Paul Rassinier: A Traitor to the Historical Methods

by L. O.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - fall 2000)

According to Hitler, "In a bastardized and niggerized world all concepts of the humanely beautiful and sublime would be lost forever." The Holocaust, the "intentional murder of European Jewry during World War II," is one of the greatest tragedies in recorded human history. No where in history has there ever been a government set out with the intentional principle and policy, to physically annihilate every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific group. It is common knowledge that the ideology of the Holocaust stemmed from the belief that denominated Aryan Germans as the most superior species on Earth. In the eyes of Adolf Hitler and his devoted followers, the racially inferior Jews were the main cause of Germany’s ills and the principal threat to Germany’s future, and, therefore, needed to be eliminated. Many people were surprised when, upon coming to power in 1933 as the chancellor of the German Reich, the Nazis began to carry out the program of their "Fuhrer" (leader). The program called for the complete extermination of the Jews, as well as Catholics, communists, gypsies, and others who were considered to be enemies or potential enemies of the Reich.

The Holocaust is perhaps one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and consequently many interpretations and personal accounts of the Holocaust have been documented. The majority of historians favor the truth by stating that the Holocaust was a German anti-Jewish propaganda that resulted in the death of several millions of European Jews. However, there are a number of individuals who argue that the destruction of the Jewish population is an exaggeration or a myth. These individuals have made it their life-long career to support their argument that that Germans were not at fault for the decimation of an entire race. Some "historical revisionists," also known as Holocaust deniers contend that the whole story of the Holocaust is a "fabrication." Others admitted it happened, but claim that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated. They claim it is only several thousands, not the estimated six million. Still, many acknowledge that a great number of deaths have occurred but that these deaths were unintentionally caused by war. Jews were wartime casualties, an occurrence that the Germans could hardly be blamed for. Some have claimed that the cause of the high number of deaths were diseases such as typhus, along with "natural deprivation" due to war and forced relocation that killed the Jews, not genocide. A number of deniers have even tried to go as far as saying that the genocidal intent of Hitler has never been fully documented, and, without undeniable proof it is safe to say that Hitler could have had full knowledge of the Jewish genocide. Others have even questioned the intentions and even the existence of the gas chambers. One of the most eminently known "historical revisionists" is Paul Rassinier, he is known as the father of Holocaust revisionism

During World War II, Rassinier was a highly decorated member of the French Resistance. In October of 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo for various activities, including the smuggling of Jewish refugees over the Franco-Swiss border. Rassinier was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald as punishment for his activities. Later he was moved to Dora where he stayed until the war ended. What caused this Jewish ally to turn his back on the very people he risked his life for? What made him decide to defend the Germans after his incarceration at the camps? What makes Rassinier stand out from other "historical revisionists" is that he has experienced life in a German concentration camp. Experiencing time in the concentration camps has gained Rassinier credibility. This paper will outline Paul Rassinier’s ideology based on his translated work, "Holocaust Stories and Lies of Ulysses." This is an introspective look into Paul Rassinier’s beliefs regarding his life at the German concentration camps compared to other survivor’s testimonies, as well as finding a plausible reason behind his change of opinion toward the Germans and Jewish people. Paul Rassinier, by using his "credibility" as a former wartime refugee, sets out to correct some of the exaggerated Holocaust facts. After the war, Rassinier returned to his native France and was elected to the Assemblee Nationale. He, trained in history, set out after the war to document his experiences within the German concentration camp system. However, it was following the publication of Rassinier’s earliest works that he realized that the wartime stories of other inmates were both popular and terrible exaggerations

Rassinier wrote, "The one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialist. The deportees-many of who were Communists- had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence." (Rassinier pg. 109). Rassinier began to debunk and deconstruct the works of his fellow inmates as fallacies, claiming that concentration camp literature were "a collection of contradictory pieces of ill natured gossip" (Rassinier pg. x), as well as free the SS from any unfair blame that have been cast upon them. In the Holocaust Story and Lies of Ulysses, Rassinier paints a horrible picture of the dead being brought from Dora to Buchenwald for cremation. "Everyday trucks brought full loads of dead bodies from Dora to be cremated at Buchenwald, and it was from the presence of these corpses that the horrors of the camp were deduced" (Rassinier pg. 38). Rassinier details the alarming death rate at Buchenwald due to "bad treatment, the poor insufficient food, the super human work, the lack of medicines, and pneumonia" (Rassinier pg. 44). Despite all that, he subsequently goes on to describe the Buchenwald as nothing more than a labor camp in which everyone works for the betterment of Germany. "[Buchenwald] was conceived in the minds of the [Nazi] authorities to be just a camp but a community working under the supervision for the building of the Third Reich, just like the other individuals of the German community who remained in relative liberty" (Rassinier pg.45). While in Buchenwald, he befriends a Czech (Chaouchs), Jircszah whom Rassinier shares the same ideas to. Rassinier is convinced that Jircszah is correct in his judgement. In defense of the SS, with the help of Jircszah he argues that it is not the SS that causes the majority of problems in the concentration camps but the inmates also. The SS "never meddled with the camp life itself I believed that Jircszah was more or less right; the National Socialists had resorted to this classic method of coercion, and it was the prisoners themselves who had made it still worse" (Rassinier pg.37). There was great corruption when a prisoner gained power. At times it was the prisoner given power who was much harsher than the SS officer. "The SS guarded the perimeter of the camp, and it can be said that we hardly ever saw the inside the camp, except when they hardly simply went through to take the salute of the prisoners " (Rassinier pg 53). However, Rassinier makes the mistake by using his experience as the framework for everyone’s experience

