(I. plausibility of big picture and motive)

1. The logistics needed to support the official story are stupendous

The number of total victims claimed used to vary wildly. In the 1980′s, a cousin of mine returned from an official tour and proclaimed to us with wild eyes that the number exterminated was actually over 20 million! Usually, however, the number of non-jewish victims is always kept just a little below that of the jewish victims, i.e. 5 million compared to their six. So stick with that for a moment.

As a budding Physicist, I was encouraged from a young age to visualize quantities, not just memorize them. If a dinosaur is said to be 30 feet tall, I look at a building and imagine a head poking in through a third-story window. That makes it vivid. We were also trained to do “order of magnitude” sanity checks of our calculations. One of my students carried out this agenda in a clever way. He supposed that every time a tire rotated, a one- atom- thick radius of rubber was removed by contact with the pavement. He then looked up the inter-atomic spacing of rubber, and calculated how long a tire should last. To order-of-magnitude, the tire life came out to be approximately right. That is the right way to test a model in a preliminary way.

Now, the serious accounts of the holocaust suggest that it took place mainly over a period of about two years — say, mid 1942 to mid-1944. Say there were six “death camps.” Then the average camp had to dispatch about 2 million victims, or 1 million per year. That is 20,000 per week, or 4,000 per day, if weekends or other rest days are allowed for.

4,000 per day, day in, day out, gassed, incinerated, and disposed of, for two years without letup, during the time that a desperate war was being waged, in which the Wehrmacht often had to resort to horses and wagons for its own logistics. Look up how long it takes a crematorium to incinerate one body with a Google search, and continue the calculation.

Perhaps, as Rocco in Godfather 2 said, “difficult; not impossible.” But almost impossible. Maybe impossible. It staggers the imagination in any case.

It was this kind of thought that first made me, with my background, open to the possibility of holocaust research. But it took years before I could work up the courage to actually start doing it.

2. There is more than one big-picture narrative, and these are contradictory

For example:

“No one knew” about the holocaust. That’s why it was rarely or never referred to explicitly by the officials.

On the other hand, “everyone knew” (e.g. the movie Amen.) That’s why the mass destruction of the German cities is justified, and never-ending reparations.

Likewise, at Treblinka, the bodies were dug up and burned, and everything bulldozed over without a trace, to remove all evidence prior to the allied victory.

On the other hand, “exterminations continued to the last day of the war” (e.g. the film We Were So Beloved).

Listen to enough discussions of the story with ears perked up, and such  contradictory covering propositions will quickly be discovered. We know from logic that once contradictions are allowed, anything can be proved.

3. If the Germans had set the goal of systematic extermination, bullets to the back of the head would have been much more efficient and cost-effective

The Judeo-Bolsheviks knew better, when they massacred the Ukrainians. Wouldn’t the Germans have learned from their superiors at the art of mass-murder?

4. The claim of having the goal of genocide — that is, completely eliminating the jew from the world — is not plausible, in that it was known that millions of jews had taken up residence in the US (for example)

Indeed, the Germans regarded the US as effectively a jewish client state.

For years the goal of the National Socialists was to induce the jews to leave, as can be seen in the film We Were So Beloved, for example. They knew many thousands of jews had emigrated to lands of safety, at the behest of the Nazis themselves. It is quite impossible to imagine rational people thinking that they could pull off a global extermination.

There is no evidence, contrary to the bar-room chatter, that Hitler had the goal of “taking over America,” let alone the world. On the contrary, Hitler envisioned a four-power division of hegemony between the Germans, the Japanese, the British, and the Americans. (See, for example, the Teaching Company’s series, World War II: A Military and Social History, conducted by Penn professor Thomas Childers.) The British indignation was not at the thought of someone “taking over the world,” but at having their own position of primacy challenged.

Thus, the idea that Hitler’s goal was to successively mop up all the remaining pockets of jewry, and thus succeed in “genocide,” is simply impossible.

(II. Rules of Evidence)

5. Much of the “evidence” comes from a group which not only had just been in a desperate war with the Germans, but was their ideological enemy.

The pictures of mountains of hair, and mountains of eyeglasses, and so forth, come almost exclusively from the Soviets. The Soviets just ten years earlier had conducted the infamous “show trials” in their own land. The Soviets had perfected the art of cinematographic propaganda in the earlier decades, led by Eisenstein. The Soviets had a visceral hatred of the Nazis exceeding even the Nazis’ hatred of them. The Soviets are now known to have blamed massacres on the Germans that were carried out by themselves — the Katyn Forest massacre, for example. They are known, documented liars.

6. Most of the “evidence” supplied by the Western allies has had to be modified or abandoned in the course of time

In the 1970s, mention of the word “Dachau” elicited the same horrified shudders that “Auschwitz” does today. But when I visited that camp in 1979, imagine my surprise to see that German historians had been permitted by their rulers to place a sign near the “gas chamber” that declared that no one was gassed to death at Dachau.

Likewise, any number of American WW2 veterans involved with the “liberation” of Buchenwald swear up and down that they “saw the evidence of the holocaust” with their own two eyes.  Yes, the conditions were harsh. Yes, many perished there in the cold or due to unjustly harsh treatment — the Reformed pastor Paul Schneider for example. But no one suggests anymore that anyone was gassed to death at Buchenwald. Buchenwald was a punitive labor camp: nothing more, nothing less.

Today, the idea that jews were turned into lampshades has been exploded.

Likewise, the stories about human soap — now abandoned.

Human hair for mattresses — absurd. No mattress stuffed with human hair has been produced. Think about it. If human hair had been seen as a desirable commodity, would not the Germans have first started a program of human-hair recapture from the civilian barbers — where the hair would be clean, not lice-infested, and plentiful, coming from repeat customers? Yet no such program has ever been made public.

By an amazing coincidence, it appears that all of the camps liberated by the Western allies have now been cleared of the charge of being death camps. All the camps still listed as “death camps” were liberated by the Soviets.

7. Even the Soviet accounts have been slowly revised and otherwise rendered suspect

It is now admitted that the main gas chamber at Auschwitz was reconstructed after the fact — “to reflect how it really was,” of course. (See other details about Auschwitz in the three videos that begin here.) The number of victims at Auschwitz has been revised downward by millions, yet the total number is never affected.

8. There is precious little actual eye-witness testimony

Examining the accounts carefully, one often finds the testimony qualified by “I heard that…” or “someone said that…” This is known technically as hearsay.

9. The detailed “eye-witness” testimony is often mutually contradictory

Some of the original “eye-witnesses” claimed the death chambers worked by electrified floors. Some said the floors were designed to open up and dump the bodies into railroad cars underneath that could haul the corpses quickly to their graves.  Others said they worked by evacuating the air. Others said the holocaust occurred by people being thrown alive into burning pits. None of these tales are accepted in the official account any more.

10. The detailed “eye-witness” testimony is often absurd

Adolf Eichmann spoke of blood spurting up out of the burial grounds.

The prison confession of Rudolf Gerstein, whose story is amplified in the movie Amen, is a serious case in point. His details are simply impossible. The pile of clothes would be ten stories high. The body counts would pack more than one victim per cubic foot of space. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Gerstein died in Allied prison under suspicious circumstances before he could be cross-examined.

11. Eye-witness testimony that runs against the official story is always discounted, making the account look like a non-falsifiable dogma

Red-cross reports on camp inspections, for example.

