Only in the 1970s, when they finally began to recognize the futility of trying to justify Nazi antisemitism, did deniers change their methods. They saw that, from a tactical perspective, the proof of Nazi antisemitism was so clear that trying to deny or justify it undermined their efforts to appear credible. As deniers became more sophisticated in the subtleties of spreading their argument, they began to “concede” that the Nazis were antisemitic. They even claimed to deplore antisemitism, all the while engaging in it themselves. They acknowledged that some Jews may have died as a result of Nazi mistreatment but continued to argue that there was no Holocaust.
In Crossing the Line Rassinier chose an interesting tactic to express his most radical contentions regarding the inmates and their experiences. Instead of arguing in his own voice, he quoted a fellow inmate, whom he described as a Czech, a lawyer who had been the assistant mayor of Prague before the war.{6} It is not clear whether this Czech really existed or whether Rassinier created him as a foil for his own controversial notions. What is clear is that the Czech voiced ideas that became part of Rassinier’s litany of claims regarding the Holocaust. Rassinier may have put this argument in the Czech’s voice for a practical reason. In the early 1950s, when he was arguing that the Nazi leadership bore little, if any, responsibility for atrocities, war wounds were still quite fresh. This was particularly so in France, which had been occupied by the Nazis. Rassinier may have been reluctant to express his views about the innocence of the Nazi leadership, the inmates’ culpability in their own suffering, and the trustworthiness, or lack thereof, of survivors’ testimony. Such views would have been particularly odious in the 1950s.
In truth, whether this Czech existed or was a literary creation is immaterial, since Rassinier not only articulated no reservations about his views but in fact acknowledged that he was convinced that this Czech was right. Even when Rassinier challenged the Czech’s views, in the end he always conceded that his friend’s ideas vanquished his own.
In these early works Rassinier set out to do three things: First he had to demolish the credibility of his fellow prisoners’ testimony. As long as one could trust what they said, any attempt to absolve the Nazis would be futile. But given the sympathy toward the inmates that existed particularly during the years immediately after the war, he could not ascribe to them diabolical or even devious motives. Instead he explained their supposed behavior in psychological terms:
Human beings need to exaggerate the bad as well as the good and the ugly as well as the beautiful. Everyone hopes and wants to come out of this business with the halo of a saint, a hero, or a martyr and each one embroiders his own Odyssey without realizing that the reality is quite enough in itself.{7}
Had Rassinier or his Czech argued that some concentration camp inmates were wont to exaggerate certain aspects of the treatment they endured, few would have questioned their conclusions. For a variety of reasons, some inmates did and still do embellish their experiences. Others sometimes adopt the experiences of fellow survivors as their own. Historians of the Holocaust recognize this and do not build a historical case on the oral history of an individual survivor, engaging instead in what anthropologists call triangulation, matching a survivor’s testimony with other forms of proof, including documents and additional historical data. But Rassinier blatantly dismissed all survivors’ testimony. Nor did he stop there in his attack on the survivors. He not only cast doubt on the testimony of victims but he exonerated the perpetrators—the Nazi leadership in general and the SS in particular. According to Rassinier, the “SS never meddled with the camp life.” If there were any excesses in the camps it was the responsibility of the inmates. Outrages in the camps were always made “still worse” by the prisoners.{8}
In response to those who argued that the camps constituted a peculiarly Nazi form of punishment and incarceration, Rassinier asserted that the camps were not uniquely German institutions. Incarceration in concentration camps was a “classic method of coercion” practiced by all countries, including France. Once again we see a harbinger of what would become a familiar method for absolving the Nazis: Whatever they did was not as severe as that of which they were accused. Moreover, all nations did the same.
Finally, in one of his most extreme arguments, Rassinier attempted to transform the Nazis from perpetrators into benefactors. He claimed that they had benign, if not positive, motives when they put people in concentration camps. Initially the National Socialists’ incarceration of people in concentration camps was a “gesture of compassion.” Their objective was to protect their adversaries by putting them “where they could not hurt the new regime and where they could be protected from the public anger.” Not only did they want to shield them, they also wanted to “rehabilitate the strayed sheep and to bring them back to a healthier concept of the German community, [and]… its destiny.”{9} This latter claim evoked memories of some of the explanations and justifications offered by Goebbels’s propaganda bureau during the early years of the regime. When people were placed in camps or in ghettos, the Nazis claimed they were doing so for educational or rehabilitative purposes. They were “helping” them become more productive members of society by incarcerating them. Rassinier ignored two essential elements: This “rehabilitation” was conducted in the harshest of fashions and, according to Nazi philosophy, there was no way Jews could be “rehabilitated.”
Given his own experiences and those of a myriad of others in the camps, Rassinier could not very well argue that they had been character-building institutions. He had to acknowledge that the Nazis’ supposedly benign intentions notwithstanding, life in the camps was quite difficult. Intent on rendering the Nazi leadership blameless, he shifted responsibility from their shoulders by explaining that the escalating severity was not the intention of those at the helm but of those in the lower echelons of the SS who disobeyed their orders. According to Rassinier, when the authorities in Berlin discovered something “awry in the way the camps were being administered, the SS staffs were called to account.”{10} Even the SS decision to select criminals, murders, and rapists to serve as Lageraltester (camp elder) and Kapos was justifiable, despite the fact that these people were particularly ruthless to other inmates. The SS did not select such individuals to run the camps out of “sadism” but to “economize personnel.” The Kapos were brutal but that was not the fault of the SS. In fact, Rassinier preferred dealing with the SS because they were “in principle… better and… more humane.”{11}