The Founding Myths
of Israeli Politics
II - The Myths of the 20th Century By Roger Garaudy
NOTE: In the course of translation and at least two digital transmissions, some portions of the text of this section were slightly damaged. All text contained in square brackets [...] indicates an editorial substitution or omission of garbled text passages.- 7/20/1996
1 - The myth of Zionist anti-Fascism
In 1941, Yitzhak Shamir committed "an unforgivable crime from the moral point of view: he preached an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain."
Source: Bar Zohar. "Le prophète armé : Ben Gourion." (Fayard. Paris 1966, p.99.)
When the war against Hitler began, almost all the Jewish organizations joined forces with the Allies and some of the most eminent leaders, such as Weizmann, declared themselves on the allied side; but the German Zionist group, though it was a small minority at the time, took the opposite side : from 1933 to 1941, it was committed to a policy of compromise and even of collaboration with Hitler. The Nazi authorities, even while they persecuted the Jews, for example by dismissing them from the Civil Service, kept contact with the Zionist leaders, granting them special treatment and distinguishing them from the "integrationist" Jews they were hunting down.
The accusation of collusion with the Hitlerian authorities does not therefore apply to the immense majority of Jews; these had not even waited until the war to fight Fascism with weapons, as they did in Spain from 1936 to 1939 as members of the International brigades, all the way to the Warsaw ghetto where the fighters of the "Jewish Committee" showed that they knew how to die in battle.
But the highly organized minority of Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis for eight years. Their one goal was to create a powerful Jewish State, while their racist vision of the world made them more anti-British than anti-Nazi.* * * On September 5th 1939, two days after the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany, Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency, wrote to the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. In his letter, he declared: "We Jews are on the side of Great Britain, and shall fight for democracy." He added that "the Jewish representatives are ready to sign an immediate agreement to allow the use of all their resources in men, techniques, material aid and all their capacities." This letter was printed in "The Jewish Chronicle" of September 8th, 1939 ; it was a genuine declaration of war on Germany by the Jewish people and raised the problem of internment of all Jews in Germany within concentration camps as "citizens of a nation at war with Germany."
* * * In the days of Hitler and Mussolini, the Zionist leaders behaved in an ambivalent way with regards to Fascism, at times sabotaging the anti-Fascist struggle and even attempting to collaborate at others. The fundamental aim of the Zionists was not to save Jewish lives but to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Ben Gurion, Israel's first head of State, declared outright to the "Labor" Zionists on December 7th 1938:
"If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel."
Source: Yvon Gelbner, "Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry", in Yad Vashem studies (Jerusalem, vol. XII, p. 199).
"The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes."
Source: Tom Segev. "Le septième million" Ed. Liana Levi, Paris, 1993, p. 539"
(...) Must we help all those who need it without taking into account the characteristics of each one? Must we not give this action a national Zionist character and attempt to give priority to the saving of those who can be useful to the Land of Israel and to Judaism? I know it may seem cruel to pose the question in this way, but unfortunately we must establish clearly that if we are able to save 10,000 people out of the 50,000 people who can contribute to the construction of the land and to the national rebirth, or else a million Jews who will become a burden for us or at best a dead weight, we must restrict ourselves to the saving of the 10,000 who can be saved - despite the accusations and the appeals of the million left behind."
Source: Memorandum of the "Salvation Committee" of the Jewish Agency. 1943. Quoted by Tom Segev. Op. cit. p. 124.
It was this fanaticism which inspired, for instance, the attitude of the Zionist delegation at the Evian conference of July 1938, where 31 nations had gathered to discuss the absorption of refugees from Nazi Germany : the Zionist delegation demanded, as the only possible solution, the admission of 200,000 Jews to Palestine.
The Jewish state was more important than the lives of Jews.
As far as the Zionist leaders were concerned, the worst enemy was "assimilation". In this they resembled the Hitlerians as do all racists, for whom the fundamental preoccupation is purity of blood. This is why the Hitlerians regarded the Zionists as valid interlocutors who served their designs, insofar as Hitler's ultimate goal was to rid Germany, and later Europe, of all Jews. We have proof of this collusion between Nazis and Zionists.
In a memorandum of June 21st 1933 to the Nazi party, the "Zionist Federation of Germany" expressed itself as follows:"In the foundation of the new State, which has proclaimed the race principle, we wish to adapt our community to these new structures... Our recognition of the Jewish nationality allows us to establish clear and sincere relations with the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not want to underestimate these fundamental principles, because we too are against mixed marriages and for the maintaining of the purity of the Jewish group...The Jews who are conscious of their identity and in whose name we speak, can find a place within the structure of the German State, for they are free of the resentment that the assimilated Jews must feel;...we believe in the possibility of loyal relations between those Jews conscious of their community and the German State.
To attain its practical objectives, Zionism hopes it will be able to collaborate with a government that is fundamentally hostile to the Jews....The realization of Zionism is impeded only by the resentment of Jews from without against the present German orientation The propaganda in favor of Zionism currently aimed against Germany is essentially non-Zionist... "
Source: Lucy Dawidovitch, "A Holocaust reader", p. 155.
The memorandum added that "should the Germans accept the cooperation of the Zionists, these would try to dissuade Jews abroad from supporting the anti-German boycott."
Source: Lucy Dawidovitch : "The war against Jews (1933-1945)" Penguin books. 1977. p. 231-232
The Hitlerian leaders were well-disposed towards the Zionists, whose exclusive aim was to create a state in Palestine, thus favoring their own designs to get rid of the Jews. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi theoretician, wrote:"Zionism must be vigorously backed so that a yearly contingent of German Jews shall be transported to Palestine."
Source: A. Rosenberg: "Die Spur des juden im Wandel der Zeiten". Munich 1937. p. 153.
Reinhardt Heydrich, who was later to become "Protector" of Czechoslovakia, wrote in Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the S.S. in 1935, when he was head of the S.S. security. In an article entitled "The invisible enemy", he made a distinction between two kinds of Jews:
"We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State...our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them."
Source: Hohne. "Order of the Death's Head", p.333.
"The German Betar received a new name: Herzlia. The activities of the movement in Germany had to obtain, of course, the approval of the Gestapo; in fact, Herzlia acted under the protection of the Gestapo. One day, a group of SS attacked a Betar summer camp. The head of the movement then complained to the Gestapo and, a few days later, the secret police declared that the SS in question had been punished. The Gestapo asked the Betar what compensation would seem most adequate. The movement asked that the recent prohibition that had struck them, forbidding them to wear brown shirts, be lifted; their request was granted."
Source: Ben-Yeruham, "Le livre de Betar" T.II, p. 350.
A circular issued by the Wilhelmstrasse indicated :"The goals that this category of Jews have set themselves (those Jews who oppose assimilation and favor a regrouping of their co-religionaries within a nation), with the Zionists in the front rank,are those least distant from the goals pursued in reality by Germany's policy towards the Jews."
Source: Circular letter by Bulow-Schwante to all the Reich diplomatic
missions. #83. February 28, 1934.
"There is no reason," wrote Bulow-Schwante to the Ministry of the Interior,"to impede by administrative measures the Zionist activity in Germany ; for Zionism is not in conflict with the National-Socialist program, whose object is to make the Jews leave Germany progressively."
Source: Letter number ZU 83-21. 28/8, April 13, 1935.
These directives confirmed previous measures and were applied scrupulously. By virtue of the privileged status of Zionism in Germany, the Bavarian Gestapo addressed the following circular to the police on January 28,1935: "By reason of their activity orientated towards emigration to Palestine, the members of the Zionist organization must not be treated with the harshness needed in dealing with the members of German Jewish (assimilationist) organizations."
Source: Kurt Grossmann : "Sionistes et non sionistes sous la loi nazie dans les années 30" Yearbook.Vol.VI, p. 310.
"The Zionist organization of German Jews had a legal existence until 1938, five years after the advent of Hitler....
The "Judaiche Rundschau" (the German Zionist newspaper) came out until 1938."
Source: Leibowitz: "Israel et Judaisme". Ed. Desclée de Brouwer, 1993. p.116.
In exchange for their official recognition as sole representatives of the Jewish community, the Zionist leaders offered to break the boycott which the world anti-Fascists were trying to organize.
Economic collaboration began in 1933 : two companies were created : the "Haavara Company" at Tel Aviv and the "Paltreu", in Berlin.
The mechanism of the operation was the following : a Jew wanting to emigrate would deposit a minimum of 1,000 pounds sterling at the Wasserman Bank in Berlin or in the Warburg bank in Hamburg. With this sum, Jewish exporters could buy German goods for Palestine, and pay the corresponding amount in Palestinian pounds into the Haavara account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank at Tel Aviv. When the immigrant arrived in Palestine, he received the equivalent of the sum he had deposited in Germany.
Several future Israeli prime ministers took part in the "haavara" undertaking, including Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharret (who was then called Moshe Shertok), Golda Meir (who supported it from New York), and Levi Eshkol, who was its representative in Berlin.
Source: "Ben Gourion et Shertok, dans Black": L'accord de la "havaara", p.294. Quoted by Tom Segev in "Le septieme million", (Ed. Liana Levi. French translation. 1993, p. 30 and 595).
The operation was advantageous for both parties : the Nazis thus succeeded in breaking the blockade (the Zionists managed to sell German merchandise even in Britain); whereas the Zionists were able to operate the "selective" immigration they desired : only millionaires were able to emigrate, their capital providing the funds needed to develop Zionist colonization in Palestine. In accordance with the goals of Zionism, it was more important to save Jewish capital from Nazi Germany that would permit the development of their undertaking, than to save the lives of poor Jews, unable to work or fight, who would have been a burden.
This policy of collaboration lasted until 1941, in other words eight years after Hitler's rise to power. Eichmann liaisoned with Kastner. The Eichmann trial revealed to some extent the mechanism of this connivance, of these "exchanges" between Zionist Jews "useful" to the creation of a Jewish State (wealthy personalities, technicians and youngsters who could serve to reinforce an army, etc.). with a mass of Jews who, being less favored, were left in Hitler's clutches.
The president of the committee, Ytzhak Gruenbaum, declared on January 18, 1943:"Zionism comes before everything else.. "
"They're going to say I'm an anti-Semite," Gruenbaum answered, "that I don't want to save the Exile, that I don't have a Warm Yiddish heart (...) Let them say what they want. I won't demand the sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Judaism. And I think that whoever demands such things accomplishes an anti-Zionist action."
Source: Gruenbaum: "Jours de destruction", p. 68.
This was also Ben Gourion's point of view:"The Zionist's task is not to save the "rest" of Israel which finds itself in Europe, but to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people."
(Quoted by Tom Segev. op.cit. p.158.)
"The leaders of the Jewish Agency agreed on the fact that the minority which could be saved had to be chosen according to the needs of the Zionist project in Palestine."
Source: Idem p.125.
The conclusion of Isaiah Trunk's book : "Judenrat" (MacMillan, New York 1972) was that:"According to Freudiger's calculations, fifty percent of the Jews could have escaped if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils." (p.141)
Significantly, at the time of the 50 th anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, Yitzhak Rabin asked Lech Walesa not to let one of the co-leaders of the insurrection, Marek Edelman, make a speech.
In 1993, Marek Edelman had been interviewed by Edward Alter for the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". In this interview, he recalled those who had been the true instigators and heroes of the Warsaw ghetto's "Jewish fighters' committee":"Socialists of the Bund, anti-Zionists, Communists, Trotskyites, Mihal Rosenfeld, Mala Zimetbaum, Edelman and a minority of Left-wing Zionists from the Poalei Zion and the Hashomer Hatzair."
"It was they who fought against the Nazis with weapons, as did the Jewish volunteers in the international brigades of Spain. Over 30% of the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were Jews, who were attacked at the time by the Zionist press because they fought in Spain instead of going to Palestine."
Source: "Jewish Life", April 1938, p. 11.
2,250 of the fighters in the Polish Dombrovski brigade, out of a total of 5,000 Poles, were Jews.
These heroic Jews fought on all fronts side by side with the antiFascist forces of the world. And yet, the Zionist leaders declared in an article by their London representatives entitled : "Must Jews take part in the anti-Fascist movements?" "NO !...", setting a single goal : "the construction of the land of Israel".
In his autobiography, the President of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldman, described his dramatic meeting with the Czech Prime Minister, Edward Benes, in 1935. Benes accused the Zionists of having broken the boycott of Hitler with the "Ha'avara" (the transfer agreements) and blamed the refusal of the world Zionist Organization to organize resistance against the Nazis."I have had to take part in many painful meetings in my life, but I have never felt as miserable and ashamed as during those two hours. I felt with every fibre of my being that Benes was right."
Source: Nahum Goldman."Autobiographie", op.cit. pp. 157- 158. Ibid, p.260.
The Zionists, counting on Mussolini's hostility to England, established contact with him as early as 1922. He had received them after his march on Rome in October, on December 20th 1922.
Source: Ruth Bondy, "The Emissary: a life of Enzo Sereni" (p.45).
Mussolini received Weizman on January 3rd 1923, and another time on September 17th 1926; Nahum Goldman, president of the World Zionist Organization, had a meeting with Mussolini on October 26th,1927, where the Italian leader told him : "I will help you to create this Jewish state." (Nahum Goldman : "Autobiographie", op.cit.p.170)
This collaboration was already a form of sabotage against the international anti-Fascist struggle. It subordinated the entire Zionist policy to the sole design of building a Jewish state in Palestine. Its design remained unaltered during the war, even when Hitler's persecution of European Jews was at its worst.
When the Jews were deported from Hungary, Rudolf Kastner, the vice-president of the Zionist organization, negotiated with Eichmann on the following basis : if Eichmann allowed the departure to Palestine of 1,684 "useful" Jews who would help in the construction of the future state of Israel (capitalists, technicians, soldiers, etc...) Kastner would allow Eichmann to make 460,000 Hungarian believe that they were not being deported to Auchwitz but simply being transferred.
At the time of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi recalled that Kastner had intervened on behalf of one of his Nazi interlocutors : one of Himmler's henchmen, Standarten feurher Kurt Becher, escaped punishment thanks to Kastner's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial.
The Judge was formal:"There was no truth or good faith in Kastner's testimony...Kastner deliberately committed perjury in his testimony before this court when he denied that he had intervened on behalf of Becher. Furthermore, he concealed this vital fact : his action on behalf of Becher was made in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...It is clear that Kastner's recommendation was not made on a personal basis but also in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...and this is why Becher was released by the Allies."
After the verdict, Israeli opinion was shaken. In the newspaper "Haaretz", Dr. Moshe Keren wrote on July 14th 1955 :"Kastner must be tried for collaboration with the Nazis..." But the evening paper "Yediot Aharonot" (23rd June,1955) clearly explained why this was impossible. "If Kastner is tried, the entire government might collapse before the nation, following what this trial will uncover."
What would be discovered was that Kastner had not acted alone but with the agreement of the other Zionist leaders who were members of the government at the time of the trial. The only way to prevent Kastner from talking and causing a scandal was for him to disappear. And indeed, he died at just the right moment, after which the Israeli Government introduced an appeal to rehabilitate him. The Supreme Court granted the appeal.
This policy of collaboration reached its apogee in 1941, when the most extremist Zionist group, the "LEHI" ("Fighters for the Liberation of Israel"), led by Abraham Stern and, after his death, by a triumvirate of which Itzak Shamir was a member, committed " an unforgivable crime from the moral point of view : advocating an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain. "
Source: Bar Zohar. "Ben Gourion, le Prophète armé" (Fayard. Paris 1966. p.99)
Eliezer Halevi, a well-known Labor unionist, member of the Gueva Kibbutz, revealed in the weekly "Tel-Aviv Hotam" (August l9th, 1983) the existence of a document signed by Itzak Shamir (who was then called Yezernitsky) and by Abraham Stern; this document was handed over to the German embassy in Ankara at a time of all-out war in Europe, and when Marshal Rommel's troops were already on Egyptian soil. The document said, among other things, "In the matter of concept, we identify with you. So why not collaborate with one another ?" In its issue of January 31st,1983, "Haaretz" quotes a letter marked "secret", sent in January 1941 by Hitler's ambassador to Ankara, Franz Von Papen, to his superiors. In it, he described his contacts with the members of the Stern Gang, joining a memorandum by the Nazi secret service agent in Damas, Werner Otto Von Hentig, regarding the negotiations with the envoys of Stern and Shamir. The memo said, notably : "cooperation between the Israel liberation movement and the new order in Europe conform with one of the speeches of the Chancellor of the Third Reich, in which Hitler stressed the need to use every combination of coalition to isolate and defeat England." It also said that the Stern Gang had "close links with the totalitarian movements in Europe, their ideology and structures." These documents are to be found at the Holocaust Memorial (Yad Vachem) in Jerusalem, classified under the number E234151-8.
One of the historical leaders of the Stern Gang, Israel Eldad, published an article in the Tel Aviv daily,"Yediot Aharonot" (February 4th, 1983) in which he confirmed the authenticity of these negotiations between his movement and the official representatives of Nazi Germany. He asserted straight out that his colleagues had explained to the Nazis how there was a probable identity of interest between the new order in Europe based on the German concept, and the aspirations of the Jewish people in Palestine, as represented by the Stern freedom fighters for Israel.
This text was entitled:
"Basic principles of the military organization(NMO) in Palestine (Irgun Zevai Leumi) concerning the solution of the Jewish question in Europe and the active participation of the NMO in the war on the side of Germany."
The following are extracts:It emerges from the speeches of the leaders of the German National Socialist State that a radical solution to the Jewish question implies an evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe. (Judenreines Europa).
This evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is the primary condition of the solution of the Jewish problem, but it is only made possible by the installation of these masses in Palestine, in a Jewish state with its historical frontiers.
To resolve the Jewish problem definitively and to liberate the Jewish people is the goal of the political activity and the long years of struggle of the "Movement for the Freedom of Israel" (Lehi) and its national military organization in Palestine (Irgun Zevai Leumi).
The NMO, knowing the benevolent position of the Reich government towards the Zionist activity within Germany, and the Zionist emigration projects, considers that:
1) There could exist common interests between the foundation of a new order in Europe, according to the German concept, and the genuine aspirations of the Jewish people as they are incarnated by the Lehi.
2) Cooperation would be possible between the new Germany and a renewed Hebrew nation (Volkish Nationalen Hebraertum).
3) The establishment of the historical Jewish State on a national and totalitarian base, linked by a treaty to a German Reich, could contribute to the reinforcement in the future of Germany's position in the Middle East.
