NOTE: In the course of translation and at least two digital transmissions, some portions of the text of this section were slightly damaged. All text contained in square brackets [...] indicates an editorial substitution or omission of garbled text passages.--7/20/96
In 1941, Yitzhak Shamir committed "an unforgivable crime from the
moral point of view: he preached an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi
Germany, against Great Britain."
Source: Bar Zohar. "Le prophète armé-- : Ben
Gourion." (Fayard. Paris 1966, p.99.)
When the war against Hitler began, almost all the Jewish
organizations joined forces with the Allies and some of the most
eminent leaders, such as Weizmann, declared themselves on the allied
side; but the German Zionist group, though it was a small minority at
the time, took the opposite side : from 1933 to 1941, it was
committed to a policy of compromise and even of collaboration with
Hitler. The Nazi authorities, even while they persecuted the Jews,
for example by dismissing them from the Civil Service, kept contact
with the Zionist leaders, granting them special treatment and
distinguishing them from the "integrationist" Jews they were hunting
down.
The accusation of collusion with the Hitlerian authorities does not
therefore apply to the immense majority of Jews; these had not even
waited until the war to fight Fascism with weapons, as they did in
Spain from 1936 to 1939 as members of the International brigades, all
the way to the Warsaw ghetto where the fighters of the "Jewish
Committee" showed that they knew how to die in battle.
But the highly organized minority of Zionist leaders collaborated
with the Nazis for eight years. Their one goal was to create a
powerful Jewish State, while their racist vision of the world made
them more anti-British than anti-Nazi.
On September 5th 1939, two days after the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany, Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency, wrote to the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. In his letter, he declared: "We Jews are on the side of Great Britain, and shall fight for democracy." He added that "the Jewish representatives are ready to sign an immediate agreement to allow the use of all their resources in men, techniques, material aid and all their capacities." This letter was printed in "The Jewish Chronicle" of September 8th, 1939 ; it was a genuine declaration of war on Germany by the Jewish people and raised the problem of internment of all Jews in Germany within concentration camps as "citizens of a nation at war with Germany."
In the days of Hitler and Mussolini, the Zionist leaders behaved in an ambivalent way with regards to Fascism, at times sabotaging the anti-Fascist struggle and even attempting to collaborate at others. The fundamental aim of the Zionists was not to save Jewish lives but to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Ben Gurion, Israel's first head of State, declared outright to the "Labor" Zionists on December 7th 1938:
"If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel."
Source: Yvon Gelbner, "Zionist policy and the fate of European
Jewry", in Yad Vashem studies (Jerusalem, vol. XII, p. 199).
"The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of
the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of
the State which was primordial in their eyes."
Source: Tom Segev. "Le septième million" Ed. Liana
Levi, Paris, 1993, p.539"
(...) Must we help all those who need it without taking into
account the characteristics of each one? Must we not give this action
a national Zionist character and attempt to give priority to the
saving of those who can be useful to the Land of Israel and to
Judaism? I know it may seem cruel to pose the question in this way,
but unfortunately we must establish clearly that if we are able to
save 10,000 people out of the 50,000 people who can contribute to the
construction of the land and to the national rebirth, or else a
million Jews who will become a burden for us or at best a dead
weight, we must restrict ourselves to the saving of the 10,000 who
can be saved - despite the accusations and the appeals of the million
left behind."
Source: Memorandum of the "Salvation Committee" of the
Jewish Agency. 1943. Quoted by Tom Segev. Op. cit. p.124.
It was this fanaticism which inspired, for instance, the attitude of
the Zionist delegation at the Evian conference of July 1938, where 31
nations had gathered to discuss the absorption of refugees from Nazi
Germany : the Zionist delegation demanded, as the only possible
solution, the admission of 200,000 Jews to Palestine.
The Jewish state was more important than the lives of Jews.
As far as the Zionist leaders were concerned, the worst enemy was
"assimilation". In this they resembled the Hitlerians as do all
racists, for whom the fundamental preoccupation is purity of blood.
This is why the Hitlerians regarded the Zionists as valid
interlocutors who served their designs, insofar as Hitler's ultimate
goal was to rid Germany, and later Europe, of all Jews. We have proof
of this collusion between Nazis and Zionists.
In a memorandum of June 21st 1933 to the Nazi party, the "Zionist
Federation of Germany" expressed itself as follows:
"In the foundation of the new State, which has proclaimed the race principle, we wish to adapt our community to these new structures... Our recognition of the Jewish nationality allows us to establish clear and sincere relations with the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not want to underestimate these fundamental principles, because we too are against mixed marriages and for the maintaining of the purity of the Jewish group...The Jews who are conscious of their identity and in whose name we speak, can find a place within the structure of the German State, for they are free of the resentment that the assimilated Jews must feel;...we believe in the possibility of loyal relations between those Jews conscious of their community and the German State.
To attain its practical objectives, Zionism hopes it will be able to collaborate with a government that is fundamentally hostile to the Jews....The realization of Zionism is impeded only by the resentment of Jews from without against the present German orientation The propaganda in favor of Zionism currently aimed against Germany is essentially non-Zionist... "
Source: Lucy Dawidovitch, "A Holocaust reader", p. 155.
The memorandum added that "should the Germans accept the
cooperation of the Zionists, these would try to dissuade Jews abroad
from supporting the anti-German boycott."
Source: Lucy Dawidovitch : "The war against Jews (1933-1945)"
Penguin books. 1977. p.231-232
The Hitlerian leaders were well-disposed towards the Zionists, whose
exclusive aim was to create a state in Palestine, thus favoring their
own designs to get rid of the Jews. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi
theoretician, wrote:
"Zionism must be vigorously backed so that a yearly contingent of German Jews shall be transported to Palestine."
Source: A. Rosenberg: "Die Spur des juden im Wandel der Zeiten".
Munich 1937. p.153.
Reinhardt Heydrich, who was later to become "Protector" of
Czechoslovakia, wrote in Das Schwarze Korps, the official
organ of the S.S. in 1935, when he was head of the S.S. security. In
an article entitled "The invisible enemy", he made a distinction
between two kinds of Jews:
"We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State...our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them."
Source: Hohne. "Order of the Death's Head", p.333.
"The German Betar received a new name: Herzlia. The activities of the movement in Germany had to obtain, of course, the approval of the Gestapo; in fact, Herzlia acted under the protection of the Gestapo. One day, a group of SS attacked a Betar summer camp. The head of the movement then complained to the Gestapo and, a few days later, the secret police declared that the SS in question had been punished. The Gestapo asked the Betar what compensation would seem most adequate. The movement asked that the recent prohibition that had struck them, forbidding them to wear brown shirts, be lifted; their request was granted."
Source: Ben-Yeruham, "Le livre de Betar" T.II, p. 350.
A circular issued by the Wilhelmstrasse indicated :
"The goals that this category of Jews have set themselves (those Jews who oppose assimilation and favor a regrouping of their co-religionaries within a nation), with the Zionists in the front rank,are those least distant from the goals pursued in reality by Germany's policy towards the Jews."
Source: Circular letter by Bulow-Schwante to all the Reich
diplomatic
missions. #83. February 28,1934.
"There is no reason," wrote Bulow-Schwante to the Ministry of
the Interior,"to impede by administrative measures the Zionist
activity in Germany ; for Zionism is not in conflict with the
National-Socialist program, whose object is to make the Jews leave
Germany progressively."
Source: Letter number ZU 83-21. 28/8, April 13, 1935.
These directives confirmed previous measures and were applied
scrupulously. By virtue of the privileged status of Zionism in
Germany, the Bavarian Gestapo addressed the following circular to the
police on January 28,1935: "By reason of their activity orientated
towards emigration to Palestine, the members of the Zionist
organization must not be treated with the harshness needed in dealing
with the members of German Jewish (assimilationist)
organizations."
Source: Kurt Grossmann : "Sionistes et non sionistes sous la loi
nazie dans les années 30" Yearbook.Vol.VI, p.310.
"The Zionist organization of German Jews had a legal existence
until 1938, five years after the advent of Hitler....
The "Judaiche Rundschau" (the German Zionist
newspaper) came out until 1938."
Source: Leibowitz: "Israel et Judaisme". Ed. Desclée de
Brouwer, 1993. p.116.
In exchange for their official recognition as sole representatives of
the Jewish community, the Zionist leaders offered to break the
boycott which the world anti-Fascists were trying to organize.
Economic collaboration began in 1933 : two companies were created :
the "Haavara Company" at Tel Aviv and the "Paltreu", in Berlin.
The mechanism of the operation was the following : a Jew wanting to
emigrate would deposit a minimum of 1,000 pounds sterling at the
Wasserman Bank in Berlin or in the Warburg bank in Hamburg. With this
sum, Jewish exporters could buy German goods for Palestine, and pay
the corresponding amount in Palestinian pounds into the Haavara
account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank at Tel Aviv. When the immigrant
arrived in Palestine, he received the equivalent of the sum he had
deposited in Germany.
Several future Israeli prime ministers took part in the "haavara"
undertaking, including Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharret (who was then called
Moshe Shertok), Golda Meir (who supported it from New York), and Levi
Eshkol, who was its representative in Berlin.
Source: "Ben Gourion et Shertok, dans Black": L'accord de la
"havaara", p.294. Quoted by Tom Segev in "Le septieme million", (Ed.
Liana Levi. French translation. 1993, p. 30 and 595).
The operation was advantageous for both parties : the Nazis thus
succeeded in breaking the blockade (the Zionists managed to sell
German merchandise even in Britain); whereas the Zionists were able
to operate the "selective" immigration they desired : only
millionaires were able to emigrate, their capital providing the funds
needed to develop Zionist colonization in Palestine. In accordance
with the goals of Zionism, it was more important to save Jewish
capital from Nazi Germany that would permit the development of their
undertaking, than to save the lives of poor Jews, unable to work or
fight, who would have been a burden.
This policy of collaboration lasted until 1941, in other words eight
years after Hitler's rise to power. Eichmann liaisoned with Kastner.
The Eichmann trial revealed to some extent the mechanism of this
connivance, of these "exchanges" between Zionist Jews "useful" to the
creation of a Jewish State (wealthy personalities, technicians and
youngsters who could serve to reinforce an army, etc.). with a mass
of Jews who, being less favored, were left in Hitler's clutches.
The president of the committee, Ytzhak Gruenbaum, declared on January
18, 1943:
"Zionism comes before everything else.. "
"They're going to say I'm an anti-Semite," Gruenbaum answered, "that I don't want to save the Exile, that I don't have a Warm Yiddish heart (...) Let them say what they want. I won't demand the sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Judaism. And I think that whoever demands such things accomplishes an anti-Zionist action."
Source: Gruenbaum: "Jours de destruction", p. 68.
This was also Ben Gourion's point of view:
"The Zionist's task is not to save the "rest" of Israel which finds itself in Europe, but to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people."
(Quoted by Tom Segev. op.cit.p.158.)
"The leaders of the Jewish Agency agreed on the fact that the
minority which could be saved had to be chosen according to the needs
of the Zionist project in Palestine."
Source: Idem p.125.
The conclusion of Isaiah Trunk's book : "Judenrat" (MacMillan,
New York 1972) was that:
"According to Freudiger's calculations, fifty percent of the Jews could have escaped if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils." (p.141)
Significantly, at the time of the 50 th anniversary of the uprising
of the Warsaw ghetto, Yitzhak Rabin asked Lech Walesa not to let one
of the co-leaders of the insurrection, Marek Edelman, make a
speech.
In 1993, Marek Edelman had been interviewed by Edward Alter for the
Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". In this interview, he recalled those who
had been the true instigators and heroes of the Warsaw ghetto's
"Jewish fighters' committee":
"Socialists of the Bund, anti-Zionists, Communists, Trotskyites, Mihal Rosenfeld, Mala Zimetbaum, Edelman and a minority of Left-wing Zionists from the Poalei Zion and the Hashomer Hatzair."
"It was they who fought against the Nazis with weapons, as did the Jewish volunteers in the international brigades of Spain. Over 30% of the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were Jews, who were attacked at the time by the Zionist press because they fought in Spain instead of going to Palestine."
Source: "Jewish Life", April 1938, p. 11.
2,250 of the fighters in the Polish Dombrovski brigade, out of a
total of 5,000 Poles, were Jews.
