Germar Rudolf / Galileo Revisited

Germar Rudolf speaking at a gathering organized by the Institute for Historical Review in California in 1999.

The story goes that when Galileo faced his inquisitors, they showed him the instruments of torture. Now whatever else he may have been, Galileo was also a physician, so he knew what metal does to flesh, hence he recanted.

Not so Germar Rudolf.

It’s also said that, in his recantation, Galileo crawled across the floor to his accusers.

Not so Germar Rudolf.

I first came across Germar while writing my own My Life as a Holocaust Denier recounting my own experiences subsequent to the 2005 publication of The Holocaust Wars. It was a letter written by Germar from his cell in Stammheim prison.

The letter examines why Rudolf became a Holocaust revisionist and why he was prepared to pay such a terrible price. The fact is that Germar Rudolf was never much interested in World War II or, for that matter, in the Holocaust. What interested him were the whys and wherefores of lies, delusions and propaganda. Why are they created, how are they propagated, maintained and enforced, and why do we believe in them? So for Rudolf, Holocaust propaganda is not an historical issue but an ideological issue. Nor does there seem to be any single motive for Rudolf’s interest, rather a mixture of personal history and personality. From childhood, he tells us, he was blessed or cursed with an insane curiosity and with what he describes as “a greatly overdeveloped sense of justice.” We also learn that he was brutalized by his father.

At the age of five he learned of the post-war expulsion of millions of Germans from East Germany and Eastern Europe, and it is from then that he dates his interest in history. He became “a very patriotic German – still within the mainstream yet at the right edge of it.”But, never did he touch upon the Holocaust topic. “The usual claims about it seemed indubitable, undeniable to me, truth chiseled in stone, self-evident.”

But in 1989 he came across the writings of Paul Rassinier, the father of Holocaust revisionism, and everything changed. On his liberation, Rassinier, a former French communist, partisan fighter and eventual inmate of Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps, began to hear stories of mechanized exterminations in Buchenwald – a claim he knew to be untrue, because he had been there – so he wondered what anyone might wonder: If they can lie about that, what else can they lie about? And for the young German patriot Rudolf: “He opened my eyes and allowed doubts. Not more, just doubts.” 

Like all post-war Germans, Rudolf had been raised not to doubt, which in itself maddened him, as did the increasing persecution in Germany of anyone who raised the issue.

“[…] at once I knew – and a little research confirmed it – that who doubts or dissents is relentlessly ostracized, persecuted, and even prosecuted with no chance of defense. So I said to myself: This is outrageous, unacceptable, against all norms and ideals of this society, and the fact that there is no other topic where dissent is more severely suppressed is evidence enough for me that it is also the most important topic. He who is sure of being truthful is relaxed; only liars call for earthly judges.”

“Give me a meaning of life!” young Germar had demanded, and now he had found it. When so many powerful people worked so hard to stop one peaceful dissident, it must be because he has something that can, and will, rock the world. It was that simple.

“I was sure I was right, and unless I was convinced by rational, scientific arguments that I was wrong, I was not going to give in. They made the mistake to provoke the blood out of me by persecuting me. That’s it. No negotiations any more. It’s me or them now. My father didn’t manage to break me with stick, whip, fists or by using me as a missile, and so they won’t break my will with violence either. It only gets stronger with every beating.”

That is Germar Rudolf: a bloody-minded contrarian with enormous willpower.

“The only way to take this away from me is by killing me. Period. Anybody who punishes me for merely exercising my human right of being a human, a creature able to doubt and explore, will meet my utmost unbreakable resistance. I won’t allow anybody to reduce me to a submissive slave. Nobody.”

Germar Rudolf, along with Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson, David Irving, Jürgen Graf, Udo Walendy, Carlo Mattogno, Erhard Kempner, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Michel Adam, Pedro Varela, Gary Lauck, Günter Deckert and many, many others have paid, and are paying, a terrible price and none more terrible than the price obviously paid by Rudolf as indicated in the dedication of his Lectures on the Holocaust.

“For Tamara, Kay and Natalie. Hoping that one day they will understand.”

