Holocaust 2.0: There’s No Business Like Shoah Business

A while back I wrote on Facebook, “I’ve heard talk recently about how what is going on in Europe right now is a sort of repeat of what happened in Germany leading up to WWII. I would offer a slightly different perspective.” The post was actually in response to a specific article, though at the time I saw no reason to link to the article. I found the article to be overly simplistic at best…not really worth drawing attention to. Since then, quite a few comments have been added to the article. I’d already offered few thoughts on the article in the above mentioned post, but after reading the comments I’d like to offer something a bit more in depth.

But first, a brief word on why I am bothering to write this. I’ve never shied away from approaching delicate and/or controversial subjects. I have explored the possibility of various conspiracies, of coverups in assassinations, of evidence of a worldwide network of pedophiles that includes highly placed government officials, and more. With a record like that, one might assume that tackling the holocaust would come naturally. Believe me, it doesn’t. In fact, coming to terms with both the information in this article, and the very idea of writing it, has been one of the most difficult things I’ve done.

Like any normal person living in the West, I’ve was raised on stories of the holocaust, had believed unquestioningly the testimony of the witness, and have felt abject horror and revulsion from the stories they have told. The very idea of questioning those who suffered in this way has seemed as abhorrent to me as the idea of questioning the veracity of the story told by a clearly traumatized victim of rape. And yet, here I am…and the question is, why?

The long and short of it is, for love of humanity, and all of our cultural expressions. It is for this reason that I can also say that I detest the cultural policies that have been claimed to be of the NSDAP — the National Socialist Workers Party, more commonly known as the Nazi Party. I don’t want to live in a culturally homogenous society. I love the varied cultural expressions of humanity. I live in the Los Angeles area, and while there is much to dislike about LA (the traffic being right at the top of the list), my favorite aspect of LA is the cultural mix. As I’ve put it in the past, in LA a person can travel the world without ever leaving town.

So why write something that could be perceived as defense of the Nazis? I’m not. Let me state that more clearly: I AM NOT DEFENDING THE NAZIS. If I were living in Nazi Germany I would have been one of those speaking out against Hitler, and against his policies. That is, if the me of today were there. If I had been raised in the cultural milieu of the late 19th and early 20th century, I would quite likely have been a very different person. However, my dislike of their policies does not lead me to simply accept everything that has been said about them, no matter how tearfully, no matter how it tugs on my heartstrings, and no matter how many epithets and slurs those who are deeply vested in maintaining those ideas in the mind of the populace want to apply to me.

Many of the earliest stories of the holocaust have already been proven a complete fiction. Much of the testimony about the atrocities allegedly committed by Germany during the war are difficult to reconcile with known facts. And, as we’ve moved further in time from the actual events, the stories told have become more and more fabulous. Accepting these stories unquestioningly as we are asked — no, demanded to do, does nothing to promote the cause of understanding the roots of how we have come to our current position of never-ending war, and rapidly eroding rights; a position that has its roots firmly in the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century.

As difficult and distasteful as we might find the questions, I think the time has come when these questions should be considered more than simply a matter of revising our picture of history. The New Testament contains the following saying attributed to Jesus: By their fruits you will know them. What have been the fruits of the victors of WWII — those who painted themselves as liberators, and the defenders of democracy and human rights? Just look around you: deceit, corruption, hatred, and never-ending war. One of the common tools used to perpetuate this state of affairs is the specter of the holocaust and the fear of a new Adolf Hitler rising up to threaten the world again. So the questioning of the stories told by the victors is not merely a question of history, it is a question of moral imperative. How did we get here, and how do we get out? Without at least something of an answer to the first question, we have no chance of finding an answer to the second.

The difficulty in approaching this subject is perfectly stated below by historian David Irving, as is his very life and career. After decades of locating and translating original documents, Irving compiled a picture of Hitler and National Socialism that was second to none. If he had dealt with any other period in history, Irving’s already stellar reputation as an historian would have risen even higher. But Irving made the fatal mistake of ignoring Hitler the caricature as painted by the victors, and instead painted a picture of Hitler the man. This wasn’t a picture of evil incarnate, it was a picture of a flawed man with political goals that were not so unlike the political goals of other nations of the time and the nations of today. For his sin, Irving has been vilified as antisemitic and a Hitler apologist, even by those who pretend to take an objective look at history. Neither of those claims is true. In Irving’s own words,

My thesis is that the crimes against the Jewish people, and others, committed by the Nazi party have been grossly exaggerated in order to pave the way for ongoing atrocities committed by Western governments and Israel. This is not a radical thesis. All history is written this way. The only thing that can make the idea seem in the least radical is the idea, driven into our heads with unprecedented efficacy through endless propaganda documentaries and movies, that somehow historians on the winning side have actually written an accurate history this time. That propaganda has been bolstered by demeaning anyone who dares challenge it with epithets like antisemite, or conspiracy theorist. Well, so be it. Like any body, the body politic must have an immune system that seeks to destroy and eliminate anything that threatens its existence. Once one begins to approach a truly objective picture of the events of WWII one realizes that there is a very good reason for the prohibitions against questioning that period of history.

At the time of WWII the US was coming into its own as a world superpower that was quickly spreading its influence around the globe, France was still attempting to build an empire with colonies in Asia and Africa, and England could still proudly proclaim that the sun never set on the British Empire. As for Israel, while they have continually claimed to be mere victims trying to find a safe home for the Jewish people, or only protecting themselves, the new state was immediately seized by people who, as Albert Einstein pointed out in a letter to the New York Times, written December 2, 1948, were closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties. As we are about to see, this kinship was evident before and during the war.

The article that prompted this missive can be found here: http://www.sott.net/article/291591-Holocaust-2-0-Coming-soon. It is fairly typical of the kinds of stories that thoughtlessly invoke the holocaust as an emotional lever into your mind.

The article begins with a sort of dedication:

Well, I’m all for that in principle…but exactly what is it that we are never to forget? Based on the article, my guess would be a History Channel version of Nazi Germany and WWII. To be fair, the article does point out that there were plenty of others who suffered in German concentration camps aside from Jews – something the History Channel seems to consistently leave out. And, to point out right up front so that this point doesn’t get lost, the article is warning against the rise of Islamaophobia in Europe, using the rise of antisemitism in Europe as an example of what it all can end in: genocide. In other words, it is not about the holocaust per se, but only using the holocaust as an emotionally charged example of what can happen when popular opinion embraces the idea that an entire group of people is worthy of contempts. So what problem could I find with that? Like the author, I am not an Islamophobe, and I would also warn against the dangers of going down the racists road of demonizing an entire people for the actions of a few.

My problem with the argument is this: by pointing people to Nazi Germany you are pointing people to the wrong place to find answers. Yes, the NSDAP were fierce nationalists, and yes they wanted the Jews out of Germany, and yes, they did use violent and abusive tactics to achieve that end. There’s no question about that. But if we are to understand that period of history — a period that includes both WWI and WWII — painting the Nazis as homicidal maniacs who just wanted to kill all of the Jews does a terrible disservice to seeking truth. Even if they were complete and utter monsters (they weren’t, though there were certainly monsters amongst them) what happened in Germany did not happen in a vacuum. Placing the blame solely on the NSDAP will not provide answers to the question of how to avoid a repeat of the events of WWII. If anything, it will baffle anyone looking for answers. There is no period of history more mired in disinformation, obfuscation, and outright BS than WWII. As a simple example, the Scholastic website page on Anne Frank claims, “More than six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during this brief period in history, including Anne Frank.” Actually, Anne Frank died of typhus. Such is the nature of this period in history. The truth doesn’t matter. Only the propaganda matters, as we will see.

