The Holocaust Revisionists

Holocaust or Hoax?

The Revisionists

by Jürgen Graf

The claims of the revisionists

Everyone today knows that there is a group of people who radically question the prevalent image of the fate of the jews under the Third Reich. These people call themselves “Revisionists”, or, more precisely, “Holocaust Revisionists”. The media bespatters them with idiotic smear words like “Auschwitz Deniers”, and lumps them together with “Right-wing Radicals”.

If you were to ask the average German what the revisionists actually say, and what they their statements are based on, he would be unable to answer. This is quite inevitable because of strict media control; the media have strict instructions not to permit any expression or discussion of revisionist arguments. Thus, many people are given the completely erroneous impression that the revisionists deny jewish suffering during the Second World War. In reality, no one denies that a considerable number of jews under German rule were interned in concentration camps, or that large numbers of deportees died of epidemics and exhaustion. Nor does anyone deny the reality of shootings of jews, particularly, on the Eastern Front.

Revisionists dispute the following three points in particular:

1) that there was a plan for the physical liquidation of the jews;

2) the existence of “extermination camps” with gas chambers for mass killing of human beings;

3) that five to six million jews died in German occupied Europe.

It is also not true that revisionism is a “Right-wing radical” movement, since it is not an ideology. It is, as Prof. Robert Faurisson likes to say, a method. Revisionists examine the official picture of the “Holocaust” using the same methods which are generally recognized as valid for other historical periods.

Of course, it is also true that most revisionists are politically to the Right, and that some of them are acknowledged National Socialists, but this has no influence on the correctness or incorrectness of their arguments. Whether the discoverer of a new planet is conservative, liberal, socialist, or Communist, is irrelevant to the history of science. What counts is the discovery of a new planet!

Furthermore, some of the best-known revisionists, for example, the Frenchmen Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume, are on the Left.

A former concentration camp inmate as revisionist pioneer:

Paul Rassinier

The founder of revisionism also came from the left. Paul Rassinier, a French resistance fighter, a Socialist and detainee at Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps. In his book Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (the Lies of Ulysses), which appeared in 1950, Rassinier denounced the endlessly exaggerated tales told by former inmates of German camps. Over the course of years of research, Rassinier finally came to the conclusion that gassings had either not taken place at all, or had taken place only as the act of a few lunatics. In Le Drame des Juifs europeens (1964), Rassinier wrote a few years before his death (1):

“For 15 years, every time that I heard of a witness anywhere, no matter where in the portion of Europe that was not occupied by the Soviets, who claimed to have himself been present at gas exterminations, I immediately went to him to get his testimony. With documentation in hand, I would ask him so many precise and detailed questions that soon it became apparent that he could not answer except by lying. Often his lies became so transparent, even to himself, that he ended his testimony by declaring that he had not seen it himself, but that one of his good friends, who had died in the camps and whose good faith he could not doubt, had told him about it. I covered thousands and thousands of kilometers throughout Europe in this way.

Since nobody else wanted to print Rassinier’s works, he finally had them published by a publishing house closely associated with the “Extreme Right” (Les Sept Couleurs). The hypocrites who reproach him for having them published them there, would no doubt have preferred to see them never published at all.

Media vilification of the revisionists

If we observe the campaign against the revisionists carried on by the media clique, we immediately note a series of remarkable features:

First, revisionist literature is flatly stated to have no credibility at all. Thus, a Swiss women named Klara Obermueller wrote as follows in an anti-revisionist series (2):

“If somebody came along today and reported the calling of a scientific congress to examine the question of whether the sun revolves around the earth or the earth around the sun, he would either be ridiculed or declared non-compos mentis. It wouldn’t occur to anyone to discuss the matter seriously… A similar thing occurs with the propagandists of the so-called ‘Auschwitz Lie’ or ‘Holocaust Lie’: their statements that there was no extermination of the jews, is so obviously false that it is basically unworthy of serious scientific discussion.”

According to the above, the revisionists are purely and simply crazy. So why persecute them? Why not just ignore them? Do people take you to court if you say the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun?

Peculiarly, these same lunatics appear to be highly dangerous to the “Western democracies”; they even appear to threaten the very basis of that society in an extremely serious way. A hack journalist named Patrick Bahners, writing in the Frankerfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 15 August 1994 in connection with the sentencing of Guenter Deckert, revisionist and Chairman of the NPD, by the German legal system, said:

“If Deckert’s attitude on the Holocaust were correct, the Bundesrepublik would be based on a lie. Every Presidential speech, every minute of silence, every history book would be a lie. Therefore, anyone who denies the mass murder of the jews dispute the legitimacy of the Bundesrepublik.”

How can a handful of lunatics endanger the legitimacy of the Bundesrepublic? No, the journalists must finally recognize that there is something askew in this argument: either the revisionists are lunatics, in which case they aren’t dangerous, and the journalists can spare the energy wasted on all their hysterical hate campaigns; or they are highly dangerous to the ruling system of the West, in which case they are not lunatics! You can’t have it both ways; the media must decide one or the other.

