An Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism

Simon Wiesenthal: Bogus 'Nazi Hunter'
by Mark Weber

Simon Wiesenthal is a living legend. In a formal White House ceremony in August 1980, a teary-eyed President Carter presented the world's foremost "Nazi hunter" with a special gold medal awarded by the U.S. Congress. President Reagan praised him in November 1988 as one of the "true heroes" of this century.

He is the recipient of West Germany's highest decoration, and one of world's most renowned Holocaust organizations bears his name: the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles. He was portrayed in flattering terms by the late Laurence Oliver in the 1978 film fantasy "The Boys From Brazil," and by Ben Kingsley in the April 1989 made-for-television movie "The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story."

Wiesenthal's reputation is undeserved. The man whom the Washington Post calls the "Holocaust's Avenging Angel" has a well-documented record of reckless disregard for truth. ^[1] He has lied about his own wartime experiences. He has misrepresented his postwar "Nazi-hunting" achievements, and has spread vile falsehoods about alleged German atrocities. He is certainly no moral authority.
Different Stories

Szymon (Simon) Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, in Buczacz, a town in the Galicia province of Austria- Hungary (now Buchach in Soviet Ukraine). His father was a prosperous wholesale sugar merchant.

In spite of all that has been written about him, what Wiesenthal did during the war years under German occupation is still not clear. He has given disturbingly conflicting stories in three separate accounts of his wartime activities. The first was given under oath during a two day interrogation session in May 1948 conducted by an official of the U.S. Nuremberg war crimes commission. ^[2] The second is a summary of his life provided by Wiesenthal as part of a January 1949 "Application for Assistance" to the International Refugee Committee.^[3]

And the third account is his autobiography, The Murderers Among Us, first published in 1967. ^[4]

Soviet Engineer or Factory Mechanic?
In his 1948 interrogation, Wiesenthal declared that between 1939 and 1941 "he was a "Soviet chief engineer working in Lvov and Odessa." ^[5] Consistent with that, he stated in his 1949 declaration that from December 1939 to April 1940 he worked as an architect in the Black Sea port of Odessa.

But according to his autobiography, he spent the period between mid-September 1939 and June 1941 in Soviet-ruled Lvov, where he worked "as a mechanic in a factory that produced bedsprings." [6]

Relative Freedom
After the Germans took control of Galicia in June 1941, Wiesenthal was interned for a time in the Janowska concentration camp near Lvov, from where he was transferred a few months later to a camp affiliated with the repair works (OAW) in Lvov of the Ostbahn ("Eastern Railroad") of German-ruled Poland.

Wiesenthal reported in his autobiography that he worked there "as a technician and draftsman," that he was rather well treated, and that his immediate superior, who was "secretly anti-Nazi," even permitted him to own two pistols. He had his own office in a "small wooden hut," and enjoyed "relative freedom and was permitted to walk all over the yards." ^[7]

Partisan Fighter?
The next segment of Wiesenthal's life -- from October 1943 to June 1944 -- is the most obscure, and his accounts of this period are contradictory.

During his 1948 interrogation, Wiesenthal said that he fled from the Janowska camp in Lvov and joined a "partisan group which operated in the Tarnopol- Kamenopodolsk area. " ^[8] He said that "I was a partisan from October 6, 1943, until the middle of February 1944," and declared that his unit fought against Ukrainian forces, both of the SS "Galicia" division and of the independent UPA partisan force. ^[9]

Wiesenthal said that he held the rank of lieutenant and then major, and was responsible for building bunkers and fortification lines. Although he was not explicit, he suggested that this (supposed) partisan unit was part of the Armia Ludowa ("Peoples Army"), the Polish Communist military force established and controlled by the Soviets. ^[10]

He said that he and other partisans slipped into Lvov in February 1944, where they were "hidden by friends of the A.L. ["People's Army"] group." On June 13, 1944, his group was captured by the German Secret Field Police. (Although Jewish partisans caught in hiding were often shot, Wiesenthal reports that he was somehow spared.) Wiesenthal told much the same story in his 1949 statement He said that he fled from internment in early October 1943 and then "fought against the Germans as a partisan in the forest" for eight months - from October 2, 1943, to March 1944.

After that, he was "in hiding" in Lvov from March to June 1944.

Wiesenthal tells a totally different story in his 1967 autobiography. He reports there that after escaping from the Ostbahn Repair Works on Oct. 2, 1943, he lived in hiding in the houses of various friends until June 13, 1944, when he was discovered by Polish and German police and returned to a concentration camp. He makes no mention of any partisan membership or activity. ^[11]

According to both his 1948 interrogation and his 1967 autobiography, he tried to commit suicide on June 15, 1944, by cutting his wrists. Remarkably, though, he was saved from death by German SS doctors and recovered in an SS hospital. ^[12]

He remained in the Lvov concentration camp "with double rations" for a time, and then, he reports in his autobiography, he was transferred to various work camps. He spent the remaining chaotic months, until the end of the war, in different camps until he was liberated from Mauthausen (near Linz) by American forces on May 5, 1945. ^[13]

Did Wiesenthal invent a past as a heroic wartime partisan? Or did he later try to suppress his record as a Communist fighter? Or is the true story altogether different - and too shameful to admit?

"Nazi Agent"?
Did Wiesenthal voluntarily work for his wartime oppressors?

That's the accusation leveled by Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, himself of Jewish ancestry and leader for many years of his country's Socialist Party. During a wide-ranging interview with foreign journalists in 1975, Kreisky charged Wiesenthal with using "Mafia methods," rejected his pretense of "moral authority," and suggested that he was an agent for the German authorities.

Some of his more pertinent remarks, which appeared in Austria's leading news magazine Profil, include:^[14]

I really know Mr. Wiesenthal only from secret reports, and they are bad, very nasty. I say this as Federal Chancellor . . . And I say that Mr. Wiesenthal had a different relationship with. the Gestapo than I did. That's right. And it can be proven. Can I say more than that? Whatever else there is to say, I'll say in court.