While the popular conception of Nazi Germany would hold that Hitler had a singular hatred of Jews that lead him to seek power in order to rid the world of their race, the Jewish Question was not a product of Hitler, Germany, or even exclusively non-Jews. That was a question being asked across Europe, even by some Jews themselves. While some Jewish people simply assimilated into the countries in which they lived, there was a large portion of the Jewish population who refused to do so. Those Jews — which included (but were not limited to) the Zionists, of which Theodor Herzl was the leader — also asked the Jewish question. Herzl’s answer to the question was a homeland for the Jews. He no more wanted Jews to integrate into German (or Polish, or Russian) culture than Hitler did.

Hatred of the Jewish people has a very long history. Herzl himself said,

In the 16th century, the founder of the Protestant Reformation (and, some would say, the spiritual father of Nazism), Martin Luther wrote of Jews:

In fact, virtually every country in Europe that has had a large Jewish population has also expelled them at one time or another.

Theordor Herzl and the Rise of Zionism

Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — part of an assimilated household that didn’t really take part in Jewish life. As an adult, he moved to Vienna, earned a Doctor of Law degree, married the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman (earning him a large dowry), and eventually became a somewhat successful comedic playwright and producer, then a featured columnist for the most influential newspaper in Austria, Neue Freie Presse.

Eugenics & Antisemitism

So-called Antisemitism was already common around the world at this point in the late 19th century, and eugenics theory was becoming more popular. The idea of eugenics is to improve the quality of the human race through selective breeding. Eugenicists argued that people of “inferior” genetics should be sterilized to keep them from propagating those genetics.

The father of modern eugenics theory was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton. Galton observed that plants and animals naturally selected the most fit members of the species for reproduction, and wanted to re-apply that concept to human reproduction. I say re-apply because it was, one could argue, the modernization of something practiced naturally by all human populations throughout time. Unhealthy children would be unlikely to reach breeding age, and even if they did they would not be considered attractive mates. Also, many tribal cultures would banish those who had what were considered defects, such as the genetic defect we would call psychopathy today, that kept them from acting in a socially responsible way within the tribe.

From it’s beginnings in England, eugenics spread throughout the West, even becoming an official discipline in some universities. In the early 20th century, eugenics policies were officially implemented in the U.S. and some European countries. Among the proponents and financial sponsors of the policy were the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and John Harvey Kellogg, a proponent of vegetarianism and the inventor of Corn Flakes. Eugenics gave rise to ideas of “racial purity”, which fed bigotry and misguided ideas of racial superiority in some people. It was within this milieu that Herzl began to face the Jewish question.

Herzl had been sent to Paris as the Neue Freie Presse’s correspondent for the Dreyfus trial. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish heritage who was accused (and eventually convicted) of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later evidence showed that Dreyfus was innocent, yet the evidence was covered up by French authorities in what is considered a blatant act of both antisemitism and hatred of the German Empire for its annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine in 1871. It was during this visit to Paris — what he considered to be the liberal center of Europe — that Herzl would be shocked by statements like death to the Jews, then later further shocked by the suicide note left by his son, Hans, which read: A Jew, is a Jew, is a Jew.

Over months after this visit to Paris, Herzl formed the ideas that would lead to modern Zionism. Zionism itself was not new. What was new was the idea of creating a Jewish State, which Herzl outlined in his 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State.

Within a short time after publishing his pamphlet, the first meeting of the Zionist Congress was held in London. The London Times had this to say in the preceding week.

Herzl’s Final Solution

Virtually everyone in the Western world attributes the phrase the final solution to the Jewish question to Hitler and the NSDAP. The words are inexorably associated with evil and homicide on an unimaginable scale. The term itself, however, is a Zionist term.

Following the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl began a campaign of approaching heads of state to present the idea of creating a Jewish homeland. His first choice was the German Kaiser, but the Kaiser wouldn’t hear him. He also approached the Russian Czar in 1899, writing,

Following Herzl’s lead, the term final solution of the Jewish question became a common phrase in Zionist writings of the time. The Jewish Criterion reported on August 4, 1899 on an address Herzl gave, quoting him as saying,

Note, also, the use of the term fatherland in the above quote — another term that has become synonymous with Nazi Germany.

The Jewish Yearbook of 1916 contained the following under the heading Jewish Communal Life:

These are only two of hundreds of examples of the common use of the term final solution to the Jewish question by Zionists well before the advent of the NSDAP. The point being, of course, that the term and the plan to relocate Jewish people from Europe were both Zionist.

Within months of Hitler taking power, Herzl’s final solution to the Jewish question was proposed to the Nazi government. This proposal that had fallen on deaf ears in the past was now taken seriously. Hitler was in favor of the idea, and from 1933 to 1940 aided thousands of German Jews to immigrate to Palestine via the Haavara Agreement. England declared war on Germany in 1939. Not long after, the transfer of Jews to Palestine was blocked by British forces. In the linked article on the agreement from the Jewish Virtual Library, the claim is made that “Haavara continued to function until World War II, in spite of vigorous attempts by the Nazi Party to stop or curtail its activities.”. The claim is untrue. While there were those in the Nazi party who opposed the agreement, Hitler himself defended the agreement throughout its years of operation. As the former head of the Zionist Federation of Germany, Dr. Hans Friedenthal,  stated in an interview following WWII,

The support for this relocation of Jews is also evidenced in this July, 1935 notice in the official paper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps:

Strange actions and writings for a government allegedly hellbent on destroying the entire Jewish race, no?

The Rise of Nazism

This is, in many ways, the crux of the matter, and the point at which the propaganda of articles like the one mentioned above do the most damage to the seeking of truth. The simplistic and juvenile notion that Hitler and everyone close to him were simply psychopaths who managed to trick and bully the German people into giving them power is not even in the truth ballpark. Or perhaps, given that all governments engage in subterfuge and trickery, we should say that it is sitting in the bleachers of the ballpark at best. It is certainly not the great lesson of the rise of Nazism.

On page 92 of his book Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner wrote about the rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany:

This description of Germany under Hitler, and the implication that before Hilter Germany was a place of “pleasure in life, amiability, fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity, and a sense of humor” is complete nonsense. I can’t think of any way to describe it other than shear propaganda born of a burning hatred. If one really wants to understand the rise of Hitler, one needs to take an honest and full look at the situation in German that lead to his rise, and his ability to address the issues of the time.

Germany before Hitler

In short, the vast majority of people in Germany were desperate. Politically the country was a shambles, and the Treaty of Versailles had left the German people broken, and broke; the country that was once Germany shattered into many pieces.

Berlin had become a virtual drug and sexual circus. Women, along with young girls and boys, turned to prostitution to make money. Virtually any sexual fantasy could be fulfilled on the streets of Berlin for anyone who could pay. There were districts that specialized in pregnant women, and other districts that specialized in disfigured women. Whatever your tastes, from pedophilia to a cocaine fueled romp with an animal, you could find satisfaction in Berlin. Despite the unfortunate title, this video will give you a good feel for the Berlin of those days.

This is the Germany that gave rise to National Socialism — the Germany that Hitler sought to return to its former glory.

The Reformation of Germany

Let’s not be shy about telling the truth, even if it does paint Hitler in something of a less-than-pure-evil light.  We all know the old joke: “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” That is what we’ve come to expect in the politics of today. Hitler had made grand promises of bringing Germany back from the brink. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that he succeeded in doing exactly what he promised.

