Ron Unz
Last month I explored the historical origins of the State of Israel and the intertwined expulsion of the Palestinian refugees from their ancient homeland. During this discussion, I emphasized the crucial role that the Jewish Holocaust had played in justifying and facilitating those momentous events of three generations ago.
- American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words
I read or reread more than a dozen books for my long review article, and also glancingly mentioned an additional one, which I’ve now digested as well. My main focus had been on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and The Seventh Million by Tom Segev only slightly touched on that topic. But his descriptive subtitle “The Israelis and the Holocaust” suggested a related subject of inquiry that proved quite fruitful.
Born in 1945, Segev is generally regarded as one of Israel’s leading journalists, the author of numerous widely-praised histories regarding Israel’s origins and its various wars. Although his 1991 bestseller was controversial, the back cover carried glowing praise from such top Israeli figures as Abba Eban and Amos Elon, as well as important Holocaust scholars such as Prof. George L. Mosse and leaders of the Jewish diaspora such as Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. I found it quite enlightening, though perhaps not entirely in the way the author intended.
Even aside from its main theme, the first chapter provided some extremely useful information. Back in 2018, I’d drawn upon the shocking research found in the books of maverick leftist Lenni Brenner to publish a long article on the surprising relationship between the various Zionist factions and Nazi Germany, which spent most of the 1930s working together in a close economic partnership that laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words
Although Brenner’s documentary research seemed rock-solid and had never been seriously challenged, I’d always had a few slight doubts at the back of my mind. I had wondered whether such utterly astonishing facts could really be true and yet remained totally concealed for generations by virtually all of our journalists and academics, but Segev’s brief discussion completely put those concerns to rest. Segev is a very mainstream pro-Zionist Israeli writer and he probably despised Brenner, a radical anti-Zionist Trotskyite, never mentioning the name of the latter anywhere in his nearly 600 pages of text. But Segev drew upon the same underlying archival sources to fully confirm all of Brenner’s most incendiary historical claims and even added a few additional ones, though all of this similar material was obviously presented in a very different fashion.
By the 1920s the mainstream leftist Zionist movement was heavily influenced by Marxism and led by Russian-born David Ben-Gurion, who modeled himself after Lenin, but those Zionists still eagerly formed a 1930s economic partnership with Nazi Germany based upon an obvious commonality of interests. Hitler was eager to encourage the departure of Germany’s problematical 1% Jewish minority while the Zionists were just as eager to receive them, along with the huge infusion of financial and industrial capital they could provide. During this period, important SS leaders including Adolf Eichmann were invited to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and then published their flattering accounts of the successful development activities of their Zionist partners in Joseph Goebbels’ leading Berlin Nazi newspaper. Some Zionist leaders reciprocated, traveling to Germany for very friendly meetings with their Nazi counterparts, and they reported how well the Jews of that country seemed to be doing despite Hitler’s supposedly harsh new regime.
Indeed, Segev’s figures demonstrate the enormous prosperity of German Jews, explaining why the Zionists were so eager to arrange for them to relocate to impoverished Palestine. The Nazis agreed that every such Jewish emigrant could take with him the present-day equivalent of $200,000 in foreign currency, plus another $250,000 or more in German merchandise. These were huge sums for what had been the desperately poor society of Weimar Germany, and such Jewish wealth had obviously been one of the major sources of anti-Semitic resentment in that country.
If the main Zionist groups cooperated with Nazi Germany on purely utilitarian grounds, their right-wing Zionist rivals had more ideological motives since they had modeled their movement after that of Mussolini, and always regarded themselves as fascists as did their bitter opponents. Many of these Zionists even considered Hitler’s notorious anti-Semitism as a mere political blemish rather than as an insupportable obstacle preventing their admiration. In 1933 a leading Zionist writer ranked the German dictator among the world’s “shining names,” alongside Mussolini, Ataturk, and the various other right-wing heroes of his movement, while another Zionist figure had loudly declared that “Hitler saved Germany.” Even after World War II began, one of these Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, hoping to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini.
One of the interesting points made by Segev is that although a large majority of ordinary Jews around the world were intensely hostile to Hitler’s regime, the leadership of most of the different Zionist factions quietly became fierce competitors for German patronage, with those that lost out then sometimes hypocritically denouncing the Nazi affiliations of their more successful rivals. These bitter words led to the 1933 assassination of one of the top mainstream Zionist leaders in Palestine at the hands of his right-wing critics.
