Letters

Old the 'Wrong Side' Win?

In his recent Opening Statement to the London Court, David Irving said: “I shall not argue, and have never argued, that the wrong side won the [Second World] war, for example, or that the history of the war needs to be grossly rewritten.” I cannot go along with that. As I see it, in reality we were fighting the wrong enemy, or so it seems by the state of the world today.

Of all those who have been hounded and punished for bringing to light facts that are unpalatable for the “exterminationists,” Fred Leuchter, the subject of the “Mr. Death” film (reviewed by Greg Raven in the Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal) probably deserves more sympathy than any other, because his travails were not of his own making. In light of what happened to him and others, it is not altogether surprising that some revisionists might sometimes appear to be back-pedaling.

Whenever I have nothing especially pressing to read, I pull out back copies of the Journal, where I always find articles of interest. Quite often I get more out of a second reading. As I write this, I am thinking of the talk given by historian John Toland at the Tenth IHR Conference, “Living History” [published in the Spring 1991 Journal], in which he reminisces about his friendships with Leon Degrelle, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Otto Skorzeny, and so forth – each of whose books I have read.

S. A.
Caloundra, Qnsld.
Australia

'Myths' About Stalin and the Ukrainian Famine

In a letter in the Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal, “One-Sided Revisionism?,” K. W. charges that Mark Weber “uncritically” repeats “myths about socialist” regimes. He questions Weber's statement (in a previous Journal issue) that “by all accounts, the victims of Stalin, America's ally, vastly outnumbered those of Hitler, America's enemy.” K. W. asks, “By whose accounts?,” and rejects as unreliable such sources the “anti-Communist Hearst newspapers” and “the Hitler regime.” These, he goes on, are responsible for “spreading the hoax of a massive famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.”

But was this a hoax? Was it, as K. W. would have us believe, a “myth” about socialism?

Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the British daily Manchester Guardian, was one of the few Western journalists to visit the famine regions of Ukraine. In a 1933 report, he wrote:

On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants. The battlefield is as desolate as in any war and stretches wider; stretches over a large part of Russia. On the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other hand, solder members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they have reduced some of the most fertile land in the whole world to a melancholy desert.

Years later Marco Carynnyk asked Muggeridge about all this during a visit at his cottage in Sussex. (This interview was published in October 1983 by the Ukrainian Canadian Committee.) When he arrived by train in the Ukrainian countryside, Muggeridge recounted, “one could sense the state of affairs. Ukraine was starving, and you only had to venture out to smaller places to see derelict fields and abandoned villages … First of all, one feels a deep, deep, deep sympathy with and pity for the sufferers. Human beings look very tragic when they are starving.”

The famine, Muggeridge recalled, “was the big story in all our talks in Moscow. Everybody knew about it. Anyone you were talking to knew that there was a terrible famine going on.” This horror was not a natural phenomenon, he continued. “The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences of human suffering.”

Historian Bohdan Krawchenko, in “Collectivization and the Famine” (also published by the Ukrainian Canadian Committee), explains that Stalin's motive in brutally imposing collectivization was to industrialize the country as quickly as possible. For this he needed large quantities of grain that could be exchanged with the West for machinery and expertise. The collectivization process involved mass confiscation of peasants' land, livestock and grain reserves. With ever more ruthless seizures of grain from the farms, famine hit hard in 1932.

Accompanying this was mass repression by the semi-military GPU or NKVD of the “Kulaks” that is, the more diligent and successful peasant farmers who were also the leaders in resisting Soviet collectivization. Masses of Kulaks were shot or deported to Siberia, where most perished in the horrendous cold and deprivation.

During the height of the famine, Krawchenko notes, Stalin ordered a massive “purge” in Ukraine. This brutal campaign continued virtually uninterrupted until 1938, “claiming the lives of 80 per cent of Ukraine's creative intelligentsia. Thousands of priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were killed, as were that church's 35 bishops.” [See also: Valentyn Moroz, “Nationalism and Genocide: The Origin of the Artificial Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine,” in the Summer 1985 Journal.]