Upon becoming the Chancellor of Germany Hitler said,

He did, in fact, do just that. He brought Germany out of the Great Depression, virtually eliminated unemployment, commissioned a car that would be cheap to build, buy, and maintain — the iconic Volkswagen Beetle, and had the best roads in the world built — the Autobahn. He instituted the 40-hour work week, with minimum amounts of yearly vacation — more for younger workers who needed the time off for their developing bodies and minds — along with mandatory overtime pay and universal healthcare. It should be noted that most of these civilized policies were being enacted in Germany by Hitler well before they would be enacted in the US. Some, like universal healthcare, aren’t even on the horizon in the US at this point. Within a very short time, Germany had gone from a destitute country to a prosperous and happy country under Hitler. Stating this fact might be considered socially unacceptable today, but it is the truth.

It was this nearly miraculous success that lead John F. Kennedy to write in his journal, prior to WWII:

and

and

Even after the war — when stories of the alleged atrocities of the Nazi gas chambers had already been spread — after a visit to Hitler’s Hitler’s tea house and holiday home in Berchtesgaden, Kennedy wrote,

There are, of course, those laws that were enacted by the Nazi government almost immediately to strike against the Jews. Well, at least that is how you will read it on virtually any website that is pushing the official story of the holocaust. What is telling is that literally none of them will print the text of the laws themselves. For example, virtually every such site will reference the April 7, 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service as being an anti-Semitic law rather than a law intended to curb the rampant corruption of the Weimar Republic. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, this law was, “The first major law to curtail the rights of Jewish citizens…according to which Jewish and ‘politically unreliable’ civil servants and employees were to be excluded from state service.” A nice touch to put ‘politically unreliable’ there in quotes. It really leaves the entire affair to the imagination of the reader who has, no doubt, been saturated with propaganda that makes the intended meaning abundantly clear: something nefarious involving not having blonde hair! Here is the actual text of the law. I invite you to find any reference to Jews.

Notice that the Holocaust Encyclopedia does not give the actual text of the law, and very deliberately misrepresents the law by stating, “according to which Jewish and ‘politically unreliable’ civil servants and employees were to be excluded from state service.” This is simply a lie. The reference is to Section 4 of the law. Read it again:

Not only is there no mention of Jews, but there is a provision that those falling under the law would get 3 months severance (try to get that from any employer today) and 3/4 pension and survivor benefits! This is just one example of what cannot be described as merely a misrepresentation of the facts. It is a complete and utter fabrication. Sadly, this is typical. If you take the time to read the source documents you will find that the claims of the promoters of the holocaust story very rarely match reality. Then again, given that the majority of those who promote this story are a subclass of the Jewish people who also vehemently support the claim that Israel is only “defending itself” when it rains virtual hell fire down on the defenseless people of Gaza, this kind of twisting of reality shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Hitler and the Jews

Werner Goldberg — The very picture of the ideal German Soldier: blonde hair, blue eyes, and Jewish heritage.

The image to the right was used in Nazi propaganda as the Ideal German Soldier. He had blonde hair, blue eyes…and his name was Werner Goldberg. He was half Jewish.

Horst Geitner

Horst Geitner, left, was awarded both the Iron Cross Second Class, and the Silver Wound Badge. He was also half Jewish.

There were also Jewish officers in the Nazi army such as Colonel Walter H. Hollaender, Luftwaffe General Helmut Wilberg, and field-marshal Erhard Milch.

Yes, there was an idea in Hitler’s Germany of an Aryan ideal, and yes Hitler did limit civil service positions to those of Aryan blood — in other words, only Germanic people were allowed to work in government. Much has been made of the seeming paradox that Hitler’s so-called master race was to be all blond-haired and blue-eyed Nordic types — a type that neither Hitler himself nor virtually any of his top staff exemplified! Paradoxes like this typically arise when some aspect of the apparent paradox is misunderstood or misinterpreted. In this case, it isn’t possible that Hitler would be attempting to create some sort of master race that he would not be a part of. In fact, the Aryan ideal was not merely one of genetics, it was one of character. It entailed characteristics of honesty, bravery, and hard work. Hitler did apparently see these characteristics as a natural part of the German people, but would confer the title of Ehrenarier (honorary Aryan) on non-Germanic people who displayed these characteristics.

Thousands of men of Jewish descent, including hundreds who were officially designated as Juden by the Nazi government, served in the German army during WWII with Hitler’s full knowledge and consent. More than 1,200 cases of Jews being given the right to remain in the German army despite the German laws against non-Germans in public service are known — exemptions personally signed by Hitler. Hitler also personally made exemptions for 77 top military officers of Jewish heritage, and decorated around twenty Jewish soldiers with the Ritterkreuz, one of the highest medals awarded in the German army.

But what will really burn your biscuits is that Hitler even went so far as to award medals to Jewish soldiers who had fled Germany for Palestine for their bravery during the first world war!

From the Ha’aretz article on that:

This is only an absurdity if one forgets, or doesn’t know, that Hitler’s plan was to rid Germany of Jews through immigration to Palestine. As the SS clearly stated, they had great respect for the spiritual movement known as Zionism…a movement that was well aligned to Hitler’s own views! There is simply no compelling evidence that Hitler wanted to create a world of all Aryans, only that he wanted segregation of what he perceived as various races. This same view was common throughout the Western world.

There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis did round up Jews and place them into concentration camps. While I can’t condone the action, it was not without reason — and the reason was actually better than the one that led the US to round up Japanese citizens into concentration camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the case of the US concentration camps, there was only a fear that some Japanese citizens would act against the US out of loyalty to Japan. In the case of Germany, world Jewry — which does not mean all Jews in the world, but men who claimed to represent Jews around the world — had actually declared war on Germany. While holocaust proponents would have you believe that this was in response to anti-Semitic legislation being passed by Germany, that is not the case. As I showed above, laws such as the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service that has been claimed to be anti-Semitic, actually were not. German laws that specifically began to target Jews did not come to pass until after “world Jewry” declared war on Germany. This inconvenient aspect of the story is typically left out of the popular WWII documentaries.

Additionally, Germany was faced with guerrilla warfare conducted by Jewish Partisans who fought in plain clothes and utilized what today would be referred to as “terrorist” tactics. In short, whatever you think of the Nazi method of dealing with the perceived threat from the Jews of Europe, the perception of this threat was born neither from paranoia nor Hitler’s alleged hatred of Jews. The threat was real.

Allied Propaganda

Anti-German propaganda started well before the war had come to an end. According to Nuremberg document NI-11696. NMT “green series,” Vol. 8, p. 606, Allied planes dropped leaflets onto the Auschwitz concentration camps, and the surrounding area, claiming that the Nazi government was gassing prisoners in the camp. Naturally, this caused rumors of gassing to spread. But before there was any talk of gassings and other atrocities being committed by the Germans, the psychological war against the Germans was already underway in the press of the Allies. This is to be expected, of course. No country can wage war without demonizing its enemy — making the enemy deserving the the horrors of war for their unmitigated evil, and creating a heroic myth around its own war efforts to maintain public opinion in favor of the war. However, in the case of WWII the Allied propaganda rose to new levels — or should I say sank to new depths?

From the start, in 1933, the war against Germany had begun. It was a war waged by international Jewry. Let me be clear; that reference is no more meant to be imply that every Jewish person in the world was involved any more than referring to the policies of any country would imply that every citizen was behind them. We are speaking of political people identifying themselves with and using Judaism as a political tool.

