History
of Revisionism as of 1993
Yoshua Shalev
The work of Paul Rassinier
The very first stone thrower and Holocaust 'heretic' was Paul
Rassinier, a French professor of history and geography who published several pioneering works on the subject between 1948 and 1967, the year of his
death. To his supporters Rassinier is now esteemed as being "the father of Holocaust
Revisionists", but is regarded by his many detractors as having been the father of "Nazi gutter
historiography", to quote Yehuda Bauer. [46 ] Another Jewish commentator described him in even harsher
words: "[He was] a teacher who came straight out of the anti-Semitic French tradition that culminated in the Dreyfus affair and is not much diminished
today... [He was] perhaps the most rabid Jew-baiter of thepost-war
period". [47]
Although Rassinier was overtly anti-Zionistic – as were a majority of the French people, in
[29] his generation – the charge that he was "anti-Semitic" resulted only from his rejection of accepted opinion on the Holocaust, and
not from a belief that Jews were racially inferior, or from any
philo-Hitlerism. Indeed, a careful reading of all available evidence reveals that he was not a racist and that he had every reason to hate the Nazi
regime, because in October 1943 he had been arrested by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) for his central role in forming the Libération-Nord resistance
movement, interned in Buchenwald concentration camp, and then in the subsidiary camp of Dora. When he was released in
April 1945, he was in such poor physical condition that he had to be repatriated on a
stretcher.
Having joined the SFIO (Section française de I'Internationale Ouvrière – the French Socialist Party) in 1934, after several years as a
Communist, Rassinier had risen by 1940 to become the head of that party in the Belfort
region. After France was occupied by the German army he helped form the Libération-Nord
movement, which became involved in various forms of non-violent
resistance, including the smuggling of Jewish refugees across the border into Switzerland in cooperation with the Swiss Jewish
Committee. His activities eventually came to the attention of the German
authorities, hence his arrest by the
Sicherheitsdienst – who tortured him for eleven days – and subsequent deportation to Buchenwald.
Upon his liberation in 1945 he returned to France and, after a period of
recuperation, was elected to the Assemblée Nationale as a Socialist
deputy, where he served for a year until it became apparent that his health would not allow continued
service. For his work in the resistance the French government bestowed upon him the highest decorations given to resistance
fighters, the Médaille Vermeil de la Reconnaissance Française and the Rosette de la
Résistance, and, being unable to return to teaching, allowed him a small
pension. Thus, the charges that he was 'anti-Semitic' or 'pro-Nazi', which abounded after the publication
of his works on the Holocaust, were groundless and, some might argue,
slanderous.
Almost immediately after the war Rassinier noticed that very many stories were circulating to the effect that almost all Nazi concentration camps – including Buchenwald – had homicidal gas chambers and other murder
machinery, used to systematically exterminate millions of Jews and
others. Indeed, when the Americans liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and Bergen-Belsen four days
later, to their horror they encountered hundreds of unburied corpses, in various stages of
decay, and thousands more living internees, many of them diseased and
emaciated. Survivors told them spine-chilling stories of torture and
atrocities, backing up their stories by showing the stunned GIs the "gas
chambers", crematory ovens, alleged torture instruments (such as batons and
whips) and even physical "proof" that human skin was used by their sadistic captors to make
lampshades, book covers, handbags and gloves.
Media representatives and politicians from Britain, France and the United States were flown into Germany to see with their owneyes the horrors at the
camps, which were filmed and photographed as evidence that Hitler had
"murdered the Jews." Having himself experienced life in Hitler's concentration
camps, Rassinier believed that the stories former internees were telling contained a small degree of true and a very large degree of exaggeration and
embellishment, and decided at once to write a factual account of his own experiences at Buchenwald and Dora. He later described that decision in these
words:
Then one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal
one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National
Socialists. The deportees – many of whom were Communists – had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous
conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an
accomplice to a dangerous influence. And, at one sitting, without paying attention to literary style and in as simple as possible a form, I wrote my
"Le Passage de la ligne" in an attempt to put things into proper perspective and in an
attempt to bring
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46 / Y. Bauer,
The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (London: Sheldon Press, 1978), p.
