Despite having “discovered” the ones who are responsible for generating this myth, Rassinier still faced, as do all deniers, a fundamental obstacle—one he could not manipulate as easily as he had the misinformation regarding the reparations. Hitler and those around him had explicitly stated many times the Nazi intention to destroy the Jews. Hitler’s best-known diatribe in this regard was made on January 30, 1939:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.{28}
This was not his only public threat to annihilate the Jews. In September 1942, six months after the gas chambers began to operate, he recalled his speech of 1939 and reiterated his predictions about the Jews’ fate. This time he was even more specific about the outcome:
In my Reichstag speech of September 1, 1939,[3] I have spoken of two things: first, that now that the war has been forced upon us, no array of weapons and no passage of time will bring us to defeat, and second, that if Jewry should plot another world war in order to exterminate the Aryan peoples in Europe, it would not be the Aryan peoples which would be exterminated but Jewry….
At one time, the Jews of Germany laughed about my prophecies. I do not know whether they are still laughing or whether they have already lost all desire to laugh. But right now I can only repeat: they will stop laughing everywhere and I shall be right also in that prophecy.{29}
Rassinier had to explain away such statements—which had to be interpreted as meaning something other than what they clearly say—in order to maintain that genocide was a myth. Rassinier dismissed the 1939 statement as irrelevant hyperbole, typical of the “kind of defiance that was hurled by the ancient heroes” and consequently of “little significance.”{30} Here too—as in the case of the total number of victims—Rassinier positioned himself on both sides of the argument. He repeatedly demanded explicit proof specifically indicating that it was the Nazis’ objective to murder the Jews. The absence of such proof, he argued, invalidated all conclusions regarding mass murder. But when a document or statement explicitly indicating an intention to annihilate was cited as proof, Rassinier dismissed it as euphemistic, hyperbolic, or irrelevant. These tactics were later adopted by deniers in their treatment of historical documents that, they argued, proved that the genocide of the Jews was not a myth. (If the documents are specific they are dismissed as euphemistic. If they are euphemistic they are interpreted at face value.)
Rassinier used a slightly different approach for the 1942 speech. Rather than simply dismissing this as hyperbole, Rassinier contended that the fact that this threat against European Jewry was not cited at the Nuremberg war crimes trials proved that it was not considered to be serious evidence. Had the Allies considered it a serious document, they would have introduced it as evidence. But Rassinier failed to note that Hitler was not on trial at Nuremberg and that, consequently many of his statements and speeches, including those with specific antisemitic themes, were not cited. Moreover, it is both ironic and revealing that Rassinier, who had such contempt for all that went on at Nuremberg, should have used the trial as a standard for determining what does and does not constitute serious evidence.
Rassinier’s attempt to explain how the Holocaust hoax has been perpetrated and spread worldwide is even more clumsy, and it revealed the true objective of his Holocaust denial. His explanation relied on traditional antisemitic imagery in order to explain the Jews’ intentions. It can be briefly summarized:
The Jews have been able to dupe the world by relying on their mythic powers and conspiratorial abilities. As they have so often done in the past, world Jewry has once again employed its inordinate powers to harness the world’s financial resources, media and political interests for their own purposes.
In isolating the source of this huge conspiracy against Germany, Rassinier rooted it in the actions of one Polish Jew.
After some fifteen years of historical research, I have come to the following conclusion: it was in 1943 that National Socialist Germany was accused for the first time of the systematic mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. The author of this first, horrible and infamous accusation was a Polish Jew, …Rafael Lemkin.{31}
Lemkin, who in 1944 introduced both the word and concept of genocide into international law, served as counsel to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson when Jackson was the United States chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.{32} Rassinier was wrong about this, as he was on so many other things. Nazi Germany was first accused of mass murder of Jews in 1942, not 1943. Lemkin had nothing to do with this accusation. Rassinier attributed Lemkin’s success in making such an accusation take hold and stick to the fact that he was supposedly aided and abetted in his efforts by falsified documents and an amenable world press, which took its marching orders from Jews:
With the release of this information by a Polish Jew and the “discovery” during the Nuremberg trials of documents detailing the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, in the world press, the gas chambers mythology began its dance to every tune and diabolical rhythm; that unrestrained saraband full of missteps has not stopped since.{33}
The media were one of the primary instruments the Jews used to spread this calumny. Here again Rassinier relied on traditional antisemitic imagery. The media had to help Jews because they were dominated by them. Consequently the media “publicize[d], with remarkable consistency,” the thesis that six million Jews had been victims of the Nazis.{34}
According to Rassinier the real culprits behind Lemkin, the historians, Jewish institutions, and all others who participated in the hoax were the “Zionists,” who used their remarkable powers to prevent the truth from emerging, including thwarting a census of world Jewry from being taken so that they could subject the Holocaust death toll “to all kinds of manipulation.”{35} (His source for this claim was the American Mercury, which from 1952 until its demise in the 1970s was a publication whose most distinguishing feature was its antisemitism.){36} Their ultimate objective was financiaclass="underline" Once they had rendered Germany a “cash cow” for Israel and its supporters, they could turn to their larger and more monstrous objective: control of world finances. Rassinier, who had already relied on an almost unbroken chain of traditional antisemitic images—Jews’ nefarious use of their inordinate international political powers, control of the press, and financial chicanery—now slipped into a purely antisemitic diatribe in his description of what would happen when the Jews consolidated their power:
Today speaking metaphorically, the aim [of the Zionists] is the gold of Fort Knox. If the plan should succeed—and all that is needed is for the American branch of international Zionism to get its hand on Wall Street—the Israeli home-port of the Diaspora would become… the command post of all the world’s industry. “You will earn bread by the sweat of your brow,” the Eternal One said to Adam and to Eve, “You will give birth in pain,” as he chased the couple from the earthly Paradise he had created for them…. The women of Israel would, to be sure, continue to bear their children in pain, but their men would earn their bread and that of their children by the sweat of other’s [sic] brows. Then at the very least, it could be said that the designation “Chosen People,” which the Jews claim for themselves, would assume it [sic] full significance.{37}
3
Author’s note: Hitler changed the date of his original speech threatening the Jews with annihilation from January 30, 1939, to September 1, 1939.