The testimony of every single inmate in every single Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. Rassinier claimed to hardly suffering from any great atrocity in the hands of the Nazis during his stay in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dora. Therefore, after observing other inmates’ more gruesome statements, he acknowledges them as an exaggeration because they do not match his own. It must be noted that Buchenwald was not an extermination camp, it was mainly a slave labor camp: Buchenwald was one of the largest slave labor system in all of Europe (97). The SS ruthlessly worked the prisoners to death in factories owned by Krupp, Thyssen, Farben, and many others. In these labor camps, there existed a difference between the treatment of Jews and non-Jews, and a hierarchy existed. The Nazi Germans divided human beings into a "hierarchy of races." According to Goldhagen, "the Nordic people — tall, blond, blue-eyed-were at the apex." Underneath the Scandinavians were the western Europeans, then the southern Europeans. Below them were the Slavs, then the Asian people, then "somewhere near the boundary separating human beings and primates," was the African American community. There were three groups of people that caused Germans to take drastic action against these people- the Jewish, the mentally ill, and the Slavs (Goldhagen 410). In the eyes of the Nazis, the Jews were conceived by the devil. The Jews were seen as a "biologically programmed people of great power, dedicated to destroying Germany, who by constitution and deed forfeited the protection of traditional morality. The Slavs were seen as a "beast of burden." They posed a threat to Germany because they were in a position to be in "a social Darwinian competition for land and resources" (Goldhagen pg.410). Goethe’s Oak- and around it Himmler built a concentration camp. Buchenwald became a massive prison demonstrating to Germans the fat awaiting those who oppose Hitler. In 1943 Buchenwald held only 17,00 prisoners, but after April 1944 it became a camp of deportees. Within these prisoners, the SS set aside "primitive" barracks for emergency needs, crowding 40,000 inmates into them. In another section the SS segregated the Jewish prisoner, where they were forced to buy their own food, otherwise they would starve to death (pg.92). Because Buchenwald was a labor camp, the prisoners were not subjected to the gas chambers. If it was not an extermination center, why did so many die there? People simply died there from disease, starvation, often times in the hands of the German SS, etc. The camp became unbearable to live in during the fall of 1944. It was devoid of the basic necessities of life; water, beds, sanitation, clothes. So many died that the bodies lay about in the open: "Nature’s call was answered atop naked, dead bodies

Savage struggles in the death took place over the pitiful daily ration Mess was commonly used in place of the latrines, partly from feebleness that made it impossible to leave the barrack, partly from fear of the weather outside or of theft, partly because it was almost impossible to get our of the crowded bunks. Those on top often climbed to the roof, by removing boards and roofing, and fouled the rafters" (Fieg pg. 93). The inmates referred to Buchenwald as the "camp of the slow death" (Feig pg. 94). In another occasion, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy, Thomas Geve, settled in the camp sleeping on the cold floor of Block 62. Later the Kapo gave him a bunk filled with a sack of straw, blankets, bugs, fleas, lice, mice, and five inmates to share it with (93). There may have been times when the Nazis provided leisure time in which inmates assigned to easy work were in good enough health to play soccer. The authorities found this a good advertisement for "prisoner morale." However, all leisure was short lived, for the SS intended its prisoners to work until they were no longer able to and die. There may have not been any gas chambers in Buchenwald, the authorities still managed, using variety of other methods, to kill thousands of prisoners. Such executions include the killing in Block 61 through injection; the detention building with its interrogation, torture, and solitary confinement; the shooting while trying to escape, beatings, trampling to death; and, of course, the infamous roll call. Rassinier’s description of the roll calls did not do justice to the actual phenomenon: "Ah! Those roll-calls!..whether it rained or the wind blew, we had to stand for hours and hours being counted and recounted" (Rassinier 39). But he seemed to dismiss the topic too quickly. His words did not do the task justice. It may have something to do with the fact that he is a non-Jew