My relationship with the Gestapo is indisputable. I was their prisoner, their inmate. I was interrogated by them. His relationship was different. That's what I say, and that will eventually come out. It's bad enough what I've already said. But he can't clear himself by charging me with defaming his honor in the press, as he might wish. It's not that simple, because that would mean a big court case ... A man like that doesn't have the right to pretend to be a moral authority. That's what I say. He doesn't have that right...

Whether a man who, in my view, is an agent, yes, that's right, and who uses Mafia methods ... That man has to go . . .

He is no gentleman, and I would say, to make this clear, so that he won't become a moral authorty, because he is not . . . He shouldn't pretend to be a moral authority ...

I say that Mr. Wiesenthal lived in that time in the Nazi sphere of influence without being persecuted. Right? And he lived openly without being persecuted, right? Is that clear? And you perhaps know, if you know what was going on, that no one could risk that.

He wasn't a "submarine" ... that is, submerged and in hiding, but instead, he was completely in the open without having to, well, ever risk persecution. I think that's enough. There were so many opportunities to be an agent. He didn't have to be a Gestapo agent.

There were many other services.

Mauthausen Myths
Before the "Nazi hunter" came the unscrupulous and deceitful propagandist. In 1946 Wiesenthal published KZ Mauthausen, a sensational work which consists mainly of his own amateurish sketches purporting to represent the horrors of the Mauthausen concentration camp. One drawing depicts three inmates who had been bound to posts and sadistically put to death by the Germans. ^[15]

The sketch is completely phony. It was copied -- with some minor alterations -- from photographs that appeared in Life magazine in 1945, which graphically record the firing-squad execution in December 1944 of three German soldiers who had been caught operating as spies behind the lines during the "Battle of the Bulge." ^[16]

The source of the Wiesenthal drawing is instantly obvious to anyone who compares it with the Life photos. ^[17]

The irresponsible character of this book is also shown by Wiesenthal's extensive citation therein of the supposed "death bed confession" of Mauthausen Commandant Franz Ziereis, according to which four million were gassed to death with carbon monoxide at the nearby Hartheim satellite camp. ^[18]

This claim is totally absurd, and no serious Holocaust historian still accepts it. ^[19] Also according to the Ziereis "confession" cited by Wiesenthal, the Germans supposedly killed another ten million people in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. ^[20] In fact, this "confession" is fraudulent and was obtained by torture. ^[21]

Years later, Wiesenthal was still lying about Mauthausen.

In a 1983 interview with the daily newspaper USA Today, he said of his experience in Mauthausen:

"l was one of 34 prisoners alive out of 150,000 who had been put there." ^[22] This is a blatant falsehood. The years have apparently not been kind to Wiesenthal's memory, because in his own autobiography he wrote that "almost 3,000 prisoners died in Mauthausen after the Americans liberated us on May 5, 1945." ^[23]

Another former inmate, Evelyn Le Chene, reported in her standard work about Mauthausen that there were 64,000 inmates in the camp when it was liberated in May 1945. ^[24] And according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, at least 212,000 inmates survived internment in the Mauthausen camp complex. ^[25]

After the war Wiesenthal worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) and the U.S. Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). He was also vice chairman of the Jewish Central Committee in the U.S. occupation zone of Austrian. ^[26]

"Human Soap"
Wiesenthal has given circulation and credence to one of the most scurrilous Holocaust stories, the charge that the Germans manufactured soap from the corpses of murdered Jews.

According to this tale, the letters "RIF" in bars of Garman-made soap allegedly stood for "Pure Jewish Fat" ("Rein jüdisches Fett"). In reality, the initials stood for "National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning" ("Reichstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung"). ^[27]

Wiesenthal promoted the "human soap" legend in articles published in 1946 in the Austrian Jewish community paper Der Neue Weg ("The New Path").

In an article entitled "RIF," he wrote:

"The terrible words 'transport for soap' were first heard at the end of 1942. It was in the [Polish] General Government, and the factory was in Galicia, in Belzec. From April 1942 until May 1943, 900,000 Jews were used as raw material in this factory."

After the corpses were turned into various raw materials, Wiesenthal wrote,

"The rest, the residual fat stuff, was used for soap production."

He continued: "After 1942 people in the General Government knew quite well what the RIF soap meant. The civilized world may not believe the joy with which the Nazis and their women in the General Government thought of this soap. In each piece of soap they saw a Jew who had been magically put there, and had thus been prevented from growing into a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein."^[28]

In another imaginative article published in 1946 entitled "Belzec Soap Factory," Wiesenthal alleged that masses of Jews were exterminated in electrocution showers: ^[29]

The people, pressed together and driven on by the SS, Latvians and Ukrainians, go through the open door into the "bath." Five hundred persons could fit at a time. The floor of the "bath chamber" was made of metal and shower heads hung from the ceiling. When the room was full, the SS turned on the 5,000 volts of electric current in the metal plate. At the same time water poured from the shower heads. A short scream and the execution was over. An SS chief physician named Schmidt determined through a peep hole that the victims were dead. The second door was opened and the "corpse commando" came in and quickly removed the dead. It was ready for the next 500.

Today no serious historian accepts the stories that Jewish corpses were manufactured into bars of soap or that Jews were electrocuted to death at Belzec (or anywhere).

Wiesenthal's imaginative view of history is not limited to the twentieth century.