These heroic Jews fought on all fronts side by side with the
antiFascist forces of the world. And yet, the Zionist leaders
declared in an article by their London representatives entitled :
"Must Jews take part in the anti-Fascist movements?" "NO !...",
setting a single goal : "the construction of the land of Israel".
In his autobiography, the President of the World Zionist
Organization, Nahum Goldman, described his dramatic meeting with
the Czech Prime Minister, Edward Benes, in 1935. Benes accused the
Zionists of having broken the boycott of Hitler with the "Ha'avara"
(the transfer agreements) and blamed the refusal of the world Zionist
Organization to organize resistance against the Nazis.
"I have had to take part in many painful meetings in my life, but I have never felt as miserable and ashamed as during those two hours. I felt with every fibre of my being that Benes was right."
Source: Nahum Goldman."Autobiographie", op.cit. pp. 157- 158.
Ibid, p.260.
The Zionists, counting on Mussolini's hostility to England,
established contact with him as early as 1922. He had received them
after his march on Rome in October, on December 20th 1922.
Source: Ruth Bondy, "The Emissary: a life of Enzo Sereni"
(p.45).
Mussolini received Weizman on January 3rd 1923, and another time on
September 17th 1926; Nahum Goldman, president of the World Zionist
Organization, had a meeting with Mussolini on October 26th,1927,
where the Italian leader told him : "I will help you to create
this Jewish state." (Nahum Goldman : "Autobiographie",
op.cit.p.170)
This collaboration was already a form of sabotage against the
international anti-Fascist struggle. It subordinated the entire
Zionist policy to the sole design of building a Jewish state in
Palestine. Its design remained unaltered during the war, even when
Hitler's persecution of European Jews was at its worst.
When the Jews were deported from Hungary, Rudolf Kastner, the
vice-president of the Zionist organization, negotiated with Eichmann
on the following basis : if Eichmann allowed the departure to
Palestine of 1,684 "useful" Jews who would help in the construction
of the future state of Israel (capitalists, technicians, soldiers,
etc...) Kastner would allow Eichmann to make 460,000 Hungarian
believe that they were not being deported to Auchwitz but simply
being transferred.
At the time of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi recalled that Kastner
had intervened on behalf of one of his Nazi interlocutors : one of
Himmler's henchmen, Standarten feurher Kurt Becher, escaped
punishment thanks to Kastner's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial.
The Judge was formal:
"There was no truth or good faith in Kastner's testimony...Kastner deliberately committed perjury in his testimony before this court when he denied that he had intervened on behalf of Becher. Furthermore, he concealed this vital fact : his action on behalf of Becher was made in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...It is clear that Kastner's recommendation was not made on a personal basis but also in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...and this is why Becher was released by the Allies."
After the verdict, Israeli opinion was shaken. In the newspaper
"Haaretz", Dr. Moshe Keren wrote on July 14th 1955 :"Kastner must
be tried for collaboration with the Nazis..." But the evening
paper "Yediot Aharonot" (23rd June,1955) clearly explained why this
was impossible. "If Kastner is tried, the entire government might
collapse before the nation, following what this trial will
uncover."
What would be discovered was that Kastner had not acted alone but
with the agreement of the other Zionist leaders who were members of
the government at the time of the trial. The only way to prevent
Kastner from talking and causing a scandal was for him to disappear.
And indeed, he died at just the right moment, after which the Israeli
Government introduced an appeal to rehabilitate him. The Supreme
Court granted the appeal.
This policy of collaboration reached its apogee in 1941, when the
most extremist Zionist group, the "LEHI" ("Fighters for the
Liberation of Israel"), led by Abraham Stern and, after his death, by
a triumvirate of which Itzak Shamir was a member, committed " an
unforgivable crime from the moral point of view : advocating an
alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain. "
Source: Bar Zohar. "Ben Gourion, le Prophète armé"
(Fayard. Paris 1966. p.99)
Eliezer Halevi, a well-known Labor unionist, member of the Gueva
Kibbutz, revealed in the weekly "Tel-Aviv Hotam" (August l9th, 1983)
the existence of a document signed by Itzak Shamir (who was then
called Yezernitsky) and by Abraham Stern; this document was handed
over to the German embassy in Ankara at a time of all-out war in
Europe, and when Marshal Rommel's troops were already on Egyptian
soil. The document said, among other things, "In the matter of
concept, we identify with you. So why not collaborate with one
another ?" In its issue of January 31st,1983, "Haaretz" quotes a
letter marked "secret", sent in January 1941 by Hitler's ambassador
to Ankara, Franz Von Papen, to his superiors. In it, he described his
contacts with the members of the Stern Gang, joining a memorandum by
the Nazi secret service agent in Damas, Werner Otto Von Hentig,
regarding the negotiations with the envoys of Stern and Shamir. The
memo said, notably : "cooperation between the Israel liberation
movement and the new order in Europe conform with one of the speeches
of the Chancellor of the Third Reich, in which Hitler stressed the
need to use every combination of coalition to isolate and defeat
England." It also said that the Stern Gang had "close links
with the totalitarian movements in Europe, their ideology and
structures." These documents are to be found at the Holocaust
Memorial (Yad Vachem) in Jerusalem, classified under the number
E234151-8.
One of the historical leaders of the Stern Gang, Israel Eldad,
published an article in the Tel Aviv daily,"Yediot Aharonot"
(February 4th, 1983) in which he confirmed the authenticity of these
negotiations between his movement and the official representatives of
Nazi Germany. He asserted straight out that his colleagues had
explained to the Nazis how there was a probable identity of interest
between the new order in Europe based on the German concept, and the
aspirations of the Jewish people in Palestine, as represented by the
Stern freedom fighters for Israel.
This text was entitled:
"Basic principles of the military organization(NMO) in Palestine
(Irgun Zevai Leumi) concerning the solution of the Jewish question in
Europe and the active participation of the NMO in the war on the side
of Germany."
The following are extracts:
It emerges from the speeches of the leaders of the German National Socialist State that a radical solution to the Jewish question implies an evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe. (Judenreines Europa).
This evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is the primary condition of the solution of the Jewish problem, but it is only made possible by the installation of these masses in Palestine, in a Jewish state with its historical frontiers.
To resolve the Jewish problem definitively and to liberate the Jewish people is the goal of the political activity and the long years of struggle of the "Movement for the Freedom of Israel" (Lehi) and its national military organization in Palestine (Irgun Zevai Leumi).
The NMO, knowing the benevolent position of the Reich government towards the Zionist activity within Germany, and the Zionist emigration projects, considers that:
1) There could exist common interests between the foundation of a new order in Europe, according to the German concept, and the genuine aspirations of the Jewish people as they are incarnated by the Lehi.
2) Cooperation would be possible between the new Germany and a renewed Hebrew nation (Volkish Nationalen Hebraertum).
3) The establishment of the historical Jewish State on a national and totalitarian base, linked by a treaty to a German Reich, could contribute to the reinforcement in the future of Germany's position in the Middle East.
On condition that the German government recognizes the national aspirations of the 'Movement for the Freedom of Israel' (Lehi), the National Military Organization (NMO) proposes to participate in the war on the side of Germany.
The cooperation of the Israel liberation movement would go in the direction of the recent speeches of the Reich chancellor, in which Mr. Hitler stressed that all negotiations and any alliance should serve to isolate England and to defeat it.
Because of its structure and concept of the world, the NMO is narrowly linked to the European totalitarian movements.
Source: The original text, in German, is to be found as appendix
number 11 of the book by David Yisraeli: "Le probleme palestinien
dans la politique allemande, de 1889 " 1945", Bar Ilan University
Ramat Gan. Israel, 1974,p. 315-317.
According to the Israeli press, which has published a dozen articles
on the subject, the Nazis never took the proposals of Stern, Shamir
and their friends seriously.
The negotiations stopped abruptly when the Allied troops arrested the
emissary of Stern and Shamir in June 1941. The emissary, Naftali
Loubentchik, was actually arrested in the Nazi secret service office
at Damascus. Other members of the group continued to have contacts
with the Nazis until the arrest by the British authorities of Izhak
Shamir in December 1941 for "terrorism and collaboration with the
Nazi enemy."
Such a past did not prevent Izhak Shamir from becoming Prime
Minister, and from still being today the leader of a powerful
"opposition", the most fiercely determined to continue the occupation
of Cisjordania. This is because, in fact, the Zionist leaders all
pursue the same racist goal, notwithstanding their internal rivalries
: to chase all the native Arabs out of Palestine through terror,
expropriation or expulsion, in order to remain the sole conquerors
and masters.
Ben Gurion once declared:
"Begin undeniably belongs to the Hitlerian type. He is a racist, ready to destroy all the Arabs in his dream of unification of Israel, prepared to resort to any means to realize this sacred goal."
Source: E.Haber. "Menahem Begin, the man and the legend." Delle
Book. New York 1979, p. 385.
The same Ben Gurion never believed in the possibility of coexistence
with the Arabs. The fewer Arabs there were within the borders of of
the future state of Israel, the better it would be. He did not say so
explicitly, but the overall impression one gets from his speeches and
his comments is clear: a major offensive against the Arabs would not
only defeat their attacks but would also reduce as far as possible
the percentage of the Arab population within the State.
"(...) He can be accused of racism, but then one will have to put on trial the entire Zionist movement, which is founded on the principle of a purely Jewish entity in Palestine."
Source: Bar Zohar (op.cit) p.146.
At the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Attorney General, Haim Cohen,
reminded the judges:
"If it does not coincide with your philosophy, you can criticize Kastner...But what does that have to do with collaboration?...It has always been in our Zionist tradition to select an elite to organize immigration to Palestine... Kastner did nothing else."
Source: Court record 124/53. Jerusalem district court.
This prominent magistrate was indeed evoking a constant doctrine of
the Zionist movement : its goal was not to save Jews but to build a
strong Jewish state.
Rabbi Klaussner, who was in charge of "Displaced persons," presented
a report before the Jewish American Conference on May 2nd, 1948:
"I am convinced people must be forced to go to Palestine....For them, an American dollar appears as the highest of goals. By the word "force", I am suggesting a programme. It served for the evacuation of the Jews in Poland, and in the history of the 'Exodus'... To apply this programme we must, instead of providing 'displaced persons' with comfort, create the greatest possible discomfort for them...At a second stage, a procedure calling upon the Haganah to harass the Jews."
Source: Alfred H.Lilienthal in "What price Israel", Chicago
1953.p.194-195.
There were several variations on this method of inducement and even
of coercion.
In 1940, to arouse indignation against the English, who had decided
to save the Jews threatened by Hitler by taking them to Mauritius,
the Zionist leaders of the "Hagannah" (led by Ben Gurion) did not
hesitate to blow up the ship when it called at Haifa on December 25th
1940, causing the death of 252 Jews and English crew-members.
Source: Dr.Herzl Rosenblum, director of "Yediot Aahronot",
revelation made in 1958 and justified in "Jewish Newsletter",
N.Y.,November 1958.
Another example was that of Irak:
Its Jewish community (110,000 people in 1948) was well-implanted in
the country. The chief Rabbi of Irak, Khedouri Sassoon had declared
:
"The Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for a thousand years and do not consider themselves as separate elements in this nation."
Then began the Israeli terrorist acts in Baghdad in 1950. Confronted
by the reticence of the Iraki Jews to register on the immigration
lists for Israel, the Israeli secret services did not hesitate to
throw bombs at them to convince them they were in danger...The attack
on the Shem-Tov synagogue killed three people and injured dozens
more. It was the start of the exodus baptized "Operation Ali
Baba".
Source: Ha'olam hazeh. April 20th and June 1st 1966, and "Yediot
Aahronot", November 8th 1977.
This has been a consistent doctrine ever since Theodore Herzl
replaced the definition of Jew no longer as a religion but as a
race.
Article 4b of the fundamental law of the State of Israel (which has
no constitution),which defines the "Law of the return" (5710 of
1950), stipulates that:
...will be considered as Jewish a person born of a Jewish mother, or converted. (racial or confessional criteria)
Source: Klein: "L'Etat juif", ed. Dunod.Paris.p.156.