On March 24, 1933, this headline (image above) blazed across the Daily Express: Judea Declares War on Germany! In the text of the article we find,

One might notice the term Israeli people in that article. Remember that the state of Israel did not yet exist. Comments that followed are extremely interesting, to say the least.

Going back to  the quote from Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler:

That kind of nonsense is typical of Haffner, who described Hitler coming to power as “[a]n earthquake shatters 66 million lives.” But it is also mild compared to the sorts of things he wrote after moving to England in 1939. In the August 1942 issue of the London monthly World Review, Haffner proposed the mass murder of all members of the SS, writing,

Such a charming man. Just how much should we trust an assessment of Germany at the time written by a man of such blind hatred that he could casually suggest the murder of half a million people without trial? A man who considers such murderous actions as, according to his article, “a resounding act of international justice,” and “criminal sentimentality to leave the terrorists alive and abroad when dearly-bought victory at last makes it possible to dispose of them.”  We certainly can’t accept his assessment as anything approaching objectivity. And Haffner wasn’t the only one writing this kind of murderous nonsense.

In 1941, Theodore Newman Kaufman published a small pamphlet titled Germany Must Perish. Kaufman’s little pamphlet might have remained an obscure racist diatribe if it weren’t for the fact that none other than Time Magazine reviewed it, saying,

I’m sure I don’t have to point out how similar this quote is to what has been claimed to be the German plan for the Jews and others they allegedly considered sub-human. But it gets even better. In a later interview, Kaufman went on to say,

Again, aside from the fact that Kaufman’s assurance that the world under the Jewish mission would become a paradise — a statement that would be hysterical if we didn’t have the contrary evidence of countless dead and displaced Palestinians at the hands of Irael — if one merely replaces the word German with Jews one has a statement that is indistinguishable from what has been claimed to be the Nazi program. If he were only a lone nut calling for genocide of Germans this would be one thing, but Time Magazine was promoting his ideas!

You can’t read so-called history of Nazi Germany without finding references to Hitler’s alleged hatred of anyone non-Aryan — the so-called sub-humans. Virtually everyone “knows” this and accepts it as truth. One story that was used to propagate the idea, and is still popular today, is the story of Hitler walking out on the Berlin Olympics.

As the story goes, Hitler had hoped to use the Olympics to prove to the world the superiority of the “Aryan race”. Those hopes were dashed, however, by an African American runner named Jesse Owens. Allegedly, Hitler was told that he must shake hands with all medal winners, and so rather than be forced into shaking hands with “inferior blacks”, just left the stadium. This was used as evidence of Hitler’s boundless racism.

Jesse Owens had something else to say about the matter at the time. According to Owens,

As reported in the Daily Mail, in 1960 Owens attempted to set the record straight on the events of that day. Sports writer Siegfried Mischner says that he spoke to Owens, and that not only did Hitler shake Owens’ hand, but Owens carried a picture of that moment with him in his wallet.

Even what Albert Speer, the Third Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, and master architect of the Third Reich, wrote about Hitler’s feelings on the Olympics in his memoir Inside the Third Reich casts serious doubt about Hitler believing that so-called Aryans were a “master race”. Despite Speer adding the racist overtones, he would have Hitler admitting that Africans were physically superior. According to Speer,

Of course, maybe Hitler said that, and maybe he didn’t. The testimony of Albert Speer has not fared well when scrutinized by historians. In his book Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, Matthias Schmidt uses a combination of documentary evidence and interviews with people who worked with Speer to show that Speer’s memoir was not an accurate picture, and that Speer’s memoir and testimony has dangerously polluted history with lies. One thing we can say about Speer’s testimony with certainty, however: it kept him from the gallows.

There is, of course, nothing that sells as well as a Nazi quote that shows what evil monsters they were. This one, for example, is a very popular quote attributed to Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels:

What Goebbels actually felt and stated about propaganda was something quite different. Here is an actual quote from Goebbels on the subject, given at an address in September 1943 at Nuremberg:

There is also this Internet favorite, attributed to Hitler:

What Hitler did talk about was how these techniques had been used by other nations to promote war. Listen to (or read the translation of) Hitler’s speech on the declaration of war against the US. Whatever you feel about Hitler, you might be surprised how accurate his picture of the US looks today.

Lampshades and Soap

Following the war, the Allied propaganda machine really shifted into high gear. Claims were made about the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps, such as the use of Jewish body fat to make soap, and the use of the skin from Jewish bodies to make lampshades. Documentary evidence of these atrocities was gathered quickly in the form of film footage showing actual lampshades. That footage was included in a documentary that was begun by Alfred Hitchcock (who left the project after one month), and finished by Billy Wilder.

The project was not an actual Hitchcock project. He had made two propaganda films in French already (making propaganda films was common for directors of the era as they helped finance other projects), and was asked to work as an adviser on this film. He worked for about one month on the project, after which it was picked up by Billy Wilder. Wilder was an Austrian Jew who began his film career in Berlin. He fled Germany for France following Hitler’s rise to power, eventually ending up in the US making comedies like, Some Like it Hot. Wilder clearly had an ax to grind, and so was not shy in the least about putting unproven — and eventually proved false — claims about Nazi atrocities into his film. The introduction to this video states that it was made as a document to “serve our collective memory.” Given the blatant (and false) propaganda in the film, a more accurate description would be “a document to [extra href=”#service” title=”(verb) The act of a male animal copulating with a female animal” info=”tooltip” info_place=”top” info_trigger=”hover”]service[/extra] our collective memory.”

Let me draw your attention to 41 minute mark of the film. It is here that we learn that, “If a prisoner had a curiously tattooed skin, it was taken from him. We can only hope he was dead when it was done.” Ooo, nice touch. Almost sounds like it could come from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock! We are then shown actual footage of actual human skin lampshades. I guess that should seal the deal, eh?

Except that, as the Israeli filmmaker Eyal Ballas has shown in his documentary, Soaps, the whole lampshade and soap story just wasn’t true. That, of course, has not stopped the story from being used to this day to strike fear and horror into the hearts of men. There are various theories about how the soap story began. The lampshade story, however, seems to have come from rumors about one woman, Ilse Koch, wife of camp commandant Karl Koch, and so-called “Bitch of Buchenwald”.

This picture of Ilse Koch in prison was posted with the title, “Ilse Koch, Imprisoned for Making Lampshades Out of Skin from Men.” Like so many holocaust stories, that sort of title is just accepted. We’ve all been told the stories throughout our lives. Now, we simply believe them without question.

But, like so many of the holocaust stories, this one is just not true. According to Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the United States Military Commander in Germany,

As we will see soon, Ilse Koch and her human lampshades became such a popular part of the holocaust mythology that some survivors even claimed to have been terrorized by her after she was in prison. But the whole story of Ilse Koch was just a rumor — the sort of scary story that one would expect to crop up in the environment of the war. While she was imprisoned, she was not imprisoned for making lampshades from human skin. Rather, both she and her husband, Karl Otto Koch, were investigated and imprisoned by the SS for embezzlement and incitement to commit murder. And here again is one of those true war stories that you won’t hear about on the History Channel.

The investigation was carried out by SS judge Konrad Morgen. His job was to investigate corruption. It was Morgen who investigated Karl and Ilse Koch. He found Ilse innocent, but Karl guilty of the murder of two (or three, by some accounts) prisoners at Buchenwald. Karl’s punishment: he was executed.

