Thoughts on the “Holocaust”

The dishonest label “Holocaust denier” is used to prevent questioning.

Source: American Dissident Voices broadcast, February 8, 1997; reprinted in Free Speech magazine, March 1997, Volume III, No. 3

by Dr. William L. Pierce

There has been a lot of commotion in the controlled media recently about Swiss bankers who supposedly are hiding the assets of various Jews who perished more than 50 years ago, during the Second World War, in the so-called “Holocaust.” The idea is that during the war Jews in Germany, France, and other European countries squirreled their money away in secret Swiss bank accounts so the Germans couldn’t get it. Then the Jews were hauled off to concentration camps or otherwise came to an end, and their money still remains in the secret Swiss accounts. The news stories have hinted that the Swiss bankers have been remiss in simply keeping the money in the accounts, rather than searching for heirs or turning it over to Jewish organizations. It has been suggested that billions of dollars of Jewish money is being kept from the Jews to whom it rightfully belongs. Jewish groups are demanding that the Swiss set up a fund immediately to reimburse “Holocaust” survivors.

The Swiss, who are proud of the integrity of their banking system, are naturally indignant about these Jewish allegations that they have behaved improperly. The outgoing president of Switzerland, Jean-Pascal Delamuraz, called the Jewish media campaign “extortion” and “blackmail.” The Jews and the media have responded by clamoring even more insistently that the Swiss should pay billions of dollars to the Jews. In fact they now have begun making demands against Sweden as well. The Jews claim that the Germans bought raw materials from Sweden during the war using gold that had been confiscated from Jews, and that now Sweden owes that gold to Jewish “Holocaust” survivors.

It’s really an amazing campaign. The Swiss bankers have said repeatedly that they have checked their inactive accounts in the past, and that they are holding at most a few million dollars which may belong to the relatives of Jews who died during the war, that it could not possibly amount to the billions of dollars the Jews are claiming, and that they have treated the accounts of their Jewish depositors just like they treat all of their accounts. Yet the media virtually ignore what the Swiss say and continue to raise a huge hullabaloo about the poor, persecuted Jews and how they are being done wrong by the Swiss and the Swedes. And, of course, the U.S. politicians are jumping into the act, demanding that the Swiss and the Swedes satisfy the Jews. It’s really amazing.

You know, I haven’t talked much in the past about the so-called “Holocaust,” because I’ve felt that really is a job for the historians, and I’m not a professional historian. Unfortunately, however, the “Holocaust” is one of those politically sensitive subjects which makes professional historians very nervous. Jews – and apologists for the Jews – have written literally thousands of “Holocaust” books during the past 50 years, and many of the claims made in these books are patently false. The professional historians know that, but they hesitate to say anything, lest they be branded as “Holocaust deniers” by the powerful Jewish organizations and by the controlled news media.

Because of this timidity on the part of the professionals, perhaps we amateurs really have an obligation to speak out more. This whole “Holocaust” business is a fascinating subject, and there’s much to be learned from looking into it, even if one isn’t a professional historian. Take, for example, the label of “Holocaust denier,” which is pasted on anyone who dares to ask questions about the “Holocaust.” If I comment publicly that the official figure for the number of Jews who died in the big concentration and labor camp at Auschwitz, in Poland, has been revised downward recently by the Polish government from an earlier figure of four million to about one million, and I suggest that perhaps that means that the famous figure of “six million” Jews killed by the Germans also needs to be revised downward – if I make such a suggestion, then I’m immediately denounced as a “Holocaust denier.” That’s the standard phrasing that’s been agreed on by all of the big Jewish outfits, the news media, the bought politicians, and so on: “Holocaust denier.” That’s what you’re called if you question anything about the official myth. It’s a crooked tactic. It deliberately makes it look like you’re denying that there ever was any such thing as a “Holocaust.” It’s a label that’s designed to make any questioner look like some sort of extremist who denies that anything at all happened to the Jews during the Second World War. That’s crooked, isn’t it?

I know that Jews were killed during the war. I’ve talked with German soldiers who shot Jews. In the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, the Germans found that virtually all of the Jews they encountered on the Eastern Front were Communist partisans, that Jews were heavily involved in Communist guerrilla activities, in sabotage, and in other hostile actions against the Germans. Often the only way to pacify an area was to round up all of the Jews and ship them off to a concentration camp or to shoot them. Most of the other folks on the Eastern Front – the Poles, the Ukrainians, often even the Russians – were happy enough to have the German Army get the Communists off their backs, but the Jews were fanatically pro-Communist. The Soviet Political Commissars who were attached to all Red Army units to spy on ordinary Russian soldiers and look for any signs of Political Incorrectness nearly always were Jews, and the German Army in many cases separated these Jewish Political Commissars from their Russian prisoners of war and shot the commissars.

