HRP: Revisonist essays and documents

Excerpts:John Birch Society's "New American" magazine (Nov. 9, 1998) "New American":

Letters to the Editor, The New American, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, Wisconsin 54913

"Sobran insists that 'there are people who are neither fanatic nor stupid nor insane nor mean-spirited who argue that it was never Hitler’s purpose or policy to exterminate the Jews.' One such individual is Jewish historian Arno Mayer, whose 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? contends that the 'Final Solution' was the product of improvisation by Hitler’s regime, rather than a premeditated plan to exterminate European Jewry.

"It is important to separate those with honest historical questions from those who offer disingenuous objections as a means of concealing invidious motives, and to that end it is useful to apply the following questions as a standard: Does the skeptic acknowledge the collectivist, anti-Jewish nature of the National Socialist regime, and that the regime was guilty of crimes against millions of individual Jews?

"A good example of the disingenuousness described above is found in the flyer 66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust, by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR)...

"The work of the SS Einsatzgruppen killing squads, which murdered more than a million Jews, was a relatively inefficient means of pursuing the 'Final Solution,' notes R.J. Rummel in his study Democide.

"For this the death camps, especially Auschwitz, became a particularly efficient conveyer belt for liquidating Jews.' Upon arrival at Auschwitz, inmates underwent immediate triage based upon their fitness for work: 'The doctor’s thumb motioning to the right meant work and life, at least for a while, even for those destined for medical experiments; to the left meant death in hours.' Those slated for liquidation were dispatched to the extermination annex called Auschwitz II, or Birkenau. An estimated one and one-half million Jews were slaughtered on what Rummel calls the 'humans-to-ashes conveyer belt' at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"Not surprisingly, the claims of many self-described 'Holocaust revisionists' have focused on Auschwitz. Question 61 from the pamphlet, 66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust, published by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), insists that there is no proof 'that gas chambers were used to kill people' at Auschwitz.

"In a court of law, it is difficult to find more convincing proof than a confession, and the confession of SS officer Josef Kramer - who was in charge of the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau - is particularly compelling.

"Kramer was first assigned to Auschwitz as an aide-de-camp to commandant Rudolf Hoess in 1940. After serving as commandant of another concentration camp, and being promoted to the position of Hauptsturmfuhrer, he returned in May 1944 and became, by his own account, 'Commandant of Camp No. 2, Birkenau.'

"Kramer was arrested by British military authorities and tried in Lunenberg. He initially insisted that the allegations of mass executions, gassings, and other atrocities were untrue. He later recanted his denial, explaining that he had given his sworn 'word of honor that I should remain silent and should not tell anybody at all about the existence of the gas chambers.'

"Kramer testified: 'When I made my first statement [denying that gas chambers existed] I felt still bound by this word of honor which I had given. When I made the second statement in prison ... these persons to whom I felt bound in honor — Adolf Hitler and [SS leader] Reichfuhrer Himmler — were no longer alive and I thought then that I was no longer bound.'

"...It is also significant that one strand of the movement now called 'Holocaust denial' began in a post-war alliance between ex-Nazis and a group of French Trotskyites led by the late Paul Rassiner. The Trotskyite line was that accounts of Nazi extermination camps were figments of 'Stalinist propaganda.'

"One purpose of the so-called 'Holocaust denial' movement has been to maintain a dialectical relationship with the Establishment: By focusing on arcane technical details and disputes over body counts, some self-styled "revisionists" ensure that discussion of the National Socialist episode does not address basic questions about the role of the state and the lethality of totalitarian socialism.

"While there are people of good will who have honest questions about the Establishment’s account of World War II, including the standard version of the atrocity known as the Holocaust, hard-core anti-Semites who seek to disguise themselves as principled skeptics encourage misguided people to believe that the 'real enemy' is 'The Jews,' rather than those who would collectivize political power against individual rights."

To the Editor:

Your November 9, 1998 article critiquing World War Two revisionism ("Lessons From the Holocaust" by William Norman Grigg), was wrong on a number of points, including the ludicrous claim that "confessions" coerced from Auschwitz camp personnel represent powerful testimony to the fact of homicidal gassings in Auschwitz.

The gassing of millions in Auschwitz should obviously be well-represented forensically in a murder weapon. But you avoid entirely the fact that the so-called extermination gas chambers shown to tourists in Auschwitz all these years were built by the Soviets after the war and are therefore a Communist hoax about which you are strangely silent.

While attacking the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and similar revisionists as either "disingenuous" or "hardcore anti-semites" you fail to note that Joseph Sobran, whom you quote approvingly, has linked his website to that of the revisionist website CODOH, which is operated by IHR researcher Bradley Smith.

You further claim that because Paul Rassinier was a socialist and one of the first revisionists, it follows that revisionism is Trotskyite. The many traditional Catholics, orthodox Protestants and American patriots actively involved in World War Two revisionism will find this smear quite contemptible.

Since the end of World War Two Communist groups and governments have fervently promoted and concocted anti-German propaganda. Moreover, Zionist groups are using this agit-prop to substitute Auschwitz for Calvary as the central ontological event of Western history and to subvert and defame the West as a repository of "hate" and "bigotry."

The enemy of revisionists has never been "The Jews" or Jewish people generally. How can it be, since several revisionists such as Joseph Burg, Ditlieb Felderer and David Cole have been Jewish?

Revisionists are not anti-Jewish because they reject an irrational belief system which is being imposed as a virtual state religion. The issues are whether or not the facts of the documentary record sustain the claims of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. Do we have the right to doubt Jewish shoah theology and Communist and Allied atrocity propaganda?

Talk of hatred and "anti-semitism" in this context is what is truly disingenuous. As Sobran wrote in 1995, "Nowadays an 'anti-Semite' is less likely to be a man who hates Jews than a man who is hated by Jews..."

And what of the professional German haters? Men like Prof. Daniel Goldhagen of Harvard University whose fraudulent book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners" claims the German people are homicidally tainted and Elie Wiesel who wrote in "Legends of Our Time" that every Jew must harbor a "healthy" hate for the Germans?

The Allied victory in World War Two, which saw Communism emerge victorious in eastern Europe and laid the groundwork for the victory of Mao in China, was yet another defeat for liberty and the West. No sympathy for Hitler or execration of the Jewish people is incumbent upon these conclusions.

Since it is a lie, the Auschwitz gas chamber cult oppresses Jewish and Gentile people alike, the former confined in a psychotic, perpetually morbid funeral home of the mind, the latter paying exorbitant taxes and "reparations" to the murderous, socialist Israeli regime.

The John Birch Society has yet to examine World War Two revisionism in a scholarly and dispassionate way. The IHR under Mark Weber has done first class research. To tar them with ADL-style smears while fearing to research the Soviet hoax perpetrated at Auschwitz, is to relegate yourselves to irrelevance as this fraud continues to unravel and more and more scientists of the calibre of Max Planck chemist Germar Rudolph and world class historians like David Irving investigate and debunk the gassing claims made for Auschwitz.

Michael A. Hoffman II
Former Assistant Director and Director of the IHR (1985-1986)
PO Box 849
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816