Chapter 8:
Remarks

Miscellaneous Objections

We close this work with a few miscellaneous remarks, most of which deal with some objections that may arise in certain situations.

An objection that one highly intelligent critic actually expressed was that he thought that my story was similar to ones he had read about "flying saucers" and "divining rods." The reaction was startling, but it was at least understandable. Years of propaganda have so associated Nazi Germany with the six million legend that denial of the legend seems at first almost as preposterous for many people as denying that World War II happened at all. Nevertheless, the objection is not one that can be answered, except by pointing out that our account does not involve the supernatural or extraterrestrial or, indeed, anything more unusual than people lying about their political enemies. With this critic, one can only ask that he attempt to say something intelligent.

The most consequential objection to this work will be that I have employed the "holocaust" literature, in particular the books by Reitlinger and Hilberg, as sources, although I have also denounced such books as "monumental foolishness." This objection is a serious one, because I would be the first to hold that, once the extermination legend had been buried, these books will become significant only as supreme examples of total delusion and foolishness and will be referenced only in connection with the great hoaxes of history. However, our task here is precisely to bury the legend, and the only way to do that is by considering the story that has been advanced, and this amounts to analyzing the case put forward by Reitlinger and Hilberg. The only practical way of exposing the hoax is by considering the claims that have been put forward by the extermination mythologists.

There was a second reason for employing Reitlinger and Hilberg as sources. In this work, great weight had been placed on providing documentation that a reader without access to a large library can confirm on his own. Unfortunately, this desire could not be entirely satisfied, because a good part of the analysis relies on documents and publications that are not readily available without going through complicated borrowing procedures. In order to partially overcome this difficulty, I have used Reitlinger and Hilberg as sources on many such points, but I have only done this in cases where I have been able to confirm their remarks. I have not adopted the practice of assuming that anything that Reitlinger or Hilberg says that helps my case must be true. For example, in connection with our discussion in Chapter 5 (p. 188) concerning the date of the first Allied air raid at Auschwitz, I gave reasons for the conclusion that the first raid did not occur before August 1944. It would have been dishonest to merely reference Hilberg on this point, because Hilberg believes that the first raid occurred in December 1944 and is obviously confused on this point.[423]

Another reason for the frequent referencing of Reitlinger and Hilberg is my sincere wish that the reader would take a look at such books; it is only then that the reader can become completely convinced that the hoax is a hoax. In this connection one can recommend a typical procedure that the reader may go through to confirm the matter in a general way. First, get a copy of Hilberg's book. On pages 567-571, Hilberg presents a magnificent discussion of the alleged role of the Zyklon B in the exterminations, and on page 619 or 621, he points out that the German documents speak only of a program of deportations to the East and associated operations. It is also useful to read his discussion of what the Nuremberg trial documents say happened in Hungary, 509-554, and to note the document numbers he cites in this connection. Next find, if possible, a copy of Reitlinger's book, first or second edition. On pages 158-159 (150 in the first edition), he reproduces the text of document NO-4473, in which he notes that the "gas chamber" that allegedly existed in the building which contained Crematory II at Auschwitz was described as a "Vergasungskeller" in the original German. On pages 118, 121 and 182 (112, 114-115 and 169 in the first edition) Reitlinger remarks on the "mystery" that "at certain periods, entire transports (of Jews) were admitted" into Auschwitz. Reitlinger also briefly mentions the chemical industry at Auschwitz, pages 109 and 492 (105 and 452 in the first edition). Hopefully, the reader will undertake a more thoroughgoing confirmation, but the above would be a good start.

Some people may assume, fallaciously, that opinions expressed by Jews and Germans on the subject of the "Final Solution" carry nearly authoritative weight.

Under circumstance where the subject of this book is being discussed by a group of people, a seemingly potent argument - because it is so laden with emotion and can upset the decorum of the group - may be offered by a Jew who claims to have lost some relative or close acquaintance in the "holocaust," and he may even have knowledge that the supposedly missing relative had been sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka, or some such place.

There are several ways to react to such a point. An obvious possibility is that the man is lying. However, it is more probable that he is telling the truth as he knows it. Assuming that his story is valid, there is only one sense in which it can be valid. That is, all he can claim is that he or his family lost contact with some relative in Europe during the war and never heard from that person again. Obviously, such data does not imply the existence of a Nazi extermination program.

