Jurgen Graf: A Holocaust Denier Hitler Would Be Proud Of

by N. T.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 2003)

Jurgen Graf touted as a "True Swiss Hero" by those who also claim the Holocaust never happened. Graf is writer of several reformist books and has close ties to the Institute for Historical Review. He is a Philologist by trade and fluent in 18 languages, which he uses to his advantage to cast a spell of enchantment over those to which he writes. That said it comes as no big shock that Graf writes with an agenda in mind. His agenda is similar to those who share his same beliefs, to prove there were no gas chambers built and used for mass extermination, to prove that the 6 million killed is just a figment of someone's imagination, and to prove that there was never a direct order or plan to exterminate the Jewish race. One of Graf's books in particular even tries to discredit a know Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg and his standard work on the Holocaust. 

Graf is a Holocaust denier that curiously uses many of his fellow colleagues revisionist texts to site from in order to make his point. In order to balance this fact out he ads a few scholarly quotes from respected historical sources, most however are pulled out of their original context. He does this because there is not enough solid evidence to back up his claims, so he intentionally ignores, conveniently disregards and manipulates any and all significant facts that could discredit his thesis. All one has to do to prove this fact however, is read one of his books and cross-reference the bibliography with the sources provided which speak for themselves.

Originally I found Jurgen Graf by mistake because I was interested in doing my paper on the Swiss denial of Jewish bank accounts and ran into his name while doing some research. I thought He was the link I had been looking for because he was Swiss and he denied not only that the Swiss owed reparations for banks accounts but also the Holocaust itself. Graf is the leader of the Swiss group "Truth and Justice" that believe the Holocaust never happened and therefore the so-called survivors are not entitled to Swiss reparations. Unfortunately, there is not much else linking him to the denial of Swiss bank accounts, which is probably due to the recent prison sentence in his home country of Switzerland and his subsequent flight to Iran where he is currently in exile. However, there is a multitude of information about him and his work as a revisionist in which I became interested. For this paper I chose to concentrate on two of Graf's books, Holocaust or Hoax? And The Giant With Feet Of Clay, Raul Hilberg and His Standard Work on the Holocaust. Throughout the paper I will show how Graf uses biased sources and incorrectly quotes scholarly sources to suit his central thesis. In order to contrast Graf's lack of unbiased sources, scholarly journals, documents, and books will be used to put things in an accurate context.

 In Holocaust or Hoax? Graf takes on the countries of the world in order to show that the Nazi’s, or as he calls them the National Socialist Party, did not commit any crimes out of the ordinary. He does this by arguing analogically; however what he is doing is distracting the reader from the cause at hand to diffuse any preconceived notions they may have about the crimes and their unique appearance in history. At first this approach seems logical, however, his comparisons are over used and tend to condescend the reader's intelligence. After a while Graf's approach grows tiresome and the realization comes that he is nothing more than a clever magician distracting the audience at one end in order to guide them through his illusion.

Graf argues that the worst crimes in WWII were not committed by the Nazis but by the Western Allies. He states that, "it is true that atrocities were in fact committed during the war, atrocities which were unprecedented in their degree of unique cruelty. These atrocities were as follows: the merciless, systematic terror bombing by the Western Allies of German and Japanese cities. For the first time in the history of the civilized world, a belligerent sought openly and without pretense to kill or maim the greatest possible number of human beings, including the elderly, women and children, without any military justification." (1) In this sentence he is referring to the American atomic bomb at Nagasaki and the night bombing at Dresden. I don't want to sound callous and unfeeling for the many people, military and civilian that lost their lives to these acts of violence however, these bombings were not unwarranted. Japan and Germany showed blatant disregard for human life and rules of engagement during times of war and provoked the US whom answered with a relentless response. The bombing at Nagasaki would never have been dropped if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor and the night bombing at Dresden and other military acts against the Germans would never have taken place if Hitler hadn't tried to destroy the Jewish race and take over the world.

