conditions "naively in terms of 'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors...."
FAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
Not only were situations such as those at Belsen unscrupulously exploited for propaganda purposes, but this propaganda has also made use of entirely fake atrocity photographs and films. The extreme conditions at Belsen applied to very few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the worst difficulties and all their inmates survived in good health. As a result, outright forgeries were used to exaggerate conditions of horror. A startling case of such forgery was revealed in the British Catholic Herald of October 29th, 1948. It reported that in Cassel, where every adult German was compelled to see a film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a doctor from Goettingen saw himself on the screen looking after the victims. But he had never been to Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment he realized that what he had seen was part of a film taken after the terrible air raid on Dresden by the Allies on 13th February, 1945 where the doctor had been working. The film in question was shown in Cassel on 19th October, 1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which killed 135000 people, mostly refugee women and children, the bodies of the victims were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several weeks. These were the scenes, purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had recognized. The forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further information the reader is referred to Arthur Ponsonby's book Falsehood in Wartime (London, 1928), which exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities in the First World War. Ponsonby cites such fabrications as "The Corpse Factory" and "The Belgian Baby without Hands", which are strikingly reminiscent of the propaganda relating to Nazi "atrocities". F.J.P. Veale explains in his book that the bogus "jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous British "Corpse factory" myth, in which the ghoulish Germans were supposed to have obtained various commodities from processing corpses (Veale, ibid, p. 192). This accusation was one for which the British Government apologized after 1918. It received new life after 1945 in the tale of lamp shades of human skin, which was certainly as fraudulent as the Soviet "human soap". In fact, from Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging admission that the lamp shade evidence at Buchenwald Trial "later appeared to be dubious" (The Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by a certain Andreas Pfaffenberger in a "written affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in 1948 General Lucius Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared after more through investigation to have been mostly 'hearsay'. An excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the Myth of the Six Million is Dr. Udo Walendy's Bild 'Dokumente' fur die Geschichtsschreibung (Vlotho/Weser, 1973), and from the numerous examples cited we illustrate one on this page [in the original book this information comes from]. The origin of the first photograph is unknown, but the second is a photomontage. Close examination reveals immediately that the standing figures have been taken from the first photograph, and a heap of corpses super-imposed in front of them. The fence has been removed, and an entirely new horror "photograph" created. This blatant forgery appears on page 341 of r. Schnabel's book on the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: eine Dokumentation uber die SS (Frankfurt, 1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". (Walendy cites eighteen other examples of forgery in Schnabel's book.) The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting to illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also illustrated without a caption in Eugene Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager Documant F. 321 for the International Court at Nuremberg; Heinz Kuhnrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p. 81); Vaclav Berdych's Mauthausen (Prague, 1959); and Robert Neumann's Hitler--Aufsteig and Untergang des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1961).
9. THE JEWS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: A FACTUAL APPRAISAL BY THE RED CROSS
There is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the conditions of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948. This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur l'activite' du CICR en faveur des civils detenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). the team of authors, headed by Frederic Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition of the Red Cross, has been strict political neutrality, and herein lies its great value. The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention in order to gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by the German authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or supervision. The Red Cross Report is of value in that it first clarifies the legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees, the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds (in German, "Schutzhaftline"), who were arrested for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. III, p. 73). These persons, it continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned under common law for security reasons" (p.74). The Report admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to security, but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from August 1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps and prisons" (Vol. III, p. 78). The ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants and launched a food relief program which continued to function until the last months of 1945, letters of thanks for which came pouring in form Jewish internees.
RED CROSS RECIPIENTS WERE JEWS
The Report states that "As many as 9000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1112000 parcels with a total weight of 4500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol III, p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. "Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Floha, Ravensbruck, Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83). In the course of the war, "The Committee was in a position to transfer and distribute in the from of relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organization throughout the world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York" (Vol. I, p. 644). This latter organization was permitted by the German Government to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief operations for Jewish internees came not from the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary and Slovakia. The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This camp, "where there were about 40000 Jews deported from various countries was a relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol III, p. 75). According to the Report, "The Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special conditions. From information gathered by the Committee, this camp had been started as an experiment by certain leaders of the Reich . . . These men wished to give the Jews the means of setting up a communal life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost complete autonomy . . . two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945. They confirmed the favorable impression gained ton the first visit" (Vol. I, p. 642). The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183000 Rumanian Jews until time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many of the German camps after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated westward. But the efforts of send relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
NO EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE
One of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps toward the end of the war. Says the Report: "In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on February 1st, 1945. . . In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was authorized to stay in each camp . . ." (Vol III, p. 83). Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable. In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews. In all its 1600 pages the Report does not even mention such a thing as a gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities, suffered rigors and privations, but its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend. Like the Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red Cross found itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become the order of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is concerned, the Report points out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the eastern front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p. 204 ff). Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes nonsense of this allegation. "Not only the washing places, but installations for baths, showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates. They had often to take action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get them repaired and enlarged" (Vol. III, p. 594).
