The Drama of the European Jews

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Steppingstones Silver Spring, Maryland

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THE DRAMA OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS

by Professor Paul Rassinier

Translated from the original French

Steppingstones Publications Box 612 Silver Spring, Maryland 2090 I

The original edition of this book was published in France under the title of LE DRAME DES ]UIFS E UROPEEN copyright by Les Sept Couleurs, Paris, France 1964. First American edition published by Steppingstones Publications Box 612 Silver Spring, Md 20901 USA 1st Printing: 2nd Printing: 3rd Printing:

February 1975 March 1975 July 1976

Copyright© by Earl W. Thomas Jr. 1975

The map of pre-war Europe is from The Origz"ns of the Second World War © Copyright 1961 by A. J. P. Taylor (Hamish Hamilton, London).

PAUL RASSINIER

Dedicated to James J. Martin and the late Harry Elmer Barnes Pioneers in Revisionist History

CONTENTS

Foreword by Michael Hardesty ............................. .

9

Chapter I.

Mr. Raul Hilberg, His Doctrine And Methods ........ .

19

II.

Witnesses, Testimonies And Documents ............ .

28

III.

Statistics: Six Million Or. .. ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61

IV.

Conclusion ................................... .

120

FOREWORD PauLRassinier was a French Professor of history and geography who devoted the las( twenty years of his life to a systematic study of one of the most crucial, controversial aspe.cts of World War II history: the atrocity question. More specifically the study of the claim that the German National Socialist government deliberately exterminated European Jewry to, the full exteht it was able to do so before the so-called 'Liberation'. From 1933 to 1943, Rassinier was a professor of history in the College d' enseignement general at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. Durisg the war he engaged in nonviolent resistahce activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the latter part of the war, he contracted a species of typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarde~ the Medaille de la Resistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise. He was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies but was subsequently ousted by the machinations of the French Communist Party in November 1946. At the age of 16, in 1922, Rassinier was very briefly drawn into theCommunist Party by the anarchist, Victor Serge. Because he was a . confirmed, total pa~iffst he was expelled from the' Party. After various attempts at unifying the worker movement along the political lines of Souvarine, and the trade union projects of Pierre Monatte, he joined the Socialist Party on the evening of February 6, 1934. Secretary of the Socialist Union of Belfort, he attempted to ·popularize the pacifist viewpoints of Felicien Challaye, Rene Gerin, Madeleine Vernet, and Louis Lecain. He was a Resistant from the first hour of the German Occupation and was one of· the founders of the 'Libe-Nord' movement. He tried to inculcate into Resistance movements his non-violent, pacifist philosophy. He was as a result condemned to death by the Communist faction of the Resistance and received the customary coffin effigy warning. A few remarks here concerning the general importance of a revisionist study of the Second World War and the interrelated atrocity question would be in order. Only the alleged urgency of the Hitler menace and the alleged extent of Hitler's guilt could even begin to justify the enormous losses and the horrible consequences of the war. Fifty million lives lost, twenty-five trillion dollars spent, half of Europe under Communist rule, China under Communist rule, vast increases in taxation, goverriment economic controls and the national d~bt, militarism as a permanent way of life, the expenditure of one and one-half trillion dollars since 1946 on 'national defense' to contain our former 'Allies' - the Communists, a foreign aid program of close to two hundred billion dollars to allegedly 'contain' Communism since the end of the war, the growth of various, vicious little 'national liberation' movements around the world seeking to impose their ugly little brand of Marxist totalitarianism on various countries, a massive American interventionism, meddling and economic imperialism to allegedly contain those same movements, a growing world-wide economic crisis, galloping inflation, the total collapse of Great Britain as a world power, the cutting of Germany in two, the increasingly widespread proliferation'of nuclear arms, the enormous growth of racism world-wide and the undeniable fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind today live under various dictatorships of one brand or another. Some of the Allies ('Good Guy') atrocities include: The Katyn Massacre of Polish officers and intellectuals (the entire Polish officer corps) in early 1940, the expulsion of about fifteen million Germans from their former homes in areas that had been under their control for over 800 years, and the subsequent death of four to six million German nationals in the process, the English initiation of civilian saturation bombing in May 1940, the militarily unjustified atom-bombing of the Japa-