 There are other German lead attacks that Graf does not seem to consider at all such as, the German bombing of London known as the Blitz, which according to multiple sources killed over 43,000 civilians and injured another 139,000. (2) This was an unprovoked attack on London and other British cities to try and get her to surrender to Germany. And what about the unprovoked attack made by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,395 people including civilians? These numbers are small compared to Graf's estimated number of German deaths caused by Western Allies. And what about the millions of Jews driven from their homes throughout Europe and forced into ghettos and eventually into concentration and extermination camps? Graf seems to leave these atrocities out of his argument. However, if an argument is going to be made to compare the circumstances of one group to another then facts should be presented on both sides. We must compare apples to apples to get a fair picture but Graf does not do this and instead insists the Germans were innocent victims of the Western Allies and any crimes committed were committed against the Nazis and not the other way around. This twist of reality is a slap in the face of all those who perished because of Nazi occupation in WWII and disrespectful to their survivors.

Graf believes that the Holocaust has been used and abused by the Jews in order to create world wide sympathy and has been turned into a new religion which has been forced upon non-Jews which has become a problem.  He uses a quote by Claude Lanzmann, producer of Shoah a film that interviews survivors, and civilians that either worked or were interned at Auschwitz. Lanzmann stated, "If Auschwitz is something other than a horror of history, if it goes beyond the 'banality of evil,' then Christianity totters on its foundations. Christ is the Son of God, who went to the end of the humanly endurable, where he endured the cruelest suffering. If Auschwitz is true, then there is a human suffering which simply cannot be compared with that of Christ. In this case, Christ is false, and salvation will not come from Him. If the pain of Auschwitz is much more extreme that that of the Apocalypse, much more horrifying than that described by John in the Apocalypse, then the Book of the Apocalypse is false, and the Gospels are false, too. Auschwitz is the refutation of Christ." (3) It is not surprising that Lanzmann would come to this conclusion being Jewish himself. And if we are to judge people by the company they keep then we should hold this true to Lanzmann as well, because he was a French intellectual that kept close ties to such existentialist writers as Sartre, Camus and de Beauvior who were know atheists. Graf uses this quote as a manipulation to show that Lanzmann as a Jew believes this and must therefore be speaking for the entire Jewish population. Graf states, "Perhaps two out of three Jews believe in God, but 99.9% of them believe in the gas chambers." (4) Interestingly he uses the word "perhaps" in this quote, he could of made his case more credible if he would have done some actual research and found the real ratio of Jews that do not believe in God. I however, could not settle for the word perhaps, so I did some of my own investigation and found that every Jewish person I spoke with disagreed with this statement and a few even found it offensive. Although this was by no means a scientific investigation of Jewish beliefs, it was indication enough that one person is not entitled to speak for the whole.

Graf continues to vent the evils of the "new Jewish religion" and believes that it has been forced on many European governments, and the US by the Zionist nation. He does not try to hide the bitter animosity he feels towards the Jews, because of this "new religion". Governing laws have been put in place to prohibit Holocaust denial and because of these laws many so called revisionists have served or been sentenced to time in prison, including Graf. Believing that this law was an infringement on his rights as a human he broke the law and was sentenced to 15 months jail. However, believing his life would be in danger if he entered prison, he chose to flee from Switzerland his home country and now lives in exile in Iran. Although on his Website it states that he was forced into exile in fear of his life. He takes no responsibility for his actions in breaking the laws of his country and his bitterness comes through with every written word sucking the credibility out of anything else he has to say.

Graf seeks to prove that Holocaust historians are not playing by the rules and are writing history according to hearsay and not much else. He compares holocaust writers and historians to the scholars of the Middle Ages that never questioned the existence of angels. He believes that "They (meaning Holocaust scholars) then proceed to speculate in a vacuum." (5) According to Graf, the revisionists take a very different approach and look at all the evidence and then base their opinions on that evidence. He even believes the questions revisionists ask to be of an objective nature, which is a different approach to that, which he calls the "exterminationists" approach. The revisionists approach is of course also more scientific even though Graf uses repeated examples from the Leuchter Report.

The Leuchter Report is seen as a farce to most parties on both sides of the debate, peculiar however, is why many of the revisionists still use it as the basis for many of their arguments. The Leuchter Report uses samples taken from an area in the modern rebuilt Auschwitz crematorium to prove that gassings never took place there. However, the samples were taken illegally and it has been proven the Leuchter purposely avoided the areas, which have given positive results. Recently however, the Polish government has done the same type of examinations and testing that Leuchter supposedly did and they found what Leuchter did not. "Most disturbing for deniers is that the Institute found the greatest concentration of poison gas in the samples it tested from Crematorium II." (6)

Graf's lack of truthfulness about the Report is obvious when he fails to mention that the Report has been discredited by almost everyone on both sides of the argument but instead he mentions that, "The Leuchter report does have undeniable weak points." (7) Weak points? Yeah, how about the fact that the report was originally published with the subtitle, "An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Chambers at Auschwitz." (8) Although this title may sound ok, Leuchter is only a self-proclaimed engineer; he has no credentials to back it up and has been sued for using the title. And the fact that Leuchter was paid 30K by Earnest Zundel, a known revisionist, to make this report and testify at his trial.