12. Video pictures, absent verbal testimony giving the interpretation, are nearly worthless

We have all seen the footage of bulldozers pushing emaciated bodies into mass graves after the war. But who were the victims? Germans starved to death by the infrastructure destroyed by Allied napalm? Prisoners that died of typhus because the means for dealing with it was similarly destroyed? Without a narrative, including dates, times, and places, raw images are worthless.

At Buchenwald, there is a picture showing a mass of bodies. As time ran out toward the end of the unconditional-surrender destruction of Germany, these corpses could not be buried or cremated in time. It is now known that Buchenwald was not a death camp.

The maker of the Night and Fog documentary admits they were operating with little documentation. See my review for some of the absurdities in that film. Staring at the images in that “documentary” confirmed me as a skeptic. (It can be dangerous taking evidence too seriously.)

13. Doing the “numbers” by census report is unsound

First, jews are reluctant to be counted, even by themselves (see Wex’s explanation for this). Second, a reduction in number obviously does not prove foul play, let alone identify the killer. Third, some census figures I have seen show the jewish population increasing during WW2. This matter needs to be gotten to the bottom of.

14. The general German concession of guilt does not pass the smell test

Nuremburg led to a remorseful owning-up by the Germans. It was neither, “Ja, we did that, but you need to hear our side,” nor, “we didn’t know about it therefore we are not guilty.” There is just stunned, remorseful silence: a peculiar combination of assuming guilt even while incognizant.

For example, the interview of Traudl Junge that frames the movie Downfall shows that she was unaware of the holocaust, though she served as the personal secretary of Hitler. Yet she feels guilty because Sophie Scholl was her age, and Sophie “knew.” But the movie expanding on Sophie Scholl’s life does not put words in her mouth different what any pacifist might say in general terms. What is the chance that Sophie, living in Munich, “knew” while Hitler’s personal secretary did not know?  How does Traudl now “know”? Because the Nuremburg Trial proved it. All the years at Hitler’s side, right up to the end, divulged not a hint of it.

(III. General nature of historical evidence)

15. The evidence for the holocaust is quite different from the evidence for other historical “facts”

Think of the difference between denying the holocaust and denying, say, the existence of George Washington, or denying that the battle of Gettysburg took place.

To do either of the latter examples, one would have to deny the entire continuity of the historical narrative, including finally one’s own existence in a coherent world. But to deny the holocaust, the rest of the narrative of history remains intact.

Suppose someone denied that the Battle of Gettysburg ever happened. But there is the field that can still be visited, with bullets still findable in the soil, and mass grave ditches. There are the official field reports. There are the thousands of soldiers’ memories, that were integrated into the shared experience of the nation and, above all, their families: widows and comrades, that lived next door to others, and whose descendants still live among us. There were the books written later by the generals that were actually there. These all match the newspaper accounts written as the event was happening. At the end of the day, there is no integrated history of the world if there was no Gettysburg: then the whole world might as well be a figment of my imagination.

This comprehensiveness and coherence that would be lost is hardly the case if it turned out there was no holocaust.  The stories of the players and the newspapers are perfectly coherent and comprehensive without a holocaust: indeed, neither the newspapers nor official statements of the time even mention a holocaust in any kind of compelling way.

(IV. Evidence of fraud)

16. Many of the salient elements of the narrative were broached before the corresponding fact could have occurred

The “six million” figure was broached several times, long before it could have been a fact.

My favorite is the reference to “gassings” in the Charlie Chaplin movie The Great Dictator, produced in 1940, and long before the alleged “final solution” proposal at Wannsee. (A correspondent suggests it was a reference to WW1 gas. However, since the Allies also used gas in WW1, it would have been awkward for Chaplin to bring this up in his parody of Hitler.)

17. The Nuremburg trials have many marks of a show-trial

The Soviets were major players as prosecutors and judges, coming off their own show-trials of the previous decade. The American staff was loaded with resentful and vengeful jews. There was very little cross-examination. There is evidence that torture was used and threatened.

18. The number of “holocaust survivors” is huge, and continues to grow

Just a couple months ago, our local rag trotted out another victim of suffering during the Holocaust, who had remained completely silent for sixty-five years!

Before they think about it, people think the vast number of survivors is proof of the holocaust. It is the opposite. It is evidence against.

19. The story has grown, and grown, and grown

Evidently, the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle make scant mention of the Holocaust by any name. The director of the movie Judgment at Nuremburg states that he found that college audiences found his material incredible at the time — the early sixties. The Holocaust only became big business in the seventies. And it continues to grow.

Normally, don’t we expect details of history to be most vivid near the event, and fade with the passage of time?

(V. politicized nature of subject)

20. Revisionists are attacked in a way that is entirely unfair, ad hominem, and even criminal

Robert Faurisson has been beaten up physically, and endlessly reviled in print. Revisionists are routinely accused, without any evidence other than the content of their conclusions, of being neo-Nazis or fascists. Above all, see also #24.

The charge of “anti-semitism” as the only motive that could lead to questioning the story is question-begging. Perhaps the attackers should entertain the converse: could it be that seeing how questioners have been ridden roughshod over is the very thing that pushes some toward “anti-semitism”?

21. Questioning the official story is usually not answered by unassailable facts, but by appeal to the authority of the establishment guild

And this is particularly weak when we realize that the guild is self-perpetuating: dissenters are not allowed in, or are forcibly removed. When discussing the identity of King Tut, we might expect some objectivity from the academic guild, but when discussing a subject for which publishing the wrong answer will lead to losing the royally-rewarded tenure track, academics themselves should be honest enough to recognize their bias. Read the story of Germar Rudolf, and ask how many other academics you have ever met would be willing to sacrifice the cushy academic life for Rudolf’s destiny. Consider this list of people fired, exiled, and persecuted in Switzerland for doubting the story. Shame, and double shame!

Now add to this the threat described in #24. It is hardly surprising that the guild is united around one story.

The appeals to authority are often coupled with a condescending sneer that suggests that only perversity could even raise the question. Compare this to how someone that believed the earth were flat and the sun revolves around it would be answered. Can you imagine how absurd it would be if the only answer ever given to such a person were, “all the university Physicists disagree with you”?

Anyone – including non-Physicists — that can’t rattle off two or three infallible proofs that the earth is round and is rotating on its axis has no right to claim those beliefs.

Anyone that can’t rattle off half a dozen infallible proofs for the holocaust has no right to scoff at the questioner.

22. The manner in which jewish suffering is highlighted, and the suffering of others minimized, smacks of propaganda

The very term “holocaust” is virtually copyrighted. The Armenians are not allowed to refer to the Armenian holocaust. Nor are the Tutsi in Rwanda. Nor, the Cambodians under the Pol Pot. All these people are only allowed to mention their story as a footnote to the One Really Important Story.

23. Likewise, the way in which the noses of the “liberators” are rubbed in the muck smacks of propaganda

Virtually every American city of any size has a holocaust memorial. I thought we were the liberators, that we should be praised. No; we are to feel guilty also.

Finally, the clincher:

24. Almost everywhere in Europe, people that question the holocaust story are thrown in prison

Pacifist artist Ernst Zundel was dragged from his home in Tennessee, shipped to Canada, and then sent to Germany, where he sits in the slammer. Note that the charge of “inciting racial hatred” is identical to the “charge” of denying that the Nazis killed millions of Jews. Note also this chilling statement: “German prosecutors were able to seek his extradition on the ground that a Web site he ran was accessible in Germany.” What site is not accessible in Germany?  By this criterion, no one is safe that publishes such material on the web.