State prosecutors and judges as watch dogs for the official version of history

The matter becomes even more suspicious when we learn that “denying” the Holocaust (a more correct term would be “disputing the genocide of the jews”) are liable for criminal prosecution in several European countries (3). The model for this impudent interference of the criminal justice system in the freedom of research is perhaps the French “Loi Gayssot”, passed in France in 1990 (4), which provides for criminal penalties for anyone disputing any matter decided by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The sentence of the Nuremberg victor’s tribunal has therefore been declared infallible in France; it has been canonized, as it were. Even Stalin did nothing of the kind.

In the BRD, revisionists are prosecuted according to paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code (“Incitement to Racial Hatred”) Paragraph 131 (“Slandering the Dead”) and paragraph 189 (“Slandering the Dead”). The first paragraph was considerably broadened on 28 October 1994, and now calls for prison terms of up to five years for anyone who approves, denies, or trivializes any criminal act alleged to have been committed by the National Socialists. Since that date, there have been thousands of trials of revisionists in Germany just since 28 October 1994.

In Austria, the so-called “Prohibition Law” against National Socialist activities has served as the Hexenhammer in suppressing the freedom of research on the Holocaust since 1992.

In France, Holocaust revisionists are liable for imprisonment for one year; in the BRD, five years; and in Austria, ten years. In practice, however, the penalties are not that severe. Not yet!

Here are the sentences from some particularly spectacular revisionist trials in the BRD:

– in October 1992, Major General Remer, one of the most highly decorated soldiers of WWII, was sentenced to 22 months without probation in Schweinfurt for “Holocaust Denial”, which, for the seriously ill old man, would have been equivalent to a death sentence (Aktenzeichen Remer 1 Kls 8 Js 7494/91). Rather than serve the sentence, Remer, accompanied by his wife, went into exile in Spain;

– in April 1995, Guenter Deckert, Chaiman of the NPD, was sentenced to two years without probation for translating a technical talk by US gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter (Aktenzeichen IV Kls 1/95 – 2AK 1/95). That Deckert laughed several times during the translation, and shortened the sacrosanct Holy Word “Holocaust” to “Holo” for short, was considered to have aggravated the offense (5);

– in June 1995, the chemist Germar Rudolf was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment without probation in Stuttgart (Aktenzeichen 17 Kls 83/94). This sentence was passed on the pretext that Major General Remer had sent Rudolf’s report on the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz (see chapter XII) to politicians, professors, and the media (6);

– in May 1996, the publisher Wigbert Grabert was fined 30,000 DM for publishing a scientific revisionist anthology with the title Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Aktenzeichen AG Tuebingen 4 Gs 173/95)

– in May 1996, the political scientist and publisher Udo Walendy was sentenced to 15 months without probation (Aktenzeichen 2 Kls 46 Js 374/95 STA Bielefeld) for “trivializing the Holocaust” (7).

In none of these terror trials did the court spend as much as one single second considering the arguments of the defendants. Every case assumed the “Offenkundigkeit” of the Holocaust, i.e., its alleged status as a “proven fact”. This “Offenkundigkeit”, believe it or not, dates back to 1945! According to article 21 of the London Statutes of August 1945, which established the procedural rules for the Nuremberg Trials, no proof was required of “facts of common knowledge”. Just what constituted a “fact of common knowledge” was, of course, decided by the court itself — a court which, in the words of chief prosecutor Robert Jackson, considered its actions a “continuation of the war against Germany” (8). Thus, the status of the “Offenkundigkeit” of an assembly-line extermination of the jews with millions of victims, was simply considered to be a “fact of common knowledge”, for which, therefore, no proof other than “confessions” and “eyewitness testimonies” is available today.

All these trials violate the basic right to free expression of opinion as guaranteed under the Constitutions of all the states concerned. It is also illegal to deny a defendant any opportunity to prove the truth of his statements; instead, expert reports on the technical impossibilities of the reported mass extermination are always rejected with reference to the “Offenkundigkeit” of the Holocaust.

Generally, the very notion that jurists are competent to decide matters of historical fact is grotesque in itself. The following is an example:

In the book Hat Karl der Grosse Je Gelebt? [Was There Ever Really a Charlemagne?] (9), the Munich scholar Herbert Illig disputes the existence of Charlemagne, and declares the whole period from 614 to 911 A.D. to be a product of fantasy. This entire period of 297 years, together with Charlemagne and all the other historical figures of the same period, are alleged to have been invented by subsequent falsifiers of history for political reasons. The absence of any structures built during the three so-called “centuries of the Dark Ages” is the logical result of the non-existence of this period of history: an analysis of architectural monuments is said to show that the few structures alleged to have been built during this period, were, in reality, built later.

Due to an insufficient familiarity with the history of the early Middle Ages on our part, we shall refrain from expressing an opinion as to the value of Illig’s book. If his arguments should prove to be sheer fantasy, they will be ignored. If they should prove correct, the author will be sooner or later have to be recognized as a genius. There is another, third possibility, i.e., that Charlemagne actually lived, but never performed many of the heroic deeds attributed to him. In this case, Illig’s work would still have a seminal influence upon the writing of history by pointing out its shortcomings — particularly, an overly blind trust in the reliability of the sources employed.

