he Big Lie Technique in the Sandbox

By Lewis Brandon

One of today’s pet Indisputable Historical Truths is that the German
Chancellor Adolf Hitler advocated the “Big Lie Technique” to discredit
and confuse one’s political opponents. However, a close look at the German
leader’s writings displays a somewhat different approach. On pages 134,
and 173 of Mein Kampf (My Stuggle) (Hurst & Blackett edition,
1942; reprint available from Angriff Press, PO Box 2726, Hollywood, CA 90028,
$10) Hitler echoes the German philosopher Schopenhauer and alleges that
it is the Jews who are “The Great Master of Lies.” At no point
does he advocate the “Big Lie Technique” himself. On the contrary,
he criticizes the Jews for allegedly adopting the technique themselves.
It is ironic that Hitler himself fell posthumous victim to this tactic.

Hitler is not the only one to have suffered in this way. Even living
historians are misrepresented. So too are history books and leading reference
works. Let us now examine some recent examples.

Reference Books

The 1975 edition of the Guiness Book of World Records by the McWhirter
twins (Bantam, New York, 1975) made the following reference under “Crime
& Punishment” (p391):

NAZI GERMANY. At the SS extermination camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim-Brezinka), near Oswiecim, in southern Poland, where a minimum of 900 000 people (Soviet estimate is 4 000 000) were exterminated from 14 June 1940 to 29 January 1945, the greatest number killed in a day was 6000. … The former French Deputy, Professor Paul Rassinier, a Buchenwald survivor and holder of the Medaille de la Résistance, published evidence in 1964 to the effect that the total Jewish death count could have not exceeded 1 200 000, as opposed to the widely accepted figure of 6 000 000.

In succeeding editions the reference to Rassinier was omitted. I wrote
to Norris McWhirter (his brother was assassinated by the Irish Republican
Army terrorist gang) at Guiness Superlatives Ltd., 2 Cecil Court, Enfield,
Middlesex EN2 6DJ, England, and inquired why this had been done. On 28 April
1980 he replied that it was because “the estimates that we attributed
to Rassinier are simply not accepted by those who also discount the Soviet
estimates. If you care to advise me of the names of authoritative agencies
which do still accept the Rassinier estimate I shall be pleased to renew
contact with them.” I forwarded to McWhirter the names and universities
of several leading Revisionist academics, but so far not one of them has
heard from him.

Historians

British historian David Irving has also fallen victim to this tactic
of re-writing history. In the introduction to Hitler’s War (Viking,
1977; available from IHR at $19.00) Irving relates how the German edition
of the book was censored by the German publishing house, Ullstein. He describes:

The same Berlin company also published my book shortly after, under
the title Hitler & Seine Feldherren; their chief editor found many
of my arguments distasteful, even dangerous, and without informing me,
suppressed or even reversed them: in their printed text Hitler had not
told Himmler there was to be “no liquidation” of the Jews (on
30 November 1941); he had told him not to use the word “liquidate”
publicly in connection with their extermination program. Thus history is
falsified! (My suggestion that they publish Himmler’s note as a facsimile
had been ignored.) I prohibited further printing of the book, two days
after its appearance in Germany. To explain their actions, the Berlin publishers
argued that my manuscript expressed some views that were “an affront
to established historical opinion” in their country.

(pxvii)

Irving’s reference to an “extermination program” is part of
his pragmatic effort to continue to have his books published by Madison
Avenue by sailing a very tight tack between truth and commercial acceptability.
It is thought unlikely by many observers that Irving should be taken in
by such a canard as the “six million.”

Just in passing, it is interesting to read Irving’s assessment of the
“memoirs” or “diaries” of many of the Third Reich dramatis
personae. Many of them are fiction, he shows.

In October 1978, the German publisher Propylaeen Verlag issued Professor
Hellmut Diwald’s massive Geschichte der Deutschen (History of
the Germans). Diwald is a history professor at the Friedrich-Alexander
University in Erlangen and has been well known in the German historical
profession since taking his doctorate under the German-Jewish historian
Hans-Joachim. Schoeps more than 20 years ago. However, Diwald’s credentials
were not enough to authenticate some mild skepticism he expressed about
the “Holocaust” on two pages of the 766 page book (164 and 165).
A cacaphony of protest was yodelled from the political and publishing minarets
throughout the Fatherland, and the publisher (part of the Axel Springer
combine) quickly agreed to make amends. The sale of the first edition was
stopped, and remaining copies withdrawn. A new edition was substituted,
with the two offending pages hastily rewritten in order to conform to the
“correct” line. This was only the beginning of the re-writing
of the book: Springer announced that by Fall 1979 the book would be “not
recognizable” (Der Spiegel, 4 December 1978).