What Graf does not dispute is the fact that many Jews were treated poorly, or died of disease, or shot for "necessary" reasons. However, he contributes most of the Jewish deaths to the disease Typhus. He claims that in Auschwitz, "The epidemic reached its climax between 7-11 September, 1942 with an average of 375 deaths a day," but the Germans did all they could to control the disease. Typhus is the reasons the deniers claim that the extra crematoriums were needed at Auschwitz. Before the largest outbreak of Typhus, there were only six ovens, however 46 new ovens were to be added. One of the reasons deniers need to make this argument is because they must find a justification for building so many new ovens. (9) Let's pretend for a second that Typhus was the actual reason for the order and building of so many extra crematoriums. Then it would be logical to ask how the NS was able to predict the need of the extra crematoriums, six months before the outbreak of the disease that was to kill so many? It is obvious that no one could have predicted an outbreak of this magnitude. There is however, documented proof of letters written by the Bauleitung to the crematorium builders Topf & Sons dated October 22, 1941, March 5 and 30, 1942, ordering the extra ovens.

There must have been some planned purpose for the ovens, however Graf ignores this fact completely. Graf makes a point to discredit any and all eye witnesses of the gas chamber gassings. He insists that all eyewitnesses must have made the story up or had heard it from someone else and then took it for their own and could not have seen anything of the sort because there was nothing to see. It is interesting that although Graf does not give any credit to gas chamber eyewitnesses that he does give credit to eyewitnesses that claim there were no gas chambers. In 1968, the French Jewess Olga Wormser-Migot wrote a book on the National Socialist concentration camps which is considered standard today; in it, she states: "Auschwitz I... which was to remain the model camp and simultaneously the administrative centre [sic] -- had no gas chamber." On 8 January 1979, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, at that time German Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote the following to a certain Herr Stuparek who had doubted the existence of the gas chambers of Auschwitz: "I, too, Know that no Gas Chambers Existed in the Auschwitz Camp." (10)

If Graf is to take into account any statement made by an eyewitness then he needs to look at statements made on both sides of the account. Once again Graf only gives the reader part of the story by barely giving mention that, "The gas chambers, Genscher then continued, were located in Birkenau, west of the main camp." (10) He skims over this topic as if it is of no importance and begins writing about David Irving. I could not however find any of the relevant quotes made by either of these sources other than on Graf's site. I found some sites that pulled up the names Genscher and Wormser-Migot however; they were in German and French. I think that the fact that it is stated that the gas chamber was not in Auschwitz but in Birkenau is only a technicality of the facts. What Graf is trying to do is take an eyewitness account and if it does not match up perfectly to what historical sources have said then he discredits the whole thing. One wonders if he would believe that the gas chambers were in use even if he were to have seen them with his own eyes. He claims that he has no bias and that although many of his revisionist colleagues may be "Rightwing Radicals" and some even subscribe to National Socialist ideologies that it does not affect the way they view the arguments. However, political ideologies already preconceived prior to the refutation of the Holocaust may in fact have some bearing on the outcome or slant of the findings.

How can one refute the many reports eyewitnesses have given about the use of gas chambers? Graf believes that all of the eyewitness reports were coordinated in order to create the legend of the holocaust (which was supposedly planned by the Zionist nation). "Eyewitness testimonies and confessions can be coordinated as much as one likes if one possesses complete freedom to torture and falsify as much as one likes as the Allies did after WWII." (11) These "coordinated" eyewitness testimonies were supposedly cooked up by the allied governments after WWII in order to provide incriminating proof of Nazi war crimes in order to punish Germany. Supposedly the Polish government was not doing their job in "planting" the stories in the minds of survivors so, the Allied governments took it upon themselves to make sure the "right" story was conveyed. Even the confession of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess is supposed to have been concocted and is therefore pure fantasy, according to Graf. He has convinced himself that all the allied governments worked out a plan to concoct a conspiracy to make the Germans pay for their war time crimes against the Jewish race and in doing so created the holocaust "myth" along with the help of the Zionist nation. What about all the confessions of NS such as Hoess and others at the Nuremberg trials? It seems that Graf has a hypothesis to their confessions as well. He believes that many of the confessions at the Nuremberg trials were coaxed through manipulation and torture.

