The Conspiracy Behind it all… Zionism

by V. V.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 1998)

Introduction

"The existence of the Holocaust was not a matter of debate. To do so would give them legitimacy and a stature they in no way deserve. It would elevate their antisemitic ideology — which is what Holocaust denial is — to the level of responsible historiography — which it is not." Holocaust deniers seek to place majority of the blame on the Jews. According to them the entire Jewish Holocaust was a hoax, one big lie, or propaganda. The deniers main objective is to distort the truth. They believe that the entire Holocaust was a Zionist conspiracy. Revisionists believe that "Holocaust denial is an ‘other side’ of history — ugly, reprehensible, and extremist — but an other side nonetheless"

Jews had been blamed for everything horrible that occurred in the world. They were blamed for "poisoning well, killing Christian children, spreading the Black Plague, and causing famines, earthquakes, and droughts…. Henry Ford, whose name was synonymous with American ingenuity and industriousness, blamed a Jewish conspiracy for social and economic upheavals." Accusations flew about Zionist’s main goal and aspiration was to gain the total sympathy of the world in order to disguise their true intentions. "The central assertion for the deniers is that Jews are not victims but victimizers. They ‘stole’ billions in reparations, destroyed Germany’s good name by spreading the ‘myth’ of the Holocaust, and won international sympathy because of what they claimed had been done to them."

The deniers argue that the deniers’ views, "however ugly, must be given a fair hearing, they take a positive Western value to an extremist end. They fail to recognize that the deniers’ contentions are composite of claims founded on racism, extremism, and virulent antisemitism." Being very quick to exploit the truth and the situation, deniers have engaged in numerous manipulative calculations. They have manipulated the two basic principles of the free country: "free speech and the search for historical truth."

"There was no rational basis to the Nazi atrocities. There was, however, the mythic of antisemitism. Hitler and the Nazis understood this, Mythical thinking and the force of the irrational have a strange and compelling allure for the education and uneducated alike. Intellectuals in Nazi Germany were not immune from irrational, mystical thinking." But some have succumbed in another fashion, "supporting Holocaust denial in the name of free speech, free inquiry, or intellectual freedom."

Revisionists argue that Nazi documents that spoke of the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’ were really referring to proposed transfer of the Jews to the ghettos. Their fundamental argument is that "not only were the Nazis not guilty of atrocities, but that the true culprits were the Jews themselves. Jews, both those who died and those who survived, deserved no sympathy because they had helped to instigate the war by supporting the treaty of Versailles." The deniers also argue that the gas chambers were used for disinfecting, not for annihilation. They state that the survivors were exaggerating what happened to them, and it was no the SS that was responsible for the terrors of the camps but the inmates to whom they entrusted the running of the camps."

Zionism

Zionism attempted to find a home for men of Jewish religion and Jewish race in a region far removed from a country where that race was nurtured and that religion came into being. It was persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire especially, and widespread anti-Semitism, which had led to the birth of Zionism before the First World War. Working on the inhospitable land they had been inspired by the belief that they were laying the basis of a state for the Jewish people. Zionists rejected radicalism, religious prejudice and anti-Semitism, and asserted, with Herzl the father of Zionism, that the Jews were a people, dispersed in history, but one people wherever they now lived. "We shall always remain strangers among the nations. They may even be moved by a sense of humanity and justice to emancipate us, but they will never respect us, so long as we make, ‘ubi bene ibi patria’ our guiding principle, indeed almost a religion and place it above our great national memories. Religion fanaticism may cease to cause hatred of the Jewish in more culturally advanced countries; but despite enlightenment and education, the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn respect of the nation whom he dwells."

Zionism was a movement advocating the return of Jews to their homeland of Palestine. Following the Russian programs it assumed a political character, notably through Theodore Herzl’s book Der Judenstaat and the establishment of the World Zionist organization. The onset of Jewish nationalism, known as Zionism, first in cultural and later in political form, was a part of the European-wide nationalist trend. Cultural Zionism appeared in the work of the so-called Hebrew Revival. This allowed for the transformation of the Hebrew "dead" liturgical language into a more modern literary and politically used language. Political Zionism differed from other manifestations of European nationalism mainly in the fact that its sacred national soil lay outside of Europe. Otherwise, it possessed all the characteristics of the other national movements of the day.