According to Morgen’s own testimony,

Again one must ask how this squares with the picture of Nazi prison camps presented in movies like Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List. The answer is, it doesn’t. No matter what happened during the war, movies like these are nothing but war propaganda used to make one side seem completely justified for its killing by demonizing the other. This is nothing new. All war is waged this way, and all history of war is told this way. Any military victory is hollow if it is not followed by the destruction of your enemy in the minds of the people. As Winston Churchill said,

On the other side of the coin there is also the use of stories and movies to bolster the idea of the righteous victors. John Wayne provided the stereotypical face of the brave American soldier for the generation that lived through the war. He was replaced with the face of Tom Hanks for the baby boomer generation, thanks to Steven Spielberg’s epic mini-series Band of Brothers. War propaganda started to take a turn for the truly bizarre with the movie Black Hawk Down, in which one of the “heroes”, Ranger John “Stebby” Stebbins,  was given a name change at the insistence of the Pentagon to Ranger John Grimes in order to hide the fact he was a convicted rapist and pedophile. Perhaps choice of the name Grimes had something to do with the fact that a John Grimes was made Assistant Secretary of Defense in 2005 by George Bush. War propaganda stories have now completed that turn toward the bizarre and have gone completely around the bend with the glorification of Chris Kyle in the movie American Sniper. Even in this article that defends Kyle, the author states,

In other words, even those who defend this man portrayed as an American hero admit that his view of people from the Middle East was virtually identical to the views they claim were espoused by Hitler. Yet this man, solely due to his being on “our side” is painted as righteous and good. He is described as being selfless when it comes to protecting American lives. The same could be said of many German soldiers in terms of saving German lives, and yet the only thing we are allowed to say of the enemy is that he was ruthless and racists.

Concentration Camp Survivors

Watching holocaust documentaries one would get the idea that everyone who lived through the Nazi prison camps has a story of torture and abuse to tell the world. That, however, is just not the case. There are those who were interred at the camps who have testified that they saw no evidence of mass executions. Maria Vanherwaarden, for instance, had heard the stories of the gassings at Auschwitz, and so was ready for an end to her life when she arrived there. What actually happened was something else entirely. To quote the Institute for Historical Review:

An Austrian woman, Maria Vanherwaarden, testified about her camp experiences in a Toronto District Court in March 1988. She was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 for having sexual relations with a Polish forced laborer. On the train journey to the camp, a Gypsy woman told her and the others that they would all be gassed at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Maria and the other women were ordered to undress and go into a large concrete room without windows to take a shower. The terrified women were sure that they were about to die. But then, instead of gas, water came out of the shower heads.

Auschwitz was no vacation resort, Maria confirmed. She witnessed the deaths of many fellow inmates by disease, particularly typhus. She saw some take their own lives. But she saw no evidence at all of mass killings, gassings, or of any extermination program.

A Jewish woman named Marika Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 Jews were supposedly gassed and cremated daily. She likewise testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of gas chambers during the time she was interned there. She heard the gassing stories only later.

Others told even stranger stories of their time in the camps. Strange, that is, if you accept the idea that the Nazis were simply murderous psychopaths intent on ridding the world of the Jewish race. How does the fact that camp prisoners formed soccer leagues, and even played with camp guards, square with the stories of the camps being nothing but extermination centers?

Or that prisoners at Buchenwald were provided with a library and a movie theater?

Or that Auschwitz had a prisoner orchestra?

Or that the Auschwitz prisoners put on plays that even SS soldiers would attend?

And, given the stories that the Nazis immediately killed children at the camps, why exactly did they have a daycare?

These kinds of activities were not limited to the prisoners at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Beginning in April of 1943, the SS soldiers at Dachau allowed the formation of prisoner soccer teams.

Dachau also had cultural events. These are prisoner drawn costume designs for a Polish cultural event put on by the prisoners at Dachau on April 29, 1943.

I certainly don’t present these as evidence that the Nazi concentration camps were really like an extended summer camp. But this is a side of the camps that you won’t see in the typical holocaust documentary. There you will only hear the most brutal tales in an effort to paint the Nazis specifically, and the German people in general as unimaginable monsters. The evidence simply does not support that claim.

Tales of Horror

But what of the number of witnesses that recounted their firsthand accounts of the gassings? Let’s consider SS Rottenführer (essentially a corporal) Richard Bock’s testimony of his watching a gassing at Auschwitz as a good example. Bock said,

There were enormous piles of clothing in there, and there was a board running around so that the piles did not collapse. And the new arrivals, the Dutch people, had to stand on top of this great heap of clothes to get undressed. Lots of them hid their children under the clothes and covered them up, then they shouted, “Get ready,” and they all went out, they had to run naked approximately twenty yards from the hall across to Bunker One.

There were two doors standing open and they went in there and when a certain number had gone inside they shut the doors. That happened about three times and every time Holblinger had to go out to his ambulance and they took out a sort of tin- he and one of his block-chiefs – and then he climbed up the ladder and at the top there was a round hole and he opened a little round door and held the tin there and shook it and then he shut the little door again.

Then a fearful screaming started up and approximately after about ten minutes it slowly went quiet.They opened the door – it was a prisoners’ Sonderkommando who did that – then a blue haze came out. I looked in and I saw a pyramid. They had all climbed up on top of the other and then the prisoners had to go in and tear it apart.

They were all tangled, one had his arm down by another’s foot and then round it and back up again and his fingers were sticking in someone else’s eye, so deep. They were all tangled, they had to tug and pull very hard to disentangle all these people. Then we went back to the hall and now it was the turn of the last lot to get undressed, the ones who had managed to hang back a bit all the time.

Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? How could human beings act in such a depraved manner? But there is a problem. Bock’s testimony is clearly nonsense. I’ve highlighted the parts that prove this fact. Let’s begin with the claim that the “took out a sort of tin”. Bock only mentions one can of what we are to assume is Zyklon B. A single can of Zyklon B is not enough to kill a large number of people inside the room — certainly not within minutes. Even if enough hydrogen cyanide was released from that amount of Zyklon B, a single can poured into a single hole in the roof would not be able to dissipate inside a crowded room fast enough to kill everyone inside in about 10 minutes.

If you visit Auschwitz today, you will see multiple holes that were allegedly used to pour in several cans of Zyklon B at the same time. The holes in the roof are actually reconstructions of what are claimed to be the original holes. Actually, the entire thing is a Soviet construction, a fact they will only tell you on the tour if you specifically ask…and then only hesitantly. But these present yet another problem with the Bock testimony. He very clearly states that there was a round hole with a little round door. All of the reconstructed holes in the roof at Auschwitz are square, not the round holes that Bock describes.

Reconstruction of one of the roof holes allegedly used at Auschwitz for the introduction of Zyklon B pellets.

The crowning glory of Bock’s testimony is his description of the bodies being removed after the alleged gassing. He claimed that the bodies were somehow in a pyramid that prisoners had to go in and tear apart with great difficulty. The obvious problem with that part of Bock’s description is, even if there were only a few hundred dead at a time the time to untangle the bodies and carry them to a transport to the cremation ovens would have slowed the entire process down to the point that it would be completely impossible to have killed the number that have been claimed to be killed per day in Auschwitz. But what really gives away the lie of Bock’s testimony is his description of the blue haze.

In Germany, hydrogen cyanide is called Blausäure — blue acid. It is so named because it was derived from the pigment called prussian blue, which also accounts for the name cyanide, after the color cyan. However, the gas hydrogen cyanide which is released from Zyklon B is colorless. In other words, Bock was only describing what he thought hydrogen cyanide gas was supposed to look like based on it’s German name. Clearly he had never actually witnessed a gassing.