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THE DRAMA OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS

nese c1t1es (planned by Roosevelt), the forcible repatriation of several million nationals back to the U.S.S.R. via 'Operation Keelhaul' in 1944-1947, the Communist inspired 'Morgenthau Plan' which envisioned turning over it1dustrial Germany into a pastoral land and contemplated with equanimity the probable death of thirty million Germans in the process and which was to a partial extent enacted under JCS 106 7 by the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany after the war. In addition the absurd 'unconditional surrender' program should be singled out for special condemnation as a particularly vicious Allied war atrocity, because it completely aborted the possibility of a negotiated peace in 1943, demoralized the anti-Hitler opposition in Germany, and caused several million needless deaths. The slogans and so-called 'principles' of the 'Atlantic Charter' and the 'Four Freedoms' were not even proposed in good faith, much less was any effort made to implement them into ~eality. All these and many more Allied atrocities have been overlooked, ignored; whitewashed and obscured by the alleged extermination of several million Jews by the Nazis during the war. The figures have never been very precise on this alleged atrocity - they have ranged· from forty million to twenty-five million to nine million to two million by supposedly reputable historians. The commonly cited figure is six. million but the historians who have used this figure all come to it by different routes and the discrepancies such as pertain to several countries such as Hungary, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia are startling to say the least. The German National Socialist policy relative to the Jews was one that favored emigration, not extermination. The government of Adolf Hitler considered the Jewish Community in Germany to be a disloyal and avaricious element. The relatively high percentage of Communists and leftist revolutionaries who were of Jewish background tended to be translated by the Nazis into the idea that a high percentage of Jews as such were Communists. This is of course an altogether different proposition and it 'is not any intention of this writer to defend it. The key factor here is, that believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of the German Jews had emigrated with a sizable proportion of their assets. However, there was a very determined effort made by liberal-leftists, Communist and some Jewish sources to attempt to obliterate the difference in the two concepts of emigration and extermination. Lion Feuchtwanger, Hans Beimler and other assorted German emigres, produced several works along this theme in which the emigration policy and the various legislative acts were being equated with actual physical extermination. The various concentration camps in Germany at that time never held more than 21,000 persons, of which the Jewish total was about 3,000. The camps were principally used for the detention of political opponents, certain types of hard-core criminals, and so-called subversives, principally Communists and Marxist Social Democrats. Compared to the camps in the Soviet Union which held many millions of persons, they were very small. The Nazi approach to Jewish emigration was not merely a negative policy of expulsion but was a more positive approach along· the lines of modern Zionism. The founder of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, Theodore Herzl, in his work THE JEWISH STATE had postulated the East African island of Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jews, and this idea was seriously studied by the Nazis. The Nazis in fact advocated this in one of their pamphlets, and believed Madagascar was a much more acceptable homeland than the revival of 'Israel' as a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab World. The Polish and the French governments were agreeable to the Madagascar idea but it was torpedoed by the British government's refusal to accept the financial terms put forward by the German government A Polish Jewish refugee in England, Professor Rafael Lemkin, was the first to make charges of 'mass extermination' in his 1943 wartime book, AXIS RULE IN

FOREWORD

11

OCCURIED EUROPE. Lemkin was the first author to state that the Nazis were exterminating millions of Jews in 'gas chambers.' He claimed that the Nazis had ex ter~inat@dpossibly as many as six million Jews. This, in 1943, would indeed have been remarkable, since the action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At that rate, the entire world Jewish population would have been exterminated by 1945. After the war, even more fantastic nonsense was spread via the world propaganda media. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have infiltrated the S.S., told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier that he knew that no less than forty million concentration camp inmates had been 'gassed.' He later reduced the figure to twenty-five million and then again reduced it to the six million figure desired by the French Prosecutor Dubost at the so-called 'Nuremburg Trials.' Gerstein claimed to have witnessed the most fantastic 'mass execution' at camps where it is now even acknowledged by official Jewish sources, such as the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv, that no 'gas chambers' were located there. He even describes a visit by Hitler to a concentration camp in Poland on June 6, 1942 which is known never to have taken place. The Tribunal at Nuremberg even refused to admit this impossible forgery into evidence at the 'Trials.' It was the world press which was responsible for publicizing this fraud and giving it an air of 'authenticity.' Another so-called 'witness' was a Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, a former assistant of Adolf Eichmann, who in fact was an agent in the service of American Intelligence (OSS) and who had written several books under the pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked for Soviet Intelligence, collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna, Perger and Verber, who acted as U.S. officers during the pre-trial inquiries of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The highly dubious testimony of Hoettl is said to constitute the only 'proof' regarding the al~eged murder of six million Jews. In his affidavit of November 26, 1945 he stated that he did not know of the murders firsthand, but that Eichmann allegedly 'told him' in August 1944 in Budapest. Since Hoettl was working as an American spy during the latter period of the war, it is very strange indeed that he never informed his American superiors of such a monstrous plot. It needs to be particularly emphasized that there is not a single document iri existence which proves tl).at the Germans ever intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews. In the flood of atrocity books by various 'authorities' such as Reidinger, Poliakov, Arendt, Hilberg, etc., which have appeared since the war the most that these 'experts' can assemble are statements after the war extracted under physical and psychological torture frpm people such as Hoettl, Gerstein, Ohlendorf, and Wisliceny. Therefore, in the absence of any real, concrete, factual, provable evidence; Poliakov writes: 'The three or four people chiefly involved in drawing up the plan for total extermination are dead, and no documents survive.' All of this is very convenient for the liberal intellectual establishment perpetrating this legend, but it only means that 'the plan' and the 'three or four' people are nothing but very nebulous assumptions on the part of all of these writers, and are completely unprovable. Since the documents which do survive make no mention whatsoever of extermination, the various 'experts' perpetuating the myth conveniently assume that such orders were generally verbal. Otto Ohlendorf, chief of the Einsatzgruppen D unit in southern Russia had originally been 'persuaded' to sign a statement to the effect that 90,000 Jews had been murdered under his command. When Ohlendorf finally came to trial in 1948 he insisted that his earlier statement had been extorted from him by torture. During his speech in his own behalf at the 1948 trial, Ohlendorf denounced Mr. Philip Auerbach, the Jewish Attorney-General of the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, for having r>ecently stated that he was seeking compensation for an alleged 'eleven million Jews' who had suffered in concentration camps. Ohlendorf stated that 'not the minutest part' of the people for whom Auerbach was seeking compensation had ever even seen a concentration camp. Eventually Auerbach was convicted for