47 / R. Kvam, "Among Two Hundred Survivors from Auschwitz", Translated by Otto Reinert,
Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, Issue No. 111, Volume 28, Number 3, Summer 1979, p. 286. Most Jewish writers on Holocaust Revisionism have made similar claims about Rassinier's attitude towards Jews. Lucy Dawidowicz stated that he had "flipflopped into a rabid anti-Semite."("Lies About the Holocaust",
Commentary, December 1980, p. 33).
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people back to a sense of objectivity and, at the same time, to a better conception of intellectual
honesty.[48]
In "Le Passage de la ligne" ("The Crossing of the Line") [49], published in 1948, Rassinier
described at length what life was actually like for internees at Buchenwald and Dora (Mittelbau). The former camp was a major concentration camp, whilst the latter was a labour camp for
'the tunnel', a massive underground network of factories where slave's were used to construct V-l and V-2 rockets and aircraft parts and
frames. According to Rassinier, life in Buchenwald was not as unbearable as many portrayals have
suggested. Nonetheless, he described an environment in which brutality was normal; internees were forced off their thin straw
mattresses, on which they slept crowded together, at 4.30 a.m. every day, beaten with rubber truncheons if they were too slow to
rise. Several hours every day were spent
in roll-calls, even in mid-winter when they would have to stand in the chilling snow or
rain, their ragged clothes getting soaked through. As the camp was a
Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), and not an Arbeitslager
(labour camp), the internees' work, which finished every night at around 9 p.m., consisted of maintaining and improving the facilities at the camp, and building new
ones. Yet the work was often unpleasant and difficult, and many died every day of
maltreatment, malnutrition, disease and fatigue. Escapers, criminals and trouble-makers were executed almost without
exception. Cadavers were carried by the
Totenkommando to the camp crematory and destroyed.
At Dora life was even worse for internees because the camp was an Arbeitslager, in essence
a slave-labour camp. They worked for twelve to fourteen hours every day, often in horrendous
conditions. For example, Rassinier wrote that the internees assigned to digging new galleries
"were veritable chain gangs whose members died like fleas, their lungs poisoned by the ammonia laden
dust."[50] He also explained that security and discipline were rigidly
enforced, to the point of callousness and brutality. During one particular
roll-call, twenty-seven men were found to be missing. The
Rapportführer ordered the Kapo of the Arbeitsstatistik to re-check his
figures, but after an hour of doing so he returned
with the same tally. At once another count was made, but twenty-seven were still found to be
missing. A thorough search of the barracks and the tunnel was made (during which time the 10,000 other prisoners were still standing to
attention) but none of the missing prisoners were found. By the time all internees were accounted for – after the
Arbeitstatistik had repeatedly rechecked their figures, amending them several times when calculations errors were found – the internees had been standing for over twelve hours
without food. When they were finally dispersed to their barracks, still without food, the
Totenkommando carried away to the crematory the bodies of forty persons who were unable toendure the
ordeal. [51]
Thus, it is clear that Rassinier attempted to present the concentration camps in a truthful
manner, and his description of day-to-day life therein resembles in many ways the stories told by other former
internees. However, his memoir differs substantially from theirs in that he stated that absolutely no genocidal activities were conducted in those two
camps. He claimed that the very many deaths that did occur – amongst all races and
nationalities, not just Jews – resulted principally from the policies and actions
of other internees, and not from the actions of the SS guards or camp
management.
To support this claim – which at first sight seems incredible – Rassinier persuasively argued that the
SS-Führung (SS administration), out of the necessity to economize
personnel, delegated almost entirely the day-to-day running of the camp to carefully-selected prisoner
trustees. These trustees were mainly German communists, some of who were inherited from Weimar Republic
jails. This practice of limited self-administration was called
Häftlingsführung, and some of the people involved in this
bureaucracy were Kapos (who headed Kommandos, or work
details),
Blockältester (block supervisors), Lagerschutz (prisoner
police), and
Lagerältester (camp supervisors). It was these people, and not the SS
overlords, who caused the majority of deaths in the camps through their
brutality, self-centred rationing of food and clothing, and management – or
mismanagement, to be more accurate – of hygiene and medical resources and
facilities.
