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Paul Rassinier
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BACKGROUND
After the war, Rassinier returned to his native France and was elected to the Assemblee Nationale. He was awarded the highest decoration by the French government for his involvement with the Resistance during the war. Rassinier, who was trained in history, set out after the war to document his experiences within the German concentration camp system. The vivid and accurate depictions of life at Buchenwald and Dora should be read by any who are interested in the subject. Rassinier paints the horrible picture of the dead being brought from Dora to Buchenwald for cremation, "Every day trucks brought full loads of dead bodies from Dora to be cremated at Buchenwald, and it was from the prescence of these corpses that the horrors of the camp were deduced." (Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses p.38 hereafter HSLU) Rassinier details the alarming death rate at Buchenwald due to, "bad treatment, the poor and insufficient food, the super human work, the lack of medicines, and ... pneumonia" (HSLU p.44) It was following the publication of Rassinier's earliest works that he realized that the war-time stories of other inmates were both popular and terrible exaggerations. Rassinier wrote, "Then one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists. The deportees-many of whom were Communists- had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence." (HSLU p.109) Rassinier began to debunk and deconstruct the works of his fellow inmates. A tremendous effort was made to debunk Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews. Rassinier went as far as to predict that in the future, Hilberg's volume "will not be spoken of at all, or if it is still mentioned, it will only be mentioned in reference to something unworthy of notice except as an example of the most scandalous aberrations of our times." (HSLU p. 212) By now, Rassinier had become skeptical of the lurid gas chamber stories which were being circulated. He wrote, "In 1950, it was still too soon to pronounce a definite judgment on the existence of gas chambers in the camps; documents were wanting and those that existed were incomplete, inexact, and obviously apocryhal or falsified." (HSLU p.158) In the 1964 article, The Drama of the European Jews, Rassinier's view became more firm:
Rassinier had determined that no wide-spread gassings took place and that there was no policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He also provided revisionists with the first real quantitative analysis of Jewish wartime deaths. His final total put the range of Jewish deaths for the twelve years of Nazism between 987,592 and 1,589,492. (HSLU p.389-90). Many years later, Professor Arthur Butz, author of, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century basically accepted Rassinier's analysis and commented, "I will offer here no definite estimate of Jewish losses. However, I have no strong reason to quarrel with Rassinier's estimate." (Hoax p.17) Rassinier would later become even more certain about the falsity of the gas chamber claims. As a result of his studies, he made the following conclusion in The Real Eichmann Trial, "There never were any gas chambers, nor any exterminations by that method at Auschwitz-Birkenau." (Real Eichmann Trial p.98) By 1960, an important event occurred regarding Rassinier's works,
they were discovered by Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes who was noted for his
revisionist writing regarding World War I, had been publishing numerous
works to show that similar situation existed at the conclusion of World
War II. Rassinier's works made a tremendous impact on Barnes. Barnes made
reference to Rassinier in his article, Revisionism and Brainwashing
commenting on "the discouragement and smearing of outsiders like the distinguished
French historian Paul Rassinier, who sought to expose the exaggerations
of the atrocity stories." By the mid 1960's Barnes had completed having
Rassinier's works translated into English. Barnes then ran head-long into
the American publishing industry's self-imposed censorship. No publishing
house was brave enough to publish Rassinier's works. Barnes refused to be
silenced. He personally photocopied 40 copies of the typewritten English
translations and distributed them to his professional associates. By 1978,
thanks to the path-breaking work of Harry Elmer Barnes, The Noontide Press
was able to collect four of Rassinier's best works, The Crossing of
the Line, The Lie of Ulysses, Ulysses Betrayed by his Own, and
The Drama of the European Jews. These works are now made available
in an Institute for Historical Review edition.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATIONDate of Birth- March 18, 1906 PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
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AUL
RASSINIER is known as the father of Holocaust revisionism. Rassinier is
an unlikely man to have earned such a title. During World War II, Rassinier
was a highly decorated member of the French Resistance. In October
of 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo for various activities including
the smuggling of Jewish refugees over the Franco-Swiss border. Rassinier
was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald for his activities. Later
he would be moved to Dora where he would stay through the war's end.