This was in keeping with the founding doctrine of Theodore Herzl, who
constantly harped on the theme in his "Diaries". As early as 1895, he
declared to a German interlocutor (Speidel):
"I understand anti-Semitism. We Jews have remained, even if it is not our fault, foreign bodies in the different nations."
Source : ("Diaries",p.9)
A few pages further, he is even more explicit:
"Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies."
Source: ("Diaries", p.19)
They did indeed have a common goal : to assemble Jews in a world
ghetto.
The facts have borne out Theodore Herzl's arguments.
Pious Jews, like many Christians, repeated each day : "Next
year, Jerusalem, " making of Jerusalem not a specific
territory but the symbol of the Alliance between God and Men, and the
personal effort to deserve it, so that the "Return" occurred only
under the impulse of anti-Semitic threats in foreign countries.
On August 31st 1949, Ben Gurion declared to a group of American
visitors to Israel:
"Although we have realized our dream of creating a Jewish State, we are only at the beginning. There are still only 900,000 Jews in Israel, whereas the majority of the Jewish people still remains abroad. Our future task is to bring all the Jews to Israel."
Ben Gurion's goal was to bring four million Jews to Israel between
1951 and 1961. 800,000 came. In 1960, there were only 30,000
immigrants for the year. In 1975-76, emigration out of Israel
outstripped immigration.
Only the great persecutions, such as that in Romania, had given a
certain impulse to the Return. Even the Hitlerian atrocities did not
succeed in fulfilling Ben Gurion's dream.
Out of the two and a half million Jewish victims of the Nazis which
sought refuge abroad between 1935 and 1943, hardly 8,5% went to
settle in Palestine. The United States limited their number to
182,000 allowed to enter US soil (less than 7%); England limited the
number to 67,000 (less than 2%). The vast majority (1,930,000),in
other words 75% found shelter in the Soviet Union.
Source: Institute for Jewish Affairs of New York, quoted by
Christopher Sykes in "Crossroads to Israel", London 1965, and by
Nathan Weinstock, "Le sionisme contre Israel," p.146.
"This tribunal represents a continuation of the war efforts of
the Allied nations."
Source: Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Attorney-General (26th July 1946
session)
On August 8th 1945, the American, English, French and Russian met in
London to organize "the pursuit and the punishment of the great war
criminals of the European Axis Powers," by creating a "military
international tribunal" (article I,a).
The crimes were defined under Title II, article 6.
1 - Crimes against peace by those who were responsible for starting the war."
2 - Crimes of war for the violation of laws and customs of war."
3 - Crimes against humanity, in other words crimes essentially committed against civilians.
The constitution of this jurisdiction already calls for a few
remarks:
1 - It was not an international tribunal since it consisted only of
the victors and, consequently, only the crimes committed by the
vanquished were taken into consideration. As the American Attorney
General, Robert H. Jackson, who presided the audience on July 26th
1946, justly acknowledged:
"The Allies are still, technically-speaking, at war with Germany... As a military tribunal, this tribunal represents a continuation of the war efforts of the Allied nations."
2 - It was therefore an exceptional tribunal constituting the last
act of war, and excluding by its very principle any responsibility on
the part of the victors - first of all in the unleashing of the war.
Any reminder of its primary source was excluded in advance : at
Nuremberg, no-one raised the question of the Treaty of Versailles and
if it was not to be blamed for the resulting consequences - the
bankruptcies and the unemployment especially which allowed the rise
of someone like Hitler, with the consent of a majority of the German
people. The law of the strongest prevailed when Germany was defeated
in 1918, asserting itself as the "right" which made might, when the
Germans had to pay 132 billion gold-marks (the equivalent of 165
billion gold francs) as reparation, at a time when their country's
national fortune was estimated at 260 billion gold-marks.
The German economy was ruined by such measures, and the German people
driven to despair by bankruptcy, by the collapse of the currency and
above all by unemployment ; it was all this which made Hitler's rise
to power possible, giving him his best arguments to sustain his
principal slogan : the cancellation of the Treaty of Versailles, with
its sum total of misery and humiliation.
It is easy to compare the unemployment figures and the successes of
the "National-Socialist Party" at the different elections:
05/04/1924 1,918,000 6.6 32 320,711
12/07/1924 908,000 3.0 14 282,645
05/20/l928 810,000 2.6 12 269,443
09/14/1932 6,407,000 18.3 107 1,061,570
07/31/1932 13,779,000 37.3 230 5,392,248
11/06/1932 11,737,000 33.1 196 5,355,428
03/05/1933 17,265,800 43.7 288 5,598,855
When Hitler and his political allies won the absolute majority in the
Reichstag, they obtained aid for rearmament in dollars, pounds and
francs. The German bank, Shreider, financed Hitler's department of
propaganda, but it was mostly the great American, English and French
trusts which financed the rearmament.
This was true in the case of the American chemical consortium, Dupont
de Nemours and of the English trust;
Imperial Chemicals Industry, which subsidized I.G. Farbein
with whom they had shared the world powder market, and;
Dillon Bank, in New York which subsidized the
Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the German steel trust.
Others were subsidized by Morgan, Rockefeller, et al..
Thus did the pound and the dollar take part in the plot which brought
Hitler to power.
In France, a request by Senator Paul Laffont to the Ministry of the
national Economy concerning the quantities of iron ore exported
towards Germany from 1934 on,received the following answer :
The quantities of iron ore (N 204 of the customs tariff) exported towards Germany in the years 1934,1935,1936 and 1937, are consigned to the following chart :
Year Quantities (in quintals)
1934 17,060,916
1935 58,616,111
1936 77,931,756
1937 71,329,234
Source: Journal officiel de la Republique francaise,March 26th
1938.
Yet the directors of Dupont de Nemours, Dillon, Morgan, Rockefeller
or François de Wendel were not asked to answer for their
actions at Nuremberg, in the chapter entitled "plotting against the
peace".
The imprecations of Hitler and the principal Nazi leaders against
Communists and Jews are often invoked. This is especially true of
Chapter XV of the second volume of "Mein Kampf", in which Hitler
evokes the past: that of the war of the gasses initiated by the
English during the First World War. The chapter is entitled:
"The right to legitimate defence :
"If, at the beginning or during the war,twelve or fifteen thousand of those Hebrew corruptors of the people had been subjected only once to the toxic gasses that hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every walk of life had to endure on the front the sacrifice of millions of men would not have been in vain. On the contrary, if we had got rid in time of these twelve thousand or so scoundrels, we could perhaps have saved the existence of a million good brave Germans full of future."
In a speech before the Reichstag on January 30th 1939, he also said
:
"If the international world of Jewish finance both within and outside Europe were to succeed in plunging nations once again in a world war, the result would not be the Bolshevization of the Earth alongside with the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe...For the age in which the non-Jewish peoples were delivered up defenceless to propaganda is over. National-Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy henceforth possess institutions which make it possible each time it is necessary to enlighten the world regarding the full details and issues of a question which many nations feel instinctively without being able to explain it scientifically to themselves."
"Jews can continue to pursue their campaign of harassment in certain States, protected as they are by the monopoly they exert over the press, the cinema, radio propaganda, theatres, literature and still other means. Yet if that people should suceed once again in precipitating millions of people in a completely absurd conflict for them, though it may be profitable for Jewish interests, then we would see manifesting itself the efficiency of a labour of explanation which has made it possible within a few years in Germany alone to get rid of Judaism completely (restlos erlegen)."
Source: I/M.T. Vol.XXXI, p. 65.
On January 30th 1941, Hitler addressed himself to all the Jews of
Europe, telling them they "would have finished playing their
role in case of generalized warfare." Then, in a speech made
on January 30th 1942, he declared that the war would see "the
annihilation of Judaism in Europe."
Hitler's political testament, published by the Nuremberg
International Military Court is full of statements to the same
effect. For example, we read :
"But I have allowed no doubt to subsist on that score if those international conspirators of the world of money and finance start treating the peoples of Europe like packets of shares, that people which is the true culprit in this murderous conflict will have to render accounts: the Jews ! (Das Judentum !)"
"I have left no-one uncertain as to the fate which awaits he through who millions of children of the Aryan peoples of Europe had to die of hunger, millions of adult men had to die and hundreds of thousands of women and children would be burnt alive in the bombardments of their city. Even if it must be done with more humane means, the culprit will have to expiate his fault. "
Hitler spoke of destroying an "influence"; Himmler spoke more
directly of destroying people.
This, for example, is what Himmler said in a speech addressed to
naval commanders at Weimar on December 16th 1943:
"When, wherever I was, I was forced to give the order to march against partisans and Jewish commissars in a village, then I systematically gave the order to also kill the wives and children of these partisans and commissars."
Later, speaking before some generals at Sonthofen on May 5th 1944, he
added :
"In this conflict with Asia, we must get into the habit of forgetting the rules of the game and the customs in use during European wars of the past, although we have grown attached to them and they suit our mentality better."
This savagery was not, unfortunately, confined to one side.
On September 4th 1940, Hitler declared at the "Sportpalast":
"If the British Air Force throws three or four thousand kilos of bombs on us, we shall throw one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred thousand kilos and more in a single night."
This is a wild exaggeration of the Lutwaffe's possibilities in terms
of strategic bombardments, but it shows the degree of hatred both
camps had reached.
In reply, Clifton Fadiman, editor of the "New Yorker" and figurehead
of the "Writers' War Board", a semi-official government literary
agency, asked writers in 1942:
"...to arouse an ardent hatred against all the Germans and not only against the Nazi leaders."
These words proving controversial, Fadiman insisted:
"...the only way to make Germans understand is to kill them. And even then, I don't think they'll understand."
In April 1942, praising a book by De Sales, "The making of
tomorrow", Fadiman developed his racist concept and
wrote:
"Today's Nazi aggression is not the work of a group of gangsters, but rather the final expression of the deepest instincts of the German people. Hitler is the incarnation of greater forces than himself. The heresy he preaches is 2,000 years old. What is this heresy? Neither more nor less than the rebellion against Western civilization which began with Arminius...the dimensions of this war thus appear distinctly..."
He approved of Hemingway's suggestion:
"...the only ultimate settlement would be to sterilize the Nazis in the surgical meaning of the word. "
He ridiculed Dorothy Thomson, who made a distinction between the
Nazis and other Germans.
His was not an isolated opinion. After Hitler's speech at the
"Sportpalast", the "Daily Herald" in London published an article by
the Reverend C.W. Wipp, declaring:
"The keynote must be : "to sweep them" and, to do that, to concentrate our science on the discovery of new and more terrifying explosives...A minister of the Gospel must perhaps not yield to such feelings, but I say frankly that if I could I would strike Germany off the map. It is a diabolical race which has been the curse of Europe for centuries."
Fortunately, there were protests against such aberrations in England
where the people, not any more than the German people and its high
degree of culture, could be confused with bloodthirsty leaders and
individuals full of hatred and baying for blood.
As early as the month of January 1934, the Zionist leader, Wladimir
Jabotinsky, declared to the Jewish newspaper "Natscha Retsch":
"Our Jewish interests demand the definitive annihilation of Germany; the whole German people poses a threat for us."
As for Churchill, he wrote to Paul Reynaud on May 16th 1940 :
"We shall starve Germany. We shall destroy its cities. We shall burn its crops and its forests."
Source: Paul Baudouin, "Neuf mois au gouvernement". La Table
Ronde, 1948, p.57.
In 1942, the British minister, Lord Vansittart, a true apostle of
hatred, declared to justify the terror of British bombardments:
"The only good Germans are dead Germans; so let the bombs rain down ! "
In July 1944, Churchill sent his chief of staff, General Hastings
Imay, a four-page memorandum in which he proposed the following
project:
"I want you to think over this question of asphyxiating gases very seriously...
"It is absurd to take morality into account in this affair when everyone has already made use of them (asphyxiating gases) during the last war, without there being any protest on the part of moralists or of the church. On the other hand, the bombing of open cities was regarded as taboo at the time; today, everyone does it as a matter of fact. It is only a question of fashion, comparable to the evolution in the length of women's hemlines...
"I want the question of how much it would pay to use asphyxiating gases to be examined coolly...We must not allow our hands to be bound by foolish principles... We could flood the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that the majority of the population would be in constant need of medical help...We may have to wait a few weeks or even a few months before I ask you to flood Germany with asphyxiating gases and,if we do it,let's do it thoroughly. Meanwhile, I would like this question to be examined coolly by sensible people and not by a team of killjoy psalm-singers in uniform of the sort one crosses now and again."
