Days of Remembrance

The front cover also bears the inscriptions: “This book was produced with the assistance and cooperation of the International Center for Holocaust Studies of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith./OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE.” U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988 (207-121-814/80028). 96 pages, 27.6 x 21 centimeters. 27 illustrations plus two maps.

Although reviewers customarily place their value judgments of books toward the ends of their reviews, I can not refrain from stating my evaluation at the outset: This book is an outrage. Although the book takes a strongly biased position on a controversial historical question of great importance, all American taxpayers have been forced to pay for its production. This book is an outrage against those members of our armed forces who are sincerely trying to provide security for the United States. It is an outrage against historical reality. It is an outrage against the most important European member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), namely Germany, without whose cooperation the defense of western Europe would hardly be possible. No book could be better calculated to play into the hands of the Kremlin by causing disunity amongst the member nations of the NATO. It repeats propaganda lies against the German nation which have been disproved by competent scholars. How can we Americans expect Germans to tolerate the mendacious abuse against them in this book and still cooperate in the defense of western Europe? Finally, it is an outrage against persons of German extraction who pay taxes to the United States.

The contents of this book are largely a compilation of quotations from the works of various authors, with occasional brief comments on them (pp. 22-88). Prominent amongst these quotations are those from the works of Elie Wiesel, whose improbable tales, self-contradictions and arrogant reproach of President Reagan on his famous visit to the cemetery in Bitburg have made him the object of derision by revisionists. A work frequently quoted also is Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, which was reviewed in Bulletin 21.

This book contains a good many samples of the errors and absurdities which have caused many people capable of independent critical thought to suspect that the “Holocaust” material is essentially a fraud propagated with well calculated purposes. Limitations of space allow us to mention only a few examples.

On page 18 the statement is made that German forces were “within 20 miles of Moscow” on 22 June, 1941. In reality, they were, at their closest, about 500 miles from Moscow on that day, the day on which “Operation Barbarossa” commenced. Such an elementary mistake about the basic history of the Second World War must make the reader question the reliability of the contents of the book as a whole.

On the same page there is also repeated the long-disproved absurdity of the claim that fat from corpses of Jews was used to manufacture soap. For the disproof, see The Journal of Historical Review, Volume I, no. 2, pp. 131-139, where the origin of the absurdity is traced to a false interpretation of the initials “RIF” on some soap (i.e., Reichsstelle fuer Insustrielle Fettversorgung – National Office for the Supply of Industrial Fats) as “Rein Juedisches Fett' (= purely Jewish fat).

On page 39 the claim is made that in one (unspecified) camp 36 ovens were capable of “burning 500 bodies an hour.” It takes only a little fifth-grade arithmetic to calculate that this means that each unit could reduce to ashes approximately eleven bodies an hour, while even modern crematory units require about two hours for one body. A somewhat similar absurdity occurs on page 68, where it is claimed that in the spring and early summer of 1942 “hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka.” Assuming 200,000 Jews every day and a period of 120 days, that would mean the gassing of 24,000,000 Jews, many times the maximal number of Jews under German control, which has been estimated at about 3,800,000.

On page 47 the book is spiced up with a sort of Freudian episode, viz., the claim that the camp commander at Flossenburg masturbated at the sight of inmates being tortured.

On p. 48 the claim is made that bodies were burned in “large trenches” at Auschwitz, which was in an area with a high level of ground water. Bodies require a great deal of fuel and oxygen to reduce them to ashes, so that it would not make sense to burn them in pits, where the supply of oxygen would be limited, even if there were no problem of ground water seeping into the pits.

On Page 93 it is claimed that the Wannsee Conference held in January, 1942 planned “the annihilation of the Jewish people.” (Never mind the fact that only a modest fraction of the Jewish people was ever under German control.) Anyone who has ever read carefully the text of the minutes of this conference could note that it contains no such plans, rather plans for the deportation and employment of Jews. (These minutes are known as the “Wannsee-Protokoll,” of which only one copy is known out of 30 which were supposedly prepared and classified as secret.) As Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyons has pointed out, the Wannsee-Protokoll even contemplates the eventual release of the inmates in the phrase, “bei Freilassung.” Also on page 93 there is even confusion about the dates of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, which started on 19 April, 1943.