David Irving — thrown into the slammer in Austria for denying the holocaust – in a speech he had made seventeen years before!

Gerd Honsik  — extradited from Spain and thrown into the slammer in Austria – for holocaust denial

Gaston-Armand Amaudruz — Swiss citizen, thrown in prison – for holocaust denial

Fredrick Toben –  sentenced for publishing “anti-Semitic material” – which are detailed as (1) suggesting the Holocaust did not happen, (2) questioning whether there were gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, and (3) hurting some jews’ feelings by challenging their intelligence.

Some of these have already been freed. On the other hand, the list is not complete.

Not since the Gulag Archipelago was in full swing has the expression of heretical opinion been treated this way. Does anyone suggest throwing flat-earthers in prison, or Gettysburg-deniers? This shows that the holocaust is functioning as a state religion — in an age that pretends horror at religious persecution.

What academic wants to be thrown in prison, or (if he is American) put in a position of not daring to step foot into Canada or Europe?

What young academic wants to jeopardize his chance for the life-long gravy-train known as tenure?

What academic, tenured or not, wants to face a national campaign by ADL terrorists to have him removed from office and rendered unemployable?

Academics today is all about “getting funding.” What is amusing is that in the very era, our own, when every historian is keenly tuned in to the “material factors” that might have “influenced” the Nicean Council, or even a Luther, seem totally oblivious to the material factors that are patently and undeniably steering their own work!

The “academic consensus” in any matter that is so politically and (above all) financially charged as this subject is, has no value whatsoever. It is unfortunate, but true.

When people are thrown in prison for expressing a belief, it is virtual proof that something is going on with the power-holders other than commitment to truth.

Conclusion

These considerations do not prove that the holocaust story is false, but the consideration I have outlined do prove that investigating it is not a sign of insanity or bad faith. On the contrary, the mockers and persecutors of revisionists must answer the charge of bad faith, if not outright dishonesty.

The landscape has changed for me, and I think the landscape will be changed for anyone that takes a couple years, part time, to look into these matters.  For me, the burden of proof has decisively swung to the side of the received story.

Because people groups have allegedly evolved separately, they are at different stages of evolution, and some people groups are less evolved. Thus, the other person may not be as fully human as you. This sort of thinking inspired Hitler in his quest to eliminate Jews and Gypsies and to establish the “master race.” Sadly, some Christians have been infected with racist thinking through the efforts on our culture of evolutionary indoctrination, that people of a different “color” are inferior because they are supposedly closer to the animals. (p. 78f.)

And, in case you missed it the first time,

Evolutionists like Hitler treated the Jews, Gypsies, and other groups as inferior, and therefore argued that they needed to be eliminated. (p. 166)

It is unfortunately necessary again to question Ham’s honesty. In the current sputtering shibboleths about Nazis, you are supposed to mention the persecution of homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses as well. Why does Ham “forget” to mention those groups? Why only Gypsies and Jews? Obviously, because Sodomites are not a racial group, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not a racial group. (Perhaps it is also because his rhetoric would then find less sympathetic reception amongst his white conservative audience?) But this should have cued him in that his premises might be wrong. He needs a theory to account for the persecution of all the groups that were persecuted.

The “closer to the animals” argument is dubious as stated. Presumably, Ham believes that cattle are “inferior” to humans; yet this has not led him to desire that all the cattle of the earth should be wiped out. Of course we slaughter cattle, but this is different than “eliminating.” The history of man is full of mutual slaughter, and not necessarily based on a theory of inferiority. Indeed, probably it hardly ever is tied to a theory of inferiority.

Moreover, one can believe that some races are inferior to others based on any number of criteria having nothing to do with evolution, nor does such a belief need to entail hatred or a desire for genocide. One could believe that one’s mortal enemies were superior, and therefore had to be eliminated — kill or be killed as they say.

Note further that the desire for racial separation does not necessarily imply a sense of racial superiority, any more than separating the squabbling children is. Think: let it be that the Aryan is inferior to the other races. Fine: now can we have our own country? Indeed, if there is any legitimacy to desiring to see one’s tribe continue qua tribe into the future, then the desire for separation would only become stronger when said tribe is mingled with a superior and dominating rival tribe.

We can summarize the fallacious forms of Ham’s logic thusly:

• Belief in racial inferiority does not imply justification for genocide
• Belief in racial inferiority does not imply belief in evolution
• Desire for racial separation does not imply belief in racial inferiority
• Desire for racial separation does not imply belief in evolution

The Hamites have not thought this matter through carefully because, I suspect, their minds have been addled by the Nazi meme, which our rulers have deeply implanted in the minds of our people. Corrupted by our rulers’ meme, the Hamites in turn plant their own. The meme-planting intent of this passage is clear: if you want to live where you can raise your children far away from Negroes, then you are equivalent to a Nazi, acting like Hitler.

Whenever the H-card is played, one should unpack carefully. Why is the deliberate Judeo-bolshevik slaughter of millions of Ukrainians prior to the ascendancy of H never mentioned? That was surely racial hatred, but not necessarily based on evolution. On the other hand, there are several ways that Ham on Hitler re race is wrong, reflecting the analysis above:

1. H’s alleged belief in the primacy of the German and the relative inferiority of the Slav, Hun, and Mediterranean did not stop him from making friendly alliances with Croatia, Hungary, and Italy (not to mention Romania) against their common enemy, the Bolsheviks; and those allied nations fought valiantly at the side of the Germans.  (Slovakia too was on friendly terms, and had something equivalent to an SA of their own.)  Many Russian soldiers after capture volunteered to fight with the Germans against their communist rulers. (Roosevelt/Truman obeyed Stalin’s order to hand them over to the USSR after the war for execution — but I digress.)

2. If he had heard that the Slavs regarded their race as superior, I suspect H would have taken that with bemused humor. He would not have cared if you did not agree that the Aryan was superior. Indeed, he would probably respect you more if you held a similar view of your own race. Think of C. S. Lewis’ friends observing that the men of every nation believe their own women the most beautiful, when one of the old ones murmured “yes… but in our case, it is true.”

(Interesting trivia: H thought of the Japanese as the “Aryans of the Orient.”)

3. Nor was his desire to expel jews from Germany necessarily based on a belief that jews were inferior or sub-human in the sense that Ham implies. It was based on his conviction that jews were deleterious in their effect on the German people; and whether that pernicious effect was due to their being superior or inferior would be irrelevant to that conclusion, unless it should be that jewish superiority made separation even more urgent.

4. Why were other groups put in concentration camps, such as Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Sodomites? I cannot produce quotes, but it does not require much imagination to find a common denominator to make sense of such a policy: all of these groups are resistant to bonding tribally: they thus needed to be quarantined during the national emergency. All of this would make for an interesting discussion in its own right, but too much of a digression just here. The point is, that Ham’s pulling of the H-card is confused and probably exploitative of current political shibboleths; it cannot be marshaled to his thesis about evolution, or even race.

If quarantining a group believed to be potentially dangerous during a national emergency is so bad, why don’t the Hamites harp on the American segregating of Japanese-Americans during WW2 — which was unambiguously race-based. Why does poor old H always have to take the heat on this one? The answer is, that the American action was very clearly not related to a belief in evolution. It was based on the question of ethnic loyalty. The action may have been just or unjust — that would be the subject for a different essay. But it would reveal a nest of debatable issues that belie the Hamites’ charge of evolution, and place the discussion in a completely different framework.

5. We have made the point before, but it bears repeating in this new application: Hitler’s view that the Aryan needed to be preserved and separated from the Jew is a position that one could hold with or without evolution. The logic is simply absent when people make this assertion.

