Revisionist Notebook

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Father Was a Nazi Storm Trooper; Anne Frank's Father Was a Nazi Collaborator and War Profiteer; Why Is One of these Stories Being Suppressed?

Arnold Schwarzenegger's father, Gustav, volunteered for the 'brownshirts' in May 1939 – about "six months after the storm troopers helped launch Kristallnacht […] when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked across Germany." [1]

Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, was a war profiteer who sold goods to the Nazi army as it 'freed' Europe of its Jews in a gigantic program of ethnic cleansing (see below for more details).[2]

Questions:

• How do we know that Gustav Schwarzenegger was a storm trooper?
• How do we know that Otto Frank collaborated with the Nazis?
• What 'goods' did Otto Frank sell to the German army?
• Why is the press covering the Gustav Schwarzenegger story now?
• Why is the press still covering up the Otto Frank story after half a century?
• How are we to judge men like Gustav Schwarzenegger and Otto Frank?
• Who benefits – profits – by 'outing' Gustav's story and attacking Arnold, while covering up Otto's story when Anne remains a great cultural icon?

The 'Hidden Life' of Anne Frank's Father, Otto. It's One Surprise after Another.

I didn't know that Anne Frank's father, Otto, was a Nazi collaborator and war profiteer. Where have I been?[3] I didn't know that Otto manufactured and wholesaled materials to the German army while hiding in his notorious 'annex' in Amsterdam. I didn't know that he collaborated with the Dutch Nazis as well as with Germans. It's just one bloody thing after another.

This story was brought to my attention by Joe Orolin. Joe sends me news clippings from Pennsylvania papers and national media. A lot of the stories he sends I have already received via the Internet, but there are always others that I would never see because they originate locally, or they are distributed nationally but fall 'below the centerfold' of Internet distribution.

One afternoon I received a clipping from Joe released on 27 July, written by Ray Locker of the Associated Press. The article was a review of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank by Carol Ann Lee, published by HarperCollins/William Morrow. This is how the surprising review kicked off.

These observations astounded me. I hadn't even heard of this book. I did an Internet search and found that The Hidden Life of Otto Frank was published six months ago, in February. I searched for reviews of the book in The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal. Major institutions that have forwarded the Anne Frank story for half a century. Nothing by the big boys.

I did find three additional reviews of the book, all by small publications. I found that the book had been published in England in 2002 – a full year earlier! I hadn't heard a word about it. In America the press, the business, about Anne Frank never ends. Never. Now we have a dramatic book about Anne's father by a respected writer, the book reveals very controversial information, and there is no interest in it. One wonders, why would that be?

On the Internet I went to Amazon.com, ordered The Hidden Life and received it five days later. I read through it in one night in our bedroom, and during one afternoon at an outdoor café in Tijuana while my wife and a lady friend were shopping. Otto appears to have been a good and decent man caught up in matters that were beyond him, as was most everyone else in those years in that part of the world.

I never thought much about Otto Frank. I never heard much about him. I knew more or less what most of us know. He left Amsterdam with his wife and two daughters under the supervision of the Germans, and when he returned to Amsterdam his wife and two daughters were dead. We've all lost family, many of us have half-lost dear family members, and I can imagine something of how Otto must have felt when Miep Gies first gave him Anne's diary pages, scavenged from the floor of the annex after the family was taken away.

Otto must have been near overcome with a tidal wave of memory, surprise, and then a kind of elation at finding that, at the very least, he had these pages, written in her own hand, while they were all living together. He had something of her. She wasn't entirely gone. He had something.

An earlier book by Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, was well received in Britain. Based on that work, she has a good deal to say in Otto's story about how the 'Diary' was put together. She is quite open about how Anne was rewriting her diary, the problems with the different translations contracted for by Otto, Otto's editing of the manuscripts, and so on. Essentially she supports the revisionist position, without saying so, codified in the 1970s and 80s, that the 'Diary' is a literary work based on diary entries, and edited by her father and others, not a diary.

Nothing wrong with that. Other than the fact that those fronting for the Holocaust Lobby lied about it for so many years.

