Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
10
THE TRUTH AT LAST:
THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER
Without doubt the most important
contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has
been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The
pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that
Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration
camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi,
nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National
Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth,
Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death
in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six
Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism. From 1933 until 1943,
Rassinier was a professor of history in the College d'enseignement
général at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. During the
war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the
Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the
German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At
Buchenwald, towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which
so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After
the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille de la Résistance
and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to the French
Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in
November, 1946. Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a
systematic analysis of alleged German war atrocities, in particular
the supposed "extermination" of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his
writings are little known; they have rarely been translated from the
French and none at all have appeared in English. His most important
works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1949),
an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own
experiences of them; and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel
which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning
German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with
two final volumes, Le Véritable Proces Eichmann (1962) and Le
Drame des Juifs européen (1964), in which Rassinier exposes
the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the
Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines
the political and financial significance of the extermination legend
and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers. One of the
many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique
German "wickedness"; and he reveals with devastating force how
historical truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of
partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the
fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and
reduced to proper proportions, loses its much vaunted "enormity" and
is seen to be only one act in a greater and much wider tragedy. In an
extensive lecture tour in West Germany in the spring of 1960,
Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that it was
high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination
legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it since the
allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the
eyes of the world.
THE IMPOSTURE OF 'GAS
CHAMBERS'
Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies
of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that travellers always
return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all
the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace their
authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas
chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New
York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that
no such things ever existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff)
Rassinier also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard, and asked him how he
could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et Lumieres that
gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that
others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing
to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209
ff). Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's
Ravensbrück.- The Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again
found that the authoress had no other evidence for gas chambers there
than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were
deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar
investigations were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was
Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's
The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none
of these authors could produce an authentic eye-witness of a gas
chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen one.
Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda
Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers at
Auschwitz, but of course, since this person was apparently dead,
Rassinier was unable to investigate the claim. He was able to
interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of Teufel und Verdammte who had
alleged that millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz.
However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his
book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and
that he based his information on what others had "told him". The palm
for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos
Nyizli's Doctor at Auschwitz, in which the falsification of facts,
the evident contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is
speaking of places which it is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame
des Juifs européen, p. 52). According to this "doctor of
Auschwitz", 25,000 victims were exterminated every day for four and a
half years, which is a grandiose advance on Olga Lengyel's 24,000 a
day for two and a half years. It would mean a total of forty-one
million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the total
pre-war Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier attempted to
discover the identity of this strange "witness", he was told that "he
had died some time before the publication of the book." Rassinier is
convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the
war, Rassinier has, in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who
was an actual eye-witness of gas chamber exterminations in German
concentration camps during World War Two, but he has never found even
one such person. He discovered that not one of the authors of the
many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of
Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much less
seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a
living authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former
prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements
not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they "heard",
always from "reliable" sources, who by some chance are almost always
dead and thus not in a position to confirm or deny their statements.
Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies,
and of which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of
"gas chambers". Serious investigations carried out in the sites
themselves have revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the
declarations of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas
chambers whatever existed in the German camps at Buchenwald,
Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in
Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to by Stephen
Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and admitted
officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich.
However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses"
again declared at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at
Bergen-Belsen setting out for the gas chambers. So far as the eastern
camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier shows that the sole evidence
attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno,
Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt
Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled
was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the
war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25
million. Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These
documents were considered of such dubious authenticity that they were
not even admitted by the Nuremberg Court, though they continue to
circulate in three different versions, one in German (distributed in
schools) and two in French, none of which agree with each other. The
German version featured as "evidence" at the Eichmann Trial in l961.
Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important
admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary
Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée,
December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order
for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering
(Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 31, 39).
'SIX MILLION' FALSEHOOD
REJECTED
As for the fearful propaganda figure of the
Six Million, Professor Rassinier rejects it on the basis of an
extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has
been falsely established, on the one hand through inflation of the
pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation,
and on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of
survivors after 1945. This was the method used by the World Jewish
Congress. Rassinier also rejects any written or oral testimony to the
Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited above, since they
are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods. He gives
the example of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor
Niemöller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent "238,000" deaths
there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhäusseler of Munich stated in a
speech at Dachau that only 30,000 people died "of the 200,000 persons
from thirty-eight nations who were interned there" (Le Drame des
Juifs européen, p . 12). Today, the estimate has been reduced
by several more thousands, and so it goes on. Rassinier concludes,
too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given by accused
men such as Hoess, Hoettl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were faced
with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of
obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their
detention, is completely untrustworthy. Rassinier finds it very
significant that the figure of Six Million was not mentioned in court
during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the Jerusalem trial
was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six million
European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It
was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war
ended, amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos.
Today, many documents have been published which were not available at
the time of the Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove that if the
Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime,
there could not possibly have been six millions victims" (ibid, p.
125). With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics,
Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs européen
that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War
could not have exceeded 1,200,000, and he notes that this has finally
been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish
Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as a
maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties
in a study of the same problem by the Jewish statistician Raul
Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State of Israel nevertheless
continues to claim compensation for six million dead, each one
representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks.
EMIGRATION: THE FINAL
SOLUTION
Prof. Rassinier is emphatic in stating that
the German Government never had any policy other than the emigration
of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the
Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with
the British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis
of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other
countries to take charge of them, but these refused (ibid, p. 20).