The testimony of Rudolf Höss at Nuremberg doesn’t fare any better. He was an Auschwitz commandant who gave seemingly damning testimony concerning the alleged gassings there, as well as the staggering estimate of 3,000,000 dead there, 2,500,000 of which were by gassing. If you can’t believe a Nazi “death camp” commandant, who can you believe? Unfortunately, not even the mainstream historians and keepers of the Auschwitz Museum actually believe his testimony today. The current number of dead at Auschwitz is officially listed as only 1,000,000. This should come as no surprise. Rudolf Höss was tortured before giving his testimony. This was common practice at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Nazis who weren’t tortured into confessions were threatened with being turned over to the Soviets if they didn’t “confess” to the gassings.

Victim Testimony

As we stated at the beginning, there is no doubt that the Jewish people, and others, suffered greatly under the Nazis. They were taken from their homes and livelihoods, and forced into overcrowded, disease-ridden labor camps. But the testimony we hear from some who survived the camps goes much further than this.

Irene Zisblatt

Irene Zisblatt claimed that throughout her time as a young girl in the Nazi prison camp system she continually swallowed the diamonds her mother gave her, dug them out of her own excrement, washed them, then repeated the process to keep them away from the Nazis. Not the greatest in terms of Nazi horror, but as a tale of the bravery and quick thinking of a young girl, it isn’t bad.

She goes on to describe how she actually escaped from the inside of a gas chamber, and how she was selected to have her skin removed to make lampshades and gloves for Ilse Koch, the woman the US press nicknamed The Bitch of Buchenwald. Fortunately for Irene, Ilse didn’t show up. Once again, she had escaped what seemed like certain death. She then goes on to describe how a compassionate Nazi camp guard saved her life by wrapping her up in a blanket, and throwing her over a barbed-wire fence onto a passing train.

According to her story, she was only 13 years old at the time, weighing only about 60 lbs. Still, if a soldier could throw 60 lbs of weight unevenly distributed across about five feet of human body over a barbed-wire fence, which we can presume was at least six feet high, and onto a passing train, which we can presume was at least several feet away from the fence, then there just might be something to the whole “master race” schtick. But the fact is, it wasn’t possible. Virtually none of Irene’s story is possible. For instance, Irene’s claim that she had been selected for Ilse Koch’s gruesome fascination with objects made of human skin is, to put it bluntly, a lie. Even if Ilse Koch did have this fascination, she could not have been asking for young girls to be taken from prison camps to fulfill her lust at the time Irene Zisblatt claims, because at that point Ilse Koch was in a German prison! If you are interested, you can read a thorough deconstruction of Irene Zisblatt’s story here.

Looking for the bits of truth in Irene’s story is like digging through her proverbial pile of excrement, though she piles on so many Nazi stereotypes that her spiel has become a microcosmic version of the entire holocaust mythos — like an iceberg of spiel threatening to sink anyone who gets too close. A veritable Spielberg.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that while she had allegedly made a piece of jewelry to pass on to her children from the diamonds she claimed to have kept safe from Nazis by continually recycling them through her bowels, she never mentioned a word to her family about where they came from, or what she claims she suffered in the camps. Until, that is, she saw Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List. Suddenly she had a spiel of heroism, blind luck, and sentimental schlock that put even the schlockmeister himself, Steven Spielberg to shame. Perhaps shame is the wrong word. Never one to pass up an over-the-top story, Spielberg included her in his Oscar(tm) winning holocaust documentary, The Last Days.

The Holocaust at the Oscars

Poster for Steven Spielberg’s holocaust documentary, The Last Days

One might think that Irene Zisblatt’s story of escaping from inside a Nazi gas chamber was a singular event…and one would be wrong. Apparently these sorts of escapes were not that uncommon, as Spielberg featured yet another gas chamber Houdini in The Last Days; a woman by the name of Alice Lok Cahana. However, in the companion book to The Last Days, Zisblatt’s story was downgraded to a hallucination she had when visiting Auschwitz in 1994.

But Spielberg didn’t only feature survivors in that documentary. He also featured three soldiers who were, allegedly, members of the Army division that liberated Dachau. And in a move that underscores his cinematic brilliance and sense of racial inclusiveness, one of those soldiers was Caucasian, one Japanese, and one African American. The African American soldier, Paul Parks, provides another stunning example of the absurdities the holocaust story has devolved into.

Paul Parks and the Liberation of Dachau

The Dachau prison camp was liberated by the Third Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division of the US Seventh Army on April 29th, 1945. Attached to that division was the 191st Tank Battalion, Battery C of the 158th Field Artillery, and supporting engineers from the 120th Engineering Battalion.

In The Last Days, Parks tells a detailed story of his experience during the liberation. He talks about seeing the naked bodies piled along the fence, and of the conversation he had with one of the prisoners upon his arrival — the conversation in which he first learned of mass exterminations being carried out at the camp. According to his story, he was completely flabbergasted by what he was being told. He had never heard of a concentration camp, let alone being given any preparation for the horrors he would be shown there. The prisoner filled him in on the details, showing him the gas chambers and cremation ovens, and leaving Parks to wonder how human beings could possibly vest such atrocities on other humans.

If you’ve made it this far still wide awake, you might have already noticed one problem with Parks’ story that, while not a deal breaker, certainly should have raised a red flag. What are the chances that he would find a Jewish prisoner in a German concentration camp who spoke English so well? Perhaps it could happen, but it should cause an eyebrow to raise.

That isn’t the biggest problem with his story, however. The big problem starts with the paragraph at the beginning of this section — the battalions involved in the liberation of Dachau. The battalion Parks was a member of was the all African American 365th Combat Engineers, which were nowhere near Dachau at the time of its liberation. The Japanese American soldier in the film who is also claimed to have been a liberator of Dachau was attached to the 442nd RCT, an all Japanese unit. The 442nd RCT wasn’t near Dachau, either.

Parks’ description of being told about the gassing at Dachau, and being shown the gas chambers themselves, proves problematic also. The problem is, the accepted history of Dachau is that while it is claimed gas chambers were under construction there, they were never finished. Hence, there were no mass execution of prisoners by gassing at Dachau. In fact, even the great Nazi hunter himself, Simon Wiesenthal, made very clear in a statement printed in Stars and Stripes that there were no gassing at Dachau or any other concentration camps on German soil.

Parks came under a considerable amount of fire for his claim that he was at the liberation of Dachau. In order to cover his tracks, he attempted to give an explanation of why he was included when his regiment was far away.

This sounds impressive, especially if one believes that Nazi soldiers were all blonde and blue-eyed, and that the integrationist policies of the US were well-known thought the world. Neither of these is true, however. Dachau was liberated at a time when segregation was still the law in the US, and lynching were still an all too common occurrence for which the law looked the other way. But surely the German army had no black soldiers! How could such a thing have squared with Hitler’s famous Aryan race building policies?

In fact, there were black soldiers in the Nazi army, and Jews, and others of non Aryan heritage. There was the Free Indian Legion, and the Free Arab Legion of the Nazi army. The Free Arab Legion was made up of Palestinians, Iraqis and Tunisians. 

Anyway, back to Parks’ story. What clearly shows the lie that Parks is telling is the simple fact that there would be no reason for the US to include black soldiers for the purpose of letting prison camp inmates know that these were American soldiers due to the mixed racial profile. The simple fact that the troops wore American uniforms, flew an American flag, and spoke English would do the job nicely.

Gas chamber door at Dachau…which was fairly obvious since it said so on the door.