Source: "American heritage", August-September 1985.
Note: The United States produced almost 135,000 tons of toxic
chemical agents during the war, Germany 70,000 tons, the United
Kingdom 40,000 tons and Japan 7,500 tons.
Neither Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Truman had to face trial for war
crimes at Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg court did not try some of the most ignoble calls to
crime of which we can mention two of the wildest : one was a call to
"genocide" (this time in the true meaning of the term) by an American
Jew called Theodore Kaufman, who wrote a book entitled : "Germany
must perish". In it, he put forward the following case:
"The Germans (whoever they are : anti-Nazis, Communists and even philo-Semites) do not deserve to live. Consequently, 20,000 doctors must be mobilized after the war to sterilize 25 Germans a day each. In this way,not one German able to breed will remain within three months, and the German race will be totally eliminated within 60 years."
This book, which came out in 1942, was a godsend for anti-Semites.
Hitler had extracts from it read on all the radio-stations. Another
work of the kind was the "Call to the Red Army" by the Soviet
writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, published in October 1944:
"Kill, kill ! There are no innocents among the Germans, either among the living or among those yet to be born! Carry out the instructions of Comrade Stalin by always crushing the Fascist beast in its lair. Break the pride of German women by violence; take them as legitimate booty. Kill, kill, valiant soldiers of the Red Army, in your irresistible assault." (quoted by Admiral Doenitz,"Dix ans et 20 jours", (pp.343-44).
Neither of the above-mentioned was tried at Nuremberg, any more than
the heads of State which covered them.
Nor were tried the Anglo-American leaders who were responsible for
the bombing of Dresden, which killed 200,000 civilians and which
served no military purpose since the Soviet Army had already reached
the Oder.
Nor was Truman tried, though he was responsible for the atomic
apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which 300,000 civilians
perished, again uselessly since Japan's surrender had already been
decided by the emperor.
Nor were Beria and Stalin tried for the massacre of thousands of
Polish
officers at Katyn, which was blamed on the Germans.
The methods of the procedure were based on the same principles (or
rather absence of principles) as the choice of the accused among the
vanquished only.
The status of the tribunal was defined as follows:
* Article 19 : The Court will not be bound by technical rules
relating to the administration of proofs. It will adopt and apply as
far as possible an expeditive and not a formalist procedure, will
admit any means it considers to have conclusive value.
* Article 21 : The Court will not require proof of facts that
are of public notoriety, but will take them as established. It also
regards as authentic proofs the official documents and reports of the
Allied governments.
This was the juridical monstrosity whose decisions were to be
canonized and regarded as criteria of an untouchable historical
truth, according to the Gayssot-Fabius law of May 2nd
1990.
This text inserts an article 24b in the 1981 law concerning the
freedom of the press which says:
"Article 24b - whosoever contests the existence of crimes against humanity sanctioned by French or international jurisdiction will be punished by imprisonment of from one month to a year and of a fine of between 2,000 and 300,000 francs, or to one of these penalties only."
Such a procedure by the Nuremberg Court raised objections even
amongst the top-level American jurists: those of the Supreme
Court.
One of these was Judge Jackson. The English historian, David Irving,
who admitted he had misjudged him earlier, was to say the following:
"Renowned jurists throughout the world were ashamed of the Nuremberg proceedings. Certainly, Judge Robert H. Jackson, the American president of the accusers, was ashamed of these proceedings ; this was obvious from his "personal diary", which I have read."
"I have had the privilege of having access to the "Memoirs" (of Judge Jackson) at the Library of Congress...Shortly after Robert H. Jackson was entrusted by President Truman with the task of leading the American judges at the Nuremberg Trial, he found out about American plans to use atomic bombs; he was uneasy about the task entrusted to him : to pursue in the name of a nation, acts which it had itself committed, for he was aware that the United States was going to commit an even greater crime." (33.9392 and 9394)
Referring to the book by Alpheus Thomas Mason on Harlan Fiske Stone:
"Pillar of the Law" (Harlan Fiske Stone was Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of the United States) the lawyer Christie quoted
page 715 of this book, in which Stone wrote to the editor of
"Fortune" magazine that not only did he disown such a procedure, but
that he regarded the whole thing as "a high-grade lynching party
in Nuremberg." (5.995-996) p.716.
Judge Wennerstrum, of the Supreme Court of the United States,
President of one of the courts (23.5915-5916) was so disgusted by the
procedure that he refused his nomination and went back to the United
States, where he voiced his objections in the "Chicago Tribune": 60%
of the members of the board of the trial were Jewish; so were the
interpreters.
"As for the principal accused : Hoess, Streicher, Pohl, they have been tortured." (23.5919).
By virtue of the Nuremberg statutes accepting as proofs all
declarations by the Allies, the Soviet report on Katyn accusing the
Germans of the massacre of 11,000 Polish officers was accepted as an
"authentic proof", irrefutable, on August 8th 1945 by the
victors.
Source: USSR Document 54, in vol. 39 of the TMI(p.290.32.)
The Soviet Prosecuting Attorney, General Rudenko, could have said
according to article 21 of the Nuremberg Trial Statute, "...there
could be no object of contestation." (XV,p.300)
On April 13 th 1990, the international press announced that the
massacre had been ordered by Beria and the Soviet authorities. When
Professor Naville, of Geneva University, had examined the bodies, he
found 1940 documents in their pockets which proved that the
executions had taken place at that date. In 1940, the Smolensk
district was occupied by the Soviets.
To stick to our theme: "The founding myths of the State of
Israel", we will examine one of the untruths which continue to
wreak the most havoc after over half a century in today's world, and
not only in Israel : "the myth of the 6 million Jews exterminated"
that has become a dogma justifying, sacralizing (as the very term
"Holocaust" implies) all the extortions of the State of Israel in
Palestine, in the entire Middle-East, in the United States and,
through the United States,in world politics, placing it above all
international law.
The Nuremberg Court made this figure official; it has never ceased
since then to be used to manipulate public opinion in the written and
spoken press, in literature and the cinema, and even in
schoolbooks.
In fact, this figure rests only on two accounts: that of Hoettl and
that of Wisliceny.
This was what the former declared:
"In April 1944, as told to the Nuremberg judges, Dr.Wilhem Hoettl, Obersturmbannfrrher, of section IV of the Central security bureau of the Reich : the S.S. Obersturmbannfeurher Adolf Eichmann, whom I had known since 1938, had a talk with me in my apartment in Budapest... He knew he was considered as a war criminal by the Allied nations since he had thousands of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many there were, and he answered : although the number was a great secret, he would tell me because of his information he had reached the following conclusion : in the various extermination camps, some four million Jews had been killed and two million had died in other ways."
Source: Nuremberg Trial,vol.IV,p.657.
And the second:
"He (Eichmann) said that he would leap into his grave laughing, for the knowledge of having the lives of five million people on his conscience would be a source of extraordinary satisfaction for him." (op.cit.)
Of these two accounts, M. Poliakov himself said :
"It would be possible that a figure so imperfectly backed up, must be considered suspect."
Source: Revue d'histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale. October
1956.
Let us add that the principal testimony, the most complete and the
and most precise, is by Hoett, an Intelligence Service officer.
Source: "Weekend" magazine,January 25th 1961, with on its cover a
portrait of Hoett, with the caption: "History of a spy. Stranger than
fiction: this friend of Nazi leaders, had a British Secret Service
chief as a boss."
Confirming the objections of top jurists of the Supreme Court of the
United States, and of many others, on the juridical anomalies of the
"Nuremberg Court", we shall give the following examples of the
violations of the rules that apply to the procedure of every genuine
trial.
1 - The establishment and the verification of the authenticity of the texts produced.
2 - The analysis of the value of the testimony and the conditions in which they were obtained.
3 - The scientific examination of the weapon used to commit the crime in order to establish the way it functions and its effects.
The fundamental texts, which are decisive for establishing what the
"final solution" must have been, are first of all the
extermination orders attributed to the most highly-placed leaders :
Hitler, Goering, Heydrich, Himmler, and the directives given for
their execution.
First of all, Hitler's directive on the "extermination".
Despite the efforts of the theoreticians of the "genocide" and
the "Holocaust", no trace was ever found of it. As Olga
Wurmser-Migot wrote in 1968:
"Just as there exists no clear order of extermination by gas at Auschwitz, there exists no order to stop in November 1944. " She specifies : " neither at the Nuremberg trial, nor during the course of marginal trials, nor at the Hoess trial in Cracow, or of Eichmann in Israel, nor at the trial of the camp commanders, nor at the Frankfurt November 45-August 46 trial of secondary Auschwitz figures, was the famous order signed by Himmler on November 22nd 1944 on the end of the extermination of Jews by gas ever found, the order putting an end to the 'Final solution.'"
Source: Olga Wurmser-Migot. "Le systrme concentrationnaire nazi."
P.U.F 1968, 544 and p.13.
Doctor Kubovy, from the Tel Aviv "Documentation Center", admitted in
1960:
"There is no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich which speaks of exterminating the Jews...the word "extermination" does not appear in the letter from Goering to Heydrich concerning the final solution to the Jewish question."
Source: Lucy Dawidowicz, "The War against the Jews (1975)
p.121.
After a conference held at the Sorbonne in Paris in February 1979 to
fight against the critical works of the "revisionists", Raymond Aron
and Jacques Furet had to declare during a press conference which had
followed the meeting that:
"Despite the most erudite research, we have never been able to find an order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews."
In 1981, Laqueur admitted:
"Until now, we have never found Hitler's order to destroy the European Jewish community, and in all probability the order was never given."
Source: Walter Laqueur: "The terrible secret", Frankfort on the
Main.Berlin. Vienna. 1981.p.190.
In spite of all this, there have been other historians who, at the
instigation of Vidal Naquet and Leon Poliakov, signed the following
declaration:
" (...) We must not ask ourselves how such a mass murder was technically possible. It was technically possible since it took place. This is the obligatory point of departure of any historical enquiry on this subject. It was our duty to simply remind people of this truth: there is not and there cannot be a debate on the existence of the gas chambers... "
We must not ask ourselves..
the obligatory point of departure....
there cannot be a debate....
Three prohibitions, three taboos, three definitive limitations to
research.
Such a text does indeed make history in the history of history: the
"fact" which must be established is posed before any research as an
absolute and untouchable truth forbidden by three prohibitory
imperatives, any research and critique of what was once and for all
judged by the victors just after the victory.
Yet history must, if it means to respect a scientific status, be a
perpetual search, questioning even what one considered as
definitively established as the postulate of Euclid or the laws of
Newton. The following is a notorious example:
"The Auschwitz International Committee intended in November 1990 to replace the commemorative plaque at Auschwitz which indicated 4 million dead by another bearing the words : "Over one million deaths". Doctor Maurice Goldstein, president of this committee, was opposed to this decision."
Source: "Le Soir", Brussels, 19-20th October l991, p.16.
In fact, Doctor Goldstein in no way challenged the need to change the
old plaques, but he did not want the new plaque to carry a figure,
knowing that it would probably be necessary to again reduce the
figure now considered within a short while.
The plaque at the entrance of Birkenau therefore bore the following
inscription until 1994:
"Here, from 1940 to 1945, four million men,women and children were tortured and assassinated by Hitlerian murderers."
Thanks to the activity of the State Museum of Auschwitz, whose
president is the historian Wladislaw Bartoszewski and whose twenty
six members are of all nationalities,the text has been modified in a
manner more in keeping with the truth:
"May this place where the Nazis murdered one and a half million men,women and children, mostly Jews from different European countries, be forever for humanity a cry of despair and a warning."
Source: article by Luc Rosenzveig, in "Le Monde", January 27th
1995
This example shows that history, when it escapes intellectual
terrorism by the predicators of hatred, demands a perpetual
"revision". It is "revisionist" or else it is a disguised form of
propaganda.
Let us go back therefore to history as such, of a critical,
"revisionist" sort, in other words one based on the analysis of
texts, the checking of accounts and the expertise regarding the crime
weapon.
First of all, this is what concerns the Jews in the National
Socialist Party program.
