I am repeating the introduction in each of this 11-part ZGram series. Read it until you know it by heart!
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A mainstream Jewish writer, giving his readers the standard Jewish slant on well-worn Holocaust orthodoxy in response to the then upcoming Irving/Lipstadt-Penguin Trial, made amazing and telling pre-emptive admissions in an article published in the February 2000 Atlantic Monthly. This 19 page article, significantly titled "The Holocaust on Trial" by D.D. Guttenplan, is so far the most comprehensive and extensive write-up on the subject of Revisionism and the Holocaust that has appeared in the global mainstream press.
The choice of the title itself speaks volumes. It is an open acknowledgement - long overdue! - that Revisionism, far from being a fringe movement run by a few crackpots and "Hitler lovers", is in fact a vibrant, legitimate historical discipline of far greater spiritual depth and political importance than has been admitted by those who would like us to listen to the B'nai Brith and Anti-Defamation League type smearmongering just a little bit longer.
Holocaust orthodoxy is not yet a sacred religious dogma of Judaism. It is, in fact, the central core of the Zionist political agenda. This agenda has had diabolical, monstrous results. It gave us World War II, the Morgenthau Plan, Operation Keelhaul, the Nuremberg Trials, an Israeli state, German reparations to maintain that state, more than half a century of Bolshevic occupation of the heartland of Europe, deliberately media-induced, all-permeating "Holocaust thinking" and, as a by-produce, permanent, bloody wars and upheaval in the Middle East. It is also the backbone of the New World Order.
Understanding this Zionist agenda is of crucial relevance to every person on this earth who prefers truth over lies, unfettered scientific and historical inquiry to back up that truth and demolish those lies, and freedom over slavery for future generations.
Leuchter's findings, Irving's adoption of these findings, and the subsequent Errol Morris documentary film about Leuchter played a central role in the lengthy Irving-Lipstadt/Penguin litigation, as the court transcripts reveal. This illustrates the crucially important role played by the much-maligned Fred Leuchter in the demolition of this edifice and relic of World War II propaganda lies.
Guttenplan's choice of the Title, "The Holocaust on Trial" - was borrowed from a Zundel publication - the 1988 'consumerized" version by Reporter Robert Lenski of the 1988 Zündel trial, reviewable on the Zundelsite. (Use the Zundelsite-specific search engine for topics of specific interest!) The title signifies acknowledgment by the back door of the importance of the two Zundel Trials and their seminal impact on Holocaust historiography.
It is only fitting that Ernst Zundel should review the Atlantic Monthly article. In this article, Guttenplan is continuing the traditional modus operandi of the "in-elite" by talking about us, around us, past us and against us. Who better than a German to respond to the continued blood libel against the Germans - and to assure more balance, sanity and honesty?
Who better than Ernst Zundel, battle-scarred veteran of this herculean struggle and originator/catalyst of the all-important Leuchter Report?
I yield my ZGrams to Ernst Zundel. The Internet allows this veteran of Holocaust Revisionism to have his say - his way!
(Paragraph pairs are numbered and separated by a line. )
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Part VII
77. Guttenplan: Irving appears in the film, and audiences may well find themselves wondering how a man who proclaims himself an expert at detecting forged documents - and who dismisses the countless eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust by those who survived as "really a matter for psychiatric evaluation" - could have been so easily gulled.
ANSWER TO 77. Irving was not easily gulled. Leuchter's "chemical experiments," so glibly dismissed by Guttenplan, have been replicated by several other experts with impeccable academic credentials. There is the German chemist, Germar Rudolf who issued his own "Rudolf Report," confirming most of Leuchter's basic findings. Then there is the "Lüftl Report" by Austrian court expert and longtime president of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers who corroborated Leuchter's premises and findings. There is also the Austrian engineer and fumigation chamber expert, Fröhlich, of Vienna, who corroborated Leuchter's views as to the inadequacies of the Auschwitz installations as "gas chambers."
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78. Guttenplan: How significant was Irving's conversion? Holocaust denial has been at the center of trials in Austria, Germany, France, and Canada. Some were criminal proceedings, and some, like the Zündel trial, began when survivors filed civil complaints. But in every one of those trials it has been the deniers who have had to defend themselves. When David Irving walks into Courtroom 37, it will be as the plaintiff, with the scales of British justice tipped in his favor. The defendant in this case is Deborah Lipstadt.