On condition that the German government recognizes the national aspirations of the 'Movement for the Freedom of Israel' (Lehi), the National Military Organization (NMO) proposes to participate in the war on the side of Germany.
The cooperation of the Israel liberation movement would go in the direction of the recent speeches of the Reich chancellor, in which Mr. Hitler stressed that all negotiations and any alliance should serve to isolate England and to defeat it.
Because of its structure and concept of the world, the NMO is narrowly linked to the European totalitarian movements.
Source: The original text, in German, is to be found as appendix number 11 of the book by David Yisraeli: "Le probleme palestinien dans la politique allemande, de 1889 " 1945", Bar Ilan University Ramat Gan. Israel, 1974, p. 315-317.
According to the Israeli press, which has published a dozen articles on the subject, the Nazis never took the proposals of Stern, Shamir and their friends seriously.
The negotiations stopped abruptly when the Allied troops arrested the emissary of Stern and Shamir in June 1941. The emissary, Naftali Loubentchik, was actually arrested in the Nazi secret service office at Damascus. Other members of the group continued to have contacts with the Nazis until the arrest by the British authorities of Izhak Shamir in December 1941 for "terrorism and collaboration with the Nazi enemy."
Such a past did not prevent Izhak Shamir from becoming Prime Minister, and from still being today the leader of a powerful "opposition", the most fiercely determined to continue the occupation of Cisjordania. This is because, in fact, the Zionist leaders all pursue the same racist goal, notwithstanding their internal rivalries : to chase all the native Arabs out of Palestine through terror, expropriation or expulsion, in order to remain the sole conquerors and masters.
Ben Gurion once declared:"Begin undeniably belongs to the Hitlerian type. He is a racist, ready to destroy all the Arabs in his dream of unification of Israel, prepared to resort to any means to realize this sacred goal."
Source: E.Haber. "Menahem Begin, the man and the legend." Delle Book. New York 1979, p. 385.
The same Ben Gurion never believed in the possibility of coexistence with the Arabs. The fewer Arabs there were within the borders of of the future state of Israel, the better it would be. He did not say so explicitly, but the overall impression one gets from his speeches and his comments is clear: a major offensive against the Arabs would not only defeat their attacks but would also reduce as far as possible the percentage of the Arab population within the State."(...) He can be accused of racism, but then one will have to put on trial the entire Zionist movement, which is founded on the principle of a purely Jewish entity in Palestine."
Source: Bar Zohar (op.cit) p.146.
At the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Attorney General, Haim Cohen, reminded the judges:"If it does not coincide with your philosophy, you can criticize Kastner...But what does that have to do with collaboration?...It has always been in our Zionist tradition to select an elite to organize immigration to Palestine... Kastner did nothing else."
Source: Court record 124/53. Jerusalem district court.
This prominent magistrate was indeed evoking a constant doctrine of the Zionist movement : its goal was not to save Jews but to build a strong Jewish state.
Rabbi Klaussner, who was in charge of "Displaced persons," presented a report before the Jewish American Conference on May 2nd, 1948:
"I am convinced people must be forced to go to Palestine....For them, an American dollar appears as the highest of goals. By the word "force", I am suggesting a programme. It served for the evacuation of the Jews in Poland, and in the history of the 'Exodus'... To apply this programme we must, instead of providing 'displaced persons' with comfort, create the greatest possible discomfort for them...At a second stage, a procedure calling upon the Haganah to harass the Jews."
Source: Alfred H. Lilienthal in "What price Israel", Chicago 1953. p.194-195.
There were several variations on this method of inducement and even of coercion.
In 1940, to arouse indignation against the English, who had decided to save the Jews threatened by Hitler by taking them to Mauritius, the Zionist leaders of the "Hagannah" (led by Ben Gurion) did not hesitate to blow up the ship when it called at Haifa on December 25th 1940, causing the death of 252 Jews and English crew-members.
Source: Dr.Herzl Rosenblum, director of "Yediot Aahronot", revelation made in 1958 and justified in "Jewish Newsletter", N.Y.,November 1958.
Another example was that of Irak:
Its Jewish community (110,000 people in 1948) was well-implanted in the country. The chief Rabbi of Irak, Khedouri Sassoon had declared :
"The Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for a thousand years and do not consider themselves as separate elements in this nation."
Then began the Israeli terrorist acts in Baghdad in 1950. Confronted by the reticence of the Iraki Jews to register on the immigration lists for Israel, the Israeli secret services did not hesitate to throw bombs at them to convince them they were in danger...The attack on the Shem-Tov synagogue killed three people and injured dozens more. It was the start of the exodus baptized "Operation Ali Baba".
Source: Ha'olam hazeh. April 20th and June 1st 1966, and "Yediot Aahronot", November 8th 1977.
This has been a consistent doctrine ever since Theodore Herzl replaced the definition of Jew no longer as a religion but as a race.
Article 4b of the fundamental law of the State of Israel (which has no constitution),which defines the "Law of the return" (5710 of 1950), stipulates that:
...will be considered as Jewish a person born of a Jewish mother, or converted. (racial or confessional criteria)
Source: Klein: "L'Etat juif", ed. Dunod. Paris. p.156.
This was in keeping with the founding doctrine of Theodore Herzl, who constantly harped on the theme in his "Diaries". As early as 1895, he declared to a German interlocutor (Speidel):
"I understand anti-Semitism. We Jews have remained, even if it is not our fault, foreign bodies in the different nations."Source : ("Diaries", p.9)
A few pages further, he is even more explicit:
"Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies."
Source: ("Diaries", p.19)
They did indeed have a common goal : to assemble Jews in a world ghetto.
The facts have borne out Theodore Herzl's arguments.
Pious Jews, like many Christians, repeated each day : "Next year, Jerusalem, " making of Jerusalem not a specific territory but the symbol of the Alliance between God and Men, and the personal effort to deserve it, so that the "Return" occurred only under the impulse of anti-Semitic threats in foreign countries.
On August 31st 1949, Ben Gurion declared to a group of American visitors to Israel:
"Although we have realized our dream of creating a Jewish State, we are only at the beginning. There are still only 900,000 Jews in Israel, whereas the majority of the Jewish people still remains abroad. Our future task is to bring all the Jews to Israel."
Ben Gurion's goal was to bring four million Jews to Israel between 1951 and 1961. 800,000 came. In 1960, there were only 30,000 immigrants for the year. In 1975-76, emigration out of Israel outstripped immigration.
Only the great persecutions, such as that in Romania, had given a certain impulse to the Return. Even the Hitlerian atrocities did not succeed in fulfilling Ben Gurion's dream.
Out of the two and a half million Jewish victims of the Nazis which sought refuge abroad between 1935 and 1943, hardly 8,5% went to settle in Palestine. The United States limited their number to 182,000 allowed to enter US soil (less than 7%); England limited the number to 67,000 (less than 2%). The vast majority (1,930,000),in other words 75% found shelter in the Soviet Union.
Source: Institute for Jewish Affairs of New York, quoted by Christopher Sykes in "Crossroads to Israel", London 1965, and by Nathan Weinstock, "Le sionisme contre Israel," p.146.
2 - The Myth of the Justice of Nuremberg
"This tribunal represents a continuation of the war efforts of the Allied nations."
Source: Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Attorney-General (26th July 1946 session)
On August 8th 1945, the American, English, French and Russian met in London to organize "the pursuit and the punishment of the great war criminals of the European Axis Powers," by creating a "military international tribunal" (article I,a).
The crimes were defined under Title II, article 6.
1 - Crimes against peace by those who were responsible for starting the war."
2 - Crimes of war for the violation of laws and customs of war."
3 - Crimes against humanity, in other words crimes essentially committed against civilians.
The constitution of this jurisdiction already calls for a few remarks:
1 - It was not an international tribunal since it consisted only of the victors and, consequently, only the crimes committed by the vanquished were taken into consideration. As the American Attorney General, Robert H. Jackson, who presided the audience on July 26th 1946, justly acknowledged:
"The Allies are still, technically-speaking, at war with Germany... As a military tribunal, this tribunal represents a continuation of the war efforts of the Allied nations."
2 - It was therefore an exceptional tribunal constituting the last act of war, and excluding by its very principle any responsibility on the part of the victors - first of all in the unleashing of the war. Any reminder of its primary source was excluded in advance : at Nuremberg, no-one raised the question of the Treaty of Versailles and if it was not to be blamed for the resulting consequences - the bankruptcies and the unemployment especially which allowed the rise of someone like Hitler, with the consent of a majority of the German people. The law of the strongest prevailed when Germany was defeated in 1918, asserting itself as the "right" which made might, when the Germans had to pay 132 billion gold-marks (the equivalent of 165 billion gold francs) as reparation, at a time when their country's national fortune was estimated at 260 billion gold-marks.
The German economy was ruined by such measures, and the German people driven to despair by bankruptcy, by the collapse of the currency and above all by unemployment ; it was all this which made Hitler's rise to power possible, giving him his best arguments to sustain his principal slogan : the cancellation of the Treaty of Versailles, with its sum total of misery and humiliation.
It is easy to compare the unemployment figures and the successes of the "National-Socialist Party" at the different elections:
I - from 1924 to 1930
Dates Votes % Seats Unemployed05/04/1924 1,918,000 6.6 32 320,711
12/07/1924 908,000 3.0 14 282,645
05/20/l928 810,000 2.6 12 269,443
II - from 1930 to 1933
09/14/1932 6,407,000 18.3 107 1,061,570
07/31/1932 13,779,000 37.3 230 5,392,248
11/06/1932 11,737,000 33.1 196 5,355,428
03/05/1933 17,265,800 43.7 288 5,598,855
When Hitler and his political allies won the absolute majority in the Reichstag, they obtained aid for rearmament in dollars, pounds and francs. The German bank, Shreider, financed Hitler's department of propaganda, but it was mostly the great American, English and French trusts which financed the rearmament.
This was true in the case of the American chemical consortium, Dupont de Nemours and of the English trust;
Imperial Chemicals Industry, which subsidized I.G. Farbein with whom they had shared the world powder market, and;
Dillon Bank, in New York which subsidized the
Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the German steel trust.
Others were subsidized by Morgan, Rockefeller, et al..
Thus did the pound and the dollar take part in the plot which brought Hitler to power.
In France, a request by Senator Paul Laffont to the Ministry of the national Economy concerning the quantities of iron ore exported towards Germany from 1934 on,received the following answer :
The quantities of iron ore (N 204 of the customs tariff) exported towards Germany in the years 1934,1935,1936 and 1937, are consigned to the following chart :
Year Quantities (in quintals)
1934 17,060,916
1935 58,616,111
1936 77,931,756
1937 71,329,234
Source: Journal officiel de la Republique francaise,March 26th 1938.
Yet the directors of Dupont de Nemours, Dillon, Morgan, Rockefeller or François de Wendel were not asked to answer for their actions at Nuremberg, in the chapter entitled "plotting against the peace".
The imprecations of Hitler and the principal Nazi leaders against Communists and Jews are often invoked. This is especially true of Chapter XV of the second volume of "Mein Kampf", in which Hitler evokes the past: that of the war of the gasses initiated by the English during the First World War. The chapter is entitled:
"The right to legitimate defence :
"If, at the beginning or during the war,twelve or fifteen thousand of those Hebrew corruptors of the people had been subjected only once to the toxic gasses that hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every walk of life had to endure on the front the sacrifice of millions of men would not have been in vain. On the contrary, if we had got rid in time of these twelve thousand or so scoundrels, we could perhaps have saved the existence of a million good brave Germans full of future."
In a speech before the Reichstag on January 30th 1939, he also said :
"If the international world of Jewish finance both within and outside Europe were to succeed in plunging nations once again in a world war, the result would not be the Bolshevization of the Earth alongside with the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe...For the age in which the non-Jewish peoples were delivered up defenceless to propaganda is over. National-Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy henceforth possess institutions which make it possible each time it is necessary to enlighten the world regarding the full details and issues of a question which many nations feel instinctively without being able to explain it scientifically to themselves."
"Jews can continue to pursue their campaign of harassment in certain States, protected as they are by the monopoly they exert over the press, the cinema, radio propaganda, theatres, literature and still other means. Yet if that people should suceed once again in precipitating millions of people in a completely absurd conflict for them, though it may be profitable for Jewish interests, then we would see manifesting itself the efficiency of a labour of explanation which has made it possible within a few years in Germany alone to get rid of Judaism completely (restlos erlegen)."
Source: I/M.T. Vol.XXXI, p. 65.
On January 30th 1941, Hitler addressed himself to all the Jews of Europe, telling them they "would have finished playing their role in case of generalized warfare." Then, in a speech made on January 30th 1942, he declared that the war would see "the annihilation of Judaism in Europe."
Hitler's political testament, published by the Nuremberg International Military Court is full of statements to the same effect. For example, we read :
"But I have allowed no doubt to subsist on that score if those international conspirators of the world of money and finance start treating the peoples of Europe like packets of shares, that people which is the true culprit in this murderous conflict will have to render accounts: the Jews ! (Das Judentum !)"
"I have left no-one uncertain as to the fate which awaits he through who millions of children of the Aryan peoples of Europe had to die of hunger, millions of adult men had to die and hundreds of thousands of women and children would be burnt alive in the bombardments of their city. Even if it must be done with more humane means, the culprit will have to expiate his fault. "
Hitler spoke of destroying an "influence"; Himmler spoke more directly of destroying people.
This, for example, is what Himmler said in a speech addressed to naval commanders at Weimar on December 16th 1943:
"When, wherever I was, I was forced to give the order to march against partisans and Jewish commissars in a village, then I systematically gave the order to also kill the wives and children of these partisans and commissars."
Later, speaking before some generals at Sonthofen on May 5th 1944, he added :
"In this conflict with Asia, we must get into the habit of forgetting the rules of the game and the customs in use during European wars of the past, although we have grown attached to them and they suit our mentality better."
This savagery was not, unfortunately, confined to one side.
On September 4th 1940, Hitler declared at the "Sportpalast":
"If the British Air Force throws three or four thousand kilos of bombs on us, we shall throw one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred thousand kilos and more in a single night."
This is a wild exaggeration of the Lutwaffe's possibilities in terms of strategic bombardments, but it shows the degree of hatred both camps had reached.
In reply, Clifton Fadiman, editor of the "New Yorker" and figurehead of the "Writers' War Board", a semi-official government literary agency, asked writers in 1942:
"...to arouse an ardent hatred against all the Germans and not only against the Nazi leaders."
These words proving controversial, Fadiman insisted:
"...the only way to make Germans understand is to kill them. And even then, I don't think they'll understand."
In April 1942, praising a book by De Sales, "The making of tomorrow", Fadiman developed his racist concept and wrote:
"Today's Nazi aggression is not the work of a group of gangsters, but rather the final expression of the deepest instincts of the German people. Hitler is the incarnation of greater forces than himself. The heresy he preaches is 2,000 years old. What is this heresy? Neither more nor less than the rebellion against Western civilization which began with Arminius...the dimensions of this war thus appear distinctly..."
He approved of Hemingway's suggestion:
"...the only ultimate settlement would be to sterilize the Nazis in the surgical meaning of the word. "
He ridiculed Dorothy Thomson, who made a distinction between the Nazis and other Germans.
His was not an isolated opinion. After Hitler's speech at the "Sportpalast", the "Daily Herald" in London published an article by the Reverend C.W. Wipp, declaring:
"The keynote must be : "to sweep them" and, to do that, to concentrate our science on the discovery of new and more terrifying explosives...A minister of the Gospel must perhaps not yield to such feelings, but I say frankly that if I could I would strike Germany off the map. It is a diabolical race which has been the curse of Europe for centuries."
Fortunately, there were protests against such aberrations in England where the people, not any more than the German people and its high degree of culture, could be confused with bloodthirsty leaders and individuals full of hatred and baying for blood.
As early as the month of January 1934, the Zionist leader, Wladimir Jabotinsky, declared to the Jewish newspaper "Natscha Retsch":
"Our Jewish interests demand the definitive annihilation of Germany; the whole German people poses a threat for us."
As for Churchill, he wrote to Paul Reynaud on May 16th 1940 :
"We shall starve Germany. We shall destroy its cities. We shall burn its crops and its forests."
Source: Paul Baudouin, "Neuf mois au gouvernement". La Table Ronde, 1948, p.57.
In 1942, the British minister, Lord Vansittart, a true apostle of hatred, declared to justify the terror of British bombardments:
"The only good Germans are dead Germans; so let the bombs rain down ! "
In July 1944, Churchill sent his chief of staff, General Hastings Imay, a four-page memorandum in which he proposed the following project:
"I want you to think over this question of asphyxiating gases very seriously...
"It is absurd to take morality into account in this affair when everyone has already made use of them (asphyxiating gases) during the last war, without there being any protest on the part of moralists or of the church. On the other hand, the bombing of open cities was regarded as taboo at the time; today, everyone does it as a matter of fact. It is only a question of fashion, comparable to the evolution in the length of women's hemlines...
"I want the question of how much it would pay to use asphyxiating gases to be examined coolly...We must not allow our hands to be bound by foolish principles... We could flood the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that the majority of the population would be in constant need of medical help...We may have to wait a few weeks or even a few months before I ask you to flood Germany with asphyxiating gases and,if we do it,let's do it thoroughly. Meanwhile, I would like this question to be examined coolly by sensible people and not by a team of killjoy psalm-singers in uniform of the sort one crosses now and again."
Source: "American heritage", August-September 1985.
Note: The United States produced almost 135,000 tons of toxic chemical agents during the war, Germany 70,000 tons, the United Kingdom 40,000 tons and Japan 7,500 tons.
Neither Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Truman had to face trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg court did not try some of the most ignoble calls to crime of which we can mention two of the wildest : one was a call to "genocide" (this time in the true meaning of the term) by an American Jew called Theodore Kaufman, who wrote a book entitled : "Germany must perish". In it, he put forward the following case:"The Germans (whoever they are : anti-Nazis, Communists and even philo-Semites) do not deserve to live. Consequently, 20,000 doctors must be mobilized after the war to sterilize 25 Germans a day each. In this way,not one German able to breed will remain within three months, and the German race will be totally eliminated within 60 years."