NOT ALL WERE INTERNED
Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population) deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free population," and this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the European Jews were placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination program", and with the claim of the forged Hoess memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing "every single Jew he could lay his hands on." In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in charge, the Report states that "A large proportion of the Jewish minority had permission to stay in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a compassionate haven of refugee for Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem to have been in comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the German forces took place. While it is true the law of May 15th, 1947 had brought about the internment of several thousand Jews, these people were held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging were tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms almost equal to those of the free labor market" (Vol. I, p. 646). Not only did large numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the war, generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich, as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews from Poland who, while in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States were held to be American citizens by the Germans occupying authorities, who further agreed to recognize the validity of about three thousand passports issued of Jews by the consulates of South American countries (Vol. I, p. 645). As further U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until March 1944," says the Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas for Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its attempted armistice with the Soviet Union) with a government more dependent on German authority, the emigration of Jews continued. The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United States "to give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from Hungary," and from the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating that "The Government of the United States...now specifically repeats its assurance that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the present circumstances are allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p. 649).
10. THE TRUTH AT LAST: THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER
Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of his work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism. From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a professor of history in the College d'enseignment general at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille de la Resistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in November, 1946. Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little know; they have rarely been translated from the French and none at all have appeared in English. His most important works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences of them; and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le Veritable Proces Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs europeen (1964), in which Rassinier exposed the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and financial significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers. One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique German "wickedness"; and he reveals with devastating force how historical truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to proper proportions, loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one act in a greater and much wider tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany in ghe spring of 1960, Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that is was high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination legend, and theat the Germans themselves should begin it since the allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
THE IMPOSTURE OF 'GAS CHAMBERS'
Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard, and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et Lumieres that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbruck: The Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other evidence for gas chambers there thatn the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these authors could produce and authentic eye-witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen one. Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz, but of couse, since this person was apparently dead, Rassinier was unable to investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of Teufel und Verdammte who had alleged that millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and that he based his information on what others had "told him". The palm for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyizli's Doctor at Auschwitz, in which the falsification of facts, the evident contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is speaking of places which it is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame des Juifs europeen, p. 52). According to this "doctor of Auschwitz", 25000 victims were exterminated every day for four and a half years, which is a grandiose advance on Olga Lengyel's 24000 a day for two and a half years. It would mean a total of forty-one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the total pre-war Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier attempted to discover the identity of this strange "witness", he was told that "he had died some time before the publication of the book." Rassinier is convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the war, Rassinier has, in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of gas chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two, but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they "heard", always from "reliable" sources, who by some chance are almost always dead and thus not in a position to confirm or deny their statements. Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies, and of which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of "gas chamber". Serious investigations carried out in the sites themselves have revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the declarations of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in the German camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in Austria. This fact, which wer noted earlier was attested to by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich. However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again declared at the Eichmann trail that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out for the gas chambers. So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned. Rassinier shows that the sole evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million. Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents were considered of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by the Nuremberg Court, though they continue to circulate in three different versions, one in German (distributed in schools) and two in Frenc, none of which agee with each other. The German version featured as "evidence" at the Eichmann Trial in 196l. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvee, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs europeen, p. 31, 39).
'SIX MILLION' FALSEHOOD REJECTED
As for the fearful propaganda figure of the Six Million, Professor Rassinier rejects it on the basis of an extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has been falsely established, on the one had through inflation of the pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation, and on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of survivors after 1945. This was the method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also rejects any written or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited above, since they are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods. He gives the example of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor Niemoller reiterated Auerbach's Fraudulent "238000" deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhausseler of Munich stated in a speech at Dachau that only 30000 people died "of the 200000 perons from thirty-eight nations who were interned there" (Le Drame des Juifs europeen, p. 12). Today, the estimate has been reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes on. Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given by accused men such as Hoess, Hoettl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were faced with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their detention, is completely untrustworthy. Rassinier finds it very significant that the figure of Six Million was not mentioned in court during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the Jerusalem trail was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended, amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, may documents have been published which were not available at the time of the Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove that if the Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime, there could not possibly have been six million victims" (ibid, p. 125). With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics, Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs europeen that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1200000, and he notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as a maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of 896892 casualties in a study of the same problem by the Jewish statisticial Raul Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State of Israel nevertheless continues to claim compensation for six million dead, each one representing an indemnity of 5000 marks.