ANSWER TO 78. That's right! Now for once they are on trial! Their concepts are being tested. It is a pity Irving did not get a lawyer to represent him and turn this into a real, in-depth Holocaust trial. He could have been the one who drove the wooden stake into Dracula's heart and ended the legend.
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79. Guttenplan: Irving's Preoccupations
My sense of Irving the man was unavoidably colored by sorrow. We had spoken on the phone several times, and had been exchanging e-mails for several months, before the gray afternoon last autumn when I presented myself at his flat, in a red-brick Victorian building off Grosvenor Square, just around the corner from the American embassy. I'd read enough of his interviews to know that Irving could be provocative, truculent, or charming. But when I came to see him, he was none of those things. He seemed deeply tired (he was due to leave for a lecture tour of the United States the following day) and more than a little sad.
ANSWER TO 79. This is undoubtedly a good description of Irving's state of mind and being at the time.
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80. Guttenplan: A few days earlier the oldest of his five daughters had committed suicide. Named Josephine Victoria (she was born, in 1963, on the anniversary of Franco's victory in Spain), she'd been schizophrenic, Irving said, for "half her life." More recently she had lost the use of both legs in a car accident. "At the hospital they said to me, 'You know, she must have been very determined.' For someone who is legless to pull herself up and throw herself out of a fourth-floor window ... " Irving stopped and then continued, responding to a question I hadn't asked. "Do you ever wonder whether you are mentally unsound or not? How do we know? There is no thermometer you can stick in your mouth that will say, 'Oh, today I'm a bit unbalanced.'"
ANSWER TO 80. This is an astonishing paragraph. It would be interesting what else was said, especially when one correlates these statements with other factors known and observed by Irving watchers.
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81. Guttenplan: I'd been to his flat once in the summer, to pick up some material, but Irving had been away. "Contact my staff (Bente) in London," he e-mailed me. Bente turned out to be the mother of Irving's youngest daughter, Jessica, who had to be collected from school, and so I was left alone, seated in Irving's study leafing through his press clippings under the gaze of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose portrait on the mantelpiece above Irving's desk was flanked by a pair of framed front pages from the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party daily.
ANSWER TO 81. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the "Völkischer Beobachter" - fancy that! Not only quicksilvery arguments - quicksilvery tastes as well!
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82. Guttenplan: One article, Irving later told me with a certain amount of malicious pleasure, was headlined "PROPHETIC WARNING TO JEWRY" - the paper's report of Hitler's famous January, 1939, speech to the Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international-finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
ANSWER TO 82. Annihilation - Ausrottung - here is what came out during the Zündel trial about this speech and this term:
The term ausrotten, said Christie, has been represented to mean 'extermination' in the literal sense. Have you examined that word in its context in the various speeches of Adolf Hitler?
"I am very fluent in the German language, having lived in that country for a long time and having read, of course, millions of words in the German language in context," said Irving. "There is no doubt that in modern Germany the word ausrotten now means murder. But we have to look at the meaning of the word ausrotten in the 1930s and the 1940s, as used by those who wrote or spoke these documents. In the mouth of Adolf Hitler, the word ausrotten is never once used to mean murder, and I've made a study of that particular semantic problem. You can find document after document which Hitler himself spoke or wrote where the word ausrotten cannot possibly mean murder. I can give one or two examples briefly. In August 1936, Hitler dictated the famous memorandum on the four year plan which contains the phrase 'if the Bolsheviks succeed in entering Germany, it will lead to the ausrotten of the German people'. Now, clearly, he doesn't mean that if the Bolsheviks invade Germany it will lead to the murder of 50 million Germans. He is saying it will lead to the end of Germany as a national state, as a power, as a factor, an end of the German people. He says the same to the Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha, on March the 15th, 1939. Hácha has just signed away Czechoslovakia's independence in a midnight session with Hitler and Hitler says to him afterwards, 'It is a good thing that you signed because otherwise it would have meant the ausrotten of the Czechoslovakian people'. Hitler didn't mean, 'If you hadn't signed, I would have had to kill 8 million Czechs.' What he is saying [is], 'If you hadn't signed, I would have ended Czechoslovakia's existence as a separate country.' There are various other examples of that and I defy anybody to find the meaning of the word differently used by Adolf Hitler to mean the word 'murder'. This is the kind of analysis which unfortunately the academic historians have not bothered to conduct." (33-9377, 9378) (Ref: Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988. Edited by Barbara Kulaszka.)