This book, which came out in 1942, was a godsend for anti-Semites. Hitler had extracts from it read on all the radio-stations. Another work of the kind was the "Call to the Red Army" by the Soviet writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, published in October 1944:"Kill, kill ! There are no innocents among the Germans, either among the living or among those yet to be born! Carry out the instructions of Comrade Stalin by always crushing the Fascist beast in its lair. Break the pride of German women by violence; take them as legitimate booty. Kill, kill, valiant soldiers of the Red Army, in your irresistible assault." (quoted by Admiral Doenitz,"Dix ans et 20 jours", (pp.343-44).
Neither of the above-mentioned was tried at Nuremberg, any more than the heads of State which covered them.
Nor were tried the Anglo-American leaders who were responsible for the bombing of Dresden, which killed 200,000 civilians and which served no military purpose since the Soviet Army had already reached the Oder.
Nor was Truman tried, though he was responsible for the atomic apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which 300,000 civilians perished, again uselessly since Japan's surrender had already been decided by the emperor.
Nor were Beria and Stalin tried for the massacre of thousands of Polish
officers at Katyn, which was blamed on the Germans.* * * The methods of the procedure were based on the same principles (or rather absence of principles) as the choice of the accused among the vanquished only.
The status of the tribunal was defined as follows:
* Article 19 : The Court will not be bound by technical rules relating to the administration of proofs. It will adopt and apply as far as possible an expeditive and not a formalist procedure, will admit any means it considers to have conclusive value.
* Article 21 : The Court will not require proof of facts that are of public notoriety, but will take them as established. It also regards as authentic proofs the official documents and reports of the Allied governments.
This was the juridical monstrosity whose decisions were to be canonized and regarded as criteria of an untouchable historical truth, according to the Gayssot-Fabius law of May 2nd 1990.
This text inserts an article 24b in the 1981 law concerning the freedom of the press which says:"Article 24b - whosoever contests the existence of crimes against humanity sanctioned by French or international jurisdiction will be punished by imprisonment of from one month to a year and of a fine of between 2,000 and 300,000 francs, or to one of these penalties only."
* * * Such a procedure by the Nuremberg Court raised objections even amongst the top-level American jurists: those of the Supreme Court.
One of these was Judge Jackson. The English historian, David Irving, who admitted he had misjudged him earlier, was to say the following:"Renowned jurists throughout the world were ashamed of the Nuremberg proceedings. Certainly, Judge Robert H. Jackson, the American president of the accusers, was ashamed of these proceedings ; this was obvious from his "personal diary", which I have read."
"I have had the privilege of having access to the "Memoirs" (of Judge Jackson) at the Library of Congress...Shortly after Robert H. Jackson was entrusted by President Truman with the task of leading the American judges at the Nuremberg Trial, he found out about American plans to use atomic bombs; he was uneasy about the task entrusted to him : to pursue in the name of a nation, acts which it had itself committed, for he was aware that the United States was going to commit an even greater crime." (33.9392 and 9394)
Referring to the book by Alpheus Thomas Mason on Harlan Fiske Stone: "Pillar of the Law" (Harlan Fiske Stone was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States) the lawyer Christie quoted page 715 of this book, in which Stone wrote to the editor of "Fortune" magazine that not only did he disown such a procedure, but that he regarded the whole thing as "a high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg." (5.995-996) p.716.
Judge Wennerstrum, of the Supreme Court of the United States, President of one of the courts (23.5915-5916) was so disgusted by the procedure that he refused his nomination and went back to the United States, where he voiced his objections in the "Chicago Tribune": 60% of the members of the board of the trial were Jewish; so were the interpreters."As for the principal accused : Hoess, Streicher, Pohl, they have been tortured." (23.5919).
By virtue of the Nuremberg statutes accepting as proofs all declarations by the Allies, the Soviet report on Katyn accusing the Germans of the massacre of 11,000 Polish officers was accepted as an "authentic proof", irrefutable, on August 8th 1945 by the victors.
Source: USSR Document 54, in vol. 39 of the TMI (p.290.32.)
The Soviet Prosecuting Attorney, General Rudenko, could have said according to article 21 of the Nuremberg Trial Statute, "...there could be no object of contestation." (XV,p.300)
On April 13 th 1990, the international press announced that the massacre had been ordered by Beria and the Soviet authorities. When Professor Naville, of Geneva University, had examined the bodies, he found 1940 documents in their pockets which proved that the executions had taken place at that date. In 1940, the Smolensk district was occupied by the Soviets.* * * To stick to our theme: "The founding myths of the State of Israel", we will examine one of the untruths which continue to wreak the most havoc after over half a century in today's world, and not only in Israel : "the myth of the 6 million Jews exterminated" that has become a dogma justifying, sacralizing (as the very term "Holocaust" implies) all the extortions of the State of Israel in Palestine, in the entire Middle-East, in the United States and, through the United States,in world politics, placing it above all international law.
The Nuremberg Court made this figure official; it has never ceased since then to be used to manipulate public opinion in the written and spoken press, in literature and the cinema, and even in schoolbooks.
In fact, this figure rests only on two accounts: that of Hoettl and that of Wisliceny.
This was what the former declared:"In April 1944, as told to the Nuremberg judges, Dr.Wilhem Hoettl, Obersturmbannfrrher, of section IV of the Central security bureau of the Reich : the S.S. Obersturmbannfeurher Adolf Eichmann, whom I had known since 1938, had a talk with me in my apartment in Budapest... He knew he was considered as a war criminal by the Allied nations since he had thousands of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many there were, and he answered : although the number was a great secret, he would tell me because of his information he had reached the following conclusion : in the various extermination camps, some four million Jews had been killed and two million had died in other ways."
Source: Nuremberg Trial, vol.IV, p.657.
And the second:"He (Eichmann) said that he would leap into his grave laughing, for the knowledge of having the lives of five million people on his conscience would be a source of extraordinary satisfaction for him." (op.cit.)
Of these two accounts, M. Poliakov himself said :"It would be possible that a figure so imperfectly backed up, must be considered suspect."
Source: Revue d'histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale. October 1956.
Let us add that the principal testimony, the most complete and the and most precise, is by Hoett, an Intelligence Service officer.
Source: "Weekend" magazine, January 25th 1961, with on its cover a portrait of Hoett, with the caption: "History of a spy. Stranger than fiction: this friend of Nazi leaders, had a British Secret Service chief as a boss."
Confirming the objections of top jurists of the Supreme Court of the United States, and of many others, on the juridical anomalies of the "Nuremberg Court", we shall give the following examples of the violations of the rules that apply to the procedure of every genuine trial.1 - The establishment and the verification of the authenticity of the texts produced.
2 - The analysis of the value of the testimony and the conditions in which they were obtained.
3 - The scientific examination of the weapon used to commit the crime in order to establish the way it functions and its effects.
* * * a) The texts
The fundamental texts, which are decisive for establishing what the "final solution" must have been, are first of all the extermination orders attributed to the most highly-placed leaders : Hitler, Goering, Heydrich, Himmler, and the directives given for their execution.
First of all, Hitler's directive on the "extermination".
Despite the efforts of the theoreticians of the "genocide" and the "Holocaust", no trace was ever found of it. As Olga Wurmser-Migot wrote in 1968:"Just as there exists no clear order of extermination by gas at Auschwitz, there exists no order to stop in November 1944. " She specifies : " neither at the Nuremberg trial, nor during the course of marginal trials, nor at the Hoess trial in Cracow, or of Eichmann in Israel, nor at the trial of the camp commanders, nor at the Frankfurt November 45-August 46 trial of secondary Auschwitz figures, was the famous order signed by Himmler on November 22nd 1944 on the end of the extermination of Jews by gas ever found, the order putting an end to the 'Final solution.'"
Source: Olga Wurmser-Migot. "Le systrme concentrationnaire nazi." P.U.F 1968, 544 and p.13.
Doctor Kubovy, from the Tel Aviv "Documentation Center", admitted in 1960:"There is no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich which speaks of exterminating the Jews...the word "extermination" does not appear in the letter from Goering to Heydrich concerning the final solution to the Jewish question."Source: Lucy Dawidowicz, "The War against the Jews" (1975) p.121.
After a conference held at the Sorbonne in Paris in February 1979 to fight against the critical works of the "revisionists", Raymond Aron and Jacques Furet had to declare during a press conference which had followed the meeting that:"Despite the most erudite research, we have never been able to find an order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews."
In 1981, Laqueur admitted:"Until now, we have never found Hitler's order to destroy the European Jewish community, and in all probability the order was never given."
Source: Walter Laqueur: "The terrible secret", Frankfort on the Main. Berlin. Vienna. 1981. p.190.
In spite of all this, there have been other historians who, at the instigation of Vidal Naquet and Leon Poliakov, signed the following declaration:" (...) We must not ask ourselves how such a mass murder was technically possible. It was technically possible since it took place. This is the obligatory point of departure of any historical enquiry on this subject. It was our duty to simply remind people of this truth: there is not and there cannot be a debate on the existence of the gas chambers... "
We must not ask ourselves..
the obligatory point of departure....
there cannot be a debate....
Three prohibitions, three taboos, three definitive limitations to research.
Such a text does indeed make history in the history of history: the "fact" which must be established is posed before any research as an absolute and untouchable truth forbidden by three prohibitory imperatives, any research and critique of what was once and for all judged by the victors just after the victory.
Yet history must, if it means to respect a scientific status, be a perpetual search, questioning even what one considered as definitively established as the postulate of Euclid or the laws of Newton. The following is a notorious example:"The Auschwitz International Committee intended in November 1990 to replace the commemorative plaque at Auschwitz which indicated 4 million dead by another bearing the words : "Over one million deaths". Doctor Maurice Goldstein, president of this committee, was opposed to this decision."
Source: "Le Soir", Brussels, 19-20th October l991, p.16.
In fact, Doctor Goldstein in no way challenged the need to change the old plaques, but he did not want the new plaque to carry a figure, knowing that it would probably be necessary to again reduce the figure now considered within a short while.
The plaque at the entrance of Birkenau therefore bore the following inscription until 1994:"Here, from 1940 to 1945, four million men,women and children were tortured and assassinated by Hitlerian murderers."
Thanks to the activity of the State Museum of Auschwitz, whose president is the historian Wladislaw Bartoszewski and whose twenty six members are of all nationalities,the text has been modified in a manner more in keeping with the truth:"May this place where the Nazis murdered one and a half million men,women and children, mostly Jews from different European countries, be forever for humanity a cry of despair and a warning."
Source: article by Luc Rosenzveig, in "Le Monde", January 27th 1995
This example shows that history, when it escapes intellectual terrorism by the predicators of hatred, demands a perpetual "revision". It is "revisionist" or else it is a disguised form of propaganda.
Let us go back therefore to history as such, of a critical, "revisionist" sort, in other words one based on the analysis of texts, the checking of accounts and the expertise regarding the crime weapon.
First of all, this is what concerns the Jews in the National Socialist Party program.
The problem of the Jews is considered in Point 4 of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) Program:"Only those who are fully citizens can possess German nationality. And those who are fully citizens are those who have German blood, regardless of religion. Therefore no Jew can fully be a citizen."
Staatsburger designated the citizen whereas Volkgenosse defined full citizenship as a member of a homogeneous community.
Further on, we come to point 5:"He who does not possess German nationality can only live in Germany as a guest (Gast) and will be submitted to the existing legislation regarding the sojourn of foreigners."
Then, point 7 raises the question of the prohibition of stay in the Reich, under certain conditions, of those who do not have German nationality; point 8 demands the stopping of all new immigration of non-Germans, as well as the immediate expulsion of non-Germans who have entered the Reich since August 2nd 1914. This last point is obviously directed against the Jews from the East, who had come to the Reich in large numbers during and after the First World War.
Point 23 also deals with this problem: it stipulates that Jews will not have the right to work in the press, while Point 24 asserts that the Party is struggling against the "Jewish materialistic spirit."
a - The orders of Hitler for the extermination of the Jews
In his book on "The Destruction of the European Jews", Raoul Hilberg wrote in the first (1961) edition that there were two extermination orders given by Hitler : one in the Spring of 1941 (invasion of Russia), the other a few months later.
But in 1985, "in the second revised edition, every reference to the orders or decisions of Hitler regarding the "final solution" was systematically suppressed."
Source : "The Revised Hilberg". Simon Wiesenthal, Annal 3.1986. p.294)
The 1961 edition indicated on page 171:"How did the phase decreeing death appear? Essentially through two decisions by Hitler. An order was given in the Spring of 1941."
In what terms were these orders given?
Hilberg: "According to General Jodl, who wrote the document I quote, the terms were the following : Hitler said he wanted the Jewish Bolshevik commissars to be liquidated. This is the first point...Such was the content of the order described by General Jodl." (4-82)
Hilberg: "The order was oral."
Thus: Hilberg said that General Jodl had said that Hitler had said....!
In his first anti-Semitic diatribes and in "Mein Kampf", Hitler proclaimed his determination to expel the Jews from Germany. We shall henceforth retain only those German texts which employ the expression "final solution" in order to obtain a precise definition of it.
On June 24th 1940, after Germany's victory over France, Heydrich spoke in a letter to Ribbentrop, the Minister of Finance, of a "final territorial solution" ("Eine territoriale Endlosung").
Source: Gerald Flemming."Hitler and die Endlosung." Wiesbaden-Munich, 1982, p.56.
To create a Jewish "reservation" outside Europe, and it was then that Ribbentrop suggested the "Madagascar project". In July 1940, Franz Rademacher who was in charge of Jewish affairs, thus summed up this directive:"All Jews out of Europe !"
Source: Joseph Billig. "La solution finale de la question juive." Paris 1977. p.58.
This "final territorial solution" was in keeping with the new situation of Germany, which now dominated Europe: it was no longer enough to expulse the Jews from Germany.
Rademacher, who was in charge of the "final solution" project to deport all the Jews from Europe to Madagascar, pointed out that it would take four years to carry it out and in the chapter entitled "Financing", he indicated that "The realization of the final solution (Endlosung) suggested will require considerable means."
Source: N.G. 2586.
b - Goering's letter to Heydrich of July 31st 1941
Heydrich asked Goering:"In 1939, you gave me the order to take measures regarding the Jewish question. Must I now extend the task with which you entrusted me to the new territories we have seized in Russia ?"
There again, there is no reference to the assassination of Jews. Only their geographic transfer is mentioned, simply taking into account the new
conditions (33.93739374).[1]
Only "final solution" thus consisted of emptying Europe of its Jews by sending them away ever further until the war (supposing the Germans won it) made it possible to place them all in a ghetto outside Europe (as the Madagascar project had been the first suggestion.)
It is impossible to sustain the hypothesis of a secret coded language since clear documents exist for other crimes : euthanasia, the order to kill British commandos, to lynch American airmen and to exterminate the male population of Stalingrad if it were occupied. " For all these crimes, the documents are there. Whereas in this case alone there is nothing, no originals, nor copies, " nor we can add, directives or the orders needed for the execution of such vast directives. (33.9375-9376)"In January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, had informed the Berlin leaders that the Feurher had decided the evacuation of all the Jews towards the territories of the East, replacing the deportation beyond the sea previously projected." (34-9544)
In a memo which circulated in March 1942 in Heydrich's office, the ministers were informed that the Jews of Europe were to be concentrated in the East, "while awaiting to be sent to a distant territory like Madagascar after the war, which will become their homeland... " (34-9545-9546)
.
Poliakov noted:Until it was given up, the "Madagascar Plan" was sometimes referred to as the "final solution" to the "Jewish question".
Source: Poliakov. "Le Proces de Jerusalem" Paris, 1963, p.152.
To maintain at all costs the thesis of physical extermination, a subterfuge therefore had to be found:"Final solution to the Jewish problem was one of those conventional phrases used to designate the Hitlerian plan to exterminate the European Jews."
Source: Gerald Reitlinger. "La solution finale" p.19.
No justification of this hypothesis of a coded language has been given, though the concept of a coded language can be used to give any document any meaning. Here are two examples.
Goering's letter of july 31st 1941 (a month after the letter by Heydrich quoted previously, the meaning of the words would have suddenly changed!). In this letter, Goering completed his directives to Heydrich:"As a complement of the task which was assigned to you by the decree of 24/1/1939, in other words to obtain the most advantageous solution possible to the Jewish question by way of emigration and evacuation given the circumstances, I charge you by the present letter to proceed with all the necessary preparations...to reach an overall solution (Gesamtlesung) of the Jewish question in the zone of German influence in Europe...I charge you with the rapid submission of an overall project (Gesamtentwurf) bearing on the measures of organization and the material and concrete dispositions to realize the final solution of the Jewish question to which we aspire.(Endlosung der Judenfrage.)"
Source: Hilberg (op.cit.) 2nd edition. p.401 (N.G.2586-E.P.S.710.)
It is significant that, quoting this document (on page 108 of his book), Reitlinger cuts out the beginning which refers to emigration and evacuation, while this letter prescribes a new extension of the evacuation measures taken "given the circumstances" at a time when Hitler dominated only Poland in January 1939, and not yet even France, whereas by July 1941, Germany dominated all of Europe.
And yet the meaning of Goering's text is perfectly clear from the first paragraph : the policy of emigration or evacuation of the Jews, practiced until then in Germany, had to spread henceforth, due to the new conquests, to all the zones in Europe under German domination. The "overall solution" took the new situation into consideration. It could only be a "final solution" after the end of the war or, in case of a total victory in Europe, Russia included, a final evacuation to Africa or elsewhere, that would make it possible, in keeping with Hitler's constant goal, " to empty Europe of its Jews."
To sum it up, Goering's directive to Heydrich, unless one wants to interpret it arbitrarily according to a preconceived schema, only applied to Europe what could, until then, only be applied to Germany. It was an inhuman and criminal objective, no doubt, but at no time did it comprise the idea of "extermination" which it was given by the Attorney-General at Nuremberg, Robert M.W. Kempner, who declared:"With these lines, Heydrich and his collaborators were officially given the task of legal murder (of Jews)."
Goering protested against the English translation of the German word "Gesamtlosung", meaning general solution, as "final solution", which is "Endlosung"; this led Attorney Jackson to acknowledge the falsification and to reestablish the true meaning.
Source: I.M.T., IX, 575
As early as June 24th 1940, Heydrich had informed Ribbentrop of his wish to realize the "final solution" as soon as possible. He wrote:"The global problem posed by the presence today of some 3 million and 1/4 Jews on the territories presently under German domination can no longer be solved by emigration: a final territorial solution henceforth becomes necessary."
Source: Evidence number 464 at Eichmann's trial at Jerusalem.
Towards the same time, Himmler had sent Hitler a memoir whose conclusion was:"I hope to see the Jewish question definitively settled thanks to the emigration of all the Jews towards Africa or in a colony."