Self-reliance was the essence of Zionism. Zionism is a Jewish programme. It is a Jewish programme because it requires of "Jews courage, initiative, resourcefulness, tenacity, will-power and sacrifice. For Jewish emancipation the most important condition is that others should be humane." "Jews were at best suffered, nowhere were they welcomed or loved. For the Jews were strangers; there was a world of difference in body and soul between the Semitic Urstamm and those whose ancestors lived in northern Europe. The Jews were neither Germans nor Slaves, neither French nor Greek, but the children of Israel, related to the Arabs." For the Jews, being left homeless was the hearth of the problem. Their dedication to their county and soil was what they needed for a normal national life. "Without soil a man sinks to the status of a parasite, feeding on others…. Hess maintained that if emancipation was not compatible with adherence to the Jewish nation, Jews ought to give up the former for the latter. They were a religious group, but a separate nation, a special race, and the modern Jew who denied this was not only an apostate, a religious renegade, but a traitor to his people, his tribe, his race."

Zionism has tradition to support it; "but if it were simply a thing of antiquity, it would perish; if it were simply a matter of history and not of living experience, it would be relegated to the sphere of archaeology. Zionism, although old, like the Jewish people, thinks freshly and independently on Jewish subjects. The roots of Zionism are in the past, but blossom in the present and its fruit in the future. The reason is simply that everything really Jewish must be bound up with history. Zionism is, first of all, undoubtedly a great historical idea. It is a simple matter of fact that Israel’s history begins with Zionism."

Zionism and its response to Antisemitism

Zionism was a response to anti-Semitism. "Jewish religion, Zion as a symbol, the nostalgia for the lost homeland and other mystical factors played a role in the development of Zionism." After the First World War the trend towards Zionism was strengthened by the growth of antisemitic movements which led to the rise of Nazism. If it had not been for the increase in tension and anti-Jewish persecution, Zionism might not have flourished as it did.

Zionism had neither money, nor military power, nor even much political value. The Zionists response to the Nazis was no different from the traditional response of Zionism towards anti-Semitism. All they ever wanted was a land of their own. Zionism has been challenged on all levels. It has been argued that the Jews had no right to a state of their own. It had also established that the Jews had no right to survive as a group. Instead they were blamed for all of Germany’s misery. On the contrary, "Jews had certain positive contributions to German cultural life, in the fields of science, art, literature, in their patronage of the arts and in their philanthropy." However, the Jews were looked as unfavorable in the eyes of the Germans. Instead the Germans believed that the Jews "misconstructed in good faith the traditions and ‘myths’ of the German people and thus exercised on the whole a confusing and disturbing influence."

As a consequence to the Weimar Republic the Jews were more and more isolated socially and economically. "A sort of ‘re-ghettoizing’ set in, reminding one of that of the 1870’s but now far more drastic. Societies as a whole closed its doors to them. The students’ clubs declared the Jews to be not satisfaktionsfahig, that is, incapable of being challenged to a duel, and introduced the ‘Aryan clause.’ The same course was taken by the sports clubs, the ramblers’ associations, and so on. The ‘superior’ summer boarding houses declined Jewish guests, a thing, which previously had only occurred exceptionally. To a great extent Jewish shops were avoided, factories refused to appoint Jewish engineers,…At the same time the Jews were being hit by all the economic misfortunes that fell upon Germany. In the smaller towns, where everyone knew everyone else and the Jews therefore were particularly defenseless against antisemitism, the economic boycott and psychic torture became altogether unbearable to many a Jew and a chief cause of the rapid decimating of the small Jewish communities and the wholesale flight to the great towns and industrial centers."

Liberation from the Jews was one of the many mottoes and ideas that were vivid within antisemitism. For Jews, Wagner perceives entry into modern society as the "infiltration of a wholly alien and antagonistic group whose success symbolizes the spiritual and creative crisis of German and European culture. The Jews represent the ’evil conscience of our modern civilization ‘ or, to quote another phrase much repeated by the Nazis, ‘the plastic demon of the decline of mankind.’ They embodied the corrupt, money-making principle of the new bourgeois world which Wagner held responsible for its artistic decay." Wagner depicted the modern and the educated, assimilated Jew as being "the most heartless of all human beings…. The Jew, wholly divorced from the Volksgeist (spirit of the race), has no passion, no soul, no ‘inner capacity for life’, no true music or poetry. He is a cold, loveless, purely cerebral being…. The only redemption from this sterility lies in the ‘going under’ of Jewry, its complete dissolution and disappearance."

Many if not all the Jews were confined to a specific type of job. Everything and anything was done to suppress the Jewish businessmen and their business options and aspirations. Anti-Jewish stereotypes had preceded racial thinking by the Germans. The Jews were only allowed to pursue such jobs and businesses that were undesirable to non-Jews. As a result, many Jews went into the work force as moneylenders, lawyers, physicians, and all other roles that were considered to be for the lower class in society. Many of these roles in society were undesirable by most except for the Jews as a result of their religious beliefs and affirmations. Such roles as pawn broker in a textile industry, jewelry, and used goods trade had a very negative response by all those of not the Jewish faith.