Rassinier provided several examples which certainly appear to support this
conclusion, which was argued in a lucid, logical and dispassionate
manner. Further, during his internment at
Buchenwald and Dora he had come into
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48 / P. Rassinier,
Debunking the Genocide Myth, Translated from the French by Adam Robbins (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review), p. 109. This work is an English translation of the bulk of Rassinier's first three books on the Holocaust,
Le Passage de la ligne, Le Mensonge d'Ulysse and Ulysse trahi par les siens. Rather than quoting from the French editions, all quotes herein will be from this English translation.
49 / Mâcon: Editions Bressanes, 1948.
50 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 73.
51 / Ibid., pp. 76-77.
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contact with numerous internees who had spent time in other western (that is in Germany, Austria or Czechoslovakia) concentration camps, and based on their evidence was able to conclude that the
Häftlingsführung arrangement, and the massive problems caused by it, were essentially the same throughout the entire National Socialist concentration camp system.
Lastly, Rassinier's thesis on the Häftlingsführung gains considerable additional support from source material which became available only after his death.
Hence,
Le Passage de la ligne was markedly different from the writings of his fellow exinternees,whose works placed exclusive blame on the Nazis for all deaths within the
camps, and made it appear as if almost all internees suffered alike at the hands of their sadistic and murderous
captors.
Rassinier's work, generally well-founded and thoughtfully written, concluded that a certain group of privileged prisoners themselves caused – by their
brutality, self-centredness and mismanagement – very many of the atrocious conditions which resulted in so many
deaths. As could be expected, the publication of his book caused quite a stir in France, a nation then trying to come to terms with its own acquiescence in German
occupation. Many angry people – mostly Communists – stated that he was whitewashing the crimes of the Nazi regime and accusing the internee leadership of collaborating with the Nazis.
In 1950 he angered them even more when he published Le Mensonge d'Ulysse
("The Lie of
Ulysses") [52], a critical study of the evidence in support of the allegation that the Nazis exterminated around six million Jews during the Second World War as an act of
state. This work provoked a very heated response from the French press, which repeatedly branded him a Nazi-apologist and an
anti-Semite.
Legal action was also taken to silence and punish Rassinier and his-publisher for their crime of the
"injury and defamation" of the French resistance movement and
(indirectly) the Jewish people [53]. Arguably, this was a spurious charge in the light of the fact that the book did not attack Jews or the genuine resistance
movement, but exposed only the tendency of many Frenchmen to claim in the immediate postwar period that they had been patriotic members of the resistance when in fact they had never been associated with that valorous
movement.
At the first trial early in 1951 Rassinier and his publisher were
acquitted. However, after a successful prosecution appeal they were convicted in November of that year in the Court of Lyon. They received suspended prison
sentences, large monetary fines, an order to have all copies of the book
destroyed, and an order that they pay damages to the National Federation of Deportees and Resistants
(F.N.D.R.). Believing that state censorship was at work and that their intellectual independence was
threatened, Rassinier and his publisher took the case to the French Supreme Court. On May 24, 1955 it set aside the previous judgement of the Court of Lyon, finding that Rassinier had neither attacked the
F.N.D.R. nor any of its members, nor any one else specifically. [54 ] News of his legal victory was widely published in the major French
newspapers.