6. Doubtless, Hitler had a dynamic view of history, such that energetic peoples would tend to expand and sluggish ones contract.  Any pointy-headed academic might entertain such a hypothesis about history. No doubt, H desired his own people to be one of the energetic ones, not one of the sluggish ones. Given the hypothesis, that is certainly a rational view to have. It is compatible with either evolution or anti-evolution.

If it turns out that H believed in evolution in point of fact, would that prove Ham’s thesis? No it would not. It is the logical entailment that is wrong with Ham’s analysis.

People need to work up the courage to study that period in our people’s history; or perhaps just a study of critical thinking will suffice. After they do, cheap rhetorical tricks such as are sprinkled through this book will be enough by themselves to strip credibility from such authors. The Hitler treated by the Hamites is actually just a cartoon character created by Hollywood. That is why I say “the Hitler” in the title of this post. It is a stock character, to be dragged out on demand from the back-stage closet, like “the Mummy,” or “the Vampire.”

Now perhaps the Hamites will answer this analysis along these lines: even granting that the desire for racial separation is not logically dependent on a view of inferiors and superiors, and even if such a desire is possible with or without evolution — yet the escalation from separation to extermination (i.e. the “holocaust”) would only be possible on a view of superiority derived from evolution. Now leaving aside the fact that the “holocaust” story itself, as we have begun to document, seems to be patched together with even more baseless assertions and distortions than the Hamites can make in one short book, consider the logic of this move even granting the premise. First, such a view would be a misunderstanding of Darwinism. Darwinism speaks of the fittest surviving, not the “superior” as conceived of along logical, ethical, or teleological grounds. In other words, a Hitler that wished to exterminate a rival gang would not need to deduce a “right” to do so from some axiology of worth: the desire itself would be its own vindication or (upon loss) rebuttal. It is a misunderstanding to think that Darwinism permits a calculation of ethical right, or even a pragmatic right. The fittest survive, because those that survive are the fittest by definition. It has nothing to do with an apriori. Second, such a desire could be produced by other non-Christian worldviews with or without Darwinism being part of the package. One could believe, for example, that one’s own tribal god has created one’s tribe, or set it apart, and so ordained. In that case, Hitler’s view would be formally analogous to the ancient Hebrews’s genocide of the Canaanites, if it were the case that Jehovah were simply a tribal invention and not the true God. Again, such an attitude need not involve either a view of superiority or evolution. Finally, the last resort of the Hamite will probably be to say, that the execution of a genocide requires the cooperation of many persons, whose scruples would have to be overcome by some means or other. But if their scruples are based on Christian convictions, how would this be overcome by Hitler asserting Darwinism? The overcoming of scruples would need to take place by defeating Christian convictions by hook or by crook, and (a) this need not take place via Darwinism, and (b) the cynical Hitler-figure would not need himself to believe whatever subterfuge would be used to overcome the others’ scruples. And again (not to sound like a broken record), the agenda could just as well be pushed on the view of the right and exigencies of tribal survival as on the view of tribal inferiority or superiority.

One gets the feeling that Ham never tests his premises by the free variation of imagination. After a while, one starts to wonder if he is just cliché-monger, not a thinker at all. But if Ham merely passes along the usual “white lies” about Nazis, we cannot let the “Editor-in-chief” Jim Fletcher in his forward to the book off the hook so easily. Of that little piece of work, we must borrow the words of Mary McCarthy spoken originally about Lillian Hellman: Every word in it is a lie, including “and” and “the.” Consider just this one whopper:

Even the Japanese in World War II, to justify that nation’s expansionist aggression, had been told that they were the most “highly evolved” race on earth. After all, Europeans, with their longer arms and hairier chests, were clearly still closer to the ape, weren’t they? (p.13)

I seriously doubt that he can back up his quote with a published citation: I am calling your bluff, “Mr. Fletcher.” But perhaps he will find some Japanese somewhere that said that. Perhaps some over-heated rhetoric on either side may be excused on the mitigating circumstance of the heat of battle — on the level of the playground pugilist’s “your mother wears army boots.”

However, even the slightest acquaintance with the facts belies this assertion as a fair statement of the case: the expansion of Japan was into the territory of fellow Orientals, and they were allied with that nation, Germany, which is arch-European! Even the attack on “European” America was reluctantly undertaken due to the deliberate provocation of the Roosevelt administration, as “Mr. Fletcher” would have known if he had read even ten pages of history before getting up on his soap box.

Again, if he feels the need to take a cheap shot, why not pick on “us” rather than “them”? After the US government had goaded and tricked the Japanese into a war they did not desire, consider how “the Allies” treated them racially. Military commentator Fletcher Pratt “declared that the Japanese ‘can neither make good airplanes nor fly them well.’” (T. Fleming, The New Dealers’ War, p. 44) After Pearl Harbor, “an agitated General Douglas Macarthur swore they must have acquired Germans or some other white mercenaries to fly their planes.” (pp. 44-45)  “After the bombs fell, the paper’s cartoonist, Theodore Giesel, future beloved children’s book writer Dr. Seuss, drew a picture of a long column of slanty-eyed Japanese lining up to collect TNT at a house labeled ‘Honorable Fifth Column.’” (p. 110) “Pearl Buck risked her status as a best-selling author … in her 1943 novel, The Promise, about the British and Chinese fighting the Japanese in Burma. She depicted the British as infected with all but incurable racist attitudes, which led them to see Asians as subhuman, even when they were allies.” (p. 379) “In an official government film, Action at Anguar, issued in the spring of 1945 to support the seventh war-bond drive, footage showed Japanese soldiers being burned alive by flamethrowers while the narrator said: “By this time we had shot, blasted or cooked six hundred of the little apes.’” (p. 540)

A Christian should be doubly careful to be fair and just in his treatment of his enemies, knowing the proneness of human nature to self-deception. One feels cheap having to correct Ham and his colleagues on these matters: like having to prove that there were 10 cookies in the jar in the presence of the little liar that obviously stole one. The situation has gone beyond the passing on of falsehoods that are part of the received tradition taught in government schools. One can forgive someone that has not been corrected, for passing on the false idea that Lincoln waged the “Civil War” to end slavery. But here, we are dealing with a situation that has gone beyond that: people think they can actually make up any slander out of thin air and pass it on with impunity when dealing with Nazis.

Schlissel thinks one can lie when dealing with a Nazi: it is but a short step, and one which most published Americans evidently have taken, to think one can tell any lie about the Nazis. Ham et al. undoubtedly think that if these baseless assertions about Nazis turn out to be false, they are just little “white lies,” well justified by the circumstance. But John Murray showed convincingly that even inadvertent passing along of falsehoods involves one in sin: for God is Truth. This is a very serious matter. If people claiming to be Christians continue to do it after being corrected, the credibility of their profession will eventually need to be questioned.

The core group interviewed consists of childhood buddies Walter Hess, now a fellow film-maker, Louis Kampf, now an activist and MIT professor, and Max Frankel, now in charge of the editorial page at the NY Times; relatives – notably his father Bert and Aunt Annie; and others in concentric rings of closeness – the rabbi’s widow Sary Lieber, Mrs. Krakow from down the hall, Walter’s mother Mrs. Moletta Hess, and the imperious Ilse Marcus. Editor Hans Steinitz and Yonkers housewife Edith Eisenmann fill out the cast.

