French pacifist, journalist and editor, * March 18, 1906, in Bermont, † July 28, 1967 in Paris

R. was born in Bermont in the Territoire de Belfort, into a politically active family. During World War I, R.'s father, a farmer and a veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present day Vietnam) was mobilized, but was put into a military prison for his pacifist attitudes. 

After the war, R. joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1922. He secured a post as a teacher at the Ecole Valdoie, and in 1933, he became a Professor of History and Geography at the College d'Enseignement General at Belfort. In 1927, R. served in the French Army in Morocco, where his pacifist views were reinforced by the brutal colonialist repression and military corruption he witnessed. Upon his demobilization, he returned to his teaching post and his political activism. Around this time that he became a member of 'War Resisters' International'.

R. moved up to become the Party Secretary of the PCF in the Department of Belfort. In 1932, R. was expelled from the Communist Party. The same year, he and other alienated Communists formed a separate party, The Independent Communist Federation Of The East. R. became the Party Secretary and the editor of the Party newspaper, 'The Worker'. Neither the party nor the paper became popular, and both were dissolved in 1934. R. joined the SFIO, the French Section of the 'Workers' International'. He became Secretary of Federation SFIO for the Territory of Belfort. Denouncing the arms race, advocating the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, demanding more workers rights and supporting a pacifist ideology that would not be restricted to France, R. become Pan-European.

R. wrote articles condemning Nazism and Fascism, describing their foreign policy as a policy of gangsters, with warnings that neither Italy nor Germany could be trusted to respect their promises. But when the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, R. supported the accords 'without much pride, it is true, but without any shame', since he regarded war as the greatest catastrophe. He received condemnation for his pacifist stance, but replied that while it's easy to be a fair-weather pacifist, a true commitment to peace is something done both in and out of season and he expressed his disappointment that so few Socialists were on this side. In August of 1939, R. was arrested by French counter-intelligence, who suspected that his newspaper was receiving Nazi funding,but was released a few days later. After France was overrun in 1940, he resumed teaching in Belfort.

In June of 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, resistance in France came alive and R. first joined up with the 'The Volunteers of Freedom', a Republican-Socialist coalition, and then with the 'Resistance group Liberation', organized in the north of France. R. became the director of 'Libération Nord' for the territories of Alsace and Belfort. He practiced non-violent resistance to the German occupation, both because of his pacifism and his fear that reprisals would fall on innocent people. He printed false identity papers, and helped establish an underground railroad from Belfort to the Swiss town of Basel, smuggling resistance fighters, political refugees and persecuted Jews to safety. He demanded that Germany was to be held accountable for the crimes of Nazism, but the contribution of the Treaty of Versailles would not be ignored, nor would Germany and Italy be held unilaterally responsible for starting the war. 

The local Communist resistance groups of the Front National (FN) were hostile to R.'s idea of non-violent resistance and were enraged when R. published leaflets condemning Soviet Communism equally with the National Socialism of Hitler. After several warnings, the Communists condemned him to death. R.'s life was saved when in reaction to attacks on Germans, R. was arrested in his classroom. His wife and two year old son were also arrested, but released a few days later. For eleven days, Rassinier was interrogated  and beaten. R. was then deported in  January 1944, to the Buchenwald-Dora concentration camp, where V1 and V2 rockets were built in underground tunnels. The corrupt mafia of the prisoners' internal camp Communist-dominated Häftlingsführung resulted in a catastrophic death rate. Beginning in April, 1944, his wife mailed him food parcels. His friendship with his Block Chief resulted in his parcel being delivered directly to him without first being plundered by the prisoner government. As he came down with nephritis, he spent two hundred and fifty days of his imprisonment in the Revier (infirmary). On April 7, 1945, he was evacuated from Dora, jumped off and  was rescued by American soldiers.

R. returned to France in June of 1945, and was awarded the 'Vermilion Medal of the French Recognition' and the 'Rosette of Resistance'. He was also classified as 95 percent an invalid (later to be revised to 105 percent). In 1945, R. had resumed his positions as head of the Belfort Federation SFIO and editor of ' The Fourth Republic'. In June 1946 he was elected to the National Assembly for two months. He had returned to his teaching post, but because of his physical condition, was prematurely retired in 1950. 

R. being a history teacher, was distressed to read stories about the concentration camps and deportations that were not true. He was also appalled at the unilateral condemnation of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity that from his experience in Morocco, he didn't consider unique, and feared that nationalistic hatreds and bitterness would divide Europe. He wrote:“ ...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.”

R.'s first book, 'Crossing The Line' (1949), an account of his experience in Buchenwald, was an immediate critical and commercial success, one reviewer describing it as "...the first testimony coldly and calmly written against the demands of resentment, idiotic hatred or chauvinism". It is notable for its criticism of the prisoner government. R. wrote that effective resistance was found only among the Russian prisoners, and that many brutalities in the camp were committed not by the S.S., but by the mainly Communist prisoners who took over the Haftlingsfuhrung and ran the internal affairs of the camps for their own benefit. R. blamed the high death rate he saw on their corruption.

