FAKE PHOTOGRAPHS Not only were situations such as those at Belsen
unscrupulously exploited for propaganda purposes, but this propaganda has also
made use of entirely fake atrocity photographs and films. The extreme conditions
at Belsen applied to very few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the worst
difficulties and all their inmates survived in good health. As a result,
outright forgeries were used to exaggerate conditions of horror. A startling
case of such forgery was revealed in the British Catholic Herald of October
29th, 1948. It reported that in Cassel, where every adult German was compelled
to see a film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a doctor from Goettingen
saw himself on the screen looking after the victims. But he had never been to
Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment he realised that what he had seen
was part of a film taken after the terrible air raid on Dresden by the Allies on
13th February, 1945 where the doctor had been working. The film in question was
shown in Cassel on 19th October, 1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which
killed a record 135 000 people, mostly refugee women and children, the bodies of
the victims were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several weeks.
These were the scenes, purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had
recognised. The forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further
information the reader is referred to Arthur Ponsonby's book Falsehood in
Wartime (London, 1928), which exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities
in the First World War. Ponsonby cites such fabrications as "The Corpse Factory"
and "The Belgian Baby without Hands", which are strikingly reminiscent of the
propaganda relating to Nazi "atrocities". F. J. P. Veale explains in his book
that the bogus 'jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the Soviet prosecution
at Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous British "Corpse Factory" myth,
in which the ghoulish Germans were supposed to have obtained various commodities
from processing corpses (Veale, ibid, p. 192). This accusation was one for which
the British Government apologised after 1918. It received new Iife after 1945 in
the tale of lamp shades of human skin, which was certainly as fraudulent as the
Soviet "human soap". In fact, from Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging
admission that the lamp shade evidence at Buchenwald Trial "later appeared to be
dubious" (The Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by a certain Andreas
Pffffenberger in a "written affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in
1948 General Lucius Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared
after more thorough investigation to have been mosdy 'hearsay'. An excellent
work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the Myth of the Six Million
is Dr. Udo Walendy's Bild 'Dokumente' für die Geschichtsschreibung?
(Vlotho/Weser, 1973), and from the numerous examples cited we illustrate one on
this page. The origin of the first photograph is unknown, but the second is a
photomontage. Close examination reveals immediately that the standing figures
have been taken from the first photograph, and a heap of corpses super-imposed
in front of them. The fence has been removed, and an entirely new horror
"photograph" created. This blatant forgery appears on page 341 of R. Schnabel's
book on the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt,
1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". (Walendy cites eighteen other examples of
forgery in Schnabel's book). The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings of
the International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting to
illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also illustrated without a caption in Eugene
Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager Document F.321 for the International Court at
Nuremberg; Heinz Kühnrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p. 81); Vaclav Berdych's
Mauthausen (Prague, 1959); and Robert Neumann's Hitler - Aufstieg und Untergang
des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1961).
9. THE JEWS AND THE
CONCENTRATION CAMPS: A FACTUAL APPRAISAL BY THE RED CROSS There is one
survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the conditions
of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and
objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red
Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948. This
comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and expanded
the findings of two previous works: Documents sur I'activité du CICR en faveur
des civils detenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne 1939- 1945
(Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second
World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet,
explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition
of the Red Cross, had been strict political neutrality , and herein lies its
great value. The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention
in order to gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe
by the Germany authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access
to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of
civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to
be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or
supervision. The Red Cross Report is of value in that it first clarifies the
legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps,
i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories. of civilian internees,
the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on
administrative grounds (in German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested for
political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger to
the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. 111, p. 73). These persons, it
continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned
under common law for security reasons." (P.74). The Report admits that the
Germans were at first reluctant to permit supervision by the Red Cross of people
detained on grounds relating to security, but by the latter part of 1942, the
ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were permitted to
distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from August
1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other
camps and prisons" (Vol. 111, p. 78). The ICRC soon established contact with
camp commandants and launched a food relief programme which continued to
function until the last months of 1945, letters of thanks for which came pouring
in from Jewish internees.
RED CROSS RECIPIENTS WERE JEWS
The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily.
From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total
weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p.
80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies.
"Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen,
Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück,
Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to
camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients
were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless
Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83). In the course of the war, "The Committee was in a
position to transfer and distribute in the form of relief supplies over twenty
million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organisations throughout the
world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York"
(Vol. I, p. 644). This latter organisation was permitted by the German
Government to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war.
The ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief operation for Jewish
internees came not from the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of
Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary and
Slovakia. The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed
at Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This
camp, "where there were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries was a
relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol. III, p. 75). According to the Report, "'The
Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin)
which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special conditions. From
information gathered by the Committee, this camp had been started as an
experiment by certain leaders of the Reich . . . These men wished to give the
Jews the means of setting up a communal life in a town under their own
administration and possessing almost complete autonomy. . . two delegates were
able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945. They confirmed the favourable
impression gained on the first visit" (Vol. I, p . 642). The ICRC also had
praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania where the Committee
was able to extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian Jews until the time of the
Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it
never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The
same situation applied to many of the German camps after their "liberation" by
the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until
the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated
westward. But the efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining
at Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued
to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as
Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
NO EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE One
of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the
true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps towards the
end of the war. Says the Report: "In the chaotic condition of Germany after the
invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies
at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed by
this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on February 1st,
1945 . . . In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and
General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could
henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was authorised to stay
in each camp . . ." (Vol. III, p. 83). Clearly, the German authorities were at
pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are
quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the
Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews
they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of
the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned
the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation
system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were
becoming inevitable. In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it
is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found
no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis- occupied Europe of a deliberate
policy to exterminate the Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report does not even
mention such a thing as a gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other
wartime nationalities, suffered rigours and privations, but its complete silence
on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million
legend. Like the Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red Cross
found itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which
had become the order of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is
concerned, the Report points out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps
were being used to combat typhus on the eastern front, so that they were
unavailable when the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p.