Any opportunity that was presented to the Jews, they took and turned it into a moneymaking occupation. This stirred up a lot of tension and jealousy among the Jews and the gentiles. With the treat of competition, many of the Christians began an uprise. " The Jews did not feel bound by guild rules of conduct, and the spirit of innovation, they developed by their checkered and dangerous existence in exile." From this concern with the Jews economic activity rose wild rumors of Jews supposedly spoiling all commerce. "The Jew was a swindler and dishonest business man who could not be trusted. Because of their customs, they were vicious and dishonest, incorrigible and incapable of regeneration."

These ideas as Jews emerging as dangerous competitors in the liberal professions, especially journalism, medicine and law, racism was obviously attractive to most. It provided a way of reconstructing the social boundaries that had fallen with the ghetto walls. Instead it replaced them with a new "biological criteria based on blood and descent." Antisemitism did not disappear with the Holocaust. Instead it was heightened by "secular universalist ideologies like Soviet Communism or indeed Zionism, which proposed to ‘normalize’ the Jewish status by creating an independent nation-state in Israel. The image of the Jew as an outsider, a nonconformist, an anomaly and an irritant has survived the rise and fall of all the secular ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Antisemitism, too, has adapted itself to the post-war situation of Jewry, transformed by the creation of Israel, by the Cold War and by the response of the Arab and Islamic world to the challenge of a non-Muslim, non-Arabic-speaking Jewish state in its midst. These new factors have, if anything heightened the usefulness of antisemitism as a weapon that can be exploited for the most potean purposes."

The Denier’s Arguments

Many Holocaust and Zionist deniers argue that the rationale of the Zionists was evident: According to them, dealing with the emancipation of European Jews would be a betrayal to Zionism. They were using all their means and effort to found a Jewish state in Palestine and were openly expressing that they could not make any move to save the European Jews from the ill-treatment of the Nazis The deniers believe that that the Zionists did not make any move to rescue the European Jews from the concentration camps, because these Jews were in no way any danger nor were they in no sense exterminated by the Nazis in these camps. The Nazis, instead, were employing these Jews as workers and taking care of their health as much as they could. The Nazis ordered tons of Zyklon B to protect the Jews from typhus. The Jews were challenged with no danger except illness in these camps where they could participate in sport life and cultural activities (Yeah right!). You must keep in mind that these camps had sport fields, amphitheaters, and swimming pools of Auschwitz.

The Zionists were very well aware of all these facts and knew they had no reason on earth to worry. They knew that the Holocaust stories were all false since they were the ones who made them up! The Zionists thought that the mass extermination of the Jews would justify their claim to settle in Palestine after the war. Yet, in reality, mass extermination of the Jews really did not exist. Actually, the Zionists did not want to shed Jewish blood but instead wanted to pretend as if Jewish blood was shed and in turn attain some rights for themselves. They asserted the fallacy that these Jews did not die of disease, but were murdered intentionally by the Nazis. They exaggerated the number of Jews who were allegedly to have died about ten times and produced scenarios for the mass extermination tale such as that of the gas chamber. They spread all these stories and false rumors during and after the war, a vigorous lie-fabrication campaign were launched. (It is amazing what people believe and all the loonies you can find in the Internet.)

The Deniers argue that the Holocaust was a lie fabricated by the Zionists in hopes of creating a more powerful Jewish state. With it, the Jews would be able to control the entire world with their influence and manipulative ways. Many deniers’ documents and books circulate about the alleged conspiracies of the Jewish people and the Zionists. Many of the documents blame the Jews for the freemason revolution in Russia, along with conspiring to dominate the entire world. Some deniers acknowledge that some Jews were incarcerated; however they say that all of these facilities had all the luxuries of home and then some. They included swimming pools and dance halls, and recreational facilities. And if, some Jews died, it was blamed as a natural consequence of the war time deprivations. In The Protocols of the wise men of Zion, Serge Nilus, a known Holocaust denier, claims that the Jews were plotting to bring the goyim, non-Jew, under their control and manipulation.

It was claimed that the Jews felt that "the atrocity, which enjoyed by law the labour of the workers, was interested in seeing that the workers were well fed, healthy and strong. We (the Jews) are interested in just the opposite — in the diminution, the killing out of the goyim. Our power is in the chronic shortness of food and physical weakness of the worker because by all t this implies he is made the slave of our will, and he will not find in his own authorities either strength or energy to set against our will." The Holocaust deniers believe that the Jews were trying to gain complete control and separate the non-Jews from each other. In Nilus’ work, The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, he claims that the Jews "In order to incite seekers after power to a misuse of power we (the Jews) have to set all forces in opposition one to another, breaking up their liberal tendencies towards independence. To this end we have stirred up every form of enterprise, we have armed our parties, we have set up authority as a target for every ambition. Of States we have made gladiatorial arenas where a host of confused issues contend…. A little more, and disorders and bankruptcy will be universal."

