THE HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Y

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THE HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

THE CASE AGAINST THE PRESUMEDEXTERMINATION OF EUROPEANJEWRY

The Author
Arthur R. Butz was born and raised in New York City. Hereceived his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. andhis Ph.D. in Control Sciences from the University of Minnesotain 1965. In 1966 he joined the faculty of NorthwesternUniversity, Evanston, Illinois,where he is now Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and ComputerSciences. Dr. Butz is the author of numerous technical papers.

Table ofContents

Foreword to the 2003Edition............................... 8
Acknowledgments .......................................15
Foreword...........................................17
A Short Introduction to the Study of HolocaustRevisionism ... 21
Chapter 1: Trials, Jews andNazis ................. 23


Trials and Doubts................................. 23
How Many Jews?......................................... 27
Our Method, Argument, and Conclusion......................33
The War Crimes Trials..............34


Chapter2: The Camps......... 55
Horror Scenes and ‘Extermination’Camps ................... 55
The Camps and Their End ................................ 57
The Industrial Role of Auschwitz..........................67


Chapter3: Washington and New York...................... 73
The Rubber Crisis of 1942..................... 73
Auschwitz of Great Interest to Americans...................77
The First ‘Extermination’Claims and Washington....... 81
The First ‘Extermination’Claims and New York............ 90
German Reactions................... 116
The War Refugee Board Report: Birth of the Auschwitz Legend. 116
Rudolf Vrba................. 124


Chapter4: Auschwitz....................................129
Structure of the Legend.......................... 129
The Höss‘Confession’........................ 130
Contradictions at the Outset............... 133
When Did It Start?........................135
The Alleged Gassings and Zyklon......................135
Lines of Authority.............. 139
Transports to Auschwitz ........................................139
A Hospital for the People Being Exterminated?............141
“SpecialTreatment”.........................144
The Crematories........................... 147
Back to the ‘GasChambers’.......154
Why in English? .............................. 157
The Role of Birkenau .... 157
Summary for Auschwitz ..........................................165


Chapter5: The Hungarian Jews...................... 167
The International Red Cross ...... 167
1944 Propaganda ......... 183
Where are the pictures?..... 187


Air Raids on Auschwitz:Rudolf Vrba Overreaches Himself .... 188
Documentary Evidence?...................................190
The Producers...............200
What Happened in Hungary?..............210
Can Anybody Believe such a Story?............... 212


Chapter6: Et Cetera........ 215
More ‘Extermination’Camps ........ 215
Logic of Defense Testimonies ............ 218
Josef Kramer, ‘Beastof Belsen’......................... 218
Hermann Göringet al.at the IMT ........................ 220
Oswald Pohl at Nuremberg...........225
Adolf Eichmann........... 226
West German Trials ................... 229
Precedents for the Trials? .......... 232
Torture?............................ 233
Adolf Hitler ........................... 236
Heinrich Himmler.................... 237
Joseph Goebbels .................... 241
The Einsatzgruppen........................241


Chapter7: The Final Solution ............ 251
The German Policy and the Wannsee Conference.............251
Numbers Deported: Whence and Whither............264
The Polish Ghettos........... 269
What Happened to Them? ........... 271
Zionism Again .................... 277
Migration to the USA............. 282
Recapitulation........................... 285


J. G. Burg ............................ 286
Conclusions ............................. 287
Himmler Nailed it Perfectly ............ 287


Chapter8: Remarks............................ 289
Miscellaneous Objections..................289
Postwar Germanyand Willy Brandt ................. 292
The Talmud................................294
Credentials........................... 297
Other Matters................................298
Some Implications ......................... 299


Appendices.....................................303
Appendix A: The “Statement”...... 303
Appendix B: SS Ranks ........... 317
Appendix C: Deportation of Jews..... 319
Appendix D: The BelsenTrial..........325
Appendix E: The Role of the Vatican....... 345


Supplements................................365


Supplement 1: The InternationalHolocaust Controversy.. 365
Supplement 2: Context and Perspectivein the Holocaust Controversy......... 379
Supplement 3: A Response to a MajorCritique of Holocaust Revisionism.............................. 409
Supplement 4: Zyklon B and GasDetectors in Birkenau Crematorium II .... 431
Supplement 5: Vergasungskeller......... 443
Illustrations.........................449
References.........................484
Index.............................492

Foreword tothe 2003 Edition

Myinvestigations of the Jewish “Holocaust”commenced in 1972, and twenty seven years have passed since the firstpublication of this book in 1976 inEnglandas The Hoax of the TwentiethCentury. Twenty six years have passed since the re­lease of theslightly revised second British and first American edition of 1977. This textconsists of the last, preceded by a short article I wrote for the studentnewspaper at Northwestern University in 19911
and followed by five supplements representingwritings from 1979-1997. There is also an addendum to Appendix E (“TheRole of the Vatican“),consisting of the obituary/tribute I wrote on Rev. Robert A. Graham. All werepublished in the Journalof Historical Review. Also Appendix A on Kurt Gerstein, has been revisedsomewhat.
Iam proud that this book remains of interest to anybody a quarter century afterpublication. Nevertheless, the age of this text, and the great advances thathave subsequently occurred in Holocaust revisionism, require some comments onthe value of the book to today’s reader.How can a quarter century old text not be ob­solete today? What does today’sreader gain from it? Would it not be better to re­vise this text to take intoaccount more recent developments?
Fromthe perspective of today, the book has defects, and several people, of whom Iam one, could now do better. In admitting such defects, I can plead that I wasone man working with little help. Except for Wilhelm Stäglich,the corre­spondents I had before publication in 1976 were not then, and havenot subse­quently become, significant in revisionist work. The literature ofrevisionist orien­tation was scanty. Some of it was rubbish that constituted aminor nuisance. On the positive side were Paul Rassinier, Thies Christophersen,and Wilhelm Stäg­lich.At that time the writings of Rassinier, a former political prisoner at Buchen­wald, were of interest both as a primary source,relating personal experiences, and as historical exposition (today Rassinier isof interest only as a primary source). Christophersen and Stäglich,Germans who had been stationed near Auschwitz,were of value only as primary sources, although Stäglichlater wrote a book of historical exposition. Even taking these three intoaccount, the historical complex was not there, as I shall explain below.
Acommon complaint about this work has been that I am not a trained histo­rian orhistory professor. It is, however, not unusual for people who are not aca­demichistorians to make contributions to history. The great American historianFrancis Parkman was no history professor; he had only a brief academic appoint­mentas Professor of Horticulture at Harvard. The late Arnaldo Momigliano urged warinessof academic historians and pointed out that none of the three leadingnineteenth century historians of the ancient world was a history professor, e.g. Mommsenwas a Professor of Law.2
However, such examples do notsatisfactorily illustrate the fact that history has
1