A Frenchmen at that, and, according, to the Nazi social hierarchy they are second underneath the Scandinavians. All the survivors remember roll call as a daily opportunity for the SS to torture the prisoners. Often the command would be heard after roll call: "All Jews, remain behind." The SS would then force the Jews to repeatedly sing the "Jew Song": For years we wreaked deceit upon the nation, No fraud too great for us, no scheme too dark. All that we did was cheat and lie and swindle, Whether with dollar or with pound or mark, And now at last the Germans know our nature And barbed wire hides us safely out of sight. Traducers of the people, we were fearful To face the truth that felled us overnight. (95-96) The Jewish prisoners stood, slumped, sang songs, did exercise- whatever the Nazis required. Even the aged and the crippled performed head - stands in the snow. Based on his experience at the concentration camps, Rassinier came to believe in the non-existence of the infamous gas chambers. It was not until he was at Dora in 1944 that he learned of the about the gas chambers. He wrote, "In 1950, it was still too soon to pronounce a definite judgement on the existence of gas chambers in the camps; documents were wanting and those that existed were incomplete, inexact, and obviously apocryphal or falsified" (Rassinier pg. 158). In the 1964 article, The Drama of the European Jews, Rassinier’s view became more obvious: "With regard to gas chambers, the almost endless processions of false witnesses and of falsified documents to which I have invited the reader’s attention during this long study, proves, nevertheless, only one thing: never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order — or in fact, order — the extermination of the Jews in this or any other manner

Did such exterminations take place without orders? This question has haunted me for fifteen years" (pg. 270). Rassinier had concluded that no widespread gassings took place, and a policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe did not exist. Rassinier also provided a quantitative analysis of Jewish wartime deaths. However, the use of gas chambers by the Nazis had been proven by a wide collection of evidence. Testimony given by the perpetrators themselves; accounts of prisoners, especially, members of the "Sonderkommando," a group of inmates who were forced to remove and dispose dead bodies from the gas chambers after the execution; and evidence shown in the "Zyklon B Trial" (March 1946, Hamburg, Germany). In the "Zyklon B Trial" the owner and the executive, Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, of the company that manufactured Zyklon B (a "deadly hydrogen cyanide" used for gassing at Auzchwitz and Majdanek) were sentenced to death after the court had proven that they had prior knowledge to the actual use of Zyklon B — to help terminate inmates. Other evidence included blueprints of the "killing installments" and orders for Zyklon B survived the war (Breitbart).

Consider Rassinier insistence against the existence of gas chambers. If there were no such things as gas chambers, then what happened to the large number of Jewish population that were thought to have been killed in the hands of the Nazis? In the final chapters of Rassinier’s Holocaust Story and Lies of Ulysses describes the emigration of European Jews to Israel and United States from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslavakia. Although it happened under brutal conditions that caused numerous casualties, Rassinier goes on to say that such deaths were unfortunate and a terrible coincidence, and were not deliberate. These deaths were not aimed directly toward the Jewish population. When Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933, there were less than 600,000 Jews living in Germany. Although a number of these German Jews who understood what was happening and who had the means to do so began to flee in panic. There were some who remained. But, the majority of Jews murdered by the Nazis did not live in Germany. They resided in the countries that Germany conquered — areas such as Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. These areas had the highest population of European Jews. Holocaust scholars such as Jacob Robinson and Helmut Krausnick, have rounded the numbers to six million European Jews killed. By comparing Europe’s Jewish population before and after the war, and by taking wartime statistical reports on ghettos, concentration camps, and mass executions, and compiling them together, it was possible to approximate that six million European Jews were killed (Breitbart). The "authentic" German document, Korherr Report (name after Richard Korherr, chief statistician for the SS) confirms the number of Jewish death in millions. In fact, the document puts the number at more than 2,254,000 died by the end of 1942. Taking to account that war in Europe would not end until May of 1945, which would give ample of time for more Jewish deaths. The number of Jewish deaths exceeded anyone’s imagination.

Rassinier took pride that he is a survivor of a German concentration camps. With that background he sets out to prove that his arguments are credible because he has lived through it. But what Rassinier to turn his back on the Jewish population he had risked his life to save [PHDN note: It is esatblished that Rassinier has not saved any jew and was a provent antisemite before the war] ? Perhaps he had been influenced by his Jirczsha, his Czech friend. After all it was Jircszah who first mention of an "exaggeration" to Rassinier: "’There is a lot that is true in all that is said about the horrors for which they are setting,’ according to Jircszah, ‘but there is a lot of exaggeration, too" (Rassinier pg. 35). " everyone hopes and wants to come out of this business with a 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 pg. 35).

