At the beginning of his chapter “The Hoax that dare not speak its Name,” Nicholas Terry writes:
“From its inception, Holocaust Revisionism has repeatedly asserted that we have been lied to about the fate of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. However much it might be denied by some contemporary negationists, Holocaust denial is unthinkable without some form of conspiracy theory.” (p. 38)
With his usual dishonesty, Terry here presents a straw man version of the revisionist thesis. Of course nobody in possession of his mental faculties would seriously claim that the officially accepted Holocaust story is the product of a conspiracy in which the participants all agreed to suppress the truth and promote instead a falsified version of events agreed upon in advance. To refute Terry’s nonsensical insinuation, I will shortly recapitulate how the legend really originated.
It is a well-known aphorism that the first casualty of war is truth. In World War One, British atrocity mongers accused the Germans of cutting off the hands of Belgian children, crucifying enemy soldiers on church doors and distilling glycerin from the bodies of their own dead soldiers. After the end of the war, this primitive propaganda against the “Huns” was discontinued. It was no longer needed.
In 2002 and in early 2003, the Bush and Blair regimes in the U.S. and U.K. spread the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify their imminent war of aggression against a country which in reality could not possibly threaten them. A few months after the occupation of Iraq, Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” were forgotten.
In September 1939, the Germans conquered the western half of Poland, a country which was home to numerous large Jewish communities; in the summer of 1941, they overran the previously Soviet occupied eastern half as well. Since the Germans had plenty of guns and the Jews had very few, the Jews were unable to resist the increasingly harsh measures imposed by the Germans (ghettoization, confinement in concentration camps, conscription for forced labor) which made their lives miserable and indeed provoked the deaths of large numbers of them. In order to mobilize world opinion against the tormentors of their people, Jewish underground movements in Poland soon began spreading all kinds of mind-boggling stories about the extermination of their co-religionists whom the Germans allegedly were murdering by electricity, steam, gas and other exotic means. The Holocaust Controversies bloggers make a futile attempt to explain away these embarrassing contemporary reports about electrocution facilities and steam chambers and the like as simple “inaccuracies,” “wartime hearsay” and “Chinese whispers” (p. 16), but this explanation does not hold water for a minute. In order to “make mincemeat” of this theory (to use Sergey Romanov’s charming formulation), it suffices to recall the lengthy report about the “steam chambers” of Treblinka published by the resistance movement of the Warsaw ghetto on 15 November 1942. I will quote merely an excerpt:
“Now comes the last act of the Treblinka tragedy. The terrified mass of men, women and children starts on its last road to death. At the head a group of women and children is driven, beaten by the accompanying Germans, whips in their hands. The group is driven ever quicker, ever heavier blows fall upon the heads of the women who are mad with fear and suffering. […] The floors of the chambers are slippery. The victims slip and fall, and they cannot get up for new numbers of forcibly driven victims fall upon them. The chief throws small children into the chamber over the heads of the women. When the execution chambers are filled, the doors are hermetically closed and the slow suffocation of people begins, brought abroad by the steam issuing from the numerous vents in the pipes. At the beginning stifled cries penetrate to the outside; gradually they quiet down and minutes later the execution is complete.”
According to another passage in the report, two million (!) Jews had already been killed in the steam chambers of Treblinka, and the Germans were preparing to exterminate the entire Polish population as well in those very same chambers!
In 1944, a Geneva-based rabbi, Adolf Abraham Silberschein, published another lengthy report about Treblinka, which he chose to christen “Tremblinki.” As the pious rabbi was apparently not too sure about the killing method used at “Tremblinki,” he opted for a creative synthesis: On the one hand, he spoke of “gas chambers,” while on the other hand he stated that the bodies of the victims, “under the influence of the water vapor,” became clumped together. I will now quote some excerpts from his “report”:
“Every day groups of a thousand people were brought into the gas and oven chambers. [All historians agree that there were no crematoria ovens at Treblinka.] At first, as at their arrival, they were lead into the bath by the Kapos. Everyone had to take off clothing and shoes and remained naked. For the further deception of the victims, each was handed a little piece of soap. […] Hauptmann Sauer took them over in the reception room of the extermination facilities. […] He did not miss any opportunity to flog every single person. [If groups of a thousand people were brought to “Tremblinki” every day, and if Sauer flogged every single victim, he must have been in enviable physical shape! More pertinently, he would have made nonsense of the alleged deception of telling the Jews they were going to take a shower.] The extermination cells all fill up. When they are full, they are hermetically sealed, from every side the pipes open out of which flows gas. The death of asphyxiation reaps a quick harvest. Then the Kapos must go to work. With pitiless blows, the guard personal force them to perform the work. The gates of death open – but the dead bodies somehow cannot be pulled out individually, for they have all clumped together with one another and stiffened under the water vapor. […] But the camp of Tremblinki had another specialty: To wit, the Jewish Arthur Gold Orchestra gave concerts there, and it had the duty of playing for those who were been lead to their deaths!!!! At the same time as thousands of Jews were poisoned in the gas chambers, the musicians had to play cheerful melodies. Whichever of them refused to do it was hanged up by his feet with his head down.”