Rhodes, 347. Daily Northwestern,May 13, 1991, correction May 14.
2
A.Momigliano, “Historyin an Age of Ideologies,”
American Scholar,Autumn 1982, pp. 495­
507.
acloser relationship to popular culture than most other academic disciplines.This is easily clarified and proved. In the major book reviews (New York Times,New York Review,etc.) one can find reviews of, and advertisements for, many works on theleading edge of historical research, i.e.works not specifically written for popular readership. No such attention isgiven to leading edge works in electrical engineering and most other academicdisciplines. Many intelligent laymen can read such historical works withcomprehension. If many can read them, then some can write them. I could givereasons for this relatively popular status of serious history study, but itwould carry us too far afield. In any case, there is no venality on the part ofacademic historians in approving of such popular promotion of their books.
Suchobservations show, however, that there is hypocrisy in their common im­plication,when denouncing Holocaust revisionism, that only people with their kinds ofPh.D. degrees are competent to deal with historical issues.
Thestyle of my book is certainly not elegant. I believe my style has improved muchsince then but, like most men with a technical education, my style remains atbest dry and not elegant. It was, however, good enough to do the job. I haveeven sometimes wondered if elegance of style might be incompatible with a sub­jectas dreary as the present one.
Itis not immodest for me to say that mine is the best book of its type, becauseit is the only book of its type. To compare my book to others, the approach ofmine is horizontal, the others vertical. Subsequent investigators have takenspe­cific subjects and gone more deeply into them than I did. Such verticalapproaches should be contrasted with my horizontal. I attempted to cover everyreasonably relevant aspect of the problem. The question of the existence of gaschambers was only one of many. I tried to show what did happen as well as whatdid not. I showed the relevance of the Zionist and related movements. Idiscussed the Allied policies and the Jewish influences in them. My use ofsources (e.g.the Nuremberg trials, Red Cross reports, Vatican documents, contemporary newspaper accounts) todayseems obvious but it was not then. To aid in comprehending the early war crimestrials, I gave witchcraft trials as a useful precedent.
Iclaim an additional contribution of this book that may seem ridiculous on itsface. I treated the German concentration camps as specific institutions thatexisted in specific locations, with the alleged events that took place in themtaking place, if at all, in real space and real time, together with otherevents that happened si­multaneously in those same camps or in real space. By “realspace”I mean a space that we all exist in so that, whatever happened at Auschwitz, ithappened at the same time President Roosevelt held meetings in Washington, and I as achild went to school, etc., and in the same space.
Thatis so obvious that it may seem preposterous for me to present it as an originalperspective, but please hear me out. My impression of the extant litera­turewas that the events claimed there may as well be imagined as having taken placeon Mars, if at all, so absent was a concern for the broader context. As I re­mindedreaders on page 210:
“There was a war going on during World War II.”
Considermy presentation of Auschwitz, the principalalleged “exterminationcamp”.I started by describing Auschwitz as a campthat performed functions similar to those performed by typical German campsthat are not claimed to have been extermination camps; I outlined thosefunctions and I presented a map show­ing where the German camps were. Then Idescribed Auschwitz in its unique re­spects and showed, why the Allies wouldhave been interested in events transpir­ing at Auschwitz.I presented pictures of crematorium ovens at Auschwitzand other camps. I presented a map of the Auschwitz region and a plan of the “Birke­nau”section of the Auschwitz camp. That plan andthe various maps showed the reader exactly where, in Europe, Poland, and at Auschwitz,the great gas cham­bers were supposed to have been located. Then I consideredone of the specific groups of Jews, the Hungarian Jews, not only from the pointof view of allega­tions of events in German camps but from the point of view ofevents in Hungary.That is, for me the problem of the Hungarian Jews was as much a problem of whathappened in Hungary as whathappened at Auschwitz. Even in consideringevents at Auschwitz, I chose to place my perspective elsewhere, among theAllies who, at the time in question, were very interested in Auschwitzas an industrial bombing target and would have photographed the camp for thatpurpose.
Thephotographs were produced almost three years after publication of my book andconfirmed my conclusions, but that is not the point that I am now trying to emphasize.My point is that, as unlikely as it may seem, my method of placing Auschwitz in its general historical context wasessentially unique in this historical area. True, some of what I said in thatrespect is to be found in earlier books that purported to relate how the “exterminations”transpired, but in scattered bits and pieces that were usually incidental tothose accounts. Even so, much had to be culled from diverse sources. Forexample, though it seems obvious that any useful discussion of the Auschwitzproblem required a map of the Auschwitz region and of the Birkenau camp, theformer had to be constructed by me from several sources and the latter had tobe lifted, not from one of the standard “Holocaust”books such as those by Hilberg or Reitlinger, but from a book about a Germantrial of Auschwitz personnel that took place in 1963-5. Hilberg, Reitlinger,and similar authors were very stingy with maps and pictures, except in booksspecifi­cally devoted to presenting pictures. We can say, with only minoroversimplifica­tion, that they would sell you a book of pictures or a book oftext, but not one book integrating the two in any useful way.
Ibelieve my analysis provoked investigations of specific problems, even whensuch influence was not acknowledged. My implied skepticism about the reality ofthe mysterious “German industrialist”who in 1942, according to the World Jew­ish Congress, passed along informationthat a plan to exterminate the Jews had been discussed in Hitler’sheadquarters, may have provoked the later investiga­tions attempting todetermine his identity. Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, in Breaking the Silence,1986, unconvincingly proposed Eduard Schulte. I also stressed the inaction ofthe Allies with respect to Auschwitz, whichLaqueur (The Terrible Secret,1980) and Martin Gilbert (Auschwitzand the Allies, 1981) tried without success to explain.
Theexistence and relevance of the 1944 aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz were, to the best of my knowledge, first arguedin my book.3
I also be­lieve that my book provoked, perhapsthrough some intermediary, the 1979 re­lease of these photos by the CIA, butagain such influence is not admitted.
Ianalyzed the specifics of the alleged extermination process at Auschwitz. I showed that all of the specific materialfacts required a dual interpretation of rela­tively mundane facts, e.g.transports, selections, showers, shaving hair, Zyklon B, crematoria, etc., allreal and all relatively mundane, had been given a second in­terpretation. Thatinsight scarcely merits the label today, but it did then. It has been the mainparadigm for all subsequent revisionist writing on Auschwitzand other alleged “extermination camps”.It may seem very simple and obvious after one reads this book; it certainly wasnot when I wrote it. The reader is shown what sorts of questions he should askif he wants to go further. Those who have studied the development of ideasunderstand that the right answers are not attainable until the right questionsare formulated (yes, questions can be right or wrong). This book, even today,shows how to do that.