The problem of the Jews is considered in Point 4 of the National
Socialist Party (NSDAP) Program:
"Only those who are fully citizens can possess German nationality. And those who are fully citizens are those who have German blood, regardless of religion. Therefore no Jew can fully be a citizen."
Staatsburger designated the citizen whereas Volkgenosse defined full
citizenship as a member of a homogeneous community.
Further on, we come to point 5:
"He who does not possess German nationality can only live in Germany as a guest (Gast) and will be submitted to the existing legislation regarding the sojourn of foreigners."
Then, point 7 raises the question of the prohibition of stay in the
Reich, under certain conditions, of those who do not have German
nationality; point 8 demands the stopping of all new immigration of
non-Germans, as well as the immediate expulsion of non-Germans who
have entered the Reich since August 2nd 1914. This last point is
obviously directed against the Jews from the East, who had come to
the Reich in large numbers during and after the First World War.
Point 23 also deals with this problem: it stipulates that Jews will
not have the right to work in the press, while Point 24 asserts that
the Party is struggling against the "Jewish materialistic
spirit."
a - The orders of Hitler for the extermination of the Jews
In his book on "The Destruction of the European Jews", Raoul
Hilberg wrote in the first (1961) edition that there were two
extermination orders given by Hitler : one in the Spring of 1941
(invasion of Russia), the other a few months later.
But in 1985, "in the second revised edition, every reference to
the orders or decisions of Hitler regarding the "final solution" was
systematically suppressed."
Source : "The Revised Hilberg". Simon Wiesenthal, Annal
3.1986.p.294)
The 1961 edition indicated on page 171:
"How did the phase decreeing death appear? Essentially through two decisions by Hitler. An order was given in the Spring of 1941."
In what terms were these orders given?
Hilberg: "According to General Jodl, who wrote the document I
quote, the terms were the following : Hitler said he wanted the
Jewish Bolshevik commissars to be liquidated. This is the first
point...Such was the content of the order described by General
Jodl." (4-82)
Hilberg: "The order was oral."
Thus: Hilberg said that General Jodl had said that Hitler had
said....!
In his first anti-Semitic diatribes and in "Mein Kampf", Hitler
proclaimed his determination to expel the Jews from Germany. We shall
henceforth retain only those German texts which employ the expression
"final solution" in order to obtain a precise definition of it.
On June 24th 1940, after Germany's victory over France, Heydrich
spoke in a letter to Ribbentrop, the Minister of Finance, of a
"final territorial solution" ("Eine
territoriale Endlosung").
Source: Gerald Flemming."Hitler and die Endlosung."
Wiesbaden-Munich, 1982, p.56.
To create a Jewish "reservation" outside Europe, and it was then that
Ribbentrop suggested the "Madagascar project". In July 1940, Franz
Rademacher who was in charge of Jewish affairs, thus summed up this
directive:
"All Jews out of Europe !"
Source: Joseph Billig. "La solution finale de la question juive."
Paris 1977.p.58.
This "final territorial solution" was in keeping with the new
situation of Germany, which now dominated Europe: it was no longer
enough to expulse the Jews from Germany.
Rademacher, who was in charge of the "final solution" project to
deport all the Jews from Europe to Madagascar, pointed out that it
would take four years to carry it out and in the chapter entitled
"Financing", he indicated that "The realization of the final
solution (Endlosung) suggested will require considerable means."
Source: N.G. 2586.
b - Goering's letter to Heydrich of July 31st 1941
Heydrich asked Goering:
"In 1939, you gave me the order to take measures regarding the Jewish question. Must I now extend the task with which you entrusted me to the new territories we have seized in Russia ?"
There again, there is no reference to the assassination of Jews. Only
their geographic transfer is mentioned, simply taking into account
the new
conditions (33.93739374).[1]
Only "final solution" thus consisted of emptying Europe of its Jews
by sending them away ever further until the war (supposing the
Germans won it) made it possible to place them all in a ghetto
outside Europe (as the Madagascar project had been the first
suggestion.)
It is impossible to sustain the hypothesis of a secret coded language
since clear documents exist for other crimes : euthanasia, the order
to kill British commandos, to lynch American airmen and to
exterminate the male population of Stalingrad if it were occupied. "
For all these crimes, the documents are there. Whereas in this case
alone there is nothing, no originals, nor copies, " nor we can add,
directives or the orders needed for the execution of such vast
directives. (33.9375-9376)
"In January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, had informed the Berlin leaders that the Feurher had decided the evacuation of all the Jews towards the territories of the East, replacing the deportation beyond the sea previously projected." (34-9544)
In a memo which circulated in March 1942 in Heydrich's office, the
ministers were informed that the Jews of Europe were to be
concentrated in the East, "while awaiting to be sent to a distant
territory like Madagascar after the war, which will become their
homeland... " (34-9545-9546)
.
Poliakov noted:
Until it was given up, the "Madagascar Plan" was sometimes referred to as the "final solution" to the "Jewish question".
Source: Poliakov. "Le Proces de Jerusalem" Paris,1963,
p.152.
To maintain at all costs the thesis of physical extermination, a
subterfuge therefore had to be found:
"Final solution to the Jewish problem was one of those conventional phrases used to designate the Hitlerian plan to exterminate the European Jews."
Source: Gerald Reitlinger. "La solution finale" p.19.
No justification of this hypothesis of a coded language has been
given, though the concept of a coded language can be used to give any
document any meaning. Here are two examples.
Goering's letter of july 31st 1941 (a month after the letter by
Heydrich quoted previously, the meaning of the words would have
suddenly changed!). In this letter, Goering completed his directives
to Heydrich:
"As a complement of the task which was assigned to you by the decree of 24/1/1939, in other words to obtain the most advantageous solution possible to the Jewish question by way of emigration and evacuation given the circumstances, I charge you by the present letter to proceed with all the necessary preparations...to reach an overall solution (Gesamtlesung) of the Jewish question in the zone of German influence in Europe...I charge you with the rapid submission of an overall project (Gesamtentwurf) bearing on the measures of organization and the material and concrete dispositions to realize the final solution of the Jewish question to which we aspire.(Endlosung der Judenfrage.)"
Source: Hilberg (op.cit.) 2nd edition. p.401
(N.G.2586-E.P.S.710.)
It is significant that, quoting this document (on page 108 of his
book), Reitlinger cuts out the beginning which refers to emigration
and evacuation, while this letter prescribes a new extension of the
evacuation measures taken "given the circumstances" at a time
when Hitler dominated only Poland in January 1939, and not yet even
France, whereas by July 1941, Germany dominated all of Europe.
And yet the meaning of Goering's text is perfectly clear from the
first paragraph : the policy of emigration or evacuation of the Jews,
practiced until then in Germany, had to spread henceforth, due to the
new conquests, to all the zones in Europe under German domination.
The "overall solution" took the new situation into consideration. It
could only be a "final solution" after the end of the war or, in case
of a total victory in Europe, Russia included, a final evacuation to
Africa or elsewhere, that would make it possible, in keeping with
Hitler's constant goal, " to empty Europe of its Jews."
To sum it up, Goering's directive to Heydrich, unless one wants to
interpret it arbitrarily according to a preconceived schema, only
applied to Europe what could, until then, only be applied to Germany.
It was an inhuman and criminal objective, no doubt, but at no time
did it comprise the idea of "extermination" which it was given by the
Attorney-General at Nuremberg, Robert M.W. Kempner, who declared:
"With these lines, Heydrich and his collaborators were officially given the task of legal murder (of Jews)."
Goering protested against the English translation of the German word
"Gesamtlosung", meaning general solution, as "final solution", which
is "Endlosung"; this led Attorney Jackson to acknowledge the
falsification and to reestablish the true meaning.
Source: I.M.T., IX, 575
As early as June 24th 1940, Heydrich had informed Ribbentrop of his
wish to realize the "final solution" as soon as possible. He wrote:
"The global problem posed by the presence today of some 3 million and 1/4 Jews on the territories presently under German domination can no longer be solved by emigration: a final territorial solution henceforth becomes necessary."
Source: Evidence number464 at Eichmann's trial at
Jerusalem.
Towards the same time, Himmler had sent Hitler a memoir whose
conclusion was:
"I hope to see the Jewish question definitively settled thanks to the emigration of all the Jews towards Africa or in a colony."
Source: Vierteljaheshefte, 1957, 197.
Hitler rallied to this suggestion since, on February 10th 1942,
Rademacher, who was in charge of the "Deutschland III" at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in an official letter:
"Meanwhile, the war against the Soviet Union has allowed us to dispose of new territories for the final solution. Consequently, the Führer has decided to displace the Jews not towards Madagascar but towards the East. Thus, there is no longer any need to consider Madagascar for the final solution."
Source: Document N.G. 3933 of the Wilhelmstrasse trial, quoted by
Reitlinger. "The final solution" p.79, in which he "interprets" again
in the sense of "fiction" or "camouflage" without giving the least
justification for it.
The original expression was in fact "die Gesamtlosung der Judenfrage"
or the complete "overall" solution there would be no going back on.
But Goering used it for the first time in the first paragraph of a
letter dated 31/7/1941, in which he gave Heydrich the order to
prepare it (P.S.710 T.XXVI,p.266)using in the last paragraph the
expression "die Gesamtlosung der Judenfrage" and, in time, it
prevailed, but with the same meaning and not in the sense of
liquidating the problem by liquidating those who were the cause of
the problem. Taken in flagrante delicto of tendentious translation by
Goering himself on March 20th 1946, Judge Jackson had no option but
to admit it (T.IX,p.552). But the press did not breathe a word of
this incident which demolished a whole theory.
The second example of this arbitrary change of the meaning of
words to justify a thesis is that of the "Grand Wannsee" conference
held in Berlin on January 20th 1942.
At the start of the conference, Heydrich reminded his audience that
he had just been appointed "to the post of head of the preparation
of the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe"
(Endlosung der europaischen Judenfrague) and he will henceforth be
responsible for the overall measures needed for the final solution of
the Jewish question, "without consideration of
geographical limitations" (underlined by R.G.)
Heydrich went on to sum up the anti-Jewish policy carried out thus
far:
a - The driving out of Jews from those spheres vital to the German people.-
b - The driving out of Jews from the space vital to the German people.
Because of the lightning-quick advance of the German army on the
Eastern front (the Soviet Union), Heydrich thus pursued, taking into
account the new situation :
"With the preliminary authorization of the Fuhrer, emigration has left room for another possibility of solution: the evacuation of the Jews towards the East." (underlined by R.G.)
"One cannot however consider these actions as palliatives, but practical experiences already obtained in this field are of significant importance for the future final solution to the Jewish question."
Source: N.G.2586 G.
Indeed, this definitive solution could not be carried out until after
the war, and this solution was always sought in the same direction :
the expulsion of all Jews out of Europe. It was what Hitler told
Abetz, the ambassador to Paris specifically : that it was his
intention to evacuate all Jews out of Europe after the
war.
Source: "Documents on German Foreign Policy" 1918-1945.Series D.
Vol.X.p.484.
The Wannsee text (January 20th 1942)
"In the course of the final solution, Jews will be conveyed under appropriate guidance, towards the East to make use of their labor. They will be separated according to sex. Jews capable of working will be taken in large columns to areas of major works, to build roads, and consequently large numbers will doubtless perish through natural selection.
"Those who will finally remain, who without any doubt will make up the most robust element, must be treated consequently, for they represent a natural selection whose liberation must be considered the germ-cell of a new Jewish development as the experience of history has shown..)" (13-3133)
David Irving:
"I have read the minutes of the Wilhem Strasse trial, the second after that of Nuremberg. There were twelve others afterwards. Not one of them brought testimony according to which the liquidation of the Jews had been discussed at Wannsee." (33-9372-9373)
The Wannsee Protocol consists of the minutes of a conference which
took place on January 20th 1942, attended by the Secretaries of State
administratively concerned by the solution to the Jewish question,
and those heads of departments in charge of its execution. In this
text, no mention is made of gas chambers or extermination, but only
of the transfer of Jews to Eastern Europe.
These minutes have all the characteristics of an apocryphal document
if we are to credit the photocopy of them published in Robert N.W.
Kempner's "Eichmann und Komplizen", pp. 132 and following (Europa
Verlag 1961) : no seal, no date, no signature, ordinary machine type
on small format paper, etc....