Although this Nazi-Zionist partnership was controversial at the time, it obviously became much more so following the Axis defeat and the concerted Allied effort to demonize the Nazis through the Nuremberg show trials and other propaganda spectaculars, so the newly established State of Israel made every effort to hide this dark secret of its recent past. When those 1930s historical facts later threatened to leak out in the mid-1950s due to the legal problems of an important Israeli political figure, the man was assassinated, and Segev suggested that Israel’s government had probably arranged the killing in order to permanently shut his mouth.
After that rather surprising first chapter, the bulk of Segev’s narrative shifts to a very different topic, namely Israel’s tangled relationship with the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of some six million helpless Jewish civilians by Nazi Germany, mostly in the gas chambers of various World War II concentration camps. On these basic facts, the author’s views seem absolutely conventional ones, and at several points he notes the bestial cruelty of the diabolical Nazi plan to erase all Jews from the world. But although references to the Holocaust, gas chambers, or the most famous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Dachau are sprinkled across a large fraction of all these pages, Segev largely avoids discussing the details of that industrial slaughter, apparently assuming that all of his readers are thoroughly familiar with the standard narrative account produced by modern Holocaust scholarship, which began in the wake of Raul Hilberg’s seminal 1961 volume. Ironically enough, Segev notes that as of the date of his writing, Hilberg’s classic work still remained untranslated into Hebrew, probably because it had reported that all those many millions of Jews had willingly gone to their deaths, shepherded by their own community leadership and without ever showing any signs of active resistance.
However, Israeli society is unusual in that such a substantial fraction of its founding population consisted of postwar Holocaust survivors, “the seventh million” of Segev’s title, individuals who had themselves passed through the various Nazi death camps. Therefore, their gripping personal accounts seem to have provided much of the understanding of those momentous events for the Israeli public, including Segev himself, who was born just weeks before Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of his German regime.
Perhaps because Segev’s first chapter documented the close Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s, which might disconcert his readers, he preceded this discussion with a Prologue that recounted the utter horrors of the Holocaust that soon followed chronologically. He focused upon the books of a particular Auschwitz survivor named Yehiel De-Nur, who had spent two years at that notorious death camp, and although the name of that writer means little in America these days, he became a celebrated postwar author in Israel.
Although all of De-Nur’s several autobiographical volumes were published under a pseudonym and his true identity remained concealed for many years, his works constituted some of the earliest Holocaust literature in Israel and were hugely influential in bringing the horrifying details of that catastrophe to Israeli popular attention, with a special literary prize established in his honor, awarded every two years by Israel’s president.
Indeed, Segev explained that he and most other Israeli teenagers of his generation first learned the extremely disturbing details of the Holocaust from De-Nur’s books, so when he managed to arrange a personal interview with the author, he did so with great trepidation. De-Nur’s writing had always emphasized the sadistic acts that were a daily part of life at Auschwitz, including the widespread sexual abuse of young Jewish boys and girls by their Nazi captors, and Segev describes the works as considerably pornographic.
According to Segev, De-Nur had been a young Yeshiva student in pre-war Poland with huge literary pretensions, desperately trying to get his writing into print when the war came along and he ended up at Auschwitz. De-Nur later claimed that Eichmann had personally condemned him to that fate so he served as a leading witness at the 1961 Eichmann trial, with his testimony ended in a fainting spell, supposedly reflecting the unspeakable personal memories that still haunted him even decades later.
As it happens, I also recently read Hannah Arendt‘s 1963 classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, and De-Nur was one of the few witnesses whom she also focused upon, treating his testimony far less gently than did Segev. According to her account, De-Nur’s bizarre, rambling monologue included a heavy focus upon astrology and all sorts of other strange things, considerably embarrassing the serious legal proceedings. When the prosecutor finally interrupted to ask a couple of basic, factual questions, De-Nur immediately collapsed in a hysterical fit, allowing the judge to salvage the situation by ordering the witness permanently removed from the stand. Arendt suggested that De-Nur’s testimony demonstrated the tremendous difficulty that emotional eyewitnesses sometimes have in distinguishing between their actual memories of events from many years earlier and the products of their own vivid imagination.
