The Holocaust Problem

by Dr. William L. Pierce

A LOS ANGELES COUNTY Superior Court judge ruled last month that the so-called “Holocaust” — the alleged extermination of six million Jews by Germany’s National Socialist government during the Second World War — is a historical fact and “is not reasonably subject to dispute.” The ruling was the outcome of a lawsuit by a Jewish concentration camp “survivor,” Mel Mermelstein, now a successful Long Beach, Calif., businessman, against the publishers of a “revisionist” historical periodical, The Journal of Historical Review. (ILLUSTRATION: Buchenwald concentration camp, May 1945: Why were there so many “survivors,” if the German plan was to exterminate all Jews? Jews were put behind barbed wire in Germany during the Second World War for exactly the same reason Japanese were locked up in the United States: because they could not be trusted. Many American “liberators” of Germany’s concentration camp eventually reached the conclusion that the world would have been better off, however, if there had been no survivors, but few had the moral courage to say it. General George Patton was an exception. After becoming well acquainted with the nature of the people [officially called “Displaced Persons”] his troops freed from Germany’s concentration camps, he noted in his diary in September 1945: “Harrison [a U.S. State Department official] and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”)

The only real purpose of the periodical — the claims of its publishers notwithstanding — was to cast doubt on Jewish Holocaust claims, and that purpose has been reflected in the pages of each issue. As a promotional stunt The Journal of Historical Review rashly offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that a single Jew was killed in a gas chamber by the German government during the Second World War. Mermelstein accepted the challenge; sued when, he alleged, the publishers reneged on their $50,000 offer; and won his case.

Although Jewish groups are chortling over Mermelstein’s courtroom victory and will undoubtedly cite it as yet another “proof” of the historical reality of the Holocaust, and although The Journal of Historical Review has been made to look very foolish, nothing, in fact, was “proved” in the Los Angeles County Superior Court last month. The judge had no business at all ruling as he did, although he certainly surprised no one by doing so. After all, everyone knows there was a Holocaust, because he’s heard so much about it; he’s even seen it on television. How could there be any doubt?

Mel Mermelstein on the witness stand.

Actually, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the truth of the matter. There are reckless “revisionists” who assert that no Jews were killed, solely for being Jews, by the German government. That is almost certainly not true.

I have spoken with SS men who told me that they shot Jews, and I believe them. They also told me that the claims of mass killings of Jews put forth after the war have been greatly exaggerated, and I believe them on that score also.

It seems “not reasonably subject to dispute,” for example, that Jewish political commissars, who were routinely attached to Red Army units at the company level to maintain watch on the political reliability of Soviet soldiers, were routinely screened out from groups of Soviet POWs and shot by the Germans. Some German Army commanders have claimed that they refused to obey the order to shoot captured political commissars, but others clearly did shoot them.

It is also “not reasonably subject to dispute” that Jews were confined in concentration camps by the Germans during the Second World War, and that toward the end of the war when food supplies became very short many of them, weakened by malnutrition, died of typhus and other infectious diseases. The unburied, emaciated corpses of thousands of them were found by the U.S. Army during the conquest of Germany.

Death is not an uncommon event in concentration camps. It was common in the Andersonville camp during the U.S. Civil War, where 13,000 captured Union soldiers died. It was common in the concentration camps in South Africa into which the British government herded Boer women and children during the Boer War; more than 20,000 of them died in 1901 and 1902.

But just as certainly it is “not reasonably subject to dispute” that organized Jewry has engaged in a lying campaign of unprecedented magnitude during the past 40 years about their “persecution” at the hands of the Germans. The Jews indisputably lied when they claimed they were “gassed” at Dachau, for example. Not only were no Jews gassed at Dachau, but the Holocaust propagandists have not yet presented a shred of credible evidence to indicate that there were gas chambers for the extermination of Jews anywhere on German soil during the Second World War, and there is a great deal of credible evidence that there were not.

Likewise, the wild propaganda tales of Jews being boiled down for their lard and converted into bars of soap, or being skinned and made into lampshades and wallets, have been thoroughly debunked since the war.

That doesn’t mean that the Jews have given up telling those tales, by any means. The cynical, professional liars, such as head Holocaust huckster Simon Wiesenthal, will continue to make claims they know to be false so long as they can be reasonably sure that most of the goyim will believe them. And that, unfortunately, will be the case so long as the Jews maintain their control over America’s news and entertainment media and are able to stifle any dissent which might reach a mass audience.

Any reasonable person who takes the trouble to look into the matter must conclude that some Jews were deliberately killed during the Second World War, and that many more died of disease while confined in concentration camps. He must also conclude, however, that the Jews have told a great many lies about the Holocaust for the calculated purpose of generating sympathy for themselves and for the state of Israel. In particular, he must conclude that they have greatly exaggerated their losses, perhaps by a factor of 20 or more.

