In the 1960s Rassinier began to change the focus of his attacks. No longer did he devote his primary energies to defending the SS or casting doubt on the stories told by concentration camp survivors. His preoccupation became the “genocide myth.” In The Drama of European Jewry (1964) he argued that the accusation that the Nazis committed mass murder through the use of gas chambers was an invention of the “Zionist establishment.” Moreover, he contended, the charge about gas chambers was a fabrication, as was the claim that six million Jews died. In his attempt to explain who was responsible for the hoax, Rassinier did not blame the survivors. Though they may have “exaggerated” their experiences, Rassinier forgave them that: “They are victims who are fired by a resentment in proportion to what they suffered.” As did other deniers, he had to explain away the perpetrators’ confessions. Those who falsely admitted that they had committed atrocities had little choice but to tell Allied officials the story they wanted to hear. “In order to get into the good graces of his captors, some poor SS private attached to an Einsatzgruppe reports that his unit exterminated… tens of thousands of Jews.”{12}, [1] The testimonies of Nazi leaders who were tried at the war crimes trials also had to be discounted because they were “testifying under threat of death” and they confessed what they thought would “be most likely to save [their]… life.” For Rassinier such behavior was “easily understood,” and consequently the credibility of such testimony could be summarily dismissed.{13}
But if the survivors and the perpetrators were not responsible, who then perpetrated the hoax? For Rassinier the culprits in the dissemination of this fraud were easily identifiable. The “Zionists,” abetted in their conspiracy by a select number of Jewish historians and institutions that conduct research on the Holocaust, were the responsible parties. Rassinier unleashed his most acerbic comments and unrelenting attacks on them. Unlike the survivors who lied because of all they had suffered, and the Nazis, who fabricated confessions to please their captors and protect their lives, the perpetrators of this hoax did not have motives that were either psychologically understandable or morally justifiable. The only reason these historians and the institutions that backed them spread this calumny about Germany was to reap institutional, communal, and personal gain.
Regarding the prominent historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg, Rassinier wrote that only “dishonesty” could “excuse” his actions. Rassinier informed readers that Hilberg was associated with a Jewish publication: “As I… read his biographical note, I find that he is a collaborator in the Jewish Encyclopedia Handbooks.” This, in Rassinier’s opinion, explained “everything.” But Hilberg was not alone in his culpability for spreading this myth on behalf of a Jewish institution. Hannah Arendt’s “intellectual outlook” and writings on the Holocaust were not trustworthy, according to Rassinier, because of her position as research director with the Conference on Jewish Relations.{14} The testimony at the Eichmann trial by the renowned historial Salo Baron, the first occupant of the chair in Jewish history at Columbia University, was clearly open to question because of Baron’s Jewish identity. Lest readers be unaware of Baron’s background, Rassinier made a practice of referring to him throughout his book as “Mr. Shalom Baron.”{15}
Their dishonesty and that of the Jewish institutions with which they were formally or informally associated was motivated by what Rassinier considered a traditional Jewish vice: the love of money. Their motive for concocting the genocide myth, Rassinier bluntly stated, “is purely and very basely, a material problem.”{16} They wished to “make Germany an ever-lasting milk cow for Israel.”{17} They devised the hoax and then demanded that “Germany pay to Israel sums calculated on the basis of about 6,000,000 dead.” Rassinier contended that the amount of reparations Germany paid to Israel was calculated on the basis of the number of dead; the higher the death toll, the greater the financial reward.{18} Israel, with the aid of cooperative Jewish historians and the “Zionist establishment,” had inflated the number of dead in order to “swindle” the Germans out of millions of marks. They claimed that six million died, but, in truth at least four-fifths of those six million “were very much alive at the end of the war.”{19} Rassinier offers no evidence to prove this or most of his other claims. Their existence had been kept a secret in order to inflate the amount of money Israel was able to extract from the Germans.
Rassinier based his argument on a completely false premise. One must assume that he did so knowingly, given the documents he cites. The reparations Germany paid to Israel were not based on the death toll but on the cost to Israel of absorbing and resettling both Jews who fled Germany and German-controlled countries during the prewar period and survivors of the Holocaust who came to Israel during the postwar years.
Israeli officials detailed their claims against Germany in their communiqué of March 1951 to the Four Powers, and this document became the official basis for the reparations agreement. It contained an explanation of Israel’s means of calculating the size of the reparations claim. In the communiqué Israeli officials explained that Nazi persecution had stimulated a “second Jewish exodus” of close to five hundred thousand. Based on the size of this exodus, Israel determined the amount of the reparations it would request:
The government of Israel is not in a position to obtain and present a complete statement of all Jewish property taken or looted by the Germans, and said to total more than $6 thousand million. It can only compute its claim on the basis of total expenditures already made and the expenditure still needed for the integration of Jewish immigrants from Nazi-dominated countries. The number of these immigrants is estimated at some 500,000, which means a total expenditure of $1.5 thousand million.{20}
It seems hardly necessary to point out that since the money the state received was based on the cost of resettling survivors, had Israel wanted to increase the amount of reparations it obtained from Germany it would have been in its interest to argue that fewer than six million had been killed and that more had managed to flee to Israel.
The contention that Israel is the main financial beneficiary of the “genocide myth” has become a critical element of Holocaust denial for a number of reasons. This explanation is particularly important for the deniers because it provides a rationale for the “hoax.” Moreover, it harks back to traditional antisemitic imagery: Jews’ association with money, particularly ill-gotten gains. For those with an inclination to believe antisemitic charges and to accept the stereotypes associated with them as true, this is a charge that feels familiar and makes sense. This is but one of many instances in which the deniers have woven a web that deftly combines pseudohistorical research with traditional antisemitism. The depiction of Israel as the beneficiary of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy also plays on preexisting hostilities toward the Jewish state. Those who are opposed to its existence and believe it came into being through nefarious means find this myth compelling. In fact, the vast majority of reparations went to individual survivors, not to Israel.
But it was for Raul Hilberg that Rassinier reserved his greatest contempt. Hilberg’s internationally acclaimed study of the German death machine in The Destruction of the European Jews, which was first published in 1961, made him an obvious target for Rassinier and subsequent generations of deniers. Because of his extensive research on the German bureaucracy during the Third Reich, specifically as it was used in the killing process, deniers have long felt obligated to try to destroy his credibility. In The Drama of European Jewry Rassinier branded Hilberg “dishonest” and accused him of being a falsifier of information particularly in regard to the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Revealingly, on the same page that Rassinier made those accusations, he engaged in the very same tactics of which he had accused Hilberg.
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