In any case they make no mention of gas chambers.
In the French versions of it, "die Zuruckdrangung der Juden aus
dem Lebensraum des deutschen Volkes" has been translated by
"the elimination of the Jews from the vital space of the German
people", as it was in English and in Russian.
The Germans, however, preferred to use other expressions to speak of
their decision to drive the Jews out of what they called their "vital
space", expressions like "Auschaltung" (exclusion, eviction,
elimination) and especially "Ausrottung"
(extirpation,uprooting). It was this last word which was translated
as extermination, which is "Vernichtung" in German.
For example : in his speech at Posen before the Obergruppenfuhrer
(the Divisional commanders of the Waffen SS) on October 4th 1943,
Himmler said:
"Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuirung, die Ausrottung des judischen Volkes...Das judische Volk wird ausgerotten, etc... "
In the following sentence, he uses the word "Auschaltung..."
(P.S.1919 T.XXIX p.145) to clarify his meaning. In other words:
"I am now thinking of the evacuation of the Jews, of the extirpation of the Jewish people, etc... "
But in the "Eichmann File", M.Billig translated it as:
"I mean by that the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people." (p.55) and "evacuation of the Jews, IN OTHER WORDS extermination" (p.47).
Another example : in a note dated 16th December 1941 on one of his
talks with Hitler (P.S 1517 T.XXVII p.270) Rosenberg uses the
expression "Ausrottung das Judentums".
At the April 17th 1946 session, the American Attorney General Dodd
translated it as "Extermination of Jews" (Tome XI,p.562). Rosenberg
protested in vain.
"But in the speeches of the Nazis, the expression "Ausrottung des Christentums", which was often used, is always translated as " the extirpation of Christianity from German culture"
Cf. Revue d'Histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, October 1st
1958, p.62.
It is when it refers to Judaism (Judentum) or the Jewish people (das
judische Volk) that the word "Ausrottung" means extermination
and applies to individuals, whereas it refers to entities.
The Wannsee conference of January 20th 1942, where, it was claimed
for over a third of a century, the decision to "exterminate" European
Jews, disappeared from 1984 on from the writings of even the most
ferocious enemies of the "revisionists". On this point, they too had
to "revise" their history : it was at the Stuttgart Congress of May
1984,where that "interpretation" was dropped.
Source: Eberhard Jackerl and Jurgen Rohwer."Der Mord an der Juden
im Zweiten Weltkrieg"('The murder of Jews during the Second World
War")
Source: DVA. 1985 p. 67
In 1992, Yehuda Bauer wrote in "The Canadian Jewish News" of January
30th that this interpretation of Wannsee was "silly".
Finally, the most recent spokesman for the orthodox antirevisionist
historians, the chemist Claude Pressac, confirmed this new revision
of orthodoxy. He wrote on page 35 of his book: "Les crematoires
d'Auschwitz" (CNRS editions, 1993):
"The Wannsee conference was held in Berlin on January 20th. If an action of "driving back" the Jews towards the East was planned, with the evocation of a "natural" elimination through work, nobody then spoke of liquidation on an industrial scale. During the days and the weeks that followed, the Auschwitz Bauleitung received neither a call, a telegram or a letter demanding the study of an installation adapted to that end."
And even, in his "recapitulative chronology", he indicates on January
20th 1942 :
"Wannsee Conference on the driving back of the Jews towards the East" (p.114).
The "extermination" was revised : it was a question of "driving
back".
It is equally remarkable that, in all this book setting itself the
goal of "proving" the thesis of extermination, there was no question
either of the document which, after that of Wannsee, was supposedly
the most decisive: Goering's letter to Heydrich of July 31st 1941, in
which it was asserted that the "final solution" meant
"extermination", and not the transfer out of Europe.
At the time of the Toronto trial in 1988, there was also a
controversy concerning the role of the "Eizenzattsgruppen", a kind of
free corps designated by the Hitlerian High Command to annihilate the
groups of partisans which formed as soon as the Germans swooped down
on Moscow in 1941 ; these groups would surge behind the German army,
trying to destroy its reserves of fuel, its supplies and its
communication networks, cutting the Germans off from their rear
bases.
This form of resistance proved so effective that Hitler gave the
harshest of orders to the "Eizenzattsgruppen", to kill off the
leaders and the political commissars.
There were many Jews among these political commissars, who played a
leading role in which they confronted death bravely.
At the Toronto trial, the problem of the participation of these
heroic Jews to the resistance against Hitlerism was evoked at great
length.
Christie, Zundel's lawyer, insisted on asking the historian Hilberg,
to clarify the meaning of the Nazi orders on this subject.
Christie: The order given to the Einzattsgruppen says : Annihilate the Jewish Bolshevik commissars, and you interpret this as meaning : "Annihilate the Jewish people and the Jewish commissars. Is that correct?
Hilberg: Correct.
Christie: It was therefore said, according to you, that it was not a question of killing the Jews, but the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars.
Hilberg: The order was given to Himmler to "solve the problem".(4839)
Christie: It concerned the problem of the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars. Which does not mean : the Jewish problem...Was there not a war on between Communism and Nazism ?
Hilberg: Yes, and the political commissars, at the core of the system, had to be shot.
Christie: This did not mean killing the Jews who were there. Did Hitler think that Bolshevism was of Jewish origin and that all the commissars were Jews?
Hilberg: That was propaganda. But it was the intention from the beginning, since June 22nd 1941.
Christie: Is this an article of faith with you?
Hilberg: No. It's not an article of faith, it's a certainty.
Christie: Can you show me Hitler's second order?
Hilberg: I say that there's a decisive directive from Hitler exposed by Goering to Heydrich on July 31st 1941...It was the text which prepared the Wannsee conference.
Christie: Was it an order or a letter from Hitler?
Hilberg: No.
Christie: You wrote in your book : "Hitler gave this second order. Is that correct?
Hilberg: That is correct.
Christie reverts to the meaning of the word "resettlement" in the East. "Does this mean an order to kill all the Jews?" (4-855)
Hilberg: Resettlement" was a synonym for "deporting the Jews to death camps.
Christie: Wasn't there a plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar ?
The English historian, David Irving, brought the following information, drawn from original sources, to the Toronto trial.
" ...The final solution to the Jewish problem consisted of deporting them to different territories. One of the hypotheses was Madagascar, especially after the fall of France, but the might of the British and later American fleets made this project impossible to carry out.
The only document I possess is a telephone conversation between Prime minister Lammers and the Feurher in the Spring of 1942, and the Feurher answered him that the final solution would be decided upon only after the end of the war.
Heinrich Himmler wrote to the gauleiters that the Feurher, Adolf Hitler, had given him the order to rid Europe of its Jews from West to East, by stages. It was obviously an order of deportation." (33-935 and 9352).
But this involved no order to exterminate the Jews.
No order of this kind was ever given, nor in the archives of the world, including the Jewish archives which cooperated with me. I must also emphasize that, in the British archives where we had deciphered the German codes of the S.S. units operating on the Eastern front, even with those English machines for deciphering codes, we did not decipher any code in which Hitler gave the order to kill the Jews. Only historians claiming to read between the lines and giving vent to their indignation have been able to decipher such a meaning. (33-93.76) "
The lawyer, Christie, quotes page 651 of Hilberg's book in which is written:
"In November 1944, Himmler decided that for all sorts of practical reasons, the Jewish question was solved. On the 25th of the same month, he ordered the dismantling of all the death installations."
Source: Testimony of Kurt Becher. 8th March 1946. P.S.
3762.
Hilberg recognizes that it was not an order by Himmler (4-861 to
864):
"Becher probably presented it from memory in his testimony. He therefore did not need to use the exact language employed by Himmler."
One more time, Hilberg said that Becher had said that Himmler had
said...(4.867)
After lengthy historical research by scholars of every background
under the pressure of revisionist critics, the director of the
"Institute of history of the present time" at the National Center of
Scientific Research, Mr. Francois Bedarida sums up these works on the
"evaluation of the Auschwitz victims":
"The collective memory has seized hold of the figure of four million, the very one which, on the faith of a Soviet report, figured until now at Auschwitz on the monument erected to the memory of the victims of Nazism - while in Jerusalem the Yad Vashem museum indicated a total very much above the truth.
And yet, as soon as the war ended, scholarly memory got down to work. The result of these patient and minute investigations was that the figure of four million rested on no serious base and could not be retained.
The court, all the same, relied on an assertion by Eichmann claiming that the extermination policy had caused the death of six million Jews, four million of them in the camps. If now we refer to the most recent works and to the most reliable statistics - as is the case with Raoul Hilberg's work, "Destruction des juifs d'Europe" (Fayard,1988), we come up with a million dead at Auschwitz. A total corroborated by the specialists as a whole since, today, these agree on a number of victims oscillating between 950,000 minimum and 1.2 million maximum."
Source: "Le Monde", 23rd July 1990.
Nevertheless, people continue after the reduction of the number of
victims at Auschwitz-Birkneau from 4 to 1 million, to repeat the
global figure : 6 million Jews exterminated, according to the bizarre
arithmetic: 6 - 3 = 6.
That the "final solution" to the Jewish problem was to be resolved
only after the war is also testified to by the "Braun Mappe" (Brown
File) of the Summer of 1941. The paragraph entitled : "Directives for
the solution of the Jewish question" specified:
"All the measures concerning the Jewish question in the lands occupied in the East having to be taken after the war, the Jewish question will find a general solution in Europe."
Source: P.S. 702. Henri Monneray. "La persecution des juifs dans
les pays de l'Est presentre " Nuremberg" CDJC 1949.
This restatement of the question does involve any attenuation of
Hitler's crimes, but simply recalls a piece of evidence which even
the most determined partisans of the theory of "extermination" have
not overlooked: during the last two years of the war, after
Stalingrad, Hitler was fighting a losing battle : the Allies were
destroying his war production centres with their bombs and
disorganizing his transport network.
He was forced to mobilize new soldiers, emptying his factories as a
result. How could he have been fatally obsessed with the will to
exterminate his prisoners and Jews, instead of using them, even in
inhuman conditions, for working on his sites? Poliakov himself, in
his "Breviaire de la haine" (p.3) emphasized this absurd
contradiction:
"It would have been so much more economical to have made them carry out the hardest work, parking them in a reservation for instance."
Hannah Arendt also pointed out what was insane about such an
operation:
"The Nazis turned straightforwardly useless into the harmful when, right in the middle of the war, despite the penury of building materials and of rolling stock, they erected huge and costly extermination factories and organized the transport of millions of people...the manifest contradiction between this behavior and military imperatives gives the entire undertaking a mad, chimerical air."
Source: Hannah Arendt. "Le systrme totalitaire" Paris 1972.
p.182.
What is even odder is that minds as subtle as Poliakov and Hannah
Arendt were so completely clouded by their a prioris that they did
not question their Surrealistic assumptions and turn to the documents
and the facts.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were powerful implantations of the
Farben-industry (chemical), of Siemens (transports) of Portland
(construction). At Monovitz (one of the camp annexes to Auschwitz)
there were 10,000 prisoners at work, 100,000 civilian workers and
1,000 English prisoners of war.
Source: "German crimes in Poland", Warsaw 1946. Vol. I.
p.37.
From 1942 to 1944, out of 39 camps that were satellites of Auschwitz,
31 used prisoners as laborers and 19 of them used a majority of
Jews.
On January 25th 1942, Himmler addressed the following directive to
the inspector-general of the concentration camps:
"Get ready to take in 100,000 Jews...Over the coming weeks, important economic tasks will be entrusted to the concentration camps."
Source: N.0. ; 020
a - In May 1944, Hitler ordered the use of 200,000 Jews as workers in
the
construction program of Jager and the Todt organization.
An S S W V H A order dated November 18th 1943 awarded a bonus to
prisoners- even Jews - who had distinguished themselves at work.
Source : Auschwitz Museum Center 6 - 1962 p.78.
There is therefore nothing "insane or chimerical", but on the
contrary an implacable realism, and an extra refutation of the
"exterminationist" themes.
b - Eyewitness accounts
The Auschwitz trial was held in Frankfurt from December 20th 1963 to
August 20th 1965, in a vast theater which was well-suited to a showy
political operation; the vast legal machine could not avoid being
forced to acknowledge in the account of the reasons for its verdict
that the elements at its disposal for reaching its verdict were
absurdly flimsy.
