ZGram - May 23, 2004 - Next time you hear an atrocity story..."

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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

May 23, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The world is learning a long-overdue lesson:  That atrocity stories 
are fabricated primarily for political and monetary gain, to function 
as "false flares", to divert attention from an inconvenient 
revelation,  to deflect guilt onto an innocent bystander - or even to 
cause or to justify wars.  9/11 and the Berg beheading are merely two 
of the more recent examples. 

If you ask the man in the street, he will more or less agree with you 
that when you hear such stories, you can't believe it all and 
something may smell fishy.

However, for most people, despite decades of revisionist work, the 
"gassing of the six million  Jews" is cast not only in cement but in 
granite.  It is astounding to me how people cling to that force-fed 
story for dear life with white knuckles - folks who are otherwise fed 
up to the hilt with the lies and deceptions of our mutual enemies. 
Why is that?  What emotional investment could such people possibly 
have? 

A few days ago, I posed the following question to one of my 
journalist friends who has moved all his life in high-brow 
liberal/libertarian circles:

"On a scale of 1-10,  one being an absolute believer in the Holocaust 
schmalz, and ten being a sterling Faurisson, where would you put the 
[name deleted] crowd?  I have been trying to make friends with a few 
people there, but they all shy away from me.  [Š] I need to break 
into mainstream with Ernst's story in the worst way, but everything 
moves like molasses." 

Here is my friend's reply:

"Probably 5, but unwilling to admit to more than 1. [One of my 
editors] has advised me
that my next piece for him should reflect that I am not "a defender of those
sort of people." He wants me to write something that will establish that I
am not a Nazi.  [Š] These people are very brave and principled, but I'm not
sure you realize the leap it represents for people to accept that WW2
propaganda never stopped."

Such is the power of relentless indoctrination!

Some of my readers will be familiar with the name of Joel Hayward. 
Search the Internet and read up on the name if his personal 
experience interests you.  He is (or I should say was) a "self-hating 
Jew", as his own tribal brethren have vilified him.  In other words, 
he was willing to examine the incongruent  findings that stand askew 
the traditional Holocaust myth.

In very broad strokes, let me just say that Hayward was a New Zealand 
Jew much in the Norman Finkelstein vein, though not nearly as 
outspoken and courageous.  About a decade ago, he did a doctoral 
dissertation on Revisionist sleuthing and found himself soon after in 
the crosshairs of Abe Foxman et al.  The spitballs simply flew!  The 
assault was too much for his psyche, and I understand he has done 
penance since and taken himself to the woodshed, essentially 
renouncing what he believed a decade ago. 

I really don't know more than that about Hayward - other than the 
fact that Ernst served as a resource for a while and thought highly 
of him while he was chiseling away at his dissertation.  Ernst tried 
to help him with document sources and forensic findings, much of 
which is reflected in the summary below - a kind of ABC of the 
revisionist position.

Print it out and give it to your friends if they want to argue the 
"six million gassed Jews" with you because they are stuck on their 
favorite atrocity story like a fly on a fly paper strip:

[START]

How it functions ... a mini-case study by Joel S. A. Hayward in 1993

As "Operation Desert Shield" was gaining momentum in the last months 
of 1990 and the first months of 1991, it was widely reported that the 
Iraqis had carried out appalling atrocities in Kuwait. The worst of 
the individual atrocities, which made headlines around the world, 
involved over three hundred premature babies who died after Iraqi 
soldiers took them from their incubators in order to cart the 
equipment off to Iraq. The Red Crescent Society, the Muslim 
equivalent of the Red Cross, was the first organization to report the 
terrible incident. Several eyewitnesses, including a young, obviously 
distressed Kuwait woman who remained anonymous for reasons of 
security, appeared in dozens of television news items and confirmed 
the verity of the story. Kuwait's embassy in Washington publicly 
condemned Iraq for this act of barbarity, and numerous world leaders, 
including President Bush on several occasions, cited it as evidence 
of Iraq's brutal maltreatment of innocent Kuwaiti civilians. That the 
incident occurred was said to have been proven "beyond doubt".

