Forked Tongues

It should come as no surprise to anyone over the age of twelve with an average intelligence that governments lie. Not just other governments, but the government that collects taxes from you and me lies as well. It appears to be an historical constant– governments lie to their citizens. They also lie to each other. And they lie to each other's citizens. They lie to expand their power, and to justify its expansion. They lie to keep that power from shrinking. Nevertheless, there is hope in this pitiable state of affairs. For it seems, lies aren't always effective, at least, not forever. As Abraham Lincoln is quoted saying, “[Y]ou can't fool all of the people all of the time.”

Sadly, it seems, that too is a lie. Honest Abe never said it. (SEE: Fake Lincoln Quotes Nevertheless, the most effective lies are the ones the receiver of the lies wants to be true. People believe lies, and fervently clutch them to their bosoms when they fill a need.

During times of war, especially, governments lie. Feeling threatened, citizens naturally believe the lies of government, since government, in these times, takes on the role of protector of the people. In this way war becomes the Miracle-Gro fertilizer of political power. Citizens gladly relinquish their liberties in a time of national crisis in exchange for security, and though governments promise to return these liberties once the threat is defeated, it seldom gives back all that it has taken. This is just one more lie people believe because it fills their need to believe that everything will be all right in the end and that their government is protecting their, rather than its own, interests in a time of war. What people need to realize is that the interests of the people and their government – even in a republic – do not always coincide.

A pile of Auschwitz Shoes

During war, governments paint their enemies as being opposed to everything that is right, good, and true. World War Two was no different. During that war, all of the belligerents lied about the governments they were fighting.

The Nazis proved particularly fertile ground for wartime lies. This is because everyone could find something repellent in the National Socialist doctrine. The communists hated German nationalism. Democrats, libertarians, and old-style conservatives hated the Nazi “leadership principle” and centralized authority embodied in National Socialism. Jews were stirred to action against Nazism by its virulent anti-Semitism, except those radical Zionists, some of whom later became leaders of Israel, who saw the Nazis as natural allies in their dream of a establishing a Jewish state.

As a result, a major portion of the world's population was prepared to listen to, and believe, anything negative about Hitler and his Nazis. Hitler's Germany had a real credibility problem. Even the club-footed Dr. Goebbels, Hitler's chief spin-meister, could not overcome it when it came to the controlled, wartime, Allied press.

Even today, when all that remains of the scary Third Reich are some scratchy black and white newsreel clips shown regularly – with appropriate commentary – on the History Channel, it is still taboo, and – in some countries illegal – to discuss that era with anything other than total disdain and condemnation.

The problem with this viewpoint is that it protects the lies told by the establishment that survived World War II from objective scrutiny. Revisionists are consequently viewed with suspicion when some of the more blatant lies told by the Americans, the Soviets, and the British during the war, and after the war, are exposed for what they are. Revisionist motives are assumed to be a sinister desire to rehabilitate the Hitler regime. People discount everything that portrays this conflict in terms other than the struggle of good against evil. Even when the lie is blatant, it has persisted for decades under the continued endorsement, and protection, of successor governments.

Take, for instance, the piles of old shoes found in warehouses at Auschwitz by the Soviets in January 1945. Photos of them were distributed around the world, and are still used in Holocaust literature. A pile of old shoes is even encased in glass and on display at the Auschwitz museum for tourists to ponder. Captions like “A warehouse full of shoes and clothing confiscated from the prisoners and deportees gassed upon their arrival” are attached to these old pictures. (Or see: the various captions of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum ) This makes the picture a fake. Though the photo may depict a real scene, the caption is false. According to Dino Brugioni, the CIA's expert on photo fakery and manipulation, there are four kinds of faked photographs, and one of them is false captioning (PHOTO FAKERY, p. 17). So the picture is a fake because the caption falsely describes the image.

The reason the caption is false is there is no evidence that this is the source of the shoes and clothing. More importantly, there is no credible evidence that prisoners and deportees were gassed at Auschwitz or anywhere else upon their arrival, and therein is the trick. The warped logic that supports the false caption attached to this old photo by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is circular, so don't be surprised while chasing it that we end up back where we started.

The contention of those who wrote the caption is that “prisoners and deportees [were] gassed upon their arrival” at Auschwitz. They have no bodies, no bones, and no graves to show, so they substitute a pile of shoes and clothes. The pile of shoes proves the gassings because shoes would not be there, but for the gassings. Except that this pile of refuse in an Auschwitz warehouse proves the prisoners and deportees were gassed no more than the shoes in your bedroom closet prove you were gassed.

It is not enough, though, to simply show that shoes prove nothing. What is needed is a logical reason for why a pile of shoes and clothes was found at Auschwitz in January 1945 by the Soviet Red Army, without the gassing of people being the explanation.

The challenge for revisionists then is to place the photo in its proper context. The answer lies in the Nazi “home front” of the war. Just as Americans were collecting scrap to help fight the war, so were the Germans. In fact, with the memory of the famine induced by the British blockade of Germany in the last war still fresh, the Nazis instituted a vigorous material recycling program.

