In April 1988 -- coinciding with Hitler's birthday -- a conference at Hofstra University on Long Island, NY will discuss possible ways to introduce "race relations" laws into the United States. The focus of the meeting will be to figure out ways to circumvent (or overturn?) the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees free speech.
Then in July 1988, focusing on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Oxford University in England will host a major conference dealing with the "impact of the Holocaust." The conference is sponsored by the wealthy British-Jewish publisher, Robert Maxwell.
Hollywood is also getting in on the act. ABC-TV plans to delight us with the eagerly awaited sequel to Winds of War, entitled War & Remembrance. Although the sequel is already in the can, after the most expensive location-shooting in television history, its broadcast has been mysteriously postponed until next season -- perhaps to make a few corrections, in response to Revisionist criticism?
Likewise, NBC-TV will be bringing us The Mel Mermelstein Story -- an all-Jewish production starring Leonard Nimoy in the title role, about a professional "survivor" who launched a personal crusade against Revisionism in California.
In January, Canadian publisher Ernst Zündel [206 Carlton Street, Toronto, ONT M5A 2L1, Canada; Phone: 416-922-9850] was back to court for his retrial for the "crime" of "publishing false news" in that he re-published a British Revisionist pamphlet entitled Did Six Million Really Die? Although Zündel was originally convicted on this charge, both the Ontario Appeals Court and the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that there were so many defects in the original trial that he must have a new trial, or have the charges dropped. Throughout the original litigation, it was obvious that the prosecution was retreating further and further in its Holocaust claims. The Crown's barrister tried to steer his "survivor" witnesses away from making their most outlandish claims; at the appeal, the Crown preferred to rely on "experts" rather than "eye-witnesses," and in recent months, the original complainant, Mrs. Sabina Citron, has been thoroughly rejected, discredited, rebuked -- and even fined -- by the Canadian authorities.
In the United States, a traveling exhibit from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland has been subject to intense criticism within and without the Jewish community. Before the display was unveiled (at the United Nations building in New York) Jewish groups insisted that the (Communist-Polish) exhibitors should include more emphasis on specifically Jewish suffering, before the exhibit could go ahead. Even with the Jewish emendations, the traveling exhibit has received a remarkably lukewarm reception from Jewish groups around the country. In fact, after its appearance at the Los Angeles City Hall rotunda, councillors voted unanimously that private groups should no longer be allowed to exhibit there.
In the scholarly publishing world, historians are furiously attacking one another for exhibiting symptoms of "proto-Revisionism" (known in the trade as "Functionalism") while at the same time they try to disassociate themselves from the more absurd claims of Exterminationism. (For a particularly amusing example of this cat-fight, please refer to the Journal of American History issues dated December 1986 and September 1987.)
All across the board the Holocaust theologians -- the Exterminationists -- are in full flight, before the irrefutable onslaught of Revisionist logic. They are continuing to revise and retract their own more outrageous claims, and replace their original scientific claims with symbolic, theological beliefs. Their original scientific claims were tested, and found lacking. Theological, religious belief is not based on empirical evidence, but on blind faith, and thus cannot be subjected to scientific examination.
"THE EYE-WITNESS"
Some "eye-witnesses" are complete charlatans. The French "survivor" of Treblinka, Martin Gray, has been widely condemned as a fake, especially by the leading Exterminationist Gitta Sereny (New Statesman, 2 November 1979, p.672) who says that Gray asked her to fabricate a powerful chapter of his "memoire" For Those I Loved. After she refused, he instead engaged the ghostwriting services of one Max Gallo, who went on to become a minister in the French government.
Ms. Sereny also has some scathing comments on Jean François Steiner's similar book, Treblinka, as does former OSI head Allan A. Ryan Jr. (Quiet Neighbors, Harcourt, 1984, p.367). Both condemn the book as a hodge-podge of fiction and hearsay.
Anyone who has attempted to correspond with the German-Jewish "survivor" Filip Müller would acknowledge that his literary skills do not quite match up to his supposed memoire: Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Stein & Day, 1979). In fact, this salacious work was the product of a German ghostwriter, Helmut Freitag, who was so lazy that he plagiarized entire sections from an earlier pot-boiler, Doctor at Auschwitz (Crest, 1961), allegedly written by one Dr. Miklos Nyiszli -- who may or may not have really existed.
Page 161 of Müller's book has a young rabbi preaching a stirring sermon in the "gas chamber." Page 144 of Nyiszli reports a young rabbi giving a stirring sermon in the "gas chamber" -- again reported verbatim. A similar story of naked, female gassees singing patriotic songs has also gone the rounds. Müller has them singing the "Hatikvah" on page 111; another "survivor," Rudolf Vrba, has them singing first the Czech national anthem, and then the Hatikvah (Escape From Auschwitz: I Cannot Forgive, Grove, 1986 [originally published 1964] p.248); the story pops up at various other, more obscure places, such as the Hefte von Auschwitz [Auschwitz Notebooks] (Auschwitz Museum, 1972, Vol.1, p.121), where this time they sing -- simultaneously -- the Polish and Hebrew national anthems.