(* Throughout, I use the present-tense “now” from the perspective of the film – I have not tracked these people down to the real present. In parentheses are the approximate time into the film, in hours:minutes.)

Most of these jews regarded themselves as Germans, and draw a sharp us-them distinction between themselves and jews from Poland or Russia. They claim to be descended from jews that followed the Roman legions up the Rhine, and stayed. There are signs of Aryan admixture: the rabbi’s widow has blue eyes, and several of them lack the characteristic “jewish whine” in their tone of voice. The claim that they thought of themselves as “Germans of a different religion” has surface (though deceptive) plausibility. Indeed Kampf’s father would have joined Hitler’s army (1:57) and Frankel confesses he would have marched with the Hitler Youth if only they would have had him (35, 2:03).

Not only did they think of themselves as Germans, they believed they were so regarded. The title comes from Bert Kirchheimer’s remark that the Germans felt bad about the new regime “because we were so beloved.” Mrs. Hess continues to correspond with her German friends from back home right up to the present (1:46) (as does Mrs. Krakow also [1:57]) and blames the problems that did occur not on something Germanic but on “the human.”

The German jews looked down their noses at the Polish jews, who, they claim, were tricky in business, dishonest, and they cheated — “not like us.” In 1938 the Polish jews in Germany began to be sent back, getting dumped in fields in Poland. Mrs. Lieber says that the attitude of the German jews was to “let them go back” (31). Frankel’s family was “first generation German” and was sent back. They walked back to Germany — so desperate were jews to get to and stay in Germany then — but were threatened with concentration camp if they came back again. (Later his mother with classic chutzpah stormed into the Gestapo office and demanded, and got, exit visas to America.) Kampf adds that the German jews blamed Polish jews for Nazi hostility toward jews, and on the ship to America there was a virtual ongoing war between the German jews and “Ostjuden” (34).

Thus, when Hitler started to make noises, many assumed it was a transient difficulty that would soon fix itself. Yet they did start to move out, and “by 1950″ – an odd year to anchor the statistic on, as if the emigration continued blithely along during and after the war – “more than 20,000 jews had settled in Washington Heights, setting up thirteen synagogues.”

The theme of ethnic and even infra-ethnic resentments is explored. Frankel admits that in New York, he was reviled even by other jews who had been there twenty years longer. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” they asked (1:09). Frankel wonders if the “hysterical, grieving, deep pessimism” of earlier waves of East European jewry is due to their peasant stock, or perhaps something more deeply cultural in the Russian soul (1:11). Some of the jews in the film tut-tut the arrogance of new immigrants, including Russian jews, while others defend them.

A basic leftist orientation is presumed with these jews. A simplistic “Nazis=capitalists,” “good people=socialists” is taken for granted. Hitler “used the concentration camps to destroy the socialist, communist and trade union opposition, which had the support of the majority.” (49) Uh… right.

Interesting facts come to light to prove that Hitler’s intent was not the genocide of jews, but their removal from Germany.
•    Jewish men could “buy” their freedom from concentration camps for the pledge to leave Germany (40)
•    In 1936 jews could leave with all their money, while Germans could only take 10 Reichsmark with them if they left (29). (Later, the restriction to 10 was evidently extended to jews as well.)
•    Mr. Hess (already deceased at the time of the documentary) spent time in Dachau, after which he took the family on a cruise ship vacation, riding first class (51).
•    As mentioned above, the Polish jews that had emigrated to Germany were “dumped” into Poland, and were often desperate to get back into Germany.

The strident Mrs. Marcuse (1:40) shares the view of the narrator (1:44) that Germany deserved to be bombed into rubble. The indignities that justify that conclusion are sprinkled throughout the film and I list them here:

1. 1936 Nuremberg law said they could not call themselves German any more
2. kosher slaughter was banned (21)
3. stores were boycotted
4. German nurses could not work on jewish men
5. some of Walter’s classmates threw dirt clods at him
6. Frau Schumacher at one point stopped inviting Walter to the annual Easter-egg hunt (59)
7. in general, the Germans made Walter hate himself (58)
8. the Germans threw the jews out of a pool in Mannheim, and as a result, one of the girls was afraid to swim for the rest of her life (24)
9. Mrs. Eisenmann says, for punishment for misbehavior in one of the camps, women’s heads were shaved funny
10. Mr. Hess at one point was made to enter his place of work through the rear door (28)
11. in one camp, Mrs. Marcuse had to use a pail as latrine (1:19)
12. in another camp, underground editor Steinitz had to use a typewriter with a broken A-key (1:18)

I will limit my commentary on this list to just the first four items. (1) Not being able to call oneself “German” is a reasonable thing applied to a tribe that refuses to assimilate, that is, a tribe that is in fact not German as to tribal identity. (2) Kosher slaughter should in fact be banned from any civilized country, and those that continue to perform it should be exiled or executed. This is deliberate cruelty to animals that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up: more will need to be said about this in the future. (3) As I showed elsewhere, boycotting minority-owned stores is actually entirely reasonable if in effect that minority is boycotting the stores of the majority — whether they are doing so as intentional program or by natural ethnic loyalty. (4) is just common sense.

Finally, I mark those items in the film that can serve as evidence that can be gleaned on the question of the “holocaust.”

1. A couple of the interviewees mention how many of their “family” were lost to the holocaust. Mrs. Krakow “lost more than twenty.” (Exactly how many; can we get some names and places?) Bert Kirchheimer says, “they always told me 46 people from my family were murdered… Of course, I counted them, a long time ago” (11). There is something a bit flippant about this statement. “They” always told him. He counted, but a long time ago – don’t ask for specific details now. Above all, if 46 people can be identified as “my family,” then “family” is a very extended family indeed. (Extend the concept sufficiently, and most Germans can probably say they “lost 46 people” in the war, too.) Names and dates and places, please.

2. Steinitz admits that the German camps were not extermination camps (1:17). This is a relief to hear: many Americans are still unaware of this fact due to the post-war propaganda. It is an amazing coincidence that all the “death camps” turn out to have been in regions “liberated” by the Red Army.

3. The narrator makes the preposterous statement, “Exterminations were carried on up to the last day [of the war]” (1:37). Meanwhile, the real Germans in Auschwitz were nursing Elie Wiesel back to health, and asking him if he wanted to be left behind to be rescued by the arriving liberators, the Red Army. Wiesel opted to return to Germany with his captors.

4. The grating Mrs. Marcuse reviles a young soldier that did not know of the existence of the nearby concentration camp – by which she must have meant “death camp.” She says “he should have been killed.” (1:43) Of course the liberating soldier would have known about the camps as such. Apparently, he had not yet discovered that they were actually death camps. Any eye-witness that does not support the story should be killed, Mrs. Marcuse evidently thinks.

5. In general, we still don’t get the names of individuals executed at named dates and places. The closest we get is Edith Eisenmann who claims to have found a letter indicating that her father was told that mother had been sent to a gas chamber. (1:39). But this is still hearsay three-times removed.

Twice, something rather odd is said in reference to gas chambers:

6. Mrs. Marcuse says that the SS women threatened that saboteurs would be “sent to the gas chambers” if it happened again (1:34). It did happen again, but instead of being sent there, the girls responsible were executed in the sight of their shifts to make an example. So, was “send to the gas chambers” a vacuous threat, like Scarlet threatening Prissy to “sell her south”? or is Mrs. Marcuse filling out the drama based on what she heard later?