Indeed, Segev seemed to confirm Arendt’s observation, explaining that De-Nur had been so emotionally broken by his experiences at Auschwitz that he required many years of psychiatric counseling and also began a series of LSD treatment-sessions, in which he recalled visions of his days in the camp. Eventually, he produced a new Holocaust manuscript that included presumably imaginary scenes of such brutal events as an SS guard murdering the Jewish boy who had been the victim of his sexual perversions, then grilling the boy’s body on a spit and devouring the flesh piece by piece.
These bizarre pages of the Prologue apparently represent much of the Holocaust narrative as understood by most Israelis and I found it rather disconcerting that they were immediately followed by the chapter describing the mundane details of the Nazi-Zionist partnership of just a few years earlier, an extremely odd juxtaposition of such radically different situations. Thus, according to Segev’s apparent reconstruction, the friendly and respectful business arrangements between German Nazis and Zionist Jews of the late 1930s were suddenly replaced in the early 1940s by a diabolical and sadomasochistic effort by the Nazis to totally exterminate all of the world’s Jews, an extremely strange transformation that raised serious questions in my mind.
As far as I know, the mainstream Holocaust narrative in America has never portrayed the German concentration camps as hotbeds of rampant sadomasochistic sexual perversion. However, such themes were found in a series of popular 1970s exploitation films beginning with Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. This leads me to wonder if many of those survivor-based accounts in Israel might fall into that same category. And indeed, according to De-Nur’s Wikipedia page, a Holocaust organization in Israel has denounced De-Nur’s books as merely pornographic fiction, not least because Nazi law absolutely prohibited any sexual relations between Aryans and Jews.
Equally bizarre and scatological stories had also been found in The Painted Bird by writer Jerzy Kosinski, which in 1976 became America’s first widely popular Holocaust memoir. But that huge bestseller was later revealed to be totally fraudulent, and the plagiarizing author eventually committed suicide. Indeed, there have been so many fake Holocaust memoirs over the years that they nearly constitute a literary genre of their own. Probably the most world’s most famous Holocaust survivor was Elie Wiesel, who parlayed the stories of his wartime suffering into becoming an enormous political celebrity, capping his career with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, whose announcement declared him “a messenger to mankind.” Yet journalist Alexander Cockburn has persuasively argued that Wiesel was simply a fraud, and his famous autobiographical work Night just another literary hoax.
According to Segev, one odd element of Israeli Holocaust dogma has been the widespread, almost universal conviction that the Nazis had rendered Jewish bodies into soap, with even top government leaders firmly describing that atrocity as fact. Not only was this a notorious hoax, but Segev explained that Yad Vashem, Israel’s most authoritative center of Holocaust research has fully debunked it as totally fraudulent.
Meanwhile, even some of the less gruesome stories that Segev passes along seem rather doubtful. According to a prominent Israeli attorney who later claimed to have liberated death camps as a Jewish officer during the war, a large group of men, women, and children were herded into one of the gas chambers, but because their numbers were insufficient, the penny-pinching Germans didn’t want to waste a full dose of gas on them, so they were forced to stand there naked for a day and a night awaiting additional victims, only to be rescued from death when their camp was suddenly liberated.
In reading Segev’s account of the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and the sort of outrageous Holocaust stories that dominated the narrative in that country, I couldn’t avoid noticing a strong connection to much more recent events.
The surprisingly successful Hamas attack on October 7th was deeply embarrassing to the Israelis, and pro-Israel propagandists soon began heavily emphasizing ridiculous hoaxes such as the claims of forty beheaded babies or a baby roasted in an oven. All of these frauds were provided by extremely disreputable characters, but eagerly accepted and promoted by leading Western political elites and media outlets.
The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion:
Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the Gray Zone demonstrated that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.
These developments bring to mind a couple of paragraphs I’d published in 2018 on similar matters:
Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble. Meanwhile, the Jewish community also seems to contain far more than its fair share of the emotionally disturbed and the mentally ill, and perhaps as a consequence has served as a launching-pad for many of the world’s religious cults and fanatic ideological movements.
Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.
