How I Became a Revisionist

Many revisionists have a strange or unusual background, one which would never have predicted that they would join with such a group of “masochists.” My story is of the same kind.

My parents were born and lived in Antwerp, in the center of the Jewish neighborhood, together with some ten to fifteen thousand mainly Chassidim Jews. Contrary to how it was in France, Germany, Poland, etc. there was no anti-Semitism in the Low Countries, as the Netherlands and “Belgium” together were then called. The Catholic Flemish people lived with the Antwerp Jews, who were largely involved with the diamond trade and cutting, and which provided many Flemish people also a good living.

In May 1940 the Germans arrived and after a few days Belgium was overrun and our country came under a German military government (Militärverwaltung). In France and Holland the Germans installed a Zivilverwaltung, which was stricter and less lenient than what was imposed on us.

The state of Belgium is an artificial construction, composed of two cultures, and constructed after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. The southern part of Belgium is French-speaking, and impregnated by the ideals of the French Revolution. In the northern part of Belgium live the Germanic-rooted Flemish Dutch-speaking folk. From the start of the state of Belgium in 1830 a Flemish autonomist movement (similar to how it was in Québec, or with the Basques, Catalans, etc.) came up, becoming more and more powerful.

My parents were not politically involved. They didn’t join the many Flemish pro-German and National-Socialist formations. Nevertheless, the Flemish population in general sustained the German occupiers (because the Germans by the romantic tradition of the 19th century supported the “Germanic” Flemish people), but the situation changed after the Stalingrad defeat when it became clear that Germany was not going to win the war.

In our family four children were born during the war. My mother told me we were never hungry and did not have any other severe problems. Our house was situated next door to the Jewish main synagogue. In 1942 anti-Jewish demonstrations started, without much approval by the people. The synagogue was damaged, but our house (we had Jewish tenants living with us) was not harmed.

In September 1942 the Germans and Antwerp police began to round up Jews, mostly those who had immigrated recently from Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, but not the Belgian Jews. And, of course, the Gestapo rang at our door too, which was opened by my (again pregnant) mother. My mother was not tall and did not look very Germanic. On the contrary! She was small and had long raven-black hair.

The Gestapo man asked her: “Bist du Arier?” (“Are you Aryan?”). My mother, being a simple housewife and not politically involved, was frightened by the question and thought this “being Aryan” must be something very bad. She answered: “Nein, No”. Moreover, the Gestapo found a few Jewish women tenants in the basement where we lived, so my mother was suspected of “Judenhilfe” (helping to hide Jews). She was arrested and put in the prison at the Gestapo-headquarters in Antwerp, which was located in the same neighborhood in a building next to the house of her mother.

When my father came home that evening and the family told him what had happened, he went to the Gestapo-office to explain the situation. My father’s mother was from Germany and my father himself was, before the war, a sales-representative of German manufacturers of glassware. The Gestapo made no problems, they were kind and very correct, and they apologized. And so my mother had the good fortune to see me (and her 3 other little children) the day after!

None of this is a big deal but it makes clear that I was not at all raised in a political right-wing or National Socialist or racist family. We were just traditional Catholics, like almost everybody in the Flemish middle-class. We did not treat much with politics and, being Flemish, we were rather positive towards the Germans who had granted a lot of political rights and benefits to the Flemish Movement. For National-Socialist Germany, Flanders belonged to their Germanische Gemeinschaft—the Germanic Community/commonwealth.

After the war a tsunami of political violence flooded over Flanders, especially over those who had participated in the Flemish Movement. Approximately 160.000 persons were charged and/or put in prisons for months, some for years, while others lost their jobs, their houses, their political rights, and were outlawed. I have seen how even in Catholic schools they pestered and mistreated children of collaborators, and this revolted me profoundly. Seeing this was the beginning of my political (and later revisionist) awakening.

When I was 11 years old my father died. I was away at boarding school at the time and I do not remember him well. But he left me, unintentionally, an important legacy. After his death I left the boarding school and went back to that huge house, next to the synagogue, and explored all the rooms, attics, cellars, where I discovered one day a lot of copies of the famous monthly German propaganda magazine Signaal. This was to my eyes better stuff than the Old and New Testament, the Catechism, etc. with which our priest-teachers were indoctrinating us every day (while at the same time they were hypocritically discriminating against the children of the collaborators).

I could not stop looking at all of those bright Germans, the soldiers, the boys and girls of the Hitlerjugend in nice uniforms, the Stukas, U-boats, the pictures of farmers and workingmen, full-color pictures and illustrations, actors, buildings, etc. I was without doubt compellingly, esthetically brainwashed by that magazine Signaal. After a short time I left the Catholic youth formation, Christus Rex, and joined a small Flemish nationalist youth organization, and later on their political parties.

In those years I, like everybody, believed in the gas-chambers, and could only raise the “argument” that there were not 6 million killed, but “only” one million. This was not really a successful argument! The whole gas-chamber hoax was a heavy burden for me, because our enemies condemned our political aspirations by saying: “Nationalism ends in gas-chambers.” What could we answer? Then came the first researchers—Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier in France, Peter Kleist in Germany. And then suddenly Richard Harwood, Thies Christophersen, Stäglich, Butz, Faurisson, Zündel and many others. Immediately I started to translate and publish in Dutch and later in French and German: It was the beginning of a long odyssey, which I followed for almost 40 years. I’m now 72 and still in the “revisionist business.”

Anti-Semitism is a strange phenomenon for me. When I was a child I saw those orthodox Jews every day in the streets around me. The Chassidim are special (not to say “weird”), but for me they were an everyday experience. When you grow up with people, it’s impossible to hate them, because they are too familiar. Moreover, those people were peaceful, hard-working, living apart in their own small world, and disturbing nobody.

When, a few years ago, I was arrested and put in jail in Heidelberg, I asked Michael Rosenthal, a German-Jewish lawyer, to be my Pflichtverteidiger (court-appointed lawyer). He accepted. I told him about my mother and my youth and he represented me in such a manner that I was the only revisionist publisher in those days who was released without being convicted, while all others got prison-sentences. Thank you God/Jahweh (and Mr. Rosenthal, of course)!

Modern Jewry is not the Jewry I experienced when I was a child. Modern Jewry is fanatical, racist and

mainly Zionist. In my opinion the Jews have chosen the wrong road by devoting themselves to a racist Zionism, that which is practiced by Israel. Modern Jews have an illness. The word for it in German is: Überheblichkeit (hubris) They are brainwashed with the dogma that they are God’s chosen people and that God has given to them exclusively a beloved country. It creates a situation whereby nobody likes them. Unfortunately, Jahweh made a big mistake. He allowed Arabs to take over that beloved country for fifteen centuries. It doesn’t look as though Obama is going to make much of a “change” in that mess.