7. Similarly, consider the statements by Mrs. Eisenmann that when her family arrived at Auschwitz, she was directed to the one side, the others to the other side. (But her father was a baker, presumably a healthy man in the prime of life. Why would he be rejected for work and a young girl kept?) Later, people in the camp said “see that? that’s the gas chamber” and most odd of all, consider this: “they told us when the gas was turned on” (1:29).

Apparently Mrs. Eisenmann heard the stories later about “gas chambers,” and she assumed that they would work like the gas oven in her kitchen. No one ever told her, or it did not sink in, that the “gas chamber” was supposed to work by Zyklon-B tablets being dropped through a slot in the roof; not by “the gas being turned on”!

The film could have had a half-hour edited out without loss, but nevertheless I recommend a couple viewings (HIx 2). It opens up new vistas on the German situation in the 1930s and the intra-tribal hostilities within jewry. Especially, it drives home unmistakably what the real German goal vis-à-vis jews was in the 30′s and it clearly was not extermination. Finally, several odd statements give further matter to ponder regarding the “holocaust” question.

An outline follows with a few minute-markers to help navigate.

1. The term holocaust itself (refers to this article) 0 – 15

2. The phrase, “the most documented event in human history”

Does it follow it is the most certain event?     19

The nature of documentation as human 28

Question of reliability    41

remembrances
Soviet army
Nuremburg testimony
camp rumors
financial incentives    49
some is fraudulent    52

What does claim “most documented” even mean?    1:09

What is an “historical event”?

If any Jews had been murdered, Rassinier said, it was the Jewish kapos in the camps who had killed them. The book was widely denounced in France. Later Rassinier sued a newspaper editor for having called him a fascist; he was, he insisted, an anarchist. But the Paris court ruled against Rassinier on the ground that his book expressed ideas “identical with those proclaimed by the neo-Nazis.” (Commentary, vol 70 #6, Dec 1980, p. 33)

Rassinier believes P;  neo-Nazis believe P; neo-Nazis are fascists; therefore, Rassinier is a fascist. So much for the favorable stereotype of the French as guardians and preservers of logic.

More recently, even my friend the affable, witty British Presbyterian Carl Trueman ominously suggests that Rassinier is “very popular among skinheads, Klan freaks, the British National Party and characters like David Irving. ” While he doesn’t exactly use the N-word, his more charitable assessment that

[Rushdoony] was historically incompetent, probably racist and, if he thought this kind of writing was intelligent scholarship, probably unhinged

amounts to much the same thing.

I.

Reflect with me first on the logic contained in the premise:

if (holocaust denier) then (Nazi or neo-Nazi)

on the assumption that it is true.

Ask yourself: which is worse, to favor the Nazis, believing they perpetrated the Holocaust, or to favor the Nazis, believing they did not?

That question remains, no matter what content you fill in for the name, “Nazism.” But now, ponder the actual content: Absent the Holocaust, what is National Socialism (=Nazism)?

Answer: it is a political program of national economic renewal, labor reform, public works projects, manipulation of business, national subsidies, and preparation for and willingness to wage war. In other words, allowing for all differences of place and circumstance, it is basically the continental version of Roosevelt’s New Deal .

Holocaust-free Nazism = American New Deal.

So if holocaust-deniers are holocaustless Nazis, why don’t conservatives scream at holocaust-deniers, “da#ned New Dealer”?

And why don’t liberals embrace them as the shock troops for New Deal liberalism?

(Oddly enough, Nazism is usually painted as extreme conservatism, even by analogy with American politics where conservatism has strong overlap with Libertarianism.)

Since Nazism absent the holocaust is, roughly speaking, F. D. Rooseveltism, I can see why someone might say, “you must be crazy” (to not believe in the holocaust). But why wouldn’t they regard it as a benign, benevolent craziness? Like the crazy uncle that has lost his mind, but at least continues to praise Roosevelt? Or, from the other side, “he praises Roosevelt because he’s crazy.”

II.

The comeback will probably have something to do with “anti-semitism.” The idea will be that even if it were granted that there was no holocaust, no planned extermination, yet undeniably, many Nazis were mean to jews, and the Party wanted them out of Germany, and eventually forced them out.

Deborah Lipstadt says, quite bluntly, “Holocaust denial is naught but a form of antisemitism.”

(Couldn’t it be a form of pro-Germanism? Why must it have something to do with an attitude toward Semites at all? But I digress.)

Unless it could be shown that this view is essential to Nazism — that the Nazi program could not exist without this aspect — then wouldn’t charity at least require asking the holocaust-denier-and-therefore-neo-Nazi whether he approves or disapproves of the ejection of jews from Germany? Should he not at least have the right to say, “no, I disapprove of that aspect of 1930′s Nazism”?

Moreover, it must be admitted that the number of people that would be sympathetic to ejecting jews, but stopping short of a holocaust, is greater than the number that would favor the extermination program. Obviously. Many cities and countries have “thrown the jews out” at one time or another, including Spain, France, England, and numerous cities such as Mainz, Frankfurt, Moscow, and various of the Italian city-states. Unless one thinks that jews have a right to live wherever they want, or that a country is better off having jews than not, why is a desire to “send the jews home” simply unthinkable?

My point here is not to argue the point, but simply to point out that the teeth of the “if holocaust denier then Nazi” rhetoric depends on the holocaust-aspect of the picture of Nazism to have its full effect; and just that is the thing that is contradictory to hold someone to if he denies it.

III.

Perhaps the rhetoric can be rescued along a different line. Suppose that holocaust denial is not taken to be an actual belief, but rather a deliberate lie.

For example, the Jewish Virtual Library states, “the Institute for Historical Review, or IHR, publishes many small pamphlets designed to misinform people about the Holocaust.” Note that the claim is, not merely that the material is false, but that it is “designed to misinform.” The Jewish Virtual Library knows this.

Tying this approach back to our test proposition, the position is something like this:

(1) Since the evidence for the Holocaust is overwhelming, one could not fail but to conclude that it took place; therefore, anyone denying it is lying.

We would still need the additional premise,

(2) Anyone that would lie about this is a Nazi.

(2) seems dubious indeed. The converse might have a bit more plausibility, namely: All Nazis would lie about it. They hope to rope people into the “movement” and only plan to spring the anti-Semitism bit on them later. But how silly is that? Work for years spreading New Deal Rooseveltism, knowing that the Party Members will go along with the “anti-semitic” hidden agenda once they are roped in?

At any rate, (2) is not the converse of itself. (2) says that “all liars about the holocaust are Nazis.” And this is implausible. There might be lots of reasons that would motivate one to lie: to draw attention to oneself, to gain a reputation as someone that does not follow the herd, etc.

Even so, what about (1)?

(1) contains an ambiguity that needs to be resolved. If the evidence is overwhelming, this is something that is known only to specialists. We should charitably assume that Carl Trueman has done the primary research. But clearly, most people believe in the Holocaust on the weight of authority, not on the basis of examination of evidence. Such has been the case for me, for most of my life, for example; is true of all the people I have ever discussed it with; and I suspect is true for most people. More or less, most people believe in the Holocaust for the same reason they believe that the earth revolves around the sun: because they have always been told so, and the experts seems to agree.

Thus, affirming the Holocaust is, for most people, not related to any particular stance toward evidence. At most, one could say it relates to one’s stance toward authority. Rejecting authority might be a sin in some cases, but it is not the same as the sin of lying. And it is rather odd to associate “rejecting authority” with Nazism.