Source: Vierteljaheshefte, 1957, 197.
Hitler rallied to this suggestion since, on February 10th 1942, Rademacher, who was in charge of the "Deutschland III" at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in an official letter:"Meanwhile, the war against the Soviet Union has allowed us to dispose of new territories for the final solution. Consequently, the Führer has decided to displace the Jews not towards Madagascar but towards the East. Thus, there is no longer any need to consider Madagascar for the final solution."
Source: Document N.G. 3933 of the Wilhelmstrasse trial, quoted by Reitlinger. "The final solution" p.79, in which he "interprets" again in the sense of "fiction" or "camouflage" without giving the least justification for it.
The original expression was in fact "die Gesamtlosung der Judenfrage" or the complete "overall" solution there would be no going back on. But Goering used it for the first time in the first paragraph of a letter dated 31/7/1941, in which he gave Heydrich the order to prepare it (P.S.710 T.XXVI,p.266)using in the last paragraph the expression "die Gesamtlosung der Judenfrage" and, in time, it prevailed, but with the same meaning and not in the sense of liquidating the problem by liquidating those who were the cause of the problem. Taken in flagrante delicto of tendentious translation by Goering himself on March 20th 1946, Judge Jackson had no option but to admit it (T.IX,p.552). But the press did not breathe a word of this incident which demolished a whole theory.* * * The second example of this arbitrary change of the meaning of words to justify a thesis is that of the "Grand Wannsee" conference held in Berlin on January 20th 1942.
At the start of the conference, Heydrich reminded his audience that he had just been appointed "to the post of head of the preparation of the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe" (Endlosung der europaischen Judenfrague) and he will henceforth be responsible for the overall measures needed for the final solution of the Jewish question, "without consideration of geographical limitations" (underlined by R.G.)
Heydrich went on to sum up the anti-Jewish policy carried out thus far:a - The driving out of Jews from those spheres vital to the German people.-
b - The driving out of Jews from the space vital to the German people.
Because of the lightning-quick advance of the German army on the Eastern front (the Soviet Union), Heydrich thus pursued, taking into account the new situation :"With the preliminary authorization of the Fuhrer, emigration has left room for another possibility of solution: the evacuation of the Jews towards the East." (underlined by R.G.)
"One cannot however consider these actions as palliatives, but practical experiences already obtained in this field are of significant importance for the future final solution to the Jewish question."
Source: N.G.2586 G.
Indeed, this definitive solution could not be carried out until after the war, and this solution was always sought in the same direction : the expulsion of all Jews out of Europe. It was what Hitler told Abetz, the ambassador to Paris specifically : that it was his intention to evacuate all Jews out of Europe after the war.
Source: "Documents on German Foreign Policy" 1918-1945. Series D. Vol.X. p.484.
The Wannsee text (January 20th 1942)"In the course of the final solution, Jews will be conveyed under appropriate guidance, towards the East to make use of their labor. They will be separated according to sex. Jews capable of working will be taken in large columns to areas of major works, to build roads, and consequently large numbers will doubtless perish through natural selection.
"Those who will finally remain, who without any doubt will make up the most robust element, must be treated consequently, for they represent a natural selection whose liberation must be considered the germ-cell of a new Jewish development as the experience of history has shown..)" (13-3133)
David Irving:"I have read the minutes of the Wilhem Strasse trial, the second after that of Nuremberg. There were twelve others afterwards. Not one of them brought testimony according to which the liquidation of the Jews had been discussed at Wannsee." (33-9372-9373)
The Wannsee Protocol consists of the minutes of a conference which took place on January 20th 1942, attended by the Secretaries of State administratively concerned by the solution to the Jewish question, and those heads of departments in charge of its execution. In this text, no mention is made of gas chambers or extermination, but only of the transfer of Jews to Eastern Europe.
These minutes have all the characteristics of an apocryphal document if we are to credit the photocopy of them published in Robert N.W. Kempner's "Eichmann und Komplizen", pp. 132 and following (Europa Verlag 1961) : no seal, no date, no signature, ordinary machine type on small format paper, etc....
In any case they make no mention of gas chambers.
In the French versions of it, "die Zuruckdrangung der Juden aus dem Lebensraum des deutschen Volkes" has been translated by "the elimination of the Jews from the vital space of the German people", as it was in English and in Russian.
The Germans, however, preferred to use other expressions to speak of their decision to drive the Jews out of what they called their "vital space", expressions like "Auschaltung" (exclusion, eviction, elimination) and especially "Ausrottung" (extirpation,uprooting). It was this last word which was translated as extermination, which is "Vernichtung" in German.
For example : in his speech at Posen before the Obergruppenfuhrer (the Divisional commanders of the Waffen SS) on October 4th 1943, Himmler said:
"Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuirung, die Ausrottung des judischen Volkes...Das judische Volk wird ausgerotten, etc... "
In the following sentence, he uses the word "Auschaltung..." (P.S.1919 T.XXIX p.145) to clarify his meaning. In other words:
"I am now thinking of the evacuation of the Jews, of the extirpation of the Jewish people, etc... "
But in the "Eichmann File", M.Billig translated it as:
"I mean by that the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people." (p.55) and "evacuation of the Jews, IN OTHER WORDS extermination" (p.47).
Another example : in a note dated 16th December 1941 on one of his talks with Hitler (P.S 1517 T.XXVII p.270) Rosenberg uses the expression "Ausrottung das Judentums".
At the April 17th 1946 session, the American Attorney General Dodd translated it as "Extermination of Jews" (Tome XI,p.562). Rosenberg protested in vain."But in the speeches of the Nazis, the expression "Ausrottung des Christentums", which was often used, is always translated as " the extirpation of Christianity from German culture"
Cf. Revue d'Histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, October 1st 1958, p.62.
It is when it refers to Judaism (Judentum) or the Jewish people (das judische Volk) that the word "Ausrottung" means extermination and applies to individuals, whereas it refers to entities.
The Wannsee conference of January 20th 1942, where, it was claimed for over a third of a century, the decision to "exterminate" European Jews, disappeared from 1984 on from the writings of even the most ferocious enemies of the "revisionists". On this point, they too had to "revise" their history : it was at the Stuttgart Congress of May 1984,where that "interpretation" was dropped.
Source: Eberhard Jackerl and Jurgen Rohwer."Der Mord an der Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg"("The murder of Jews during the Second World War")
Source: DVA. 1985 p. 67
In 1992, Yehuda Bauer wrote in "The Canadian Jewish News" of January 30th that this interpretation of Wannsee was "silly".
Finally, the most recent spokesman for the orthodox antirevisionist historians, the chemist Claude Pressac, confirmed this new revision of orthodoxy. He wrote on page 35 of his book: "Les crematoires d'Auschwitz" (CNRS editions, 1993):"The Wannsee conference was held in Berlin on January 20th. If an action of "driving back" the Jews towards the East was planned, with the evocation of a "natural" elimination through work, nobody then spoke of liquidation on an industrial scale. During the days and the weeks that followed, the Auschwitz Bauleitung received neither a call, a telegram or a letter demanding the study of an installation adapted to that end."
And even, in his "recapitulative chronology", he indicates on January 20th 1942 :
"Wannsee Conference on the driving back of the Jews towards the East" (p.114).
The "extermination" was revised : it was a question of "driving back".
It is equally remarkable that, in all this book setting itself the goal of "proving" the thesis of extermination, there was no question either of the document which, after that of Wannsee, was supposedly the most decisive: Goering's letter to Heydrich of July 31st 1941, in which it was asserted that the "final solution" meant "extermination", and not the transfer out of Europe.
At the time of the Toronto trial in 1988, there was also a controversy concerning the role of the "Eizenzattsgruppen", a kind of free corps designated by the Hitlerian High Command to annihilate the groups of partisans which formed as soon as the Germans swooped down on Moscow in 1941 ; these groups would surge behind the German army, trying to destroy its reserves of fuel, its supplies and its communication networks, cutting the Germans off from their rear bases.
This form of resistance proved so effective that Hitler gave the harshest of orders to the "Eizenzattsgruppen", to kill off the leaders and the political commissars.
There were many Jews among these political commissars, who played a leading role in which they confronted death bravely.
At the Toronto trial, the problem of the participation of these heroic Jews to the resistance against Hitlerism was evoked at great length.
Christie, Zundel's lawyer, insisted on asking the historian Hilberg, to clarify the meaning of the Nazi orders on this subject.Christie: The order given to the Einzattsgruppen says : Annihilate the Jewish Bolshevik commissars, and you interpret this as meaning : "Annihilate the Jewish people and the Jewish commissars. Is that correct?
Hilberg: Correct.
Christie: It was therefore said, according to you, that it was not a question of killing the Jews, but the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars.
Hilberg: The order was given to Himmler to "solve the problem".(4839)
Christie: It concerned the problem of the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars. Which does not mean : the Jewish problem...Was there not a war on between Communism and Nazism ?
Hilberg: Yes, and the political commissars, at the core of the system, had to be shot.
Christie: This did not mean killing the Jews who were there. Did Hitler think that Bolshevism was of Jewish origin and that all the commissars were Jews?
Hilberg: That was propaganda. But it was the intention from the beginning, since June 22nd 1941.
Christie: Is this an article of faith with you?
Hilberg: No. It's not an article of faith, it's a certainty.
Christie: Can you show me Hitler's second order?
Hilberg: I say that there's a decisive directive from Hitler exposed by Goering to Heydrich on July 31st 1941...It was the text which prepared the Wannsee conference.
Christie: Was it an order or a letter from Hitler?
Hilberg: No.
Christie: You wrote in your book : "Hitler gave this second order. Is that correct?
Hilberg: That is correct.
Christie reverts to the meaning of the word "resettlement" in the East. "Does this mean an order to kill all the Jews?" (4-855)
Hilberg: Resettlement" was a synonym for "deporting the Jews to death camps.
Christie: Wasn't there a plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar ?
* * * The English historian, David Irving, brought the following information, drawn from original sources, to the Toronto trial.
" ...The final solution to the Jewish problem consisted of deporting them to different territories. One of the hypotheses was Madagascar, especially after the fall of France, but the might of the British and later American fleets made this project impossible to carry out.
The only document I possess is a telephone conversation between Prime minister Lammers and the Feurher in the Spring of 1942, and the Feurher answered him that the final solution would be decided upon only after the end of the war.
Heinrich Himmler wrote to the gauleiters that the Feurher, Adolf Hitler, had given him the order to rid Europe of its Jews from West to East, by stages. It was obviously an order of deportation." (33-935 and 9352).
But this involved no order to exterminate the Jews.
No order of this kind was ever given, nor in the archives of the world, including the Jewish archives which cooperated with me. I must also emphasize that, in the British archives where we had deciphered the German codes of the S.S. units operating on the Eastern front, even with those English machines for deciphering codes, we did not decipher any code in which Hitler gave the order to kill the Jews. Only historians claiming to read between the lines and giving vent to their indignation have been able to decipher such a meaning. (33-93.76) "
* * * The lawyer, Christie, quotes page 651 of Hilberg's book in which is written:
"In November 1944, Himmler decided that for all sorts of practical reasons, the Jewish question was solved. On the 25th of the same month, he ordered the dismantling of all the death installations."
Source: Testimony of Kurt Becher. 8th March 1946. P.S. 3762.
Hilberg recognizes that it was not an order by Himmler (4-861 to 864):"Becher probably presented it from memory in his testimony. He therefore did not need to use the exact language employed by Himmler."
One more time, Hilberg said that Becher had said that Himmler had said...(4.867)
After lengthy historical research by scholars of every background under the pressure of revisionist critics, the director of the "Institute of history of the present time" at the National Center of Scientific Research, Mr. Francois Bedarida sums up these works on the "evaluation of the Auschwitz victims":"The collective memory has seized hold of the figure of four million, the very one which, on the faith of a Soviet report, figured until now at Auschwitz on the monument erected to the memory of the victims of Nazism - while in Jerusalem the Yad Vashem museum indicated a total very much above the truth.
And yet, as soon as the war ended, scholarly memory got down to work. The result of these patient and minute investigations was that the figure of four million rested on no serious base and could not be retained.
The court, all the same, relied on an assertion by Eichmann claiming that the extermination policy had caused the death of six million Jews, four million of them in the camps. If now we refer to the most recent works and to the most reliable statistics - as is the case with Raoul Hilberg's work, "Destruction des juifs d'Europe" (Fayard,1988), we come up with a million dead at Auschwitz. A total corroborated by the specialists as a whole since, today, these agree on a number of victims oscillating between 950,000 minimum and 1.2 million maximum."
Source: "Le Monde", 23rd July 1990.
Nevertheless, people continue after the reduction of the number of victims at Auschwitz-Birkneau from 4 to 1 million, to repeat the global figure : 6 million Jews exterminated, according to the bizarre arithmetic: 6 - 3 = 6.
That the "final solution" to the Jewish problem was to be resolved only after the war is also testified to by the "Braun Mappe" (Brown File) of the Summer of 1941. The paragraph entitled : "Directives for the solution of the Jewish question" specified:"All the measures concerning the Jewish question in the lands occupied in the East having to be taken after the war, the Jewish question will find a general solution in Europe."
Source: P.S. 702. Henri Monneray. "La persecution des juifs dans les pays de l'Est presentre " Nuremberg" CDJC 1949.
This restatement of the question does involve any attenuation of Hitler's crimes, but simply recalls a piece of evidence which even the most determined partisans of the theory of "extermination" have not overlooked: during the last two years of the war, after Stalingrad, Hitler was fighting a losing battle : the Allies were destroying his war production centres with their bombs and disorganizing his transport network.
He was forced to mobilize new soldiers, emptying his factories as a result. How could he have been fatally obsessed with the will to exterminate his prisoners and Jews, instead of using them, even in inhuman conditions, for working on his sites? Poliakov himself, in his "Breviaire de la haine" (p.3) emphasized this absurd contradiction:"It would have been so much more economical to have made them carry out the hardest work, parking them in a reservation for instance."
Hannah Arendt also pointed out what was insane about such an operation:"The Nazis turned straightforwardly useless into the harmful when, right in the middle of the war, despite the penury of building materials and of rolling stock, they erected huge and costly extermination factories and organized the transport of millions of people...the manifest contradiction between this behavior and military imperatives gives the entire undertaking a mad, chimerical air."
Source: Hannah Arendt. "Le système totalitaire" Paris 1972. p.182.
What is even odder is that minds as subtle as Poliakov and Hannah Arendt were so completely clouded by their a prioris that they did not question their Surrealistic assumptions and turn to the documents and the facts.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were powerful implantations of the Farben-industry (chemical), of Siemens (transports) of Portland (construction). At Monovitz (one of the camp annexes to Auschwitz) there were 10,000 prisoners at work, 100,000 civilian workers and 1,000 English prisoners of war.
Source: "German crimes in Poland", Warsaw 1946. Vol. I. p.37.
From 1942 to 1944, out of 39 camps that were satellites of Auschwitz, 31 used prisoners as laborers and 19 of them used a majority of Jews.
On January 25th 1942, Himmler addressed the following directive to the inspector-general of the concentration camps:"Get ready to take in 100,000 Jews...Over the coming weeks, important economic tasks will be entrusted to the concentration camps."
Source: N.0. ; 020
a - In May 1944, Hitler ordered the use of 200,000 Jews as workers in the
construction program of Jager and the Todt organization.
An S S W V H A order dated November 18th 1943 awarded a bonus to prisoners- even Jews - who had distinguished themselves at work.
Source : Auschwitz Museum Center 6 - 1962 p.78.
There is therefore nothing "insane or chimerical", but on the contrary an implacable realism, and an extra refutation of the "exterminationist" themes.
b - Eyewitness accounts
The Auschwitz trial was held in Frankfurt from December 20th 1963 to August 20th 1965, in a vast theater which was well-suited to a showy political operation; the vast legal machine could not avoid being forced to acknowledge in the account of the reasons for its verdict that the elements at its disposal for reaching its verdict were absurdly flimsy."The court lacked almost all the means of information which an ordinary criminal trial disposes of to compose a faithful portrayal of events such as they really occurred. The bodies of the victims lacking, the autopsy reports, the conclusions of the experts as to the cause of death; traces left by the culprits were lacking, crime weapons, etc...It was possible to check the accounts only in a very few cases."
Source: Page 109 of the account of the reasons for the verdict
According to the accusers, the crime-weapon was the "gas chambers." Yet the judges found no "traces" of them!
It was enough for those gas-chambers to be "notorious" to exist, as in the days of the witch-trials, where no-one would have dared to question the witches' "carnal knowledge" of the devil for fear of being burnt at the stake too.
One of the jurists sent by the United States to Dachau, which had become an American camp and a center of "war-crime trials", Stephen S. Pinter, wrote:"I lived at Dachau for 17 months after the war as US military judge, and can testify that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What they show visitors is presented in an erroneous manner as a gas chamber, being a crematorium oven. Nor were there any gas chambers in the concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but as Auchwitz was in the Russian zone, we did not have permission from the Russians to visit...they thus made use of the old propaganda myth according to which millions of Jews were killed. I can attest, after 6 years spent in Germany and Austria after the war, that many Jews were killed, but that the figure of 1 million was certainly never reached, and I believe myself to be better-qualified than anyone else on this subject."
Source: Letter by Pinter to the Catholic weekly, "Our Sunday Visitor", June 14th 1959, p.15.
Lacking written proofs and irrecusable documents, the Nuremberg court was forced to base itself on "eyewitness accounts", like the fictionalized works and the films that came later.
The survivors who were called upon to bear witness and who authenticated the existence of "gas chambers" did it not from what they had seen but what they had "heard said".
A typical and famous example is that of Doctor Benedict Kautzsky, successor to his father at the head of the Austrian Social Democratic party.
After declaring that the maximum period of survival at Auschwitz was three months (though he himself spent three years there), he wrote his book: "Teufel und Verdammt" (published in Switzerland in 1946), in which he declared about the "gas chambers" :"I did not see them personally, but so many faithworthy people confirmed their existence."
"Il will hier noch eine kurze Shilderung der Gaskannmern einflechten, die ich zwar selbst nicht gesehen habe, die mir iber von so vielen glaubwurdig dargestellt worden sind... "
A few eyewitness accounts were regarded as fundamental, notably those of Rudolf Hoess, Saukel and Nyszli ("Doctor at Auschwitz").
The key witness, who turned out to be the perfect witness to "prove" the thesis of the victors disguised as judges was Rudolf Hoess, ex commander of the Auschwitz camp.