"The court lacked almost all the means of information which an ordinary criminal trial disposes of to compose a faithful portrayal of events such as they really occurred. The bodies of the victims lacking, the autopsy reports, the conclusions of the experts as to the cause of death; traces left by the culprits were lacking, crime weapons, etc...It was possible to check the accounts only in a very few cases."
Source: Page 109 of the account of the reasons for the
verdict
According to the accusers, the crime-weapon was the "gas chambers."
Yet the judges found no "traces" of them!
It was enough for those gas-chambers to be "notorious" to exist, as
in the days of the witch-trials, where no-one would have dared to
question the witches' "carnal knowledge" of the devil for fear of
being burnt at the stake too.
One of the jurists sent by the United States to Dachau, which had
become an American camp and a center of "war-crime trials", Stephen
S. Pinter, wrote:
"I lived at Dachau for 17 months after the war as US military judge, and can testify that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What they show visitors is presented in an erroneous manner as a gas chamber, being a crematorium oven. Nor were there any gas chambers in the concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but as Auchwitz was in the Russian zone, we did not have permission from the Russians to visit...they thus made use of the old propaganda myth according to which millions of Jews were killed. I can attest, after 6 years spent in Germany and Austria after the war, that many Jews were killed, but that the figure of 1 million was certainly never reached, and I believe myself to be better-qualified than anyone else on this subject."
Source: Letter by Pinter to the Catholic weekly, "Our Sunday
Visitor", June 14th 1959, p.15.
Lacking written proofs and irrecusable documents, the Nuremberg court
was forced to base itself on "eyewitness accounts", like the
fictionalized works and the films that came later.
The survivors who were called upon to bear witness and who
authenticated the existence of "gas chambers" did it not from what
they had seen but what they had "heard said".
A typical and famous example is that of Doctor Benedict Kautzsky,
successor to his father at the head of the Austrian Social Democratic
party.
After declaring that the maximum period of survival at Auschwitz was
three months (though he himself spent three years there), he wrote
his book: "Teufel und Verdammt" (published in Switzerland in
1946), in which he declared about the "gas chambers" :
"I did not see them personally, but so many faithworthy people confirmed their existence."
"Il will hier noch eine kurze Shilderung der Gaskannmern einflechten, die ich zwar selbst nicht gesehen habe, die mir iber von so vielen glaubwurdig dargestellt worden sind... "
A few eyewitness accounts were regarded as fundamental, notably those
of Rudolf Hoess, Saukel and Nyszli ("Doctor at
Auschwitz").
The key witness, who turned out to be the perfect witness to "prove"
the thesis of the victors disguised as judges was Rudolf Hoess, ex
commander of the Auschwitz camp.
The description he gave when he was arrested became the synopsis of
his declarations at Nuremberg; it was everything the Court expected
of him.
Here is his declaration, written under oath and signed by Rudolf
Hoess on April 5th 1946:
"I was commander of Auschwitz until December 1st 1943, and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed there and exterminated by gassing and cremation, and that at least half a million others died there of hunger and disease, which makes a up a total of about 3,000,000 dead. The "final solution" of the Jewish question signified the extermination of all the Jews in Europe. I received the order to prepare the extermination at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there already existed three other extermination camps in the general government : Belzec, Treblinka, Wolzek."
One cannot imagine a more perfect confirmation of the theses which
were
going to be spread by the media for half a century.
And yet this text itself already contains three statements in obvious
contradiction with the truth:
1 - The number of 3 million dead at Auschwitz, needed to justify the total number of Jewish victims (6 million), official figure proclaimed from the start at Nuremberg and which has never ceased to be the leitmotif of official history and of the media since that time, has to be reduced by at least two thirds, as the new commemorative plaque at Auschwitz-Birkenau proves, on which the figure of four million has been replaced by: a little over a million.
2 - The camps of Belzec and Treblinka did not exist in 1941. They were not opened until 1942.
3 - As for the Wolzek camp, it never existed on any map.
How could this "capital testimony" have been recorded without prior
verification?
Höss himself explains it: the first declarations were made under
the control of the Polish authorities which had arrested him.
The autobiography of Rudolf Höss indicates on page 174 of the
French edition:
"At the time of my first cross-examination, the first confessions were obtained by beating me. I do not know what there is in that report although I signed it." (5.956).
(Hoess signed an 8-page typescript at 2.30 in the morning of March
14th 1946 which does not essentially differ from what he later wrote
and said at Nuremberg or Cracow.)
Hoess himself describes in hand-written notes made at Cracow the
circumstances of the first interrogatory to which he was subjected by
the British military police.
"I was arrested on March 11th 1946 at llPM...The Field Security Police subjected me to painful treatment. I was dragged until Heide, precisely to the barracks where, eight months earlier, I had been released by the English. It was there I was interrogated for the first time, during which harsh means were used. I do not know the contents of the report even though I signed it. So much liquor and whip-lashes got the better even of me...A few days later, I was taken to Meiden-on-the-Weser, the main interrogation center of the British zone. There, I fared even worse at the hands of a public attorney, a commander."
Source: Document NO-1210
It was only in 1983 that there was confirmation of the tortures
inflicted upon Rudolf Hoess to obtain the "proof" of the "two and a
half million" Jews exterminated by him at Auschwitz.
This book was written by Rupert Butler and was called : "Legions of
Death" (Hamlyn Paperbacks). It publishes the testimony of Bernard
Clarke, who arrested Rudolf Höss after finding out his
whereabouts from his wife after threat of death to herself and her
children. Hoess was arrested at the farm where he was hiding on March
11th 1946. Butler describes how it took three days of torture to
obtain a "coherent declaration", eg. the one we have just quoted,
signed March 14 th 1946 at 2 in the morning.
As soon as he was arrested, Hoess was beaten so hard that "in the
end,the health officer intervened with insistence to the captain :
tell him to stop or you'll bring back a corpse."
It must be noted that Butler and his interlocutor Clarke both seem
highly satisfied with these acts of torture.
The American enquiry committee made up of judges Van Roden and
Simpson, sent to Germany in 1948 to investigate irregularities
committed by the American military court at Dachau (which had tried
1,500 German prisoners and sentenced 420 of them to death),
established that the accused had been subjected to physical and
psychological torture of every sort to force them to make the desired
"confessions". Thus 137 out of 139 German prisoners examined had been
kicked in testicles, receiving permanent injuries.
Source: Interview with Judge Edward L. Van Roden, in "The
Progressive", February 1949.
The fate of the principal defendant, Richard Baer, last commander at
Auschwitz, who died before the start of the trial, is particularly
interesting. He was arrested in December 1960 near Hamburg, where he
worked as a forest ranger. In 1963, he died in gaol in mysterious
circumstances.
According to several sources, based on French accounts in the French
press, Baer had obstinately refused during his imprisonment to
confirm the existence of gas chambers in the sector that had once
been under his
responsibility.
Source: Hermann Langbein, "Der Auschwitz Prozess", Europaissch
Verlag. Frankfurt 1965.
The autopsy report carried out by the Legal Institute of Frankfurt
University concluded that "the ingestion of an odorless and
noncorrosive poison...can not be excluded."
The Nuremberg lawyer, Eberhard Engelhardt, quotes this passage in the
autopsy report in a letter to the Frankfurt public prosecutor dated
November 12th 1973, asserting that Bauer was poisoned during the
investigation.
Second example : the Gerstein report, that of a Waffen SS, was so
obviously, far-fetched that it was refused as evidence by the
military court at Nuremberg on January 30th 1946, but was used at the
Eichmann Trial at Jerusalem in 1961.
According to this "testimony" the number of victims (60,000 a day in
three camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor) would have totalled 25
millions!
Source: Cote P S 1553.
Furthermore, he claimed to have seen 700-800 people piled up in a 25
square meter room (over 28 per square meter!).
Professor Roques, of Nantes University, who wrote a thesis
demonstrating the inconsistency of the "Gerstein report", was
stripped of his doctor's title as a result, although Alain Decaux
wrote in "Le Matin de Paris" (December 13th 1986) that "all
researchers would henceforth have to take these studies into
account", adding that Professor Roques was, "currently the
best informed person regarding the Gerstein affair."
They therefore looked for ridiculous administrative reasons.
As he had prepared his thesis in Paris under Professor Rougeot, and
as he had been transferred to Nantes to defend his thesis under
Professor Riviere, which was perfectly in order, he was accused of
not paying his registration fees at the University of Nantes !
This was how Henri Roques found himself deprived...
Third example, if we confine ourselves solely to the most
famous "witnesses" : Doctor Miklos Nyszli, who wrote "Medecin "
Auschwitz" published in 1953 by Jean-Paul Sartre in "Les Temps
Modernes", and a deported Hungarian doctor (translated by Tibere
Kremer, Julliard 1961).
Example: Miklos Nyszli tells us that the gas chambers were 200 meters
long, and the document produced at Nuremberg tells us that they were
either 210, 400 or 580 square meters; this would mean respective
widths of 1m05, 2m and 2m90, which does not hold water if you
consider that 3,000 people would have entered the premises, moved
about easily, and that there were columns in the center and benches
on each side.
It is significant that neither the "Encyclopedia Judaica" (1971)
nor the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" (1990) even mention this
work, which they regard as discredited which is attached to it since
the critique of it made by Paul Rassinier.
Nyszli's first assertion is that, when he arrived at the camp at the
end of May 1944, the exterminations had been going on for four years.
Yet the Nuremberg document (N.0.4.401) indicates that orders were
given only in August 1942, and document 4r463 that they were not
ready until February 20th 1943.
In August 1960, the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte made the
following declaration to the press:
"The Dachau gas chambers were never finished or put in action... Mass extermination of Jews by gas began in 1941-42, and only in a few places in occupied Poland, by means of technical installations set up for that purpose, but in no cases on German soil."
Source: "Die Zeit", August l9th 1960.
Other examples:
One of the principal accused, Sauckel, declared on May 30th 1946
before the Nuremberg Court :
"I confirm that my signature figures on this document. I ask the court permission to explain how that signature was obtained. "
"This document was presented to me in its final form. I asked for permission to read and study it so as to decide if I should sign it. This was refused...Then a Polish or Russian policeman came in and asked : Where is Sauckel's family ? We'll take Sauckel with us but his family will be handed over to Soviet territory. I'm the father of ten children and, thinking of my family, I signed this document."
The testimony of General Ohlendorf is particularly revealing among
those of other criminals. From the summer of 1941 to the summer of
1942, he headed the "einsatzgruppen" in charge of executing the
political commissars in charge of the partisans' activities in the
Southern Russia. At the I.M.T. trial. he declared that he had
received oral orders to add to his functions that of exterminating
Jews by using special lorries for the killing of people, including
women and children.
Source: I.M.T. Vol IV, p. 311-355 and I.M.T. Vol XXII, p. 478-480
; 491-494 ; p.509-10 ; 538.
General Ohlendorf's testimony during his second trial (N.M.T. case 9)
is completely different: first of all, he retracted his declarations
to the I.M.T. regarding the oral order to exterminate Jews ; he
acknowledged having killed Jews and Gypsies, but only within the
context of the struggle against the partisans, and not as part of a
specific plan of extermination of Jews and Gypsies. He also admitted
to having killed 40,000 people and not 90,000, as he had told
I.M.T.
Source: N.M.T. Vol IV.p. 223-312.
No critical refutation, no scientific contradiction or discussion was
opposed to the arguments of critical historians : they encountered
only silence at best and repression at worst.
Silence was the lot of the works of Paul Rassinier, a historian who
had himself been deported to Buchenwald and Dora. This father of the
critical history of Hitler's crime wrote: "Le mensonge d'Ulysse", "Le
drame des juifs europrens" and "Le veritable proces d'Eichmann."
Then silence and multiple persecutions in America of the engineer
Leuchter, a specialist of gassings in certain American
penitentiaries, who had given a purely technical expertise with
regards to the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz, during the previously
mentioned trial of Ernest Zundel at Toronto.
Professor Faurisson was dismissed from his post at the University of
Lyon, was hounded by the law and was finally victim of an
assassination attempt in which he was stabbed with a knife and
seriously wounded, because he had questioned the existence of the
"gas chambers".