American journalist Lothrop Stoddard wrote in his 1940 book about his visit to wartime Europe:

“What we in America call 'trash' must be carefully segregated into the following categories: (1) newspapers, magazines, or other clean paper; (2) rags; (3) bottles; (4) old metal; (5) broken furniture or about anything else that is thrown away. City collectors come around for this segregated trash at regular intervals. There are no private junk dealers. An all-seeing paternal state attends to even this petty salvage. Wartime Germany overlooks no details.”—Into The Darkness, page 108.

After its 1939 surrender, Germany extended this salvage program to occupied Poland. The same year Stoddard roamed Europe gathering material for his book, Hermann Göring, the head of the German war economy, issued a directive for the collection of raw materials. This general order from 1940 contained the following excerpts:

(SOURCE: “Document 1375-PS, Part 02 [translation]”, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume III: Documents 001-PS-1406-PS. District of Columbia: GPO, 1947. pp. 927-929.)

It is evident that from the beginning of the war that the German government was collecting scrap of all kinds in Poland to be sorted and reworked into products for the war effort and to fill critical civilian needs. This program was totally independent of any imaginary extermination program.

One piece of the puzzle is still missing. In order to place the photo and the current museum displays of old shoes in their proper context, it must be shown that Auschwitz played a role in this program of scrap collection for the German government.

Confirmation of this can be found in another German document, reporting on clothing stocks available to fill the needs of new prisoners expected to be incorporated into the concentration camp system in the late summer of 1944. In this report, the author notes that the camp populations were soon expected to more than double, and the SS would be hard pressed to clothe these 612,000 additional prisoners. In closing, the author of the report wrote:

“For the above-mentioned reasons I ask you, Gruppenfuehrer, to arrange for the necessary steps to be taken at the Reich Ministry of Economics, to obtain once more extra quotas for spinning yarn and leather, so that the extraordinary high demand for prisoners' clothing will be guaranteed. It should be pointed out to the Ministry of Economics that up to now enormous quantities of rags from the useless civilian clothing, from the individual campaigns in Auschwitz and other camps, that were delivered and placed at the disposal of the Reich Ministry of Economics, are being delivered. [sic]“

(SOURCE:Title: “IV. Selections From the Evidence on Important Aspects of the Case: B. The Concentration Camp System: Document NO-1990”, in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10. Vol. 5: United States v. Oswald Pohl, et. al. (Case 4: 'Pohl Case'). District of Columbia: GPO, 1950. pp. 388-392. Author: Department of the Army (USA), Accession Number: AC_94X_12474, Fulltext: TRANSLATION OF DOCUMENT NO-1990 PROSECUTION EXHIBIT 73)

In addition to being a center for the collection of civilian rags and other scrap material, Auschwitz also had a tannery as one of its enterprises. This tannery became the center of controversy a couple of years ago, when some enterprising Poles wanted to use the building as a discotheque.

Whether this building was actually a place where hides were tanned, or simply a place where scrap leather was processed is not clear. What is clear is that the caption the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has placed on this photograph and that others have placed on similar and related photographs are false. It is shameful that decades after Hitler's ashes were scattered in the wind, those who tout themselves as the leaders of the free world still lie about something so easily discredited.

This is what makes the task of the revisionist historian so thankless, and even dangerous. Anyone seen to be “rehabilitating Nazism” is viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. There is enough in the character of Nazism to raise hackles all across the political spectrum. Those who get upset at revisionists in this regard – particularly those who consider themselves libertarians – totally miss the point: in many cases, consciously so. The point to revisionism is not the rehabilitation of a long-dead regime. Nazism is not going to leap back to life if the Holocaust legend is discredited. God help us all, if the only thing that made Nazism unacceptable is the mass murder of Jews.

Yet, it seems this is the argument coming from the likes of the lesbian cabalist, Deborah Lipstadt. In her paranoid world, it seems everyone would be breaking out the armbands, if the Holocaust were not fervently believed: As if it had never occurred to anyone that state-sponsored murder was wrong before World War Two.

The point to revisionism is, and always has been, to revise the historical record to match the facts, and not to rehabilitate dead regimes. Libertarians should understand and support this effort. It is not the rehabilitation of a statist regime that is the focus of Holocaust revisionism. The point is the lies of the other statist regimes involved in the defeat and dismemberment of Germany need to be exposed. This is because the strong central governments that survived the war are as dangerous to people's rights and liberties as the ones that disappeared in 1945.

It should be plain to libertarians, as it should to everyone else who is not beholden to the current world order that the victors of World War Two lied about their enemies as much as the defeated did. These lies continue to be told nearly six decades after everyone should know better. The deeper question is why this is so. Ponder this. What utility do the victors in that war still derive from these lies, that six decades later some countries make the exposure of these lies illegal?

Whatever the answer, the facts remain. What we in America might call “trash” is enshrined and revered by some like holy relics of early Christian martyrs. Photos of it grace Holocaust-themed Websites across the Internet. It is revealing that shoes that substitute for victims continue to be used to bolster a belief in a substitute religion by a new, all-seeing, paternal state, and almost no one seems to think this is either odd or unsettling. Ponder that, when you take your recycle bin to the curb next week for the state to attend to this petty salvage. The current world order overlooks no details.