That contact was lost during the war was almost inevitable, either because it was difficult for Jews deported to the east to communicate with people in allied countries, or because it was difficult or impossible to communicate from the east to points farther west during the chaotic last year of the war. Thus, the only point of interest in such a case is the claim that contact was not reestablished after the war.

The simplest explanation is that the relative did indeed perish somewhere in Europe during the war, or in a concentration camp, from causes that have been covered in this book, along with an indeterminate number of other persons of central and east European nationalities.

The second possibility is that the relative survived the war, but did not reestablish contact with his prewar relations. One possible, although not very likely, motivation for such a failure to reestablish contact could have been some prohibition on such correspondence imposed by the Soviet Government on those Jews who had been absorbed into the Soviet Union.

A more important and more plausible motivation for failing to reestablish contact held when a separation of husband and wife was involved. A very large number of marriages are held together by purely social and economic constraints; such constraints didn't exist for a great number of the Jews uprooted by the German policies and wartime and postwar conditions.

In many cases deported Jewish families were broken up for what was undoubtedly intended by the Germans to be a period of limited duration. This was particularly the case when the husband seemed a good labor conscript; just as German men were conscripted for hazardous military service, Jews were conscripted for unpleasant labor tasks. Under such conditions, it is reasonable to expect that many of these lonely wives and husbands would have, during or at the end of the war, established other relations that seemed more valuable than the previous relationships. In such cases, then, there would have been a strong motivation not to reestablish contact with the legal spouse. Moreover, none of the "social and economic constraints," which we noted above, were present, and Jews were in a position to choose numerous destinations in the resettlement programs that the Allies sponsored after the war. This possibility could account for a surprisingly large number of "missing" Jews. For example, suppose that a man and wife with two small children were deported, with the man being sent to a labor camp and the wife and children being sent to a resettlement camp in the East. Let us suppose that the wife failed to reestablish contact with her husband. We thus seem to have four people reported dead or missing; the husband says his wife and children are presumably dead and the wife says her husband was lost. However, this one separation of husband and wife could account for even more missing Jews, for it is likely that the parents and other relatives of the wife, on the one hand, and the parents and other relative of the husband, on the other, would also have lost touch with each other. Thus, one had some number of people on the husband's side claiming that some number of people on the wife's side are missing, and vice versa. Obviously, the possibilities of accounting for "missing" Jews in this way are practically boundless.

It is said that the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem now have the names of between 2.5 and 3 million Jewish "dead from the Nazi holocaust." The data have supposedly been "collected on one-page testimony sheets filled in by relatives or witnesses or friends." Of course, it is in no way possible to satisfactorily substantiate this production of the Israeli government, which certainly cannot be claimed to be a disinterested party in the question of the number of Jews who perished. There is no doubt that many Jews died during the war, so we should expect that a part of the Yad Vashem claim is valid, but it is also the case that there is no possible way to distinguish, in this data, between Jews who actually died during the war and Jews with whom the signers of the "testimony sheets" have merely lost contact. The data is particularly meaningless when it is a "friend" who has contributed a declaration; I have lost contact with a great many former friends and acquaintances, but I assume that nearly all are still alive. Indeed, the use of the testimony of "friends" for the purpose of gathering the Yad Vashem data shows that the data is mostly meaningless; such "friends" have no more basis for declaring their missing acquaintances dead than I do.[424]

I have no idea what is meant by the "witnesses" who signed the testimony sheets. There is also a better than negligible possibility that some signers of these declarations invented missing friends and relative for any of a number of possible motivations, and it is even possible that some of the signers never existed.

To summarize our reaction to the claims of Jews regarding persons said to be victims of the "holocaust," such claims are no doubt valid to some extent, because many Jews died, but the hard data possessed by Jews who report such losses, when they are reporting truthfully, is not conclusive in regard to the deaths of the persons involved, and certainly in no way implies the existence of a Nazi extermination program.

Postwar Germany and Willy Brandt

One must be careful in interpreting the fact that Germans, themselves, seem to believe in the exterminations. Certainly, most individual Germans seem to concede the myth, and not all do so in order to stay out of trouble. However, it is clear that the German people were no better situated to see the truth than anybody else. Many might, indeed, have observed local Jews being deported, not to return after the war, and this may have given some an even more vivid conviction in support of the extermination hoax than that which holds generally. The basic observation to make relative to the views of individual Germans is that the standard sort of "information" on this subject has been available to them, and they are thus just as innocently deluded as other nationalities.