But, as mentioned above, to pin the facts down precisely — to prove whether the Germans gassed Jews outside the territory of the Reich, in occupied Poland, for example, or not; or to determine whether the total Jewish losses during the war were as low as the 300,000 figure calculated by the International Red Cross or were three times that many — is very difficult, if not impossible. For those interested in absorbing the facts which are available, there is no better source of information at this time than Professor Arthur Butz’s book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

So, how does one answer the question, was there a Holocaust? If one means by “Holocaust” six million gassed and incinerated Jews, as claimed by the Wiesenthals and the Mermelsteins, then the answer is an emphatic “no.”

If one means, on the other hand, the removal of Jews from their positions of control in the German news and entertainment media, the German educational system, and other areas of public influence in Germany by the National Socialist government; the economic boycott of Jewish merchants in Germany by the Germans after the Jews in the United States and elsewhere had launched a boycott of German imports; the imprisonment of many (though by no means all) Jews in Germany and German-occupied areas after the outbreak of the Second World War (much as Japanese-Americans on the U.S. West Coast were imprisoned after the Pearl Harbor attack); the discomfort and death by disease of some of the Jews so imprisoned; and the shooting of some Jewish partisans, some Jewish political commissars, and some other Jews in the eastern territories during the war — then the answer is “yes.”

But, really, why is that such an urgent question? It still has not been determined how many German women and children were killed in the murderous Allied raid on Dresden in February 1945, for example. The conditions at that time were so chaotic, with the task of locating and disposing of all the corpses in the rubble still not completed when the Red Army overran the city, that figures given for the number of victims vary between 130,000 and 250,000, and it is very difficult to say which is correct.

Should it not be at least as important to uncover all the facts of that monstrous crime — which, after all, was against people of our own race — and even to expose and then punish the war criminals who perpetrated it, as it is to continue haggling over the question of exactly how many Jewish Soviet commissars were shot, or whether or not there may have been gas chambers in occupied Poland?

Of course, it should be! And the fact that there have been no television documentaries or dramatizations about the Dresden holocaust, while there have been countless grade-B films and serialized “docudramas” about the Jews’ supposed sufferings, should tell us something about the priorities of the people who control the mass media.

More important, the fact that the average American schoolchild can parrot back the grossly inflated “six million” figure he has been taught, when asked how many Jews were killed during the Second World War, while he has not the remotest idea how many U.S. servicemen lost their lives in that glorious effort to make the world safe for Jews again, should tell us something about the American educational system and about the priorities of the politicians, educators, and intellectual leaders who have let it get that way. It should also tell us something about the dangerous lack of self-consciousness on the part of the American people — and, perhaps, a little about the shortcomings of democracy as a form of government.

We understand, of course, why the Jews and those Gentiles who fawn on them are always harping on the Holocaust. We understand why they have lied about it and exaggerated it and misrepresented it, and why they scream with such rage and mock indignation when anyone contradicts them: they have an enormous vested interest in all of the mystique and mythology of the Holocaust.

And we also understand why there are some Germans and some Americans and some White people of other nationalities who have considered it so important to contradict them. One of the reasons is the strictly practical matter of proving the Jews liars, destroying their credibility, exposing their deceptions, as a prelude to getting them off Germany’s back and America’s back and everyone else’s back, forever. That’s a good reason, and the National Alliance wishes everyone well who works at exposing the Holocaust lies because of it — including The Journal of Historical Review, if it survives the recent Los Angeles County Superior Court ruling. It’s the reason — the only reason — we write about the Holocaust from time to time and distribute factual material, such as The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, dealing with it.

There is, unfortunately, another reason why some White people are uptight about the Holocaust question. That reason is guilt. The thought that their racial kinsmen, or people whom they have admired or whose ideology they share, may have put large numbers of Jews to death makes them very uncomfortable.

The same sort of psychology is at work as that which makes some White people feel guilty because their ancestors owned Black slaves. Many of these guilt-stricken descendants of slave owners attempt to ease their moral discomfort by being super-solicitous of Blacks today, while others seemingly find relief in punishing other Whites (or even themselves) by supporting busing or welfare schemes.

The people who control the news and entertainment media are experts at manipulating this sort of psychology. By keeping the Holocaust alive and well in the consciences of their Gentile readers and viewers they evoke from most of them solicitude for Jews generally — and support for Israel, in particular. From the rest — from those who simply cannot bring themselves to be solicitous of Jews or to support Israel — they evoke a need to ease their consciences by denying the reality of the Holocaust.

There are two things seriously wrong with this sort of motivation for contradicting the Wiesenthals, Mermelsteins, and other Holocaust hoaxers. First, it is nearly always a sign of moral inconsistency. That is, very few of the tender-minded souls who are tormented by the mental spectacle of Jews being herded into gas chambers lose any sleep over the millions of Ukrainians and Russians who were deliberately starved to death after the triumph of Jewish Bolshevism in Russia only a few years earlier, as just one example.