  Nonetheless, within weeks of the US-led coalition's stunning victory 
over Iraq, it was discovered by ABC journalist that the "incubator 
atrocity" never occurred. Many premature babies had indeed died, but 
not as a result of Iraqi brutality. Basically, they died because the 
nursing staff deserted them and because the maternity hospital itself 
locked the incubators away in storage rooms. Dr. Mohammed Matar, who 
ran the hospital, admitted that the widely-circulated atrocity claims 
were "just for propaganda".  It later turned out that the 
much-publicized "eyewitness" was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador 
to the United States, that she had not even been in Kuwait at the 
time the atrocity was said to have been committed, and that her story 
was entirely concocted.

  This case has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Yet other now 
discredited Gulf War atrocity claims are similar in nature and 
substance, although not in scope, to certain Holocaust claims. For 
example, at the height of the Gulf War The Jewish Press, which 
promotes itself as "the [world's] largest independent Anglo-Jewish 
weekly newspaper", reported that on Saddam Hussein's orders Iraq had 
constructed gas chambers for exterminating all Jews in the Middle 
East. The February 15, 1991 issue carried the headline, in huge 
letters: "IRAQIS HAVE GAS CHAMBERS FOR ALL JEWS".   Similarly, a 
number of newspapers reported that the Iraqis had constructed a 
"death camp in occupied Kuwait", where civilians, including children, 
were being executed en masse.   These claims, although supported by 
seemingly-genuine eyewitness accounts and citations to official 
sources, were later proven to be entirely groundless.

  It would, of course, be extremely irresponsible to conclude from 
these examples of blatant propaganda falsehood that Nazi atrocities 
against Jews must also have been the invention of propaganda. These 
examples are intended only as a useful reminder that during wartime 
truth is often abandoned in favor of propaganda, and that atrocity 
propaganda is still used as a weapon against enemies.

Atrocity propaganda is one of the hallmarks of modern warfare, due 
mostly to the development of the mass media. During the First World 
War the German public was told that staff members of French and 
Belgian hospitals were gouging out the eyes of captured German 
soldiers. The British public was told by their own newspapers, and 
the propaganda ministry set up by Charles Masterman in September 
1914, that babies in Belgium were thrown up and caught on the end of 
German bayonets, that Belgian children had their arms or hands cut 
off, and that the Germans were making soap from human cadavers. After 
the introduction of gas onto the battlefield in 1915, homicidal 
gassings of civilians began to feature in atrocity propaganda. For 
example, in March 1916 the Daily Telegraph reported that the 
Austrians and the Bulgarians had murdered hundreds of thousands of 
Serbians using poison gas. In one case, stated this newspaper, three 
thousand women, children and elderly men were gassed in a church in 
Belgrade. Government sources, documents and seemingly credible 
eyewitness accounts were provided to support these sorts of claims.

  During the Second World War Josef Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of 
Information and Propaganda were not the only propagandists 
disseminating untrue stories of atrocities committed by their 
enemies. The British Government, like those of its allies, was active 
in spreading anti-German and anti-Japanese atrocity propaganda. The 
Political Warfare Executive and the Ministry of Information were two 
of the government agencies involved in disseminating this type of 
misinformation. In his book on Allied diplomacy, for instance, Edward 
Rozek notes that the following memorandum was sent in June 1944 from 
the Ministry of Information to high-level civil servants, leading 
media figures and to the higher British Clergy:

" Sir,

  :I am directed by the Ministry to send you the following circular 
letter: It is often the duty of the good citizens and of the pious 
Christians to turn a blind eye on the peculiarities of those 
associated with us. But the time comes when such peculiarities, while 
still denied in public, must be taken into account when action by us 
is called for.

"We know the methods of rule employed by the Bolshevik dictator in 
Russia itself from, for example, the writing and speeches of the 
Prime Minister himself during the last twenty years. We know how the 
Red Army behaved in Poland in 1920 and in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, 
Galicia and Bessarabia only recently.

"We must, therefore, take into account how the Red Army will 
certainly behave when it overruns Central Europe. Unless precautions 
are taken, the obviously inevitable horrors which will result will 
throw an undue strain on public opinion in this country.