——————-

[Note: I use the term "Nazi" throughout to conform to popular usage. However, it is actually just as silly constantly to say "Nazi" for National Socialist as it would be constantly to say "commie" for Communist. Next time you read a narrative about WW2, about the Nazi government, the Nazi army, Nazi policy, etc. substitute the word "commie" while pretending it is about the Soviet Union and see just how childish it sounds.]

The narration is in French, but the poetic tone is universal. “Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau… The blood has dried, the tongues have fallen silent. The only visitor to the blocks now is the camera,” intones the mesmerizing voice.

The structure is to approach from outside and gradually burrow in to the depths of the camps. On first approach to the camps, the architecture of the guard towers is compared: Alpine, Japanese, “garage,” none. Aspects of construction are alluded to sarcastically: “Bids, businessmen, bribes.”

Boxcars loaded with people are shown. “Nudity strips the inmates of all pride in one stroke. Shaved. Tattooed. Numbered.” The problem of ungenerous food rations is discussed; the role of the latrine as place for discussion; the ill-supplied clinics, where “the same ointment is used for every wound.” Indeed, “chemical companies send poisons to be tested.” Finally, the gas chambers, including the “shower rooms.” Fingernail scratchings on the concrete ceiling are shown. Pyres are shown “where crematoriums fell short.” Pictures of half-burned bodied lying everywhere. “But the ovens can handle thousands of bodies a day.”

“Everything was saved.” There are pictures of huge heaps of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, bowls and plates, shoes, and hair, each in its own pile.

Soap is asserted to have been made from the bodies. What is done with the skin is not stated, but “shown.”

At 28:00, the Allies are shown opening the gates. There are corpses everywhere, placed in intertwined, dramatic poses. There is the famous bulldozer shot. Then, the deliberate placing of skulls in a field of skulls [but why?] is shown.

It concludes, ever poetic, that nine million dead haunt this countryside [which countryside?]. The threat still surrounds us all, and is closing in. We ignore the cries of humanity. The capos and informants and reinstated officers are still at large. “There are those that refused to believe, or believed only for brief moments.”

In evaluation, we must observe that mere video is quite unsuitable to “document” this kind of thing, for a variety of reasons. There is the problem of identification and authentication. You see a movie clip of people in a boxcar for example. Then, you see a clip of a boxcar door open, and a heap of bodies. In an age long before ubiquitous home movies, who took the picture? Where? When? Given the absence of documentation, how do we know it wasn’t staged for a fictional movie? Likewise, at 22:13 some pictures “were taken moments before a mass killing.” Nothing is really shown. How do they know that’s what it is? Where was it? When? We are never told. At 21:45, “deportation from every city.” But the city looks bombed out; maybe the citizens are being evacuated from the destruction wrought by the Allies? And so forth.

As to the heaps of material, we need to examine each one from two perspectives: (1) is the story rational? does it make sense? does it match human nature? (2) is the footage credible in itself?

As an example of (1), consider the heap of eyeglasses. The motive, of course, would be to provide spare eyeglasses in a time of national shortages such as are common in wartime. But what good would the massive, jumbled heap of glasses accomplish? Why would they not be sorted in famous Germanic manner — by strength, size, sex, and style, and shipped off to a distribution point?

Both criteria can be examined in connection with the mountain of hair. (1) The motive is alleged to be this: “at 50 Pfennig a kilo, it’s used to make cloth,” and reams of cloth, like rolls of carpet are shown. (Other accounts of the hair claim it was for mattresses.) And indeed, a google search turns up a picture of an invoice for “250 kilos of hair” from some company or other. But is this credible?

a. If you were trying to start a program of recycling human hair, would you not start with the ordinary civilian barbers? First, their customers are a gift that keeps giving. Second, the cleanness of the hair would naturally be much higher — hair would typically be washed, and above all, lice-free. Yet I have never heard a claim of a civilian barber hair-recapturing program.

b. If you were to start such a camp-program, why would you heap the hair up like a mountain, outdoors, where wind, sun, and rain would continue to dirty and spoil it (beyond the existing filth and lice that would have been there to begin with)?

(2) Now, freeze the frame at 25:42. The hair looks suspiciously like wigs — i.e. clusters of hair that belong together, like a wig — overlaid with some kind of glittery tinsel. What is the chance of hair shavings staying together like that after being swept up and carted? (But if they were wigs used as stage-props…) Then, as the camera pans back, it is a literal mountain. And some of the mountain just looks like sod.

The pile of combs — why? Why not distribute them or burn and bury them with the victims? Same with the mountain of shaving brushes — as if the men would have brought such an extensive shaving kit with them. The bowls and plates — where did they come from? and why?

Again, the place, time, and photographers are not identified for us. Are these films from the Soviet film-making machine? We really need to know.

The macabre rack of five decapitated bodies next to the basket of heads is particularly odd. As to criterion (1) — If the point of the gas-chambers was mass-production (itself a dubious thesis — why not use the Jewish-Bolshevik method of a bullet to the back of the head? Bullets at such a high rate of efficiency are quite cheap), then why single out five for the guillotine? Why line their naked bodies up in a display rack? with a wooden baffle to conveniently disguise the neck hole?

Likewise, why the basket of heads? If they are for study, would they not be separated out and put on a shelf, not jumbled on top of each other? If for public desecration, would they not be pilloried or spindled in public?

As to criterion (2), stop the film at 26:50. Several of the heads have normal musculature, as if still attached to a body. The closest one’s neck is snipped neatly off, like one might do with a photo; the same with one furthest away: it’s chin is fully intact. Some of the heads seem almost to be floating. A few seconds later, the camera pans back again — but the heads are clearly not the same as in the first shot. They are made up differently.

The tendentious nature of the film is revealed in vicious little phrases thrown in gratuitously. At 7:50, with the flames of the crematorium in the distance, the voice explains, “one of those night scenes so dear to a Nazi’s heart.”

The allusion to soap and tattooed lamp shades endure in the popular mind, but apparently are quietly disappearing from serious studies. And of the list of camps that opens the film, at least some are now known to have had no gas chambers. Did the producers know that in 1955? If not, then what was the evidentiary basis for their insinuations?

Finally, the interview with director Alain Resnais gives further proof of the propagandistic nature of this film.They worked fast, Resnais says, and “without much documentation.”

Obviously; but documentation should be the heart of a documentary.

Apparently, the scenes in the French relocation camp in Pithiviers (a town about 40 mi S of Paris) showed the complicity of a French policeman in the deportation. So, the French censors refused to approve the film at first. It is unclear whether this obstacle was cleared up by deliberately painting in a beam to obscure the French cap, or if by luck the editing “just happened” to obscure it. But in either case, think about it:

Any made-up vicious insinuation can be made about your enemy and historical continental rival, but nothing negative, even something indisputably factual, may be shown about your own people.

I think that recipe is known as propaganda.

We are assured by good men like Steve Schlissel and Carl Trueman that the “holocaust” is the most thoroughly documented event in history. So much so that only loony-tunes or men filled with malice could conclude otherwise. It is obvious to even an amateur like myself, however, that documentation such as this film hardly counts at all — indeed, it can only raise suspicions.

You might have thought documentation would be better the closer in time it was produced to the event.

The title, in German Nacht und Nebel, allegedly referring to the way some inmates were categorized, is also appropriate to the obscurantism of the film itself.

A memorial museum in the basement of the Nickolai church in Hamburg departs from the usual grim silence of Germans that has predominated in the face of the relentless western propaganda demonizing them (which continues to this day) in that it protests the burning of the city and its inhabitants, especially since Hamburg was a stronghold of anti-fascist sentiment in Germany.