In 1955 Rassinier combined Passage de la Ligne and Le Mensonge d'Ulysse and published
them, with the addition of material increasingly critical of the gas chambers
claim, as Le Mensonge d'Ulysse Second Edition. The most widely distributed edition was the
fifth, published in 1961, the year he published
Ulysse Trahi par les siens ("Ulysses Betrayed by His Own") [55], a concise companion volume comprising three
essays, the latter being the text of a speech he gave in a 1960 lecture series throughout Germany. In 1962 he decided to present as a whole the entire problem of concentration
camps, alleged atrocities and war
crimes trials, the result being his Le Véritable Procès Eichmann ou les Vainqueurs incorrigibles
("The Real Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors") [56]. Two years later he attempted to examine the subject of Nazi anti-Jewish atrocities by examining the demographic evidence for and against accepted
opinion. This book,
Le Drame des Juifs européens, ("The Drama of theEuropean
Jews") [57] was his final general work on the subject of the extermination of the
Jews. However, in 1964 he published
L'opération "Vicaire" (Operation "Vicar") [58], a defence of Pope Pius XII, accused
in Rolf Hochhuth's play "The Deputy" – and by
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52 / Mâcon: Editions Bressanes, 1950.
53 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 130.
54 / Cf. P. Rassinier, The Real Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible
Victors, Third English Printing, 1983 (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review. First published as
Le Véritable Procès Eichmann ou les Vainqueurs incorrigibles by Les Sept Couleurs, Paris, 1962), p. 25.
55 / Librairie Française, 1961.
56 . / Cited in footnote 54.
57 / Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1964.
58 / Paris: La Table Ronde, 1965.
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several Jewish commentators – of having favored Nazism and not speaking out against the Jewish
exterminations.[34]
We have argued that Rassinier's first book was, overall, quite well argued and thoughtfully
(if not always eloquently) written, despite his own personal suffering at the hands of the Nazis. An investigation of his numerous other works reveals
that, with some exceptions, he maintained the degree of evenhandedness displayed in his first
book. Several of his principal arguments were reasonable and supported by reliable evidence of a primary nature, although he also made very many errors of judgement and on several occasions quoted from clearly unreliable
sources, or misquoted others. Rassinier began by challenging the reliability and credibility of both the inconsequential and important eyewitness accounts
of genocidal activities within the concentration camps, and successfully exposed several of them as lies or
exaggerations. He explained, by way of illustration, how he met up again after the war with Abbé Jean-Paul Renard, someone he was interned with at Buchenwald and Dora and who later published a wellreceived collection of poems on life in the
camps. In one poem,
J'ai vu, j'ai vu, et j'ai vécu ("I saw, I saw, and I lived!"), he had
written: "I saw going into the showers thousands and thousands of persons over whom poured out, instead of liquid, asphyxiating
gases. I saw those who were unfit for work injected in the heart."
Regarding the genocidal activities described in this poem, Rassinier
wrote:
Actually, Abbé Jean-Paul Renard saw nothing of the kind because gas chambers did not exist either at
Buchenwald or at Dora. As for the injections, it was not done at Buchenwald at the time he went through there. When I pointed that fact out to him at the beginning of 1947, he answered, "Right, but that's only a figure of speech ... and since those things existed somewhere, it is of no
importance." [59]
Rassinier's reason for stating that no gas chamber(s) existed in Buchenwald appears
reasonable: because of its physical necessities and the nature of its task a gas chamber could not be hidden or
disguised. Thus, as he had never seen one or heard about one during his own internment
there, despite the fact that he possessed an intimate knowledge of all the buildings in the camp and their
functions, one could not have existed. However, at the time he wrote these words it was accepted in France –
indeed, throughout the world – as an undeniable fact that Buchenwald had a homicidal gas
chamber, in which thousands of internees were fatally asphyxiated. When the camp was liberated dozens of internees came
forward to testify that there was a gas chamber (or chambers, as some
insisted) in the camp. An official French government report submitted to the International Military Tribunal as a prosecution exhibit
had, for example, stated that the railway line at Buchenwald had been lengthened by the Nazis so that the deportees might be led directly from the trains to the gas
chambers, of which the floor of one allegedly "tipped" after the gas had done its job, so as to drop the bodies into the room with the cremation
oven.[60] Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at that
tribunal, himself declared in his closing address that [35] "murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the
ovens" of Buchenwald, and several other camps.[61] In 1947, Georges
Hénocque, a French priest interned in Buchenwald, published his widely-read
book,
Les Antres de la Bête. He claimed to have visited the inside of the Buchenwald gas
chamber, and described it at length and in considerable detail. [62]
Numerous other writers and historians, particularly in the 1950s, echoed these claims without making any serious attempts to analyse the evidence according to accepted methodological
principles.