Graf inevitably turns the table on the Allies and gives examples of the crimes they committed after the war in which he reports the loss of 2 million German lives with another 15 million Germans being driven from their homes from 1944-1949, and from those came another 2 million civilian deaths. According to Graf the total of German deaths after the war is over 4 million. However, according to the West German government in 1951 as stated to the United Nations, in which 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. The discrepancy in these figures is huge. I checked several different sources and the only one that had tallied the numbers to over 4 million were not surprisingly, revisionist. 

There are admittedly huge discrepancies on both side of the issue on the number of Jewish deaths during WWII. This is fact is often capitalized on by Holocaust deniers in order to make their point. The point they often try to argue is: If no one can agree on a specified number of Holocaust victims, then the Holocaust must never have happened. To argue this way is to base the assumption that the distinction or classification is exclusive and exhaustive, when in fact other pertinent alternatives exist. There is no either/or dilemma in when it comes to determining whether the Holocaust did in fact happen. One of Graf's main points is that the monument at Auschwitz had until 1991 read that 4 million had been killed, and all historians agreed upon this figure. When in fact, historians have never agreed upon this figure, which proves nothing when the monument was changed to read 1.1 million killed. He believes that this figure had been changed because historians began to see that the revisionists were right. Graf looks at Hilberg's number of around 5,999,000 Jewish victims throughout the entire war and disputes this number in saying that, In other words, the numbers are humbug snatched out of thin air which Hilberg has copied down from various other unnamed authors and partially "corrected" after his own personal taste. When in fact, Hilberg does not pull his statistics out of thin air, but has derived them from, "various methods, including population demographics before the war, the number reported transferred to camps, the number reported killed, the number liberated from the camps, the number killed in 'special actions' by the Einsatzgruppen and the number remaining after the war. Hilberg does not tout these numbers without recognizing that there is always a "margin of error" when working with statistics of this magnitude.

Graf attacks the eyewitness testimonies that Hilberg uses as his sources of information one by one in chapter 7 of The Giant With Feet of Clay. Graf relies on the times in which each source has been used in Hilberg's work as a justification to rip the work apart. However, Graf does the same thing in all of his works, citing the same sources over and over again. As statements are made about each witness Hilberg uses Graf continually berates each and every one of them.

Hilberg uses the words "Statistics of Killed Jews" in order to title his statistics of Jewish deaths. Graf argues that this title is inappropriate because the statistics include Jews that died by other means than the gas chambers and technically it should be titled "Statistics of Deaths of Jews." However, it seems logical to use Hilberg's title of "Statistics of Killed Jews" since none of the Jews would have died by the means of gas chamber, shootings, disease, exhaustion and other means, if it were not for the Nazis plan of annihilation. In Hilberg's book he breaks down the type of victims into three separate categories: "deaths as a result of (1) privation, principally hunger and disease in ghettos, (2) shootings, and (3) deportations to death camps." (15) Graf takes time to debunk all three. In regards to the Jews killed in shootings Graf begins with Hilberg's statistics and spins a web of different numbers that is particularly hard to follow. It's as if Graf is purposely trying to confuse the reader into discounting Hilberg by giving too many number statistics.

From the sources that Graf has used in his books it is sometimes difficult to tell if he is quoting correctly because he either uses obscure sources or archival material that is not translated into English. The only times that one can check his sources on a consistent level is when he uses other revisionist texts in which to cite. These texts are also highly manipulative and should be taken with a grain of salt. When Graf cites Hilberg's book "Destruction of the European Jews he has for the most part taken the text from its original form and manipulated it to fit into his central thesis. Graf is a master philologist that can take a paragraph out of its original intended form to make it look like the author Hilberg is an old confused man that does not know what he is talking about or even what century he is in. Graf takes Hilberg's scholarly work and transposes it together in pieces, morphing it into an amateur form of historiography in which the reader should never waste their time. It is important that people reading any of Graf's Holocaust denial books be aware of the spider web of illusions he is capable of spinning or they may get caught in web of lie and never get out.