The Gray Zone editors noted that any skeptical analysis of those outrageous Hamas atrocity stories has prompted pro-Israel advocates to fiercely denounce such critics while stubbornly refusing to provide any solid evidence.
This is obviously correct. However, I think an equally skeptical approach must also be applied to the conventional narrative of the Holocaust, which constitutes the central ideological pillar of the Jewish State, its political leadership, and its committed supporters, both Jewish and Gentile alike. Unfortunately, applying such analytical methods may be quite psychologically difficult for many Westerners because over the last couple of generations Hollywood has elevated that historical event of the 1940s into something resembling a quasi-religion. As I wrote in 2018:
All three of America’s television networks were under Jewish ownership or control, so it was hardly surprising that two years later ABC decided to repeat this process with the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust, which also achieved an audience of 100 million and generated enormous profits…
The following year, William Styron published Sophie’s Choice, a heart-rending tale involving deeply buried memories of the extermination of Christian Polish children in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Although such an occurrence was absolutely contrary to the doctrines of all Jewish Holocaust scholars, the novel became a huge national best-seller anyway, and a 1982 film of the same name soon followed, with Meryl Streep winning an Oscar for Best Actress. A decade later, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List won a remarkable seven Oscars, while grossing nearly $100 million.
With Hollywood so overwhelmingly Jewish, the consequences were hardly surprising, and a huge cinematic genre soon developed. According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Many billions of dollars have surely been invested over the years on the total production costs of this ongoing business enterprise. For most ordinary people, “seeing is believing,” and how could anyone seriously doubt the reality of the Holocaust after having seen all the gas chambers and mounds of murdered Jewish corpses constructed by highly-paid Hollywood set designers? Doubting the existence of Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk would be almost as absurd.
Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West, so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable, apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Internet critics have suggested that over the last couple of generations, energetic Jewish activists have successfully lobbied Western nations into replacing their traditional religion of Christianity with the new religion of Holocaustianity, and the Williamson Affair certainly seems to support that conclusion.
Consider the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Funded by Jewish interests, it spent years launching vicious attacks against Christianity, sometimes in crudely pornographic fashion, and also periodically vilified Islam. Such activities were hailed by French politicians as proof of the total freedom of thought allowed in the land of Voltaire. But the moment that one of its leading cartoonists made a very mild joke related to Jews, he was immediately fired, and if the publication had ever ridiculed the Holocaust, it surely would have been immediately shut down, and its entire staff possibly thrown into prison.
Western journalists and human rights advocates have often expressed support for the boldly transgressive activities of the Jewish-funded Femen activists when they desecrate Christian churches all around the world. But such pundits would certainly be in an uproar if anyone were to act in similar fashion toward the growing international network of Holocaust Museums, most of them built at public expense.
Indeed, one of the underlying sources of bitter Western conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to be that he has restored Christianity to a favored place in a society where the early Bolsheviks had once dynamited churches and massacred many thousands of priests. Western intellectual elites held far more positive feelings toward the USSR while its leaders retained a stridently anti-Christian attitude.
In the same very long 2018 article, I described how I’d become curious about the evidentiary basis of the Holocaust, and after careful investigation concluded that the Holocaust was largely, perhaps almost entirely a hoax.
In particular, I found strong indications that during the years immediately following World War II, most of America’s mainstream journalists and academics seem to have quietly recognized that the stories claiming that millions of Jews had been killed in gas chambers by the Nazis were merely crude wartime propaganda, not dissimilar to the First World War accusations that the Germans had raped Belgian nuns and eaten Belgian children.
One important piece of evidence was my discovery of a book written by Prof. John Beaty, who had served as a colonel in Military Intelligence during the war.
Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs. And as a very minor aside, he also criticized the Israelis for continuing to claim that Hitler had killed six million Jews, a highly implausible accusation that had no apparent basis in reality and seemed to be just a fraud concocted by Jews and Communists, aimed at poisoning our relations with postwar Germany and extracting money for the Jewish State from the long-suffering German people.
Furthermore, he was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.
Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.
Moreover, although Jewish groups including the ADL harshly condemned the book, especially in their private lobbying, those efforts provoked a backlash, and numerous top American generals, both serving and retired, wholeheartedly endorsed Beaty’s work, denouncing the ADL efforts at censorship and urging all Americans to read the volume. Although Beaty’s quite explicit Holocaust Denial might shock tender modern sensibilities, at the time it seems to have caused barely a ripple of concern and was almost totally ignored even by the vocal Jewish critics of the work.