In March 1978, assassination of the French historian, Francois
Duprat, by a commando, for publishing a brochure by an Australian who
questioned the figure of 6 million dead.
Repression against Henri Roques, who was refused the title of Doctor
though he had had an honorable mention for his thesis, because he
made a critical analysis of the "Gerstein Report".
Repression of the publisher, Pierre Guillaume, for his publications,
"Annales d'histoire revisionniste", forcing him to give up his
magazine by crushing him financially through fines and by breaking
the windows of his bookshop.
In Germany, the magistrate Staglich was hounded for his critique of
the different texts and eyewitness accounts concerning the camps,
pointing out a number of counter-truths in his book : "The Myth of
Auschwitz" (1978). Even his doctor's title was withdrawn, according
to a Hitlerian law of June 7th 1939. (Reich Code.I, p.1326).
The historian Butz suffered the same treatment when he tried to
establish a dividing-line between the truth and the myth in "The Hoax
Twentieth Century"(1976). The book was banned in Canada and
Germany.
In Canada, the Toronto trial against Zundel for publishing Harwood's
work: "Did six million really die?" was persecution since even the
official answer to that question is negative like his.
These silences, persecutions and repressions against a historical
critique of Hitler's crimes rested on libellous and false premises :
to show that Hitler's great crimes against the Jews and all his
enemies, the German or Slav Communists who were to defeat him, needed
no falsehoods to reveal their horror. It was, according to the
adversaries of historical critique (whom they called "revisionists"),
"making Hitler innocent or at least attenuating his crimes"!
To them, it was "racism" encouraging discrimination and racial hatred
to demonstrate that Nazi crimes were not confined to a vast pogrom
against the Jews only, but had led to the deaths of 50 million people
in the battle
against Fascism.
It is against such a chorus of hate against the critical researchers
that we are trying today to bring, with their sources, elements to
this dossier in the hope that it will serve to start off a genuine
discussion on the objective realities of this past, without lending
this or that researcher political motives, without condemning him in
advance to repression and silence.
One does not prepare the future by perpetuating hatred and feeding it
with lies.
The critique of proven historical accounts and of scientific studies
make it possible for public opinion to reflect on past crimes to
forestall those of tomorrow; it is a moral as well as a scientific
obligation.
Until now, even artists of great talent and of genuine good faith
have only been given false and arbitrary figures.
In spite of this, some authentic masterpieces have emerged, as for
example Robert Merle's novel : "La mort est mon metier", which
reconstitutes in first-person form, the career of Hoess, commander at
Auschwitz.
Though he quotes the arbitrary figures of the false witness, Robert
Merle sometimes writes in a manner worthy of Stendhal:
"...The public prosecutor cried out : You have killed three and a half million people!
"-- I asked to be allowed to speak and said : I beg your pardon, I killed only two and a half million!
"There were murmurs in the hall. Yet I had done nothing save to correct a false figure."
Source: R. Robert Merle, "La mort est mon metier"
Ed.Gallimard,1952, Folio. p.365-366.
In the film world, a brilliant and yet subtle film like Alain
Resnais' "Nuit et Brouillard" gives a poignant and unforgettable
image of barbarism and suffering; but it is disfigured by its
evocation of the arbitrary figure of 8 million Jewish victims at
Auschwitz alone!
But there were soon to be a lot of books, and especially a lot of
films for the screen and for TV, which warped the meaning of Hitler's
crime. How many times just after the liberation, as a whole
generation can testify and judge for themselves, did we see the
exploits of those who fought the most efficiently against the Nazis :
the film "La bataille de l'eau lourde" evoked the decisive exploit of
Joliot-Curie and his team to extract from Hitler the stocks that
would have enabled him to be the first to use the atomic bomb ?
"La bataille du rail" shows how the railroad workers sabotaged German
transports to paralyze the concentration of their troops. How many
films like "Paris brule-t-il?" showed the uprising of the people of
Paris, freeing their own city and capturing the German governor Von
Choltitz to force the enemy to capitulate.
How many times have such films been shown compared to "Exodus",
"Holocaust", "Shoah" and other such works which we can see, along
with similar works, on our TV screens, as if the "sacrificial"
suffering of some was infinitely nobler than the suffering of all the
others in their heroic struggle ?
Lanzman's "Shoah" lasts for nine hours, during which we see endless
stones and trains, and are told by someone like the Treblinka barber
that he was able to fit into a 16 square-meter room 60 women and 16
barbers !
Those who commission works for the "Shoah business" are generous. The
State of Israel for a start : Menahem Begin raised 850,000 dollars
for "Shoah", which he deemed "a project of national
interest."
Source: "Jewish telegraphic agency," June 20th 1986, "The Jewish
journal".N.Y. June 27th 1986, p.3.
One of the films which helped to manipulate world opinion the
most:
" The TV film "Holocaust" is a crime against historical truth. The general theme was that such a large-scale event - the extermination of 6 million Jews could not go unnoticed by the German people as a whole. If therefore the Germans did not know, it was because they did not want to know and were therefore guilty."
Source: "Liberation", March 7th 1979.
And these are the wormy fruit of this "breviary of hatred":
"All these enemy agents must be expelled from the country. We have been asking for permission to do it for two years. What we need is very simple and clear : the authorization, and enough ships. The problem involved in sinking those ships does not, unfortunately, devolve upon the Paris municipal council."
Source: Bulletin municipal officiel de Paris. Assembly debate the
Paris Municipal Council, October 27th 1962 session, p.637.
This was not an ill-considered remark, as was confirmed by Mr.
Moscovitch on January 15th 1963, who declared during a libel suit he
himself had instigated:
"I have indeed regretted that France's enemies were not exterminated...and I still regret it!" ("Le Monde", January 27th 1963).
After a sober and dignified first book, written just after he was
released from Buchenwald, "L'Univers concentrationnaire" (Ed. de
Minuit, 1946), David Rousset gave us, in a literary and subtle form,
in "Les jours de notre mort", most of the hackneyed stereotypes of
our concentration camp literature.
Novels too have contributed to this mystification since "Les jours de
notre mort" by David Rousset, which warped the reality of the
Buchenwald and Dora camps, as did Martin Gray's "Treblinka", which
was ghosted by a famous French writer to describe a camp in which he
had never set foot. Since the fake archives of the Veterans'
Ministry, "discovered" by Serge Klarsfeld, including the apocalyptic
fakes by Nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel, who saw "with his very eyes"
"gigantic flames" rising from an open trench in which "little
children were being thrown" (flames never spotted by any of the
American planes that flew over the camps). In a crescendo of horror
and delirium, he adds:
"Later, I learned from a witness that, for months and months, the earth had not stopped moving, and that from time to time geysers of blood had spouted from it." (This concerns an "eyewitness account" on Babiyar.)
Source: Elie Wiesel: "Paroles d'rtranger", Ed. du Seuil. 1982,
p.192,p.86.
The apotheosis of this fictionalized literature is the world
best-seller, the "Diary of Anne Frank". The wonderfully touching
novel replaces history and, once again, the myth is disguised as
history.
The English historian, David Irving, testified at the Toronto Trial
on April 25th and 26th 1988 (33.9399-9.400); he had this to say about
the "Diary" of Anne Frank:
"The father of Anne Frank, with whom I corresponded over many years, finally relented and allowed the diaries to be submitted to the kind of laboratory examination that I always insist upon where a document is in question."
The expertise was conducted at the German police criminal laboratory
of Wiesbaden. The conclusion reached was that a portion of the
"Journal" of Anne Frank had been written with a ball-point pen; such
pens did not go on the market until 1951, whereas Anne Frank died in
1945.
David Irving continues:
"My own conclusion on the Anne Frank diaries is for the greater part they are authentic writings of a pubescent teenage Jewish girl who was locked up and hidden, that they were then taken by her father, Otto Frank, after the girl's tragic death of typhus in a concentration camp, and her father or other persons unknown amended the diaries into a saleable form as a result of which he and the Anne Frank Foundation became rich, but as a historical document they are completely worthless by virtue of having been tampered with."
The "Shoah-business" uses only "eyewitness accounts" evoking various
ways of "gassing" victims, without our ever being shown the
functioning of a single "gas chamber" (of which Leuchter has
demonstrated the physical and chemical impossibility), nor a single
of those numberless trucks supposed to have served as "ambulatory
gas-chambers" through their Diesel fumes; nor the tons of ashes from
the bodies, buried after the cremations.
"There are no photographs of the gas chambers and the corpses have gone up in smoke. Only witnesses remain."
Source: "Le Nouvel Observateur", April 26th 1985
Claude Lanzman's endless film was conceived in the same spirit. As
Lanzman put it himself:
"We had to make this film from nothing, without any documents from archives, inventing everything."
Source: "Liberation" April 25th 1985.p.22
If we try to imagine the goal of a criminal trial, we must admit the
primordial importance of hearing experts giving their opinion on a
wide range of questions, if only to reach a conclusion as to the
credibility of many witnesses as well as a few "documents". Let us
formulate here what a few of these questions would be:
" How long did it take for "Zyclon B" gas to act, and how did its effects manifest themselves ?
" How long did the gas remain active in an enclosed space (either unventilated or ventilated immediately after use) ?
" Was it possible,as has been stated, to enter the premises without a mask when they were impregnated with "Zyklon B" gas, only half an hour after use of the gas ?
" Was it possible to burn the corpses completely within 20 minutes in a crematorium oven?
" Could crematorium ovens work day and night without time to cool off?
" Is it possible to burn human bodies in ditches several meters deep, and if so how long would it take ?
Until now, no "incriminating proof" has been produced. We shall only
give two examples:
* that of the "itinerant gas chambers" in lorries;
* that of the soap made from human fat (a tall story already used during the 1914-1918 war) (Just as "gassing" is a recycled version of the "gassing" of Serbs by Bulgars in 1916).
Source: "The Daily Telegraph",London March 22nd 1916.p.7
"The history of the exterminations by genuine "mobile gas chambers", which were lorries in which thousands of people are supposed to have been killed by a twist of the Diesel exhaust pipe towards the interior was first spread in Western opinion in the "New York Times" of July 16th 1943, p.7." (Until then, the theme had been developed only in the Soviet press.)
The Daily Telegraph, London June 25th 1946. p.5.
There again, the crime weapon (hundreds, if not thousands, of lorries
specially installed for these murders) has disappeared. Not one of
them was ever found and shown as evidence at any trial.
Here too, we can note that if the "extermination" plan had to remain
an absolute "secret", it would be strange if it had been communicated
to thousands of lorry drivers and their assistants who would have
dealt with the victims (without any order of mission), making
thousands of bodies disappear by magic, while being the keepers of
the "terrible secret".
It was Wiesenthal who promoted the legend of "human soap" in articles
published in 1946 in the Austrian Jewish community paper, "Der Neue
Weg" (The new way). In an article entitled "RIF", he wrote:
"The terrible words "Transport for soap" were heard for the first time at the end of 1942. It was the general Government (of Poland) and the factory was at Belzec, in Galicia. From April 1942 to May 1943, 900,000 Jews were used as raw material in this factory."
After the transformation of the corpses into various raw materials,
Wiesenthal wrote:
" the leftovers, the residual fatty waste, was used for the production of soap."
He added:
"After 1942, the people in the general Government knew very well what RIF soap meant. The civilized world cannot imagine the joy this soap gave the Nazis of the general Government and their wives. In each bar of soap, they saw a Jew who had been magically placed there and thus prevented from becoming a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein."
The Yad Vashem Memorial has answered very officially that the Nazis
did not make soap out of Jewish corpses. During the war, Germany
suffered a shortage of fats and the production of soap was placed
under the supervision of the government. The bars of soap were marked
with the initials RIF, the German abbreviation meaning "pure
industrial fat". Certain people mistakenly thought it was RJF and
meant "pure Jewish fat".
The rumor spread rapidly.
There is a document which, if it were discussed seriously and
publicly, would put an end to the controversies about the "gas
chambers": this is the "Leuchter Report" (April 5 th 1988).
Zyklon B gas, made from cyanhydric substances, is considered to have
been the product used to gas a multitude of prisoners. It is normally
used to disinfect clothing and instruments that