Nonetheless, it would appear that Rassinier was essentially correct after all, as today very few historians claim that gassings or other genocidal activities
(as opposed to incidental murders and routine brutality) occurred in Buchenwald.
In the August 19, 1960 issue of Die Zeit – a major Hamburg weekly –Martin
Broszat, one of West Germany's leading historians (later director of the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte) and an expert on the Holocaust, stated
that: "Neither in Dachau, nor in Bergen-Belsen, nor in Buchenwald, were Jews or other inmates
gassed." [63] Regarding genocidal policies or activities in the western
camps, Simon Wiesenthal wrote in 1975 that "there were no extermination camps on German
soil". [64] This, of course, includes both Buchenwald and Dora, situated not far from Weimar in
Thuringia, Germany.
Professor A. S. Balachowsky, a member of the prestigious Institut de France, was more specific when he
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59 / Rassinier,
Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 130.
60 Nuremberg Document 274-F; IMT, Volume XXXVII, p. 148.
61 / IMT, Volume XIX, p. 434; NC & A, Suppl. Volume A, p. 61.
62 / G. Hénocque, Les Antres de la Bête (Paris: G. Duraissie, 1947), pp. 115-116.
63 / "Keine Vergasung in Dachau", Die Zeit, August 19, 1960 (No. 34), p. 14. For a discussion of Broszat's concession, see Gitta Sereny, "The Men Who Whitewash Hitler",
New Statesman, November 2, 1979, p. 670.
64 / Letter in Books and Bookmen, April 1975, p. 5.
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stated that: "I would like to confirm to you that no gas chamber as such existed at Buchenwald" [65 ], a point also conceded by Konnilyn Feig in her 1981
book.
Hitler's Death Camps. [66] Many other researchers and scholars have quietly abandoned the opinion that Buchenwald had a homicidal gas chamber or conducted
mass-murder. However, possibly to their discredit, none have chosen to comment on how and why so many witnesses – whose reliability and credibility they had previously insisted on – had earlier testified
to the existence of one or more there. Finally, in basic agreement with Rassinier's
thesis, it is now generally agreed that most of the very many deaths in the western camps resulted from disease and
malnutrition, a direct but unintended consequence of the virtual collapse of Germany's
communications, transport, food and public health systems caused by the Allied saturation bombing of German
cities, industrial centres, roads and railways. [67] Accordingly, the horrendous piles of cadavers found by American forces at Buchenwald and the other western camps are no longer
believed, except by a few diehard anti-Nazis, to be 'proof (or even consequential
evidence) of specific Nazi policies or actions of genocide or
mass-extermination.
Rassinier continued by arguing that some of the authors who described the operation of gas
chambers had themselves never actually seen them, but relied solely on what others had told them. For
example, after investigating the claims about the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers found in Eugen Kogon's
L'Enfer Organisé, still often quoted, he found that only one person was mentioned who hadactually seen a gas
chamber. Unfortunately, "by a happy chance", he wrote, this eyewitness
("Janda Weiss") lived in the Russian zone and could not be contacted for verification of his story. [68]
Similarly, Rassinier claimed that David Rousset, author of
L'Univers concentrationnaire – which contained agraphic description of the alleged gassing process – "was
not, actually, ever present at this scene of torture of which he gives so exact and so gripping a
description." [69] On this point, one must concede that Rassinier was entirely
correct; Rousset, like the other authors mentioned, had relied on hearsay evidence and had never seen the described
events.