I first met Germar in 2010. He’d recently come out of prison, and two more contrasting beings you could not hope to meet. As we walked along – a tall (6 feet 5 inches) powerfully-built, totally focused German scientist and a not-so-tall (5 feet 6 inches, not so powerfully built and certainly not so focused) Jewish navel-gazer, we talked against a constantly shifting backdrop including a pizza bar in Leicester Square, the Sussex Downs, a Brighton hotel room, Brighton beach and Beachy Head.

During three days in his company he spoke about aspects of the Holocaust and Holocaust revisionism, his own struggle, his erstwhile Catholic faith, Germany and Germans then and now, the Third Reich and Hitler, his own present state and relationships, and his hopes and fears for the future and many other topics. Speaking fully and fluently in English and with an astonishing grasp of facts and interpretations, I estimate he must have talked for at least a solid eight hours – and never, never, not once did he repeat himself.

At one point (I think we were somewhere on the path up to Beachy Head) I referred to the extraordinary wartime achievements of the German military, and this most self-contained of Germans permitted his voice to choke with pride.

Resistance Is Obligatory

Germar Rudolf: “Resistance Is Obligatory.” 376 pages, 6″×9″, with color illustrations, $35 from The Barnes Review. The book is also available from Castle Hill Publishers in the UK. A German version entitled “Widerstand ist Pficht” appeared in March 2012. Die deutsche Fassung als kostenlose PDF-Datei!

In 2006 Germar faced the District Court in Mannheim where he was charged with “inciting the masses“ (Holocaust denial to you and me). Such a trial inevitably contains much that is bizarre, but none more than the Kafkaesque situation whereby any defense which tries to demonstrate that has been said is true is, by definition, committing the same offense. As Germar said:

A defense based on the facts of the case was impossible, and if attempted regardless, it merely would have exacerbated my situation, because in trying to prove that my views are correct I would have repeated once more the very crime of violating state dogma for which I was on trial in the first place.

So since any defense was impossible Germar determined “…to treat the upcoming trial as an opportunity to document the Kafkaesque legal conditions now prevailing in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to write a book about it after the trial was over.”

So, from 15 November 2006 to 29 January 2007, after much of the trial was completed and as he awaited verdict and sentence, Germar addressed the court.

It didn’t help of course. Unmoved by his arguments, the court sentenced him to 30 months imprisonment and ordered his Lectures on the Holocaust, to be confiscated and burned. In addition, the public prosecutor initiated another criminal investigation against Rudolf, because he had tried to publish his defense speech from his prison cell.

But that really wasn’t the point because Germar wasn’t all that interested in the court. As he wrote in the introduction of the book he published five years later:

“I have prepared these lectures not primarily for [the court and the judges] but rather for posterity and the whole world: for you, dear reader, who is now holding the book in your hands.” 

This then, is Resistance is Obligatory. If you buy this book, you will hear Germar Rudolf on many matters: truth-seeking as the essence of human dignity, the conflict between the truth-seeker and the state, the meaning of science, justice and resistance in the Federal German Republic and elsewhere. You will find appendices documenting countless motions to the courts and their rejections, letters to distinguished historians and their craven and sometimes less-than-craven replies. You will read these and many more things. Finally, you will hear the court’s verdict and the sentence.

But back to Galileo. When Galileo faced his inquisitors, all so very sure that the sun went round the earth, he of course knew they were wrong. But did not his accusers, clever, educated, sophisticated men all, also not know they were wrong? And when Germar Rudolf faced his accusers and they told him that in locking him up for a dissenting view of history they were promoting democracy and free speech, Germar of course knew they were wrong. But again, perhaps not so deep down, know that they were wrong too?

It makes you want to weep.

Germar’s book is called Resistance Is Obligatory.

UK: https://www.vho.org/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=351
USA: http://www.barnesreview.org/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=555

Rudolf's original introductory paper to his book can be found here:
http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2012/volume_4/number_1/resistance_is_obligation.php

A German edition can be bought here:
https://www.vho.org/shop/index.php?language=de&main_page=product_info&products_id=349

The German edition is also available as a free download:
http://germarrudolf.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Widerstand.pdf
[email protected]