In his 1973 book Sails of Hope, he argued that Christopher Columbus was secretly a Jew, and that his famous voyage to the western hemisphere in 1492 was actually a search for a new homeland for Europe's Jews. ^[30]

Fraudulent "Nazi Hunter"
Wiesenthal's reputation as the world's foremost "Nazi hunter" is completely undeserved. His greatest achievement in more than thirty years of searching for "Nazi criminals" was his alleged role in locating and capturing Adolf Eichmann. (Eichmann headed the wartime SS Jewish affairs department. He was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires in 1960 and was hanged in Jerusalem after a trial that received worldwide media attention.)

But Isser Harel, the Israeli official who headed the team that captured Eichmann, has declared unequivocally that Wiesenthal had "absolutely nothing" to do with the capture. (Harel is a former head of both the Mossad and Shin Bet, Israel's foreign and domestic security agencies.) In addition, Arnold Forster, general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the influential Zionist organization, reported in his book Square One that just before the Israelis seized Eichmann in Argentina, Wiesenthal was placing him in both Japan and Saudi Arabia.

When the Israeli government refused to give Wiesenthal funds to search for Eichmann, the "Nazi hunter" issued a statement to the Israeli press claiming the government was refusing to help capture the former SS man. ^[31]

One of Wiesenthal's most spectacular cases involved a Chicago man named Frank Walus. In a letter dated Dec. 10, 1974, he charged that Walus "delivered Jews to the Gestapo" in Czestochowa and Kielce in Poland during the war. This letter prompted the U.S. government's investigation and legal campaign against Walus. ^[32]

The Washington Post dealt with the case in a 1981 article entitled "The Nazi Who Never Was: How a witch-hunt by judge, press and investigators branded an innocent man a war criminal."

The lengthy piece, which was copyrighted by the American Bar Association, reported:^[33]

In January 1977, the United States government accused a Chicagoan named Frank Walus of having committed atrocities in Poland during World War II.

In the following years, this retired factory worker went into debt in order to raise more than $60,000 to defend himself. He sat in a courtroom while 11 Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation of Poland testified that they saw him murder children, an old woman, a young woman, a hunchback and others ...

Overwhelming evidence shows that Walus was not a Nazi War criminal, that he was not even in Poland during World War II.

... In an atmosphere of hatred and loathing verging on hysteria, the government persecuted an innocent man.

In 1974, Simon Wiesenthal, the famous "Nazi hunter" of Vienna, denounced Walus as "a Pole in Chicago who performed duties with the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over a number of Jews to the Gestapo."

The Chicago weekly newspaper Reader also reported on the case in a detailed 1981 article headlined:

"The Persecution of Frank Walus: To Catch a Nazi: The U.S. government wanted a war criminal. so, with the help of Simon Wiesenthal, the Israeli police, the local press and Judge Julius Hoffman, they invented one."^[34]

The article stated:

... It is logical to assume that the "reports received by Wiesenthal [against Walus] actually were rumors ... In other words, Simon Wiesenthal had no evidence against Walus. He denounced him anyway.

While [Judge] Hoffman had the Walus case under advisement, Holocaust aired on television. During the same period, in April 1978, Simon Wiesenthal came to Chicago, where he gave interviews taking credit for the Walus case. "How Nazi-Hunter Helped Find Walus," was the Sun-Times headline on a story by Bob Olmstead.

Wiesenthal told Sun-Times Abe Peck that he "has never had a case of mistaken identity."

"l know there are thousands of people who wait for my mistake," he said.

It was only after an exhausting legal battle that the man who was vilified and physically attacked as "the butcher of Kielce" was finally able to prove that he had spent the war years as a peaceful farm laborer in Germany. Wiesenthal's irresponsibility and recklessness in the Walus case should have been enough to permanently discredit him as a reliable investigator. But his Teflon reputation survived even this.

After Wiesenthal was ultimately proven wrong in a similar case in Canada, the Toronto Sun newspaper commented in an editorial:

"It seems that material provided by professional Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is wrong, but repeated anyway [in the media]." ^[35]

Much of the Wiesenthal myth is based on his hunt for Josef Mengele, the wartime physician at Auschwitz known as the "Angel of Death." Time and time again, Wiesenthal claimed to be close on Mengele's heels. Wiesenthal reported that his informants had "seen" or "just missed" the elusive physician in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Spain, Greece, and half a dozen locations in Paraguay. ^[36]

One of the closest shaves came in the summer of 1960. Wiesenthal reported that Mengele had been hiding out on a small Greek island, from where he escaped by just a few hours. Wiesenthal continued to peddle this story, complete with precise details, even after a reporter whom he had hired to check it out informed him that the tale was false from beginning to end. ^[37]

According to another Wiesenthal canard, Mengele arranged for the murder in 1960 of one of his former victims, a woman he had supposedly sterilized in Auschwitz. After spotting her, and her distinctive camp tattoo, at a hotel in Argentina where he was staying, Mengele allegedly arranged to have her killed because he feared that she would expose him. It turned out that the woman was never in a concentration camp, had no tattoo, had never met Mengele, and her death was a simple mountaineering accident.^[38]

Mengele regularly dined at the finest restaurants in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, Wiesenthal said in 1977, and supposedly drove around the city with a bevy of armed guards in his black Mercedes Benz. ^[39] Wiesenthal announced in 1985 that he was "100 percent sure" that Mengele had been hiding out in Paraguay until at least June 1984, and charged that the Mengele family in West Germany knew exactly where. As it turned out, Wiesenthal was completely wrong. It was later definitively established that Mengele had died in 1979 in Brazil, where he had been living for years in anonymous poverty. ^[40]

In truth, the bulging Mengele file in Wiesenthal's Vienna "Documentation Center" was such a jumble of useless information that, in the words of the London Times, it,

"only sustained his self-confirmatory myths and gave scant satisfaction to those who apparently needed a definitive answer to Mengele's fate." ^[41]

Even Israel's former ambassador to Paraguay, Benjamin Varon, cautiously criticized the phony Mengele campaign in 1983:

"Wiesenthal makes periodic statements that he is about to catch him, perhaps since Wiesenthal must raise funds for his activities and the name Mengele is always good for a plug." ^[42]

In the words of Gerald Posner and John Ware, co-authors of Mengele: The Complete Story, Wiesenthal spent years assiduously cultivating a mythical,

"self-image of a tireless, dogged sleuth, pitted against the omnipotent and sinister might of Mengele and a vast Nazi network." Because of his "knack of playing to the gallery," Posner and Ware concluded, Wiesenthal "ultimately compromised his credibility." ^[43]

Bruno Kreisky once summed up his unambiguous attitude towards the "Nazi hunter" in these words: ^[44]

The engineer Wiesenthal, or whatever else his title is, hates me because he knows that I despise his activity. The Wiesenthal group is a quasi-political Mafia that works against Austria with disgraceful methods. Wiesenthal is known as someone who isn't very careful about the truth, who is not very selective about his methods and who uses tricks. He pretends to be the "Eichmann hunter," even though everyone knows that this was the work of a secret service, and the Wiesenthal only takes credit for that.

Wiesenthal is not always wrong, of course. In 1975 he acknowledged in a letter published in a British periodical that "there were no extermination camps on German soil."^[45]

He thus implicitly conceded that the claims made at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal and elsewhere that Buchenwald, Dachau and other camps in Germany proper were "extermination camps" are not true.

"Commercializing the Holocaust"
Simon Wiesenthal and the Los Angeles Center that bears his name "commercialize" and "trivialize" the Holocaust, according to the director of Israelis Yad Vashem Holocaust center. The charge was reported by the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz in December 1988. ^[46]

The Brooklyn weekly Jewish Press commented on the charge:

"The displeasure of Yad Vashem over what it sees as the commercialization of the Holocaust by the Wiesenthal Center has long been well known, but this is the most open attack yet."

Wiesenthal "threw out" the figure of "11 million who were murdered in the Holocaust -- six million Jews and five million non-Jews," said the director. When asked why he gave these figures, Wiesenthal replied: "The gentiles will not pay attention if we do not mention their victims, too." Wiesenthal "chose 'five million (gentiles)' because he wanted a 'diplomatic' number, one that told of a large number of gentile victims but in no way was larger than that of Jews... "

The Los Angeles Center pays Wiesenthal $75,000 a year to use his name, the Yad Vashem director said.

"The Jewish people does many vulgar things," the report added, "but the Wiesenthal Center raised it to a complete level: The optimum use of sensitive issues in order to raise money ... "

The Jewish Press, which claims to be the largest-circulation English-language Jewish community paper in America, went on to comment:

"What Wiesenthal and the Los Angeles Center that bears his name do is to trivialize the Holocaust, to take from it its unique Jew-hatred. And of course, Jews will continue to support it because it is so fashionable."

Wiesenthal is often asked why he does not forgive those who persecuted Jews more than forty years ago. His stock answer is that although he has the right to forgive for himself, he does not have the right to forgive on behalf of others. But this is Talmudic sophistry. On the basis of this logic, neither does he have the right to accuse and track down anyone in the name of others.

Wiesenthal has never confined his "hunt" to those who victimized him personally.

It is difficult to say just what drives this remarkable man. Is it a craving for fame and praise? Or is he trying to live down a shameful episode from his past?

Wiesenthal clearly enjoys the praise he receives. "He is a man of considerable ego, proud of [his] testimonials and honorary degrees," the Los Angeles Times has reported. ^[47] Bruno Kreisky has given a simpler explanation. He said that Wiesenthal is "driven by hatred" ("von Hass diktiert"). ^[48]

In light of his well-documented record of deception, lies and incompetence, the extravagant praise heaped upon this contemptible man is a sorry reflection of the venal corruptibility and unprincipled self-deception of our age.