The primary work of Carol Ann Lee's The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, is to find out who 'betrayed' the Frank's hiding place and the Frank family to the Germans. For myself, it's the least interesting part of the story. No accounting for taste. But along the way Ms. Lee documents the fascinating story of Otto Frank's wartime collaboration with the Nazi regimes, both in Germany and the Netherlands. She writes:

Here's what she's referring to. Otto manufactured and wholesaled pectin and other products to the German army.

With regard to Otto producing and selling products to the German army, Lee writes:

Miep Gies, the lady who collected Anne's diary pages from the floor of the annex after the Germans took off the Franks, is quoted as saying:

Here is a 'revisionist' take on Otto Frank's life in Amsterdam during WWII. Otto Frank ran a business during the war, in the ground floor of the 'annex' where he hid his family, that delivered goods to the German army. He made a profit doing it. He paid a Dutch Nazi to keep his business 'secret.'

Otto then was a Jew, a Nazi collaborator, a war profiteer, and a good man with highly developed sensibilities. I would very much liked to have known him, to have been his friend, and to have done what I could to have saved his daughters from those who saw them as their enemy.

I should add that it appears very likely indeed that Otto paid blackmail to the Dutch Nazi factotum, Tonny Ahlers, after the war as well as during it, to cover up Otto's wartime collaboration with the Nazis. As a matter of fact it looks like Otto was still paying blackmail to Tonny Ahlers at the time of Otto's death in 1980!

In the first instance, what does all this mean to someone like me? The first thing it means is that collaborating with the Germans/Nazis was something very different than what the Holocaust Industry wants you to think, and very different from how the Office of Special Investigations use the word "collaboration" as it goes about its work of running down old European men who "collaborated" with the Germans during WWII.

Collaboration was a norm, though admittedly not for everyone. In the Netherlands, for instance, only 80% of Dutch businessmen collaborated with the Nazis. In the camps nearly all Jews whom the Nazis chose to work for them themselves chose to collaborate with the Nazis. It was the norm. There were some who chose not to collaborate. Same as with the Dutch businessmen.

And then we would want to ask how many Belgian companies helped the German war effort. How many French? Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech? And how many of the businessmen in those countries were run by Jews?

As to that: how many Jews served in the German army during the Hitlerian regime?[4] How many Jews continued to run their businesses in Germany throughout the war? Were there any? Is anything known about this? Are their histories being covered up like Otto's was covered up?

On August 1st, 2003, a 79-year-old suspected former Nazi camp guard now living in Queens, Jakiw Palij, was stripped of his citizenship by a federal judge. Federal prosecutors did not accuse Palij of personally committing any atrocities. But Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said Palij has blood on his hands.

Palij is 79 years old. In 1944, when he was "collaborating" with the Germans by working as a perimeter guard at Trawniki, he must have been about 21. In 1944, when Otto Frank was helping feed and perhaps arm the German army, he was 55 years old.

One would think that you are better equipped to judge the political and moral nature of the great events you are living through when you are 55 than when you are when you are 21. Maybe it is going to be argued by the ADL and the Industry in general that Otto, being a Jew, necessarily needed a few extra decades to grow a moral conscience. I don't think that was it.

When I was 21 years old, I was with the Seventh Calvary in Korea. I was a young man who, as the song had it a few years ago, just wanted to have fun. I was a volunteer. I had no politics. I didn't want to hurt anyone, but I would have done anything my superiors asked of me. As a matter of fact, that's what I did do. Anything I was asked (ordered) to do.

I can hardly imagine how a 21-year old Ukrainian or German or Dutch kid could have sorted out the 'moral' issues of WWII, and then acted upon them. Some did, to one extent or the other, but to judge them now, after sixty years have gone by, a lifetime, is an ugly, self-serving charade of self-promoting 'morality.'

First published in Smith's Report (print edition) in August 2003

Brainwashing Student Editors

Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League have teamed up to personally put the kibosh on my campus work. Try to imagine it – Sulzberger and Foxman, two of the most influential men in American culture and politics, each with access to tens of millions of dollars, teaming up to kill a project run by one man with a couple volunteer helpers and no budget.

The story below appears in the 2003 special summer edition of ADL on the Frontline (the article does not appear on the ADL Website – if I'm wrong about this please forward me the correct URL).

Notes