The description he gave when he was arrested became the synopsis of his declarations at Nuremberg; it was everything the Court expected of him.
Here is his declaration, written under oath and signed by Rudolf Hoess on April 5th 1946:"I was commander of Auschwitz until December 1st 1943, and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed there and exterminated by gassing and cremation, and that at least half a million others died there of hunger and disease, which makes a up a total of about 3,000,000 dead. The "final solution" of the Jewish question signified the extermination of all the Jews in Europe. I received the order to prepare the extermination at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there already existed three other extermination camps in the general government : Belzec, Treblinka, Wolzek."
One cannot imagine a more perfect confirmation of the theses which were
going to be spread by the media for half a century.
And yet this text itself already contains three statements in obvious contradiction with the truth:1 - The number of 3 million dead at Auschwitz, needed to justify the total number of Jewish victims (6 million), official figure proclaimed from the start at Nuremberg and which has never ceased to be the leitmotif of official history and of the media since that time, has to be reduced by at least two thirds, as the new commemorative plaque at Auschwitz-Birkenau proves, on which the figure of four million has been replaced by: a little over a million.
2 - The camps of Belzec and Treblinka did not exist in 1941. They were not opened until 1942.
3 - As for the Wolzek camp, it never existed on any map.
How could this "capital testimony" have been recorded without prior verification?
Höss himself explains it: the first declarations were made under the control of the Polish authorities which had arrested him.
The autobiography of Rudolf Höss indicates on page 174 of the French edition:"At the time of my first cross-examination, the first confessions were obtained by beating me. I do not know what there is in that report although I signed it." (5.956).
(Hoess signed an 8-page typescript at 2.30 in the morning of March 14th 1946 which does not essentially differ from what he later wrote and said at Nuremberg or Cracow.)
Hoess himself describes in hand-written notes made at Cracow the circumstances of the first interrogatory to which he was subjected by the British military police."I was arrested on March 11th 1946 at llPM...The Field Security Police subjected me to painful treatment. I was dragged until Heide, precisely to the barracks where, eight months earlier, I had been released by the English. It was there I was interrogated for the first time, during which harsh means were used. I do not know the contents of the report even though I signed it. So much liquor and whip-lashes got the better even of me...A few days later, I was taken to Meiden-on-the-Weser, the main interrogation center of the British zone. There, I fared even worse at the hands of a public attorney, a commander."
Source: Document NO-1210
It was only in 1983 that there was confirmation of the tortures inflicted upon Rudolf Hoess to obtain the "proof" of the "two and a half million" Jews exterminated by him at Auschwitz.
This book was written by Rupert Butler and was called : "Legions of Death" (Hamlyn Paperbacks). It publishes the testimony of Bernard Clarke, who arrested Rudolf Höss after finding out his whereabouts from his wife after threat of death to herself and her children. Hoess was arrested at the farm where he was hiding on March 11th 1946. Butler describes how it took three days of torture to obtain a "coherent declaration", eg. the one we have just quoted, signed March 14 th 1946 at 2 in the morning.
As soon as he was arrested, Hoess was beaten so hard that "in the end,the health officer intervened with insistence to the captain : tell him to stop or you'll bring back a corpse."
It must be noted that Butler and his interlocutor Clarke both seem highly satisfied with these acts of torture.
The American enquiry committee made up of judges Van Roden and Simpson, sent to Germany in 1948 to investigate irregularities committed by the American military court at Dachau (which had tried 1,500 German prisoners and sentenced 420 of them to death), established that the accused had been subjected to physical and psychological torture of every sort to force them to make the desired "confessions". Thus 137 out of 139 German prisoners examined had been kicked in testicles, receiving permanent injuries.
Source: Interview with Judge Edward L. Van Roden, in "The Progressive", February 1949.
The Auschwitz Trial
The fate of the principal defendant, Richard Baer, last commander at Auschwitz, who died before the start of the trial, is particularly interesting. He was arrested in December 1960 near Hamburg, where he worked as a forest ranger. In 1963, he died in gaol in mysterious circumstances.
According to several sources, based on French accounts in the French press, Baer had obstinately refused during his imprisonment to confirm the existence of gas chambers in the sector that had once been under his
responsibility.
Source: Hermann Langbein, "Der Auschwitz Prozess", Europaissch Verlag. Frankfurt 1965.
The autopsy report carried out by the Legal Institute of Frankfurt University concluded that "the ingestion of an odorless and noncorrosive poison...can not be excluded."
The Nuremberg lawyer, Eberhard Engelhardt, quotes this passage in the autopsy report in a letter to the Frankfurt public prosecutor dated November 12th 1973, asserting that Bauer was poisoned during the investigation.
Second example : the Gerstein report, that of a Waffen SS, was so obviously, far-fetched that it was refused as evidence by the military court at Nuremberg on January 30th 1946, but was used at the Eichmann Trial at Jerusalem in 1961.
According to this "testimony" the number of victims (60,000 a day in three camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor) would have totalled 25 millions!
Source: Cote P S 1553.
Furthermore, he claimed to have seen 700-800 people piled up in a 25 square meter room (over 28 per square meter!).
Professor Roques, of Nantes University, who wrote a thesis demonstrating the inconsistency of the "Gerstein report", was stripped of his doctor's title as a result, although Alain Decaux wrote in "Le Matin de Paris" (December 13th 1986) that "all researchers would henceforth have to take these studies into account", adding that Professor Roques was, "currently the best informed person regarding the Gerstein affair."
They therefore looked for ridiculous administrative reasons.
As he had prepared his thesis in Paris under Professor Rougeot, and as he had been transferred to Nantes to defend his thesis under Professor Riviere, which was perfectly in order, he was accused of not paying his registration fees at the University of Nantes !
This was how Henri Roques found himself deprived...
Third example, if we confine ourselves solely to the most famous "witnesses" : Doctor Miklos Nyszli, who wrote "Medecin " Auschwitz" published in 1953 by Jean-Paul Sartre in "Les Temps Modernes", and a deported Hungarian doctor (translated by Tibere Kremer, Julliard 1961).
Example: Miklos Nyszli tells us that the gas chambers were 200 meters long, and the document produced at Nuremberg tells us that they were either 210, 400 or 580 square meters; this would mean respective widths of 1m05, 2m and 2m90, which does not hold water if you consider that 3,000 people would have entered the premises, moved about easily, and that there were columns in the center and benches on each side.
It is significant that neither the "Encyclopedia Judaica" (1971) nor the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" (1990) even mention this work, which they regard as discredited which is attached to it since the critique of it made by Paul Rassinier.
Nyszli's first assertion is that, when he arrived at the camp at the end of May 1944, the exterminations had been going on for four years. Yet the Nuremberg document (N.0.4.401) indicates that orders were given only in August 1942, and document 4r463 that they were not ready until February 20th 1943.
In August 1960, the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte made the following declaration to the press:"The Dachau gas chambers were never finished or put in action... Mass extermination of Jews by gas began in 1941-42, and only in a few places in occupied Poland, by means of technical installations set up for that purpose, but in no cases on German soil."
Source: "Die Zeit", August l9th 1960.
Other examples:
One of the principal accused, Sauckel, declared on May 30th 1946 before the Nuremberg Court :"I confirm that my signature figures on this document. I ask the court permission to explain how that signature was obtained. "
"This document was presented to me in its final form. I asked for permission to read and study it so as to decide if I should sign it. This was refused...Then a Polish or Russian policeman came in and asked : Where is Sauckel's family ? We'll take Sauckel with us but his family will be handed over to Soviet territory. I'm the father of ten children and, thinking of my family, I signed this document."
* * * The testimony of General Ohlendorf is particularly revealing among those of other criminals. From the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1942, he headed the "einsatzgruppen" in charge of executing the political commissars in charge of the partisans' activities in the Southern Russia. At the I.M.T. trial. he declared that he had received oral orders to add to his functions that of exterminating Jews by using special lorries for the killing of people, including women and children.
Source: I.M.T. Vol IV, p. 311-355 and I.M.T. Vol XXII, p. 478-480 ; 491-494 ; p.509-10 ; 538.
General Ohlendorf's testimony during his second trial (N.M.T. case 9) is completely different: first of all, he retracted his declarations to the I.M.T. regarding the oral order to exterminate Jews ; he acknowledged having killed Jews and Gypsies, but only within the context of the struggle against the partisans, and not as part of a specific plan of extermination of Jews and Gypsies. He also admitted to having killed 40,000 people and not 90,000, as he had told I.M.T.
Source: N.M.T. Vol IV. p. 223-312.
No critical refutation, no scientific contradiction or discussion was opposed to the arguments of critical historians : they encountered only silence at best and repression at worst.
Silence was the lot of the works of Paul Rassinier, a historian who had himself been deported to Buchenwald and Dora. This father of the critical history of Hitler's crime wrote: "Le mensonge d'Ulysse", "Le drame des juifs europrens" and "Le veritable proces d'Eichmann."
Then silence and multiple persecutions in America of the engineer Leuchter, a specialist of gassings in certain American penitentiaries, who had given a purely technical expertise with regards to the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz, during the previously mentioned trial of Ernest Zundel at Toronto.
Professor Faurisson was dismissed from his post at the University of Lyon, was hounded by the law and was finally victim of an assassination attempt in which he was stabbed with a knife and seriously wounded, because he had questioned the existence of the "gas chambers".
In March 1978, assassination of the French historian, Francois Duprat, by a commando, for publishing a brochure by an Australian who questioned the figure of 6 million dead.
Repression against Henri Roques, who was refused the title of Doctor though he had had an honorable mention for his thesis, because he made a critical analysis of the "Gerstein Report".
Repression of the publisher, Pierre Guillaume, for his publications, "Annales d'histoire revisionniste", forcing him to give up his magazine by crushing him financially through fines and by breaking the windows of his bookshop.
In Germany, the magistrate Staglich was hounded for his critique of the different texts and eyewitness accounts concerning the camps, pointing out a number of counter-truths in his book : "The Myth of Auschwitz" (1978). Even his doctor's title was withdrawn, according to a Hitlerian law of June 7th 1939. (Reich Code.I, p.1326).
The historian Butz suffered the same treatment when he tried to establish a dividing-line between the truth and the myth in "The Hoax Twentieth Century"(1976). The book was banned in Canada and Germany.
In Canada, the Toronto trial against Zundel for publishing Harwood's work: "Did six million really die?" was persecution since even the official answer to that question is negative like his.
These silences, persecutions and repressions against a historical critique of Hitler's crimes rested on libellous and false premises : to show that Hitler's great crimes against the Jews and all his enemies, the German or Slav Communists who were to defeat him, needed no falsehoods to reveal their horror. It was, according to the adversaries of historical critique (whom they called "revisionists"), "making Hitler innocent or at least attenuating his crimes"!
To them, it was "racism" encouraging discrimination and racial hatred to demonstrate that Nazi crimes were not confined to a vast pogrom against the Jews only, but had led to the deaths of 50 million people in the battle
against Fascism.
It is against such a chorus of hate against the critical researchers that we are trying today to bring, with their sources, elements to this dossier in the hope that it will serve to start off a genuine discussion on the objective realities of this past, without lending this or that researcher political motives, without condemning him in advance to repression and silence.
One does not prepare the future by perpetuating hatred and feeding it with lies.
The critique of proven historical accounts and of scientific studies make it possible for public opinion to reflect on past crimes to forestall those of tomorrow; it is a moral as well as a scientific obligation.
Until now, even artists of great talent and of genuine good faith have only been given false and arbitrary figures.* * * In spite of this, some authentic masterpieces have emerged, as for example Robert Merle's novel : "La mort est mon metier", which reconstitutes in first-person form, the career of Hoess, commander at Auschwitz.
Though he quotes the arbitrary figures of the false witness, Robert Merle sometimes writes in a manner worthy of Stendhal:"...The public prosecutor cried out : You have killed three and a half million people!
"-- I asked to be allowed to speak and said : I beg your pardon, I killed only two and a half million!
"There were murmurs in the hall. Yet I had done nothing save to correct a false figure."
Source: R. Robert Merle, "La mort est mon metier" Ed.Gallimard,1952, Folio. p.365-366.
In the film world, a brilliant and yet subtle film like Alain Resnais' "Nuit et Brouillard" gives a poignant and unforgettable image of barbarism and suffering; but it is disfigured by its evocation of the arbitrary figure of 8 million Jewish victims at Auschwitz alone!
But there were soon to be a lot of books, and especially a lot of films for the screen and for TV, which warped the meaning of Hitler's crime. How many times just after the liberation, as a whole generation can testify and judge for themselves, did we see the exploits of those who fought the most efficiently against the Nazis : the film "La bataille de l'eau lourde" evoked the decisive exploit of Joliot-Curie and his team to extract from Hitler the stocks that would have enabled him to be the first to use the atomic bomb ?
"La bataille du rail" shows how the railroad workers sabotaged German transports to paralyze the concentration of their troops. How many films like "Paris brule-t-il?" showed the uprising of the people of Paris, freeing their own city and capturing the German governor Von Choltitz to force the enemy to capitulate.
How many times have such films been shown compared to "Exodus", "Holocaust", "Shoah" and other such works which we can see, along with similar works, on our TV screens, as if the "sacrificial" suffering of some was infinitely nobler than the suffering of all the others in their heroic struggle ?
Lanzman's "Shoah" lasts for nine hours, during which we see endless stones and trains, and are told by someone like the Treblinka barber that he was able to fit into a 16 square-meter room 60 women and 16 barbers !
Those who commission works for the "Shoah business" are generous. The State of Israel for a start : Menahem Begin raised 850,000 dollars for "Shoah", which he deemed "a project of national interest."
Source: "Jewish telegraphic agency," June 20th 1986, "The Jewish journal". N.Y. June 27th 1986, p.3.
One of the films which helped to manipulate world opinion the most:
" The TV film "Holocaust" is a crime against historical truth. The general theme was that such a large-scale event - the extermination of 6 million Jews could not go unnoticed by the German people as a whole. If therefore the Germans did not know, it was because they did not want to know and were therefore guilty."
Source: "Liberation", March 7th 1979.
And these are the wormy fruit of this "breviary of hatred":"All these enemy agents must be expelled from the country. We have been asking for permission to do it for two years. What we need is very simple and clear : the authorization, and enough ships. The problem involved in sinking those ships does not, unfortunately, devolve upon the Paris municipal council."
Source: Bulletin municipal officiel de Paris. Assembly debate the Paris Municipal Council, October 27th 1962 session, p.637.
This was not an ill-considered remark, as was confirmed by Mr. Moscovitch on January 15th 1963, who declared during a libel suit he himself had instigated:
"I have indeed regretted that France's enemies were not exterminated...and I still regret it!" ("Le Monde", January 27th 1963).
After a sober and dignified first book, written just after he was released from Buchenwald, "L'Univers concentrationnaire" (Ed. de Minuit, 1946), David Rousset gave us, in a literary and subtle form, in "Les jours de notre mort", most of the hackneyed stereotypes of our concentration camp literature.
Novels too have contributed to this mystification since "Les jours de notre mort" by David Rousset, which warped the reality of the Buchenwald and Dora camps, as did Martin Gray's "Treblinka", which was ghosted by a famous French writer to describe a camp in which he had never set foot. Since the fake archives of the Veterans' Ministry, "discovered" by Serge Klarsfeld, including the apocalyptic fakes by Nobel prize-winner Elie Wiesel, who saw "with his very eyes" "gigantic flames" rising from an open trench in which "little children were being thrown" (flames never spotted by any of the American planes that flew over the camps). In a crescendo of horror and delirium, he adds:"Later, I learned from a witness that, for months and months, the earth had not stopped moving, and that from time to time geysers of blood had spouted from it." (This concerns an "eyewitness account" on Babiyar.)
Source: Elie Wiesel: "Paroles d'étranger", Ed. du Seuil. 1982, p.192, p.86.
The apotheosis of this fictionalized literature is the world best-seller, the "Diary of Anne Frank". The wonderfully touching novel replaces history and, once again, the myth is disguised as history.
The English historian, David Irving, testified at the Toronto Trial on April 25th and 26th 1988 (33.9399-9.400); he had this to say about the "Diary" of Anne Frank:"The father of Anne Frank, with whom I corresponded over many years, finally relented and allowed the diaries to be submitted to the kind of laboratory examination that I always insist upon where a document is in question."
The expertise was conducted at the German police criminal laboratory of Wiesbaden. The conclusion reached was that a portion of the "Journal" of Anne Frank had been written with a ball-point pen; such pens did not go on the market until 1951, whereas Anne Frank died in 1945.
David Irving continues:"My own conclusion on the Anne Frank diaries is for the greater part they are authentic writings of a pubescent teenage Jewish girl who was locked up and hidden, that they were then taken by her father, Otto Frank, after the girl's tragic death of typhus in a concentration camp, and her father or other persons unknown amended the diaries into a saleable form as a result of which he and the Anne Frank Foundation became rich, but as a historical document they are completely worthless by virtue of having been tampered with."
The "Shoah-business" uses only "eyewitness accounts" evoking various ways of "gassing" victims, without our ever being shown the functioning of a single "gas chamber" (of which Leuchter has demonstrated the physical and chemical impossibility), nor a single of those numberless trucks supposed to have served as "ambulatory gas-chambers" through their Diesel fumes; nor the tons of ashes from the bodies, buried after the cremations."There are no photographs of the gas chambers and the corpses have gone up in smoke. Only witnesses remain."
Source: "Le Nouvel Observateur", April 26th 1985
Claude Lanzman's endless film was conceived in the same spirit. As Lanzman put it himself:"We had to make this film from nothing, without any documents from archives, inventing everything."
Source: "Liberation" April 25th 1985. p.22c - The instrument of crime
If we try to imagine the goal of a criminal trial, we must admit the primordial importance of hearing experts giving their opinion on a wide range of questions, if only to reach a conclusion as to the credibility of many witnesses as well as a few "documents". Let us formulate here what a few of these questions would be:" How long did it take for "Zyclon B" gas to act, and how did its effects manifest themselves ?
" How long did the gas remain active in an enclosed space (either unventilated or ventilated immediately after use) ?
" Was it possible,as has been stated, to enter the premises without a mask when they were impregnated with "Zyklon B" gas, only half an hour after use of the gas ?
" Was it possible to burn the corpses completely within 20 minutes in a crematorium oven?
" Could crematorium ovens work day and night without time to cool off?