The West German government, which, by interminable war crimes trials, now being held thirty or more years after the alleged crimes, by instruction in the schools, and now by means of naked terror, as shown in the Stäglich episode,[425] does everything possible to keep the lie propped up and to prevent open discussion, is a different matter, because the cause for its behavior is not innocent misunderstanding. The basic fact is that the claim of the Bonn government to be a German government is somewhat tenuous. The entire political structure of West Germany was established by the U.S. government. This includes the control of the newspapers and other media, the control of the schools, and the constitution of thid Bundesrepublik. As a puppet creation, this "German" political establishment necessarily had an interest in the lies of the conquerors and behaved accordingly. That is very simple, and this situation is perfectly illustrated by the career of the man who was Chancellor of West Germany during the greater part of the time when this book was being written: Herr Willy Brandt (an alias - Brandt's real name is Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm - Frahm was his mother's maiden name).

Marxist Brandt left Germany after the Hitler takeover and acquired Norwegian citizenship. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, he slipped into neutral Sweden and eventually was given a position in the press corps there. It was none other than Willy Brandt who, during the war, was transmitting the concocted propaganda stories that had supposedly originated in Stockholm and ended up on the pages of the New York Times.[426]

After the defeat of Germany, Brandt naturally decided that the atmosphere back home had improved, so he returned to Germany, resumed German citizenship, and entered West Berlin politics as a Social Democrat. He eventually became Mayor of West Berlin and acquired a press aide, Hans Hirschfeld, a German Jew who, along with Kempner, Marcuse, et al., had been employed in the OSS during the war. During the 1961 espionage trial in the U.S. of R. A. Soblen, which resulted in Soblen being sentenced to life imprisonment, a government witness, Mrs. J. K. Beker, who had been a courier in a Soviet espionage ring during the war but had turned FBI informer later, testified that she had carried information from Hirschfeld to Soblen for transmission to Moscow. Mrs. Beker was the principal government witness, so the obvious answer of the defense should have been to produce Hirschfeld. Indeed, Soblen's defense counsel said that he had attempted to convince Hirschfeld to come to the U.S. to testify, but Hirschfeld declined, at first on the grounds that the publicity associated with his appearance as a witness could hurt Brandt, who was engaged in an election campaign. Hirschfeld was also concerned about the possibility that he might be charged with some sort of offense if he journeyed to the U.S. Brandt, in New York during the controversy involving Hirschfeld, naturally defended his former close associate, who had by that time been living in retirement in Germany.

In order to give the defense every opportunity to make a case for Soblen, the government offered Hirschfeld immunity against prosecution for "any past acts or transactions" if he would come to the U.S. to testify, adding only that Hirschfeld could be prosecuted for any perjury committed in a retrial of Soblen. Hirschfeld nevertheless declined to appear in Soblen's defense.[427]

Brandt eventually became Chancellor of West Germany and won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1971 for his efforts to build friendlier relations with the eastern bloc, his "Ostpolitik." Brandt seemed to be riding high, but by 1974, various Brandt policies had brought his Social Democratic Party to a new low in popular esteem, and even SPD politicians in long term SPD strongholds expressed the belief that they were going to lose their next elections. Fortuitously for the SPD, the Günter Guillaume scandal erupted in late April with Guillaume's arrest as an East German espionage agent. Although it had been known that Guillaume had been a member of an East Berlin espionage organization, he had been cleared by the Brandt government for a high post in the inner circle of Brandt's associates and advisers. The scandal brought Willy Brandt's downfall with his resignation on May 7, 1974. Brandt was succeeded by Helmut Schmidt, whose leadership terminated the decline of the SPD.[428]

Clearly, a career such as Brandt's postwar career is possible only in a country in which treason has become a normal part of political life, so it is not in the least surprising that the Bonn government is a defender of the hoax.

An interesting objection is the claim that nobody would dare invent such a tale as the six million legend; nobody had the extraordinary imagination required, and even if he did, the obvious risks in telling such gigantic lies should dissuade him. The argument amounts to the claim that the mere existence of the legend implies the truth of its essentials, so I suppose we can classify it as the hoaxers' ontological argument.

What is interesting about this objection is its superficially logical quality. Indeed, I imagine that this calculation accounts in good measure for the widespread acceptance of the legend; people assume that nobody would be so brazen as to invent such lies. Nevertheless, the logic is not sound, for history affords us numerous examples of popular acceptance of gigantic lies, and in this connection we can again cite witchcraft hysteria as precedent for the psychological essentials of the six million hoax.

