In response to those who argued that the camps constituted a peculiarly Nazi form of punishment and incarceration, Rassinier asserted that the camps were not uniquely German institutions. Incarceration in concentration camps was a “classic method of coercion” practiced by all countries, including France. Once again we see a harbinger of what would become a familiar method for absolving the Nazis: Whatever they did was not as severe as that of which they were accused. Moreover, all nations did the same.
Finally, in one of his most extreme arguments, Rassinier attempted to transform the Nazis from perpetrators into benefactors. He claimed that they had benign, if not positive, motives when they put people in concentration camps. Initially the National Socialists’ incarceration of people in concentration camps was a “gesture of compassion.” Their objective was to protect their adversaries by putting them “where they could not hurt the new regime and where they could be protected from the public anger.” Not only did they want to shield them, they also wanted to “rehabilitate the strayed sheep and to bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community, [and] . . . its destiny.”9 This latter claim evoked memories of some of the explanations and justifications offered by Goebbels’s propaganda bureau during the early years of the regime. When people were placed in camps or in ghettos, the Nazis claimed they were doing so for educational or rehabilitative purposes. They were “helping” them become more productive members of society by incarcerating them. Rassinier ignored two essential elements: This “rehabilitation” was conducted in the harshest of fashions and, according to Nazi philosophy, there was no way Jews could be “rehabilitated.”
Given his own experiences and those of a myriad of others in the camps, Rassinier could not very well argue that they had been character-building institutions. He had to acknowledge that the Nazis’ supposedly benign intentions notwithstanding, life in the camps was quite difficult. Intent on rendering the Nazi leadership blameless, he shifted responsibility from their shoulders by explaining that the escalating severity was not the intention of those at the helm but of those in the lower echelons of the SS who disobeyed their orders. According to Rassinier, when the authorities in Berlin discovered something “awry in the way the camps were being administered, the SS staffs were called to account.”10 Even the SS decision to select criminals, murders, and rapists to serve as Lageraltester (camp elder) and Kapos was justifiable, despite the fact that these people were particularly ruthless to other inmates. The SS did not select such individuals to run the camps out of “sadism” but to “economize personnel.” The Kapos were brutal but that was not the fault of the SS. In fact, Rassinier preferred dealing with the SS because they were “in principle . . . better and . . . more humane.”11
In the 1960s Rassinier began to change the focus of his attacks. No longer did he devote his primary energies to defending the SS or casting doubt on the stories told by concentration camp survivors. His preoccupation became the “genocide myth.” In The Drama of European Jewry (1964) he argued that the accusation that the Nazis committed mass murder through the use of gas chambers was an invention of the “Zionist establishment.” Moreover, he contended, the charge about gas chambers was a fabrication, as was the claim that six million Jews died. In his attempt to explain who was responsible for the hoax, Rassinier did not blame the survivors. Though they may have “exaggerated” their experiences, Rassinier forgave them that: “They are victims who are fired by a resentment in proportion to what they suffered.” As did other deniers, he had to explain away the perpetrators’ confessions. Those who falsely admitted that they had committed atrocities had little choice but to tell Allied officials the story they wanted to hear. “In order to get into the good graces of his captors, some poor SS private attached to an Einsatzgruppe reports that his unit exterminated . . . tens of thousands of Jews.”12, 1* The testimonies of Nazi leaders who were tried at the war crimes trials also had to be discounted because they were “testifying under threat of death” and they confessed what they thought would “be most likely to save [their] . . . life.” For Rassinier such behavior was “easily understood,” and consequently the credibility of such testimony could be summarily dismissed.13
But if the survivors and the perpetrators were not responsible, who then perpetrated the hoax? For Rassinier the culprits in the dissemination of this fraud were easily identifiable. The “Zionists,” abetted in their conspiracy by a select number of Jewish historians and institutions that conduct research on the Holocaust, were the responsible parties. Rassinier unleashed his most acerbic comments and unrelenting attacks on them. Unlike the survivors who lied because of all they had suffered, and the Nazis, who fabricated confessions to please their captors and protect their lives, the perpetrators of this hoax did not have motives that were either psychologically understandable or morally justifiable. The only reason these historians and the institutions that backed them spread this calumny about Germany was to reap institutional, communal, and personal gain.
