der Auschwitz Mythos': A Book and Its Fate in the German Federal Republic, The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Five, Number One, Spring 1984, p. 49

[95] W. Stäglich, Der Auschwitz Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit? (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1979)

[96] Federal Office for the Examination of Publications Harmful to Young People. This Orwellian office gives harmful books — including some academic publications — a classification which is similar in some respects to the R18 classification given in New Zealand to pornography. The National Socialist regime is still condemned (and rightly so) for passing similar laws, but there has been no universal condemnation of this state censorship and deprivation of intellectual freedom.

[97] Stäglich, 'Der Auschwitz Mythos': A Book and Its Fate…, p. 65

[98] Reichsgesetzblatt I, 985, June 7, 1939. On November 17, 1987 the Higher Administrative Court at Lüneburg rejected Stäglich's appeal to regain his doctorate.

[99] Berlin/Frankfurt/Vienna: Propyläen Verlag, 1978.

[100] Ibid., pp. 164-165

[101] Mann in Der Spiegel, December 4, 1978

[102] Der Spiegel, April 9, 1979

[103] For Diwald's attitude towards his acquiescence, see an interview with him published in the Austrian student magazine, Die Aula, Number 3, 1980, pp. 9-10

[104] E. Aretz, Hexen-Ein-Maleins einer Lüge (Pähl/Obb: Verlag Hohe Warte — Franz von Bebenburg KG, 1973). Aretz apparently based the very unusual title on Scene VI of Goethe's magnificent Faust, in which a witch was observed by Faust and Mephistopheles to be juggling figures in an abominable fashion; the inference being that the Jews have done likewise in calculating their wartime fatality totals. Aretz was no stranger to Holocaust Revisionism, and had been publishing Revisionist articles since the early 1960s; Cf. Das fragwürdige Auschwitz, Der Quell, Issue 9, 1961

[105] Cf. Was geschah nach 1945? (1972); Wieso waren wir Väter Verbrecher? (1972); Was hätten wir Väter wissen müssen? (1973); et al. (all self-published)

[106] Cf. an interview with Walendy, in which he is called a brave young historian, Deutsche Nachrichten, February 17, 1967

[107] Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1964

[108] Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, (Vol. I) 1966; (Vol. II) 1967.

[109] Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1973. The 1979 English edition was by the same publisher.

[110] Bild-Dokumente für die Geschichtsschreibung?, p. 54. The clearly altered photograph had been published on page 345 of R. Schnabel' s book Macht ohne Moral — Eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt/Main: Röderberg-Verlag GmbH, 1957), with the following caption: Corpses of prisoners in a goods truck of a transport train from the CC-Sachsenhausen to CC-Dachau.

[111] Ibid., p. 74. The photograph was published in IMT, Volume XXX, p. 421, and shortly before in Eugene Aroneanu, Konzentrationslager — Ein Tatsachenbericht über die an der Menschheit begangenen Verbrechen, Doc. F321 for the International Court of Justice in Nürnberg; also in R. Schnabel, Macht ohne Moral, p.341; et al.

[112] Ibid., pp. 38-39. The original photograph is listed at the Panstwowe Muzeum Oswiecim (PMO) as photographic negative number 281. It has been reproduced as evidence of the gassing process in numerous books, including G Schönberner, Der Gelbe Stern — Die Juden-Verfolgung in Europa 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Rütten und Löning Verlag, 1960), and its 1969 English translation, The Yellow Star: Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945 (London: Corgi, n.d.); Adler, Langbein, and Lingens-Reiner, Auschwitz: Zeugnisse und Berichte (Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1962); SS-Henker und ihre Opfer (Vienna: Internationale Föderation der Widerstandskämpfer, 1965); J-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989); D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945 (London/New York: l. B. Taurus & Co., Ltd., 1990); et al.

[113] Cf. J. Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (Los Angeles, The Noontide Press, 1951), et al.

[114] E. Cawthron, The Big Lie: Six Million Murdered Jews (Fyshwick: The History Research Unit, Unity Publishers, c. 1970). Cawthron was then one of Australia's leading Nazis and the editor of the Australian National Socialist Journal. His Revisionist booklet opened with these nasty words: Whenever you see or hear a Jew teaching, do not think otherwise than that you are hearing a poisonous basilisk who with his face poisons and kills people … be on your guard against them. Interestingly, Cawthron had an outstanding academic career, gaining a B.Sc with first class honours at the University of Adelaide in 1963 and being awarded a Ph.D in 1970. Cf. Harcourt D., Everyone Wants to be Führer: National Socialism in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: Angus and Robertson. 1972), pp. 143-144

[115] Richmond, Surrey: Historical Review Press, 1974

[116] C. Wilson, The Fuehrer in Perspective, Books and Bookmen, November 1974, pp. 28-31

[117] Ibid., p. 31

[118] Books and Bookmen, April 1975, pp. 7-8. Wilson had not mentioned a Jewish conspiracy.