What was the toll in human lives? In his detailed 1986 study, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (pp. 301-306), historian Robert Conquest carefully concluded that “the total peasant dead as a result of the dekulakization and famine” was “about 14.5 million.” About half of this incredible total were famine victims, some three million of them children, and half were victims of “dekulakization” and forced “collectivization,” of whom some 3.5 million perished in the camps. About five million of the seven million famine victims were Ukrainians, or about 19 percent of the entire Ukrainian population.

Joseph Sobran wrote in his column of May 20, 1997, “The Forgiven Holocaust”: “Soviet Communism eventually killed tens of millions of people – nearly 62 million, according to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, a specialist in the study of 'democide' (his term for government mass murder) [in his 1990 book Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917]. In 1933 its record was already so bloody that Central Europe was terrified of the Communist threat that so many Western intellectuals preferred to see as the Great Progressive Hope.”

Contrary to what K. W. asserts, the imposed mass famine in Ukraine is no “hoax,” and the millions of victims of Soviet rule, especially under Stalin, is no “myth.” These authentic horrors are well documented.

J. C. M.
Imray City, Mich.
[by e-mail]

Not 'Reconstruction' But Falsification

In the Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal, page 13, the caption to the photograph of the “gas chamber” at the Auschwitz main camp, shown to many hundreds of thousands of tourists over the years, tells readers that this “is actually a postwar reconstruction.” (Similarly, on page 67 of this same Journal issue, readers are told that this “alleged gas chamber … is not in its original state.”)

This is, or could be, misleading because it implies that this room might be a faithful “reconstruction” of an original wartime homicidal “gas chamber.”

Over the years, “exterminationists” have called this a “reconstruction” because they have wanted to suggest that it is faithful to the original. For example, in a 1992 video entitled “David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper,” the Auschwitz State Museum senior curator said that today's Auschwitz main camp “gas chamber” was “very similar” to the original one. Piper was lying: it was not “very similar,” but rather crudely falsified.

David Cole, the young Jewish-American researcher who conducted the interview, could himself have immediately demonstrated this by showing Piper the authentic original blueprints that I discovered in 1976 and published in 1979.

For more than 20 years, I have repeatedly demonstrated that this “reconstructed” Auschwitz main camp “gas chamber” is really a falsification. I made this point most recently in the article “The 'Gas Chamber' of Auschwitz I,” published in this very same Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal issue (pp. 12-13). In that article I quoted two anti-revisionist historians who themselves have used the terms “false,” “falsifications,” “falsified” and “falsifying” in describing this “gas chamber.”

More than 25 years ago, in a letter of October 11, 1975, to the famous writer Andre Malraux, I wrote:

“I have just returned from Poland. I visited, Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. There the 'museographical frenzy' [a term used by French-Jewish historian Olga Wormser-Migot], in the matter of 'reconstructed' gas chambers, reaches proportions that I would have to describe as stunning if I were still subject to surprise at the base crassness that Man can invent when he lies.”

Robert Faurisson
Vichy, France

For Continued Pursuit

Thank you one and all for the great work, and for your continued pursuit of truth. I wish 1 could help more financially.

H. F. H.
Baltimore, Md.

Outstanding Work

Please accept my thanks for the documentation and source references you provided last year for a letter I sent to the Journal of Forensic Sciences in regard to a psychoanalytical study of Hitler based, in part, on the spurious reminiscences of Hermann Rauschning. As you know, this collection of invented quotations and events, which was accepted as evidence by the Nuremberg Tribunal, has been proven to be the concoctions of a disaffected National Socialist Party member. Unfortunately, though, this fraudulent document [published in the US under the title The Voice of Destruction] is often still cited as an authentic historical source.

