E. Michael Jones Takes on the Holocaust – Part One

Who is E. Michael Jones?

Dr. E. Michael Jones, erstwhile professor of English at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, is a very conservative Catholic who has written a number of books espousing a traditional Catholic perspective. He is a popular guest on interview shows in alternative media because of his strong, vividly expressed views. In particular, he is an unabashed critic of Jewish behavior and influence in politics, society and culture. As a critic of the USA’s pro-Israel foreign policy, he has been a frequent guest-commentator on Iran’s Press TV.

The worldview of E. Michael Jones is certainly not Hitlerian. To E. Michael Jones, the Jews are strictly a religious group that rejects Jesus and is thus in rebellion against Logos. He insists on a theological rather than an evolutionary understanding of Jewish behavior (in the manner of Kevin MacDonald). Jones rejects hereditary psychology even to the point of rejecting the proposition (widely accepted for the past several decades among psychologists) that IQ is largely a matter of heredity. He has even said on several occasions that a Black African raised by Germans would be in all important regards German. It is hard to imagine a more un-Hitlerian opinion than that.

In accord with the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, Jones regards the Jews as a people who live in error, for whom conversion to Christianity is the only proper and satisfactory solution. On that basis, Jones argues that he is properly speaking not an anti-Semite but a critic of what he calls “the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit,” having written a book with that title.

Nonetheless, the ADL lists E. Michael Jones in its top ten anti-Semites. The ADL’s profile of him says that he does not deny the Holocaust but instead “goes so far as to justify […] the Nazi Holocaust.” In fact, Jones never “justified” the Holocaust: he used to say that the Holocaust was a bad reaction to bad Jewish behavior. In other words, he accepted the Holocaust as a true story, and even incorporated it into some of his rhetoric – although for some years he has seemed open to the possibility that elements of the story might not be true (perhaps influenced by Bishop Richard Williamson’s famous espousal of Fred Leuchter’s findings).

The ADL’s assertion that E. Michael Jones does not himself dispute the Holocaust is now thoroughly obsolete. He began disputing the Holocaust circa publication of the October 2021 issue of his magazine Culture Wars, and seems to have adopted debunking of the Holocaust as a matter of primary importance, mainly because of what he now understands to be the detrimental effect of Holocaust propaganda on the Catholic Church. As of March 2022, his efforts to dispel the Holocaust narrative show no sign of abating.

The German Rebellion Against Guilt

When, for the October 2021 issue of Culture Wars, E. Michael Jones reviewed Katharina Volckmer’s novella The Appointment, which portrays a German woman suffering self-hatred because of Holocaust-propaganda, that was when he began to regard debunking the Holocaust as an important endeavor. The title of Jones’ review is: “The Repressed Returns to Germany.” Katharina Volckmer’s novella consists of a monologue delivered by a German woman living in England (Volckmer’s real-life situation) while she undergoes an examination by a Jewish physician preparatory to a sex-change operation. Jones argues that Volckmer’s “deliberately obscene and transgressive narrative” is a Trojan horse for her real message:

“No publishing house, either English or German, would have published this book if their editors understood what Volckmer is really saying about the real but hidden taboos which dominate Germany at this point in time.”

The monologue is about German self-hatred as the cause of wishing to become something else. The projected surgery is to be not only a sex-change but an ethnicity-change, because the protagonist expects to have a circumcised “Jewish cock.” To cease being German is the real point of the surgery.

The arbitrariness and injustice behind this German self-hatred are strongly implied by Volckmer. She contrasts the Germans to the English, about whom she says:

“[…] that they are free from the troubles of guilt. That because they won a war, they can always claim to think they were good. And they even have a Queen, and they always make it look like they only need to build memorials for themselves and not for the crimes they have committed elsewhere.”

This is a complaint about Holocaust memorials, and the fact that the British by contrast are not required to feel guilty for the indisputable war-crime of firebombing German cities. Volckmer thus implies that guilt in Germany’s case is really not about being right or wrong, but really only about losing a war.

Volckmer indicates the importance of Holocaust-propaganda in this guilt when, on the penultimate page, she refers to Auschwitz as:

“the foundation of all that we are today.”

What “we are today,” quite emphatically, is a self-loathing wreck of a human being.

Volckmer does not clearly dispute any accusations against the Germans. She refers near the end of the story to “Auschwitz, or what is left of it,” and Jones takes this as an allusion to the erosion of  Auschwitz’s credibility as a site of gassings. It could mean that, but in context, it is not at all clear: if it is such an allusion, Volckmer was careful to make it entirely ambiguous.

What she does indicate clearly is the infliction of guilt and suffering on the Germans, and the arbitrariness of it, and what kind of sickness in a German person’s soul can result from it.

Jones’ review of Volckmer’s book includes a lengthy (four-page) digression on the mistreatment of the Germans by the conquering Allies after the war, especially the deliberate starving of prisoners in the Rhine-meadow camps in 1945. In this section Jones relies very heavily on James Bacque’s books Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies. Jones believes that Germans are increasingly understanding the unreasonableness of the guilt that has been imposed on them, and that Volckmer’s novella is one manifestation of that, while the rumor (apparently false) of remains of German soldiers rising out of the soil of a former Rhine meadow camp during the disastrous Ahrweiler flood of July 2021 is another.