I wish to commemorate this anniversary by presenting a brief summary of a book by Vera Brittain published after Gomorrah but still in the midst of the Anglo-American bombing rampage against Germany. Following the summary, I will give a brief mention of the Anglo-American response to the book and discuss the relevance of all this for us today.

The Book

Miss Brittain’s book, titled Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means, was published in the spring of 1944. I rely on Grayling’s summary (see biblio note below). Brittain pointed out that probably the British public simply did not comprehend what was being done to the cities of Germany. This was due in part to the government’s use of euphemisms in press releases, such as “softening-up an area,” and “neutralizing the target.” If the public only knew what was really happening, it would “rise and demand a change of policy on the part of our rulers.” (Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.)

In the remainder, Brittain rebutted the two main arguments that were proffered to justify the ruthless and exterminative manner of British bombing. These two justifications were (A) waging such a campaign will hasten the end of the war and thus save lives, and (B) the attacks are just revenge for obliteration bombing attacks that the Germans had launched against England.

In response to (A), Brittain made the following points. (1) There is no guarantee that this technique would hasten the end of the war. She had Churchill nailed here, with a direct quote in which he had referred to the mass bombings as an “experiment.” (2) With particular insight, she observed that the term “shortening” the war is ambiguous. More people might be killed in a few hours of a bombing raid than die in several weeks of a major battle engagement. And this is not to mention the extra and needless loss of libraries, art galleries, ancient churches and priceless landmarks. (3) The idea that the war will be shortened because the dehoused and demoralized masses will demand an end to it is dubious at best. Just as likely, it will create a sense of revenge that will further fuel the flame now and set the stage for WW3 later. (4) The destruction of Germany will hurt England later on, in that there will not be the basis for future peaceful trade to England’s benefit.

In response to (B), she (1) quoted Shaw to the effect that the magnitude of retaliation had become completely disproportionate, to the point that Germany would have at least as much to accuse Brittain of in a future world tribunal as England Germany. (2) The question of “who started it” can be more ambiguous than appears at first blush. (3) As one who had herself lived through the London Blitz, she did not see how anyone would want to inflict that kind of terror on women and babies, “any more than our soldiers would go into action using ’enemy’ mothers and children as a screen.” (4) Retaliation “in kind” reduces one to the level of one’s enemies.

It is interesting that the last two points are supported by the sentiments of people involved as reflected in polls that were taken. In areas that had not suffered any bombing in England, 76% approved of retaliatory raids, while only 45% did in areas that had actually suffered such kinds of attacks.

By an accident of circumstance, the book was published in the USA first, under the title “Massacre by Bombing,” along with the statement “Christian people should be moved to examine themselves concerning their participation in this carnival of death, even though they be thousands of miles away” undersigned by 28, including E. Stanley Jones, Henry Emerson Fosdick and Kenneth Latourette. (It would be interesting to know if Machen would have signed, but alas, he had already passed.)

Unfortunately, the American response was in the main a “firestorm” of protest.

Attacks on Miss Brittain occurred from coast to coast by the hundreds in every imaginable medium of communication; the printed condemnations alone would have filled a number of volumes. The New York Times reported its mail running fifty to one against it, and notables entered the arena repeatedly. Because so many of the signers of the preface of “Massacre by Bombing” were renowned Protestant clergy, it appeared as though there were a compulsion on the part of those clergy of similar faith supporting the obliteration bombing to come out immediately in rejection of Miss Brittain and her small company of supporters. (James Martin in article cited by Grayling op. cit.)

When the book was finally published in England, there was much less of a response, though it did draw an interaction from George Orwell.

Concluding reflection

Several elements in this sad story can be highlighted as having pressing relevance for us today.

(1) The temptation of government to cover its atrocities with euphemisms seems to be irresistible. Thus our own Republicans do not often mention torture; instead, it is persuasive interrogation techniques. It is not conquering a sovereign nation, but resisting insurgents. And so forth.

(2) A people once engaged in war seem to get their brains saturated in blood. This was bad enough in the British public, which at least had the excuse of their country having come under attack. But the American response to Vera Brittain is simply unconscionable. America had no reason whatsoever to be at war with Germany, let alone to adopt such a blood-thirsty attitude.

We see the same thing today. While the American public has at last turned against our invasion of Iraq, that was by no means the case when the war was first agitated by our beloved Führer.

(3) It is shameful that the voices of Christian reason were mostly those (at least among the names I recognize) of the liberal type of persuasion. Conservatives need to examine themselves here. This is a plague that (seemingly) beset our leaders in 1940, and still does today. Some deep self-examination is called for. The good news is that there does seem, finally, to be signs that this is happening here and there.

(4) Clearly, the historiography of the 20^th century is due for a massive revision, at least, the history as it has been assimilated by the mainstream American (perhaps more often than not by osmosis rather than reading and reflection). For example, the very existence of Miss Brittain’s book in early 1944, and the response to it, shows that ignorance cannot be appealed to as extenuating the complaisance of the American and British public toward the murderous bombings of Germany and Japan (which point is the reason for Grayling including the material). We will not be able to set our feet on a valid path forward as long as the past is willfully distorted.

Much of the information for this reflection was obtained from A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (Walker 2006), chapter 5.

There are two ways to interpret the movie, depending on whether you take it to be about (abstract) humanity or (concrete) history. (1) If humanity, then the thesis is something like an exposé of universal selfishness. However, this is not supported by anything plausible in the movie, unless the historical facts are generally true. (2) The real thesis, therefore, seems to be that “everyone” knew the Holocaust was taking place, and could have done something about it; they are therefore complicit in the guilt thereof.

But the encounters with church officials, which take up the bulk of the story, are all fictional; so it raises the question, whether the thesis of the movie has any right to be regarded as compelling. The historical Gerstein himself is a particularly weak figure to build such a case around.

After the war, he surrendered to the French and allegedly wrote a confession, in French, shortly before dying under suspicious circumstances in prison. The confession itself includes several patent absurdities. For example, the number of victims crammed into the chamber that he witnessed would come to several people per square foot. He mentions a heap of shoes 75 feet high, which is also inconceivable (how would you get the next pair of shoes up there? and for what purpose?). One must reflect on what this does to his credibility as a witness. There seem to be several possibilities:

1. He intentionally lied because of the political situation, but intended it to be recognized as such with the obvious boners.
2. He was mentally hallucinatory, or perhaps mingled nightmare fantasies with the outline of genuine memories.
3. The confession was itself forged.

(1) is the most attractive to rescue Gerstein’s integrity as a person, but seems inconsistent with certain facts of his life.

(2) has some plausibility in view of the mental conflict that Gerstein had set up even several years before the war by simultaneously dissenting from the Party line, yet persistently trying to join the Party, which was reluctant to take him. Was he a self-appointed spy from the beginning? Coupled with the crazy details that accompanied his stories, can we say that his mind produced images in wish-fulfillment? Psychology has amply studied how expectation and fear can influence perception.

(3) has the circumstantial support of his apparent “suicide” just days after it was written. According to the movie, he had a beautiful wife and three young children; if he stayed in the SS for three years though opposed to it, why would he abandon his little family after it was finally over, when moreover he would finally have the chance to make his case to the world?

His death obviously removed him from the possibility of cross-examination.

I am not an historian by profession, and I suppose that the strange and impossible testimony of Gerstein is a negligible part of the evidential basis for the Holocaust. But for that reason, it is odd that his story would be the chosen vehicle for a movie having the purpose that it does.