One important eyewitness account Rassinier considered too unreliable and incredible to be
considered worthy of the historian's serious attention was Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's
Médecin à Auschwitz. This memoir is allegedly based on Nyiszli's experiences as a Hungarian-Jewish internee and medical pathologist in Auschwitz. [70 ] Rassinier introduced his critique of Nyiszli's account with this carefully argued demolition of his evidence regarding the gas
chambers:
... he gave the first detailed account of all the horrors that took place at Auschwitz, including the exterminations in the gas chambers in particular. Among other
things, he claimed that in this camp was a gas chamber 200 metres long (width was not given), together with three others of similar dimensions. They were used to asphyxiate 20,000 persons a day, and four crematory ovens, each with fifteen burners, incinerated the victims as the operation proceeded. He added, in another connection that 5,000 other persons were, every day, done away with by less modern means in two immense open air hearths. And, he
added again that for eight months he had been personally present at these systematic massacres. Finally (this is on page 50 of the Julliard edition) he stated specifically that when he arrived at the camp (about the end of May 1944 at the earliest) the exterminations by gas, at the rate cited above had been "going on for four
years."
From the aforementioned testimony, the following contradictions can be gleaned.
First, this fellow did not know that if there were gas chambers at Auschwitz they had not been installed or made ready to work until February 20, 1943 (Document NO. 4463, already
cited).
Second: he did not know that the area of the gas chambers, officially and respectively, was 210 square meters for the first (the very one lie mentioned), 400 square meters for the second, and 580 square meters for the last two. In other words, the gas chambers which he saw, and whose operation he describes so minutely, must have been only 1.05 meters wide. In fact, it must have resembled a long hall [way passage]. Since he states precisely that down the middle of the chamber there was a row of columns with holes from which the gas came out (these columns came up through the roof and into these openings hospital attendants wearing Red Cross armbands threw the tablets
of
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65 / G. Tillion,
Ravensbrück (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 231.
66 K. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, (London/New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), p. 100. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica, a good indicator of accepted opinion on most subjects, states in its latest edition (15th; 1988) that "there were
no gas chambers" at Buchenwald. (Volume 2, p. 596).
67 / See below, pp. 240-241.
68 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 158.
69 / Ibid., p. 158.
70 Extracts from Nyiszli's memoir were first published in the March and April, 1951 issues of Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly review,
Les Temps Modernes (although there may have been a Hungarian edition in 1946). In 1961 it was published as a whole in five issues
(January/ February) of the Munich weekly Quick, under the title "Auschwitz". In the same year it was published as a volume of 256 pages with the title Médecin à Auschwitz, Souvenirs d'un médecin
déporté, published by Julliard Publishers, causing quite a sensation
in France. An English translation, entitled Auschwitz, A Doctor's Eye-witness Account was published shortly after, and has gone through over a dozen reprints, making it one of the most 'popular' Holocaust memoirs.
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Zyklon B), that there were along the walls on both sides for sitting (surely not very wide, those benches!) and that 3,000 persons (they were gassing batches of 3,000!) could move about easily in the room, I claim that one of two things is true: either this Dr. Miklos Nyiszli never existed, or, if he did exist, he never set foot in the places that he
describes.
Third: if the gas chambers at Auschwitz, together with the open hearths, exterminated 25,000 people aday for four and a half years (since according to this "witness") they continued to exterminate for six months after his arrival) that makes a total of 1,642 days. And at the rate of 25,000 persons per day for 1,642 days, there would have been 41 million cadavers, a little more than 32 million in gas chambers and a little less than 9 million in the open hearths. I shall add that even if it had been possible for the four gas chambers to asphyxiate 20,000 persons a day (at the rate of 3,000 per batch as the witness says), it was absolutely not possible to cremate that many at the same time, even if there were 15 burners and even if the job took only 20 minutes, as Dr. Miklos Nyiszli also falsely claims. Taking these figures for a basis, the capacity of the ovens, all working together, could not have consumed more than 540 corpses per hour, or 12,960 for the 24-hour day. At this rate the ovens could not have been put out until several years after the
liberation.[71 ]
Little additional commentary is needed, as Rassinier's arguments, which successfully refute
Nyiszli's claims, are reasonable and based on reliable evidence.