They say they do not believe the German people could have planned anything so morally repugnant as the liquidation of Europe’s Jews, but they say nothing at all about the Morgenthau Plan or the Kaufman Plan, the two Jewish schemes for liquidating Europe’s Germans. (The Morgenthau Plan, which was approved by the Roosevelt administration and implemented by Eisenhower’s occupation forces, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Germans — especially infants and very young children, who succumbed to starvation and disease in the early postwar period. Had it not been for the later perception of a growing communist danger in Eastern Europe and the need to preserve the Germans as a “buffer,” it would have caused millions of German deaths.)

That’s the same sort of morality which has allowed U.S. Presidents to smile while shaking the hand of a Chairman Mao or a Generalissimo Tito — who murdered, in the first case, millions of his own countrymen and, in the second case, hundreds of thousands — and then to impose a trade boycott on the beleaguered Whites of Rhodesia for their “immoral” denial of equal rights to Blacks.

It is, in other words, no morality at all, but simply fashionableness: not cynically calculated fashionableness, of course — except, perhaps, on the part of the U.S. Presidents — but the sort of unreasoning fashionableness which stems from the need to conform.

Why is it that a perfectly normal person can wax maudlin over the misfortune of some poor soul whose plight is in the public eye at the moment and who is receiving sympathy from thousands of others; but he can at the same time callously ignore the suffering of another, whose plight may be even worse but who has not yet won the fickle favor of the crowd? It is because what we call morality is, in all except perhaps a Francis of Assisi or an Albert Schweitzer, nothing more than one aspect of herd instinct. It does not obey any higher law, or any rule of reason or consistency, but merely the blind urge to act, and even think, in a way which will earn the approval of one’s fellows.

What all this means is that the solution of the Holocaust problem for a great many people requires nothing more than bringing about a change in fashion, in switching the attention of the hand-wringers from the supposed gassing of Jews by the Germans during the Second World War to the actual slaughter of Croats and Cossacks by America’s Yugoslav and Soviet allies after the war. That, of course, will not happen so long as the present arbiters of fashion are able to retain their grip on the White world’s mass media.

But there is a more fundamental ill underlying the discomfort which the Holocaust causes for many “revisionists,” even for some of them who are consciously anti-Jewish. That ill is their implicit acceptance of a morality according to which the Germans should be condemned, if the Jewish Holocaust claims were, in fact, true.

For, although there may be very few Francis of Assisis or Albert Schweitzers among us, what those few believe and feel is of surpassing importance.

As a practical matter the behavior and sentiments of the common man may be determined almost entirely by his perception of what is expected of him at the moment by his fellows; but the values and ideals which a society claims, at least, as the determinants of the behavior and sentiments of its members are nevertheless of the utmost significance for the destiny of the society.

Indeed, it is hardly possible to overstate the urgency of this point: the two things of absolutely fundamental importance about any society are the racial quality of its members, and the values and ideals which it holds up as the proper basis for their thought and action. A proper physical basis and a proper spiritual basis are both necessary for a truly progressive society.

The values and ideals claimed by Western society today are those of a slave morality, a love-thy-nigger ethic of Asiatic origin. It is a morality of envy, which exalts the botched and the degenerate and disparages the noble, the strong, and the beautiful. It is a morality which holds that everything which walks upright on two legs and talks is precious and ought to be preserved. It is a turn-the-other-cheek morality which denies a people the right of self-defense.

It is a morality which damns the Germans for attempting to rid themselves of a pernicious infestation which was stifling their national life; and it is a morality which will equally damn any attempt by White Americans to disinfect the cesspool of mongrelization which their own country is fast becoming.

Ultimately it is a morality of racial death, and the ultimate significance of the current debate over the Holocaust is that it is inextricably rooted in this morality.

The “revisionist,” the conservative, the right winger, the anti-Semite who cannot face the Holocaust squarely and judge it on the basis of a higher morality, according to which it is only the upward course of Life which is sacred, also cannot solve the other moral problems of the day; he cannot, for example, cope successfully with the challenges to a White future which are presented by non-White immigration and by a high non-White birth rate.

His attempts until now to cope have been inconsistent with the slave morality to which he pays lip service — and which exacts its toll for every transgression. For it is never healthy for a people to say one thing and do another: to preach the equality of races and the brotherhood of all members of genus Homo, on the one hand; and to refuse, on the other hand, to share everything we have — our land, our food, our women — with any Mexican or Haitian or Vietnamese who wants them. America’s half-hearted and ineffective immigration restrictions are a perfect reflection of this fundamental inconsistency.

The expedient society, the society which must often act counter to its proclaimed fundamental values and ideals, because those values and ideals are inconsistent with the survival of the society, is sick. Either it must find a new set of values and ideals, consistent with survival and with progress, or it will perish. Ultimately, only the society with absolute conviction in the rightness of its actions can achieve the last and greatest goals on this earth.

The Jewish Holocaust propagandists understand this, and the time has come for us to understand it also. That is a necessary first step to a new and higher morality: the spiritual basis for a new force which can give new life to our race.

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From Attack! No. 84, 1981, transcribed by Anthony Collins and edited by Vanessa Neubauer, from the book The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom