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Debunking the Genocide Myth

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Debunking the Genocide Myth Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review Debunking the Genocide Myth A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry by Paul Rassinier Introduction by Pierre Hofstetter Translated from the French by Adam Robbins The Noontide Press, Newport Beach, California Contents About The Author Introduction by Pierre Hofstetter Part I: The Author's Experience Chapter One: Prologue Chapter Two: Swarms of Humanity at the Gates of Hell Chapter Three: The Circles of Hell Chapter Four: Charon's Bark Chapter Five: Port of Grace; Anteroom of Death Chapter Six: Shipwreck Part II: The Experience of Others Chapter Seven: Concentration Camp Literature Chapter Eight: The Minor Witnesses l. Frere Birin II. Abbe Jean-Paul Renard III. Abbe Robert Ploton Chapter Nine: Louis Martin-Chauffier I. The Line of Argument II. Another Line of Argument IV. Maltreatment V. A Qualified Witness? Chapter Ten: The Psychologists: David Rousset and the Universe of the Concentration Camp I. The Postulate of the Theory II. The Labor III. The Haeftlingsfuehrung IV. Objectivity V. Traduttore, Traditore Chapter Eleven: Eugen Kogon and L'Enfer Organise I. The Prisoner Eugen Kogon II. The Method III. The Haeftlingsfuehrung IV. The Arguments V. The Conduct of the S.S. VI. Health Personnel VII. Devotion VIII. Cinema, sports IX. The Brothel X. Informing XI. Transports XII. Tableau XIII. Evaluations XIV. Statistics XV. Nota bene... Chapter Twelve: Raul Hilberg: His Doctrine and His Methods Chapter Thirteen: Witnesses, Testimonies, and Documents I. Generalities II. The Witness Rudolf Höss III. The Witness Miklos Nyiszly IV. The Witness Kurt Gerstein V. Conclusion Chapter Fourteen: Statistics: Six Million or ... II. Postwar Statistics III. Prewar Statistics IV. The Jewish Migration, or `The Wandering Jew' V. The Movement of the European Jewish Population from 1933 to 1945 Conclusion: Six Million Exterminated Jews -- Fact or Fiction Annexes Appendix A: Four Descriptions of Prison Life in French Penal Institutions Discipline in the Maison Centrale in Riom in 1939 In the Prisons of the "Liberation" At Poissy German Prisoners in France Appendix B: The Two French Versions of the Gerstein Document The Gerstein Document Author's Postscript Appendix C: The Wolfgang Grosch Statement and A Report of a Second Lieutenant to a Lieutenant 1. The Wolfgang Grosch Statement 2. Report of a Second Lieutenant to a Lieutenant Afterword Proceed to Chapters 1 & 2 About The Author Paul Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906, in Beaumont, a small village near Montbéliard, the son of a farmer. He received his formal education in the schools of the area and passed the necessary examinations which allowed him to teach history and geography at the secondary school level and to use the title of "professor." He taught in the secondary school at Faubourg de Montbéliard where students were prepared to take the "brevet," an examination that is somewhat inferior to that examination which is taken by students in the lycées who desire to matriculate at the university. It was at this school that he was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943. Having joined the Socialist Party, SFIO, in 1934, Paul Rassinier became the head of that party in the Belfort area when the war broke out in 1939. Following the German occupation of France, he participated in the founding of the "Libre Nord" organization which became involved in various forms of "passive resistance," including the smuggling of Jewish refugees over the Franco-Swiss border into Switzerland in cooperation with the Swiss Jewish Committee. Rassinier's activities eventually came to the attention of the German authorities who caused him to be arrested and to be deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Later he was sent to the camp at Dora where he was incarcerated until the end of the war. Upon his liberation in 1945, he returned to France where he was elected to the Assemblée Nationale as a Socialist deputy. He served for one year and then retired He was awarded the highest decoration which the French government bestowed for service in the wartime resistance movement. Due to his frail health, a consequence of his two years of imprisonment at Buchenwald and Dora, he retired from teaching and received a small pension from the French government. He died on July 29. 