Jurgen Graf the author of these two texts, Holocaust or hoax?, and Giant With Feet Of Clay, is not interested in any alternative Hypothesis. When reading his books you can almost feel his sense of triumph that an unsuspecting person may come along one of his texts and believe what he is preaching. He is very skilled in word manipulation; by being able to speak 18 languages fluently Graf has access to an abundance of otherwise obscure resources including untranslated archives. Due to his recent exile in Iran, Graf has gained a new audience, and with that the sympathies of the surrounding countries. As he has learned to speak and write Farsi, the language of the native people of Iran, he has translated all of his texts into this language and has been well received by the public. This is a scary factor in which not many of the other revisionist can compare, because Graf is able to appeal to others by being able to speak their language, whereas traditional historians may have a language barrier to over come. That is why it is so important that people become aware of Graf and his sympathizers before it is too late for the masses.

Graf is not at all critical of himself or of any of his fellow revisionists and he actually phrases his findings as absolute fact and that of scholarly historians as a created myth. He believes that this myth is a world wide conspiracy worked out after World War II by the Allied Countries and the Zionist nation in order to create sympathy for the Jews. This sympathy for the Jews would blind the world into believing the histories we know believe. These countries pooled their sources together to create fake evidence in order to punish Germany for dragging the world into another war. Graf calls his form of history the "real history". There is not such thing as balance or fairness in Graf's web of lies, the only thing there is, is a manipulation of the facts and accusations to those countries with laws that have punished Graf and his denier friends.

My research in the Holocaust has brought me upon many documents, historians, places, names, and numbers. All of these things have enabled me to gain a better understanding of the atrocities committed in World War II by all parties. Statistics prove that most of the public gets their ideas regarding history from the movies, which are good forms of entertainment however; they often sentimentalize or endear the people, places and events that took place. In general we as a public should take these movies for what they are, good entertainment with some historical information thrown in for fun. Instead, the American public is guilty of taking movies such as, Schindler's List, Elizabeth, and Gladiator etc. as absolute truths. We must be more skeptical, or the filmmakers must try and portray events as they actually happened, which unfortunately does not happen too often. The historical sources I studied really helped me to see that historical facts can sometimes change when new material is made available which contributes to a better understanding of the subject. It is ok for historians to revisit and revise their books, papers and other texts in order to communicate to the public the newest information available.

Throughout this tedious project I have learned to be a skeptic and to research my subject with a fine toothcomb. The people who make it their lifelong work to educate the world about the Holocaust are now being bombarded with those who seek to destroy their teachings. These people are the Holocaust Deniers, although the call themselves the revisionists they are nothing more than master propagandists preying on the unsuspecting public. They do this by presenting their findings as the "real history" and anyone that vulnerable to conspiracy theories may find themselves buying into this manipulation of words. This is how the revisionists are able to gain support. Their motives are to "educate" the public about the lies that have been told about the Holocaust in order to open people's eye to the lies they have supposedly been told for over 50 years by the allied governments.

Jurgen Graf is a master at his chosen field of manipulation; he uses words to appeal to the emotions of those who he is trying to entice. Good thing so many courageous scholars in the world have dedicated their lives to making sure that the memory of those lost in the Holocaust are never forgotten. Jurgen Graf has taught me that Holocaust Deniers will go to any length to make sure that their message is heard. There is no end to the tactics they will use or the propaganda they will spread even if it means fleeing their home countries to live in exile in another, as long as it helps to prove their point. Graf's agenda is as obvious as it is apparent and hopefully most people that stumble upon his site or books will have the sense to check alternative sources. Graf has many points that he feels are worthy of a lot of time in which he spends picking things apart to make his point. His method would have been more affective if he would stop trying to point the finger at everyone else and just present the facts. His effort to try and discredit the many eyewitnesses and Holocaust historians is a feeble attempt at best to stir up controversy. It did not work this time, as I am unwilling to be duped by this master of words and fall victim to his illusion. Jurgen Graf's biggest weakness is in his inability to look at both sides of the issue and intelligently debate the side that he feels is correct. Instead he chooses to show the faults of everyone else and become the perpetrator of deception, lies and propaganda. Sound Familiar? The head of the National Socialists Party would have been so proud, the Nazi party should be happy to have one more person to help spread their lies, Hitler would be proud.           

Work Cited:

(1) Holocaust or Hoax Ch.1, pg.1