The Palestine project was revived in 1938, but broke down because
Germany could not negotiate their departure on the basis of 3,000,000
marks, as demanded by Britain, without some agreement for
compensation. Despite these difficulties, Germany did manage to
secure the emigration of the majority of their Jews, mostly to the
United States. Rassinier also refers to the French refusal of
Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the
21st August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible
to negotiate with France in this direction and described
conversations which had taken place between July and December 1940,
and which were brought to a halt following the interview with
Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval's
successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would
be able to re-open these negotiations and bring them to a happy
conclusion" (ibid, p . 108). After the outbreak of war, the Jews,
who, as Rassinier reminds us, had declared economic and financial war
on Germany as early as 1933, were interned in concentration camps,
"which is the way countries all over the world treat enemy aliens in
time of war . . . It was decided to regroup them and put them to work
in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of Russia,
was situated towards the end of 1941 in the so-called Eastern
territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland: at
Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Treblinka etc . . . There they
were to wait until the end of the war for the re-opening of
international discussions which would decide their future" (Le
Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). The order for this
concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich,
as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to "the desired
final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had
ended.
ENORMOUS FRAUD
Of great concern to Professor Rassinier is
the way in which the extermination legend is deliberately exploited
for political and financial advantage, and in this he finds Israel
and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after 1950, an
avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the
stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their
activities that one might well believe them to have been contrived in
partnership. One was the "Committee for the Investigation of War
Crimes and Criminals" established under Communist auspices at Warsaw,
and the other, the "World Centre of Contemporary Jewish
Documentation" at Paris and Tel-Aviv. Their publications seem to
appear at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the
Soviet Union their purpose is simply to maintain the threat of Nazism
as a manoeuvre to divert attention from their own activities. As for
Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a
purely material problem. In Le Drame des Juifs européen (P.
31, 39). he writes: " . . . It is simply a question of justifying by
a proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which
Germany has been paying annually since the end of the war to the
State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which moreover she
cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since
there was no State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took
place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly material problem.
"Perhaps I may be allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was
only founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all
states with the exception of Israel, in order to underline the
dimensions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on
the one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six
million dead, and on the other, since at least four-fifths of these
six million were decidedly alive at the end of the war, she is paying
substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims of Hitler's
Germany to those who are still alive in countries all over the world
other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of those who have
since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six
million), or in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying
twice."
CONCLUSION
Here we may briefly summarise the data on
Jewish war- time casualties. Contrary to the figure of over 9 million
Jews in German- occupied territory put forward at the Nuremberg and
Eichmann trials, it has already been estabhshed that after extensive
emigration, approximately 3 million were living in Europe, excluding
the Soviet Union. Even when the Jews of German-occupied Russia are
included (the majority of Russian Jews were evacuated beyond German
control), the overall number probably does not exceed four million.
Himmler's statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr and the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the number respectively at
5,550,000 and 5,294,000 when German- occupied territory was at its
widest, but both these figures include the two million Jews of the
Baltic and western Russia without paying any attention to the large
number of these who were evacuated. However, it is at least an
admission from the latter organisation that there were not even six
million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined. Nothing better
illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million legend than
the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately
avoided mentioning the figure. Moreover, official Jewish estimates of
the casualties are being quietly revised downwards. Our analysis of
the population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by
the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Professor Rassinier, demonstrate
that it would have been simply impossible for the number of Jewish
casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. It is
very significant, therefore, that the World Centre of Contemporary
Jewish Documentation in Paris now states that only 1,485,292 Jews
died from all causes during the Second World War, and although this
figure is certainly too high, at least it bears no resemblance at all
to the legendary Six Million. As has been noted earlier, the Jewish
statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896,892.
This is beginning to approach a realistic figure, and the process of
revision is certain to continue. Doubtless, several thousand Jewish
persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must
be seen in the context of a war that cost many millions of innocent
victims on all sides. To put the matter in perspective, for example,
we may point out that 700,000 Russian civilians died during the siege
of Leningrad, and a total of 2,05O,OOO German civilians were killed
in Allied air raids and forced repatriation after the war. In 1955,
another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich (January 19th, 1955),
in a survey of all Second World War casualties based on figures of
the lnternational Red Cross, put the "Loss of victims of persecution
because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and
concentration camps between 1939 and 1945" at 300,000, not all of
whom were Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate
assessment.
IMAGINARY SLAUGHTER
The question most pertinent to the
extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million
European Jews under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee estimated the number of survivors in
Europe to be only one and a half million, but such a figure is now
totally unacceptable. This is proved by the growing number of Jews
claiming compensation from the West German Government for having
allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the number of
these claimants registered with the West German Government had
tripled in ten years and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965).
Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of
the Six Million. Most of these claimants are Jews, so there can be no
doubt that the majority of the 3 million Jews who experienced the
Nazi occupation of Europe are, in fact, very much alive. It is a
resounding confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during the
Second World War can only be estimated at a figure in thousands.
Surely this is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right
to compound it with vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal
shame a great European nation, as well as wringing fraudulent
monetary compensation from them? RICHARD HARWOOD is 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 Rassineir, 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.
Index
Introduction
1. German policy toward the Jews prior to the
war
2. German policy toward the Jews after the outbreak
of war
3. Population and Emigration
4. The Six Million: Documentary Evidence
5. The Nuremberg Trials
6. Auschwitz and Polish Jewry
7. Some Concentration Camps Memoires
8. The Nature & Condition of War Time
Concentration Camps
9. The Jews and The Concentrations Camps: A Factual
Appraisal by the Red Cross
10. The truth at last: The work of Paul
Rassinier
Comments about Did Six Million Really
Die?
The whole book as PDF