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83. Guttenplan: This time - perhaps in deference to his siblings, who, though embarrassed by Irving, had come to London for the funeral - the papers had been taken down. Nor was a famous self-portrait of Hitler, given to Irving by the Führer's secretary, anywhere in evidence. And Irving himself, a husky, square-jawed man with a weakness for martial metaphors ("It may be unfortunate for Professor Lipstadt," he had remarked to me on the telephone, "that she is the one who finds herself dragged out of the line and shot"), was on his best behavior.
ANSWER TO 83. An interesting "quicksilver" insight into Irving. Removing pictures on his wall so as not to hurt the feelings of his siblings, one of whom even changed his name so as not to be identified with his brother? Interesting!
The famous "self-portrait" of Hitler referred to was recently shown on CNN by Irving. It is a 4x5-inch piece of paper with a few pencil lines on it, drawn by Hitler as a doodle.
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84. Guttenplan: There were glimpses of the Irving I'd read about. "In crude terms, you've got a problem," he said regarding the fate of Hungarian Jews shipped to Auschwitz in 1944, "because you're talking about 45,000 tons of meat." He described "a very good friend": "Sometimes I say, 'He's Jewish but ...' Jewish but very nice, very decent, and so on - from which you can see I have all the stereotypes embedded in me." But these half-hearted attempts to shock me were not very convincing - nor, I think, were they meant to be.
ANSWER TO 84. Once again the sensibilities of Guttenplan are offended. When people are dead, as it is alleged by the Holocaust promoters these Hungarian Jews allegedly were, then the German Auschwitz camp administration had indeed a disposal problem for all these cadavers. The comment, "45,000 tons of meat", is a little tasteless for a cultured Englishman, true - but then Mr. Quicksilver is like that. Guttenplan said himself that Irving likes to shock people.
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85. Guttenplan: When he's among friends, Irving's manners are less fastidious. At a lecture in Germany a few years ago a television cameraman captured his wit: "There's the one-man gas chamber, carried by two German soldiers looking for Jews alone in the Polish countryside. This one-man gas chamber must have looked like a sedan chair, but disguised as a telephone kiosk. How did they convince the victim to step, of his own free will, into this one-man gas chamber? Apparently there was a phone in it, which would ring, and the soldier would say, 'It's for you!'"
ANSWER TO 85. Ahhh, that "one man gas chamber" joke! That really got to the Guttenplans and Lipstadts. Jewish writers who make the most insane, outrageous claims about Nazi behavior from "Springtime for Hitler" to "Maus", from Mel Brooks to Charlie Chaplin's depiction of Hitler, get all bent out of shape when somebody pokes fun at their racket. They have no sense of humor when it comes to themselves - they can dish it out, but they cannot take it when the tables are turned.
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86. Guttenplan: And there is his light verse, to be recited, according to Irving's diary (which he has had to make available to Lipstadt's lawyers), when out with his daughter and "half-breed children" are wheeled past: "I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no plans to marry an / Ape or Rastafarian." But since Jessica, now six (she spent a portion of our interview sitting on my lap), was barely a year old when that entry was written, the intended audience was probably her mother, whose reaction, Irving noted with satisfaction, was "suitably shocked."
ANSWER TO 86. A private in-house attempt to get a rise out of his partner becomes national - no, international! - headlines! Boy, these people are really groping!