1967, at his home in Asnieres, near Paris. He is survived by his wife, Jeanette, and his only son, Jean-Paul, who is a practising physician Introduction by Pierre Hofstetter In every respect, Paul Rassinier was a remarkable man of his time -- out of the ordinary, we are tempted to write -- a man to whom can be immediately attributed these three essential qualities, all of which are rather rare today in a single person: courage, honesty and ability. As a professor of history and geography. he could have had a brilliant and lucrative career in these disciplines if he had confined himself to the "official history" -- i.e. the "official false history that is taught ad usum Delphini" and of which Balzac spoke -- and if he had not opted for historical revisionism by beginning to study carefully the "hidden history" wherein lies the true causes of events, in short, of the "shameful history". He devoted the last twenty years of his life to the debunking of the historical orthodoxy that surrounds World War II produced a shelf full of books which culminated in the remarkable work, insufficiently known, entitled Les Responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale (1) which was published shortly before his death in July 1967. Paul Rassinier also could have made a name for himself in politics if, when he was a socialist representative in 1946, he had submitted to the oppressive climate of that period in France and had accepted open collaboration with the Communist Party. But, he refused such collaboration, and that party did all that it could to defeat him in his bid for re-election. As a matter of fact, the Communists always did want Paul Rassinier's "hide" in both the literal as well as the figurative sense. A confirmed, total pacifist, Rassinier, in 1922 at the age of 16, under the influence of the anarchist Victor Serge, had been drawn into the Communist Party from which, having later gone to the opposition, he was quickly excluded. He joined the Socialist party in 1936, where he made himself known particularly in the pacifist wing that was opposed to the French policies that led to the 1939 war. Then, after France was occupied by the German army, he was one of the earliest resistants to this occupation and helped to found the "Libre-Nord" movement, but, unlike the murderous guerrilla bands and the "shadow assassins," he tried to inculcate into these Resistance movements "the idea of nonviolence and the principles of total pacifism." Such an attitude succeeded in getting him "condemned to death" by the Communist resistance (which had arrived on the scene late following the German attack on the U.S.S.R. in June 1941) and in putting him on the receiving end of the ritual "little warning coffin" effigy. It is bitter irony that this man -- deported to Buchenwald and to Dora, where he endured frightful suffering for nearly two years -- should later concede that he only escaped from the rain of Communist machine gun fire thanks to his arrest by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943, and his subsequent deportation to Germany. Liberated in 1945, returned to France on a stretcher, and declared to be a severe invalid, Paul Rassinier could have, once again, had a lucrative and successful career in what was called "resistantialisme," that is to say, the shameless, continuous and highly advantageous exploitation -- "make room for us!" -- of the events of the "resistance," real or imaginary. However in Belfort, his native city, he began with a nearly naive honesty to proclaim vociferously that he had never met in the Resistance most of the men who were speaking in its name, which was in itself, already a bold step But, he went even further and with the exceptional courage of an honest man who was sickened by the flood of lies that flowed before his eyes, he began to denounce exaggerations of every kind concerning German war crimes, while maintaining that there had been as many war crimes committed on the Allied side as on that of the Axis and that they were all of a similar horrible nature. Indignant. Paul Rassinier was thoroughly indignant, this former deportee, about the whole avalanche of questionable and often fanciful literature about the German concentration camps that passed before him. In the preface of Rassinier's Le Parlement aux mains des banques (2), the dramatist and screenwriter Henri Jeanson described Paul Rassinier's indignation as follows: I like Rassinier very much. I like him very much because, without losing his composure, without grandiloquence, quite simply Rassinier lived, in the word of Zola, "indignant." Indignant, but calm because he was sure of his facts. Indignant, but imperturbable. Indignant since the age of sixteen. The indignation of Rassinier does not make itself known through spectacular temper tantrums. He does not at all become carried away and avoids all invective. >From these traits stem his strength and perfect aim. He does not belong to that race of congestive polemists who rid themselves in one article -- whew -- of their scrupulosity or their bad temper and who write like someone purging himself. Once the article has been published, he does not consider himself released from duty as concerns himself and does not move to another sort of exercise. No, he carries on with a good faith that no one dreams of reproaching him for, with the exception, of course, of these national organizations in which authentic resistance fighters and deportees innocently allow themselves to be duped by the profiteers of the crematoriums.
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