One thing is for certain: Illig will never be hauled into court because of his book. No judge will ever jail him for “Denying the Genocide of the Pagans”, although, by disputing Charlemagne’s existence, he is, in effect, denying the mass murder of Saxon pagans attributed to him.

In short, Charlemagne, or any other historical subject for that matter, may be researched with complete freedom and the broadest possible latitude. The same statement is true of every other period of history — except the Second World War, and, in particular, the fate of the jews under the Third Reich. This fact alone ought to make every thinking person deeply suspicious: “truths” that require protection by criminal law usually turn out to be lies.

The bankruptcy of the official version of history

“Historians have only interpreted the Holocaust. The thing is to research it.”

Ulrich Herbert, German historian, in the Frankfurter Rundschau of 13 February 1997, p. 7.

The Lausanne daily Nouveau Quotidien on 2 and 3 September 1996, published two articles by the historian Jacques Baynac (an anti-revisionist). The first bore the promising title “How the Historians Turned the Job of Silencing the Revisionists Over to the Courts”. That means: the governmental persecution of revisionists described above is the logical consequence of the inability of orthodox historians to come up with any counter-argument with which to answer the revisionists. While revisionists RESEARCH the Holocaust, historians are simply content to INTERPRET it. The facts are irrelevant.

An excellent example of this may be seen in Gunnar Heinsohn’s book Warum Auschwitz? [Why Auschwitz?] (10). At the very beginning of the book, Heinsohn mentions an alleged Himmler order issued on 25 November 1944 on the disassembly of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. This Himmler order has haunted Holocaust literature for decades. No source for it is ever given, since no such order has ever been found. We don’t know which historian invented this lie, since the Holocaust scribblers simply copy all their nonsense back and forth.

With mock seriousness, Heinsohn lists “Two Hundred Forty Recognized Theories on Auschwitz”, and comments upon them at the end of the book (“Theory no. 20: Auschwitz as the Punishment of the jews for Worshipping Female Deities”

Theory no. 33: “Auschwitz as Preparation for the Restoration of Israel So That All Surviving jews May Gather Together and Fulfil the Conditions for the Coming of the End Days Through the Christian God”, etc., etc). He finally comes to the conclusion that Hitler wished to exterminate the jews because he hoped that, “with the disappearance of the jews of flesh and blood, the law of the sanctity of life, as well as the Commandments of love and righteousness, would be lost. He wished to create the right to kill, in order to create strategic advantages for the Germans in the conquering of living space” (cover blurb).

In the Middle Ages, scholars engaged in complex disputes as to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The existence of angels was never cast in doubt, and never proven; it was simply assumed as an axiom. Holocaust writers act in the same way. The existence of an “assembly line mass extermination” is assumed as an axiom, without any regard to the need for proof. They then proceed to speculate in a vacuum, far removed from historical realities, on the psychological and sociological factors which led to the assembly-line killing of jews in the third Reich”, etc., etc., just as medieval scholars speculated upon the sex of the number of angels dancing on the pinhead.

Revisionists ask very different questions, such as: What do the documents show about Auschwitz? How reliable are the eyewitnesses? What was the capacity of the crematoria? How quickly does Zyklon B evaporate, and at which temperatures? Did the “gas chambers” possess an efficient ventilation system? How did the Zyklon B enter the “gas chambers”? Are there any traces of cyanides in the mortar samples from the “gas chambers”?

In other words, on the one hand, are reason and logic; on the other, stands primitive superstition. There is no possible compromise between the two opposing parties. That is why the historians, to borrow a phrase from Baynac, have turned the job of silencing the revisionists over to the courts.


Notes:

1) Paul Rassinier, Le Drame des juifs europeens, Les Sept Couleurs, 1964, reprinted by La Vieille Taupe, Paris, p. 79.

2) Weltwoche series, “Auschwitz und die ‘Auschwitz-Luege’”, 9, 16, and 23 December 1993, 3 articles.

3) So far (early 1997) Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain have passed anti-revisionist muzzle laws in addition to France, Germany, and Austria. In Belgium and Spain, however, there appears to be little danger of their being used — for the moment.

4) The “Loi Gayssot”, see Eric Delcroix, La Police de la Pensee contre le Revisionnisme, RHR, Colombes Cedex/F. 1994.

5) See, in this regard, Gunther Anntohn/Henri Roques, Der Fall Guenter Deckert, DADC, Germania Verlag, Weinheim 1995.

6) See, in this regard no. Herbert Verbeke (publisher) Kardinalfragen zur Zeitgeschichte, Vrij Historisch Onderzoek, Berchem 1996.

7) Compare, in this regard, issue no. 69 of Historischen Tatsachen.

8) Prosecutor Jackson’s speech before the Tribunal, 26 July 1946.

9) Heribert Illig, Hat Karl der Grosse je gelebt? Mantis Verlag, Graefeling, 1995.

10) Gunnar Heinsohn, Warum Auschwitz? Rowohl, Hamburg, 1995.

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