Given his crucial wartime role, there probably would have been few Americans better informed of our Intelligence information than Prof. Beaty, and his huge 1951 bestseller casually dismissed the Jewish Holocaust stories as nonsense. His book was strongly endorsed by many of our leading generals, and although the ADL and other Jewish groups ferociously attacked him on every other point, none of them ever challenged his statements on the Holocaust.
I went on to explore the striking absence of any significant mention of the Holocaust during those years:
Beaty’s very brief 1951 discussion has been the earliest instance of explicit Holocaust Denial I have managed to locate, but the immediate postwar years seem absolutely rife with what might be described as “implicit Holocaust Denial,” especially within the highest political circles.
Over the years, Holocaust scholars and activists have very rightfully emphasized the absolutely unprecedented nature of the historical events they have studied. They describe how some six million innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately exterminated, mostly in gas chambers, by one of Europe’s most highly cultured nations, and emphasize that monstrous project was often accorded greater priority than Germany’s own wartime military needs during the country’s desperate struggle for survival. Furthermore, the Germans also undertook enormous efforts to totally eliminate all possible traces of their horrifying deed, with huge resources expended to cremate all those millions of bodies and scatter the ashes. This same disappearance technique was even sometimes applied to the contents of their mass graves, which were dug up long after initial burial, so that the rotting corpses could then be totally incinerated and all evidence eliminated. And although Germans are notorious for their extreme bureaucratic precision, this immense wartime project was apparently implemented without benefit of a single written document, or at least no such document has ever been located.
Lipstadt entitled her first book “Beyond Belief,” and I think that all of us can agree that the historical event she and so many others in academia and Hollywood have made the centerpiece of their lives and careers is certainly one of the most extremely remarkable occurrences in all of human history. Indeed, perhaps only a Martian Invasion would have been more worthy of historical study, but Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds radio-play which terrified so many millions of Americans in 1938 turned out to be a hoax rather than real.
The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust certainly constituted a very substantial fraction of all the wartime casualties in the European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100 all the British who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more numerous than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would surely have provided the best possible justification for the Allied war effort. Yet for many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of amnesia seems to have gripped most of the leading political protagonists in that regard.
On that matter, I quoted a very interesting passage by Prof. Robert Faurisson, who became one of France’s leading Holocaust Deniers in the 1970s:
Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.
Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.
Consider the full implications of these facts.
As Faurisson emphasized, during the years 1948-1959, Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle published their memoirs and histories, which totaled more than 7,000 pages. These individuals were the greatest victorious heroes of World War II and the massive works they had published were intended to permanently establish their places in history, not merely for the next few years, but for many decades and even centuries to come.
Mainstream Holocaust scholars have reasonably argued that the event they study was probably the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world, the rapid extermination of six million innocent victims by one of the world’s most highly-educated countries using diabolically advanced scientific means.
Those three leaders had led the global campaign to defeat the country responsible for the Holocaust, which had only occurred about a decade earlier.
Yet no one reading those 7,000 pages of text would have ever suspected that any Holocaust had even occurred. How can that possibly be explained under the standard historical narrative?
My own contrary explanation is a very simple one. All three of those top leaders knew perfectly well that the Holocaust was merely a hoax, a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda. They were sure that within another five or ten years, twenty at the most, the Holocaust hoax would have been completely debunked and universally recognized as absurd, just as had happened with the atrocity-hoaxes of the First World War. So they believed that if they mentioned it in their books, they would be endlessly ridiculed by future generations, and they wanted to avoid that embarrassing fate.
I’ve never looked into it, but I assume that all the prominent Allied leaders who published their histories and memoirs after WWI were very careful to avoid including any claims that the Germans had raped Belgian nuns or eaten Belgian children.