" Is it possible to burn human bodies in ditches several meters deep, and if so how long would it take ?
Until now, no "incriminating proof" has been produced. We shall only give two examples:* that of the "itinerant gas chambers" in lorries;
* that of the soap made from human fat (a tall story already used during the 1914-1918 war) (Just as "gassing" is a recycled version of the "gassing" of Serbs by Bulgars in 1916).
Source: "The Daily Telegraph", London March 22nd 1916. p.7"The history of the exterminations by genuine "mobile gas chambers", which were lorries in which thousands of people are supposed to have been killed by a twist of the Diesel exhaust pipe towards the interior was first spread in Western opinion in the "New York Times" of July 16th 1943, p.7." (Until then, the theme had been developed only in the Soviet press.)
The Daily Telegraph, London June 25th 1946. p.5.
There again, the crime weapon (hundreds, if not thousands, of lorries specially installed for these murders) has disappeared. Not one of them was ever found and shown as evidence at any trial.
Here too, we can note that if the "extermination" plan had to remain an absolute "secret", it would be strange if it had been communicated to thousands of lorry drivers and their assistants who would have dealt with the victims (without any order of mission), making thousands of bodies disappear by magic, while being the keepers of the "terrible secret".
It was Wiesenthal who promoted the legend of "human soap" in articles published in 1946 in the Austrian Jewish community paper, "Der Neue Weg" (The new way). In an article entitled "RIF", he wrote:"The terrible words "Transport for soap" were heard for the first time at the end of 1942. It was the general Government (of Poland) and the factory was at Belzec, in Galicia. From April 1942 to May 1943, 900,000 Jews were used as raw material in this factory."
After the transformation of the corpses into various raw materials, Wiesenthal wrote:" the leftovers, the residual fatty waste, was used for the production of soap."
He added:"After 1942, the people in the general Government knew very well what RIF soap meant. The civilized world cannot imagine the joy this soap gave the Nazis of the general Government and their wives. In each bar of soap, they saw a Jew who had been magically placed there and thus prevented from becoming a second Freud, Ehrlich or Einstein."
The Yad Vashem Memorial has answered very officially that the Nazis did not make soap out of Jewish corpses. During the war, Germany suffered a shortage of fats and the production of soap was placed under the supervision of the government. The bars of soap were marked with the initials RIF, the German abbreviation meaning "pure industrial fat". Certain people mistakenly thought it was RJF and meant "pure Jewish fat".
The rumor spread rapidly.* * * There is a document which, if it were discussed seriously and publicly, would put an end to the controversies about the "gas chambers": this is the "Leuchter Report" (April 5 th 1988).
Zyklon B gas, made from cyanhydric substances, is considered to have been the product used to gas a multitude of prisoners. It is normally used to disinfect clothing and instruments that could spread contagion in epidemics such as typhus, and was in use before World War I.
[Cyanide gas, HCN] was used for an execution for the first time in Arizona in 1920. Other American states used it for their Death-row inmates: California, Colorado, Maryland, Mississipi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina.
Source: Leuchter Report (number 9.004)
Leuchter was an engineer who served as consultant for the State of Missouri, California and North Carolina. Today, several of these states have given up this method of execution because [...] the security precautions required for its use make it an expensive method of execution.
Fumigation with Zyklon B requires a minimum ventilation of ten hours after its use, depending on the dimensions of the building (6.005).
The room in which it is used must be airtight, and [...] the doors must have joints made out of asbestos, neoprene or teflon (7.0001).
Having visited and expertised by previous deduction the "gaschambers" of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps in the East, the conclusions were the following : (12.001 concerning bunkers 1 and 2 at Auschwitz:"On the spot inspection of the buildings indicates that the conception of these installations would have been extremely bad and dangerous if they had been used as execution chambers. Nothing was prepared for that use...
"Krema I stands next to the SS hospital at Auschwitz, and has drains that are connected with the camp's main sewage system, which would have allowed the gas to infiltrate all the camp buildings (12.002). On Majdanek, the building could not have been used for the purpose attributed to it and does not correspond even to the minimum needs for the construction of a gas chamber."
Leuchter concluded that none of the conditions existed for the use of these buildings as homicidal gas-chambers. Whoever would have worked there would have been doing so at the peril of his life and the lives of those in the surroundings (32.9121). There was no means of ventilation or air distribution, no way of adding the materials required by the use of Zyklon B (33.145)"After going over all the documentation material and inspecting all the sites at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, the author finds the evidence overwhelming : in none of these places were there any gas chambers for executions."
Source: Written at Malden, Massachusetts, April 5th 1988. Fred Leuchter Jr., Chief Engineer.
At the Toronto trial, the lawyer, Christie, noted how many "accounts" were in contradiction with the reality of the chemical and technical possibilities. Here are three examples:
a) - Rudolf Hoess, in "Commandant d'Auschwitz".p.198. wrote:"The doors were opened half an hour after the adduction of the gas, after ventilation had renewed the air. The task of removing the bodies began immediately."
"This task was carried out with indifference, as if it were part of a daily routine. As they dragged the bodies, they ate or smoked."
So they did not even wear masks ? wondered the lawyer, Christie. (51123)
It is [highly inadvisable] to handle bodies that have just been in contact with Zyklon B, within a half an hour after the gassing, and even less so to eat, drink or smoke. It takes at least ten hours to ventilate the premises before the place is safe.
b) - Christie produced Nuremberg document 1553 PS, in which Hilberg acknowledged that the same quantity of Zyclon B had been sent to Oranienburg as to Auschwitz on the same day.
Hilberg indicated that Oranienburg was:
"...a concentration camp and an administrative center where, as far as he knew, no-one had been gassed."
Leuchter's samples and expertise even shown that traces of cyanide from Zyklon B are found in much larger quantities in those rooms we are certain were used for disinfection than in the supposed "gas-chambers"."One would have expected to detect a higher level of cyanide in the samples taken from the first gas-chambers (due to the larger quantity of gas used, according to the sources, in these places) than in the control sample. As the opposite is true, we have to conclude ... that these installations were not execution gas-chambers."
Source: Leuchter Report (op. cit.) 14.006.
This conclusion was confirmed by a counter-expertise made at Cracow by the Medical-Legal Institute of Expertise from February 20th to July 18th 1990, at the very time that the plaque commemorating the "4 million" was being taken down.
Source: Institute reference. 720.90. Museum reference 1-8523/51/1860.89.
It is true that tourists are shown if not the functioning of the "gas chambers", at least their sketchy reconstitution, even in places where it turns out they were never used, as in Dachau.
c) - Leuchter examined the sites which, according to official maps of Birkenau, were used as "cremation ditches" by the Nazis to get rid of the corpses. Most of the texts in the Holocaust literature describe them as ditches about 6 feet deep...The most surprising thing about them is that they are about one and a half feet in water from the surface. Leuchter emphasized the fact that it would have been impossible to cremate bodies under water. And there was no reason to believe that things had changed since the war as books about the Holocaust describe Auschwitz and Birkenau as having been built on a swamp (32.9100,9101). Yet there are photographs in the exhibition of these supposed "cremation ditches".
14.008 (as far as the open-air crematoriums in the "cremation ditches" are concerned):"Birkenau is built on a swamp; all its sites are water-logged 60cm from the surface. The opinion of the author of this report is that there never were any cremation ditches at Birkenau." (14.008)
A precious document on these open-air cremations whose smoke filled the sky is: "The Auschwitz album", a collection of 189 photographs with a commentary by Serge Klarsfeld; it includes aerial photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau taken from American planes, and was published in 1979 by the Americans Dino A. Brugioni and Robert C. Poirier. (The Holocaust revisited : A retrospective analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination complex, Washington, CIA February 1979.)
Whereas Pressac gives us a Dantean picture: "in the clear blue sky, two squat chimneys spat out flames" (p.91), in this inferno of fire whose flames supposedly devoured, according to the orthodox, 25,000 corpses a day from May to August 1944, chiefly because of the deportation to Auschwitz of the Hungarian Jews, aerial photographs dated June 26 th and August 25 th 1944 did not show the least trace of smoke, any more than they show evidence of crowds or of any particular activity.
"The Auchwitz album", a compilation of 189 photographs taken in the camp of Birkenau around the same period, which has an introduction by Serge Klarsfeld and a commentary by J.C.Pressac, shows us 189 scenes of concentration camp life at the time of the arrival of a convoy of deportees from Hungary. There again, there is strictly nothing to suggest a massive and systematic extermination.
On the contrary, a great number of photographs give us a general picture of the place which, far from confirming this extermination, exclude the possibility of its having taken place simultaneously in some "secret" place in the camp. J.P. Pressac's commentary is so full of obvious extrapolations that it achieves the opposite effect and makes the mechanism of fabrication almost tangible.
Source: "l'Album d'Auschwitz". Le Seuil.Paris 1983. 221 pages.
But it is the Canadian, John C. Ball, a specialist in the interpretation of aerial photos who seems to have compiled the most original photographic documents, competently and rigorously analyzing them. His conclusions totally contradict official history.
Source: Air Photo Evidence. Ball Resource Ltd. Suite 160, 7231 120th street Delta, B.C. Canada. 4C6PS. 1992. 116 pages.
But these technical questions as a whole were raised at the trial of Ernst Zundel at Toronto, where the two sides were able to express themselves freely and fully. The account of this trial is therefore an exceptional source for any honest historian as it makes it possible to become acquainted with theses taking into account all the elements of the controversy. The declarations of the different parties are all the more valuable and significant for the fact that each spoke under the control of the immediate criticism of the opposite party.
A detail which seems decisive in its importance : on April 5 th and 6 th 1988, the director of the Calgary Crematorium (Canada), Yvan Lagace, where the crematoriums are built along the same lines as those of Birkenau (though these were built in 1943) was able to expose all the technical restrictions and the need for upkeep of these kinds of incineration apparatus. He spoke of the need to cool the equipment between cremations, and when a body was introduced, because otherwise the ovens' fireproofing was damaged.
Lagace was asked to give his opinion concerning the evaluation Hilberg made of the capacity of 46 ovens in 4 Birkenau crematories ("La destruction des juifs europrens", second edition, p.978).
Hilberg had claimed:"The theoretical daily capacity of the 4 ovens at Birkenau was over 4,400 but with stops and slow-downs which made it less in practice."
Lagace declared that this assertion was "absurd" and "unrealistic" To claim that 46 ovens could burn over 4,400 corpses in a day was grotesque. Based on his own experience, Lagace affirmed it was possible to burn 184 corpses a day at Birkenau.
Source: 27-736 to 738.
This is very different from the claims made by a book like that of Pressac, "Les crematoires d'Auschwitz": "La machinerie du meurtre des masses" (1993), which spares only one chapter of 20 pages (out of 147) for the "gas-chambers", and which does not even quote the Leuchter report,to which he consecrated a "refutation" in 1990 (again financed by the Klarsfeld Foundation).
Until a scientific and public debate between equally competent specialists is held concerning the Leuchter report and other works concerning the "gas chambers", there will still be room for doubt and skepticism.
Until now, the only arguments that have been used against those who questioned official history have been a refusal to discuss the matter, attacks and repression.
3 - The Myth of the "Holocaust"
"Genocide : the methodical destruction of an ethnic group through the extermination of its individuals."
Larousse Dictionary
"Like the divine promise contained in the Bible, the Genocide is an element of ideological justification for the creation of the State of Israel"
Source: Tom Segev, "Le septième million" Ed. Liana Levi. 1993. p. 588.
Three terms have often been used to define the treatment inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis: Genocide, Holocaust and Shoah.
The term "genocide" has a specific etymological meaning: the extermination of a race. Even if we assume there is a Jewish "race", as Hitler claimed and as Israeli leaders still maintain, defining a Jew (in other words someone entitled to the "return")......can it be said that there was a "genocide" of the Jews during World War II ?
In all dictionaries, the term "genocide" has a specific meaning. Larousse, for example, gives the following definition:"Genocide: The systematic destruction of an ethnic group by the extermination of its individuals."
This definition cannot be applied to the letter except in the case of the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, where, we are told for each city conquered : "he left none remaining" (for example in Numbers XXI, 35).
The word was therefore used in a completely erroneous manner at Nuremberg, since it was not a matter of annihilating an entire people, as was the case with the "sacred exterminations" of the Amalacites and the Canaanites, and other peoples still, of which we are told in the Book of Joshua that at Eglon and Hebron: "he left none remaining" (Joshua X, 37) or at Hagor : "every man they smote with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe." (Joshua XI, 14).
On the contrary, Judaism (its definition as a "race" belonging to the Hitlerian vocabulary) has enjoyed a considerable development in the world since 1945.
There is no doubt that the Jews were one of Hitler's favorite targets, by virtue of his racist theory of the superiority of the "Aryan race" and the amalgam he made between the Jews and the Communists, who were his chief enemy, as can be seen in the fact that he had hundreds of thousands of German Communists executed and was particularly relentless in his treatment of the Slav prisoners. For him, the two so went together that he created a special term for them : "Judeo-Bolshevism".
As soon as he created his "National-Socialist" party, he considered not only the uprooting of Communism but also chasing all Jews out of Germany to begin with, and later out of Europe, when he became the master. He proceeded in the most inhuman fashion, first by exiling and expelling them, then, during the war, by incarcerating them in concentration camps in Germany to begin with, then by deporting them. At first he considered deporting them to Madagascar, where they would have formed a huge European ghetto, then to the occupied territories in the east of Europe, especially to Poland, where Slavs, Jews and Gypsies were decimated at first by hard labor in the war industry, then by terrible typhus epidemics, the magnitude of which is borne out by the multiplication of crematoriums.
What was the dreadful outcome of Hitler's persecution of his political and racial victims?
50 million people died during World War Il, of which 17 million were Russians and 9 million Germans. Poland too paid a heavy tribute, as did the other occupied countries of Europe, the millions of soldiers from Africa or Asia who had been mobilized for this war as they had been for the first, though they once more had nothing to do with the European rivalries that precipitated the conflict.
The Hitlerian domination was thus far more than the huge "pogrom", as Hannah Arendt described it, of which the Jews were the main if not the sole victims, as a certain form of propaganda would have us believe. Hitlerism was a human catastrophe which, unfortunately, had a precedent in the policy applied over five centuries by the European colonialists to "colored people". What Hitler did to white people, they did to the American Indians, of which they killed [75%] (also through forced labor and epidemics, even more than through massacres); just as they did to the Africans, of which they deported between 10 and 20 million, which means that Africa was robbed of 100 to 200 million of its inhabitants since ten people had to be killed for one to be taken alive during capture by the slave-dealers.
The myth suited everybody : to speak of the "greatest genocide in history" was for the Western colonialists to have their own crimes forgotten (the decimation of the American Indians and the African slave-trade), as it was a way for Stalin to mask his own ferocious repressions.
For the Anglo-American leaders, after the Dresden massacre of February 1945, which killed within a few hours some 200,000 civilians, burned alive by phosphorus bombs, for no military purpose since the German army was being pushed back all along the Eastern front before the lightning quick advance of the Soviet army, which had reached the Oder by January.
For the United States even more, which had just dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in "over 200,000 people killed and almost 150,000 injured, doomed within a given lapse of time."
Source: Paul-Marie de la Gorce: "1939-1945. Une guerre inconnue." Ed. Flammarion. Paris 1995. p.535.
The ends were not military but political. As early as 1948, Churchill wrote in his "History of the Second World War" (Volume VI):"It would be false to suppose that the fate of Japan was decided by the atomic bomb."
The American admiral, William A. Leahy, confirmed this in his book, "I was there":"In my opinion, the use of that barbaric weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not much use in the war against Japan."
And indeed, the emperor of Japan, Hirohito, had already engaged negotiations for the surrender of his country as early as May 21st 1945 with the Soviet Union (which was not yet at war with Japan), through the intermediary of the Japanese minister of foreign affairs and the Soviet ambassador, Malik."Prince Konoye was asked get ready to go to Moscow, to negotiate directly with Molotov."
Source: Paul-Marie de la Gorce. op.cit. p.532.
"The Japanese intentions were perfectly well-known in Washington: "Magic" gave an account of the correspondence between the minister of Foreign Affairs and his correspondent in Moscow."
Source: Idem. p.553.
The goal pursued was therefore not military but political, as the American Aviation Minister, Finletter, admitted, explaining that use of atomic bombs was "to knock out Japan before Russia's entry into war."
Source: "Saturday Review of Literature", June 5 th, 1944.
Leahy, the American admiral, concluded (op.cit.):"By being the first to use the atomic bomb, we stooped to the moral level of the barbarians of the Middle Ages...This new and terrible weapon, which is used for an uncivilized war, is a modern barbarity unworthy of Christians."
Thus all those leaders, which a genuine "International Court" made up of neutral countries would have placed with the war criminals alongside Goering and his gang, discovered an unhoped-for alibi with the "gas chambers", the "holocausts" and the "genocides", that could justify, if not eradicate, their own crimes against humanity.
The American historian,W.F. Albright, who was director of the "American School of Oriental research", wrote in his major work of synthesis: "De l'age de pierre " la certiente. Le monotheisme et son revolution." (French translation : Ed. Payot 1951), after having justified the "sacred exterminations" of Joshua when he invaded Canaan (p.205):"We Americans have perhaps... less right to judge the Israelites... since we exterminated thousands of Indians in every corner of our great land, and have parked the ones that remained in vast concentration camps." (p.205).
The term "Holocaust", applied to the same tragedy from the Seventies on, based on the book "La Nuit" (1958) and made famous by the title of the film: "Holocaust", shows even more clearly the determination to turn the crime committed against the jews into an exceptional event without any possible comparison with the massacres of the other victims of Nazism, or even with any other crime in history because their suffering and their dead had a sacred character: the "Larousse Universel" (2 volumes, Paris 1969, p. 772) thus defined the "holocaust":"Sacrifice practiced by the Jews, in which the victims was completely consumed by fire."
The martyrdom of the Jews thus became irreducible: because of its sacrificial nature, it was part of the divine Plan, like the crucifixion of Jesus in Christian theology, inaugurating a new age. Which was to allow a rabbi to say:"The creation of the State of Israel was God's answer to the Holocaust."
To justify the sacred nature of the holocaust, there had to be:- total extermination
- cremation.
a) Total extermination. A "final solution" to the Jewish problem that would have been extermination would have had to be considered. In fact, it has never been possible to produce a text attesting that the "final solution" of the Jewish problem was regarded by the Nazis as being extermination.
