Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism. From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a professor of history in the College d'enseignement général at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille de la Résistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in November, 1946. Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely been translated from the French and none at all have appeared in English. His most important works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences of them; and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le Véritable Proces Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs européen (1964), in which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and financial significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers. One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique German "wickedness"; and he reveals with devastating force how historical truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to proper proportions, loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one act in a greater and much wider tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany in the spring of 1960, Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that it was high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it since the allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
 
 

Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard, and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et Lumieres that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbrück.- The Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other evidence for gas chambers there than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these authors could produce an authentic eye-witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen one. Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz, but of course, since this person was apparently dead, Rassinier was unable to investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of Teufel und Verdammte who had alleged that millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and that he based his information on what others had "told him". The palm for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyizli's Doctor at Auschwitz, in which the falsification of facts, the evident contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is speaking of places which it is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 52). According to this "doctor of Auschwitz", 25,000 victims were exterminated every day for four and a half years, which is a grandiose advance on Olga Lengyel's 24,000 a day for two and a half years. It would mean a total of forty-one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the total pre-war Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier attempted to discover the identity of this strange "witness", he was told that "he had died some time before the publication of the book." Rassinier is convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the war, Rassinier has, in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of gas chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two, but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they "heard", always from "reliable" sources, who by some chance are almost always dead and thus not in a position to confirm or deny their statements. Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies, and of which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of "gas chambers". Serious investigations carried out in the sites themselves have revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the declarations of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in the German camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich. However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again declared at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out for the gas chambers. So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier shows that the sole evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million. Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents were considered of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by the Nuremberg Court, though they continue to circulate in three different versions, one in German (distributed in schools) and two in French, none of which agree with each other. The German version featured as "evidence" at the Eichmann Trial in l961. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p. 31, 39).
 
 

As for the fearful propaganda figure of the Six Million, Professor Rassinier rejects it on the basis of an extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has been falsely established, on the one hand through inflation of the pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation, and on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of survivors after 1945. This was the method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also rejects any written or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited above, since they are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods. He gives the example of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor Niemöller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent "238,000" deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhäusseler of Munich stated in a speech at Dachau that only 30,000 people died "of the 200,000 persons from thirty-eight nations who were interned there" (Le Drame des Juifs européen, p . 12). Today, the estimate has been reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes on. Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given by accused men such as Hoess, Hoettl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were faced with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their detention, is completely untrustworthy. Rassinier finds it very significant that the figure of Six Million was not mentioned in court during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the Jerusalem trial was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended, amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, many documents have been published which were not available at the time of the Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove that if the Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime, there could not possibly have been six millions victims" (ibid, p. 125). With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics, Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs européen that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000, and he notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as a maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem by the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State of Israel nevertheless continues to claim compensation for six million dead, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks.
 
 

Prof. Rassinier is emphatic in stating that the German Government never had any policy other than the emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with the British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other countries to take charge of them, but these refused (ibid, p. 20). The Palestine project was revived in 1938, but broke down because Germany could not negotiate their departure on the basis of 3,000,000 marks, as demanded by Britain, without some agreement for compensation. Despite these difficulties, Germany did manage to secure the emigration of the majority of their Jews, mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French refusal of Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the 21st August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible to negotiate with France in this direction and described conversations which had taken place between July and December 1940, and which were brought to a halt following the interview with Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval's successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would be able to re-open these negotiations and bring them to a happy conclusion" (ibid, p . 108). After the outbreak of war, the Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us, had declared economic and financial war on Germany as early as 1933, were interned in concentration camps, "which is the way countries all over the world treat enemy aliens in time of war . . . It was decided to regroup them and put them to work in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of Russia, was situated towards the end of 1941 in the so-called Eastern territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland: at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Treblinka etc . . . There they were to wait until the end of the war for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide their future" (Le Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). The order for this concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich, as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to "the desired final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had ended.
 
 

Of great concern to Professor Rassinier is the way in which the extermination legend is deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in this he finds Israel and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after 1950, an avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their activities that one might well believe them to have been contrived in partnership. One was the "Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals" established under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the "World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation" at Paris and Tel-Aviv. Their publications seem to appear at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the Soviet Union their purpose is simply to maintain the threat of Nazism as a manoeuvre to divert attention from their own activities. As for Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a purely material problem. In Le Drame des Juifs européen (P. 31, 39). he writes: " . . . It is simply a question of justifying by a proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has been paying annually since the end of the war to the State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which moreover she cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since there was no State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly material problem. "Perhaps I may be allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was only founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all states with the exception of Israel, in order to underline the dimensions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on the one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six million dead, and on the other, since at least four-fifths of these six million were decidedly alive at the end of the war, she is paying substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims of Hitler's Germany to those who are still alive in countries all over the world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of those who have since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six million), or in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice."
 
 

Here we may briefly summarise the data on Jewish war- time casualties. Contrary to the figure of over 9 million Jews in German- occupied territory put forward at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, it has already been estabhshed that after extensive emigration, approximately 3 million were living in Europe, excluding the Soviet Union. Even when the Jews of German-occupied Russia are included (the majority of Russian Jews were evacuated beyond German control), the overall number probably does not exceed four million. Himmler's statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr and the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the number respectively at 5,550,000 and 5,294,000 when German- occupied territory was at its widest, but both these figures include the two million Jews of the Baltic and western Russia without paying any attention to the large number of these who were evacuated. However, it is at least an admission from the latter organisation that there were not even six million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined. Nothing better illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million legend than the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately avoided mentioning the figure. Moreover, official Jewish estimates of the casualties are being quietly revised downwards. Our analysis of the population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Professor Rassinier, demonstrate that it would have been simply impossible for the number of Jewish casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. It is very significant, therefore, that the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris now states that only 1,485,292 Jews died from all causes during the Second World War, and although this figure is certainly too high, at least it bears no resemblance at all to the legendary Six Million. As has been noted earlier, the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896,892. This is beginning to approach a realistic figure, and the process of revision is certain to continue. Doubtless, several thousand Jewish persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in the context of a war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides. To put the matter in perspective, for example, we may point out that 700,000 Russian civilians died during the siege of Leningrad, and a total of 2,05O,OOO German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation after the war. In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich (January 19th, 1955), in a survey of all Second World War casualties based on figures of the lnternational Red Cross, put the "Loss of victims of persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945" at 300,000, not all of whom were Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment.
 
 

The question most pertinent to the extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million European Jews under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a half million, but such a figure is now totally unacceptable. This is proved by the growing number of Jews claiming compensation from the West German Government for having allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the number of these claimants registered with the West German Government had tripled in ten years and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965). Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six Million. Most of these claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the majority of the 3 million Jews who experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe are, in fact, very much alive. It is a resounding confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during the Second World War can only be estimated at a figure in thousands. Surely this is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right to compound it with vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great European nation, as well as wringing fraudulent monetary compensation from them? RICHARD HARWOOD is a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University of London. Mr. Harwood turned to the vexed subject of war crimes under the influence of Professor Paul Rassineir, to whose monumental work this little volume is greatly indebted. The author is now working on a sequel in this series on the Main Nuremberg Trial, 1945 -1946.