204 ff)- Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were
carried out in gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the
Report makes nonsense of this allegation. "Not only the washing places, but
installations for baths, showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates.
They had often to take action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get
them repaired or enlarged" (Vol.III, p. 594).
NOT ALL WERE
INTERNED Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish
Civilian Population) deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free
population," and this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the
European Jews were placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to certain
restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly
with the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination programme", and with the
claim in the forged Hoess memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing "every
single Jew he could lay his hands on." In Slovakia, for examle, where Eichmann's
assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in charge, the Report states that "A large
proportion of the Jewish minority had permission to stay in the country, and at
certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a comparative haven of refuge for
Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia
seem to have been in comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a
rising against the German forces took place. While it is true that the law of
May 15th, 1942 had brought about the internment of several thousand Jews, these
people were held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging were
tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms almost
equal to those of the free labour market" (Vol. I, p. 646). Not only did large
numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether,
but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the war, generally by way of
Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish emigration from
German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich, as in the case of
the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews from
Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States
were held to be American citizens by the German occupying authorities, who
further agreed to recognize the validity of about three thousand passports
issued to Jews by the consulates of South American countries" (Vol.I, p. 645).
As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern
France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in
particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until
March 1944," says the. Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas
for Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the
replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its attempted armistice
with the Soviet Union) with a govenment more dependent on German authority, the
emigration of Jews continued. The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain
and the United States "to give support by every means to the emigration of Jews
from Hungary," and from the U.S. Govermnent the ICRC received a message stating
that "The Government of the United States . . . now specifically repeats its
assurance that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in
the present circumstances are allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p .
649).
10. THE TRUTH AT LAST: THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER
Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the
extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul
Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that
Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also
that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined
to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and
historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his
death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six
Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism. From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a
professor of history in the College d'enseignement général at Belfort, Academie
de Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was
arrested by the Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in
the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald,
towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health
that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the
Medaille de la Résistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to
the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in
November, 1946. Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis
of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of
the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely been
translated from the French and none at all have appeared in English. His most
important works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1949),
an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences
of them; and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted
the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His
monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le Véritable Proces
Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs européen (1964), in which Rassinier
exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the Jews
by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and
financial significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by
Israel and the Communist powers. One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is
exploding the myth of unique German "wickedness"; and he reveals with
devastating force how historical truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable
fog of partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the
fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to
proper proportions, loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one
act in a greater and much wider tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West
Germany in the spring of 1960, Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German
audiences that it was high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the
extermination legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it since the
allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the
world.
THE IMPOSTURE OF 'GAS CHAMBERS' Rassinier
entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that
travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he
investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace
their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers
at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an
inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there
(Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard,
and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et
Lumieres that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that
others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as
a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also
investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbrück.- The Women's Camp of Death
(London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other evidence for gas
chambers there than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were
deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations
were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was Auschwitz: The Story of a
Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell
(N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these authors could produce an authentic
eye-witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen
one. Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda
Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz,
but of course, since this person was apparently dead, Rassinier was unable to
investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of
Teufel und Verdammte who had alleged that millions of Jews were exterminated at
Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his
book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and that he based
his information on what others had "told him". The palm for extermination
literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyizli's Doctor at Auschwitz, in
which the falsification of facts, the evident contradictions and shameless lies
show that the author is speaking of places which it is obvious he has never seen
(Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 52). According to this "doctor of Auschwitz",
25,000 victims were exterminated every day for four and a half years, which is a
grandiose advance on Olga Lengyel's 24,000 a day for two and a half years. It
would mean a total of forty-one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a
half times the total pre-war Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier
attempted to discover the identity of this strange "witness", he was told that
"he had died some time before the publication of the book." Rassinier is
convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the war,
Rassinier has, in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual
eye-witness of gas chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during
World War Two, but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that
not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had
exterminated millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such
purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors
produce a living authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners
such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements not upon what they had
actually seen, but upon what they "heard", always from "reliable" sources, who
by some chance are almost always dead and thus not in a position to confirm or
deny their statements. Certainly the most important fact to emerge from
Rassinier's studies, and of which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter
imposture of "gas chambers". Serious investigations carried out in the sites
themselves have revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the
declarations of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers
whatever existed in the German camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück,
Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was
attested to by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised
and admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich.
However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again declared
at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out
for the gas chambers. So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned,
Rassinier shows that the sole evidence attesting to the existence of gas
chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited
memoranda of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be
recalled was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the
war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million.
Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents were
considered of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by the
Nuremberg Court, though they continue to circulate in three different versions,
one in German (distributed in schools) and two in French, none of which agree
with each other. The German version featured as "evidence" at the Eichmann Trial
in l961. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission
by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation
at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy
recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler,
Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 31, 39).