He was not completely wrong about gas chambers at Dachau, though. They did exist — and they were used for delousing to stem the tide of typhus which was causing a massive number of prisoners to die in the camps. Here is a picture of a US soldier standing at the entrance door. If, as has been claimed, the Nazis were trying to fool the prisoners into believing they were actually going to take a shower, they did a piss poor job. The stenciling on the door reads: Caution! Gas! Life danger! Do not open!

The skull and crossbones above the lettering should need no translation.

And if we are to believe Parks’ story, and the common stories of the liberation of Dachau, US soldiers were greeted by nothing but a mass of starving, nearly dead people. There certainly were starving people at Dachau, but here are actual pictures taken at the liberation of the camp. You decide if the stories are strictly accurate.

One might notice several inconsistency between these photos and the stories that have been told. Hardly anyone looks like they are on the verge of death, many prisoners are wearing regular street clothes…and there are children!

OK, if you watched the videos I posted above, the children should not be a big surprise. Children in the camps were actually putting on plays. But if you believe the standard story — the sort of story told by the likes of Steven Spielberg, in History Channel documentaries, or in movies like Sophie’s Choice — you might be surprised since you’ve been told that children were immediately exterminated upon entering the camp. Perhaps you are thinking that these children were old enough to work, and so were kept alive. But the babies! What about the poor, hopeless babies?! No doubt those Nazi bastards used them for target practice, or even worse.

Well, here are some more pictures taken of the liberation of Dachau — some of the babies born there. If you watched the early propaganda film above, started by Hitchcock and finished by Billy Wilder, you will see actual footage of some of these babies. In fact, according to the documentary, there were over 200 children under 12 years old found still alive at the Belsen camp. Well, so much for the idea that the Nazis immediately killed the children. The narrator of the documentary still manages to turn this into something ominous, stating, “To these children, clean, dry clothes and kind words from a stranger were strange, undreamed of, mysterious things.” Really? The narration then goes on with, “Some had been born behind the barbed wire. In what circumstances one dare not try to imagine.” Hmmm…perhaps one shouldn’t dare try to imagine. One might realize that the circumstances were quite what we have been told.

Dachau prisoners placing a body in a cremation oven following the liberation of the camp.

OK, I don’t want to paint a picture of Dachau as a place where all of the prisoners were well fed, happy, and healthy. They weren’t. In fact, the reason the women look so healthy is because the SS gave extra food rations to pregnant women. There were certainly gruesome scenes aplenty there. There were, in fact, gruesome scenes to be found all over Europe at the time. It was war. And yes, there were corpses stacked at Dachau. The Allies proceeded to do what the Nazis were doing with them — cremate them to prevent the spread of disease. The cremation of bodies has been made into some special kind of final humiliation of the dead, but cremation is exactly the correct response when prisoners are dying due to typhus and other diseases.

The picture of the body being placed into a cremation oven was taken following the liberation of Dachau. There are two things one might notice about the picture. The first is that the cremation ovens are the standard sort that would have been used at the time, big enough for only one body. That would mean they would never have been appropriate for use in mass exterminations. The other thing one might notice is that camp prisoners were put to work doing the actual cremation. If these prisoners had been subjected to the horrors that have been claimed, what kind of monsters would then put them to work carrying on the horrors they had finally been liberated from? Another question one might ask is, what kind of prisoners, if they had just been liberated from the horrors we’ve been told about, would pose for a picture like this?

These are the kinds of incongruities that one finds everywhere in the holocaust story. At the very least, they should give us pause to wonder whether the stories we have been told might have been blown just a little out of proportion.

Spielberg’s Lie

Perhaps this heading should have gone above since the last few hundred words have been dedicated to his bloated berg of spiel. If you’ve happened upon this heading without reading the preceding text, please see above. But there is one other point I’d like to make concerning Spielberg’s choice of including Paul Parks in The Last Days. Spielberg already knew that Parks’ story wasn’t true before he made the film. While I’m willing to give Parks the benefit of the doubt in terms of his character (for reasons I’ll give shortly), I have to say that Steven Spielberg is a cold, calculated liar.

I don’t know Steven Spielberg, so a fair question to ask would be how I could possibly know that he knew that Parks was not telling the truth. The answer is simple. This was not the first holocaust documentary Parks had appeared in.

On November 11, 1992 PBS aired a documentary based on a book of the same name, called Liberators: Fighting On Two Fronts In WWII. The documentary claimed that the all African American battalion, the 761st Tank Battalion, liberated both Buchenwald and Dachau. The Army says this isn’t the case. According to the book and documentary, the 761st was attached to the 71st division, yet the Army only acknowledges the 71st division as being liberators. Alright, I can hear you saying that the Army was just being prejudiced against these brave African American soldiers, denying them their rightful place in history. The problem is, there are many pictures of the liberation of these camps, yet in every single picture there are two things missing: tanks and African American soldiers. Kind of a problem. Even more of a problem is that even Jewish writers slammed the film as being a fraud.

When the movie was nominated for an Academy Award ™ Col. James S. Moncrief, the Sixth Armored’s assistant chief of staff for personnel sent a letter of protest. The film was not removed from contention for an Oscar ™, but the outcry did keep it from winning. The scandal, however, was well-known in Hollywood circles, which means that Steven Spielberg was well aware that the claim that Paul Parks’ tank battalion (and Paul Parks himself) was known to be false. And yet the Man of Spiel still used Parks in his own documentary! To quote the Times of Israel article on the debacle:

Of course, there will be those who think I’m being too hard on Paul Parks. As a matter of fact, Elliot Perlman put that thought quite eloquently in the LA Times when he wrote,

Yeah, Elliot, apparently there are still a few of us out there who hold to a slightly higher standard of proof. But I have to hand it to him — I don’t think anyone else has so eloquently, and in so few words, stated the fundamental sales pitch of the holocaust industry.

For more on the liberation of Dachau, and commentary on the subjects we’ve just touched on, read this page of history written by men of the 157th Infantry who were provably there.

The Veracity of Eyewitnesses

The earliest “official” witness testimony has come to us via the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. We’ve all heard of the “trial” there, and many of us have seen the somber documentaries of the unfolding story of Nazi horrors that was revealed there. As with everything else in the holocaust story, one comes away with the impression that all of the judges there were thoroughly convinced that they were witness to the most horrendous act ever perpetrated in the history of mankind, and couldn’t wait to get a rope around a Nazi neck. In the end, everyone agreed that the Nazis were evil and needed to die, then everyone lived happily ever after.

But as with everything else in the holocaust story, that’s not quite how it went. As Sir Norman Birkett, British alternate judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal, put it, “the trial is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political.” And Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor and a former US Attorney General, declared that the Nuremberg Tribunal “is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations.” But it was Judge Iola T. Nikitchenko who really got to the heart of the matter when, at a press conference before the start of the tribunal, said,

We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime...

The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment -- the sentences.

US Senator Robert A. Taft denounced Nuremberg, saying,

About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret. In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials -- government policy and not justice -- with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.

US Representative Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin had this to say,

"The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history ... The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst."

And Milton R. Konvitz, a Jewish specialist of law and public administration who taught at New York University, denounced the trials with,

"Our policy with respect to the Nazis is consistent with neither international law nor our own State Department's policy... The Nuremberg trial constitutes a real threat to the basic conceptions of justice which it has taken mankind thousands of years to establish."

Well alright, so the trial wasn’t on the up-and-up strictly speaking. Still, we must believe the witnesses. They were there. And unlike Irene and Paul, above, the memories were still fresh in their minds. What they told must have been the truth.

Or maybe not.