Notes

1. Quoted in: M. Weber, "'Nazi Hunter' Caught Lying," Spotlight, Washington, DC), Oct. 26,1981, p. 9.
2. Interrogation of S. Wiesenthal on May 27 and 28, 1948, conducted by Curt Ponger of the Interrogation Branch of the Evidence Division of the Office (U.S.) Chief of Counsel for War Crimes. Interrogation No. 2820. On file at the National Archives (Washington, DC), "Records of the U.S. Nuremberg War Crimes Trials Interrogations, 1946-49," Record Group 238, microfilm M-1019, roll 79, frames 460-469 and 470- 476. Also cited in "New Documents Raise New Doubts About Simon Wiesenthal's War Years," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89 (VoL 8, No.4), pp. 489-503.
3. PCIRO (International Refugee Organization, Austria) "Application for Assistance filled out and signed by Wiesenthal. Dated Jan. 16, 1949. (This was a trial exhibit in the Walus court case. Photocopy in author's possession.)
4. Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us, edited by Joseph Wechsberg. (New York: McGraw HilL 1967)
5. Interrogation of S. Wiesenthal, May 27, 1948, pp. 1-2.
6. Murderers Among Us, p. 27.
7. Murderers Among Us, pp. 29-35. This account is not inconsistent with his 1948 and 1949 statements.
8. Interrogation of May 27, 1948, p. 2.
9. Interrogation of May 28, 1948, pp. 1-2.
10. Interrogation of May 28,1948, p. 5.
11. Murderers Among Us, pp. 35-37.
12. Murderers Among Us, pp. 37-38. Interrogation, May 27, 1948, p. 2, and May 28, 1948, p. 5.
13. Murderers Among Us, pp. 3944. Interrogation, May 27, 1948, pp. 2-3.
14. Interview with foreign journalists in Vienna, Nov. 10, 1975. Text published in: "War Wiesenthal ein Gestapo-Kollaborateur?," Profil, Vienna No. 47, Nov. 18, 1975, pp. 16, 22-23. See also reprint in. Robert H. Drechsler, Simon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation (Vienna 1982), pp. 215-218.
15. S. Wiesenthal, KZ Mauthausen (Linz: Ibis-Verlag, 1946). Facsimile reprint in Robert H. Drechsler, Sirnon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation (Vienna 1982), p. 64.
16. "Firing Squad," Life magazine, U.S. edition, June 11, 1945, p. 50.
17. See also: M. Weber, "The Sleight-of-Hand of Simon Wiesenthal," Journal of Histoncal Review, Spring 1984 (Vol 5, No. 1), pp. 120-122.
18. S. Wiesenthal, KZ Mauthausen (1946). See also facsimile reprint in: Robert H. Drechsler, Simon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation (Vienna 1982), pp. 42, 46. This "confession" is a somewhat altered version of Nuremberg document NO-1973.
19. According to the Encydopaedia Judaica ("Mauthausen," EJ, VoL 11, p. 1138), a grand total of 206,000 persons were inmates of Mauthausen and its satellite camps (including Hartheim) at one time or another.
20. S. Wiesenthal, KZ Mauthausen (1946). Facsimile reprint in: R Drechsler, Simon Wiesenthal: Dokumentation, p. 47.
21. R. Faurisson, "The Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1981, p. 361. See also: Hans Fritzsche, The Sword in the Scales (London: 1953), p. 185; M. Weber, "AIlies Used Torture ... The Spotlight, Dec.24, 1979 (reprint), p.8; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London Sphere, pb., 1971), p. 515.
22. USA Today, Thurs., April 21, 1983, p. 9A.
23. Murderers Among Us, p. 44.
24. Evelyn Le Chene, Mauthausen: The History of a Death Camp, (London 1971), pp. 166-168 and 190-191.
25. "Mauthausen", Encylopaedia Judaica (New York & Jerusalem 1971), vol 11, p. 1138.
26. C. Moritz, ed., Current Biography 1975 (New York H.W. Wilson, 1975), p. 442; Wiesenthal interrogation of May 27, 1948, p. 3.
27. Robert Faurisson, "La savon juif," Annales d'Histoire Révisionniste (Paris), No.1, Printemps 1987, pp. 153- 159. (The "human soap" myth is repeated, for example, in: H. Kamm, "Elie Wiesel's Hometown," The New York Times, Dec. 9, 1986, p. A9.)
28. Der Neue Weg, Vienna, No. 17/18, 1946, pp. 4-5. Article entitled "RIF" by "Ing. Wiesenth" (Simon Wiesenthal).
29. Der Neue Weg, Vienna, Nr. 19/20, 1946, pp. 14-15. Article entitled "Seifenfabrik Belsetz" ("Belzec Soap Factory"), by "Ing. S. Wiesenth."
30. S. Wiesenthal, Sails of Hope (Macmillan, 1973).
31. S. Birnbaum, "Wiesenthal's Claim on Eichmann disputed by Former Mossad head," Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (New York), April 4, 1989. (Dispatch dated April 3). See also: "Israeli Spy Terms Wiesenthal No Help in Finding Eichmann," Reuters dispatch from New York, St. Louis Post- Dispatch, April 9, 1989. Facsimile reprint in Christian News, April 24, 1989, p. 17.
32. Michael Arndt, "The Wrong Man," Sunday, The Chicago Tribune Magazine, Dec. 2, 1984, pp. 15-35, esp. p. 23.
33. "The Nazi Who Never Was," Washington Post, May 10, 1981, pp. B5, B8.
34. "The Persecution of Frank Walus," Reader (Chicago), Jan. 23. 1981, pp. 19, 30.
35. Quoted in: M. Weber, "The Sleight-of-Hand of Simon Wiesenthal," Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1984, pp. 120-122.
36. Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story (New York: Dell 1987), pp. 220-221.; Gerald Astor, The 'Last' Nazi: The Life and Times of Dr. Joseph Mengele (Toronto: Paperjacks, 1986), p. 202.
37. G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story (cited above), p. 220.
38. G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele (cited above), pp. 179-180.; G. Astor, The 'Last' Nazi (cited above), pp. 178-180.
39. Time magazine, Sept 26, 1977, pp. 36-38. Cited in G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele (cited above), p. 219.
40. "Hunting the 'Angel of Death.'" Newsweek, May 20, 1985, pp. 36-38. See also: M. Weber, "Lessons of the Mengele Affair," Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1985 (Vol 6, No. 3), p. 382. Also, on Wiesenthal's distortion of truth in the Mermelstein-IHR case, see: M. Weber, "Declaration,"Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1982 (VoL 3, No.1), pp.42-43; M. Weber, "Albert Speer and the 'Holocaust,'" Journal of Histoncal Review, Winter 1984 (Vol. 5, Nos. 24), p. 439.
41. Tom Bower in The Times (London), June 14, 1985, p.14. Quoted in: G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele (cited above), pp. 222-223.
42. Midstream, Dec. 1983, p. 24. Quoted in G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele (cited above), p. 219.
43. G. Posner and J. Ware, Mengele (cited above), pp. 222-223.
44. "Was hat Wiesenthal zu verbergen?," D. National-Zeitung (Munich), Nov. 11, 1988, p. 4.
45. Letter by Wiesenthal in Books & Bookmen, London, April 1975, p. 5.; he later mendaciously disclaimed this statement. In a letter dated May 12, 1986, to Prod John George of Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, (copy in author's possession), Wiesenthal wrote: "I have never stated that 'there were no extermination camps on German soil.' This quote is false, I could never have said such a thing."
46. Ha'aretz, Dec.16,1988. Reported in: Jewish Press (Brooklyn, NY), Dec. 23, 1988.
47. Quoted in: M. Weber, Spotlight, Oct. 26, 1981, p. 9.
48. D. National-Zeitung (Munich), July 8, 1988, p. 7.