Hitler's anti-Semitism was linked from his earliest speeches to the fight against Bolshevism (he constantly uses the expression"JudeoBolshevism"); the first concentration camps he had built were to be used for German Communists, where thousands, including their leader Thaelman, died.
Hitler accused the Jews of completely contradictory sins: first of all they were, he said, the most active actors in the Bolshevik revolution (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc.); at the same time they were, according to him, the worst capitalist exploiters of the German people.
It was therefore important, after liquidating the Communist movement and preparing the expansion of Germany towards the East in the manner of the Teutonic knights, to crush the Soviet Union; this was the beginning of the end of his career, but it was his chief obsession and manifested itself during his days in power, in the ferocious way he treated the Slav prisoners (Russian and Polish). He even created, during the war against the U.S.S.R."Einsatzgruppen" in other words units whose special task it was to combat the Soviet partisans and to slay their political commissars, even those who were prisoners. Among these were many Jews who, like their heroic Slavic companions, were massacred.
(This proves the limitations of propaganda regarding "Soviet anti Semitism": it cannot both be claimed that the Soviets kept the Jews away from important posts and be asserted that Jews made up the majority of "political commissars" among the groups of partisans the "Einsatzgruppen" were sent out to slay . How can one imagine that the responsibility for directing partisan activity behind enemy lines (where it was easier to desert and collaborate) would have been entrusted to Jews considered suspect?)
One of the Nazis' most monstrous ideas was to aim to rid Germany of its Jews, and later, when Hitler became master of the continent, to rid all Europe of Jews (judenrein).
Hitler proceeded in stages:
* The first was to organize their emigration in conditions that made it possible to plunder the wealthiest. (And we have seen that the Zionist leaders of the "Havara" efficiently collaborated in this undertaking by promising, in exchange, to prevent the boycott of Hitlerian Germany and not to take part in the anti-Fascist movement.)
* The second stage was expulsion, in the pursuit of the plan to send them all to a world ghetto: after the capitulation of France, the island of Madagascar, which was supposed to pass under German control once the French had compensated the French ex-residents.
The project was dropped not so much because of French reticence as because the number and size of the ships required for this operation would have exceeded Germany's capacities in times of war.
* The Hitlerian occupation of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, made it possible to attain the "final solution": to empty Europe of its Jews by deporting them en masse to these distant camps: it was there that they suffered the greatest hardships, not only those of all civilian populations in time of war - bombardments, famine and privations of every sort, forced marches that were deadly for the weakest, to evacuate the centres, but also forced labor in the most inhuman conditions to serve the German war effort ( for example, Auschwitz was the most active center of the chemical industries of the "Farbein industrie"). And finally, there were the epidemics, especially typhus, which devastated a concentration-camp population which was exhausted and under-nourished.
Was it therefore necessary to resort to other methods to explain the terrible mortality which struck the victims of such treatments and to grossly exaggerate their numbers at the risk of having to lower it at a later date?
* To change the inscription at Birkenau-Auschwitz to reduce the number of dead from 4 to 1 million?
* To change the inscription of the "gas chamber" at Dachau to specify that it never functioned?
* Or that of the Paris "Velodrome d'Hiver" to admit that the number of Jews parked there was 8,160 and not 30,000 as the original plaque (since removed) indicated?
Source: "Le Monde", July 18th 1990. p.7.
Is it really necessary to maintain at all costs the exceptional nature of the "Holocaust" (sacrificial extermination by fire) and to brandish the specter of the "gas chambers"?
In 1980, for the first time, the unique nature of the massacre of the Jews was questioned by a famous journalist, Boaz Evron:"And as if it went without saying, each important guest is taken on a compulsory visit to Yad Vashem (and) to make him fully understand the feelings and the guilt expected of him."
"If we assume the world hates us and persecutes us, we feel exempted from the need to be accountable for our actions towards it."
The paranoid isolation from the world and its laws would lead certain Jews to treat non-Jews as sub-humans, thus rivalling in racism with the Nazis. Evron warned against the tendency to confuse the Arab's hostility and Nazi anti-Semitism.
"We can not distinguish the ruling class of a country from its political propaganda, for this is presented as a part of its reality", he wrote : "Thus the governments act in a world peopled with myths and monsters of their own making."
Source: Boaz Evron, "Le genocide: un danger pour la nation" Iton 77 Number May-June 1980. p. 12 and following.
First of all because millions of people whose good faith can not be doubted confuse "crematoriums" and "gas chambers". The existence in the Hitlerian camps of a large number of crematorium ovens to try to stop the spread of typhus epidemics is not a conclusive argument: there are crematoriums in all large cities (in Paris - at the Pere Lachaise cemetery - in London and in all the major capitals' those incinerations obviously do not signify a wish to exterminate the populations.
"Gas chambers" therefore had to be added to the crematorium ovens to establish the dogma of extermination by fire.
The first elementary demand to demonstrate their existence was to produce the order prescribing this measure: but in the archives so minutely established by the German authorities and all seized by the Allies when Hitler was defeated, the budgets allocated to this undertaking, the instructions regarding the construction and the functioning of these chambers, in other words everything that would have made an expertise of the "crime weapon" possible, as in all normal crime investigations, there is not a trace of evidence.
It is astonishing that after officially acknowledging that there were no homicidal gassings on the territories of the ex-Reich, despite numberless attestations to the contrary by "eyewitnesses", the same criteria of the subjectivity of the accounts was no longer accepted when the camps in the East, especially in Poland, were concerned. Even when these "accounts" were most legitimately suspect.
The same Martin Broszat who had published as an authentic document the diary of Auschwitz commander, Rudolf Hoess, in 1958, wrote in "Die Zeit" on August l9th 1960, p. 16, a letter declaring that there had been no homicidal gassings at Dachau or, generally speaking, in any of the German camps within the frontiers of the ex-Reich.
Martin Broszat, from the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich, wrote:"Neither at Dachau, nor at Bergen-Belsen, nor at Buchenwald, were Jews or any other prisoners gassed."
(In 1972, Martin Broszat became Director of the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich.)
The revelation is all the more important insofar as a number of "witnesses" and "eyewitnesses" had affirmed the existence of gas chambers in these camps, and the display of a "reconstitution" of Dachau "gas chamber" was the document which most forcefully impress visitors, especially those from the United States.
At the Nuremberg court on July 26 th 1946, Sir Harley Shawcross mentioned:
"...gas chambers not only at Auschwitz and Treblinka but also at Dachau..." (TMI, tome l9,p.4563)
The staging at Dachau made it possible to fool not only thousands of children taken there to be taught the dogma of the Holocaust [and hundreds of thousands of American servicemen-Ed.], but also adults like Father Morelli, a Dominican friar, who wrote in "Terre de détresse" (Ed. Bloud et Gay, 1947, p.15):"I gazed with utter horror at the sinister porthole through which the Nazi murderers could watch the unfortunate people being gassed writhe."
Even ex-deportees from Buchenwald and Dachau have let themselves be taken in by the legend so carefully upheld.
One great French historian, Michel de Bouard, honorary dean of the Caen Faculty, member of the Institute and ex-prisoner at Mauthausen, declared in 1986:"In the monograph on Mauthausen I gave (...) in 1954, I spoke about gas chambers twice. When time had made me reflect, I said to myself: "Where did I get the conviction that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen?" It was not during my stay in the camp, for neither myself nor anyone suspected there could be one; it is therefore an "extra" which I acquired after the war, admittedly. Then I noticed that in my text - whereas most of what I say is backed by references - there were none concerning the gas chamber... "
Source: "Ouest-France", 2nd and 3rd of August 1986. p.6.
Already, Jean Gabriel Cohn Bendit had written:"Let us fight for the destruction of those gas chambers they show tourists in the camps where there were none, as we now know; otherwise we run the risk of being no longer believed concerning that of which we are certain."
Source: "Liberation", March 5th 1979, p.4.
On August 26 th 1960, M. Brosrat of the Munich "Institute for the history of the present times", wrote to "Die Zeit"(p.14) although he was a Zionist:"The gas chamber at Dachau was never finished and never worked."
Since the summer of 1943, a board in front of the showers explains:"This gas chamber, camouflaged as a shower room, was never put into service."
It adds that the prisoners sentenced to gassing were transferred East.
4 - The myth of a "land without a people for a people without a land".
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
Source: Mrs. Golda Meir. Statement to "The Sunday Times", 15 June, 1969.
Zionist ideology rests on a very simple postulate: It is written in Genesis (XV, 18 - 21) :"The Lord made an alliance with Abraham in these terms : It is to your descendants that I give this country, from the river of Egypt to the big river, the river Euphrates."
Starting from this, without asking themselves what the alliance consisted of, to whom the promise had been made or if the choice made was unconditional, the Zionist leaders, even the agnostics and atheists, proclaim: Palestine has been given to us by God.
The Israeli government's own statistics show that 15% of Israelis are religious. This doesn't stop 90 % of them claiming that this land has been given to them by God... in whom they don't believe.
The great majority of Israelis today share neither religious practice nor faith and the different "religious parties" who, nevertheless, play a decisive role in the state of Israel, can only muster a tiny minority of citizens.
This apparent paradox is explained by Nathan Wienstock in his book: 'Zionism Against Israel' (Pub. Maspero, 1969, p.315)"If the obscurantism of the rabbis triumphs in Israel, it is because Zionist mysticism only has coherence by reference to the religion of Moses. Take away the concepts of a "chosen people" and a "promised land" and the foundation of Zionism crumbles. This is why the religious parties paradoxically draw their strength from the complicity of agnostic Zionists. The internal coherence of the Zionist structure of Israel has imposed on its leaders the strengthening of the clergy's power. It was the social democrat "Mapai" party and not the religious parties which, on an impulse of Ben Gurion, made religious instruction an obligatory part of the school curriculum."
"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy. This is the basic axiom formulated by Mrs. Golda Meir."
Source: "Le Monde", 15 October 1971
"This land has been promised to us and we have a right to it." restated Begin.
Source: Begin's statement at Oslo. "Davar" 12 December 1978.
"If one possesses the Bible, if one considers oneself to be the people of the Bible, one should also possess the biblical lands, those of the Judges and the Patriarchs, of Jerusalem and of Hebron, of Jericho and others besides."
Source: Moshe Dayan. "Jerusalem Post" 10 August 1967.
Very significantly, Ben Gurion evokes the American "precedent" where, in effect, for a century, the frontier remained mobile (as far as the Pacific, where the "closing of the frontier" was proclaimed in line with the success of the "Indian Hunt" to drive them away and grab their land).
Ben Gurion said very clearly:"It's not a matter of maintaining the status quo. We have to create a dynamic state, orientated towards expansion."
Political practice corresponds to this remarkable theory: take the land and drive the inhabitants from it, as Moses and his successor Joshua did.
Menachem Begin, more deeply imbued with the biblical tradition than anyone, declared:"Eretz Israel will be given back to the people of Israel. In its entirety and for ever."
Source: Menachem Begin: "The Revolt: Story of the lrgun", p. 335.
Thus the state of Israel places itself straight away above international law.
Imposed on the U.N. on the 11 May 1949 by the will of the United States, the State of Israel was only admitted on three conditions:1 - Not to touch the status of Jerusalem;
2 - To allow Palestinian Arabs to come back to their homes;
3 - To respect the borders fixed by the partition decision.
Speaking about this U.N. resolution on "sharing", taken well before its admission, Ben Gurion declares:"The State of Israel considers the U.N. resolution of 29 November 1947 to be null and void."
Source: "New York Times", 6 December 1953.
Echoing the theories already quoted of the American Albright, on the parallel between American and zionist expansion, General Moshe Dayan wrote:"Take the American declaration of Independence. It contains no mention of territorial limits. We are not obliged to fix the limits of the State."
Source: "Jerusalem Post" 10 August 1967
Policy corresponds precisely to this law of the jungle: the "partition" of Palestine, in line with the U.N. resolution was never respected.
Already, the resolution on the partition of Palestine, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (at the time composed of a massive majority of western states) on the 29 November 1947, indicated the designs of the West on their "forward stronghold" : On this date the Jews constituted 32% of the population and possessed 5.6% of the land : they would receive 56% of the territory, including the most fertile land. These decisions had been secured under U.S. pressure.
President Truman put the State Department under unprecedented pressure. Under-Secretary of State S. Welles wrote:"By direct order of the White House American civil servants had to use direct or indirect pressure... To ensure the necessary majority in the final vote."
Source: S. Welles, "We need not fail" Boston, 1948, p.63
The Minister of Defense of the time, James Forrestal, confirms:"The methods used to pressure and to constrain the other nations within the U.N. were close to scandalous."
Source: "Forrestal's Memoirs", N.Y., The Viking Press. 1951, p.363
The power of the private monopolies was mobilized : Drew Pearson, in the Chicago Daily of 9 February 1948, gives details, for example:"Harvey Firestone, a rubber plantation owner in Liberia, used his influence with the Liberian government."
From 1948 even these partial decisions were violated.
As the Arabs protested against and refused to accept such an injustice, the Israeli leaders took advantage and grabbed new territory, notably Jaffa and Acre, so that by 1949 the Zionists controled 80% of the country and 770,000 Palestinians had been driven out.
The method used was that of terror.
The most glaring example was that of Deir Yassin : On April 9, 1948, the 254 inhabitants of this village (men, women, children, old men) were massacred by "Irgun" troops (whose leader was Menachim Begin), by the same method as the Nazis' at Oradour.
In his book "The Revolt: The History of Irgun", Begin wrote that there would not have been a State of Israel without the "victory" of Deir Yassin (p. 162 of the English edition). He added:"The Haganah carried out victorious attacks on other fronts... In a state of terror, the Arabs fled, crying,'Deir Yassin'." (Idem p. 162 ; French edition p.200)
Any Palestinian who had left his home before 1 August 1948 was considered as "absent".
In this way two thirds of Arab land (70,000 ha out of 110,000) was confiscated. When a law was passed in 1953 on property ownership, compensation was fixed on the value of the land in 1950, but in the meantime the Israeli Pound had dropped to a fifth of its 1950 value.
Besides, since the beginning of jewish immigration, and here again in the most classical colonial way, land had been bought from feudal, non-resident landowners (the "effendi") so that were driven from the land which the poor peasants, the fellah, they cultivated by these arrangements between their former masters and the new arrivals without their involvement. Deprived of their land, all they could do was to flee.
The U.N. had appointed a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. In his first report, Count Bernadotte wrote:"It would offend basic principles to prevent these innocent victims of the conflict from returning to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flood into Palestine and, what's more, threatening to permanently replace the dispossessed Arab refugees who have been here for centuries."
He described, "Zionist pillage on a grand scale and the destruction of villages without apparent military need."
This report (U.N. Document A. 648, p.14) was filed on the 16 September 1948. On the 17 September 1948 Count Bernadotte and his French assistant, Colonel Serot, were assassinated in the part of Jerusalem occupied by the Zionists.
Source: For the assassination of Count Bernadotte see General A. Lundstrom's report (who was sitting in Bernadotte's car) which was sent to the U.N. the same day as the attack (17 September 1948). See also the book published by the same general for the 20th anniversary of the crime : L'assassinat du Compte Bernadotte, printed in Rome (pub. East. A. Fanelli) in 1970 under the title : 'Un tributo a la memoria del Comte Folke Bernadotte'. Ralph Hewins' book : 'Count Bernadotte, his life and work' (Hutchinson, 1948). And in the Milanese weekly Europa', Baruch Nadel's confessions (quoted in Le Monde, 4 and 5 July 1971).
It was not the first zionist crime against someone who criticized their deception.
Lord Moyne, the British Secretary of State in Cairo, declared on 9 June 1942 in the House of Lords that the Jews were not the descendants of the ancient Hebrews and that they had no "legitimate claim" on the Holy Land. In favor of limiting immigration into Palestine, he was accused of being "an implacable enemy of Hebrew independence."
Source: Isaac Zaar: "Rescue and Liberation: America's part in the birth of Israel", N.Y. Bloc Publishing Cy, 1954, p115
On 6 November 1944 Lord Moyne was shot dead in Cairo by two members of the Stern Gang (Yitzhak Shamir's group). Years later, on 2 July 1975, "The Evening Star" of Aukland revealed that the bodies of the two executed assassins had been exchanged for 20 Arab prisoners to be buried at the "Heros Monument" in Jerusalem. The British government deplored that Israel should honor assassins as heros.
On the 22 July 1946 the wing of the King David Hotel where the British military had set up their headquarters was blown up killing about 100 people - Englishmen,Arabs and Jews. It was Irgun, Menachem Begin's group, who claimed responsibility.
The State of Israel replaced the former colonialists and used the same procedures. For example, agricultural aid for irrigation was distributed in a discriminatory way, such that jewish farmers were systematically favored. Between 1948 and 1969 the area of irrigated land rose, for the jewish sector, from 20,000 to 164,000 ha and, for the Arab sector, from 800 to 4,100 ha. The colonial system was thus perpetuated and even aggravated : Doctor Rosenfeld, in his book, "Arab Migrant Workers", published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1970, recognizes that Arab agriculture was more prosperous during the British mandate than today.
Segregation is also a feature of housing policy. The president of the Israeli Human Rights League, Doctor Israel Shahak, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in his book, "The Racism of the State of Israel" (p.57) tells us that there are in Israel whole towns (Carmel, Nazareth, Illith, Hatzor, Arad, Mitzphen-Ramen, and others) where non-Jews are forbidden by law to live.
In cultural matters the same colonialist spirit reigns."In 1970, the Ministry of National Education proposed two different versions to high school pupils of the prayer to 'Yiskar': one version declared that the death camps had been built by 'the diabolical Nazi government and the German nation of murderers.'"
"The second version evoked, more globally, '...the German nation of murderers' and both contain a paragraph calling on God 'to avenge before our eyes the blood of the victims.'"
Source: "Ce sont mes freres que je cherche", Ministry of Education and Culture. Jerusalem, 1990.
This culture of racial hatred has borne fruit:"Following Kahana, an ever-growing number of soldiers steeped in the history of the Genocide imagined all sorts of scenarios to exterminate the Arabs", declared Ehud Praver, an officer in charge of the Army teaching body. "It is very worrying that the genocide can thus legitimize a Jewish racism. We must henceforth know that it is not only vital to deal with the question of the Genocide, but also with that of the rise of Fascism, to explain its nature and dangers for democracy." According to Praver, "Too many soldiers have started to believe that the Genocide can justify any dishonourable action."
Source: Tom Segev. op. cit. p. 473.