EMIGRATION: THE FINAL SOLUTION
Prof. Rassinier is emphatic in stating that the German Government never had any plicy other thatn the emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with the British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other countries to take charge of them, but these refused (ibid, p. 20). The Palestine project was revived in 1938, but broke down because Germany could not negotiate their departure on the basis of 3000000 marks, as demanded by Britain, without some agreement for compensation. Despite these difficulties, Germany did manage to secure the emigration of the majority of their Jews, mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French refusal of Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the 21st August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible to negotiate with France in this direction and described conversations which has taken place between July and December 1940, and which were brought to a halt following the interview with Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval's successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would be able to re-open these negotiations and bring them to a happy conclustion" (ibid, p. 108). After the outbreak of war, the Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us, had declared economic and financial was on Germany as early as 1933, were interned in concentration camps, "which is the way countries all over the world treat enemy aliens in time of war . . . It was decided to regroup them and put them to work in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of Russia, was situated toward the end of 194l in the so-called Eastern territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland: at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belze, Maidanek, Treblinka etc... There they were to wait until end of the war for the reopening of international discussions which would decide their future" (Le Veritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). The order for this concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich, as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to "the desired final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had ended.
ENORMOUS FRAUD
Of great concern to Professor Rassinier is the way in which the extermination legend is deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in this he finds Israel and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after 1950, an avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their activities that one might well believe them to have been contrived in partnership. One was the "Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals" established under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the "World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation" at Paris and Tel-Aviv. Their publications seem to appear at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the Soviet Union their purpose is simply to maintain the threat of Nazism as a manoeuvre to divert attention from their own activities. As for Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a purely material problem. In Le Drame des Juifs europeen (P. 31, 39). he writes: "... It is simply a question of justifying by a proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has been paying annually since the end of the war to the State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which moreover she cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since there was no State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly material problem. "Perhaps I may be allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was only founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all states with the exception of Israel, in order to underline the dimenstions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on the one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six million dead, and on the other, since at least four-fifths of these six million were decidedly alive at the end of the war, she is paying substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims of Hitler's Germany to those who are still alive in countries all over the world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of those who have since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six million), or in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice."
CONCLUSION
Here we may briefly summarise the data on Jewish wartime casualties. Contrary to the figure of over 9 million Jews in German-occupied territory put forward at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, it has already been established that after extensive emigration, approximately 3 million were living in Europe, excluding the Soviet Union. Even when the Jews of German-occupied Russia are included (the majority of Russian Jews were evacuated beyond German control), the overall number probably does not exceed four million. Himmler's statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr and the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the number respectively at 5550000 and 5294000 when German-occupied territory was at its widest, but both these figures include the two million Jews of the Baltic and western Russia without paying any attention to the large number of these who were evacuated. However, it is at least an admission from the latter organisation that there were not even six million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined. Nothing better illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million legend than the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately avoided mentioning the figure. Moreover, official Jewish estimates of the casualties are being quietly revised downwards. Our analysis of the population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Professor Rassinier, demonstrate that it would have been simply impossible for the number of Jewish casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. It is very significant, therefore, that the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris now states that only 1485292 Jews died from all causes during the Second World War, and although this figure is certainly too high, at least it bears no resemblance at all to the legendary Six Million. As has been noted earlier, the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896892. Thuis is beginning to approach a realistic figure, and the process of revision is certain to continue. Doubtless, several thousand Jewish persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in the context of a war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides. To put the matter in perspective, for example, we may point out that 700000 Russian civilians died during the siege of Leningrad, and a total of 2050000 German civilian were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation after the war. In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich (January 19th, 1955), in a survey of all Second World War casualties based on figures of the INternational Red Cross, put the "Loss of victims of persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945" at 300000, not all of whom were Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment.
IMAGINARY SLAUGHTER
The question most pertinent to the extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million European Jews under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a half million, but such a figure is not totally unacceptable. This is proved by the growing number of Jews claiming compensation from the WEst German Government for having allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the number of these claimants registered with the West German Government had tripled in ten years and reached 3375000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965). Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six Million. Most of these claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the majority of the 3 million Jews who experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe are, in fact, very much alive. It is a resounding confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during the Second World War can only be estimated at a figure in thousands. Surely this is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right to compound it with vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great European nation, as well as wringing faudulent monetary compensation from them? ---------------------------------------------------------------- RICHARD HARWOOD is a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University of London. Mr. Harwood turned to the vexed subject of war crimes under the influence of Professor Paul Rassinier, to whose monumental work this little volume is greatly indebted. The author is now working on a sequel in this series on the Main Nuremberg Trial, 1945-1946.