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.
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