    Following is Germar Rudolf's response of August 27, 2006 from Stammheim
    prison, to Israel Shamir's question: “What makes Germar tick, is it love
    to Germany or love to Christ?”]

    Germar responds in English and I quote:

    I can not only understand Mr. Shamir's disinterest in WWII as such, I
    actually share it. For some reason people think that WWII is a main
    focus of my intellectual interest because I got my life entangled in
    Holocaust studies. The truth is that I never cared for the history of
    any war as such. I do have an interest in understanding how and why wars
    get to be, the intrigues, schemes, lies, and propaganda used by all
    sides to justify it, and of course how this propaganda is afterwards
    maintained by the victorious side. People keep sending me books on WWII
    history into prison, and after reading just one of them - a study of
    Patten’s campaigns - which was also the first book I ever read on battle
    history, I decided that this is quite enough. I didn't touch any of the
    others that were sent my way and put the general message out to put a
    stop to that. I must admit that I do have a friend whose entire life
    centers around WWII, as he is a book dealer with the sole focus on WWII.
    Although he has thousands of titles on the topic and is quite an expert,
    we never talk about WWII when we meet, and I also never looked into - or
    received - a book of his collection, nor did I ever ask.

    Holocaust propaganda is an ideological issue, not a historical [one]. I
    never focused on the actual aspects of persecution of minorities, Jewish
    or not, during WWII. It's not a pleasant topic either nor is there a
    need to deal with it, as there are plenty of scholars worldwide who make
    a profitable business out of doing nothing else but this. No, it's
    propaganda - prewar, wartime, and postwar propaganda I am interested in,
    and how to distinguish it from reality.

    I could very briefly answer to the question what makes me tick by
    pointing to my respective essay I wrote back in 1995/96 and [which I]
    have added as an appendix to my expert report, which can be read online
    at www.vho.org/ GB/b/trr in HTML format or as pdf at www.vho.org/
    dl/ENG/trr. pdf

    But let me try to give a condensed version here. First, there is no
    single motive that got me to do what I have been doing during the past
    16 years. Lots of it is personal history with all its imponderability
    and coincidence, and another huge factor is personality, my genetic
    make-up, if you wish.

    Since I was a little boy I had the reputation of driving grown-ups crazy
    with my incessant questions, driven by insatiable curiosity. Add to that
    a greatly overdeveloped sense of justice, overextended as my mother
    claims, though I'd like to dispute that. All through my childhood my
    father has been brutalizing me to one degree or another, and my mother,
    in an attempt to prevent me from starting to hate me [myself], found
    excuses in my father's own history [background] mainly his father's bad
    treatment of his children as well as their family having been expelled
    from Silesia after WWII, tossing them into poverty. In other words, my
    mother used the Poles as lightning rods for my suffering and the
    resulting feeling of injustice. That is, at age 18 (!), where my newly
    awakened interest in history started: The expulsion of 12 million
    Germans from East Germany and Eastern Europe. At age 18-23 I was a very
    patriotic German, still within the mainstream - I thought - yet at the
    right edge of it. This started to fade slowly later, for one thing due
    to stress during my university studies, but also because it became
    boring. I never touched upon the Holocaust topic in any of those years.
    The usual claims about it seemed indubitable, undeniable to me, truth
    chiseled in stone, self-evident.

    This changed in 1989 by pure accident, as I was handed a book written by
    Paul Rassinier, a former communist, partisan fighter against the German
    occupation in France during WWII, and eventually inmate in Buchenwald
    and Dora concentration camps. I probably would never have allowed any
    German to raise doubts within me about the prevailing view on the
    Holocaust, because I would have suspected him of bias and self-interest,
    but a Communist, Partisan-fighter, former inmate? He broke [opened] my
    eyes and allowed doubts. Not more, just doubts. But that was enough to
    trigger a chain reaction, because I obviously had been raised in this,
    my German society to feel guilty if I doubt the truth to [in] this
    regard. I actually did feel guilty for doubting, and that made [me] mad,
    because it contradicted everything I was taught: question authorities,
    don't take paradigms at face value, criticism is noble, and all the
    other ideals of the enlightenment. I realized that this society is
    hypocritical, and at once I knew - and a little research confirmed it -
    that any doubts and dissenter is relentlessly ostracized, persecuted,
    and even prosecuted with no chance of defense. So I said to myself: This
    is outrageous, unacceptable, against all norms and ideals of this
    society, and the fact that there is no other topic where dissent is more
    severely suppressed is evidence enough for me that it is also the most
    important topic. He who is sure of being truthful is relaxed; only liars
    call for earthly judges The injustice of all this persecution becomes
    more and more predominant in my driving forces, also the conviction, if
    we don't stop the tyrants at the outset, they'll destroy more and more
    our freedoms to scrutinize their skeletons in their closets. Next, it's
    just enthusing [amusing] with how little effort one can get entire
    governments to panic, an entire civilization to tremble, just because of
    a well-founded, fact-oriented, objectively written book. "Give me a
    meaning of life!" I demanded in early years of my youth and adulthood.
    I've found it. When so many powerful people use so many criminal tools
    to stop a peaceful dissident, it must be because I’ve got something that
    can - an will! - rock the world. I'll show them. Now that they have
    destroyed my life, I'll have no other way but to prove that I'm right,
    and the fact that more and more historians change sides - for now behind
    the scenes only, but that'll change - and that these powers that be get
    increasingly frantic is proof enough for me that it's working. The
    postwar and the New-World order were erected on the Holocaust, and
    together with it, they'll come down. But that's not important, because
    it'll come down anyway, if only because they ruin the planet and drive
    world economics against the wall. For me it's simple: I am sure I'm
    right, and unless one does not convince me with rational, scientific
    arguments that I am wrong, I am not going to give in. If you like the
    comparison, I am kind of a human intellectual pit-bull terrier, and they
    made the mistake to provoke the blood out of me by persecuting me.
    That's it. No negotiations any more. It’s me or them now. My father
    didn't manage to break me with stick, whip, fists or by using me as a
    missile, and so they won't break my will with violence either. It only
    gets stronger with every beating.. That's my personality: a contrarian
    with enormous will power, stubbornness, if need be, when not reason is
    used to talk to me but brute force. Pressure causes counter pressure. In
    this way I am a simple physical principle. Here is my human right to
    doubt, research, scrutinize, disagree, dispute, refute, challenge,
    question. The only way to take this away from me is by killing me.
    Period. And that is the strongest motivation: Anybody who punishes me
    for merely exercising my human right of being a human = a creature able
    to doubt and explore, will meet my utmost unbreakable resistance. I
    won't allow anybody to reduce me to a submissive slave. Nobody."