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A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel
by Robert Faurisson

ELIE WIESEL won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: (note 1)

These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.

But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. (note 2) He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that!

Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have also disappeared.

Only the gas remains.

The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. (note 3) The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. (note 4) The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. (note 5)

The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies.

He writes: (note 6)

Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load - little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it - saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)

A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks."

An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: (note 7)

Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.

These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes.

That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a miracle.

He says that: (note 8)

In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?

In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: (note 9)

Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of action.

We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of them - authentic deportees - whose sick minds strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the imposture.

Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.

Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. (note 10) Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.

However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, (note 11) little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.

Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, (note 12) which won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. (note 13) The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. (note 14)

Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others.

We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity.

However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: (note 15)

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.

At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in the process of reconciliation." (note 16) That is what might be called "going from National Socialism to national masochism."

Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel.

Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:

Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."

As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written:

"The devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a recognizable truth."

(note 17)

Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers.

Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs. (note 18)

On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians keep quiet.

But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the lies and the hatred.

That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never was one. (note 19)

The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored methods of historical criticism.

Notes

1. October 17, 1986. Front page.
2. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and the crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or "crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.)
3. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
4. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
5. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
6. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.
7. Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.
8. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.
9. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
10. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
11. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
12. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
13. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
14. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New York).
15. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
16. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
17. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
18. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
19. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.

Summary
Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other "eyewitnesses."

He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.

When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors.

It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.

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Why Holocaust Revisionism?
by Theodore J. O'Keefe

The "Holocaust," the alleged murder of some six million Jews by the German Nazis during the Second World War, has in recent years come under increasing fire from the Revisionists, those unconventional historians who challenge orthodox versions of past events.

Researchers such as Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson, David Irving, and Wilhelm Stäglich have become famous (some would say notorious) around the world for their scholarly critique of the claim that Hitler and his followers sought to exterminate European Jewry during the war, killing millions by poison gas and other means.

There are those who would suppress the Revisionists by restricting their freedom of research and expression, and indeed the Revisionists have suffered physical attacks and legal sanctions, even in countries which take pride in being "open societies."

Many more people, however, are not so much hostile to the Revisionists as they are simply puzzled by them.

They have questions about Holocaust Revisionism, questions like these:

"What motivates these Revisionists? Are they simply Nazis, seeking to rehabilitate the Hitler regime? Even if some of their facts are correct, does it really matter if the number of Jews who died in the war was 'only' a million and a half? Or half a million? Or just one? And even if the Revisionist case against the Holocaust could be proved, what difference does it make what did or didn't happen to some Jews in Europe fifty years ago? Why not stick to issues that are more important and safer?"

To answer these questions, it is necessary to say something about the origins of modern Historical Revisionism. While conscientious historians have always attempted to "correct" the errors and omissions of their predecessors, modern Revisionism dates from the First World War. That great and terrible war was the first in history to affect people in every corner of the globe.

It brought the great empires of Europe, their colonies in Asia and Africa, and finally the independent nations of the Americas into conflict on an unprecedented scale. Technology developed fearsome new weapons -- airplanes, submarines, tanks, machine guns, poison gas -- to gain military victories.

A different sort of technology directed at the minds, not the bodies, of men was raised to new levels of effectiveness.

While both sides -- the German-led Alliance and the Franco-British-Russian Entente lured the political and financial leadership of the neutral nations in secret with bribes and promises, they wooed the masses at home and abroad with propaganda. Each side depicted its own war aims as a mighty crusade for peace and freedom, and those of its enemies as a diabolical grab for world domination.

Even more effective was the so-called "atrocity propaganda," which attributed every crime imaginable to the enemy. And the undisputed masters of "atrocity propaganda" were in the Allied camp. Their mastery of the propaganda weapon gave the world such images as the Belgian-baby-killing Hun, the crucified Canadian, a corpse factory in which the Germans processed their own dead, and a hundred others which raised Allied and neutral populaces to righteous and patriotic frenzy.

Allied propaganda helped lure America into the war, tipping the scales to insure Allied victory. Then, Allied leaders forced the defeated nations, Germany and its allies, to sign humiliating treaties which stripped them of territory and colonies, imposed crushing reparations and virtual disarmament, and, most galling of all, compelled the defeated to accept all responsibility for starting the war.

Soon after that war it had already become evident that much of what the citizens of America and the other powers had been told by their leaders about the causes, the conduct, and the aims of the war was simply not true. In particular, the vast majority of the lurid atrocities attributed to the Germans and their allies were admitted by the politicians and journalists who fabricated them to have been lies.

A group of concerned scholars and laymen in America and other countries, who became known as Revisionists, became determined to establish the historical facts, as opposed to the government and press propaganda, about the war. Within a decade Revisionist historians in America, England, France, Germany, and Austria were able to demonstrate that the war had not been waged to save the world for democracy, and that Germany and its allies did not bear sole guilt for starting the war.

One of Revisionism's founding fathers was the young American historian Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes would later define Historical Revisionism as "bringing history into accord with the facts." Barnes' study of the facts, as opposed to the propaganda, of the years 1914 to 1918 taught him that, in his words, "Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime."

The hard facts which Revisionists had established about the First World War, only after a bloodbath which cost ten million lives, inspired Revisionists in America and elsewhere to resist their countries' involvement in wars and interventions at the behest of politicians and bankers.

But the rise of international Communism, which gained a firm base in Russia following the First World War, the crisis of capitalism in the worldwide depression of the 1930's, and the emergence of authoritarian, anti-Communist, nationalist regimes in Europe and Japan set the stage for new conflicts.

Unlike the years before 1914, the build-up to the Second World War found not only nations but supra-national ideological movements competing for power in every sphere of human life. Communists, Fascists, Nazis, and Zionists joined the existing nationalists, imperialists, and enthusiasts for "one world" in a no-holds-barred struggle in which, spurred by the world economic crisis, propaganda technicians brought the arts of mass persuasion to unprecedented levels of achievement.