By claiming that the authors of such ridiculous reports, which Mattogno and I extensively quote in Treblinka, were acting in good faith and merely committed an excusable error by relying on “wartime hearsay,” our opponents once again make fools of themselves. As a matter of fact, such reports were classic examples of coarse atrocity propaganda; they were obvious hoaxes. The “Chinese whisper” theory also fails to explain why the Soviet commission which visited Treblinka in late August 1944 and questioned twelve former inmates of the camp “ascertained” that “three million people” (!) had been killed by pumping the air out of the chambers (!).
Starting in December 1941, the reports concocted by various Jewish underground movements were forwarded to Jewish organizations all over the world. The fact, however, that the press in the Allied nations did not give repeated frontpage coverage of the allegedly ongoing mass slaughter, if at all, indicates to what extent the Jewish leaders in these nations believed these grotesque tales. They were much too intelligent to take them at face value.
After the war, however, the victors decided to maintain and even extend their wartime extermination propaganda, because unlike the horror stories of World War I and the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction they were still very useful to the interested parties:
- Zionist Jews with influence in international media and political circles naturally understood that the Holocaust tale would give them the status of a martyr nation, victim of a crime of unprecedented magnitude. Henceforth anybody critical of organized Jewry, its aims and its methods could automatically be castigated as a “vile antisemite” eager to perpetrate a new Holocaust. This muzzling of dissenting voices in turn made possible the anachronistic creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. At that time, Britain had just granted independence to India, and dozens of other Asian and African territories were striving ever harder to shed the white man’s rule. Yet at the very moment of worldwide de-colonization, the Zionists were permitted to launch a new colonial venture in the Near East, one with terrible consequences for the Palestinian people. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, made no secret of the fact that the Holocaust had been instrumental to the foundation of the Zionist entity: “One reason of this really stupendous victory was without the faintest doubt the Shoa. The memory of the genocide was still alive.”
- Despite the animosity which has always characterized Polish-Jewish relations, the Poles also stood to benefit from the Holocaust hoax. After all, Poland had annexed huge tracts of German territory at the end of the war and brutally expelled the overwhelming majority of their ethnic-German population. In order to justify this crime against humanity, the Poles thus needed an even more heinous German crime to point to – the Holocaust. However, if the Holocaust story was to be widely believed, it had to be given a minimum of coherence. As it was simply not credible that the Germans should have used a wide array of outlandish, if not unfeasible killing methods in their “extermination camps,” – the steam chambers, subterranean electrocution installations, etc. – they were eventually relegated to the memory hole and replaced by homicidal gas chambers using poison gas.
- And for the Western Allies and the Soviet Union the Jewish extermination tale was of great utility as well, for it enabled them to hush up their own crimes, such as the indiscriminate fire-bombing of German cities and the Katyn massacre. Thanks to the Holocaust story, Stalin was able to take on the role of a savior who had freed half of Europe from a tyranny even more cruel than his own. More importantly, the victorious powers could use the Holocaust myth to prevent any resurgence of German nationalism. It allowed them to poison the German people with a collective guilt complex which rendered Germans unable to defend their national interests.
As we can see, then, no “conspiracy theory” is needed to explain the birth of the Holocaust myth and its survival after 1945. Rather, the “hoax,” as Arthur Butz memorably dubbed it in his seminal 1976 study The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, was born from the exigencies of wartime propaganda, but has since been perpetuated because it serves the converging interests of various national and transnational parties which have both the will and the means to enforce its acceptance by the public. In an excellent recent article, “The Non-Jewish stake in the Holocaust mythology,” revisionist Paul Grubach outlines numerous reasons why the hoax continues to be tenaciously defended even six and a half decades after the end of the Second World War.