I also know that Germans didn’t like Jews, and Hitler especially didn’t like them, and as a consequence the German government tried very hard to encourage Jews to leave Germany, even before the war. Laws were passed limiting Jewish participation in some professions – such as the law and publishing – where they were heavily overrepresented.

So I know that something did happen to the Jews in Europe both before and during the Second World War, and if they want to call that something a “Holocaust,” that’s all right with me. I don’t deny that something did happen. I don’t deny that there was a “Holocaust.” I’m just interested in checking the details, in checking the facts. But as soon as I or anyone else does that, we’re called “Holocaust deniers.”

That’s interesting, because the obvious intent of the people who use that label is to discourage us from asking questions. They don’t want the details checked. They don’t want anyone looking for any facts other than the official facts they present to us. And after being called a “Holocaust denier” a hundred times or so, I’ve come to believe that the reason they don’t want their facts checked is that they know that in many cases their facts are false. That’s really crooked – but I believe that to be an accurate assessment of the situation.

I first became interested in the “Holocaust” enough to want to check it out when I encountered some especially fanciful accounts by so-called “survivors.” I read accounts by Jews who claimed that they saw German soldiers grabbing Jewish babies by their legs and swinging their heads against brick walls to smash out their brains. One Jewess told of witnessing German soldiers carrying Jewish children one at a time up the stairs to the top of a building, throwing them off, and laughing when they hit the pavement below and were killed. Other Jews made the claim that they saw German guards separate Jews out from prisoners arriving at concentration camps, pour gasoline on them, and set them afire, right on the train platform. And there were other stories about Jewish prisoners with colorful tattoos being selected from the camps and then skinned so that their tattooed skin could be made into lampshades. Now, these stories just didn’t jibe with what I knew about the German Army and the German government during that period. I knew that the Germans didn’t like Jews, but I also knew that the German Army was the best-disciplined army in the world. I knew that they had a better record of behavior in the countries they occupied than any other army in the Second World War – including the U.S. Army. I had until that point believed the stories that the Germans had methodically herded the Jews into gas chambers. But I really doubted that any disciplined army would tolerate its soldiers just killing prisoners for sport.

If you saw the anti-German propaganda film which came out a couple of years ago, Schindler’s List, you will remember that it portrayed the German commandant of a labor camp shooting Jewish inmates with a hunting rifle from his balcony. That was the sort of thing I had questioned when I first encountered these stories. And yet, very few other people were questioning these accounts. Newspapers and magazines and books were reporting them as if they were unquestionably true.

I began looking into the matter in detail, and I discovered many interesting things. I discovered that some Jews had been killed, and I discovered the circumstances under which they were killed. I discovered that many more Jews simply died under the conditions that existed toward the end of the war, when malnutrition and disease were rampant in the prison camps. I discovered that the total number of Jews who were killed and who died of disease was substantially less than the six million claimed by the Jewish propagandists. Most important, I discovered that a great many lies had been told about what had happened during the “Holocaust.” I discovered that most of the tales about gas chambers – that is, the ones that could be checked out – were not true. I discovered that not a single one of the stories about bashing out babies’ brains or throwing children off buildings or shooting prisoners with hunting rifles for sport, à la Schindler’s List, could be substantiated, and that they were all almost certainly false.

All of this is interesting in itself; at least, it is interesting to me. It is a part of our history. I could talk all day about the details, about the facts that I discovered when I began looking into the “Holocaust,” but I don’t want to bore you. If you really want to know the details, write to the Institute for Historical Review. They’re experts, and they’re honest. Their address is:

Institute for Historical Review
P.O. Box 2739
Newport Beach, CA 92659

To me what’s even more interesting about the “Holocaust” story than all of the holes in it is the motivation behind it, the way the story is being used today, and the response of various elements of our society to it. Let’s go back for a moment to that deliberately misleading label of “Holocaust denier” that I mentioned earlier. If you’ve spent any time exploring the Internet – especially some of the political discussion groups on the Internet – you’ll have heard that term “Holocaust denier” often enough. It’s not that the “Holocaust” is a hot topic of discussion on the Internet. It isn’t. But it is discussed occasionally, along with just about every other topic under the sun, and it’s discussed openly, without fear. The Internet is just about the only place left where one can discuss politically sensitive topics openly. And that just drives the big Jewish censorship organizations crazy. They don’t want any open discussion of the “Holocaust.” They’re terrified of it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been especially loud in its complaints about the lack of censorship on the Internet. Without censorship, they complain, the “Holocaust deniers” can say anything they want. If we don’t censor the Internet, the “Holocaust deniers” can come right into your home and contaminate your child’s mind while he’s using his computer to do his homework.