Iconsider my book generally “right”even today in the sense of how the his­torical parts fit together, and they fitperfectly without major or fundamental mys­teries. Contrast the gyrations ofthe typical historians who have nothing but mys­teries. How and when was anorder to exterminate given? Was such an order given at all? Why didn’tthe Allies recognize what was (allegedly) happening at Auschwitz?Why didn’tthe Pope forthrightly condemn physical extermination, even after the German hadbeen driven out of Rome?Why didn’tthe Allied press give greater prominence to reports of extermination of Jews,rather than bury them in the back pages of the larger newspapers?
Thishorizontal analysis remains unique in the revisionist literature. The bookpresented a historical complex that remains valid today. The book made special­izedstudies easier because investigators did not have to worry about coherence ofthe larger picture; they could direct a curious person to my book. I did a goodenough job for that, even if not a perfect job. The proof is that, amongrevision­ists, defects of the book are certainly seen, but, unfortunately,there seems to be no great demand for an improved integrated work of comparablescope and no as­piring author in view.
An example. You want to discuss thequestion of gas chambers at Auschwitz. My oldbook won’thelp if you want to be current, and there would not necessarily be any reasonto cite it. There are much more recent and conclusive writings, but I could notimagine a person securely venturing into such a controversy without having agrasp of the general historical complex, as provided in my book. Thus, I cannotimagine contemporary Holocaust revisionism existing without a book such asmine, even if it is never necessary to cite it today.
Thereis an unconfirmed and disputed claim that U.S. Army Capt. Jacob Javits (laterU.S. Sena­tor) used the photos, in 1944, to argue for bombing Auschwitz.See letters in the New YorkJew­ish weekly Forward,23 Feb. 2001, p. 10, and 6 April 2001, p. 16. If the claim is true, the photoswere forgotten until I argued, in my 1976 book, that they had to exist. I aminclined to think the claim is not true.
Itis still the only book of this sort. A better one would be nice but there aretwo problems that occur to me. First such a book, if written from the point ofview of our knowledge today, would not fit into a single volume. This explainswhy I reject the idea of trying to bring this book up to date. Such a projectwould quickly run away from “updating”,resulting in an entirely new work. Any attempt to respect the original contentand organization of the book would be a handicap in the updating project. Thebest single volume for bringing the reader up to date on revisionistscholarship is a compilation of papers by many people, not an inte­grated work.4
Second,a paradox: a weakness of the book explains some of its strength. From thepresent point of view, there seems much in the book that is awkwardly pre­sented.This is because I did not write this book as an expert. The book was writ­tenas works of research normally are: I was myself struggling to understand, aswould an intelligent and serious reader. Thus, the book expresses arelationship of common perspective, and therefore implicit mutual empathy,between author and reader that could not exist in a new book, written todayfrom a position of exper­tise and directed at a neophyte reader, which is theonly relationship possible to­day. I believe this explains the occasionaloverwhelming effect the book has. From this point of view the book is stillcontemporary, as well as “right”,and ought not undergo major revision.
Forthese reasons, I have rejected any idea of “updating”this book. Rather, several later writings from 1979 on have been provided here,as specified above.
Thatthis book is still valuable today is due to the distortions and misrepresen­tationsthat have continued to issue from the media and academe, resulting in mil­lionsof people so uninformed that a viewpoint of 1976 is a great revelation for themin 2003.
I consider this book as successfulas could have been judiciously hoped under the circumstances, but it isimportant to view it as one of the successes in the phe­nomenon of Holocaustrevisionism, for which no single person, or set of specific persons, can takecredit. It seems to me to be just something that was timely and had to developand that I was just a part of this development. I discussed this in my paperreproduced as Supplement 1, but to try to make my point clearer, let meemphasize that the Jews have played a very important role in this development;they must take some of the credit. It was they who chose, in 1977, to spreadthe news of this obscure book to the most remote corners of the universe. Whocould have imagined such massive publicity for a book from an unknownpublisher, written by an unknown author, and only barely available in the USA? They haveused their powerful positions in the media to keep the subject of “Holocaust”up­permost in the minds of the populace; we get it for breakfast, lunch, anddinner. The present “Holocaustomania”,which younger readers may believe has been a
GermarRudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust:The Growing Critique of “Truth” and “Mem­ory”, 2nd
edition, Theses & Dissertations Press, PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625, USA, 2003.Expanded version of the text originally published as Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte: Ein Hand­buch über strittige Fragen des 20.Jahrhunderts, by Ernst Gauss (ed. = Germar Rudolf), Grabert-Verlag, Tübingen, 1994. Probably not available from Grabert now, but availablefrom T&DP.
permanentfeature of our public affairs since World War II, can be fairly said to havestarted with the 1978 NBC-TV “docudrama”
Holocaust.Only Jewish groups (either formally Jewish or having a largely Jewishmembership), on the campus of Northwestern University, havemaintained students’ interest in my work on the “Holocaust”.Such mutual dependency only holds for things that had to happen.
WhenI wrote this book, there were perhaps a half dozen serious Holocaust re­visionistresearchers (most not known by me). Today there are too many for me to even tryto list, and readers of contemporary Holocaust revisionist literature in alllanguages certainly number in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.
Thereare many back-handed compliments to our success. Perhaps the most conspicuousis the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A February 1992 funds appeal for it,signed by “NationalCampaign Chairman” Miles Lerman, named “revisionists”as those whom the museum would “counter”.The Museum for­mally opened in April 1993 with the “Intenton refuting revisionist attempts to diminish the scope of the Holocaust”.5
As if that weren’tenough, the 104th Con­gress passed, without dissent, a resolution making onlytwo points: it “deplores”revisionism and “commends the vital, ongoing work ofthe […] Museum.”6
That silly Museum is an ironic monument toHolocaust revisionism.7
TheMuseum will not be the last such monument. In 1996, Jewish Senators BarbaraBoxer and Arlen Specter handed Jewish movie director Steven Spielberg a checkrepresenting a $1 million federal grant for his “Survivorsof the Shoah Visual History Foundation” (a projectof videotaping accounts of “survivors”
–
“Shoah”is the Hebrew word used in place of “Holocaust”).Specter motivated the grant in terms of opposing the considerable success ofrevisionists.8
Amore recent example is the projected Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A July 2001 advertisement, appealingfor funds, raised the danger of revisionism.9
Revisionist apostasy has been rare.It has been most visible in cases where some public figure who was not actuallya revisionist made public remarks sup­portive of revisionism. A 1996 examplewas Abbé Pierre, a sort of French Mother Teresa (although more active inpublic affairs) who, despite his quick recantation of his revisionist remarks,will never be forgiven by his former friends.10
This epi­
5
Chicago Tribune,23 April 1993, sec. 1, p. 18.
6