"We cannot reform the Bolsheviks but we can do our best to save them 
- and ourselves - from the consequences of their acts. The 
disclosures of the past quarter of a century will render mere denials 
unconvincing. The only alternative to denial is to distract public 
attention from the whole subject.

"Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity 
propaganda directed against the enemy. Unfortunately the public is no 
longer so susceptible as in the days of the "Corpse Factory" and the 
"Mutilated Belgian Babies" and the "Crucified Canadians." Your 
cooperation is therefore earnestly sought to distract public 
attention from the doings of the Red Army by your wholehearted 
support of various charges against the Germans and Japanese which 
have and which will be put into circulation by the Ministry.

"Your expression of relief in such may convince others. I am, Sir, 
Your obedient servant,

  "(signed) H. HEWETT, ASSISTANT SECRETARY

"The Ministry can enter into no correspondence of any kind with 
regard to this communication which should only be disclosed to 
responsible persons."

  These few words about atrocity propaganda are not intended to cast a 
shadow of doubt upon the nature of the Holocaust. They are intended 
only to illustrate the need for historians to approach all reported 
wartime atrocities - including those by Nazis against Jews - with a 
heightened sense of circumspection. However, throughout this study it 
was noted that many people, including historians, have incautiously 
accepted a number of allegations of brutality or crimes against Jews 
which, in fact, cannot survive the standard tests of historical 
evidence. For example, for almost fifty years it was claimed (and is 
still claimed by many non-specialists) that the skin of murdered Jews 
was tanned by certain Nazis and used to make book covers and lamp 
shades. Physical samples of these human-skin products were even 
produced at the International military tribunal, and eyewitnesses 
came forward to testify that they had seen these atrocities 
occurring. It is now known, however, that the samples produced as 
evidence were made of goat skin and the testimonies of the 
eyewitnesses were fraudulent. It is the same with the allegation that 
Nazis turned Jewish cadavers into soap. Plentiful evidence for the 
soap story was presented at the International Military Tribunal.

Eyewitnesses testified or signed affidavits, providing the 
prosecutors with specific details such as the names of those involved 
in the soap production, the names and locations of factories where 
the soap was made, chemical 'recipes' and so forth. A cake of human 
soap was also produced as evidence. Even Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief 
British prosecutor, stated in his closing address that the bodies of 
the Nazis' victims were "used to make good the wartime shortage of 
soap". Although one or two historians rejected the human soap story 
in the 1980s, it was not until 1990 that historians, following the 
lead of Yehuda Bauer, really began to abandon it. They apparently did 
so because Revisionists were easily disproving such claims.

  A careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence 
pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that even these apparently 
fall into the category of atrocity propaganda. Because of the 
seriousness of this statement it is necessary to make the following 
defence. First, the RSHA monitoring service for foreign broadcasts 
discovered that the BBC and other Allied radio stations were 
broadcasting right across Europe a number of atrocity claims. These 
included allegations that Jews were being exterminated in gas 
chambers. These broadcasts, sent regularly throughout the second half 
of the war, were in a number of languages, including German, Polish 
and Spanish. On July 2, 1944, for example, the BBC broadcast in 
Spanish the claim that 400,000 Jews had been deported from Hungary to 
Germany and killed in gas chambers.  These radio broadcasts would 
have been received by a number of resistance organisations in the 
concentration and labour camps, which, as numerous memoirs by former 
internees attest, had secret radio sets. Although it is difficult to 
gauge the influence these broadcasts had on those who received them 
in the camps, they doubtless contributed to the widespread belief 
that such atrocities were occurring.

  Second, Allied aeroplanes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written 
in German and Polish, over the Auschwitz camps stating that gassings 
were occurring. One source worth quoting, because it describes both 
these pamphlet drops and the Allied radio broadcasts, is the 
affidavit of Charles J. Coward which was submitted to the Nuremberg 
Military Tribunal in 1947. Coward, a Battery Sergeant in the 8th 
Reserve Regimental Royal Artillery, was captured by the Germans in 
May 1940 and placed in a succession of different Stalag camps. In 
December 1943 he was transferred to Auschwitz to work at the I.G. 
Farben industrial c omplex, and was housed in camp E715. The relevant 
section of Coward's affidavit states:

" Even while still at Auschwitz we got radio broadcasts from the 
outside 'speaking about the gassings and burnings at Auschwitz. I 
recall one of those broadcasts was by Anthony Eden himself. Also, 
there were pamphlets dropped in Auschwitz and the surrounding 
territory, one of which I personally read, which related what was 
going on in the camp at Auschwitz... These leaflets were scattered 
all over the countrysideŠ

  Third, the rumor that people were being gassed by the Nazis was 
widespread in certain regions of Europe during the war, and led to 
some people believing in gassings without seeing any evidence for 
them. Others, of course, heard the rumors and believed them for a 
time, only to reject them later. For example, in December 1942 Maria 
van Herwaaden was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau for having sexual 
intercourse with a Polish forced laborer who worked with her on an 
Austrian farm. During the train journey from Vienna to Auschwitz 
Herwaaden was told by a [p. 332] Gypsy woman that they would all be 
gassed on arrival. Shortly after she arrived in Auschwitz Herwaaden 
was taken with other women into a building where their hair, both 
head and pubic, was shaved and their clothes were taken from them. 
They were then moved into a large, cold concrete room without 
windows. They were told they were to have a shower. The women were 
absolutely terrified because they were sure they were about to be 
gassed, as the Gypsy had said. However, to their great relief, only 
water flowed from the shower heads. Herwaaden remained in Auschwitz 
until January 1945, and although she witnessed numerous deaths by 
suicide on the electric fences and thousands of deaths by disease she 
saw no evidence of gassings, shootings or any other types of 
extermination.  There are numerous examples of internees even hearing 
and believing rumors of gassings in camps where gassings are now 
claimed by orthodox scholars not to have taken place.

  Fourth, gas chambers were only one of a number of apparatus 
originally claimed in Allied reports to have been used by Nazis to 
exterminate Jews. As already noted, both during the war and at the 
main Nuremberg trial it was seriously claimed that Jews were also 
killed in steam chambers or by electrocution in mechanically-operated 
vats of water. Even the OSS, the United States' main intelligence 
agency, reported that Jews were steamed to death in Treblinka. It was 
also claimed by the Polish government that Jews were killed in 
chambers by suffocation when the air was extracted by huge pumps. The 
evidence produced at that time in support of these now-discredited 
claims is not qualitatively different from the evidence produced in 
support of the gassing claims.

  Eyewitnesses even came forward to testify or sign affidavits about 
the steamings, electrocutions and suffocations. Their accounts of the 
killing processes were detailed and contained descriptions of the 
machinery and buildings involved. However, despite the simile (sic) 
evidence for these killings, allegations of steamings, electrocutions 
and suffocations have been quietly dropped whilst the gassing claims 
remain. Historians have never explained why they considered the 
evidence for gassings more credible than the evidence for these other 
methods of extermination.

  Fifth, at the International Military Tribunal (and for the next two 
decades or so) it was claimed that the Nazis systematically gassed 
Jews not only in camps in occupied territories but also in camps on 
German soil. At Buchenwald, Dachau and several other German camps 
murder was conducted, said Sir Hartley Shawcross, "like some mass 
production industry in the gas chambers and crematories." 230,000 
persons were said to have died in Dachau alone, many of them in the 
gas chamber. Eyewitnesses testified and signed affidavits about these 
gassings, which they sometimes described in gruesome detail. The gas 
chambers were mentioned in official government reports, were 
inspected and photographed, and Dachau's was even opened up to the 
public. In fact, the evidence provided for the existence of these gas 
chambers is not qualitatively different from the evidence for the gas 
chambers in the camps in Poland now referred to as 'death camps'. 
However, despite the fact that the evidence for gassings in Germany 
is no less credible than the evidence cited for gassings in Poland, 
specialists in the field now state that no systematic exterminations 
in gas chambers occurred on German soil. The claims about gassings in 
Germany were quietly abandoned decades ago. Systematic mass gassings, 
according to accepted opinion, only occurred in six camps in Poland: 
Auschwitz (I and II), Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and 
Treblinka. Historians have never explained why they consider the 
evidence for gassings in the east more credible than for gassings in 
the west.

  Sixth, it is apparent that the descriptions of gassings in the 
eastern death camps given by former internees and SS personnel 
contain many lapses, errors, fabrications and distortions. A number 
of these flaws are major, and seriously diminish the sources' overall 
reliability and credibility. We noted, for example, that the 
so-called 'confession of Kurt Gerstein', is amongst the most widely 
cited sources for gassings at Belzec. Yet Gerstein insisted that "at 
least twenty million persons" had been gassed in the Nazi 
concentration camps, that in Belzec 700-800 persons were gassed at a 
time in rooms the size of an average bedroom, that he saw in Belzec a 
pile of shoes the height of a ten story building, and that he saw in 
Treblinka a pile of clothes the same height. He also insisted that 
"in Auschwitz alone millions of children were murdered by having a 
pad [translated by many scholars as "tampon"] of hydrocyanic acid 
held under their noses". It is the same with Miklos Nyiszli's widely 
cited account of gassings in Birkenau. Aside from the number of other 
errors and fabrications in his account, the fantastic gas chambers he 
described are almost the same length as two New Zealand rugby fields 
end on end. These sources are unfortunately typical of the evidence 
supporting claims of gassings in the eastern camps. They will not 
survive the standard methodological tests of historical evidence.

  Seventh, the scores of original German blueprints and architectural 
plans for the crematory buildings in Auschwitz allegedly housing gas 
chambers contain no evidence that these buildings were ever used for 
homicidal purposes. On the contrary, the specifications revealed in 
the blueprints and plans show that the rooms now designated as gas 
chambers could not possibly have held anywhere near the numbers of 
persons purportedly gassed in them at a time. It would have been 
physically impossible. The blueprints and plans, which also record 
all structural changes made to the buildings, clearly indicate that 
the only ventilation devices in the morgues (the alleged gas 
chambers) were ordinary morgue air ventilators. The rooms had no air 
exhaust devices suitable for gas extraction. They also had no air 
heating or circulation systems, both of which would be necessary for 
gassings with Zyklon-B.

  Eighth, inspections of the physical remains of the crematory 
buildings in Auschwitz and Majdanek (nothing is left at the other 
camps) confirm that the buildings were constructed in accordance with 
the blueprints and architectural plans, and that no additional 
structural changes were made to transform them into gas chambers. 
Moreover, whilst blue staining (indicating the presence of 
iron-cyanide compounds) is clearly visible on the surfaces of the 
delousing chambers, no staining can be detected on the surfaces of 
the alleged gas chambers. Physical samples taken from these rooms by 
specialists (including scientists from the Krakow institute) and 
submitted for chemical analysis also show that the rooms were never 
exposed to significant amounts of cyanide.

  Ninth, whilst the specifications and layouts of the buildings' 
physical remains match identically those shown in the original 
blueprints, descriptions of the gas chambers given in the already 
contradictory and implausible eyewitness accounts resemble neither 
the physical remains nor the buildings shown in the plans. Nyiszli, 
for example, described multiple corpse elevators and 
automatically-opening cremation ovens. Building plans and 
contemporary photographs clearly reveal that these never existed. 
Similarly, in the WRB report of November 1944 the layout of the 
rooms, the layout and number of ovens, and the method of removing 
corpses bear no resemblance either to other eyewitness accounts, to 
the original blueprints, or to the physical remains of the buildings. 
Of course, we now know that the authors of that section of the WRB 
report never actually entered the buildings they described, but 
relied instead on hearsay evidence.

  Tenth, it is not possible even today with our sophisticated and 
technologically-advanced equipment to cremate human cadavers at 
anywhere near the rate claimed in most books on the Holocaust. 
Whereas today an average-sized adult body can be cremated in around 
eighty minutes, in the early 1940s it took two hours or more. Claims 
that corpses were incinerated in ten or twenty minutes (or even less, 
if we are to believe some 'eyewitnesses') are extremely far-fetched, 
to say the least. In order to be sure of his facts on such a grisly 
matter the present writer consulted cremation experts and even took 
the opportunity to observe the cremation of a[n] average-sized male 
body in a modern oven which reached almost 1900°F. He can confirm 
that even after thirty minutes the corpse was well burned but still 
very much intact. Therefore, the claims of historians of the 
Holocaust and former internees that 6,000 or more bodies of gassed 
Jews were cremated each day in the forty-six retorts in Birkenau are 
very irresponsible. The highest claim the present writer is aware of 
is 17,280 per day, which is preposterous.  Including 'down time' no 
more than 250 bodies could have been cremated each day.

  Eleventh, detailed aerial photographs of the entire Auschwitz 
complex taken on random occasions throughout the period in 1944 when 
the gassing process was supposed to be at its height (ten thousand or 
so per day) show no signs that any murderous activities were 
occurring. Despite the claims of many former internees that smoke and 
flame emanated continually from the crematory chimneys, and was 
visible for miles around, not even one of the detailed photographs 
show any flames or smoke. In any event, having studied the blueprints 
of the ovens and chimneys, and having submitted them to an American 
cremation expert for his opinion, the present writer can confirm that 
the Auschwitz crematories, like the crematories in Christchurch and 
all other major cities, could not emit any flames or dense smoke. 
Additionally, and clearly more importantly, none of the photographs 
show any signs of the piles of corpses, large pyres, burial pits, and 
so forth that are claimed to have been in Auschwitz at this time.

  Finally, the gassing claim is irreconcilable with the overwhelming 
weight of evidence on the nature of official Nazi policy on the 
Jewish question. That policy, our careful and unbiased reading of the 
evidence suggested, was not one of total extermination, but was a 
brutal policy of deportation and forced labour.

  This departure from accepted opinion on the gas chambers does not 
represent an ideological defence of one school of historical thought 
on this issue against the other. Nor is it an attempt to rehabilitate 
the Third Reich. The present writer considers the Nazis' brutal and 
destructive treatment of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's 
Witnesses, the physically and mentally ill and other such groups to 
be abhorrent. As a libertarian he also finds repugnant the Nazis' 
assault on freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the 
press, and considers their persecution of political dissenters and 
academic and artistic free-thinkers worthy of the international 
condemnation it was and continues to be met with.

  Moreover, although the weight of evidence supports the view that the 
Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers or have 
an extermination policy as such, it cannot be denied that Jews in 
German hands suffered terribly during the Second World War. Even 
Hitler threatened that "brutal methods could be used, if necessary" 
to force the Jews to the east and to put them to work. "Really, the 
Jews should be grateful to me for wanting nothing more than a bit of 
hard work from them", exclaimed the exasperated Führer after learning 
of an Allied radio broadcast that the Jews were being exterminated. 
To understand what exactly Hitler meant by this understatement 
"wanting nothing more" it is appropriate to return to his comments to 
Horthy in April 1943: "The Jews are just parasites....  If the Jews 
there [in Poland] refused to work, they were shot. Those who could 
not work just wasted away." Gas chambers or no gas chambers, Hitler 
was responsible for the terrible maltreatment of the Jewish people. 
The total number of Jewish deaths is probably impossible to 
determine, as even scholars upholding orthodox opinion agree. Figures 
range from four million to six or more million. No estimate has been 
offered in this thesis, although the total would undoubtedly be more 
than one million and far less than the symbolic figure of six 
million. Random atrocities, pogroms by local inhabitants in occupied 
territories (particularly Latvia and Lithuania), and the actions of 
the murderous Einsatzgruppen claimed the lives of many hundreds of 
thousands. As Himmler himself revealed in his above-[cit]ed speech to 
the naval officers in Weimar on December 16, 1943, thousands of 
innocent Jewish women and children were killed along with the men in 
the occupied Soviet territories as the Einsatzgruppen carried out 
various reprisals and hunted out commissars, partisans, political 
agitators, criminals and other security threats and undesirables. 
Sometimes hundreds of Jews or more at a time were robbed of their 
possessions, lined up in front of ditches, and mowed down by rifle or 
machine-gun fire.  Because of the squalid conditions they were forced 
to live and work in, hundreds of thousands more Jews died of typhus, 
diarrhea and a variety of other diseases. Tens of thousands more died 
during the deportations and of malnutrition and overwork, and routine 
brutality claimed the lives of countless more. These deaths cannot by 
justified.

  But what of the Revisionists? It is worth repeating one point made 
above: some Revisionist books and articles (such as those by Weber, 
Irving and Faurisson) are balanced and authoritative, containing both 
solid research and highly-developed analysis. They contribute 
substantially to the accumulated body of knowledge about the 
Holocaust, and should not be ignored or discounted out-of-hand by 
historians upholding received opinion. The truth-seeking historian 
has nothing to fear from these scholars.

  The present writer recently read in an American newspaper an 
excellent letter from Laird Wilcox, the political commentator 
described in the introduction to this study. Because they seem to sum 
up nicely, albeit slightly more harshly, the points made in this 
thesis it is worth using Wilcox's words to round off this conclusion.

"I think revisionists have an exaggerated faith in their own beliefs 
and arguments, as though if you can disprove Jewish holocaust claims, 
then all the Jews will say, "Son-of-a-gun!   You guys sure caught us 
on that one. I guess all we can do now is march into the sea and 
disappear!"

  This, however, is not to be. Even absent gas chambers and six 
million dead, Adolf Hitler's onslaught against human rights, civil 
liberties, and basic human rationality are only exceeded by the 
Marxist-Leninists. There is still one helluva lot to explain about 
the mistreatment of Jews and others. The Nazi regime was horrible 
even by the most generous standards, and no amount of debunking one 
claim or another can erase the totality of their brutality. Even if 
Jews are removed from the issue entirely, Nazism was brutal beyond 
any justification....

  Extremists and fanatics on both sides have tended to make this 
subject a "no man's land" where most scholars fear to tread. I think 
it's especially important to keep a clear head, to give full 
recognition to the human factors involved, and to be as honest and 
objective as possible. If there are errors in contemporary accounts 
of the holocaust, they should be investigated and brought to light. 
But this is not the same as ameliorating the responsibility of Adolf 
Hitler and his evil regime, and it is not an indictment against the 
Jews should they prove to be wrong about the holocaust in some 
respect or other.

  Now having said all of this, I also believe that Jewish 
organizations have been incredibly heavy-handed and repressive in 
confronting the holocaust revisionist issue. Typically, they revert 
to name-calling and harassment and advocating silencing revisionists. 
What this has done is give revisionists a decided underdog image and 
lend credibility to their charges that Jews are afraid to debate the 
issues because they fear the results. This argument has some merits, 
and one has to really wonder what they have to fear.

  What they have to fear is not that the holocaust will be debunked. I 
think the Jewish community has the resources and personnel to give 
the revisionist movement a serious challenge in a debate situation. 
In terms of the bulk of expert testimony alone the Jewish community 
could snow their opposition. What the Jewish community fears is that 
to allow the holocaust to even be debatable is an admission of 
uncertainty, and that cannot happen. There is probably no issue so 
central to Jewish identity as the holocaust. One can argue whether 
this should or shouldn't be, but it nevertheless is.

  In my view, this inflexibility, and stridency is a mistake. Its like 
putting all your eggs in one basket. Had I been in charge of this 
issue I would have anticipated that someday I might have to say, "OK, 
so maybe our figures aren't etched in stone, and maybe gas chambers 
weren't as prevalent as we thought. So what? It really doesn't change 
anything much, does it? However extensive it was, or wasn't, it was 
still terrible and deserves the universal condemnation of mankind."

  Had they done this, they wouldn't have boxed themselves into a 
corner as they have. What could happen (and I think it will happen) 
is that no amount of repression and name-calling will keep scholars 
from investigating this issue (some might even be attracted by it on 
those grounds alone), and it's probably just a matter of time until 
some mainstream scholar, possibly nearing retirement, will publish 
the revisionist book that will break the dam and then all this effort 
has been for naught.


[END]