When Vrba was presented as a prosecution eye-witness at the Great Holocaust Trial of Ernst Zündel, Vrba was forced to admit -- under withering cross-examination -- that his book was not in fact a scholarly history, but was "an artistic depiction" ...and that he had "used poetic license to re-create the situation." Despite Vrba's propensity for "poetic license" his description of Auschwitz became a cornerstone of wartime Allied propaganda: the War Refugee Board's German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz & Birkenau, published in November 1944. Strangely, the WRB attributed their "facts" to several Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, whom they declined to name. It was only at the Eichmann trial in 1961 that it was claimed that Vrba was one of the escapee sources for the report; since that time, Vrba has popped up as a witness at various trials, but has by and large kept his head down.
Likewise with professional survivor Mel Mermelstein. His book By Bread Alone (self-published, Los Angeles, 1979) admits right away that many of the names therein "had to be changed to protect their privacy." That's not all he has changed. The cover of the book shows the inmates of Buchenwald being liberated on 16 April 1945. However, another reproduction of this same photo on page 208 indicates that Mermelstein has painted out one figure, for reasons unknown. Similarly, on pages 120-121 the author shows a picture of the alleged "gas chamber" at Auschwitz-1, and his caption claims that it is "Auschwitz-Birkenau" -- 5km away! He also asks the reader to "note the pipes and shower heads above" -- a task which is difficult since the ceiling does not have any "pipes and shower heads" either in the photo or in real life! In his suit against me, and in his book (p.114), Mermelstein claims that he saw his mother and sisters heading down a tunnel into "gas chamber #5" at Birkenau. However, the [ruined] "gas chamber #5" at Birkenau does not have, and never had, a basement; it was entirely above-ground. This is even confirmed by the CIA report The Holocaust Revisited (CIA, February 1979; ST-79-10001, p.12). Although he agrees that he didn't actually witness "gassings" (he was told of his family's fate later), Mermelstein insists that he was an eye-witness to genocide by immolation. On page 115 of his book he describes "three huge pits ...[with] humans in the fire, writhing and moaning ...[and] around the naming pits naked men were running in an endless circle [being beaten by] SS guards with leather whips." At several points in his book, Mermelstein remarks that he was unable to distinguish between reality and nightmares. No doubt this explains why he has been seeing a psychiatrist for many years, often on a weekly basis. He admits that he has made two dozen trips to Auschwitz -- the site of Jewish "destruction" and only one or two to Israel -- the site of Jewish "salvation."
Mermelstein's account of Jewish immolation may be lifted from the book of Jewish fairy tales known as The Holy Bible, where in Jeremiah 7:31 we read that the Jewish exiles in Babylon eagerly worshipped the Babylonians' fire god, Moloch, by sacrificing their babies in a "gas oven." Likewise, the tale of Shadrak, Meshak, and Abednego walking around inside a "gas oven" with the Messiah himself, shows us that Holocaust lore has been around for longer than one would think.
Furthermore, Mermelstein may have been influenced by the Holocaust guru Eli Wiesel, who was allegedly shipped from Auschwitz to Buchenwald with him. (Although Mermelstein is prone to emphasize his bunkhouse comradeship with Wiesel, for reasons best known to himself he denies that "Elijah ...from Sighet [p.195] is actually Eli Wiesel from Sighet, a town in Romania.)
Wiesel, too, has a "thing" about immolation. Throughout his autobiographical literature there is no mention whatsoever of "gas chambers." Instead, Wiesel speaks of fiery pits (Night, Avon, 1969, p.44; also Report to the President, President's Commission on the Holocaust, 1980) and of "geysers of blood" squirting out of the ground for "months" after the alleged Babi Yar massacre (The Jews of Silence, New American Library, 1966, p.48).
Significantly, Eli Wiesel recently resigned as Chairman of the President's Council on the Holocaust, allegedly because it was becoming a boondoggle for Jewish property developers. However, informed sources indicate that his resignation had more to do with his fear of the Revisionists, than his lack of confidence in his kinfolk. Naturally, Wiesel's departure received very little play in the secular press.
Other Auschwitz alumni pop up from time to time. Jack Glocer, now of Normal, [sic] Illinois, claims in lectures that the Auschwitz Nazis burned and buried Jewish babies alive (University of Tulsa Collegian, 11 February 1982). This one sounds awfully like various biblical atrocity yarns, such as the one where God ordered 70 Jewish babies to be decapitated, and their heads loaded into baskets at every city gate (II Kings 9:8 and 10:1-11); and the thousands of first-born [Gentile] babies slain by God in Egypt because their parents were not smart enough to paint their doorposts with blood (Exodus 12:29).
Kitty Felix-Hart, now of Birmingham, England, has not only written a book, Return to Auschwitz (Athenaeum, 1983), she was also featured in a 1979 Yorkshire Television production "Kitty -- Return to Auschwitz" which is still available on videotape. Her book deals with "gassing" in just one paragraph on page 112. Her film deals with the scenario more extensively. In the movie version she claims that she was sunbathing opposite Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium #4 when she witnessed an SS man climbing up a ladder and tipping in Zyklon-B, and human ashes coming out 10 minutes later. Since modern cremation techniques take at least two hours, we are quite sure that mortuaries around the world will be clamoring for this amazing, miraculous formula.