Popular Books

Non-academic books are also subject to re-writes. In 1971 the Berkley
Publishing Corporation of New York (a subsidiary of Putnam’s) was to publish
a book entitled Lansky by Hank Messick. Naively assuming that what
was good for Jews is good for Gentiles, the publishers designed the cover
and promotional advertisements with a slogan translated from an earlier
book review in Hebrew in Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Unfortunately, the translation read: “Jews control Crime in the
United States.” The ad appeared only once in the New York Times
before the balloon went up. The Zionist Anti-Defamation League immediately
contacted the publishers to “first appeal to reason” according
to the ADL Bulletin for October 1971. When this “appeal
to reason” did not bring about a positive response, the ADL adopted
different tactics, and presto, the slogan on both the offending advertisement
and on the book’s cover, became: The Mob Runs America and Lansky Runs the
Mob.”

Newspapers

Newspapers are also subject to Zionist “revisionism.” In the New
York Times of 22 February 1948 a feature on the Jewish putsch in
Palestine gave a population figure of 15 to 18 million Jews in the world.
This figure would, of course, make the “Six Million” a demographic
nonsense, as there were 15 million Jews in the world in 1940. Immediately,
the Zionist lobby “appealed to the reason” of the publishers,
and four days later, the following codicil was published:

Last Sunday’s article incorrectly estimated the Jewish population of
the world at 15 million to 18 million. No census has been conducted since
the war, and estimates are only approximate, but most authorities agree
that Hitler’s wholesale massacres of Jews during the war reduced the Jewish
population to perhaps 12 million today.

Sensing that something was rotten in the state of publishing, the ardent
anti-Zionist Jew Benjamin Freedman investigated the case in 1959. In his
newsletter Common Sense of 1 May 1959 he described how he had been allowed
to visit the Times offices “through the courtesy of Mr. Arthur Hays
Sulzberger” (at that time somewhat of an anti-Zionist Jew) in order
to examine the reference file on the original article. He claimed to have
met with the Military Editor, Hanson Baldwin, who showed him “the results
of the(ir) searching investigations.”

Eight years later, a Zionist writer, Morris Kominsky, investigated Freedman’s
investigation. Baldwin this time claimed that he had never met Freedman,
as far as he could remember, and that the original figures were simply lifted
from the 1948 edition of the World Almanac. The affair is discussed at length
in Kominsky’s book The Hoaxers, Brandon Press (no relation!), Boston, 1970.

Voices

Even voices can be faked. Many people have felt their pulses quicken
as they listened to the famous speech of Sir Winston Churchill imploring
the British population to “fight on the beaches, etc.” Churchill
made the speech in the House of Commons, but as broadcasting from the Houses
of Parliament was not permitted, the speech would have to be presented over
again for the BBC radio listeners. Since matters of state were more pressing,
an actor was engaged to read the speech instead. His name was Norman Shelley,
and he had already established a minor reputation as a Churchill imitator.
The Prime Minister approved of the fakery, and even complimented Shelley
on his accuracy. “Very nice,” Churchill reportedly said, “he’s
even got my teeth right,” referring to the rattling of his dentures.

The fakery remained a secret for 39 years until Shelley told of his role
during an interview with the London Daily Mail. Shelley died on 22
August 1980, and his obituary in the Los Angeles Times of 25 August
was the first time that American readers were presented with this astonishing
story.

Magazines

Earlier this year, the leading Zionist organization in Great Britain,
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, issued a protest at an article in
History Today, a leading part-work monthly. The January 1980 issue
contained a feature entitled “A Nazi Travels to Palestine” describing
interface between the Nazi Government and the Zionists in Palestine during
the war. The article was written by a Jew, Dr. Jacob Boas, but explored
a seam of history which the Board felt was better left un-exploited. Another
Jewish historian, Dr. Geoffrey Alderman, leaped to Boas’ defense, and issued
a statement:

The action taken by the Board in relation to the article is, in my view,
another reflection of a dangerous anti-intellectualism which pervades the
Anglo-Jewish establishment and which is marked by a refusal to face realities
or to have cherished beliefs questioned dispassionately: the belief in
this case being, I suppose, that Jews and Nazis could not possibly have
ever had anything in common. I have read the article and, as a Jew, a Zionist,
and, may I add, a professional historian, I do not take exception to it
at all. As for the protests being made by the Board about the way in which
the article was advertised, this is really too petty to require further
comment.