The “rediscovery” of the Holocaust in Western historiography only occurred at the beginning of the 1960s, and some of those very ironic circumstances seem to point towards the same controversial conclusion. As I wrote in my 2018 article:
The late scholar Raul Hilberg is universally acknowledged as the founder of modern Holocaust studies, which began with the 1961 publication of his massive volume The Destruction of the European Jews. In his very interesting 2007 Hilberg obituary, historian Norman Finkelstein emphasizes that prior to Hilberg’s work, there had been virtually no writing on the Holocaust, and discussion of the topic was considered almost “taboo.” For a recent event of such apparent enormity to have been so completely wiped away from public discussion and the consciousness of historians and political scientists can be explained in several different ways. But once I began to investigate the circumstances behind Hilberg’s ground-breaking work, I encountered all sorts of strange ironies.
According to Wikipedia, Hilberg’s family of Austrian Jews coincidentally arrived in the United States on the exact day in 1939 that war broke out, and in his early teens he was soon horrified to read all the news reports of the ongoing extermination of his fellow Jews in the continent his family had left behind, even telephoning Jewish leaders asking why they were doing so little to save their kinsmen from annihilation. He subsequently served in the U.S. military in Europe, then majored in Political Science at Brooklyn College after the end of the conflict. The inspiration for his future scholarly focus seems to have come when he was shocked by a remark made by one of his lecturers, Hans Rosenberg:
The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain.
When Hilberg asked how Rosenberg, himself a German-Jewish refugee, could have so totally ignored the murder of 6 million Jews, a monstrous crime committed just a couple of years earlier, Rosenberg sought to deflect the question, saying that “it was a complicated matter” and “history doesn’t teach down into the present age.” Since Rosenberg was a student of Meinecke, whom Lipstadt has bitterly denounced as an implicit Holocaust Denier, one wonders whether Rosenberg may have shared the beliefs of his mentor but was reluctant to admit that fact to his overwhelmingly Jewish students in emotionally-charged postwar Brooklyn.
Later, Hilberg conducted his doctoral research at Columbia under Franz Neumann, another German-Jewish refugee scholar. But when Hilberg indicated he wanted his research to focus on the extermination of Europe’s Jews, Neumann strongly discouraged that topic, warning Hilberg that doing so would be professionally imprudent and might become “his academic funeral.” When he attempted to publish his research in book form, it received numerous negative reviews, with Israel’s Yad Vashem fearing it would encounter “hostile criticism,” and over a six year period, it was rejected by several major publishing houses along with Princeton University, based on the advice of the influential Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt. One naturally wonders whether all these established scholars may have quietly known something that a naive young doctoral candidate such as Hilberg did not. His book only appeared in print because a Jewish immigrant whose business had suffered under the Nazis funded the entire publication.
Yet another strange element, thoroughly documented but rather difficult to square with the traditional Holocaust narrative is that large numbers of part-Jewish Germans served loyally in Hitler’s armies, with some of them holding very high military ranks:
Consider the interesting case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s very powerful number-two in the German Luftwaffe. His father was certainly a Jew, and according to researchers Robert Wistrich and Louis Snyder, there is archival evidence that his mother was Jewish as well. Now it is certainly not impossible that a Third Reich supposedly dedicated with grim fanaticism to the extermination of each and every Jew might have spent the entire war with a full- or half-Jew near the absolute top of its military hierarchy, but surely that puzzling anomaly would warrant careful explanation, and Milch’s apparent Jewish background was certainly known during the Nuremberg Trials…
Indeed, the fascinating and widely-praised 2002 book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg notes that aside from Milch, Hitler’s military contained over a dozen half-Jewish generals and admirals and another dozen quarter-Jews of that same high rank, plus a total of roughly 150,000 additional half- or quarter-Jewish soldiers, with a large fraction of these being officers. All of these individuals would have had some fully-Jewish parents or grand-parents, which seems decidedly odd behavior for a regime supposedly so focused on the total eradication of the Jewish race.
I discussed all of these issues and many others as well in my very long 2018 article, as well as a related piece published the following year:
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words - American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words
For those who prefer to absorb some of this same information in a different format, I was interviewed last year by Iranian broadcast television on a number of the highly-controversial topics excluded from the Western media, and two of the half-hour segments focused on the Holocaust. Channel Four of the Iran Broadcasting Corporation is one of the country’s largest, having a potential audience of ten million, and after the segments were put online, I had them video-captured and uploaded to a Rumble channel:
Analyzing the Holocaust, Part I • 25m
Video Link
Analyzing the Holocaust, Part II • 32m
Video Link
Although totally ignored by our dishonest Western media, over the last two generations principled Holocaust investigators have uncovered and accumulated an enormous volume of persuasive evidence, demonstrating the utter and complete falsehood of the traditional historical narrative on a very wide range of different grounds.