Nyiszli, if he ever did see the chambers at Auschwitz – and he claimed that for several months he slept in the Aufenthaltsraum für Häftlinge on the ground floor of the Krema II building – exaggerated their measurements and capacities by an average multiplier of over
four. That is, every measurement or capacity he asserted was
at least four times greater than in reality. For example, he stated that the
Leichenkeller (the alleged gas chamber) in Krema II was "200 yards [600
feet, or 182.8 meters] long", Whereas the true length was only 100
feet, or 30 meters. [72] The Birkenau gas chambers of Nyiszli's curious memoir
are, to make a comparison, almost identical in length (and width, if we use
conservative [38] ratio estimates) to the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. This juxtaposition should entirely dispel from any
readers' minds the notion that Nyiszli's very many measurement errors do not severely weaken the overall credibility of his
book. It is clear that his claimed statistics are not the result of poorly judged
estimates; they are irrational inventions. He not only made errors of that nature, but also such mistakes as getting the colour of Zyklon B granules wrong
(despite it being a very distinctive colour, and after him allegedly having seen it on many occasions being tipped into the gas
chambers), and referring to it as "chlorine". A medical
pathologist, very familiar with chlorine and its properties, would not have confused it with Zyklon-B
(hydrocyanic acid). Much more importantly, he invented physical details about the Krema II building that never
existed, such as multiple corpse elevators and automatically-opening cremation
ovens, he even described forests and playing fields that never existed, at least not in the areas of the camp he said that they
did. Academic historians should have picked up on these obvious and major
flaws. Yet Nyiszli's implausible account, which Rassinier called
"one of the
most abominable piece's of trickery of all time" [73], is unfortunately still being quoted or cited as reliable evidence by some incautious
historians, including scholars of considerable reputation such as Martin Gilbert. [74] [75]
In similar fashion, Rassinier detected major defects in the postwar confession of
SS- Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, whose job it was to supervise the distribution of disinfestation and disinfection agents – including Zyklon B – to the concentration
camps. This account was written shortly before his death in 1945 and describes exterminations by gas at Belzec and Treblinka. Rassinier pointed out many impossibilities and improbabilities within the German officer's statement (of which six contradictory versions
exist), which was later accepted as a prosecution document at the InternationalMilitary Tribunal. [76] Among Gerstein's more absurd
claims, he insisted, was his insistence that twentyfive
million persons had been gassed during the war; that in Belzec he saw "700 to 800" persons gassed into a chamber measuring only twenty-five square meters
(about the size of an average living room) [77]; and that Hitler had himself inspected gas chamber installations at Lublin on August 15, 1942
(whereas at that time he was hundreds of kilometers [39] away, at his
Wehrwolf headquarters near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine). Although Rassinier did not mention
them, Gerstein also made many other irrational claims, such as that in Belzec there was a pile of shoes measuring 35-40 metres in height
("35 oder 40 Meter Höhe" – the height of a ten or eleven story
building), that in the German concentration camps at least twenty million persons ("mindestens 20 000 000 Menschen") were systematically
gassed, or that in Auschwitz alone millions of children were murdered by having a pad of hydrocyanic acid held under their noses ("In
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71 / Rassinier,
Debunking the Genocide Myth, pp. 244-245.
72 / See below, p. 113, n. 98.
73 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 244.
74 / Cf. M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), pp. 698-699.
75 / Nuremberg Document 2170-PS. Typewritten statement dated May 6, 1945.
76 / IMT, Volume VI, pp. 211, 225, 360-364. The "confession", with some Zyklon invoices, became Document 1553-PS.
77 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, pp. 250-258. To fit 700-800 persons into twenty-five square meters would require 28-
32 persons per square meter (a space smaller than the average single wardrobe). This is clearly impossible.
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Auschwitz wurden allein Millionen Kinder durch Unterhalten eines Blausäuretupfens unter die Nase getötet.") [78 ]
It is strange that this seriously flawed document – critically appraised for the first time by Rassinier
(who did make several minor errors) – was ever considered as evidence for the International Military Tribunal. It is even more strange that it was dragged out again in 1961 and presented as prosecution evidence at the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was, like the 'major war
criminals' at the aforementioned Tribunal, hanged for his crimes. Most
strange, however, is the fact that it has been (in itsvarious forms) repeatedly cited and quoted by very many
historians. Raul Hilberg, for example, quoted or cited the Gerstein confession ten times in his
book.
