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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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people massacred, but only 500,000 to 1,000,000 (39, pp. 64 65), or rather 1,000,000 to
1,500,000 (40, p. 94) or 896,892 to
1,485,292 (41, p. 210 211).
He
reached these figures by astutely mixing reasonings and false information with
semblances of demographic calculations. The lines of argument are often
completely absurd; the information was taken from highly debatable sources when
not notoriously false. The demographic data were gleaned without any
discernment at one time in this work, at another time more simply in a
newspaper article presenting no guarantee of seriousness. Sometimes they were
taken from an improvised speech not claiming to be an exact piece of reasoning,
or even from a chance declaration having but a very distant connection with the
problem of the victims of the "final solution." All of this hotch potch was put
together by Rassinier to stupefy the reader and lead him to blindly accept the
former's "conclusions."
A few examples will clearly illustrate
Rassinier's methods. The sole difficulty lies in the fact that there are only
too many of these examples to choose from.
Here is the first, very
simple specimen: Rassinier approached (41,
p. 114) the problem of the number of Jews living in Russia, and he cited the
total of two to three million in 1962 according to the estimate of the
"Institute of Jewish Affairs" in London. But that did not seem serious to him,
"if one believes M. Nahoum Goldmann," who himself mentioned the figure of three
million in 1963. According to Rassinier, this proved that the "statistics of
Jewish origin" were falsified. It is to be pointed out that M. Goldmann did not
at all discuss the problem of the number of Jews in Russia, but rather that of
their position in that country; and the statistics remain in this context
without importance. If Rassinier had not sought to confuse one of the most
simple problems and to create doubt for his reader, it would have been very
easy for him to satisfy his curiosity by examining the results of the official
census of the population of the USSR by "nationality." He would have thus
learnt that in 1959 there were 2,268,000 Jews in that country.
Since we
are considering the problem of the Jews in Russia, another example comes to
mind of the "seriousness" of Rassinier's work. On numerous occasions, he quoted
an article by a Soviet Jewish journalist, David Bergelson. The latter had
written on December 5, 1942, in the Yiddish paper published in Moscow and known
to Rassinier thanks to the newspaper, "Der Weg," of Buenos Aires (January 1953)
that "due to the evacuation (inside Russia, G.W.) the majority (80%) of the
Jews from the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latavia were saved."
Rassinier unreservedly accepted this information. It allowed him to figure up
that in the Baltic countries alone there were "196,000 certain survivors" and
"49,000 missing in 1945" (41, pp.
177-178). The reader should be informed that Bergelson was a journalist who
belonged to an ad hoc Jewish "Committee" in the USSR at the end of 1941. It
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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
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