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It is difficult to imagine anyone better suited to be the great pioneer of what has become known as Holocaust Revisionism than Paul Rassinier. This French professor of history was a non-Communist Socialist who was arrested during the war for "passive resistance" activities, which included helping to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland. Rassinier was then sent to the Buchenwald and Dora camps in Germany, where he remained an inmate until the end of the war. When he returned to France, he was astonished by the stories that were being circulated about the camps, and he felt honor-bound to tell the truth as he knew it. For example, a French priest who had also been an inmate at Buchenwald claimed to have seen "thousands and thousands of persons" going into gas chambers there. When Rassinier met with the priest and pointed out to him that no one was ever gassed at Buchenwald, he replied: "Right, but that's only a figure of speech.... and since those things existed somewhere, it's not important." (pages 129-130 of this volume. See also: M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87.) Rassinier was a man of rare courage and conscientious devotion to historical truth. In spite of poor health he traveled many thousands of kilometers across Europe to meet with persons who claimed to have personal knowledge of mass killings. (p. 271). As he put it,"... A historian worthy of the name should not suppress anything that he knows which is relevant to the subject under discussion." (p. 282). His obvious intellectual honesty contrasts sharply with the deceitful spirit of "Exterminationist" historians such as Leon Poliakov, Lucy Dawidowicz and William L. Shirer. Rassinier's work has stood the test of time remarkably well. His basic thesis -- that there was no German policy or program of extermination, and that the incessantly repeated figure of six million Jewish wartime dead is a gross exaggeration -- has been abundantly confirmed by a tremendous amount of new evidence collected by the scholars who have followed in his path. All Revisionists owe a great debt to this man. Some of the more important of those who have built upon the foundation he laid are Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon (France) and Henri Roques, who knew Rassinier personally. (Incidentally, Dr. Butz provides a useful summary of Rassinier's work in his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, pp. 10-11.) It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the case for the revisionist view of the Holocaust story is immeasurably stronger today than it was when Rassinier died in 1967. Because Holocaust Revisionists challenge an official and prevailing view of history, they have a tremendous burden of proof. They are held to a much more rigorous standard of accuracy than most historians. This was dramatically demonstrated, for example, in the essentially political trials of Revisionists Robert Faurisson in France and Ernst Zündel in Canada. Rassinier was in frail health when he wrote most of the works that have been brought together in this volume. And because he was a pioneer who worked virtually alone, a number of errors unfortunately found their way into his writings. These mostly minor errors are neither malicious nor deceitful, which is shown by the fact that they are not crucial to his central thesis. It may even be said that these mistakes underscore Rassinier's basic honesty. If he were alive today, he would be the first to revise his findings in the light of more complete and accurate information. Thus, in the spirit of historical accuracy that Rassinier himself vigorously supported, the following corrections and explanatory points are offered:
These corrections should not discourage the reader from digging into this important volume, which is a valuable memoir of concentration camp life, as well as an insightful and often brilliant critique of the Holocaust extermination story.
1. The figure in this column actually represents the number of European Jews who were not accounted for in the preceding study. Consequently, this figure must be viewed with the following caveats: first this figure represents a maximum figure which doubtless would be considerably smaller if a census of the world Jewish population were taken today since whenever a question has arisen pertaining to the propriety of some statistic, it has been resolved in a manner which has favored the proponents of the Zionist line. Second, not every person who is included within this figure can be said to have died at the hands of the Germans. The mere fact that a person is not accounted for does not necessarily mean that he is deceased. These comments also hold true for Mr. Hilberg's statistics which are outlined on the following page
2. These estimates for immigration include natural increase.
3. The total allows one to admire once again the seriousness of the statistics from Jewish sources. For Argentina, Canada and Brazil, the totals is 844,000. However, there are, in addition, a few Jews in the other countries of the American continent, notably in Mexico, 70,000; in Uruguay, 60,000; in Chile, 15,000, and so on. The total, therefore, for these six countries is 989,000. And for the whole Western Hemisphere, the same statistics give a total of 6.3 million, which the Jerusalem Post Weekly (April 19, 1939) brings forward. If, from this total for the two American continents, we subtract these 989,000 persons, there remain for the United States 5,311,000 and not 5.5 million as is claimed by the official statement of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of London and the World Almanac of 1963 (p. 159). That is what you come to when you want to conceal the actual total of the Jewish population of the United States.
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