BY HARRY ELMER BARNES
THE DRAMA OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS, by Paul Rassinier. Les SeptCouleurs, Paris, 1964. (In French.)
This is an important book by the French scholar, professor and writer who was deported by the Germans and actually lived through grim months in concentration camps of the Third Reich. To this experience he has consecrated a work of worldwide interest: The Lie of Ulysses. Rassinier is, indeed, a unique historian. For him, only facts, figures, and documents carefully verified, are relevants. But as author, he does not live in an ivory tower. He is a close observer of the changing international scene. And what are his main findings about the situation in Europe from 1950 onward? Precisely that a political program is gaining ground: West Germany must be reintegrated with Western Europe and fully restored to the concert of democratic nations.
GERMAN REVIVAL ALARMS RUSSIA AND ISRAEL
This assumption deeply disturbs two Countries, the U.S.S.R. and Israel. The Russians fear a strong and united Western Europe. They had undergone a series of reverses: the Allied airlift rendered ineffective the Berlin blockade; the Greek Communists failed in their subversive activity; NATO came into being and guaranteed greater military security to the West. The Israelis have other serious apprehensions. Most important of all will the Bonn Republic, once it is "cleared" and relieved of pressure by the enemies of the former Third Reich, continue to pour out huge indemnities to Mr. Ben Gurion's state?
The counter-offensive of Russia and Israel was not long delayed, according to Rassinier. Two sources of attack, so remarkably synchronized that they might well have been contrived in concert and paired, spearheaded the operations devoted to the fabrication and falsification of documents. One had the special label "Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals," established under Russian auspices behind the Iron Curtain at Warsaw. The other was called "World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation," set up chiefly at Paris and Tel Aviv.
Paul Rassinier, analyzing the propaganda campaigns launched by these two organizations, sees Germany as their target, and their common theme is the horrors and atrocities committed during the Second World War by Nazism, implied to be a natural vocation of Germany, including the assertion that the Bonn government had accepted the chief nationalists and militarists of the Third Reich. All this meant that the Germans are a people who must be kept under rigid control, and isolated.
AN AVALANCHE OF BOOKS APPEARS
At once an avalanche of books began to break upon the world: first, Doctor at Auschwitz, by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented figure-1 and then the Breviary of Hatred, by Leon Poliakov, both in 1951. Since then, the flood of such books has not stopped. Rassinier points out that every time there was the slightest sign of rapprochement between Germany and the other European nations: European Coal and Steel Commission, Common Market, Franco-German Treaty, etc., whole libraries of hate Germany books appeared under the stamp of the "Warsaw Committee," or of an important unit of the "World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation," or the "Institute of Contemporary History (London)," which is an affiliate of the latter. Among early examples of these mounting indictments, ever more horrendous, and all skillfully contrived to make the Bonn Republic odious to the whole world, we may cite The Third Reich and the Jews (1953) by Leon Poliakov; The Memoirs of Rudolf Hess (1958), and the like.
Before referring to Paul Rassinier's voluminous documentation, let us state his conclusion concerning this vast international propaganda scheme of the USSR and Israel. When the International Zionist Movement claimed that six million Jews were exterminated by the Germans in gas chambers, it furnished Khrushchev with his main argument. This he used and abused by tying it in with a hypothetical rebirth of Nazism and Prussian militarism in West Germany, all to the effect that the German people are a nation of barbarians which it would be dangerous to integrate into Europe. He thus aimed to kill in embryo that concert of Europe, which is inconceivable without Germany.
On the other side, by presenting a reparations invoice based on the figure of six million Jews exterminated, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks, the International Zionist Movement has been concerned mainly with lightening the permanent deficit weighing on the bankers of the Diaspora; indeed, even to get rid of it and transform it into an appreciable profit.
As objectively as possible I have summarized Paul Rassinier's thesis. But, foreseeing that certain defenders of the "universal conscience" will lose no time in distorting the attitude and import of his book, and that of this review, I underline emphatically that the author of this volume does not, for an instant, seek to excuse or to conceal the nameless atrocities committed by certain brutes in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, many of whom were Communists, who had infiltrated as guards.
On the contrary, Rassinier leaves nothing in shadow. The title of his book alone tells enough. But the courageous author lays the chief blame for misrepresentation on thos2 whom we must call the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from non-existent, mythical and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner.
WERE SIX MILLIONS EXTERMINATED?
With the help of one hundred pages of statistics, cross-checked and verified by reliable documents, in difficult but condensed and detailed analysis, Rassinier offers us two conclusions, between which he refrains from making a choice.
The first is that, according to the data available, and correcting the inevitable duplications and exaggerations, presented by the "World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation," there were 17, 583,057 Jews alive in 1962. Some 1,485,292 are said to have lost their lives in some way during the war. The second, from other sources, also checked, and supplied by Mr. Raul Hilberg, in his Destruction of the European Jews, is that some 18,265,601 Jews survived, while 896,892 of them perished during the war.*
Whichever of these conclusions one accepts, although we are horrified when confronted with these million or more victims, it must be emphasized that we are far from the figure of six million which shameless propagandists, doubtful witnesses, and others ill-informed have accepted.
It is instructive that despite the figures cited, as based on the corrected data, both of these Jewish sources accept the legend that six million Jews were exterminated by the Germans during the Second World War.
It is abominable enough that from a million to a million and a half Jews perished between 1940 and 1945, without having to add vast imaginary slaughter. It only weakens the case when, with the use of false documents, the weakest sort of testimony, and statistics outrageously inflated, the State of Israel claims indemnity for six million dead. This completely inaccurate figure only serves Communist and other political causes in Europe, and outright financial purposes in Tel Aviv.
That is the limit to place on one's patience and credulity. Read instead The Drama of the European Jews by Paul Rassinier, and you will be edified, dear readers, as I was.
* Editorial Note:
In a revision of his statistics in 1966, Rassinier states that the properly corrected figures given by the "World Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation," claim that some 1,593.292 European Jews perished from all causes between 1939 and 1945. Revised analysis of the figures given by Hilberg indicates that the data reveal the death of 1,003,392 Jews from all causes during this period.
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