The Talmud

It is ironic that Hitler anticipated the psychology of the "big lie" in his remarks on the subject in Chapter X of Mein Kampf. It is also ironic that the most mind-boggling invented accounts of exterminations appear in the Jewish Talmudic literature in connection with the last two of the three great Jewish revolts against the Roman empire, the Diaspora revolt of 115-117 AD and the Palestine revolt of 132-135 AD. In connection with the Palestine revolt of 66-70 AD, the Talmudic writings do nothing more than bewail the loss of the Temple in Jerusalem and discuss the implications of the loss for Jewish law. A good discussion of the three revolts is given in Michael Grant's The Jews in the Roman World.

According to the ancient accounts (mainly Cassius Dio, who wrote around 200 AD, and Eusebius, the early fourth century Bishop of Caesarea), the Diaspora revolt started in Cyrenaica (northeast Libya) at a time when the Emperor Trajan had, for the purpose of annexing Parthia and its valuable Mesopotamian territory, constituted a huge eastern army at the price of withdrawing many small contingents that had served to keep order in various parts of the Empire. The Jews attacked the Greek and Roman civilian populations, and it is said they killed 220,000 in Cyrenaica, amusing themselves in various gruesome ways. The revolt then spread to Egypt, where the Jews killed an unknown number, and to Cyprus, where they are said to have killed 240,000. In Alexandria, however, the predominantly Greek population gained control of events and are said to have massacred the Jews of that city. Recent archaeological evidence indicates that the ancient accounts are not exaggerated.[429]

The Talmud says almost nothing about this revolt, except to give the number of Jews killed in Alexandria as "sixty myriads on sixty myriads, twice as many as went forth from Egypt," i.e. 1,200,000 on the assumption that addition and not multiplication is intended. The killings are blamed on "the Emperor Hadrian," which may be due to the fact that Hadrian was at the time the commander of Trajan's eastern army and succeeded Trajan as Emperor when Trajan died in 117, possibly before the final suppression of the revolt.

The figure given for the number of Jewish victims is obviously exaggerated, for, while it is usually difficult to be more than approximately correct in estimating the populations of ancient cities, Alexandria of the period had a population of 500,000 or more, with an upper bound of one million a reasonable one to assume, because that was the approximate population of the city of Rome, a figure concerning which there is also some uncertainty, but if Rome ever attained a population significantly greater than one million, it never got near two million.[430] The 1,200,000 martyred Jews may seem a brazen invention, but you haven't seen anything yet.

The next great revolt was in Palestine in 132-135 and was a serious attempt by its leader, Bar-Kokhba, to set up a Jewish state with himself as king, although he eventually claimed to be the Messiah. During the revolt, he made laws, issued money, and performed the other regular functions of government.

Bar-Kokhba's end came in 135. Jerusalem not being suitable to withstand a siege, he led the remnant of his army to the village of Bethar (the present Bittir), which is located on high ground about 10 miles southwest of Jerusalem, 25 miles from the Dead Sea and 35 miles from the Mediterranean. The dimensions of the ancient town were roughly rectangular, with a north-south length of about 600 meters and an east-west width of about 200 meters. The south half of the town was fortified.[431] These dimensions plus the fact that the estimates for the Jewish population of Palestine of the time range from a low of 500,000 to a high of 2.5 million make it unlikely that Bar-Kokhba's Bethar army numbered as many as 50,000 men.[432]

The Romans laid siege to Bethar in the summer of 135, and Bar-Kokhba's resistance collapsed in August. The Romans broke into the fortress and Bar-Kokhba was killed in that final battle.

For general reasons, it seems unlikely that the Romans carried out a massacre of the Jewish population of Bethar. The only "evidence" for a general massacre occurs in the Talmudic literature (including in this context the Midrash Rabbah), which for reasons unknown comments extensively on the siege of Bethar and its supposed aftermath. Except where noted, the Talmudic passages are reproduced in the Appendix to the book Bar-Kokhba by the archaeologist Yigael Yadin. The size of Bar-Kokhba's Bethar army is given as 200,000 men. Bar-Kokhba is said to have been so tough that, when the Romans catapulted missiles into his fort, he would intercept the missiles with his knee with such force that he would knock them back into the faces of the astonished Romans, killing many. The Talmud goes on to claim that the number of Jews killed by the Romans after the fortress fell was 4 billion "or as some say" 40 million, while the Midrash Rabbah reports 800 million martyred Jews. In order to reassure us that these figures are given in earnest, the necessarily accompanying events are set forth. The blood of the slain Jews reached to the nostrils of the Romans' horses and then, like a tidal wave, plunged a distance of one mile or four miles to the sea, carrying large boulders along with it, and staining the sea a distance of four miles out.