Jewish Chronicle

4 January198O

Professor Alderman himself came under fire from the Deputies in 1978
for revealing in a letter to the London Times that some Jews voted for the
National Front. He was “severely condemned” by the Deputies for
“publicly revealing” sensitive findings. However, he still retains
his part-time post as a member of the Research Committee of the Board of
Deputies.

Photos

The area of photography is worth a whole book in itself.

As Udo Walendy shows in his Faked Atrocities (IHR, $5.00) many
“atrocity” pictures have been forged or arbitrarily captioned.
The Institute for Historical Review is currently compiling a dossier of
pictures which are recycled throughout many Exterminationist books with
a different description as caption each time. These findings will be published
later. But for now, what better description of the uses of fake photography
could we have but that put forward by Exterminationiste Lucy Dawidowicz
in her article “Visualizing the Warsaw Ghetto: Nazi Images of the Jews,
Refiltered by the BBC” which was published in SHOAH: A Review of
Holocaust Studies and Commemorations, University of Bridgeport, CT 06602:

Nowadays we live in an era of photomania, where photographs are regarded
as the magic key to unlock the doors of the past, which only the most effortful
study of history had previously been able to open. Nowadays people regard
pictures as the essence of truth, forgetting that, like written documents,
the camera falsifies objective reality because it creates its own illusion
of reality. Too often pictures have been made to serve the uses of propaganda.
Selective photography, posed or staged subject matter, technical tricks
of the trade which bring into existence nonexistent subjectsthese are the
standard ways the camera is made to lie. Too often the camera serves ends
that contribute neither to the truth of art nor to the truth of history.

(sic!)

Toys

The Zionists’ thought control even extends into the kindergarten. A two-year
campaign by the American Jewish Congress has resulted in the deletion of
war toys bearing swastikas by American toy manufacturers. Revell of Venice,
CA and Lindberg of Skokie, IL were the first to “suspend the manufacture
of swastika-emblazoned toys” and the largest manufacturer, Mattel of
Hawthorne, CA, were soon to follow. The AJC’s Director, Julius Schatz, gloated:

We consider the Mattel action to be a major victory in our effort to
discourage the production of toy tanks, planes, ships, and other military
objects carrying the symbol of destruction of six million Jews and
millions of others. Mattel’s announcement vindicates our stance… No
badge or symbol in human history is as foul a reminder of bestiality as
the swastika. Yet these insignia of blood lust, of human skin made into
lampshades, of millions of men and women and children slaughtered like
cattle, are emblazoned on toys that are sold by the million to American
children… it is also a matter of safeguarding young and vulnerable
children from the taint of war toys with swastikas, playing war games that
will simulate the Nazi war machine.

Thus, at a stroke, Toytown history is re-written, with the deletion of
one of the most essential aspects of any playroom or sandbox battle scenario:
The Bad Guys. Mr Schatz has not only ensured that impressionable American
youngsters will be unable to re-enact the Nilrnburg Rallies, with flypasts
of squadrons of swastika-emblazoned Stukas and Messerschmidts, nor indeed
the Munich putsch, with “the insignia of blood lust” flaunted
on the sides of Nazi Personenwagen, but he has also determined that The Good Guys in the battle scenes will be fighting with … Other Good Guys!

Presumably the ADL and other Zionists adopt this patronizing attitude
to us adults as well. It would appear by all evidence that they regard us
intellectually as children in a sandbox who need to be protected from things
that might influence our impressionable, vulnerable, little brains. It remains
to be seen, how much longer American academics are prepared to tolerate
this situation. As a consortium of Civil Liberties organizations pontificated
in an amicus curiae suit filed against the School Board of Warsaw,
IN recently:

The public school should be a vibrant, free market of ideas. Indeed,
if the “right to read and be exposed to controversial thoughts”
cannot flourish anywhere in the school house, the prospects are bleak that
it will ever flourish anywhere in society.

(sic, sic, and sic again!)

Unfortunately, this high-minded idea does not appeal to our old friend
Yaakov Riz, whose basement Holocaust Museum we mentioned on page 132 of
our Summer 1980 issue. Mr. Riz wrote to the Jewish Press on 5 September
1980 to point out how “the Talmud teaches us how to use Visual Propaganda.”
He quotes a passage from the Talmud where the Angels Gabriel and Michael
tricked God into drowning the wicked Egyptians by showing him an Egyptian
brick and a dead Jewish child. Riz vigorously advocates using the same trickery
to combat the wicked “Arabs, Nazis and Communists” who otherwise
are “winning their filthy hate campaign against Israel and American
Jewry.” One wonders what Talmudic trickery Riz and his cohorts have
used already?