By the outbreak of war in 1939, Germany had already been the object of a furious, international propaganda campaign by the left, led by the Communists, and by the world's Jews. Britain's formidable global propaganda apparatus had shifted into high gear, particularly in anti-interventionist America, where British agents had set up a vast, clandestine propaganda operation with the covert agreement of President Franklin Roosevelt.

When Germany and its European allies attacked Stalin's Russia in June 1941, the uneasy truce between the Nazis and the Reds ended, and Moscow's agents around the world began transmitting the Kremlin's version of events to an often unsuspecting audience in the democracies.

Such propaganda influences, combined with President Roosevelt's stealthy policy of entangling America on the side of the Allies, defeated the wise counsels of American Revisionists, prominent in the anti- interventionist camp, and in December 1941 America entered the war through the back door at Pearl Harbor.

Although officials among the Western Allies, mindful of the cynicism which had followed the exploded atrocity lies after the First World War, at first tried to steer clear of more lurid and improbable accusations, as the Axis triumphed on all fronts Allied propagandists began to abandon their scruples. Meanwhile, Jewish and Communist sources had opened up a drumfire of allegations against the Germans, blasting them for every conceivable crime.

By the summer of 1942 Jewish spokesmen were demanding that Allied leaders condemn the Germans for annihilating a million Jews and plotting the extermination of millions more. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin's condemnation was forthcoming by December 1942; for the remainder of the war Jewish and Allied propagandists spread fantastic tales of Jews murdered by scores of methods, as diabolical as they were improbable: they were reported to have been steamed, baked, electrocuted, gassed, eaten away by quicklime, starved, shot, buried alive, mauled by wild beasts, subjected to sadistic experiments, and deliberately injected with lethal chemicals or germs.

According to the propaganda, not even their remains were inviolable: their skins made into lampshades or riding breeches, their hair stuffed into mattresses or used to make slippers, their gold dental fillings swelling the Reich's coffers, and what was left over turned into soap or fertilizer.

Even during the war, as Exterminationist writers have lately emphasized, there was widespread disbelief of the extermination claims among Americans and Britons, not to mention the peoples of the Axis nations.

Allied policy-makers -- Jewish, Communist, or Western democratic -- mindful of the aftermath of the "war to end all wars," took steps to insure that the wartime propaganda would not be so easily discredited. Following the Second World War, they arranged for a series of trials devised to "prove" all of their atrocity claims as well as to convict and punish their enemies. Germany, and Japan as well, were occupied by the victors.

The occupying powers wrote new constitutions, picked out new ruling elites, and imposed new modes of thought and methods of education so that the Germans and Japanese would absorb and internalize the propaganda of their conquerors.

Like most critical-minded citizens, Revisionistscholars and publicists had believed that eventually the exaggerations and fabrications surrounding Germany's treatment of the Jews would be swept away after the war, as propaganda and the passions it stoked were replaced by dispassionate gathering and analysis of the facts.

They failed to reckon, however, with the rise of Israel and Zionism as a focus of allegiance for the world's Jews. The Zionists regarded the alleged extermination attempt -- and the seemingly miraculous rise of a Jewish state and nation which followed it -- as the central myth of a reborn Israel. Jews seized on the Holocaust story as a means of rendering criticism taboo and support almost automatic for Israel and the Diaspora.

Opponents of Israel were routinely compared to Hitler, while an endless and ubiquitous media Shoah business promoted Holocaust items and themes, from Anne Frank's alleged diary to the latest docudrama, gradually raised the wartime extermination legend to an unassailable sacred cow. The Holocaust propaganda became a tool to generate billions, first as reparations or aid, now as virtual tribute, from West Germany and America.

The enemies of German nationalism, from the Soviet Union with its newly consolidated satellite empire in Eastern Europe to leftists and jingoists in Western Europe, not to mention British "balance of power" enthusiasts and the would-be Caesars of an American imperium: all these forces had an interest in maintaining the Holocaust story as a barrier to free investigation of not merely the Jewish experience, but to any objective re-examination of the key historical questions of the Second World War.

Nevertheless, despite what Harry Elmer Barnes' called "the historical blackout," a small cohort of open-minded and intrepid writers in Europe and America began to challenge publicly the supposed magnitude of Jewish losses in Europe, and to examine critically the evidence for a German program to annihilate European Jewry.

The Revisionists who called for skepticism toward Holocaust claims, and began the hard work of bringing "history into accord with the facts" on this thorny issue, pointed out that the Holocaust was bad history. Paul Rassinier, the French pacifist and socialist who was himself interned in Buchenwald for his part in the French resistance, exposed the lies and exaggerations of his fellow survivors, who blithely testified to the existence of an imaginary gas chamber.

Early Revisionists, like Harvard-educated historian David Hoggan and German-American Professor Austin App, focused on the disparities between the documented National Socialist Jewish policy and the postwar oral accounts of "survivors," the "confessions of German prisoners in Allied custody, and the self-serving testimony of witnesses for the prosecution.

These and other Revisionist pioneers exposed the rickety statistical foundations of the figure of six million Jewish dead, paving the way for a efflorescence of critical Revisionist scholarship which began in the 1970's and flourishes today.

The coming of age of Holocaust Revisionism is best symbolized by the founding of the Institute for Historical Review in California in 1978, enabling the publication of the key findings of such contemporary Revisionist scholars of the Holocaust as Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson, Wilhelm Stäglich, Ditlieb Felderer, Walter Sanning, Henri Roques, Fritz Berg, Mark Weber, Carlo Mattogno, and many others.

It should be emphasized that men and women who have dedicated themselves to determining and spreading the truth about the Holocaust are anything but Nazis or unconditional apologists for Germany's National Socialist regime. In fact, Holocaust Revisionists neither subscribe to nor represent a fixed ideology. Politically, Revisionists have come not only from the ranks of the political right, but also from the left, and even from the ranks of the anti-statist libertarians and anarchists.