[119] Letter signed by R. Ainsztein, T. Allen, Philip Jacobson, Sydney Jacobson, Phillip Knightley, Alan Sillitoe, in Books and Bookmen, May 1975, p. 5

[120] Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?, p. 3.

[121] Ibid., p. 3

[122] An English translation of The Jewish State can be found in A. Hertzberg, (ed.), The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: A Temple Book, Atheneum, 1951), pp. 204-226. Madagscar is not mentioned.

[123] Cf. C. R. Browning, Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939- 1941. German Studies Review, Volume 9 (1986), pp. 497-519 (esp. pp. 511-12)

[124] Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?, p. 14

[125] The incorrect quotation appeared in T. Christophersen, Die Auschwitz Lüge, p. 5. Christophersen probably copied it from Heinz Roth, who quoted this alleged statement by Kautsky repeatedly in his books and booklets, or from Franz Scheidl, who made the same error in Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands, Volume IV, p. 53.

[126] Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?, p. 7. Also see above, p. 39. Previous to Lemkin's book there was, for example, the Joint Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942, which accused the German authorities of conducting a bestial policy of coldblooded extermination of Europe's Jews. The Declaration, signed by eleven nations, was read in the British House of Commons and published worldwide in newspapers. Cf. the New York Times, December 18, 1942, pp. 1 and 10.

[127] Letter from Wilson in Books and Bookmen, February 1975, p. 6

[128] Letter from Wiesenthal, Books and Bookmen, April 1975, p. 5

[129] The University of London similarly told the present writer that Richard Harwood is not, and never has been, associated with the University of London in any capacity. Letter from H. Kneeshaw, University Information Officer, dated December 5. 1989.

[130] Cf. Searchlight, Issue 31, p. 4: Patterns of Prejudice, September/October 1977, p. 19; C. C. Aronsfeld, Debauchers of the Truth: How the Facts of the Holocaust Are Distorted, Jewish Frontier, June/July, 1978, pp. 9-13; New Statesman, September 7, 1979, October 5, 1979. November 2, 1979, July 17, 1981; L. Dawidowicz, Lies About the Holocaust, Commentary, p. 34; et al.

[131] Zündel is a German-Canadian Revisionist who was charged with violating Canada's 'false news' laws by publishing his own edition of Harwood's booklet. He was tried and convicted in 1985, but in 1987 Ontario's Court of Appeal ordered a re-trial. He was retried in 1988 and was again convicted. In 1990 the Court of Appeal rejected his petition. He took his case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which in August 1992, much to the horror of Canadian Jewry which had been seeking Zündel's imprisonment or deportation back to Germany, struck down as unconstitutional the 'false news' law. Zündel's legal battles, which he finally won after more than a decade, attracted international media attention. Rather than Zündel being on trial, it was almost as if the Holocaust itself was on trial. Revisionist historians, including Robert Faurisson, David Irving and Mark Weber, appeared for the defence and challenged the accuracy of accepted opinion on the Holocaust. Orthodox historians, notably Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning, appeared for the prosecution and defended accepted opinion.

[132] Cf. SZTR, 23-5725

[133] … there is no trace in the records of the university of an individual with the surname Verrall being, or having been, associated with the University of London in any capacity. Letter from H. Kneeshaw, dated January 8, 1990.

[134] The present writer recognises the author's right to use a pseudonym, regardless of the reason, and when discussing his booklet and reactions to it, will refer to him by the name Harwood.

[135] One of the first such articles was Harwood's Distortion of Holocaust Facts, Patterns of Prejudice, May/June 1975, pp. 25-27. Cf. also the publications listed in footnote 129.

[136] To list just a few from one newspaper, cf. The Daily Telegraph, December 17, 1974, December 30, 1974, January 30, 1975, February 26, 1975.