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87. Guttenplan: Irving is a prodigious diarist, and though the entries I've seen read more like the first drafts of a press release than like a record of his inner life, the need to fill up the pages does sometimes allow something personal to slip through. His love affairs, for example, are apparently recorded in a code based on the word "amiable," as in "Caroline came round and was amiable." But even the sections cited by the defense in various expert reports hardly reveal a passionate Jew-hater. Irving believes in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy - both to discredit him personally and to exploit the Holocaust for political and economic ends. He habitually refers to Jewish groups as "traditional enemies of the truth," and as far back as 1963, describing a speech by Oswald Mosley at Kensington Town Hall, he wrote, "Yellow Star did not make a showing." But his recurring preoccupations are money and his career, not the Jews.
ANSWER TO 87. So Irving is a womanizer. That hardly disqualifies him as a historian. JFK was a womanizer, which did not disqualify him as a president - not to mention Bill Clinton.
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88. Guttenplan: Irving likes to point out that at one time both his lawyer and his publisher were Jews. The lawyer, Michael Rubinstein (who says he's not Jewish), told me that relations with Irving had been proper and professional.
ANSWER TO 88. Michael Rubinstein is not Jewish? I suppose the Pope isn't Catholic.
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89. Guttenplan: As for Lord Weidenfeld, the assumption of mutual utility can be gleaned from a letter he sent Irving after a newspaper article, obviously inspired by Irving, suggested that Weidenfeld had been pressured not to publish Hitler's War. "I have every reason to believe," Weidenfeld wrote, "that it was the reporter's tone and not your intention to disturb a businesslike and friendly climate of cooperation between us." The firm of Weidenfeld and Nicholson went on to publish Irving's biographies of Field Marshals Erhard Milch and Erwin Rommel.
ANSWER TO 89. Mr. Weidenfeld is one smart man. Business is business.
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90. Guttenplan: In the end, Irving's relationships with individual Jews don't take us very far. Deborah Lipstadt is a Jew, and Irving sued her. But Gitta Sereny is not a Jew, and after she wrote an article for the London Observer accusing him of peddling a "clever mixture of truth and untruth," Irving sued her as well. In fact Lipstadt never accuses Irving of anti-Semitism. She charges him with "Holocaust denial" - an accusation that has also been leveled against some Jews.
ANSWER TO 90. One more proof that Irving is right. Anti-Semitism is a mild pejorative these days. It is running out of steam because of overuse.
"Holocaust Denier" is the Auschwitz club with some potency left in it. It is the preferred weapon of choice these days against all infidels, non-believers and critics of all things or all behavior Jewish. "Holocaust Denier" is a deadly label - for the time being at least. Syria, Iran and now Lebanon have become "Holocaust Denial states." When will Austria, Switzerland and maybe even Germany join? Holocaust Denial states! Amazing!
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91. Guttenplan: "Judeobolshevism"
In 1962 Commentary asked Hugh Trevor-Roper to review Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg's analysis of the Nazi machinery of extermination, Trevor-Roper wrote, carried "a profound social content." The "most surprising revelation," he warned Commentary readers, would also be "the least welcome" - namely, Hilberg's depiction of the extent to which the Nazis relied on the Jews to assist in their own destruction.
ANSWER TO 91. "The Nazis relied on the Jews to assist them in their own destruction"? Here Guttenplan is venturing out onto dangerous ground. Nazi-Zionist collaboration has been the big taboo within the even larger taboo. That man must be crazy or suicidal to tackle this topic - even if he cloaks himself in Hugh Trevor-Roper!
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92. Guttenplan: The magazine, published then as now by the American Jewish Committee, hastened to counter Trevor-Roper's praise with an article by the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, titled "Jewish Resistance to the Nazis." Handlin accused Hilberg of "impiety" and "defaming the dead." In 1968, when Hilberg went to Israel on sabbatical, officials at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, refused to allow him into the archives (a situation anticipated by the response to his book published in Yad Vashem Studies. The review was titled "Historical Research or Slander?").
ANSWER TO 92. Poor Hilberg! So even the Jews in control did not like this book! Sometimes you just can't please anybody. "Impiety" and "defaming the dead"! In Germany, you can get five years for defaming dead Holocaust victims as not having been holocausted! You can defame 89 million living Germans with lies, falsifications, wrong accusations, with a blood libel of genocide against the Jews - but you can end up in jail for saying that these victims died only as a result of war, epidemics, starvation - not as a matter of a deliberate policy.
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Tomorrow: Part VIII