They’ve tried to intimidate people into silence. They’ll have one of their own people claim to be a World War II veteran, and his standard line will be, “Hey, don’t try to tell me there wasn’t a Holocaust. I was there. I saw the bodies. So don’t try to tell me there wasn’t a Holocaust.”

Now, that sort of tactic may work on television, where they control the whole medium and no one can contradict them. But on the Internet people have been contradicting them. People have been saying, “Hey, we’re not trying to tell you there were no bodies. We just want to know how many bodies. We want to know how they died.” But they will not engage in a rational discussion with you. If one trick won’t silence you, they’ll try another. They’ll say, “What difference does it matter how many? If only one Jew were killed just for being a Jew, that’s a terrible crime. That’s a Holocaust.” That’s supposed to embarrass you into shutting up. But on the Internet you can come back and say, “Well, what about the Germans who were killed just because they were Germans. What about the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Hungarians who were killed by some Jewish Commissar just because they were anti-Communists? Don’t they count? Wasn’t that a crime for which someone should be held accountable?”

They don’t like to hear that. They really don’t. Try it sometime, if you have a thick skin and don’t mind having them shriek insults at you.

Their final line of defense is governmental force, governmental repression. If they can’t embarrass you into silence, they turn to the politicians and demand laws to make you shut up. That’s what they’ve already done in Europe and in Canada, where you can be jailed for being a “Holocaust denier” – which means, for questioning anything at all about what really happened. There are many people in German prisons now who made the mistake of saying, “Hey, I was a guard at such and such a prison camp during the war, and there was no gas chamber there.” In Britain, they already have laws against criticizing Jews, but they want the laws toughened, and so they’ve turned to the politicians. And, I’m sorry to say, the politicians in Britain are just about as crooked a lot as we have here. The chairman of the British Labor Party, Tony Blair, is a real piece of filth, of about the same quality as Bill Clinton. He hopes to be the new prime minister after the parliamentary elections coming up in May. He has announced, with a little prodding from the Labor Party’s Jewish backers, that when he is prime minister he will propose a new law making “Holocaust denial” a specific crime, so that anyone who questions whether or not there was a gas chamber in such and such a place can be locked up, just as in Germany.

And that’s what they want in America too. The Jewish lawyers and journalists and professors – and their Gentile collaborators – already are working hard to persuade people that the First Amendment to our Constitution needs to be scrapped, or at least rewritten. The Founding Fathers never intended to protect all types of speech, they say. They never intended to protect indecent or hurtful speech. And to deny the “Holocaust” is indecent and hurtful. They’re working hard on it. The trendier Gentiles already are falling into line. Believe me, they’ll be making a strong push to abolish free speech in America soon. They’ll tell us that it’s for our own good.

But it’s for their own good, not ours. That’s the most interesting insight I gained from checking out the “Holocaust.” I learned why they push it so hard, why they’ve made so many Hollywood propaganda films like Schindler’s List, why they’ve told so many whoppers about bashing out babies’ brains and making lampshades out of skinned Jews, why they talked the politicians into letting them have a Holocaust Museum in Washington, why they’ve gotten politicians at the state level to pass laws requiring that the public schools carry “Holocaust” indoctrination courses, and why they’re so desperate to stop people from asking questions.

It’s not just because they’re afraid of being exposed as liars if they stop defending their old lies with new lies. It’s not just because they hate the Germans and like to beat them over the head with the “Holocaust.” And it’s not just because they find the “Holocaust” a convenient excuse for the crimes they have committed and still are committing against the Palestinian people. There’s a much bigger reason than all of these things – and a much more dangerous reason for us, for our people. But you are an intelligent person with at least a little bit of open-mindedness, a little bit of mental independence, or you wouldn’t be reading this magazine. Why don’t you discover for yourselves why the Jews are so defensive about the “Holocaust,” why they are so afraid for anyone to ask questions about it? It’s an easy thing to do, and I believe it’ll be much more convincing if you find out for yourselves, instead of having me tell you. There are thousands of books out there that they’ve written. Go into any large bookstore or library and you’ll find books about the “Holocaust” by the top “Holocaust” promoters, Jews like Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal. Read these books with an open mind, with a questioning mind. Think about the claims they make. Then get a copy of our book catalog and read a couple of the books we sell – or  read some books from the Institute for Historical Review – and think about what you read in these books too. Make up your own mind. I believe you’ll find it an illuminating and rewarding experience.

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