The Jewish school children of Bethar, according to the Talmudic literature, were of course not spared by the Romans, who are said to have wrapped each of them in his scroll and then burned all of them, the number of these school children having been either 64 million or at least 150,000 (the approximate present public school population of Washington, DC).

The Romans matched the Germans in efficiency, for the bodies of the slain Jews were used to build a fence around Hadrian's vineyard, which is said to have been eighteen miles square, and blood saved over from the tidal wave was used to fertilize Roman vineyards for seven years. Shades of soap, glue and fertilizer factories!

It is also claimed that Bar-Kokhba (usually referred to in the Talmudic literature as Bar-Koziba - it is still not clear what his real name was) was killed by rabbis for falsely claiming to be the Messiah.[433]

The Talmudic literature was not intended for general circulation so its authors could exercise more freedom than the inventors of the six million hoax, who had to assess the gullibility of a possibly skeptical gentile audience. However, the spirit of the Talmudic accounts in the above instances seems remarkably similar to the spirit of our century's hoax. In this connection, it may be noted that it is not really anomalous that a Talmudic scholar such as Rabbi Weissmandel plays a possibly significant role in the hoax. Also, because Rabbi Wise translated a good deal of ancient and medieval Jewish literature and also founded a Jewish seminary, he may also have some claim to being a Talmudic scholar. One suspects that such scholars might have been exactly the type required to give birth to the hoax.

Credentials

A remaining objection could raise the question of my credentials for writing such a book. This is a good point, for it is true that my formal training has been in engineering and applied mathematics and not history.

It is not unprecedented for investigators to make contributions in fields apparently remote from their specialties, but I will concede that the point should not be waved aside lightly. Normally, we expect developments in historical investigation to come from historians, just as developments in engineering come from engineers. Exceptions to this rule can be admitted, but some justification for the exception should be expected.

My justification is the obvious one: default on the part of regular professional historians. No such person has come forward with a critical study of the question or with any work actually arguing any particular side of the extermination question and presenting the evidence, which supports the thesis. The closest thing to such a work is the book by Reitlinger, who is at least willing to take explicit note of some of the anomalies that develop in presenting the story of the "holocaust," but Reitlinger is not a historian but an artist and art collector. He has written several books, the most significant being his three volume study of the history of dealings in objects of art, The Economics of Taste. After Reitlinger, Hilberg manages a tiny bit of a critical attitude, but Hilberg is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, and his doctorate is in public law and government.

The books by Reitlinger and Hilberg recognize, to a very inadequate but nevertheless perceptible degree, a responsibility to convince the skeptic. The other extermination mythologists do not make any effort whatever to show that the exterminations happened; they just assume we all know it happened and then they take it from there. This is the case with the remaining three of the five leading extermination mythologists - Nora Levin, Leon Poliakov, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Levin was a research librarian while writing her book and now teaches history at Gratz College, a small Jewish school in Philadelphia. Poliakov is research director of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, and thus a professional Jewish propagandist. Dawidowicz is the only regular professional historian in the group and occupies the Leah Lewis Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Yeshiva University in New York. All five of the leading extermination mythologists are Jews.

In books and articles on subjects that are other than, but touch on, the "holocaust," professional historians invariably give some sort of endorsement to the lie, but the extent, to which contrary hints are found in their writings, is considerable. No professional historian had published a book arguing and presenting evidence either for or against the reality of the exterminations. The motivations are obvious. No established historian had been willing to damage his reputation by writing a scholarly-sounding work supporting the extermination allegations, solemnly referencing documents and testimonies produced at illegal trials held under hysterical conditions and seriously setting forth, without apology, obvious idiotic nonsense such as the alleged dual role of the Zyklon. At least, no inducement to produce such a work seems to have come along. On the other hand, the pressure of intellectual conformity (to put it mildly) in academia has evidently terrorized historians into silence in the opposite regard. This being the case, it is both justified and expected that works such as the present one be produced by engineers and whatever.[434]

Other Matters

As promised early in this book, we have dealt here at depth with only one propaganda myth and have in no sense attempted to cover the general field of World War II revisionism. There is no point in repeating here what has been ably said by other authors who have contributed to demolishing lingering mythology relating to the war, but a few words, intended mainly to direct the reader to the appropriate literature, are in order.