They run the gamut from fundamentalist Christians to militant atheists (and yes, like Joseph G. Burg and Bezalel Chaim, there are Jewish Revisionists of the Holocaust). Harry Elmer Barnes, for example, expressed himself with increasing frankness on the corrosive effects of the Holocaust propaganda in his last years, was a free-thinking humanist and progressive.

As a glance at the roster of the Institute for Historical Review's editorial advisory committee reveals, Revisionists are not merely Germans or of German descent, but include scholars from France, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Croatia, Latvia, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa, as well as Americans of English, Irish, Swedish, French, and Italian extraction.

Besides challenging the factual basisof the legend of a wartime Nazi extermination program for Jews, the Revisionists have sought to establish a historical context for the undeniable persecutions and wrongs which were carried out against the Jews. In this context the Revisionists remind those critics who object, quite rightfully, that the murder of a single Jew is inexcusable, that the willful exaggeration of Jewish losses is similarly intolerable: What man or woman person would condone deliberately multiplying the number of children slain by Israeli soldiers and settlers during the Palestinian intifada?

Revisionist scholars further attempt to compare the ordeal of the Jews during the Second World War with the experiences of other groups during that war and indeed throughout the course of history. Here the Revisionists are mindful of the unique status that most Exterminationists, particularly Jews, have tried to arrogate for the Holocaust.

Basing their arguments on the false premise that the architects of Germany's anti-Jewish program planned the systematic killing of all the Jews of Europe, Exterminationists have often minimized the sufferings of non-Jewish civilians. Such has been the power of the Holocaust taboo that the losses of such victims of Axis invasion and occupation as the Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians have been neglected by the Establishment academy and media.

It need scarcely be added that the Holocaust devotees who dominate the air waves, the press, and the schools guard against the shedding of even a single tear over the millions of German and other civilian victims of British and American bombers or of the hands-on brutality of Soviet troops.

Above all, the Revisionists argue that the Holocaust story and its exploitation form a massive obstacle to the objective history of Western Civilization in the twentieth century. The successful imposition of the Extermination thesis as an unchallengeable orthodoxy has helped Western intellectuals and opinion makers to shirk a confrontation with the far bloodier record of Communist regimes, as well as to gloss over sometimes comparable atrocities by regimes and movements, Left and Right, colonialist and revolutionary, around the world.

By exploiting the Holocaust taboo, the ideologues of socalled liberal democracy are able to forestall any dispassionate analysis of ideas and movements tarred as "fascist" or "Nazi." The inevitable result has been a general version of the political and historical dynamics of this century which is woefully inaccurate, is not merely useless but dangerous as an aid to understanding the present and the future, and which serves only the short-sighted and selfish interests of small elites.

For today's and tomorrow's Americans, the consequences of a continued refusal to establish and disseminate the facts, instead of the lies, about the Extermination legend can only be grave. For present-day America is in the grip of what can only be called "Holocaustomania."

The purveyors of this contagion in New York, in Hollywood, in Washington, and in schools all across America have been working industriously for years now to convert the Holocaust from an alleged historical event to an active present reality. Their mastery of the media has enabled them to vend Holocaust propaganda as edification and entertainment to tens of millions.

Their grip on governments national, state, and local has allowed them to mandate national holidays in "remembrance" of this historical hoax, to construct museums and memorials for the exhibition of relics and the generation of hatred and guilt. Federal prosecutors and police hunt down "war criminals" fifty years after the fact or often, the non-fact but only "Nazi" war criminals for justice, too, must yield its claims to the Holocaust.

Our children are being indoctrinated in a growing number of compulsory programs in the schools, programs which aim not merely at conveying information and reasoning ability, but which attempt to mold emotions and attitudes through techniques of "group learning" and "enforced sensitivity" that recall those of the Communist Chinese in Chairman Mao's heyday.

Christian theologians grandly proclaim that the Jewish tales from Auschwitz invalidate the Gospel of Christ, and that Christians and Gentiles bear a moral stain which can be expunged only by eternal allegiance to Israel.

The next few decades will be dangerous ones for Americans blinded to past and present realities by Holocaustomania. Like it or not, Germany and Europe are working free from political and economic domination by the rulers of America and Russia. That they will shake free from the historical myths which served to dominate them spiritually is inevitable.

In the Soviet Union, the archives are opening, the mass graves are being opened, almost invariably to the embarrassment of those who placed their trust in Stalin's propagandists. Israel has become an international pariah everywhere except in America and among America's dwindling number of subservient clients abroad.

A country that can't support itself economically and daily violates the liberal and humane ideals it urges on everyone else - as a matter of its own survival as a state - is not a fit friend for America.

To rely on Zionists and their supporters in America to determine our perception of history - particularly through the distorted lens of the obsessive Holocaust hoax - is to court disaster.

That is why intelligent, concerned Americans - and people everywhere - owe the Holocaust Revisionists a fair hearing.

The brave little band of conscientious scholars and sometimes flamboyant publicists who have risked social and economic ostracism in this country - and physical violence and prison abroad in countries as diverse as France, Canada, Sweden, West Germany, Brazil, and South America - doesn't demand blind faith or unquestioning adherence to a creed.

What they ask for is the right to argue their case - from facts, not emotions or covert political agendas - in the public forum, in that marketplace that we Americans have fought to keep open to ideas, even strange and unpleasant ones, ever since this country was founded.

For the Revisionists, the right to continue participating in what a French lawyer has called "the intellectual adventure of the twentieth century" without legal or illegal harassment is quite enough.

"Why Holocaust Revisionism?", I think Thomas Jefferson answered that question over two centuries ago, when he wrote:

"There is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world."

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