Regarding the prominent historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg, Rassinier wrote that only “dishonesty” could “excuse” his actions. Rassinier informed readers that Hilberg was associated with a Jewish publication: “As I . . . read his biographical note, I find that he is a collaborator in the Jewish Encyclopedia Handbooks.” This, in Rassinier’s opinion, explained “everything.” But Hilberg was not alone in his culpability for spreading this myth on behalf of a Jewish institution. Hannah Arendt’s “intellectual outlook” and writings on the Holocaust were not trustworthy, according to Rassinier, because of her position as research director with the Conference on Jewish Relations.14 The testimony at the Eichmann trial by the renowned historial Salo Baron, the first occupant of the chair in Jewish history at Columbia University, was clearly open to question because of Baron’s Jewish identity. Lest readers be unaware of Baron’s background, Rassinier made a practice of referring to him throughout his book as “Mr. Shalom Baron.”15
Their dishonesty and that of the Jewish institutions with which they were formally or informally associated was motivated by what Rassinier considered a traditional Jewish vice: the love of money. Their motive for concocting the genocide myth, Rassinier bluntly stated, “is purely and very basely, a material problem.”16 They wished to “make Germany an ever-lasting milk cow for Israel.”17 They devised the hoax and then demanded that “Germany pay to Israel sums calculated on the basis of about 6,000,000 dead.” Rassinier contended that the amount of reparations Germany paid to Israel was calculated on the basis of the number of dead; the higher the death toll, the greater the financial reward.18 Israel, with the aid of cooperative Jewish historians and the “Zionist establishment,” had inflated the number of dead in order to “swindle” the Germans out of millions of marks. They claimed that six million died, but, in truth at least four-fifths of those six million “were very much alive at the end of the war.”19 Rassinier offers no evidence to prove this or most of his other claims. Their existence had been kept a secret in order to inflate the amount of money Israel was able to extract from the Germans.
Rassinier based his argument on a completely false premise. One must assume that he did so knowingly, given the documents he cites. The reparations Germany paid to Israel were not based on the death toll but on the cost to Israel of absorbing and resettling both Jews who fled Germany and German-controlled countries during the prewar period and survivors of the Holocaust who came to Israel during the postwar years.
Israeli officials detailed their claims against Germany in their communiqué of March 1951 to the Four Powers, and this document became the official basis for the reparations agreement. It contained an explanation of Israel’s means of calculating the size of the reparations claim. In the communiqué Israeli officials explained that Nazi persecution had stimulated a “second Jewish exodus” of close to five hundred thousand. Based on the size of this exodus, Israel determined the amount of the reparations it would request:
The government of Israel is no
t in a position to obtain and present a complete statement of all Jewish property taken or looted by the Germans, and said to total more than $6 thousand million. It can only compute its claim on the basis of total expenditures already made and the expenditure still needed for the integration of Jewish immigrants from Nazi-dominated countries. The number of these immigrants is estimated at some 500,000, which means a total expenditure of $1.5 thousand million.20
It seems hardly necessary to point out that since the money the state received was based on the cost of resettling survivors, had Israel wanted to increase the amount of reparations it obtained from Germany it would have been in its interest to argue that fewer than six million had been killed and that more had managed to flee to Israel.
The contention that Israel is the main financial beneficiary of the “genocide myth” has become a critical element of Holocaust denial for a number of reasons. This explanation is particularly important for the deniers because it provides a rationale for the “hoax.” Moreover, it harks back to traditional antisemitic imagery: Jews’ association with money, particularly ill-gotten gains. For those with an inclination to believe antisemitic charges and to accept the stereotypes associated with them as true, this is a charge that feels familiar and makes sense. This is but one of many instances in which the deniers have woven a web that deftly combines pseudohistorical research with traditional antisemitism. The depiction of Israel as the beneficiary of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy also plays on preexisting hostilities toward the Jewish state. Those who are opposed to its existence and believe it came into being through nefarious means find this myth compelling. In fact, the vast majority of reparations went to individual survivors, not to Israel.
But it was for Raul Hilberg that Rassinier reserved his greatest contempt. Hilberg’s internationally acclaimed study of the German death machine in The Destruction of the European Jews, which was first published in 1961, made him an obvious target for Rassinier and subsequent generations of deniers. Because of his extensive research on the German bureaucracy during the Third Reich, specifically as it was used in the killing process, deniers have long felt obligated to try to destroy his credibility. In The Drama of European Jewry Rassinier branded Hilberg “dishonest” and accused him of being a falsifier of information particularly in regard to the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Revealingly, on the same page that Rassinier made those accusations, he engaged in the very same tactics of which he had accused Hilberg.
One of the methods Rassinier used to convince his readers that the Holocaust was a fraud was his use of the numbers game. Among the first to engage in this practice, he established a pattern followed by all deniers who try to prove that the death tolls are not valid. Rassinier argued that Jewish historians have fraudulent intentions and manipulate the data accordingly. For Rassinier the proof of this dishonesty is that they each interpret the data in a dramatically different fashion. Consequently their findings cannot be relied on, and they cannot be personally trusted.