The problem was posed very clearly even before the existence of the State of Israel. The Director of the "National Jewish Fund", Yossef Weitz, was writing already in 1940:"It should be clear for us that there is not room for two peoples in this country. If the Arabs leave it, there will be enough for us (...) There is nothing else to do but to remove them all; we mustn't leave a single village, a single tribe... We must explain to Roosevelt and all the heads of friendly states that the land of Israel isn't too small if all the Arabs leave and if the borders are pushed back a little to the north, as far as the Litani, and to the east, on the Golan Heights."
Source: Yossef Weitz, "Journal" Tel Aviv, 1965
In the important Israeli newspaper "Yediot Aahronot", of 14 July 1972, Yoram Bar Porath reminded us forcefully of the objective to be reached:"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their land."
Here we are, once again, in the most rigorous logic of the zionist system: How do you create a jewish majority in a country populated by a native Palestinian Arab community ?
Political zionism provided the only solution in its colonialist program: Realize a colony of settlements by driving off the Palestinians and encouraging jewish immigration.
Driving off the Palestinians and grabbing their land was a deliberate and systematic undertaking.
At the time of the Balfour Declaration the zionists owned only 2.5% of the land and at the time of the decision to "share" Palestine, 6.5%. In 1982 they possessed 93%.
The methods used to dispossess the native of his land are those of the most implacable colonialism, with an even more marked racist coloring in the case of Zionism.
The first stage had the characteristics of a classic colonialism : exploiting the local work force. This was the method of Baron Edouard de Rothschild : Just as he had exploited, on his vineyards in Algeria, the cheap labor of the fellahs, he had simply enlarged his sphere of activity in Palestine, exploiting on his vineyards different Arabs to the Algerians.
A historical twist happened around 1905 with the arrival from Russia of a new wave of immigrants following the crushing of the 1905 revolution. Instead of carrying on with the fight on the spot, beside the other Russian revolutionaries, the deserters of the crushed revolution imported a strange "zionist socialism" into Palestine : They created artisan cooperatives and peasant "Kibbutz", excluding the Palestinian Fellahs to create an economy relying on a jewish working and agricultural class.
From classical colonialism (of the English or French type), one thus moved to a colony of settlement, in the logic of political zionism, implying a flow of immigrants "in favor" of whom and "against" nobody (as Professor Klein said) land and work had to be reserved.
From this point it comes down to replacing the Palestinian people with another one and, naturally, grabbing the land.
The starting point of the great operation was the creation, in 1901, of the "National Jewish Fund", which shows the following original characteristic, even compared to other colonialisms : the land acquired by it cannot be resold or even rented to non-Jews.
Two other laws concern the Keren Kayemet ("National Jewish Fund". Law passed on 23 November 1953) and the Keren Hayesod ("Reconstruction Fund". Law passed on 10 January 1956).
"These two laws," wrote Professor Klein, "permitted the transformation of these societies, which find themselves benefitting from a certain number of privileges."
Without enumerating these privileges, he introduces, as a simple "observation", the fact that lands possessed by the "National Jewish Fund" are declared "Land of Israel", and a fundamental law was passed to proclaim the inalienability of these lands. It is one of the four "fundamental laws" (elements of a future constitution, which still doesn't exist, 50 years after the creation of Israel), passed in 1960. It is deplorable that the learned lawyer, normally attentive to detail, makes no comment on this "inalienability". He does not even define it: a piece of land "saved" by the Jewish National fund (redemption of the land), is a piece of land which has become "Jewish"; it can never be sold to a "non-Jew", nor rented to a "non-Jew", nor worked by a "non-Jew".
Can one deny the racial discrimination of this fundamental law?
The agrarian policy of the Israeli leaders is one of systematic despoilment of the Arab peasantry.
The property law of 1943 on expropriation in the public interest is a relic of the British mandate period. This law looses its direction when it is applied in a discriminatory way, for example, when, in 1962, 500 ha were expropriated at Deir El-Arad, Nabel and Be'neh, the "public interest" consisted of creating the town of Carmel, which was reserved exclusively for Jews.
Another procedure : the use of the "emergency laws", passed in 1945 by the British against the Jews and Arabs. Law 124 gives the Military Governor the right, this time under the pretext of "security", to suspend all citizens' rights, including free movement : The army only has to declare a zone forbidden "for security reasons" and an Arab no longer has the right to go onto his land without the authorization of the Military Governor. If this authorization is refused, the land is then declared "uncultivated" and the Ministry of Agriculture can "take possession of uncultivated land in order to ensure its cultivation."
When the British passed this fiercely colonialist legislation in 1945 to fight jewish terrorism, the lawyer Bernard (DOV) Joseph, protesting against this system of "lettre de cachet", declared:"Are we all to be subjected to official terror?... No citizen can be safe from life imprisonment without a trial... the power of the administration to exile anyone is unlimited... it is not necessary to have committed any crime, a decision taken in some office is enough... "
The same Bernard (DOV) Joseph, once Israeli Minister of Justice, would apply these laws against Arabs.
J. Shapira, speaking about the same laws, at the same protest meeting of 7 February 1946 at Tel Aviv (Hapraklit, February 1946, p. 58 - 64), declared in even stronger terms:"The order established by this legislation is unprecedented in civilized countries. Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws."
The same J. Shapira, once Public Prosecutor of the State of Israel, was to apply these laws against the Arabs. To justify the keeping of these laws of terror, "the state of emergency" has not been lifted since 1948 in the State of Israel.
Shimon Peres wrote in the newspaper "Davar" of 25 January 1972:"The use of law 125, on which military government is founded, follows directly on from the struggle for Jewish implantation and immigration."
The law of 1948 (amended in 1949) on the cultivation of fallow land goes in the same direction but more directly: Without even seeking the pretext of "public utility" or "military security", the Minister of Agriculture can requisition any abandoned land. The massive exodus of terrorized Arabs, as in the case of Deir Yassin in 1948, Kafr Kassem on 29 October 1956, or the "pogroms" of "unit 101" (created by Moshe Dayan and commanded for a long time by Ariel Sharon) thus "liberated" vast areas, cleared of their Arab owners or workers and given to the Jewish occupiers.
The mechanism for the dispossession of the fellahs is completed by the law of 30 June 1948, the emergency decree of 15 November 1948 on the property of those "absent", the law relating to the lands of the "absent" (14 March 1950), the law on the acquisition of land (13 March 1953), and a whole arsenal of measures to legalize theft by forcing the Arabs to leave their land and installing jewish colonies, as Nathan Wienstock illustrates in his book: "Zionism Against Israel".
To wipe out even the memory of the existence of the Palestinian agricultural population and to give truth to the myth of the "deserted country", the Arab villages were destroyed - their houses, walls and even their graveyards and tombs. In 1975 Professor Israel Shahak gave, district by district, a list of 385 Arab villages destroyed by bulldozer, out of 475 existant in 1948.
"To convince us that before Israel, Palestine was a desert, hundreds of villages were razed by bulldozer - their houses, walls, graveyards and their tombs."
Source: Israel SHAHAK, "Racism and the State of Israel", from p. 152.
The overall result is as follows : A million and a half Palestinians having been driven off the land, "jewish land", (as the people of the "National Jewish Fund" call it), 6.5% in 1947, today represents more than 93% of Palestine (75% to the State and 14 % to the National Fund.)
It is noteworthy (and significant) that the consequences of this operation were summarized at an early stage in the newspaper of the Afrikaners of South Africa, "Die Transvaler", an expert in matters of racial discrimination (apartheid):"What is the difference between the way in which the Jewish people struggles to remain what it is in the midst of a non-Jewish population, and the way the Afrikaners try to stay what they are?"
Source: Henry Katzew, "South Africa: a Country Without Friends", quoted by R. Stevens (Zionism, South Africa and Apartheid).
The same system of "apartheid" manifests itself in the status of the individual as it does in the appropriation of land. The "autonomy" which the Israelis want to grant the Palestinians is the equivalent of the "homelands" for the blacks in South Africa.
Analyzing the consequences of the law of "return", Klein asks the question:"If the Jewish people are easily the most numerous in the State of Israel, by the same token, one can still say that the entire population of the State of Israel is not Jewish, as the country has a sizeable non-Jewish minority, mainly Arab and Druze. The question which must be asked is to what extent the existence of a Law of Return which favorizes the immigration of one part of the population (defined by its religious and ethnic adherence), cannot be regarded as discriminatory."
Source: Claude Klein, Director of the Institute of Comparative Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "The Jewish Character of the State of Israel", Ed. Cujas, Paris 1977, p. 33.
The author wonders in particular if the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (adopted on 21 December 1965 by the General Assembly of the United Nations) doesn't apply to the Law of Return.
By a dialectic which we shall let the reader be the judge of, the eminent lawyer concludes with this subtle distinction:
In matters of non-discrimination "a measure must not be directed against one particular group. The Law of Return is in favor of Jews who want to settle in Israel, it is not directed against any group or nationality. One cannot see in what respect this law would be discriminatory."
Source: op.cit. Klein p. 35
To the reader who might risk being led astray by this, at the very least audacious, logic, according to a famous sally, that all citizens are equal but that some are more equal than others - let's give a concrete illustration of the situation created by this Law of Return. The Law of Nationality (5712 - 1952).
It concerns (article 3) "any individual who, immediately before the foundation of the state, was a Palestinian subject and who didn't become Israeli by virtue of article 2" (which concerns the Jews). Those referred to by this circumlocution (and who are considered as "having never had any nationality previously", in other words stateless people by inheritance) must prove that they were living on this land over a given period (documentary proof often being impossible to find because the papers disappeared during the war and the terror that accompanied the establishment of the Zionist state). Failing this, to become a citizen, the "naturalization" route demanded, for example, "a certain knowledge of the Hebrew language." After which, "if he judges it useful" the Minister of the Interior grants (or refuses) Israeli nationality.
In short, by virtue of Israeli law a Jew from Patagonia becomes an Israeli citizen the very moment he sets foot on Tel Aviv airport; a Palestinian, born in Palestine, of Palestinian parents can be considered as stateless. Here there is no racial discrimination against the Palestinians, simply a measure in favor of the Jews!
It therefore seems difficult to contest the U.N. General Assembly's resolution of 10 November 1975 (Resolution 3379 xxx) defining zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination."
In actual fact, only a tiny minority of those who settle in Israel have come to realize "the promise". The "Law of return" has had very little effect. This is fortunate because in every country of the world Jews have played an eminent role in every area of culture, science and the arts and it would be distressing for zionism to reach the objective which the anti-semites set themselves: to tear the Jews from their respective homelands and to enclose them in a world ghetto.
The example of the French Jews is significant; after the Evian agreements of 1962 and the liberation of Algeria, out of 130,000 Jews who left Algeria, only 20,000 went to Israel and 110,000 to France. This movement was not the result of anti-semitic persecution as the proportion of non-Jewish, French settlers who left Algeria was the same. The reason for this departure was not anti-Semitism but the prior French colonialism and the French Jews of Algeria met the same fate as the other French people in Algeria.
To sum up: Almost all Jewish immigrants to Israel came to escape anti-semitic persecution.
In 1880 there were 25,000 Jews in Palestine for a population of 500,000.
In 1882 the large-scale immigration started following the great pogroms of czarist Russia.
Thus 50,000 Jews arrived in Palestine between 1882 and 1917.
Then, between the two wars, came emigrants from Poland and the Maghreb to escape persecution.
But the greatest number comes from Germany as a result of the vile anti semitism of Hitler; almost 400,000 Jews thus arrived in Palestine before 1945.
In 1947 on the eve of the creation of the State of Israel, there were 600,000 Jews in Palestine out of a total population of 1,250,000.
And so the systematic uprooting of the Palestinians began.
Before the war of 1948 about 650,000 Arabs lived in the territory which was to become the State of Israel. In 1949 there were 160,000 of them left. Because of a high birth rate their descendants numbered 450,000 at the end of 1970. The Human Rights League of Israel reveals that between June 1967 and 15 November 1969 more than 20,000 Arab houses were dynamited in Israel and the West Bank.
There were, at the time of the British census of 31 December 1922, 757,000 inhabitants in Palestine of which 663,000 were Arab (590,000 Muslim Arabs and 73,000 Christian Arabs) and 83,000 Jews (that is : 88% Arabs and 11% Jews). It should be remembered that this so-called "desert" was a cereal and citrus fruit exporter.
As early as 1891 one of the first zionists, Asher Guinsberg (writing under
the pseudonym Ahad Ha'am) "one of the people" visiting Palestine, gives this eye-witness account:"Abroad, we are used to believing that Eretz-Israel is today semi-desert, desert without cultivation. and that whoever wants to acquire land can come here and get as much as his heart desires. But the truth is nothing like this. In any part of the country, it is difficult to find uncultivated fields. The only uncultivated places are expanses of sand and stony mountains where only fruit trees can grow, and even then, only after a lot of heavy preparatory labor."
Source : Ahad Ha'am. Complete Works (In Hebrew). Tel Aviv. Devir Publ. House and Jerusalem. The Hebrew Publishing House, 8th edition, p. 23. (Tel Aviv)
In reality, before the zionists, the "bedouins" (in fact cereal growers) were exporting 30,000 tons of wheat per year; the area of Arab orchards tripled between 1921 and 1942, that of orange groves and other citrus fruit grew seven-fold between 1922 and 1947, production grew ten-fold between 1922 and 1938.
If we just take the example of citrus fruit, The Peel Report, submitted to the British Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Colonies in July 1937, based on the rapid growth of orange groves in Palestine, estimated that for the 30 million crates of winter oranges by which the world consumption would rise in the following decade, the producing and exporting countries would be as follows:
Palestine: 15 million
United States: 7 million
Spain: 5 million
Other countries (Cyprus, Egypt, Algeria, etc.): 3 million
Source: "Peel Report", chapter 8, º 19, p. 214
According to a State Department study, submitted on 20 March to a Congress commission:"More than 200,000 Israelis are now settled in the Occupied Territories (including Golan and East Jerusalem). They amount to 'approximately' 13% of the total population of these territories.
About 90,000 of them live in the 150 settlements of the West Bank, "where the Israeli authorities have about half of the territory."
"In East-Jerusalem and in the Arab suburbs attached to the municipality," continues the State Department, "almost 120,000 Israelis are settled in about twelve districts. In the Gaza Strip, where the Hebrew State confiscated 30% of an already overpopulated territory, 3,000 Israelis live in about 15 settlements. On the Golan plateau, there are 12,000 spread over about 30 localities."
Source: "Le Monde", 18 April 1993
The daily "Yedioth Aharonoth", the biggest circulation paper in Israel, wrote:
"Since the 70's, there has never been such an acceleration in construction in the territories. Ariel Sharon (Minister for Housing and Construction), is feverishly busy establishing new settlements, developing those already existant, building roads and preparing new building sites."
Source: These Israeli texts are reproduced in "Le Monde", of 8 April 1993
(Let's not forget that Ariel Sharon was the general who commanded the invasion of Lebanon. He armed the Phalangist militias who carried out the "pogroms" in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatilla. Sharon turned a blind eye to these exactions and was an accomplice, as was revealed, even by the Israeli commission appointed to investigate the massacres.)
The maintenance of these Jewish colonies in the occupied territories and their protection by the Israeli army and the arming of the settlers (like the adventurers of the American Wild-West in the past) makes any real Palestinian "autonomy" impossible and makes peace impossible as long as the occupation continues to be a reality.
The main thrust of colonial settlement is directed at Jerusalem with the declared goal of making irreversible the decision to annex Jerusalem in its entirety, a decision which was, nevertheless, unanimously condemned by the United Nations (including by the United States !)
The colonial settlements in the Occupied Territories are a blatant violation of international law and specifically of the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949, article 49 of which stipulates:
"The occupying power cannot proceed with a transfer of one part of its own civil population into the territory occupied by it."
Even Hitler did not infringe this international law: He did not install German civilian "settlers" on land from which French peasants had been evicted.
The pretext of "security", like the one of the "terrorism" of the "Intifada", is laughable. The statistics on this subject are telling:"1,116 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the Intifada (the stone-throwing revolt) on 9 December 1987, shot by soldiers, policemen or settlers. The figures break down as follows : 626 deaths in 1988 and 1989, 134 in 1990, 93 in 1991, 108 in 1992 and 155 from 1 January to 11 September 1993. Among the victims were 233 children under 17 years old according to a study carried out by Betselem, the Israeli association for human rights.
"Military sources give a figure of nearly 20,000 for the number of Palestinians wounded by bullets and the U.N. Relief and Works agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) gives a figure of 90,000.
"33 israelis soldiers have been killed since 9 December 1987 : 4 in 1988, 4 in 1989. 1 in 1990 2 in 1991, 11 in 1992 and 11 in 1993.
"40 civilians, mostly settlers, have been killed in the occupied territories according to the army's reckoning.
"According to the humanitarian organizations, in 1993, 15,000 Palestinians were being held in prisons of the penal administration and in army detention centres.
"12 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the beginning of the Intifada, some of them under circumstances which have yet to be illuminated, Betselem assures us. This humanitarian organization also indicates that at least 20,000 detainees are tortured every year during interrogation in the military detention centres."
Source: "Le Monde" of 12 September 1993 p. 118
There have been many violations of international law, considered as a "scrap of paper" and, what is more, as Professor Israel Shahak wrote:"These colonies, by their very nature, subscribe to a system of despoilment, discrimination, and apartheid."
Source: Israel Shahak: "Racism and the State of Israel", p. 263
Here is Professor Israel Shahak's testimony on the idolatry which consists of replacing the God of Israel by the State of Israel.I am Jew who lives in Israel. I consider myself as a law-abiding citizen. I do my time in the army every year even though I am more than 40 years old. But I am not "devoted" to the State of Israel or any other state or organization! I am attached to my ideals. I believe that one must say the truth and do whatever is necessary to save justice and equality for all. I am attached to Hebrew poetry and language and I like to think that I modestly respect some of the values of our ancient prophets.
But to devote a cult to the State? I can well imagine Amos or Isaiah if they had been asked to "devote" a cult to the kingdom of Israel or Judea!
Jews believe and say three times a day that a Jew must be devoted to God and to God alone :"You will love Yaveh, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might." (Deuteronomy, ch.VI, verse 5).
A small minority still believe in this. But it seems to me that the majority of the people have lost their God and replaced it by an idol just like when they adored the golden calf in the desert so much that they gave all their gold to make a statue to him. The name of their modern idol is the State of Israel.
Source: Ibidem, p. 93