The myth of Germany's solitary responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1939 has been demolished by the American historian David L. Hoggan in his book The Forced War. A. J. P Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War is not as extensive, but it has achieved a much greater circulation and has been available in paperback for some time. Taylor's well deserved reputation as a Germanophobe have made his book a notable addition to the revisionist literature.

The myth of extraordinary Nazi brutality, as compared to the brutalities of the Western democracies, had been exploded by a number of books, of which the best is F. J. P. Veale's Advance to Barbarism, of which a new and expanded edition appeared in 1968. Other noteworthy books are Unconditional Hatred by Captain Russell Grenfell, RN, America's Second Crusade by William Henry Chamberlin, and Freda Utley's The High Cost of Vengeance. However, these authors ignore one of the greatest crimes of the western democracies, the forcible repatriation of Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union after the war ("Operation Keelhaul"). Most of what we know of this shameful episode is due to the efforts of Julius Epstein, a Jew who left Germany during the Thirties for the usual reasons, but started his crusades for truth during the war with his investigations into the Katyn Forest massacre and has spent the greater part of the postwar period investigating Operation Keelhaul. His book on the subject was published in 1973. Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago offers a long discussion of Operation Keelhaul, which, because it is written from a Russian point of view, supplements Epstein's treatment notably. Nicholas Bethell's The Last Secret explores the political background of the forced repatriations.

For a reader interested in a more thoroughgoing discussion of the revisionist literature, the best seems to appear in the testimonial volume Harry Elmer Barnes, edited by Arthur Goddard. The pamphlet by Barnes, Blasting the Historical Blackout, is a more intensive analysis of the status of World War II revisionism and is still available.

None of the above named publications touch the gas chamber myth or deal in a serious way with whatever was supposed to have happened in the German concentration camps. Here we have treated the camps almost entirely from a single point of view and have not deeply investigated the factual basis of other allegations of brutalities of a more random and less systematic nature. However, the Ilse Koch case, which was discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 60-62), should be sufficiently instructive in distinguishing between fact and fiction, and the methods used at Dachau by the U.S. authorities to produce "evidence" of extraordinary brutalities should be conclusive.

The scandal of the continued imprisonment of Rudolf Hess, who died in prison in 1987 at age 93, was treated by a number of books while he was alive, notably Prisoner No. 7: Rudolf Hess, by Eugene K. Bird, one of the U.S. commanders at Berlin's Spandau prison, who broke regulations by not only talking to Hess but also interviewing him in depth. Two other books are Motive for a Mission by James Douglas-Hamilton and Hess: The Man and His Mission by J. Bernard Hutton.

Some Implications

In this book, we have necessarily restricted ourselves to the demolition of only one myth and have not attempted to treat the very broad subject of the general behavior of Nazi Germany as compared to the Allies, except by recommending the above publications. They will help support the major implication of this work: the media in the western democracies are exposed as constituting a lie machine of vaster extent than even many of the more independent minded have perceived.

A second implication of this work naturally relates to Palestine. The "justification" that Zionists invariably give for driving the Arabs out of Palestine always involves the six million legend to a great extent. Of course, there is more than one non sequitur involved; Palestine was not invaded by six million dead Jews or, indeed, by any dead Jews, and in any case, it is not just or reasonable to make the Arabs pay for whatever the Germans are supposed to have done to Jews in Europe during the Second World War. Moreover, Israel is not a land that welcomes all persons who suffered in some way at the hands of the Nazis, but all Jews, regardless of whether they or their relatives had ever had any contact with the Nazis.

Today the United States supplies enough aid to Israel to assure that Israel is able to retain, by armed occupation, lands that the United States itself declares to be rightfully Arab (the territories seized in the 1967 war). Although it is hard to see why the six million legend should motivate such a policy, such a motivation or justification is very often advanced. When, in November 1975, an overwhelming majority at the United Nations, in a burst of intellectual clarity rare for that organization, endorsed a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism (a truth as inescapable as 2 + 2 = 4) the U.S. representative Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an otherwise impressive intellect, was reduced in astonishingly short order to hysterical yapping about the six million. As was shown by the aftermath of the "Yom Kippur War" of 1973, this support of Israel is completely contrary to the interests of the West. The obvious fact that this support is immoral in terms of the moralizing that has become a pervasive feature of Western foreign policies makes it doubly mad.