The recently-deceased Fania Fenelon (who, like Kitty Hart, was only half-Jewish) had her memoirs of Auschwitz openly ghostwritten by one Marcelle Routier (Playing for Time [Berkeley/Athenaeum, 1979]). Although she dedicates the book to "the survivors of [Auschwitz-] Birkenau extermination camp," the reader is hardpressed to find any first-hand references to "gas chambers" within the text. On page 134 she tells of sooty air; likewise on p.145, and p.181. We never get a first-hand account of "gassings" -- all we read are hearsay stories and allegations, such as on p.172, p.173, p.175, p.186, p.197, and p.203. Ms. Fenelon even lurches into the absurd, when she accuses Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Josef Kramer of having made his wife a handbag out of "tattooed, human skin" (p.197) -- an allegation which has long since been abandoned by scholarly exterminationists.
However, the "handbag of human skin" is not the most ludicrous of Ms. Fenelon's allegations. On p.173 of her narrative she claims that she had "heard" that the Nazis segregated the women prisoners according to breast-droop. The officer would lift the women's breasts with the tip of his whip (naturally); "those whose breasts sagged went to the left, those whose breasts remained firm went to the right." This sounds on a par with the aforementioned Filip Müller's Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, where SS doctors would slice off bits of the [dead] gassees' flesh, which promptly jumped around in buckets (p.47); a striptease in the "gas chamber" (p.87); chief gasser Moll, and his dog, getting sexually excited by a gassing (p.141); and babies being flung into pits of sizzling human fat (p.142).
On a similar level is Jack Eisner's The Survivor (Bantam, 1982), written with the "editorial assistance" of one Irving A. Leitner. While still a teenager, the remarkable Eisner managed to smuggle food and arms into the Warsaw Ghetto, to take part in the ghetto uprising, to escape from several death camps, to escape execution by seconds -- and even after all this trauma he is still able to recount specific conversations verbatim, and specific sexual encounters blow-by-blow. It is understandable that such a miraculous adventure -- recorded by such an accurate mind -- should now become a book, a stage play, and a film.
Sometimes Gentiles get a look in. The Ukrainian survivor of Auschwitz, Petro Mirchuk has given us his memoirs, In the German Mill of Death 1941-1945 (Vantage Press, 1976), where on page 127 he tells the story of a young "Greek-Jewish dancer" who stabbed an SS guard to death, before being herself machine-gunned. In The Naked Puppets by "Christian Bernadac" (Ferni Publishing, Geneva, 1978) the valiant, naked partisan has become a "classical American dancer" (p.227). Whether or not she was the same gassee who distracted her gassers with a striptease in order to attack them with her stiletto-heel (Müller, p.87), or the beautiful, naked Polish gassee who gave a fiery speech in the gas-chambers (Hefte von Auschwitz, Vol. 1, p.121) is not known.
Robert Clary, who acts in the television series "Hogan's Heroes," often shows off his Auschwitz tattoo to impressionable high-school audiences, when he represents the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. According to the Serge & Beate Klarsfeld directory, Memorial to the Jews deported from France 1942-1944 (Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1983), it appears from pages 312-318 that Clary (né: Widermann) was "gassed" at Auschwitz. Likewise, with Mrs. Simone Veil (né: Jacob) who appears among the "authoritative" list of "gassees on page 538. Both Clary/Widermann and Veil/Jacob are extremely active in anti-Revisionist campaigns; for understandable reasons!
Some survivor books have been taken off the shelves rather fast. The Auschwitz Album (Random House, 1981) never made it to a second edition -- hardback or paperback -- despite having received a considerable number of favorable reviews. This collection of Auschwitz pictures was "liberated" by one Lili Jacob Meier, who -- like Mermelstein, Wiesel, & Co. -- was deported to Auschwitz from the heavily-Jewish Carpathian Mountains in the early summer of 1944. In fact, her book lends more credence to Revisionist theory, not Exterminationism (even though we are condemned editorially on p.xxviii). Photos of the Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau show the crematoria (#2 & #3) quite clearly in the background (p.15, p.59, and especially p.107) and none of them are "belching forth flames and smoke" as the text (p.14) quite bizarrely insists to the contrary. Predictably, the Auschwitz Album was brought into publication by the Klarsfeld duo; for some odd reason, their French edition contains some very rare -- and fascinating -- pictures of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria #4 & #5, which do not appear in the U.S. edition.
A similar conundrum surrounds the CIA's 1979 pamphlet The Holocaust Revisited. Attempts to ask the two compilers, Brugioni and Poirier, why there is no "smoke and flame" in their 1944 aerial photographs are met with a wall of silence. This "dog and pony act" (as they are referred to by the Jewish head of the National Archives section, Robert Wolfe) performed their "research" in private time, and thus cannot expend CIA time to answer correspondence or phone calls on the matter. No explanation is provided as to how the CIA ever published a "private" pamphlet under its own, government, imprimatur. Continue...