The problem is, it is not terribly difficult to get people to remember things that never happened. Sure, you’ll want to argue that while you might be able to get people to remember a day at the circus that never happened, or implant a memory of getting stuck in a tree as a child, no one could get someone to remember something like that. It’s an understandable argument…but it’s wrong.

Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter conducted a study in which they successfully implanted detailed memories of events that never happened into 70% of the study participants. These were not simple memories of a childhood event that might have happened. They convinced the participants that they had committed a crime in adolescence that resulted in police contact! The abstract of the study states:

Memory researchers long have speculated that certain tactics may lead people to recall crimes that never occurred, and thus could potentially lead to false confessions. This is the first study to provide evidence suggesting that full episodic false memories of committing crime can be generated in a controlled experimental setting. With suggestive memory-retrieval techniques, participants were induced to generate criminal and noncriminal emotional false memories, and we compared these false memories with true memories of emotional events. After three interviews, 70% of participants were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components. It appears that in the context of a highly suggestive interview, people can quite readily generate rich false memories of committing crime.

This is one of the reasons that psychologists, hypnotists, cops, and attorneys are all trained on how to ask questions without leading the witness. What begins as only questioning can become the foundation of memories that simply aren’t accurate. And, given the atmosphere of revenge of the Nuremberg tribunal — one that lead the tribunal to torture Nazi officers to gain confessions, to the point that some begged to be put to death — one has to wonder how many witnesses were allowed to exact their own revenge through the telling of completely fabricated stories.

But even without the desire for revenge by the witnesses, and without the torture, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. And yet, it is interesting to note that virtually always when the US wants to engage in military intervention in a foreign country, the evidence that is used is either eyewitness testimony of atrocities or secret documents that can’t be shared. Such has been the case with the current conflict in Ukraine, such was the case with the invasion of Iraq (where Saddam Hussein was actually called a “new Hitler”), and such was the case in the Gulf War.

The Nayirah Testimony

In the lead up to the Gulf War, we heard about the atrocities being committed by Iraqi forces. While Saddam Hussein was not yet called the new Hilter, the atrocity stories were clearly meant to evoke that image. They could easily have come from the Nuremberg tribunal. The most impressive testimony came from a woman who identified herself as simply Nayirah.

The story she told was heartbreaking. In telling the story, she broke into tears several times. In case you don’t remember, here is a video of the testimony she gave. Just listen, and try to imagine the brutality she describes.

Dammit!! Now that I’ve heard her testimony again, I can feel the patriotic, freedom-protecting need to kill me some A-rabs rising up. Saddam Hussein must die!!

Oh, wait…he’s already dead.

Oh yeah…and there’s that part about how everything she said was actually a lie.

Of course, it isn’t easy to catch someone lying when they are talking about something that emotionally moving. She’s talking about babies being killed, for cryin’ out loud. How could anyone be expected to listen critically to what she is saying? Just do something. You know, kind of like when you hear a holocaust witness tearfully recount the horrors they experienced. Don’t think, just feel the emotions and tell the politicians to do whatever they have to.

If you were heartless enough to be listening critically, though, you might have noticed where she slipped in her story around 3:25. She begins her story clearly indicating that neither she nor her mother live in Kuwait. They were there on a “peaceful summer holiday” so that they could spend time with her sister who had recently had a baby. Notice that in the first sentence she has managed to set up the peacefulness of Kuwait before the Iraqis, and the babies she will later use as the emotional lever. But where she screws up is when she says that she and her mother were hassled by the Iraqi soldiers as they tried to leave Kuwait, which they were only doing because Kuwait had become intolerable. I suppose she forgot that she didn’t actually live there, was only on summer break, and would have to return to school. Alright, fine. The girl is shaken up. Give her a break!

But did I mention that she was lying? As it turned out, Nayirah was not exactly who she claimed to be. She wasn’t simply an impartial and deeply affected witness to an atrocity. Wait, did I say she wasn’t simply that? She wasn’t that at all. In fact, she was actually the daughter of the the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, being used by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, which had been retained by the Kuwaiti government to drive world opinion against Iraq. The nonprofit group Citizens for a Free Kuwait was not, as was claimed, a group working to expose these alleged atrocities being committed. It was part of the PR campaign, and was run from the offices of Hill & Knowlton. Her testimony was a complete fake.

Now, if her testimony was the only testimony given, or if all of the testimony was given by those under the control of Hill & Knowlton, all we would have is run of the mill political shenanigans that were eventually found out — though only found out after the US joined the Gulf War. But that isn’t what happened. Her testimony was corroborated by Amnesty International, and by multiple eyewitnesses who had fled Kuwait. Yet, despite all of this corroboration from both a respected international human rights group and actual eyewitnesses who were there, the story was not true. In other words, despite their credentials as eyewitnesses, their testimony was completely unreliable.

Well, not completely. There were some awful incidents that happened with babies in the hospital. You see, as fighting started (this was during a war in Kuwait, remember) apparently some people tried to get out, and incubators for premature babies were indeed knocked over. No doubt some of the eyewitnesses who corroborated the Nayirah story had seen those knocked over incubators, but didn’t actually know what had happened. Given that they were running from Iraqi soldiers, and had already heard the tearful and compelling testimony of Nayirah, they simply filled in the blanks in their memories with the soldiers.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. The curious reader might want to take a look at the book You Are Not So Smart to learn a bit more about the subject. In that book you will learn just how easy it is to delude ourselves, and just how much of our own memories are actually fiction. This is part and parcel of being human, and there is absolutely no reason to assume that the witnesses at Nuremberg were any different. Even if we assume the gas chambers were real, all conventional history of the time has the Nazis doing everything they can to hide the gas chambers from the inmates. They are allegedly disguised as showers, diesel trucks are allegedly run to mask the sound of the screams, and everything was placed out of view of the barracks so that no one would witness the carnage. In other words, prisoners did witness people dying and disappearing (they died regularly of disease, and prisoners were often transferred to other camps) and they did hear rumors (spread by the Allies themselves in the form of propaganda leaflets dropped in and around Auschwitz) but they would not have witnessed the gassing itself. Just like the “witnesses” to the killing of babies by Iraqi soldiers, the camp “witnesses” would naturally fill in the blanks in their memories with the prevailing, tearfully delivered story of holocaust.

Before we wrap up, just one more video on yet another holocaust survivor, Herman Rosenblat, who gained notoriety for his story, then infamy when it was found to be a complete lie. This one is special.

What makes this story special is that it combines elements of both Irene Zisblatt/Paul Parks and Nayirah. Not only did this fantasy of Rosenblat’s become a reality in his own mind, the fantasy also infected his wife. He admits that the story wasn’t true (though not a lie, just a fantasy), yet his wife tells the same story. She knows the story is fake, but she repeats it anyway. And even when Herman admits that he knows it is fake, he would still tell it.

And that, dear friends, is how it goes far more often than we’d like to think.

The Big Number

Since we are already in the pool, we might as well at least dip our toe into the deep end. While various holocaust myths come and go, and various fabulous (even outrageous) stories are debunked, the one sacrosanct and untouchable aspect of the story is the Big Number: six million. One can question or deny virtually any aspect of the holocaust story without legal ramifications (though the social ramifications are nothing to sneeze at) as long as the questioning/denial does not cast doubt on this one aspect: six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi government in prison camps during WWII. For example, the website rationalwiki.com (an ironic name if ever there was one) has this to say about those who dare question this number:

Sigh. Sorry if I fail to find the rationality in that, guys. Sounds more like the Catholic Church decrying claims that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Ah well. Actually, let me quote a bit more from that “rational” entry on their site. It’s very telling.