It seems that various Allied crimes against the Germans have been receiving significantly greater attention recently, because the President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, complained about this in a speech on the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden. She complained that some Germans were  using this admittedly very real event:

“Revisionistische Gedanken zu verbreiten. Deutsche Schuld klein zu reden. Sogar im Verhältnis zu den Millionen Opfern der Shoa.” (B. Bas, 13 February 2022)

“To spread revisionist ideas. To downplay German guilt. Even in relation to the millions of victims of the Shoah.”

The best way to minimize the influence of such heresy, if it were not already widespread, would be to ignore it. Evidently so many Germans are now reassessing history and rejecting guilt that the tendency can no longer be ignored.

Jones also sees Germany’s gigantic movement of resistance against coronavirus restrictions (whose adherents are known as Querdenker) as part of this rejection of guilt. Insofar as guilt is used to secure submissiveness, that may be true, but what is less likely is Jones’ explanation of how this rebellion was awakened. Jones thinks that quiet rejection of the Holocaust narrative is an important underlying cause of the massive anti-lockdown protests. However much we Holocaust Revisionists would like to claim this much influence, it is probably not the case. I learned of two figures in the Querdenker movement who have attracted attention by publicly disputing the Holocaust: one is Attila Hildmann, a Turk raised by German adoptive parents who was a celebrity author of vegan cookbooks until he began violating the Federal Republic’s speech-taboos, and the other is Nikolai Nerling, a former schoolteacher who calls himself Der Volkslehrer. Since Germans are pressured to refrain from saying everything that they might believe, so that prohibited ideas could be widespread in Germany without commensurate representation in public discourse, I asked Nikolai Nerling if he, having close familiarity with the Querdenker movement, thought that there was a relationship between opposition to coronavirus restrictions and skepticism about the victors’ history of the Second World War (especially the Holocaust and the Rheinwiesenlager), and his  answer was this:

“I’d say that people who are protesting the restrictions are generally more open to new views on historic events. There is some kind of awakening in this movement. Sadly many of the leading figures of the protests are still afraid of being called ‘Nazi’ so they are not willing/able to see the whole story behind this. Or perhaps they do see the story, but are afraid of talking about it openly. Nevertheless there are many occasions of great discussions among the protesters, who meet every Monday in hundreds of towns and cities.” (Nikolai Nerling, response to question, 19 February 2022)

So, if the growth of Holocaust Revisionism is not (as Jones supposes) an important underlying cause of the anti-lockdown protests in Germany, it is nonetheless a very likely effect.

A more important fundamental cause of this awakening seems to be the massive influx of “rape-u-gees” that was allowed under Angela Merkel, a trauma that has shocked many Germans (and Austrians) out of complacency. The two well-known Querdenker who also dispute the Holocaust, Nikolai Nerling and Attila Hildmann, happen to condemn mass-immigration too. Nerling has warned against being overrun with foreigners (Überfremdung) and “the extinction of the German people.” Hildmann, despite being an ethnic Turk, has accused Jews of wanting “to exterminate the German race,” and fled to Turkey in early 2021 before he could be arrested and prosecuted for Volksverhetzung and other offenses (M. Manakas, Der Standard, 4 November 2021).  (Nerling also fled Germany, taking refuge in Brazil for a time, but has now returned.) Dr. Erwin Annau is an Austrian Querdenker who has founded a colony for German refugees in Paraguay, the number one motive for which he identifies as Migrationskrise, the immigration-flood under Merkel in Germany and Faymann in Austria, which he calls “the greatest high treason in history” (E. Annau, 31 October 2016). From a very different perspective Niklas Frank, a very liberal journalist and son of Hans Frank, observes that the massive influx of undesirable immigrants allowed by Merkel has caused serious unrest among most Germans:

“I also loved very much when Merkel said, we will do it with the refugees. It was a good thing. […] But, also, as you can see, especially with Merkel and the refugees, everything changed, because the silent majority – as if it were Jews again – all this swamp is coming.” (Niklas Frank, BBC Hard Talk, 4 October 2021)

This shock of being flooded with undesirable immigrants in 2015, not some historical insight, seems to be the main impetus for a new, noncompliant attitude toward the postwar order that requires Germans always to apologize and to accept destructive impositions.

Part of the process of rejecting guilt can be, as Bärbel Bas complains, to relativize the accusations against Germans by showing that Germans have been victims too. However: to understand that the accusations used to make the Germans guilty and submissive were simply false will put the German rejection of guilt on a much more solid foundation than the (still legally permitted) relativist arguments that many Germans and Austrians (like Martin Sellner) have been using.

About Volckmer’s novella Jones of course makes some specifically Catholic observations. The monologist of The Appointment is a lapsed Catholic, and for Jones this is an important part of the tragedy. Jones argues that prior to Vatican II the Catholic faith was a barrier to the foreign social engineering that has damaged the German psyche, and that the changes made within the Church under Vatican II have allowed this social engineering to progress unimpeded.

Part Two will be about that.