A recent Journal item refers to “Opole, in southern Poland.” Your readers may be interested to know that until the massive ethnic cleansing of eastern Germany in 1945-46, this Silesian city of Oppeln was as German as Berlin or Leipzig. Over the years the IHR has courageously upheld the memory of this terrible episode of the Second World War, certainly its greatest war crime. It is ironic indeed that this unprecedented mass expulsion of twelve million human beings – most of them women and children – is eradicated from our collective memory, while the distorted history of another people is relentlessly pounded into us. Today even standard reference works misleadingly refer to such formerly German cities as Stettin, Breslau and Danzig as having been “returned” to the Poles after “liberation” from the Germans.

As the IHR has repeatedly pointed out, history does have fundamental implications for the future. Russo-Germans are being resettled in northern East Prussia, the Königsberg cathedral is being rebuilt, and twice the Russian government has offered to sell this region back to Germany. According to a recent poll, one third of Poles living in eastern German lands expressed approval of a restoration of German sovereignty.

Allow me to congratulate the Journal on consistently outstanding work. Your articles (really, our articles) are practically unique.

Eric Rachut, M.D.
Moody, Texas

White Builders of Indian Civilizations?

In his complaint about “one sided history” (March-April 1999 Journal), Zoltan Bruckner laments the “disgraceful picture” given in an earlier issue by Mark Twain, “The Noble Red Man,” and Kevin Beary, “Lifestyles: Native and Imposed.” Just these two modest articles in a single issue of the Journal, it seems, are enough to upset Bruckner's notion of “balanced history.” Although I am nearly 50 years old, the first critical or derogatory description of the American Indian I read anywhere was Twain's essay, as reprinted in the May-June 1998 Journal.

Accompanying Bruckner's article is a beautiful drawing of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. What is not mentioned is that this magnificent city wasn't built by the Aztecs. While archaeologists disagree about just who did build it (some believe it was the Olmecs, and others the Toltecs or the Cholulas), they all agree that it was built centuries before the coming of the Aztecs.

The Aztecs themselves along with the Mayas and the Incas – ascribed the establishment of their civilizations to “bearded white men” from the East. The leader of these white men was called Quetzacoatl by the Aztecs, Kukulkan by the Mayas and Viracocha by the Incas.

It is well known that the spectacular victories of Cortes over the Aztecs, and of Pizarro over the Incas, each with a small band of conquistadors, were greatly helped by the natives' expectation of the return of the white “gods.” In support of these stories, ancient sculptures and paintings of white, bearded men have been found throughout the Americas, particularly in the Mayan cities. Ancient mummies found in Peru also bear distinctly Caucasian features. [For more on all this, see, for example, Early Man and the Ocean, by Norwegian anthropologist and explorer Thor Heyderdahl.]

Even in North America some Indian tribes had similar myths of ancient white men, called “the Old Ones,” described as tall, white-skinned and having red hair. Adding further weight to this thesis is the much-publicized discovery in 1996, on the north bank of the Columbia river, of the remains of a 9,300-year-old Caucasoid. With his long, narrow skull, this “Kennewick Man” is racially unlike the Indians of today.

In response to Bruckner's flattering portrayal of the Aztecs, it hardly seems necessary to add to the abundant evidence of their practices of mass human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. It is estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the Aztec empire as a whole reached about 250,000 per year by the beginning of the 16th century. (J. Milton, R. A. Orsi and N. Harrison, The Feathered Serpent and the Cross, p. 55.)

As for the popular notion of Indians living “in harmony with nature,” it was only due to their backwardness that they did not ravage the environment. No Indian today, of course, dispenses with such products of “evil” European civilization as automobiles or televisions.

While granting that Indians received the dubious “gift” of alcohol from Europeans, let's not forget that Europeans received the similarly questionable “gift” of tobacco from Indians. Who can really say who got the worst of the exchange?

M. H.
Fargo, North Dakota

A Reliable Source

Not only do I read every single line of each Journal issue with pleasure, but I never miss an opportunity to pass along copies of items to my journalist friends. I get on very well with all the “friendly press” here in France. Let me tell you that they know very well that any information coming from the Institute for Historical Review is reliable. Such a level of trustworthiness is itself a victory in the revisionist struggle.

Y. S.
Le Vesinet, France

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