In trying to make his case, Rassinier fabricated data, misquoted, and used quotations out of context. He first tried to demonstrate that Arendt and Hilberg were in disagreement about the number of Jews who were killed in Poland. According to Rassinier, in her February 23, 1963, New Yorker article Arendt “coolly inform[ed] us that ‘three million Polish Jews were massacred during the first day of the war’ “ He then wrote: “Mr. Raul Hilberg found that ‘about 2,000,000 Polish Jews, . . . were transported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943.” Rassinier complained about this apparent contradiction between the findings of these two historians and added: “It would be a good thing to come to an understanding: were there in Poland 3 to 3.3 million Jews during the war, as all statisticians unanimously claim, including those who are Jewish, or were there 5.7 million as Mme. Hannah Arendt is obliged to claim, since here are 5 million exterminated.”21
Rassinier simply falsified Arendt’s statement. In addition, he made minor but strategically important changes in Hilberg’s quote and then quoted it out of context in order to make it appear as if there were some contradiction between the two scholars. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg analyzed the role of the railways in the annihilation process. He observed that the “railway network managed to carry about 2,000,000 Polish Jews to their deaths in 1942 and 1943.” Rassinier ignored the references to the railway network. He makes it appear as if Hilberg is citing the total number of Polish Jews who were annihilated and not just those transported by rail. (Hilberg does not include in this total Jews deported by other means and those who were killed in ghettoes or in areas immediately adjacent to their homes.22 When those Polish victims are included, Hilberg’s total comes to three million Polish Jews.)
But Rassinier committed an even more egregious falsehood in connection with Arendt’s quote. Arendt did not write that three million Polish Jews were killed in the first day. Discussing German estimates of the number of Jews left in Europe in 1940, Arendt observed that one particular estimate “did not include three million Polish Jews, who, as everybody knew, had been in the process of being massacred even since the first days of the war.”23 By changing Arendt’s quote to say three million had been killed on the first day, Rassinier manages to make Arendt sound not only in total contradiction to other historians but quite out of touch with reality. Deniers would repeatedly rely on this tactic to try to make the findings of Holocaust historians seem particularly fantastic.
While Rassinier wished to cast doubt on the findings and motives of as many Jewish scholars as possible, he was particularly intent—as we have seen—on destroying Hilberg’s status. Ironically, after attacking Hilberg’s credibility, he used Hilberg’s standing as the premier historian in this field to cast doubt on the finding of other Jewish historians and institutions. In an obvious attempt to throw into question the findings of the World Jewish Congress, he wrote that while the congress “gives the figure of 1,000,000 (dead in the USSR) Mr. Raul Hilberg finds only 420,000.”24 Once again Rassinier misrepresented Hilberg’s findings. In one of his tables delineating the number of victims according to their countries of origin, Hilberg lists the prewar and postwar populations of the USSR. The difference between the two figures is 420,000. But the two figures represent dramatically different categories, as Hilberg clearly acknowledges at the bottom of the table, where he notes that the first column was based on prewar and the second on postwar boundaries. The postwar boundaries of the USSR were significantly larger than those of the prewar period, and Hilberg’s list reflects this. Since the Baltic republics were independent when the war began they are listed as separate countries in the prewar table. Because they became part of the USSR as a result of an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, in postwar totals Hilberg treats their Jewish victims as part of the toll for the entire USSR. Moreover, Hilberg’s postwar total must also be adjusted because it includes, as again he clearly notes, three hundred thousand refugees, deportees, and survivors from other regions.2* With these adjustments Hilberg’s total was one million, precisely that of the World Jewish Congress. By ignoring these critical and obvious pieces of information, Rassinier makes it sound as if Hilberg is not only contradicting other historians but himself as well, since elsewhere in the book he cites the total dead in the USSR as approximately one million.25
Rassinier devised this alleged contradiction in order to depict these historians as willfully creating farfetched facts and figures. “One would like to invite all of these people—[Arendt, Baron, and Hilberg] and the multitude of others in the same boat—to please get together and agree on their figures before undertaking to explain us to ourselves.”26 The fact is that while there are differences in totals, there are no fundamental contradictions between the findings of these or any other major historians. Virtually all agree that of the total killed approximately three million were Polish Jews. There is some variation of opinion on the number of Soviet Jews killed. The estimates range between 1 million and 1.3 million. The total death toll i
s somewhere between five and six million.27
Rassinier’s thesis, built on falsified data, is that the discrepancies between these historians invalidate their findings. Rassinier is correct in one regard, however: There are variances in each of their findings. Few agree on precisely the same number. But rather than invalidating their credibility, these discrepancies support it. According to Rassinier, if Hilberg has one toll for the victims and Baron another, it is proof that both are creating fictionalized accounts. Since both use official documents and testimonies to reach their conclusions, the contradictions in their findings supposedly illustrate that neither they nor the documents can be trusted. But in making this argument Rassinier ignores a critically important historical fact. Complete unanimity among historians regarding an event of such magnitude would itself be highly suspicious. A death toll on which all historians unequivocally agreed would raise legitimate suspicions about the independent nature of their historical research. It is precisely these differences that show that these are not “court-appointed” historians but independent researchers, each trying to assemble a myriad of details regarding one of the most brutal and chaotic chapters in recent history.
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