The map on page 33 claims that the following numbers of Jews from various countries were “murdered”:

Of the six million or so Jews commonly claimed by Zionists to have been “murdered” while in German captivity, the other nearly five million thus claimed were living in countries occupied or partly occupied by the USSR before June, 1941. During or after the war, the Baltic republics, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, central Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania were all made part of the Soviet empire with little real sovereignty. For that reason we are dealing with statistics pertaining to Jewish mortality during the war which originated from areas held by communists, who have a strong interest in exaggerating statistics on alleged German crimes in order to make obscure the crimes which the USSR itself committed, such as the Katyn massacres, the genocidal starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, etc. (For an example of the Communist falsification of statistics, see pp. 98-106 of Alfred Schickel's Vergessene Zeitgeschichte, which was reviewed in Bulletin 18.)

Approximately three million Jews migrated to Palestine after 1939 in addition to huge numbers of them who migrated to various other countries throughout the world. The 90,000 mentioned on the map on page 33 in the case of France are just a little more than one-tenth of the total living in France according to the Wannsee-Protokoll of 20 January, 1942. In view of the fact that the Jewish populations of western Europe were aging as a result of low reproductive rates, natural attrition could easily account for the 90,000 deaths if the number given in the Wannsee-Protokoll, 865,000, is correct. We also know from a Zionist source (Maurice Bisgyer's Challenge and Encounter, 1967) that approximately as many Jews were living after the war in what is now the territory of the German Federal Republic as there were in 1939 (see Bulletin 9). Even Days of Remembrance, page 33, concedes in fine type under the map: “There is no way to establish an accurate figure for the total number of Jews murdered in the Final Solution.” Indeed! If the real number of Jews who died from one cause or another while in German captivity could ever be determined, it would probably be a quite modest one in comparison with the number of Germans murdered during the expulsions after the war (see Bulletin 18) or the number of Ukrainians deliberately starved to death in the early 1930s by the Communists. The chaotic conditions and corpses of victims of diseases in such camps as Bergen-Belsen at the time they were liberated by advancing Allied armies furnished shocking pictures, but what fraction of six million do these corpses represent? Such conditions were largely caused by the paralysis of transportation facilities by Allied bombings and the general scarcity of food in Europe as a result of the Allied blockade. For a detailed analysis of the difficult subject of the extent of Jewish mortality during the Second World War, see Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry (1983). For a brief summary of the evidence against the Extermination Thesis in general, see Bulletins 14 and 15.

The historical distortions which Days of Remembrance projects are even more a result of what it does not contain than what it does contain. The central fault of this book lies in the fact that it presents only one side of an important argument and that the book was published at the expense of all American taxpayers. Many books written by Zionist authors and by lackeys of Zionists are recommended in the sections entitled “Further Reading” (pp. 32, 38, 53, 60, 70, 83), but not one revisionist title of the growing number of them concerning the Extermination Thesis is included. There is no mention of the genocidal threats against the German people in such a book as Germany Must Perish (1941), the massacres of the German population in the Bromberg area in September, 1939, the hunger blockade of the European continent from 1939 to 1945, the fact that partisan warfare (p. 81) and typhus epidemics (see Bulletin 13) were important reasons for the decision, finally, to intern the Jews 2-1/2 years after the outbreak of the war, the irresponsible demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, the useless bombing of Dresden, etc. As we know today, the Germans' fears of genocide were well founded, since about 3,000,000 of them died at the end of the war and during the following year or so in conjunction with the brutal expulsion actions (see Bulletin 23).

There is no mention of the shameful Allied Operation Keelhaul, in which hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Russians were turned over to almost certain death at the hands of Stalin. No mention is made in the book of our interning persons of Japanese descent within a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, presumably for reasons of military security. By contrast, German authorities were so dilatory about interning Jews that as late as April, 1943, some 32 months after the outbreak of the war, there were still so many Jews left in the Warsaw ghetto that they were able to hold off German military forces for weeks during their uprising.