Another country that has extended considerable material aid to Israel is West Germany. As of 1975, the Bonn government had paid Jews several billion worth of restitutions and indemnifications of various sorts (calculated mainly in terms of dollars of the late Fifties and early Sixties), and was still making commitments for new payments.[435]

The largest single such program was defined in the 1952 Luxembourg Treaty between the Federal Republic and Israel; Bonn committed itself to paying Israel $750 million, primarily in the form of German industrial products and oil shipments from Britain. The program, referred to in Israel as the Shilumin program, was completed in 1966. The text of the Luxembourg Treaty opens with the words:[436]

"

Whereas

unspeakable criminal acts were perpetrated against the Jewish people during the National Socialist regime of terror

and whereas

by a declaration of the Bundestag on 27 September 1951, the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany made known their determination, within the limits of their capacity, to make good the material damage caused by these acts

[...]."

The Bonn government has undertaken additional programs of indemnification that have been similarly motivated. Because this work has shown that the "unspeakable criminal acts," in the sense in which that expression is used in the Luxembourg Treaty, are largely a hoax and, specifically, a Zionist hoax, it then develops that Israel owes Germany a lot of money, because the proposed justification for the reparations has been invalidated.

Notes

[423] | Hilberg, 632.
[424] | Colorado Springs Sun (Jan. 30, 1973), 6.
[425] | As a punishment for publishing his recollections of Auschwitz, Stäglich's pension as a retired judge was reduced by 20% for five years; Nation Europa (Coburg), August 1975, p. 39. The reduction of Stäglich's pension was "naked terror" by the standards of 1975. That action against Stäglich was mild in comparison to what was to come. Later on, the University of Göttingen revoked Stäglich's Dr.-jur. degree for having published his research results in the book Der Auschwitz Mythos, which was seized and destroyed by the German authorities; German Federal Constitutional Court, ref. 1 BvR 408f./83; Wigbert Grabert (ed.), Geschichtsbetrachtung als Wagnis, Grabert, Tübingen 1984; Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart 36(3) (1988), p. 18; ibid., 36(1) (1988), p. 7, ibid., 31(1) (1983), pp. 19f., ibid., 29(3) (1981), p. 38. Re. the recent escalation of naked terror in Germany, see Germar Rudolf's article "Discovering Absurdistan" in The Revisionist, 1(2) (May 2002), pp. 203-219.
[426] | New York Times (Aug. 12, 1972), 23.
[427] | New York Times (Oct. 6, 1961), 10; (Oct. 14, 1961), 10; (Oct. 17, 1961), 35; (Nov. 4, 1961), 11; R. H. Smith, 237n.
[428] | New York Times (May 8, 1974), 16.
[429] | Fuks.
[430] | Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 10, 296; Packer; Carcopino, 16-21; T. Frank, vol. 2, 245; vol. 4, 158f; vol. 5, 218n.
[431] | Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 4, 735.
[432] | McCown.
[433] | Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b or p. 627 in the translation edited by I. Epstein.
[434] | In the years after this book was first published in 1976, there was a great outburst of relevant scholarship of varying quality (see e.g. my Foreword to the 2003 edition). In 2003, I would not express myself on the historians in quite the way I have in these paragraphs. See for example my discussion of books by Martin Gilbert and Walter Laqueur in Supplement 2, written in 1982. Their books, while not brilliant, are competent and routine works of history. Their outstanding feature is that the authors fail to draw the obvious conclusions from their own research, as I explain in Supplement 2.
[435] | New York Times (Jan. 18, 1975), 6. Editor's note: By 1963, total German payments amounted to 20 billion marks (5 billion 1963 dollars), and by 1984 the total had risen to 70 billion marks (23 billion 1984 dollars; D. v. Westernhagen, Die Zeit, Oct. 5, 1984, p. 36); in 2002, the German government estimated total payments of 138 billion marks (some 78 billion 2003 dollars: Bundesministerium der Finanzen (ed.), Entschädigung von NS-Unrecht, Berlin 2002).
[436] | Vogel, 56, 88-100.

Next Chapter
Previous Chapter
Back to Table of Contents