His second book, 'The Lie Of Ulysses: A Glance At The Literature Of Concentration Camp Inmates' (1950) caused controversy. R. criticized exaggerations and denounced authors, such as Eugen Kogon, and expressed doubts on the existence of gas chambers and a Nazi policy of extermination. The book created a scandal, and on November 2, 1950, R. was even attacked on the floor of the French National Assembly. On April 9, 1951, R. was expelled from the SFIO. R. was sued for slander by various organizations. After a round of trials and appeals, he was acquitted, and an expanded edition of 'The Lie of Ulysses' was published in 1955, which sold well. 

R. continued advocating socialism and pacifism. In 1953, he published 'The Speech of the Last Chance - An Introductory Essay to the Doctrines of Peace', describing the ideology of pacifism, and in 1955 'Parliament in the Hands of the Banks', a condemnation of capitalism and French financial policy. In 1961, R. returned to his earlier themes with 'Ulysses Betrayed by his Own', an anthology of the speeches he gave during a lecture tour of Germany built around a third edition of 'The Lie. This tour, along with his increasing association with right-wing activists such as Maurice Bardèche, led to him being denounced as an anti-semite. In 1962, after the Jerusalem trial, R. published 'The True Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors', a condemnation of the Nuremberg Trials and Adolf Eichmann trials, and in an expanded second edition, of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, from which he had been forcibly excluded by the West German government. At the end of the expanded edition, he argued that continuing war crimes trials were part of a Zionist and Communist strategy to divide and demoralize Europe. 

IN 1964, with 'The Drama of the European Jews', R. came to the conclusion that there was never a policy of extermination by Nazi Germany. He criticized Raul Hilberg's book 'The Destruction of the European Jews' (1961), again critiqued witness testimony, and questioned the technical feasibility of the claimed methods of extermination. He asserted that Zionist and Jewish organizations were conspiring to use Nazi crimes to extort money to fund themselves and the State of Israel. In 1965, R. - a declared atheist - was outraged by Hochhuth's thesis that Pope Pius XII stood silently by while the Jews of Europe were exterminated. He traveled to Rome, and was given access to the Vatican archives. 'Operation Vicar' was a defense of Pope Pius XII. 

During the early 1960's, R. had corresponded with the American Harry Elmer Barnes, who arranged for the translation of four of his books. In 1977, these were collectively published by 'Noontide Press' under the title 'Debunking The Genocide Myth'. R.'s lifelong dream was to write the history of Florence during the age of Machiavelli, but he did not live to realize it. His kidneys had been badly damaged at his fifteen months in Buchenwald and Dora, and he never recovered. He died on July 28, 1967, in the Parisien suburb of Asnieres while working on yet more books, 'The History of the State oOf Israel' and a book version of 'A Third World War for Oil'.

Literatur über / Writings concerning R.: 
Revisionist portrait
PROFILES IN HISTORY: Paul Rassinier, by Richard A. Widmann

Literatur im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek von und über / Writings in the catalogue of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek of and about Paul Rassinier
* Fabrication d'un antisémite, Fresco, Nadine. - [Paris] : Ed. du Seuil, 1999 Vorhanden in Leipzig
* Die Jahrhundert-Provokation - Tübingen : Grabert, 1998, 3. Aufl. Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Die Jahrhundert-Provokation - Tübingen : Grabert, 1989 Vorhanden in Frankfurt
* Le véritable procès Eichmann ou Les vainqueurs incorrigibles - Paris : La Vieille Taupe, 1983, 2. éd. Vorhanden in Leipzig
* Was ist Wahrheit? - Leoni am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1982, 8. Aufl. Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Was ist Wahrheit? - Leoni am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1981, 7. Aufl. Vorhanden in Frankfurt
* Was ist Wahrheit? - Leoni am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1980, 6. Aufl. Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* The real Eichmann trial or the incorrigible victors - Silver Springs, Md : Steppingstones Publ., 1979, 2. print. Vorhanden in Leipzig
* Was ist Wahrheit? - Leoni am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1979, 4. Aufl. Vorhanden in Frankfurt
* Was ist Wahrheit? - Leonie am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1978, 3. Aufl., Sonderaufl. für Nation-Europa-Leser 
* Der Fall Rassinier, Leoni (am Starnberger See) : Druffel, 1971 Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Operation Stellvertreter - München : Damm, 1966 Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Das Drama der Juden Europas - Hannover : Pfeiffer, 1965 Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Die Lüge des Odysseus - München : Damm, 1964, 3., verb. u. erw. Aufl. Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Zum Fall Eichmann: Was ist Wahrheit? oder Die unbelehrbaren Sieger - Leoni am Starnberger See : Druffel, 1963 Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Le Véritable procès Eichmann ou Les vainqueurs incorrigibles - Paris : Les Sept Couleurs, 1962 Vorhanden in Leipzig
* Was nun, Odysseus? - Wiesbaden : Priester, 1960 Vorhanden in Leipzig und Frankfurt
* Die Lüge des Odysseus - Wiesbaden : Priester, 1959 
 
Letzte Änderung / Last update: 18.03.2014 

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