[137] Gitta Sereny quoted Robin Beauclair giving the figure of almost a million copies distributed before November 1979, in her article The Men Who Whitewash Hitler, New Statesman, November 2, 1979, p. 670

[138] Quoted in the Jewish Chronicle (London), October 2, 1974

[139] A. Suzman and D. Diamond, Six Million Did Die: The Truth Shall Prevail (Johannesburg: Committee of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, 1977)

[140] Southam, Warks: Historical Review Press, 1978. Mark Weber told the present writer (letter and notes, dated 2 August 1992) that, as he recalled, the real author of this 2nd Harwood booklet was really David McCalden. For McCalden, see below, pp. 147-149

[141] R. Harwood, Der Nürnberger Press — Methoden und Bedeutung (Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1977)

[142] Some of the early works in the series that are directly relevant to this study are: U. Walendy, Die Methoden der Umerziehung (Richmond, Surrey: Historical Review Press, 1976), 1979, English translation: The Methods of Reeducation (Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1979) The following were all published by Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho/ Weser: — Der Verrat an Osteuropa (Nr. 3), published 1977, U. Walendy, and W. Stäglich, NS-Bewältigung — Deutsche Schreibtischtäter (Nr. 5), published 1979, U .Walendy, Der moderne Index (Nr. 7), published 1980 — , Holocaust nun unterirdisch? (Holocaust Now Underground?) (Nr. 9), published 1981. This book analyses some of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz released by the CIA in 1979. See above, p. 60 n. 87. Udo Walendy has also published at least one book that is not in the series, namely Auschwitz im IG Farben Prozess — Holocaust-Dokumente? (Auschwitz in the I.G. Farben Trial) (Vlotho/ Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1979), a central point of which is that none of the engineers who worked at the immense Farben plant at Auschwitz heard of Jewish exterminations before May 1945.

[143] A. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Ladbroke, Warwickshire: Historical Review Press, 1976). Published in German as Der Jahrhundert-Betrug (Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1977). First United States edition by Noontide Press, Torrance, 1978. All references herein to Butz's book will be, unless otherwise indicated, from the seventh U.S. printing (Costa Mesa: Institute for Historical Review, 1985)

[144] Spearhead, although not the most widely read of the National Front publications, had substantial ideological significance within the ranks of the party. It expounded a Revisionist position on most modern events and epochs, especially the Second World War, and — particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s — endorsed a Revisionist position on the Holocaust. To give just a few examples: Spearhead 80 referred to the six million Jew myth which the propaganda machines have seemingly embedded into the world conscience (p. 15). Butz's book was reviewed in very laudatory terms in Spearhead 95, and in issue 108 Butz was interviewed at length.

[145] Interviewed on The Other Face of Terror (Belboa Film Productions, 1984). See below, p. 285 ff.

[146] S. S. King, Professor Causes Furor by Saying Nazi Slaying of Jews Is a Myth, New York Times, January 28, 1977, p. A10

[147] See below, pp. 284-285

[148] For example, see Der Schwindel des 20. Jahrhunderts: Das Ende der 6-Millionen-Lüge, von Prof. Dr. Arthur R. Butz (The Hoax of the 20th century; the end of the six million lie), National Zeitung February 18, 1977, et al.

[149] S. S. King, S. S., Professor Causes Furor

[150] New York Times, February 4, 1977, p.A22

[151] The quote is from Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Lies About the Holocaust, Commentary, p. 34

[152] Ibid., p. 34. Dawidowicz was one of the three Jewish lecturers. Elie Wiesel, the 'heavyweight champion' of Holocaust orthodoxy, was another.

[153] Daily Northwestern, March 30, 1977, p. 5

[154] Cf. J. Jost, 'No Holocaust' Theory Starts Major Storm, The National Times, Week ending February 10,1979

[155] Cf. The Age, February 16, March 3, 15, 17, 22, 24, April 14 (all 1979); National Review, May 31, 1979, June 28, 1979 (a 2,000 word letter by Bennett); Quadrant, September 1979; Quadrant, October 1981 (which described Bennett as possibly being more evil than Himmler and Pol Pot); Farrago 2/7 (1982); et al.

[156] For example, see New Statesman, September 7, 1979 (The article, entitled Nazis, referred to Bennett's Revisionism as pathological ravings) (p. 332); New Statesman, October 5, 1979; P. Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent (Paris: Petite Collection Maspero, 1980), p. 268; L. S. Dawidowicz, Lies About the Holocaust; et al.

[157] Cf. Sydney Morning Herald, July 25, 1985; Harvest of Hate, The Bulletin, April 4, 1989, pp. 42-49; The Australian Jewish News, July 27, 1990; Sunday Sun, August 12, 1990; W. Rubinstein, Profile: John Bennett; Without Prejudice, No. 2, February 1991, pp. 47-51; et al