The Destruction of the European Jews, which is still
considered a standard textbook on the subject. By presenting the Gerstein confession as credible and trustworthy these scholars leave themselves wide open to the charge that they have failed in their professional
duties.[79 ]
If Rassinier had limited himself to this type of study, his principal theses would have been irrefutable
(despite many inconsequential mistakes [80]). However, he also attempted to
prove, on the basis of an extremely detailed statistical study, that nowhere near six million Jews died during the Second World War, but
rather, that no more than 1,200,000 perished. In doing so he made [40] several major
errors, proving that he was not a skilled demographer. He relied on statistics from a variety of secondary
sources, including American newspapers, which fluctuated widely in
reliability. For example, Rassinier referred at length to the statistics quoted in the February 11, 1948 issue of the
New
York Times by "Hanson W. Baldwin, the Times expert on Jewish population
matters." [81] In fact, Baldwin, a staff writer for the newspaper, was very far from being an
"expert" on Jewish demography, and his statistics were based on documents of questionable origin and
reliability. Among the other newspapers cited by Rassinier was the
American Mercury, a right-wing, America-first publication. That newspaper's
political position, of course, does not in itself disqualify the evidence it puts
forward, but it is worth
pointing out that the editors based their own research on generally unreliable sources and illogical
methodology. Rassinier, extremely critical of the pedigree of sources used by other historians to uphold accepted
opinion, erred himself by incautiously quoting the demographic statistics of that and other
newspapers. Consequently, his lengthy ramblings on the number of Jewish fatalities are filled with major errors and
miscalculations, including at one point attributing to Raul Hilberg a figure of under 900,000 for the Jewish wartime
dead, based on a misreading of the latter's book (Hilberg's overall figure was actually 5,100,000).
Nonetheless, one can now see why almost all Holocaust Revisionists hold Rassinier in high
esteem; he was the first to openly challenge accepted opinion on the Holocaust, and he generally did so in a thoughtful and responsible
manner. Whilst he made many errors – some major, most minor – it must be conceded that he successfully demonstrated that some of the evidence used to uphold accepted opinion is of dubious origin and lacking in reliability and
credibility. It should also be recognized that today's Revisionists (and, of
course, those who uphold accepted opinion) have a wealth of primary documentary evidence that was unavailable in the 1950s and 1960s to
Rassinier, who was forced to rely partly on a
combination of 'official' documents and secondary sources. Where possible he contacted the people involved to verify that their testimonies were based on real events and recorded
faithfully, but this was only possible in a few cases. Thus, whilst only Rassinier's principal theses have been
investigated, it has been shown that his arguments were not anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi in origin or nature, but were generally reasonable and dispassionate criticisms of some of the evidence for Holocaust
orthodoxy.
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78 Rassinier was not aware of just how many contradictory versions of Gerstein's
"confession" there actually were, and restricted himself to examining two versions presented by Léon
Poliakov. Henri Roques, in his thorough 1985 doctoral thesis, Les 'Confessions'de Kurt
Gerstein, proves that there have been six different versions. The above quotes are from the typewritten German text of 6 May 1945, a facsimile of which is in the National
Archives, Washington.
79 / G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1953); L. Poliakov and J. Wulf,
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (Berlin: Arani Verlag, 1955); S. Friedländer,
Kurt Gerstein ou l'ambiguité du bien (Casterman, Tournai, 1967); L. Dawidowicz,
The War Against the Jews (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1975); G. Hausner, Justice à Jérusalem (Flammarion, 1976); M. Gilbert,
Final Journey (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1979); J. Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Ballantyne Books, 1979); et al.
80 / Such as stating that the first accusation against the Germans of the genocide of Jews was made in a
book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. Cf.
Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 288. The first serious extermination claims were
actually made a year earlier by the World Jewish Congress.
81 / Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth, p. 294.
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