In Mein Kampf, Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews was that of complete hatred. He described the Jew as a parasite: "Wherever he establishes himself the people who grant him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or later He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering in cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate" (Feig pg.10). Hitler defined the Jews as "definitely a race" and insisted on their "uncompromising removal" (Feig pg.9). In medieval times the only good Jew was one who converted to Christianity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the only good Jew was one who assimilated. By 1933 the only good Jew was one who emigrated. But even then, a shred pf goodness or virtue was possible. From Hitler, however, we learned that the only good Jew was a dead one. Hitler came to power in 1933 with two aims: to wage war against the Versailles Treaty, and to wage war against and gain victory over the Jew. He believed he had a divine mission to purify his Germany and create a true racial community, cleansing it of its "evil, its devil, its bloodsucker — the Jew" (Feig pg.9). Hitler became "eternal wrath upon the head of the foul enemy of mankind." "No nation can remove this hand from its throat," Hitler wrote, "except by the sword such a process is and remains a bloody one" (Ferencz pg. 2). Within a few years upon rising to power Hitler lead an anti-Jewish propaganda. By 1935 German Jews were divested of their citizenships and the protection of the courts. Sexual relations between a Jew and one of "Aryan blood" were made punishable by death. Everywhere, Jews were insulted, taunted, bullied, and beaten without provocation. On November 1938, the SS launched a massive program against the Jews of Germany. Jewish synagogues were burnt, Jewish shops and homes were smashed and looted, and Jews were assaulted and killed in the streets. Thirty-five thousand Jews were arrested on the "night of the broken glass," the Kristallnacht (Ferencz pg.4). German Jews who understood what was happening and who had the means to do so began to flee in panic. Those who remained were to be deprived not only of their civil rights and their property but also of their hope.

Finally, some six million Jews of Europe would lose their lives as a result of Hitler’s agenda. Within the next few years, a number of concentration camps are built. As the persecution if Jews, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, communist, gypsies, and others who were conceived to be enemies or possible enemies of the German Reich continued to grow, so did the number of concentration camps to contain them (Ferencz pg.3). Buchenwald, near Weimar, was built in 1937. Buchenwald was a labor camp, which contained a variety of prisoner, a majority of them non-Jews. The idea of using prisoners as workers had been in the process for a long time when large German business corporations took the final step during World War II by investing huge sums in the construction of factories at the camps — for the purpose of using the pool of camp slave labor. It was in labor camps such as Buchenwald that Jews were subjected to force labor. Nazi Germans believed that work was a "taxing burden" to the Jews, and by forcing them to work, the Nazi were punishing them: "Work ‘punished’ the Jew physically, and thus wreaked vengeance upon him for his centuries, indeed millennia, of exploitation. Another reason why the German put the Jews to work was the satisfaction of watching a Jew work: "The second non-material motive for getting a Jew to work was the satisfaction it gave his German masters, by providing them with the pleasing sight of a laboring Jew and by demonstrating their ability to subdue the Jew to such a degree that he acts contrary to his nature, namely like an honest man" (Goldhagen pg. 286). Although the Germans used Jews for "useful" labor, then were some cases in which the Jews were forced to work to humor the Germans. In one case, during Germany’s annexation of Austria, several Jews were forced to clean a Viennese street with a toothbrush. Another case occurred in Buchenwald in which the SS forced the Jews to construct a wall but was told to break it down the next day, and then the next day was to told to put it up, then tear down the next, etc. as a form of torture and punishment (Goldhagen pg. 285-286).

Thus, Holocaust is a great tragedy. It is known fact that Holocaust is real. Yet, there are still a number of people who deny it ever happened. Paul Rassinier is known as the father of Holocaust Revisionism. His account of his imprisonment at Buchenwald may have had some credibility but he makes the mistake of "universalizing" is account. Instead of accepting other inmate stories, he totally dismisses. It is at that point, when he dismisses other accounts that he loses his credibility. However, many years later, his work is still a great controversy. Many contemporary Holocaust deniers look to him as a base for their arguments. One of these is Arthur Butz, the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz basically accepted Rassinier’s "quantive analysis’ on of Jewish war-time deaths, and commented, "I will offer her no definite estimate of Jewish losses. However, I have no strong reason to quarrel with Rassinier’s estimate" (Butz pg, 17). Rassinier still remained one of the leading Holocaust revisionist. Even, years after his death still remained one of the most controversial Holocaust revisionists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feig, Konnilyn G. Hitler’s Death Camps: the Sanity of Madness. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1979.

Ferencz, Benjamin B. Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1979.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc., 1996.

Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust. New York: Plume Book, 1993.

Rassinier, Paul. The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses. California: Institute of Historical Review, 1978.