One of the earliest major works was originally published in 1976 by Prof. Arthur R. Butz of Northwestern and after having been updated several times since then, his volume still constitutes one of the most comprehensive introductions to the subject. The book bears the very appropriate title of “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century” and although it was purged by Amazon several years ago, it is still easily available here and elsewhere.
- The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry
Arthur R. Butz • 1976/2015 • 225,000 Words • PDF • ePub Format
As I discussed in my 2018 article, the most important recent addition to this extensive collection of material was probably published about a decade ago by a respected science historian.
Most recently, Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, who had spent eleven years as a historian of science on the staff of University College, London, suffered this same fate in 2008. His scientific interests in the Holocaust provoked a media firestorm of vilification, and he was fired with a single day’s notice, becoming the first member of his research institution ever expelled for ideological reasons. He had previously provided the Isaac Newton entry for a massive biographical encyclopedia of astronomers, and America’s most prestigious science journal demanded that the entire publication be pulped, destroying the work of over 100 writers, because it had been fatally tainted by having such a villainous contributor. He recounted this unfortunate personal history as an introduction to his 2014 book Breaking the Spell, which I highly recommend.
Kollerstrom’s text effectively summarizes much of the more recent Holocaust Denial evidence, including the official Auschwitz death books returned by Gorbachev after the end of the Cold War, which indicate that Jewish fatalities were some 99% lower than the widely-believed total. Furthermore, Jewish deaths actually showed a sharp decline once plentiful supplies of Zyklon B arrived, exactly contrary to what might have been expected under the conventional account. He also discusses the interesting new evidence contained in the British wartime decrypts of all German communications between the various concentration camps and the Berlin headquarters.
Dr. Kollerstrom’s excellent book was purged from Amazon, but is freely available on the the Internet or can be easily downloaded in various formats, and I would highly recommend it to those interested in the topic.
- Breaking the Spell
The Holocaust: Myth & Reality
Nicholas Kollerstrom • 2014/2023 • 110,000 Words • PDF • ePub Format
Much of his important material was presented in an interesting two hour interview on Red Ice Radio, eventually purged from Youtube but still available elsewhere on the Internet:
A couple of decades earlier, German chemist Germar Rudolf had been similarly purged and later imprisoned for his skeptical investigation of the scientific evidence for the Holocaust. Rudolf eventually created the most comprehensive published collection of Holocaust Denial literature, one that includes the works of Butz and Kollerstrom as well as dozens of other books by various scholars, nearly all of them freely available for downloading;
- Holocaust Handbooks • 51 Volumes
For those who prefer to receive their information in video format, that same website has a considerable collection of such video documentaries and I would particularly recommend the following three very long ones, all produced around 15 years ago by a San Francisco resident. Although they lack the lavish production values of a big budget Hollywood film and the quality of the narration is only so-so, I think the volume of factual material presented in these videos is extremely comprehensive and persuasive, just as I had remembered from originally watching them four or five years ago.
One-Third of the Holocaust • 4h15m
Video Link
Buchanwald, a Dumb, Dumb Portrayal of Evil • 2h21m
Video Link
The Auschwitz Hoax – Why the Gas Chambers are a Myth • 50m
Video Link
I think that anyone who has carefully investigated the subject would soon conclude that there is an overwhelming volume of strong factual evidence against the reality of the Holocaust, which appears to be almost entirely fictional, just as fraudulent as the recent claims of forty beheaded babies. But that Holocaust myth has nonetheless remained in place and steadily grown for more than three generations, having seemingly become a lie too enormous to ever be challenged.
One likely reason for such impunity has been the successful transformation of the historical Holocaust into the quasi-religion of Holocaustianity, which in many respects reigns as the dominant faith of much of today’s deeply secular West. I have noted that although Pope Benedict XVI and his successor had been willing to accept deviations from the canonical doctrines of their Catholic Church on numerous questions, no skepticism towards the Holocaust could possibly be tolerated. Many otherwise courageous individuals are very reluctant to challenge such a religious faith, especially one in which they themselves have been immersed from their early childhood, perhaps without even recognizing that process.
However, belief in such pernicious falsehoods may sometimes prompt acts of the most dreadful nature, just as the recent Israeli atrocity-hoaxes have been used to enable the horrific ongoing massacre in Gaza.
According to Segev’s book, the widespread postwar belief among the Jews of Palestine that the Germans had exterminated six million of their people provoked a group of Zionist militants to plot the extermination of six million German civilians in retaliation, spending months infiltrating the water supply facilities of Occupied Germany and securing large quantities of the deadly poison that they planned to introduce. Fortunately, their project failed and although Segev seems convinced that the plot was real and came close to success, I am personally more skeptical. But the mere possibility that the most enormous mass-murder in all of human history might have been prompted in retaliation for an imaginary Holocaust crime is a sobering one.
Soon afterward, the Zionists leveraged the same Holocaust story to provide themselves the political cover they required for their brutal war of aggression and expulsion towards the native inhabitants of Palestine, seizing nearly 80% of the land and forcing 80% of the longstanding Arab population to flee as pitiful refugees.
During the many decades that followed, that same get-out-of-jail-free Holocaust card has been endlessly played, invoked by Israel’s leaders and its fierce advocates to justify every naked violation of international law and every grisly war crime, culminating now in the destruction of defenseless Gaza. Over the last three months, more than 22,000 bodies of dead civilians have been identified by the Gaza Health Ministry, and with so many thousands more still missing, their bodies buried in the rubble of 100,000 destroyed buildings, the true death-toll is probably well above 30,000.
Without doubt, this is the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world, and some of Israel’s top leaders have used explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the millions of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches, either unwilling or unable to halt the killing. After more than three months of this unending massacre, the government of South Africa has now filed an 84-page legal brief condemning Israel for this ongoing “genocide.”
In our own country, popular progressive slogans advocating for a single unified secular democratic state of Palestine have been demonized as calling for “Jewish genocide.” When several elite college presidents refused to suppress criticism of Israeli policy on their campuses, they were browbeaten by Congressional interrogators and billionaire Jewish donors, with two of them already forced to resign.
The Israel Lobby appears to possess near total control of our political system, government, and media organs, and most observers see no prospect of change, agreeing that it would take an unprecedented ideological earthquake to dislodge such control. But surely the collapse of the Holocaust narrative would constitute exactly that sort of unprecedented ideological earthquake, perhaps causing the total disintegration of the entire Zionist project built upon it. For most pro-Israel partisans, the reality of the Holocaust is the fundamental cornerstone of their understanding of the world, and calling it into question would threaten the complete annihilation of their entire system of beliefs.
Those who wish to end what they regard as the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians must recognize that one of their best and only chances to achieve that goal may involve their courageous willingness to challenge a purported genocide from eight decades ago, a genocide that never took place, but has subsequently been used to justify an enormous catalog of war crimes and massacres.
I can only repeat the closing paragraphs of my original 2018 article on Holocaust Denial:
Despite this situation, the powerful media focus in support of the Holocaust over the last few decades has elevated it to a central position in Western culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if it currently occupies a larger place in the minds of most ordinary folk than does the Second World War that encompassed it, and therefore possesses greater apparent reality.
However, some forms of shared beliefs may be a mile wide but an inch deep, and the casual assumptions of individuals who have never actually investigated a given subject may rapidly change. Also, the popular strength of doctrines that have long been maintained in place by severe social and economic sanctions, often backed by criminal penalties, may possibly be much weaker than anyone realizes.
Until thirty years ago, Communist rule over the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies seemed absolutely permanent and unshakable, but the roots of that belief had totally rotted away, leaving behind nothing more than a hollow facade. Then one day, a gust of wind came along, and the entire gigantic structure collapsed. I wouldn’t be surprised if our current Holocaust narrative eventually suffers that same fate, perhaps with unfortunate consequences for those too closely associated with having maintained it.
And the Holocaust is merely one of many enormous falsehoods regarding the central shaping events of the twentieth century that I had discussed in several pieces last year:
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words - More Falsehoods of World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words - Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words
Related Reading:
