For most of my life, I cherished an image of the International Red Cross as a neutral organization, suffused with humanitarian idealism, whose primary function was to bring comfort to victims of war - pick up and give first aid to the wounded on the battle field, help feed the hungry, shelter innocent people displaced by violent conflicts etc. I have vivid images of highly respected, squeaky clean German girls and women dressed in snow white uniforms doing Florence Nightingale type work in the blood and gore of World War II. Medics wearing Red Cross armbands or insignia on their helmets were not supposed to be fired on as they rushed from wounded to wounded even in the heat of battle.
My first introduction to the Red Cross not quite living up to what it was made out to be came in the early 1980s when I did some research in conjunction with a book project I helped write for an M.D. in what later became known as the "tainted blood" AIDS scandal. It shocked me and disturbed me greatly what I learned. According to medically trained insiders, there seemed to be what amounted to trafficking in death - a callous attitude towards life and a cavalier attitude towards safeguarding the blood needed by ailing recipients.
Still later, in the summer of 1995, I happened to sit in on a (to me) absolutely revelatory meeting between some big wig Holocaust opposition leaders - one of them a Rabbi - and Ernst Zundel. There were four men who came, so one of them said cheekily, to "insult you" (meaning Ernst) and who were treated in the basement of his just fire-gutted Zundel-Haus to one of the most spirited lessons on the dangers of keeping up the insane Holocaustomania - "at your own peril", according to Ernst - that I have ever heard. Let me tell you that those four guys were listening with rapt attention to what a hugely animated Mr. Zundel had to say. (Ernst later said: "They knew that their tails were on fire...")
During this meeting the question was raised: "What would it take for you, Mr. Zundel, to rest your case - once and for all?"
There was a long and pregnant pause, and then Ernst said: "Arolsen. Unfettered access by Revisionist scholars to the information that the International Tracing Service via the Red Cross administers and stores at Arolson. If we could have access to the information those documents contain, this Holocaust issue and our differences could be put to rest."
That's when I first heard about "documents at Arolsen."
Shortly afterwards the censorship cyberwar, started by the German government, to shut down the Zundelsite, broke out with its massive, worldwide media coverage, and some of the strange electronic visitors who showed a sudden interest afterwards about the material on the Zundelsite were people from the World Bank and, equally astonishingly, from the Red Cross.
And no wonder. The expertly condensed, explained and indexed excerpted witness transcripts that I had just posted on the Zundelsite prior to the cyber war contained a chapter in Zundel-attorney Barbara Kulaszka's classic, masterfully crafted Holocaust Resource book ("Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988) on Mr. Charles Biedermann, Director of the International Tracing Service at Arolsen and a Red Cross employee from Switzerland.
If you want to know what his testimony contained, just search for "Biedermann" with the help of the Zundelsite search engine. (Click on the word "search" at the bottom of each document and type in "Biedermann").
I believe I did a ZGram or two on the "funny business" Arolsen matter - among them the fact that whatever hides at Arolsen is off limits to Revisionists. When I raised the question as to why that kind of censorship was implemented, I received a letter from one of our most respected pioneer Revisionists who told me that it didn't used to be like that. Before 1979, and before the advent of the intellectual movement we now know as Revisionism with its attendant panic caused in the liars' ranks, there were no restrictions to access to information held at the ITS.
Only after the First International Institute for Historical Review conference in 1979, during which Dr. Faurisson's trail-blazing paper on the Auschwitz gas chambers - interspersed with copies of the original "Leichenkeller" (morgue) and crematory architectual drawings found by Dr. Faurisson in Auschwitz - were read by Ernst Zundel to that gathering of enquiring minds, did the opposition get spooked and censorship clamp down on Revisionists at Arolsen. From then on, only "court historians" with the correct political orientation, specially vetted by the "Information Control Officers" and spin doctors would get access to those miles and miles of data.
This morning I was digging for some documents in our own archives, and what I found, to my amazement and delight, was this letter, written in 1986 by Mr. Biedermann:
What for many of us is personal experience is often for the younger generation, in and outside the International Tracing Service (ITS) only so much history. But the employees of this institution, which was founded in London in 1943, see the effects of that history, every day as they comb the ITS archives.
We have a duty to keep this history alive in order to ensure that now, more than 40 years on, the victims of National Socialist persecution still obtain that to which they are entitled.
The ten member states of the International Commission for the International Tracing Service (IC/ITS) set the framework in which the ITS is to operate and see to it that it is properly adhered to. They thus guarantee that the work continues for the benefit of the former persecutees for whom the ITS was created to serve.
Under the Bonn Agreements of June 1955, between the Western Allies and the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federal Republic assumed responsibility for the finances of the International Tracing Service. In an exchange of notes concerning the matter in which the work of the ITS would be continued, the governments also agreed in June 1955 that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, in view of its neutral, impartial and humanitarian character, would be entrusted with the direction and administration of the ITS.
The International Commission for the International Tracing Service gave the International Tracing Service the mandate of
- assembling
- classifying
- preserving
- and evaluation
personal records on former persecutees of the National Socialist Regime. The following activities result from that mandate:
The ITS provides documentary proof of persecution for civilians who were incarcerated or sent into forced labour under the Third Reich because of their race, religion, ethnic origin, creed or political leanings. This proof is furnished in the form of certificates and excerpts from documents which are the only legal instruments with which claims for compensation or old-age pensions can be substantiated. We still receive 30,000 to 40,000 inquiries each year from about 35 countries. The substantiation is given to the former persecutees themselves, their assigns or the compensation or pension authorities.
The following categories of personal records are used by the International Tracing Service to provide substantiation:
- Documents concerning Germans and non-Germans held in concentration camps, labour camps or prisons
- Documents concerning non-Germans sent into forced labour on the territory of the Third Reich during the Second World War
- Doucments concerning displaced non-Germans who were given assistance by the United Nations relief organizations following the War.
With the extensive archives (comprising a total of 20 separate archive-units) and great variety of documents preserved at the International Tracing Service, a special filing system has had to be developed. Since the registration of people of many different nationalities, which began during the War and went on until the late 40s, was intended for use by people of many different nationalities, an alphabetic/phonetic index of names had to be set up. With this filing system, it is not possible to extract information on single groups of persecutees or according to camps or geographical areas. But it ensures that any and all records which we have on a given person are readily available for consultation and evaluation by our specialists. The International Tracing Service thus represents a very singular archive since, unlike other archives, in addition to assembling, classifying and preserving documents, it also gives special training to its personnel in the evaluation of those documents. In accordance with the Service's mandate, the information is then given only to those directly concerned.
Arolson, Summer 1986
(signed) Ch-Cl Biederman, Director
===
In a separate document, we find the following:
The records of the International Tracing Service contain information on an estimated 13.5 million former persecutees of the National-Socialist Regime.
Since there may be several sources of information on a single person, the index contains 43 million cards.
The International Tracing Service
- in 1986 had
+ 17,118 linear metres of documents (1 metre = appr. 3 feet) = 90,450 metres of microfilm
= 31,300 microfiches
Since 1943, it has
= dispatched 6.5 million reports, for which = 1.6 million individual personal files were opened, to which - should new inquiries be made, additional information be acquired or a tracing request be made - immediate access may be obtained.
At present, with a total of 212.5 permanent posts, 244 persons are employed to carry out the evaluation and classification of the documents. In addition, eight trainees are employed at the International Tracing Service.
====
So what do we have here, I ask?
When I asked Ernst to put it all into perspective, he said dryly:
"The International Tracing Service, as an arm or extension of the International Committee of the Red Cross, is part of the problem, since they actively and brazenly block access to independent historians investigating Holocaust details, which would allow the compiling of camp population claims and statistics and unravel the numbers racket in short order, based on information in Arolsen. As an organization, the ITS is now used to run interference for Holocaust orthodoxy, to keep undesirables out of those archives, and to shore up the Allied government's and German vassals' version of events. Biedermann is delegated by the ICRC to the ITS. Biedermann was flown in by the prosecution during my second trial to shore up the lies and strengthen their case against me.
"Thus the Red Cross with its image of being "neutral", supposedly "not taking sides in political ideological squabbles", has clearly taken the side of the Allied version of events of World War II. Biedermann's carefully phrased and often cagey testimony was a revelation.
"We did manage by persistent cross-examination to wring out of that slippery, cynical, cold-hearted bureaucrat a few historically very telling and important admissions - among them that there was no reference to "death camps" or "extermination camps" in World War II Red Cross documents in his Geneva Headquarters' possession, even though the Red Cross had done periodic inspections of Auschwitz and other German concentration and prisoner-of-war camps.
"Those Allied propaganda terms were only imported into subsequent post-Nuremberg to Red Cross documents after World War II with its emotionally loaded terms. Pre-1945 Red Cross documents are pretty carefully phrased.
"Another important admission was that ***anybody*** ever incarcerated in a German concentration camp was automatically classified by the ITS as a "victim of Nazism" - which meant that child molesters, rapists, serial killers, check forgers, thieves, prostitutes, traitors and saboteurs etc., criminals who had been prosecuted, tried and convicted by duly established and authorized courts, all qualified for the lofty sympathy-evoking title or label as having been poor "persecutees".
"All the perks in post-war Germany accrued to them - higher pensions, preferred treatment when looking for jobs, housing, food etc. The blessings of "victimhood" bestowed by the ITS and thus, by extension, by the Red Cross, have been and continue to be a financial bonanza and political armour of inestimable value for half a century to many common criminals! Even those concentration camp inmates drowned on the quarantine ship Cap Arosa, sunk by the Allies at the end of the war, are listed as "victims of Nazism."
"The gist of the function of the folks at Arolsen has been and still is to serve the Allied cause and to present the Allied version of events, making "victims" out of perpetrators of crimes and political-ideological adversaries, and generally to support the concentration Camp aficionados' agenda, not to be the disinterested and neutral guardian of important historical documents which they pretend to the public - documents that could lead the world to reconciliation through historical facts and truth and put an end to the grotesque cult of death trafficking in human tragedy that our globe has been afflicted with for more than half a century."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day - long but important, squeezed out of a reluctant witness by Christie's cross-examination, as recorded in the Kulaszka book:
"Biedermann had been given clear instructions by the ICRC ***not to establish or draw up statistics***. (Vol. 12-pages 2701-2702) Which shows that the ICRC has ultimate authority of the ITS since it can instruct them - in effect, direct and order them - to do or not to do things. It also means that those people know that statistics based on their information would end the false Holocaust claims.
Biedermann further agreed there were never any indications by the Red Cross from all its reports that gas chambers were being used during the war.
(Vol 12-2624.2624)
Biedermann did not know why the ICRC refused an invitation of the German Red Cross to investigate the Katyn Forest massacre. (Vol. 12-2638)
Biedermann said he was not aware of the ICRC or any delegate ***ever*** testifying before in a criminal proceeding for the prosecution of the publisher of a book. (Vol. 12-2726).
(Addendum supplied by Ernst Zundel in response to my query to put meaning to the ICRC's and the ITS's role generally and Biedermann specifically)
Back to Table of Contents of the March 1999 ZGrams