It is the thought that the Jews will achieve complete monopoly over the entire world. They will direct their attention and all their powers to do that which is beneficial for them and their people. They will do what is need to obtain the end means that they desire. This whole notion takes us back to set one. Once again, we are to assume that the entire Jewish race was driven on the mere need for superficial needs and goods. "Evil is the one and only means to attain the end, the good. Therefore we must not stop at bribery, deceit, and treachery when they should serve towards the attainment of our end." Holocaust deniers make allegations that imply that the Jews have a tremendous clout and influence over the press and the entire world. It is their thought that the Jewish international rights and strengths need to be reinforced at the expense of the nation rights of the non-Jewish world. Holocaust deniers first tried to justify the occurrences, and then they tried to deny them. "This is the means by which those who still advocate the principles of fascism attempt to reintroduce it as a viable political system."

Denier H. Barnes, one of the major Holocaust deniers, believed that "in order to justify the ‘horrors and evil results of the Second World War,’ those who had led the Allies into war also needed to justify their efforts. There were two false dogmas that ‘met the need perfectly’: Germany’s diabolism in provoking the war and committing massive atrocities." Barnes also felt that the "allegations’ and ‘exaggerations’ against Germany were not just capricious, Barnes argued, but served an important purpose for historians and political leaders from the Allied nations." It was during this time that Barnes was introduced to the works of Rassinier, and his claims that the Holocaust was a hoax. "Barnes described Rassinier as a ‘distinguished French historian’ and applauded him for questioning the existence of gas chambers in concentration camps in Germany and for exposing the ‘exaggeration of the atrocity stories."

Paul Rassinier, a former Communist and a Socialist who had been interned in the "concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dora, published Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the Line). This was the first in a series of books he would write during the next two decades intended to show that survivors’ claims about the behavior of the Nazis, particularly in relation to the atrocities, could not be trusted." Rassinier set out two propositions. He suggested that the survivors exaggerated what happened to them and that it wasn’t the SS that was responsible for the atrocities and the terrors of the camps but the inmates who were entrusted in running the camps. Rassinier set out to discredit and demolish the creditability of the prisoners and their testimony. "As long as one could trust what they said, any attempt to absolve the Nazis would be futile. But given the sympathy toward the inmates that existed particularly during the years immediately after the war, he could not ascribe to them diabolical or even devious motives. Instead he explained their supposed behavior in psychological terms:

Human beings need to exaggerate the bad as well as the good and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Everyone hopes and wants to come out of this business with the halo of a saint, a hero, or a martyr and each one embroiders his own Odyssey without realizing that the reality is quite enough in itself."

Rassinier flat out dismissed all of the testimony of the survivors. Instead he attempted to transform the Nazis’ from perpetrators into benefactors. He claimed that the Nazi’s motives were for the positive and in no way meant harm. They just wanted to "rehabilitate the strayed sheep and to bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community, [and] … its destiny." Rassinier argued that all the accusations of the Nazi committed mass murder through the gas chambers were fabrications and inventions of the 'Zionist establishment.’ He also "contended the charge about gas chambers was a fabrication, as was the claim that six million Jews died."

For Rassinier as well as for other holocaust deniers, the culprits were easily identifiably. "The ‘Zionists,’ abetted in their conspiracy by a select number of Jewish historians and institutions that conduct research on the Holocaust, were the responsible parties." The Zionist conspiracy is that the Jewish community and institutions was set on the love of money. The love of money was the driving force behind all those vicious lies and accusations about Germany. The Jews wished to "make Germany an ever-lasting milk cow for Israel. They devised the hoax and then demanded that ‘Germany pay Israel sums calculated on the basis of about 6,000,000 dead."

According to Rassinier, it was all a plot against the German’s from day one. Germany was an innocent bystander who was being victimized. Ever form of explanation was and is still used to explain the actions taken by the Germans. They even "contended that the amount of reparations Germany paid to Israel was calculated on the basis of the number of dead; higher the death toll, the greater the financial reward. Israel, with the aid of cooperative Jewish historians and ‘Zionist establishment,’ had inflated the number of dead in order to ‘swindle’ the Germans out of millions of marks." Rassinier along with all other Holocaust deniers have gone to great lengths to explain their actions and turn the tables around. The German’s have portrayed themselves as innocents as can be. They, with great ease, portray the Jews in a negative overtone. Changing, bending, and even fabricating the truths in order to smell like a rose. The Germans have used every tactic to falsify documents and information and dismiss all survivor testimonies. Their main concern is to discredit their enemies and in doing so, raise their own name and creditability.