Senateresolution 193 passed 9 Nov. 1995, and House resolution 316 passed 16 April1996.

7
Perhapsthe most telling point is that the Museum, after so much promotion and millionsspent, has failed to depict a homicidal gas chamber. Robert Faurisson hascommented on this and re­lated his humorous encounter with the Museum’sdirector, Dr. Michael Berenbaum. Journalof Historical Review, Jan./Feb. 1994, p. 23; Nov./Dec. 1994, p. 4.
8

BostonGlobe,24 July 1996, p. A6. Spielberg got into “Shoahbusiness”(from an American ex­pression –
“there’sno business like show business”) via his Schindler’s List movie, which also failed todepict a gassing or homicidal gas chamber. On the basis of his other movies andother scenes in this one, I could not attribute the failure to squeamishness onSpielberg‘spart. He is a good enough showman to have realized that a complete depiction ofa gassing via Zyklon B, faithful to the legend and to physical possibility,would have been far too preposterous even for him. The Jewish worker who wasshot for exceeding her assigned tasks was routine rubbish, but the gassingwould have been too much.
9
NY Times,18 July 2001, p. A6.
10

NY Times, 1 May 1996,p. A6. Boston Globe,23 July 1996, p. A5.
sodeis one of many that illustrate the handicaps that Holocaust revisionism haslabored under.
Afinal proof, if needed, of our success is the fact of laws passed in recentyears, in several European countries, criminalizing the publication ofrevisionist views on the Holocaust. Such literature circulated freely in Europe until the pre­sent revisionist movement startedmaking its impact in the late 70s. In the United States we are still free ofstate suppression, although there is considerable whining in some quartersabout “FirstAmendment absolutism”. Here the repression works largelyby extra-legal means of intimidation and reprisal. For example, Fred Leuchterwas the leading execution technologist in the USAwhen he published his famous 1988 report on the alleged Auschwitzgas chambers.11
Since then, hisbusiness has been ruined and his marriage destroyed. All such developments areof course back-handed and evil tributes to the success of Holocaust revisionism.Even the most naive reader will see the point: they don’twant you to know these things! They are trying to hold back the wind.
We are successful, but we have a longway to go, as the brute strength of the dying monster is considerable. Evanston, IllinoisJune 2003
S.Lehman, “AMatter of Engineering,”
Atlantic Monthly,Feb. 1990, pp. 26-29. Also see the let­ters in the May issue; Fred A. Leuchter,An Engineering Report onthe alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland,Samisdat Publishers Ltd., Toronto 1988; for an update on this issue, see GermarRudolf, The Rudolf Report. ExpertReport on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz, Theses& Dissertations Press, PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625, USA, 2003.

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A Short Introduction
to the Study of Holocaust Revisionism

First published in the Daily Northwestern, May 13, 1991, correction May 14.
I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in the leg¬end of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II: U.S. and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the west German camps they cap¬tured in 1945 (e.g. Dachau and Belsen), there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland, and historians generally support the legend.
During both world wars Germany was forced to fight typhus, carried by lice in the constant traffic with the east. That is why all accounts of entry into the Ger¬man concentration camps speak of shaving of hair, showering, and other delous¬ing procedures, such as treatment of quarters with the pesticide Zyklon. That was also the main reason for a high death rate in the camps and the crematories that existed in all.
When Germany collapsed in chaos, then of course all such defenses ceased, and typhus and other diseases became rampant in the camps, which quartered mainly political prisoners, ordinary criminals, homosexuals, conscientious objec¬tors, and Jews conscripted for labor. Hence the horrible scenes, which however had nothing to do with “extermination” or any deliberate policy. Moreover, the west German camps involved were not the alleged “extermination camps”, which were all in Poland (e.g. Auschwitz and Treblinka) and which were all evacuated or shut down before capture by the Soviets, who found no such scenes.
The “Final Solution“ spoken of in the German documents was a program of evacuation, resettlement, and deportation of Jews with the ultimate objective of expulsion from Europe. During the war, Jews of various nationalities were being moved east, as one stage in this Final Solution. The legend claims that the move¬ments were mainly for extermination purposes.
The great majority of the millions allegedly exterminated were east European, not German or west European, Jews. For that reason study of the problem via population statistics has been difficult to impossible, but it is a fact that there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland. However, the Germans were only one of several parties involved in moving Jews around. The Soviets deported vir¬tually all of the Jews of eastern Poland to their interior in 1940. After the war, with Polish and other Jews pouring out of the east into occupied west Germany, the Zionists moved large numbers to Palestine, and the U.S. and other countries absorbed many Jews, in most cases under conditions making impossible a nu¬merical accounting. Moreover, the Polish borders were changed drastically at the end of the war; the country was literally moved west.
Historians generally support the legend, but there are precedents for nearly in¬comprehensible blindness on the part of scholars. For example, throughout the Middle Ages even the Pope’s political enemies conceded his false claim that the 4th century Emperor Constantine had ceded rule of the west to the Pope, although all knew very well that Constantine had been succeeded by more emperors. Near unanimity among the academics is especially suspect when there exist great po¬litical pressures; in some countries Holocaust revisionists have been prosecuted.
It is easy to show that the extermination legend merits skepticism. Even the casual reader of the Holocaust literature knows that during the war virtually no¬body acted as though it was happening. Thus, it is common to berate the Vatican, the Red Cross, and the Allies (especially the intelligence agencies) for their igno¬rance and inaction, and to explain that the Jews generally did not resist deporta¬tion because they did not know what was in store for them. If you add all this up you have the strange claim that for almost three years German trains, operating on a continental scale in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly and sys¬tematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody noticed except for a few of our Jewish leaders who were making public “extermination” claims.
On closer examination, even those few Jewish leaders were not acting as though it was happening. Ordinary communications between the occupied and neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of “extermi¬nation” if those claims had any validity.
This incredible ignorance must also be attributed to Hans Oster’s department in German military intelligence, correctly labeled “the veritable general staff of the opposition to Hitler” in a recent review.
What we are offered in evidence was gathered after the war, in trials. The evi¬dence is almost all oral testimony and “confessions.” Without the evidence of these trials there would be no significant evidence of “extermination”. One must pause and ponder this carefully. Were trials needed to determine that the Battle of Waterloo happened? The bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Na¬gasaki? The slaughter in Cambodia?
Yet this three year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of victims, required trials to argue its reality. I am not arguing that the trials were illegal or unfair; I am arguing that such historical logic as the legend rests on must not be countenanced. Such events cannot happen without generating commensurate and evidence for their reality, just as a great forest fire cannot take place without pro¬ducing smoke. One may as well believe that New York City was burned down, if confessions to the deed can be produced.
Detailed consideration of the specific evidence put forward in support of the legend has been a focus of the revisionist literature, but I shall mention one point here. The claim of the legend is that there were no technical means provided for the specific task of extermination, and that means originally provided for other purposes did double duty in improvised arrangements. Thus, the Jews were alleg¬edly gassed with the pesticide Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the cre¬matories along with the deaths from “ordinary” causes (the ashes or other remains of millions of victims never having been found).
Surely any thoughtful person must be skeptical.

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Chapter 1:
Trials, Jews and Nazis

Trials and Doubts
The “war crimes trials,” which the victors in World War II conducted, mainly of Germans but also of many Japanese, were precedent-shattering in their scope and in the explicitness of the victorious powers’ claims to some sort of legal juris¬diction in respect of laws or understandings, which did not exist at the time they were allegedly broken by the Axis powers. Thus, in disregard of European honor conventions, which had been respected for centuries, German civilian and military prisoners, many of the highest rank, met violent deaths while in Allied captivity as a supposed consequence of these extraordinary proceedings.
Nothing resembling the trials of 1945-1949, which were conducted by the war¬time enemies of Germany, has ever occurred before. The case of Joan of Arc comes to mind, but that involved a solitary prisoner, not an entire state, and the English who were, in the last analysis, responsible for the trial did everything to make the issue appear to be one of heresy and witchcraft, already formally pro¬scribed, to be decided by an impartial and universal church according to pre¬existing rules of evidence and procedure.
In the United States, the real progenitor of the trials, opinion on the appropri¬ateness of having conducted such trials has always been divided, but the balance has varied. In the immediate post-war period, opinion generally favored the trials with, however, some significant voices in opposition. In the middle of the heated election campaign of 1946, just before the major Nazis Göring, Ribbentrop et al. were to be hanged, Senator Robert A. Taft delivered a speech attacking both the legal basis for the trials and the sentences which had been imposed; his speech seems to have hurt his Republican Party in those elections.
A decade later, views had evidently changed somewhat, since at that time the then obvious presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published a book, Profiles in Courage (a survey of various people whom Senator Kennedy thought coura¬geous), in which he commended Taft for taking this stand, adding that Taft’s views “are shared […] by a substantial number of American citizens today.”13
With the Eichmann abduction in 1960 and subsequent “trial” and with the as¬sociated later publicity, opinion seemed to move again, however slowly, toward approval of the trials. Many reasons may be offered for this extraordinary rever¬sal, but it seems to me that what had happened was that in a peacetime, generally non-hysterical atmosphere the world’s attention had been focused on one tale of a peculiarly macabre sort: the killing, mainly in “gas chambers,” of several (usual
Kennedy, 216-219; 236-239 in Memorial Edition.
figure, six) million Jews of all ages and conditions by the Nazis during the war, as part of a program of ridding Europe of Jewry. Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solu¬tion, 2nd edition (1968), is generally accepted as the most detailed and useful presentation of this claim, and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) tells essentially the same story. Other writings are Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), several books by Léon Poliakov, and The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1975).
Returning to the problem of the appropriateness of the war crimes trials, eve¬rybody would agree as to the (at least) shaky legal foundations of the trials, but apparently many people would go along with the claim that the trials were appro¬priate anyway because normal wartime excesses were not involved; the extraordi¬nary nature of the crime, the extermination of the European Jews, called for ex¬traordinary proceedings. Such cruelty must not only be punished but documented as well, the argument goes.
I do not propose in this book to settle the question of what degree of cruelty justifies what degree of legal irregularity. Rather, a rarely heard point, which is at least relevant to the debate, is insisted upon here: It is a fact that without the evi¬dence generated at these trials, there would be no significant evidence that the program of killing Jews ever existed at all. One has only to examine the sources employed by Hilberg and by Reitlinger to see this. If the trials had not been held, a person claiming the existence of the extermination program could not, if chal¬lenged, produce any evidence for this, save a few books (not including Hilberg or Reitlinger) whose claims are just as unsupported as his original claim. Thus, the problem that had been involved in deciding whether or not to hold trials on the Jewish extermination aspect was not a simple question of whether or not to try mass murder; unlike the usual murder case there was legitimate and very solid doubt that the deed had been committed at all.
This may surprise the reader who regards the tale of Jewish extermination as a near certainty; such is simply not the case. There are many considerations support¬ing this view, and some are so simple that they may surprise the reader even further. The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason: at the end of the war, they were still there.
This must be qualified only slightly. Consider a West European observer, who had been familiar with the status of European Jewry prior to the war, making a survey of West European Jewry in, say, late 1946 (East European Jewry was out of bounds). He would have found Italian, French, Belgian, and Danish Jewry es¬sentially unscratched (these points will be discussed more fully in later chapters). On the other hand, he would have found that large numbers of Jews, possibly ma¬jorities, were missing from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia (then accessible from the West). German-Austrian Jewry was confused because, although most had emigrated before the war, it was difficult to be precise about what numbers had emigrated to where. In any case, large numbers, possibly ma¬jorities, of those who had remained were no longer resident in their former homes.
However, the absences were offset by the obvious fact that displaced persons’ camps in Germany were full of Jews (a figure of more than 250,000 has been given14) and that many European Jews had emigrated to the U.S. or Palestine or elsewhere since the beginning of the war. The facts available to the West Euro¬pean observer in late 1946 argued very strongly against the extermination claims, which had received such wide publicity during the war and at the recent trial at Nuremberg.
The passage of a quarter of a century has, despite superficial developments, gradually strengthened this view of the extermination tale, although for many years there was only one serious writer in the field, the late French geographer Paul Rassinier. In 1948, he published a book, Passage de la Ligne, on his experi¬ences as a left wing political prisoner at Buchenwald, 1943-1945, “generally re¬ceived with sympathy, provoking only muffled and inconclusive gnashings of teeth on a certain side.”15 Then in 1950, he published Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses), a critical study of the concentration camp literature, in which he challenged the certainty of the gas chambers: “It is yet too early to pronounce a definitive judgment on the gas chambers.”16 This provoked a violent press cam¬paign, which led ultimately to legal actions, in which author, preface author, and publisher were first acquitted, then found guilty with judgments involving fines, damages, and suspended prison sentence, and finally acquitted again.
In 1955, the two books were combined as Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, 2nd edition, in which material increasingly critical of the gas chamber claim had been added. The most common (but not very common) edition today is the fifth (referenced here), published in 1961, in which year Rassinier also published a short “comple¬mentary” volume, Ulysse Trahi par les Siens, consisting of three essays showing that he had moved rather strongly in the direction of a negative judgment on the gas chambers; the last essay is the text of a speech given in several German and Austrian cities in the early spring of 1960 (just before the Eichmann affair). In 1962 followed Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (The Real Eichmann Trial), a study of the entire range of alleged German crimes in their historical and political con¬texts; by this time, he had reached a definitive conclusion on the tale of extermi¬nation of the Jews: “a historic lie: the most tragic and the most macabre imposture of all time.”17
Rassinier employed two basic approaches to reach this conclusion: the mate¬rial and the demographic.
By the material approach we mean the analysis of the evidence that mass exe¬cutions of Jews by gassings or other specific means were in fact conducted by the Germans during World War II. The material approach is nearly synonymous with analysis of the war crimes trials evidence, or of the trials evidence as interpreted by Hilberg and by Reitlinger, and as supplemented by them with similar evidence. Rassinier only tentatively explored the demographic approach in Le Véritable Procès Eichmann, but in his final general work on the Jewish extermination prob¬lem, Le Drame des Juifs Européens (The Drama of the European Jews), 1964, he
14
Grayzel, 792.
15
Rassinier (1961), 9. 16 Ibid., 175.
17
Rassinier (1962), 112.
presented a lengthy analysis of the question from a demographic point of view. In 1965, he published L’Opération “Vicaire,” a critique of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. One must comment that it is necessary to check up on Rassinier in his interpretation of sources; some do not check out, and, in addition, he employs some clearly unreliable sources at a few points. There are also some glaring but relatively irrelevant errors of fact, such as characterizing Hanson Baldwin as the New York Times’ “expert in matters of Jewish population” (it is doubtful that the Times ever had a staff member who could be characterized thus) and in asserting that the majority of American Jews are anti-Zionist and support the outlook of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (which was never a politically signifi¬cant organization). However, Rassinier was a courageous pioneer in an ignored area and, despite the various shortcomings of his work, no fair minded person could read it without becoming at least skeptical about the “exterminations.” Rassinier passed away in July 1967. His books had appeared in German, Spanish, and Italian translations, but no English translation was published for some years.18
Rassinier’s books were followed by three books, which Josef Ginsburg pub¬lished under the pseudonym J. G. Burg: Schuld und Schicksal (Guilt and Fate), 1962, Sündenböcke (Scapegoats), 1967, and NS-Verbrechen (National Socialist Crimes), 1968. Ginsburg’s books are not particularly well researched, since his views are based mainly on what he had read in the newspapers plus his personal experiences as a Jew who, together with his family, was deported during the war to occupied eastern territory by the Nazis and the Romanians. After the war, Ginsburg took his family to Israel, but he eventually became very anti-Zionist and moved back to Europe, eventually setting up a bookbindery in Munich. While he believes that many Jews perished as a result of the combined effects of Nazi poli¬cies and wartime conditions, he denies that the German government ever contem¬plated the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and he is particularly scornful of the six million figure. He is unsure of the existence of gas chambers, but he be¬lieves that many Jews perished on account of epidemics, pogroms, air raids, and executions of partisans and offers an estimate of about three million as the maxi¬mum possible number of victims, although he believes the correct figure is much lower. As a reward for his efforts to get at the truth, Ginsburg, a small man and not young, was beaten up by Jewish thugs while visiting his wife’s grave in the Is¬raelite cemetery in Munich.
In 1969, a short book was published in the United States, The Myth of the Six Million, attributed to an anonymous author. While some things can be said in fa¬vor of this book, e.g. I learned of Rassinier there, it also contains so many errors of fact that it illustrates that it is not enough that a book’s thesis be correct, for quite a few people who used it as a basis for prosecuting public controversy got burned as a result.
The next development was the publication in Germany of a book by Emil Aretz, Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge (The Witches’ Multiplication Table of a Lie), of which only the third edition, Munich, 1973, seems to have attained sig-
Editor’s note: A collection of the most important texts by Rassinier was published in 1978: Paul Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth.
nificant circulation. Aretz carries the case against the exterminations only slightly beyond Rassinier. He depends heavily on Rassinier in this respect, although he provides some new material. A major function of his book is the presentation of a remarkably bold and forthright general defense of the German nation.
The unreasonable continuation of war crimes trials in West Germany and the absence of any statute of limitations with respect to alleged war crimes by Ger¬mans have had a seldomly remarked implication: people who “were there” have been afraid to come forward and report what, to their knowledge, actually hap¬pened. They would rather not call attention to the fact that they “were there.” However, it was inevitable that a few courageous individuals would come forward nevertheless. The most important of these, to date, has been Thies Christophersen, author of the booklet Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie). Christophersen was at Auschwitz from January to December 1944. In 1973, he published his rec¬ollections and his firm view that no exterminations ever took place there. An Eng¬lish translation of Christophersen’s booklet, to which some colorful announce¬ments had been added, was published in 1974. Christophersen was followed by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, a retired Hamburg judge, who had been assigned to an anti¬aircraft unit near Auschwitz during 1944 and had visited the camp on a few occa¬sions. For such honest reporting of his recollections, Stäglich was punished with a five year, twenty percent reduction of his pension.19
In late 1973, Austin J. App, a retired English professor in Maryland, published a short booklet, The Six Million Swindle. Early in 1974, Wolf Dieter Rothe pub¬lished the first volume of his study, Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, and later in 1974, Richard Harwood published in England his book, Did Six Million Really Die? Harwood’s booklet is quite good in convincing power, although it has some weak points, and the reader is referred to Rassinier for a definitive treatment of the subject. It was favorably reviewed by Colin Wilson in the November 1974 is¬sue of the influential British monthly Books and Bookmen, setting off a months-long controversy in the pages of that journal.
In early 1975, Harry Elmer Barnes’ translation of one of Rassinier’s books, The Drama of the European Jews, was issued by a small publisher in the United States.

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How Many Jews?
In this introductory chapter, we quickly review the principal problems that arise when demographic questions are asked. We then indicate, how demographic problems are resolved in this book, but indicate that the specific task of resolution must be deferred until later in the book.
The problems inherent in a demographic study are formidable. First, all sources of post-war primary data are private Jewish or Communist sources (exclu-
Nation Europa, vol. 23 (Oct. 1973), 50; vol. 25 (Aug. 1975), 39. The Ginsburg beating incident is well known and is mentioned by App, 20.
sively the latter in the all important cases of Russia and Poland). Second, it ap¬pears that one can get whatever results desired by consulting the appropriately se¬lected pre-war and post-war sources. Consider world Jewish population. The 1939 study of Arthur Ruppin, Professor of Jewish Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gave 16,717,000 Jews in the world in 1938.20 Because Ruppin (who passed away in 1943) was considered the foremost expert on such matters, on ac¬count of many writings on the subject over a period of many years, the estimates of other pre-war sources tend to agree with him. Thus, the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1933, which appears in the 1940 World Almanac, was 15,315,359. The World Almanac figure for 1945 is 15,192,089 (page 367); no source is given, but the figure is apparently based on some sort of religious cen¬sus. The 1946 World Almanac revised this to 15,753,638, a figure which was re¬tained in the editions of 1947 (page 748), 1948 (page 572), and 1949 (page 289). The 1948 World Almanac (page 249) also gives the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1938 (sic), 15,688,259 while the 1949 World Almanac (page 204) re¬ports new figures from the American Jewish Committee, which were developed in 1947-1948: 16,643,120 in 1939 and 11,266,600 in 1947.
However, New York Times military expert Hanson Baldwin, in an article writ¬ten in 1948 dealing with the then forthcoming Arab-Jewish war on the basis of in¬formation available at the UN and other places, gave a figure of 15 to 18 million world Jewish population as well as figures for such things as Jews in Palestine, Jews in the Middle East, Arabs in Palestine, total Arabs, total Moslems, etc.21
Such a sketch illustrates some of the simpler uncertainties that exist in a de¬mography study. To carry the matter further, the 11-12 million postwar world Jewish population figure, which it is necessary to claim in order to maintain the extermination thesis, is very vulnerable on two points. The first is the set of statis¬tics offered for the U.S., and the second is the set offered for Eastern Europe. Both, especially the latter, are subject to insuperable uncertainties. Let us first consider the United States. Census figures for the total U.S. population are:22
Table 1: U.S. total population
YEAR
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960
POPULATION
105,710,620 122,775,046 131,669,275 150,697,361 179,300,000
while U.S. Jewish population figures, as given by the Jewish Statistical Bureau (subsidiary of either the American Jewish Conference or the Synagogue of Amer¬ica), H. S. Linfield, Director, are:23
20
Ruppin, 30-33.
21
New York Times (Feb. 22, 1948), 4.
22
World Almanac (1931), 192; (1942), 588; (1952), 394; (1962), 251.
23
World Almanac (1931), 197; (1942), 593; (1952), 437; (1962), 258.
Table 2: U.S. Jewish population
YEAR
JEWISH POPULATION
1917

3,388,951
1927 4,228,029
1937 4,770,647
1949  5,000,000
1961  5,530,000
It is important to note that all of the U.S. Jewish population figures are given by the same source (Linfield).
The indicated growth of U.S. Jewish population, 1917-1937, is 40.8%, while the growth of total U.S. population, 1920-1940, is 24.6%. This contrast is gener¬ally reasonable, since in the period under consideration Jewish immigration was fairly heavy. However, Jewish immigration into the U.S. raises some problems of its own. The American Jewish yearbook gave a net Jewish immigration for the years 1938-1943 and 1946-1949 (inclusive) of 232,191.24 Figures for 1944 and 1945 do not seem to be available. It was in those two years, incidentally, that an indeterminate number of Jews were admitted to the U.S. “outside of the regular immigration procedure.” It was claimed that there were only 1,000 such Jews quartered at a camp near Oswego, New York, and that they were not eligible for admission to the U.S. This was supposed to be a U.S. contribution to relieving the problems of refugees, but the whole episode seems most strange and suspicious.25
Rather than attempt to settle the problem of the extent of Jewish immigration, suppose one allows the Jewish population a growth rate in 1937-1957 at least equal to that of the U.S. Jewish population of 1917-1937, as seems at least rea¬sonable in view of various facts, e.g., the reasons which sent 1.5 million Jews to Palestine during the World War II and aftermath period appear to motivate immi¬gration to the U.S. just as well, and no national or racial immigration quotas were applicable to Jews as such. In such a case, there should be at least 6,678,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957, not the 5,300,000 that are indicated. There are about 1,400,000 Jews missing from the interpolated figures for 1957, and we consider this a conservative figure for the reason given. The period 1937-1957 was one of Jewish movement on an unprecedented scale.
On the other hand, we can adopt an equally conservative approach and assume that the 4,770,647 Jews of 1937 grew in 1937-1957 at the same rate as the U.S. population in 1940-1960. Under this assumption, these should have become 6,500,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957. If one adds the reasonable figure of 300,000 more due to immigration, we have 6,800,000 in 1957. Thus, by either method of extrapolation the figures offered for post-war U.S. Jewish population are at least approximately 1.5 million short for 1957.
The specific major fault of the U.S. Jewish population figures is the inexplica¬bly small claimed growth from 1937 to 1949 despite record Jewish movement and
24
World Almanac (1952), 438.
25
US-WRB (1945), 64-69; New York Times (June 10, 1944), 1; (June 13, 1944), 1; (Aug. 10, 1944), 5; (Oct. 24, 1944), 14; (Oct. 25, 1944), 13; Myer, 108-123.
a very open U.S. immigration policy.
Eastern Europe, however, presents the core of the demographic problem. In order to avoid very serious confusion, one must first recognize that there have been extensive border changes in Eastern Europe in the course of the twentieth century. A map of Europe on the eve of World War I (1914) is given as Fig. 1. A map for January 1938 showing, essentially, Europe organized according to the Treaty of Versailles, before Hitler began territorial acquisitions, is given in Fig. 2, and Fig. 4 shows the post-war map of Europe. The principal border change at the end of World War II was the moving westward of the Soviet border, annexing the three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and parts of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Prussia. Poland was compensated with the re¬mainder of East Prussia and what used to be considered eastern Germany; the ef¬fect was to move Poland bodily westward.
Pre-war (1938) Jewish population estimates for Eastern Europe were offered by H. S. Linfield and the American Jewish Committee in the 1948 (sic) World Almanac (page 249). Post-war (1948) figures are published in the 1949 World Almanac (page 204).
Table 3: Eastern European Jewish population (est.)
COUNTRY          1938         1948
Bulgaria Hungary Poland Romania  USSR         48,398  444,567 3,113,900 900,000 3,273,047         46,500  180,000 105,000  430,000 2,032,500
TOTALS          7,779,912         2,794,000

The claimed Jewish loss for Eastern Europe is thus 4,985,912. The figure for the USSR includes, in both cases, the three Baltic countries and the Jews of Soviet Asia. The pre-war figures are in all cases in close agreement with the figures that Ruppin published shortly before the war. To the extent that the extermination leg¬end is based on population statistics, it is based precisely on these statistics or their equivalents.
The trouble is that such figures are absolutely meaningless. There is no way a Western observer can check the plausibility, let alone the accuracy, of such fig¬ures. He must either be willing to accept Jewish or Communist (mainly the latter) claims on Jewish population for Eastern Europe, or he must reject any number of¬fered as lacking satisfactory authority.
It is possible to reinforce our objection on this all important point and simulta¬neously deal with a reservation that the reader may have; it would appear exces¬sively brazen to claim the virtual disappearance of Polish Jewry, if such had not been essentially or approximately the case or if something like that had not hap¬pened. This seems a valid reservation, but one must recall that much of the terri¬tory that was considered Polish in 1939 was Soviet by 1945. It was possible for Polish Jewry to virtually disappear, if, during the 1939-1941 Russian occupation of Eastern Poland, the Soviets had dispersed large numbers of Polish Jews into the Soviet Union and if, during 1941-1944, the Germans had concentrated Polish Jews eastwards, with the Soviet Union ultimately absorbing many of these Jews into its territory, with those who did not wish to remain in the Soviet Union emi¬grating, mainly to Palestine and the U.S., but also to some extent to the new Po¬land and other lands. This, in fact, is what happened to the Jews who had resided in Poland before the war.
Whatever may be said about Soviet Jewish policy after, say, 1950, it is clear that the earlier policies had not been anti-Jewish and had encouraged the absorp¬tion of Jews into the Soviet Union. It is known that many Polish Jews were ab¬sorbed during and immediately after the war, but of course numbers are difficult to arrive at. Reitlinger considers this problem and settles on a figure of 700,000, without giving reasons why the correct figure might not be much higher. He then notes that the evidence that he employs of extermination of Jews in Russia (documents alleged to be German) indicates about the same number of Soviet Jews exterminated, from which he correctly infers that, in the period 1939-1946, the Soviet Jewish population may have actually increased.26 This important con¬cession, coming from the author of The Final Solution, shows that our unwilling¬ness to accept the Communist figures need not be regarded as motivated merely by the necessities of our thesis. The figures are inarguably untrustworthy. It is claimed by the Soviets that their Jewish population declined by 38%, despite the acquisition of territory containing many Jews. Since the USSR is one of the lands where “Jew” is a legally recognized nationality, the Soviets do indeed possess ac¬curate figures on the number of Jews they have but have chosen (in Reitlinger’s opinion, if you choose not to accept this author’s) to claim an utterly mythical Jewish population loss of 38%.
Likewise with the value to be attached to the remainder of the figures offered.
The most relevant research by a demographer appears to be that of Leszek A. Kosinski of the University of Alberta (Geographical Review, Vol. 59, 1969, pp. 308-402 and Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 11, 1969, pp. 357-373), who has studied the changes in the entire ethnic structure of East Central Europe (i.e. ex¬cluding Germany and Russia) over the period 1930-1960. He explains the extreme difficulties with basic statistics:
“The criteria used in compilation differ from country to country and are
not always precise. In principle, two types are used: objective criteria, such as
language, cultural affiliation, and religious denomination, and subjective cri¬
teria, based on the declaration of the persons themselves. Each type has vir¬
tues and deficiencies. Objective criteria define nationality only indirectly and
are difficult to apply in marginal cases (for example, bilingual persons).
The same criticism applies even more to subjective criteria. External pres¬
sure and opportunism can influence the results, especially where national con¬
sciousness is not fully developed or where an honest answer can bring unde¬
sirable consequences. Official data are not always reliable, then, even when
they are not forged, as has also occurred. However, criticism of the official
Reitlinger, 534, 542-544.
data cannot be applied in the same degree to all the countries, and reliability is very much a function of national policy.”
Jews are of course one of the groups Kosinski is interested in, and he presents various figures, generally comparable to those given above, for numbers of pre¬war Jews. However, his post-war data are so useless from this point of view that he does not even attempt to offer specific post-war numbers for Jews, although he offers post-war figures for other groups, e.g. gypsies, giving numbers less signifi¬cant, statistically, than the numbers of Jews who, according to the extermination mythologists, survived in Eastern Europe. It is true that he accepts the extermina¬tion legend in a general way and presents a bar graph showing a catastrophic de¬crease in the Jewish populations of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslova¬kia. He also remarks that the combined war-caused population losses for Yugo¬slavs, Jews, Poles and east Germans was about 12.5-14 million, not breaking the total down, and referring the reader to the statistical summary Population Changes in Europe Since 1939 by Gregory (Grzegorz) Frumkin, whose figures for Jews come from the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Centre de Documentation juive contemporaine (Center for Con¬temporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris.
However, the point is that Kosinski arrives at no figures for Jews, as he obvi¬ously should not, given the problems he has noted. The ethnic population figures from Communist Hungary are based on language, and the figures from Commu¬nist Poland, Communist Czechoslovakia, and Communist Romania are based on “nationality,” whatever that means in the various cases. Naturally, he apologizes for his use of “official statistics, imperfect as these may be.” We will return to demographic problems, especially those which involve the Polish Jews, in Chap¬ter 7.
We must also remember that the problem of counting Jews in Western coun¬tries contains enormous difficulties on account of the lack of any legal, racial, or religious basis for defining a “Jew.” As an example, the statistics available to Reitlinger indicate to him that early in World War II there were 300,000 Jews in France, including refugee German Jews.27
The Nazis, on the other hand, thought that there were 865,000, and I see no motivation for deliberate inflation of this figure; other figures used by the Nazis were not wildly inflated compared to the figures of other sources.28 I should add that I really have no idea how many Jews there are in the U.S. I can consult the World Almanac, which will tell me that there are about 6,000,000, but I cannot see how that figure was arrived at and have little confidence in it. As far as I know, the correct figure could as easily be 9,000,000. There must be at least 4,000,000 in the New York area alone.
To summarize what has been said with respect to Jewish population statistics: the problem of compiling such statistics is formidable even without political inter¬ference or pressure. Moreover, in the demographic argument for a five or six mil¬lion drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures
27
Reitlinger, 327. 28 NG-2586-G in NMT, vol. 13, 212.
used are Communist and Jewish and thus, by the nature of the problem we are ex¬amining, must be considered essentially useless. In addition, the post-war figures for the United States are demonstrably too low by a significant amount.
One should not form the impression that it is essential to my argument that any demographic conclusions seemed to be reached above be accepted by the reader. It has only been shown what sorts of problems arise if one attempts a too direct demographic approach; it is not possible to settle anything in such a manner. In the final analysis, the difficulty is that the figures available amount to nothing more than statements, from Jewish and Communist sources, that millions of Jews were killed. Such claims are to be expected, but they must certainly not deter us from looking deeper. We will take up the demographic problem later in the book, however, because the nature of the situation is such that reasonably useful demo¬graphic conclusions are possible once it is understood what, in general, happened to the Jews.
Rassinier’s demographic study, in fact, does not really even attempt to settle the problem, strictly speaking. His basic approach is to analyze the inferences that have been drawn from two different sets of data, that of the Centre de Documen¬tation juive contemporaine and that of Hilberg, both of whom infer from their data five to six million Jewish victims of the Nazis. Rassinier’s conclusion is that the former can only claim 1,485,292 victims form its data and the latter 896,892.29 Rassinier accepts the reality of about a million Jewish victims of Nazi policies, while rejecting the claims of extermination. For example, it is known that some East European peoples took advantage of general political-military conditions to persecute Jews. Also, many Jews who were deported from their homes no doubt perished as a result of generally chaotic conditions, which accompanied the latter part of the war.
Believing that the task is not possible, I will offer here no definite estimate of Jewish losses. However, I have no strong reason to quarrel with Rassinier’s esti¬mate.30
Our Method, Argument, and Conclusion
As stated, the “material” approach will be extended here and, in addition, a “historical-political” approach will be “introduced.” This is just a fancy way of saying that we will grasp that there are two political powers involved in the prob¬lem, not just one. That is to say, we have a tale of extermination, and we should inquire into the circumstance of its generation. Clearly, there are two states in¬volved in the problem. Germany had an anti-Jewish policy involving, in many cases, deportations of Jews from their homes and countries of citizenship. That is
29
Rassinier (1964), 220.
30
Editor’s note: compare in this regard Walter N. Sanning, The Dissolution of the Eastern Euro¬pean Jewry, and Germar Rudolf, “Holocaust victims: A Statistical Analysis”, in Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, pp. 181-213.
certain. The wartime policy of Washington was to claim extermination, and the post-war policy was to hold trials, at which there was generated the only evidence that we have today that these wartime claims had any foundation. That is also cer¬tain. The policies of both states are necessarily of interest, and if there is any re¬spect, in which this book may be breaking fundamentally new ground on the problem, it is in its insistence in seeing Washington as an active agent in the gen¬eration of the story. Thus, we are interested not only in what Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and Heydrich were doing during the war in regard to these matters, but also what Roosevelt, Hull, Morgenthau, and the New York Times and associated media were doing during the war, and what the various tribunals con¬trolled or dominated by Washington did after the war. This is not only a fair but, more importantly, an illuminating historical approach.
The conclusion is that Washington constructed a frame-up on the Jewish ex¬termination charge. Once this is recognized, the true nature of German Jewish policy will be seen.

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