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THE DRAMA OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS

embezzlement and fraud directly related to his attempt to get money for his phantom victims. Ohlendorf told the Tribunal that his formations often had to take ~~gorous action to prevent pogroms against Jews organized by various Russian nationalities behind the German front. He denied that the Einsatzgruppen as a whole inflicted even one quarter of the alleged 1,000,000 casualties claimed by the prosecution. He stated that the illegal (under international law) partisan warfare in Russia, which the Einsatzgruppen were· combatting had taken a far higher toll of German army lives - at least 500,000 Germans were killed, a figure confirmed by the Soviet govern~ent. Since any Russian civilian who maintained his civilian status instead of acting as a terrorist or franc tir.eur was liable to be executed by the Soviets as a 'traitor,' it was virtually impossible on the whole Russian Front to draw any clearcut, proper distinction between the 'civilian population' and the terro,rists. This, of course, is one of the basic purposes of the Communists' 'civilian guerrilla warfare' program used throughout the world with much success, and in Inda-China in particular most recently. While various ivory tower theorists living in a virtual cloudcuckoo land refer to the 'beautiful Peoples' Wars,' in actual reality the civilian, guerrilla type of warfare is the most vicious, cowardly, bloody, brutal and unheroic brand of warfare know to mankind. This was the type of warfare German uniformed soldiers had to fight, and that is why Ohlendorf in a written appeal before his execution in 1951, accused the Allied of utter hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account to conventional laws of warfare when they (Germany) had to fight a very savage, ferocious Soviet enemy who did not respect those laws. The brilliant English jurist, R. T. Paget, in his book,.MANSTEIN, HIS CAMPAIGN AND HIS TRIAL (London 1951), concluded that the Allied prosecution in accepting Soviet figures, had exaggerated !he number of casualties inflicted by the Einsatzgruppen by more than 1000% and in addition that they (Allied side) distorted much further the actual situation in which these casualties were generally inflicted. This is a key point in the whole extermination legend because it is the popular mythology that the physical liquidation of European Jewry began with the action of the Einsatzgruppen against their Soviet adversaries in 1941. The whole extermination ~egend was built on just such bits and pieces of calculated falsehood. The trial of Oswald Pohl was another instance of Allied utter hypocrisy. For eleven years, Pohl was the principal administrative chief of the entire S.S. in his capacity as head of the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, which after 1941 was· concerned with the industrial productivity of the concentration camps system. The highlight of hypocrisy was reached at the Trial when the prosecution said to Pohl 'that had Germany rested with the exclusion of Jews from her own territory, with denying them German citizenship. with excluding them from public office, or any like domestic regulation, no other nation could have been heard to complain.' Of course in point of fact Germany was bombarded with invective and economic sanctions for doing precisely these things, and her internal measures against the Jews were certainly a very. crucial pre-War propaganda cause celebre by the factions in the 'democracies' which eventually steered their respective countries into war agamst her. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R. Wisconsin) pointed out that Pohl had signed some incriminating statements after being subjected to severe torture, including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. Pohl successfully repudiated this particular charge. Eventually enough first hand reports were brought forward by American and British observers after the war which established the complete fraudulen