Evidence Against the Deniers

Zionism main plot was to regain Jewish self-respect and dignity in the eyes of the non-Jews; and to rebuild a Jewish national home. "The Zionist movement has certainly succeeded in carrying out part of its assignment. The establishment of the Jewish state has been the greatest turning point in two thousand years of Jewish history and has had a profound effect on Jewish life all over the world." Anti-Semitic ideas have given momentum to the idea of the Zionist conspiracy. Many of the anti-Semitic documents and arguments are based on false information or plagiarized. Many of these documents especially those by Nilus are full of ambiguities. Many are documents written and needed to stir up anti-Semitic sentiments rather that truth based. Instead the Jewish people and the Zionism was created to face an "Uphill struggle in its endeavour to make its neighbours recognize its right of existence. While this struggle continues, the existence of the state and its independence is no more assured that that of other small countries whose geopolitical location exposes them to the expansive designs of a superpower."

Many of the blames and injustice suffered by the Jews were as a result of economic turmoil within Europe. Anti-Semitic sentiments were derived from jealousy and fear. The Jews were made as escape goats for all evil ever occurred or endured by the German’s. "Being a latecomer among the national movements, Zionism from the very beginning was a movement in a hurry, forever racing against time." It was believed by the German’s that the Jews spread these vicious lies to drive them into the ground and completely ruin their reputation. "The Jews represented the ‘evil conscience of our modern civilization’ or, to quote another phrase much repeated by the Nazis, ‘the plastic demon of the decline of mankind.’ They embodied the corrupt, money-making principle of the new bourgeois world which Wagner held responsible for its artistic decay." The Jews were often time depicted as "the most heartless of all human beings’, alien and apathetic in the midst of a society he does not understand, whose history and evolution are indifferent to him. The Jew, wholly divorced from the Volksgeist (‘spirit of the race’), has no passion, no soul, no ‘inner capacity for life’,… he is a cold, loveless, purely cerebral being."

Time and time again, the deniers go on to believe the lies they have fabricated in their minds. I guess it is true about the saying if you repeat a lie over and over again, you yourself will soon enough begin to believe it yourself. That is clearly the case with the deniers. They seem to have an excuse and a story with supposed proof that can not be justified on how the Holocaust was all a conspiracy to ruin Germany and gain control over the world by the Zionist’s. We have heard every excuse in the book and every argument, however non-are with justice or with significant proof or reason. The German’s are looking for an escape goat; they found that in the Jews and in Zionism.

Conclusion

Hitler had exploited anti-Semitic feelings on his rise to power and latter called for a ‘final solution to the Jewish question.’ Most Jews in countries overrun by the Nazis who did not emigrate in time were victims of the Holocaust, which effectively obliterated the Jewish secular and religious life that was flourishing in Europe for centuries. Many anti-Semitic measures were taken against the Jews. In Germany, after the Nuremberg Laws, Jews were lost citizenship rights, the right to hold public office, practice professions, intermarry with a German, or use public education. All their property and business were registered and sometimes sequestered. Continual acts of violence were perpetrated against them, and propaganda encouraged ‘true’ Germans to hate and fear them. How could a country on the rise to complete power be run out or controlled by a group of people who had no country, no nationality, and no voice? This is a little difficult people including myself to believe. It’s your turn to decide!

Works Cited

Bernstein, Herman, The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion" (New York, NY: Covici and Friede Publishers, 1935

Hertzberg, Arthur, History of Zionism. (New York, NY: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1969)

Laqueur, Walter, A History of Zionism. (New York, NY: Holt Reinhart, and Winston, 1972)

Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: growing assault on truth and memory. (New York, NY: A Plume Books, 1993)

Nilus, Serge, The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. (Boston, MA: 1921)

Poliakov, Leon. The history of Anti-Semitism III. Org. pub. Histoire de l’antisemitisme: de Voltaire a Wagner. 1968. Trans. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975

The Zionist Terror Network: Background and Operations of the Jewish defense League and other criminal Zionist Groups. (A Special Report by The Institute for Historical Review; 1985)

Valentine, Hugo. Antisemitism historically and critically examined. Trans. A. G. Chater. (New York, NY: The Viking Press, 1936)

Wistrich, Robert S. Antisemitism: The longest hatred. (New York, NY: Phantheon Books, 1991)