ZGram - 10/31/2003 - Prisoner of Conscience Letter # 31

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 31, 2003, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

When thinking about Revisionism and how to spread the message, my 
favorite saying is that one doesn't have to eat a whole sheep in 
order to know what a cutlet tastes like.  Likewise, one doesn't need 
to know the finest ins and outs about the crass impossibilities of 
"genocidal gassings" in order to dismiss the idiocy of that brazen 
claim in one's own mind for good. 

I remember how it was for me - until 1994 a believer in the 
traditional Holocaust tale, although I must say I never gave it much 
thought.  I sort of believed.  I had been in the midst of an 
unbelievably brutal war, and I assumed, uncritically, that in the 
havoc of that brutal war, it might have happened as described - since 
Jews were widely seen as subversives who undermined the war on 
Germany's side and were perceived as a huge problem for a country 
besieged on every front and struggling for survival. 

Revisionism for me began at an IHR conference.  I watched Ernst 
interview a lady, from Argentina I believe, who simply said when 
asked how she came to be a Holocaust skeptic - and here I quote from 
memory: 

"It's simple common sense.  Why would the Germans have carted all 
those hundreds of thousands of Jewish families from camp to camp at 
great expense and inconvenience to them, wasting expensive fuel, 
while German refugee children froze to death on the road?  If the 
Germans had really wanted to do away with the Jews, a bullet on 
location would have been simpler and cheaper."

I had been a child on the road during that brutal winter of 1944-45 - 
the coldest in a century - and I had seen German children, frozen to 
death, lying in ditches, half-covered with snow. As I watched this 
lady being interviewed, was my first own moment of insight.  Finely 
honed revisionist details, which I learned in time that fit into my 
new perception, only verified what I already knew through simple 
common sense.  Ever since, I feel nausea rising when I hear yet one 
more time of those "gassed people cremated at Auschwitz."  Would the 
frugal Germans, knowing their parents or children frozen to death on 
the road, have wasted their precious fuel on millions and millions of 
dead Jewish bodies?  Nonsense!

In the letter below, written to a "new" Zündel admirer, Ernst 
explains how insight came to him - how common sense simply takes 
over, and how the political landscape is never again quite the same. 

[START]

Dear (name deleted) -

I received your touching letter of 9-17-03.  The process you 
described in your letter about debating my case with your friend, 
Peter, is similar to my own story.  It has similarities to my own 
"conversion" - a kind of parallel to the Biblical Saulus-to-Paulus 
event. 

I understand your reaction fully.  It happened to me in Canada.  When 
I was 20 years old, I used to badmouth Hitler, based on the post-war 
brainwashing we had received as German school children after World 
War II in Allied-controlled/occupied Germany.

I was doing my usual condemnation of Hitler and his regime to Adrien 
Arcand, a French-Canadian journalist and political figure from the 
1930s the day I first met him.  This man, very gently, admonished me 
not to condemn a person before I had carefully ascertained the facts. 
He said:  "You are talking about a man who was chosen in democratic 
elections over and over again by tens of millions of Germans!  Have 
you ever gone to the source of his ideas?  Have you ever read Mein 
Kampf?  You are lucky - you speak German.  You have a duty as an 
honest man to verify the facts for yourself."

I was pulled up short, for I  had never ever actually read anything 
written by Hitler nor listened to any of his speeches except for the 
snippets I saw on anti-Hitler newsreels, TV shows etc.  I was so 
profoundly embarrassed by my own inadequacy that I decided then and 
there never to do that again if at all possible - to let myself be 
swayed by others before I at least had tried to ascertain the facts 
for myself. 

To make a long story short, I went to a Montreal second-hand 
bookstore, bought a used copy of Mein Kampf, read it in three days 
from cover to cover, and was astounded by the difference between what 
the man really thought and wrote and what I had been lied to in 
school and by the media who had falsely depicted his thinking.  I did 
not tremble like you, but I was so shook up that it was the beginning 
of a painful re-evaluation of my thinking, which has been an ongoing 
process to this day. 

It was and is unsettling, because one suddenly realizes that there 
are few black-and-white issues, that there are always lots of shades 
of gray.  

One morning [during my first trial in 1985] I was being 
cross-examined by the prosecutor about why I no longer believed that 
the Holocaust story was true as we were told it in books, films, 
novels etc.  I referred to the alleged "cremation of millions of 
bodies in burning pits" and "crematories" at Auschwitz-Birkenau and 
pointed out that I had believed the story, like everybody else, until 
during a trip to India at the Ganges River, I had seen the big pile 
of wood it took to cremate just one body - never mind millions! 

I explained that there would have had to be mountains of wood or coal 
next to these pits or crematories if the story was true.  I pointed 
out that I had obtained air photos taken of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the 
Allied Air Forces.  No huge mountains of coal were near the 
crematories, or any billowing smoke from any burning pit.

I had brought with me these air photos, which I had enlarged - and 
which the judge did not allow me to show to the jury and did not 
allow into evidence, which was later one of the reasons, by the way, 
why I won my appeal.

I told the prosecutor that I had researched and obtained the patents 
from the patent office of the German firm which supplied these 
crematory ovens.  They [specified] the method of operation, the 
amount of time it took to cremate a body; I multiplied it all - which 
would have meant, if the numbers of "gassing victims" were true as 
claimed, that they would still be cremating bodies in Auschwitz even 
today, which they are clearly not!

[That's] the way it has worked in one way or another with millions of 
people, all of whom used to believe uncritically until something made 
them doubt, research, and then change their minds.  Very few of them 
turned into "Nazis" or "Nazi defenders."  Even I, who has become an 
"understander" of Hitler and many of his policies and ideas, am 
highly critical of some of the things that resulted from the policies 
of that regime - just as I am equally critical of what was done by 
Stalin's regime, Churchill's, Roosevelt's, and even DeGaulle's in 
France after the war. 

To you I can only say it has been an incredible journey!

Would I do it again?  YES, but naturally with hindsight and maturity, 
I might have been less strident, more diplomatic - but that's 
maturity and battle fatigue speaking.  The reality is:  We Germans 
are tired of being kicked around, vilified, [portrayed] as Col. 
Klings and often far worse.  We are people with feelings.   I include 
some info for you, but really, you have to find your own way to the 
truth. 

It will be painful at times, but it will set you free - and tell 
Peter:  Galileo was right, Columbus, too.  The majority is frequently 
wrong.

Ernst Zündel

[END]