There is no mention of the facts that Hitler's hostility toward Jews was partly a result of American influences and that eugenic sterilization (to which the book makes a number of references) was not introduced in Germany until 1933, long after the practice had commenced in the United States (see Bulletin 5 and 21). Were the compilers of this book too ignorant to have pointed out such facts or were they simply too dishonest to have done so? Although it is argued (pp. 39 and 71) that the suffering of Jews in Europe during the war was unique, no mention is made of the genocidal, deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians during the early 1930s by the Communists (see Bulletin 7), for example. Finally, Days of Remembrance avoids any objective analysis of the main reasons for the hostility toward Jews so prevalent throughout Europe after 1917; the perception that Communism, with its gross cruelty, was essentially a Jewish phenomenon and the perceived economic gains which Jews made at the expense of their host populations as a result of the hyperinflations in central and eastern Europe.

Although such nonsense and questionable, biased material as that which has been enumerated above are commonly contained in other Zionist publications, it is quite frightening to contemplate their occurrence in a book published by “our” Department of Defense, a book which even includes strong recommendations for it over the signatures of President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. These recommendations (pp. 2 and 3) are in the form of letters dated 8 February, 1988 and accompanied by the smiling portraits of these two gentlemen. There can thus be no doubt that President Reagan and Secretary Carlucci must be held responsible for the publication of this book, with its prejudiced, irresponsible and mendacious contents.

Another frightening aspect of this book is the detailed set of instructions for indoctrinating U.S. military personnel (pp. 6-21), which even include sample plans for a ceremony. The compilers of this book are so confident that such indoctrination of military personnel will be extended over a period of many years that they even include observation dates projected for the years 1988 to 2000 (p. 16).

A sharp bone which keeps sticking in the throats of the Zionists, however, are the silence and inaction by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not only that, important Jews close to Roosevelt, such as Rosenman, Lehman, Baruch and Frankfurter showed little concern about the “Holocaust” alleged to have been taking place at the time (pp. 67-68). Could it be that these men, with their access to all sorts of intelligence reports, had no “Holocaust” with which to be concerned? Roosevelt, with his nearly pathological hatred of Germans, would certainly have shouted into many microphones about a “Holocaust” if one had actually been going on. Why, too, did Pius XII maintain his famous “silence” about the alleged extermination actions?

In one of the most frightening passages in the whole book, “Rudolf, son of a Nazi, interviewed by Peter Sichrovsky” declares that he had decided to put an end to his noble lineage by never having any children as a result of his feeling of guilt (pp. 85-86). Germany, in fact, has such a low birthrate that during the coming years its aging population will shrink rapidly, to be replaced by immigrants from many lands.

Why was Days of Remembrance published at a time when the world is aghast at the almost daily criminal behavior of the Jewish state in Palestine? Is the purpose of the book to gain some sort of sympathy and understanding for Jewish members of the armed forces? That could hardly be the case because at present there are extremely few Jewish members of the armed forces. Was the purpose of the book to combat the traditionally hostile, widespread attitudes toward and distrust of Jews on the part of the American officer corps, attitudes intensified by the Israel attack on the “Liberty”? Was the purpose to justify our role in Europe during and after the Second World War, a war which left nearly half of Europe (west of the western boundaries of the USSR as of 1938) under the tyranny of the Communists and which left the nations which had fought Communism in economic and physical ruin? Or was there a more immediate purpose? Is the Department of Defense contemplating the possibility that our troops will be ordered to defend the criminal Jewish state in Palestine, which has come to be such an abomination to so many Americans? Whatever the motivations for publishing this book at the expense of the American taxpayers, its publication calls for a loud protest. Is the publication of this book an act which none dare call treason? We shall probably be justified at some future time in considering the publication of this book a major blemish on the eight-year administration of Ronald Reagan.

Charles E. Weber, Ph.D., is Chairman of Committee for the Re-Examination of the History of the Second World War. This review was published in CRHSWW Bulletin #25.