Ernst Zundel, the man who destroyed the Holocaust industry, died

[James]

Ernst Zundel, the man who destroyed the Holocaust industry, died

By Jonas E. Alexis on August 7, 2017

Let us assume for a moment that Zundel was wrong, that his then publisher should not have written a pamphlet praising Hitler. Let us further assume that Zundel was a vicious anti-Semite for doing so. Are we going to apply the same logic to Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised the Red Army which ended up killing more than twenty million innocent men, women, and children?

 

…by Jonas E. Alexis

 

Ernst Zundel, one of the great fighters against the Holocaust establishment in the Western world, has recently passed away. His wife put me in contact with him at the end of last month, and we had a very brief correspondence. But I never knew that he was dying.

Zundel stirred the ideological pot throughout his life. Long before Zundel passed away, Michael Shermer repeatedly said that Zundel was a very nice guy. But then Shermer ended up writing a book mischaracterizing and misconstruing virtually everything Zundel has said.[1]

Zundel was called “a threat to national security.” Canada once declared that “Zündel is inadmissible on security grounds for being a danger to the security of Canada.” Zundel was “a threat to national security,” but no one could judiciously pronounce the nature of his crime. Since Zundel was “a threat to national security,” his house was burned to the ground because he challenged the Khazaran Bansker Cult, the ideological force that has progressively become, in the words of Yuri Slezkine, “The Jewish Century.”[2]

“On May 8, 1995, his Toronto residence at Carlton Street was the target of an arson attack resulting in $400,000 in damage. A group calling itself the ‘Jewish Armed Resistance Movement’ claimed responsibility for the arson attack; according to the Toronto Sun, the group had ties to the Jewish Defense League and to the extremist group Kahane Chai.

“The leader of the Toronto wing of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Weinstein, (known then as Meir Halevi) denied involvement in the attack; however, five days later, Weinstein and US JDL leader Irv Rubin were caught trying to break into the Zündel property, where he was apprehended by police.

“No charges have ever been laid in the incident. Later the same month Zündel was the recipient of a parcel bomb that was detonated by the Toronto Police bomb squad. The investigation into the parcel bomb attack led to charges being laid against David Barbarash, an animal rights activist based in British Columbia, but they were eventually stayed.”

You burn someone’s house to the ground and try to kill him, but “no charges have ever been laid in the incident.” This could only happen again in “the Jewish Century,” where no one is allowed to question or challenge the central aspect of what is now known as “the Holocaust.”

The media faulted Zundel because Samisdat Publishers, which was then owned by Zundel, released a pamphlet back in 1977 entitled, “The Hitler We Love and Why.” Zundel, we were told, was an anti-Semite for doing so.

Yet in 2011, noted military historian R. H. S. Stolfi of the U.S. Naval Post-graduate School published his study Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, in which cogently argued that Hitler was rational in making many of his decisions and that the Holocaust establishment has irresponsibly demonized him for ideological purposes.

Stolfi declares that he has “weighted the great biographies [of Hitler] on the scales of historical reality and found them wanting…”[3] According to Stolfi, the great biographies do not ask deep questions and fail to address the serious issues surrounding the evolution of Hitler and Nazi Germany. He writes,

“Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in the more than half century since 1945 has been based on antipathy. In a seemingly boundless corpus of writing, every work from the mighty to the insignificant is fundamentally similar in its common revulsion for the man and his national movement.

“In the most recent great biography, Professor Ian Kershaw begins and ends with detestation. His work is skilled and often brilliant, but he fails to inform the reader of certain characteristics indispensable for true comprehension of the man, and he underestimates the importance of the postwar conditions inflicted by the Allies on Germany, which contributed to Hitler’s rise.

“Bullock, Fest, and Kershaw ascribe criminal features to Hitler’s foreign policy from 1933 through 1939, but they fail to correlate it realistically with the Allied imposition of the Versailles Treaty—the ultimate manifestation of German defeat and Allied victory following World War I.

“In the present situation, the reading public has been served only half a portrait of the great tyrant of the twentieth century….half a portrait of Hitler tells us little about the man as a human being and presents a distorted and incredible interpretation of his actions as creator of National Socialism and leader of Germany.

“The great biographies take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend him…Every single one falls short of producing an adequate understanding of Hitler as a historical person. To this point in time, the biographers have lost the biographical war.”[4]

In a review of Stolfi’s work, biographer Carl Rollyson writes in the Star Tribune,

“Stolfi is no apologist for Hitler in the sense of minimizing his culpability for the Holocaust and the war, but the biographer wants to understand, even empathize, with the man.

“He portrays Hitler’s great personal courage during World War I as an intrepid combat soldier, and afterward as a man who personally waged war in the streets of Germany against Marxist street gangs. Stolfi quotes Thomas Mann’s reluctant admission that Hitler was an artist, and shows, in detail, Hitler’s consummate understanding of opera and architecture and how those arts shaped his view of history and modern Germany.

“Most important, however, Stolfi analyzes Hitler as a world leader of astonishing capability, a leader unlike any other politician of his time. Hitler was a messiah, wishing to create a new Germany unencumbered by the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty that crippled German politics and the country’s economy.”[5]

I shook my head in dismay largely because David Irving has been saying almost the same thing in Hitler’s War. Zundel has also been punished for saying the same thing. Yet to this very day the Holocaust establishment charges both Irving and Zundel of being vicious anti-Semites!

I was even appalled by a statement made by Mimi Frank of the Jewish Book Council:

“I personally found it difficult to read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, because I, like the other biographers, have a hard time overlooking the evil deeds of Hitler and concentrating instead upon his supposed genius. Stolfi characterizes Hitler as a rare world historical figure, compared with the likes of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar. He clearly presents an alternate view from all the other major biographers of Adolf Hitler, but not a view that I can share.”[6]

What we are seeing here is that the so-called Holocaust has never been about establishing historically rigorous scholarship and criteria. At least for Frank, it boils down to personal opinion.  Frank cannot share Stolfi’s views not because he has rigorous evidence to the contrary, but because Stolfi’s analysis does not line up with Frank’s ideological premises.

In any event, Stolfi’s study, like Irving’s Hitler’s War, is an important book and it will more than likely stand the test of time.

If Zundel was evil, what about Benjamin Netanyahu?

Let us assume for a moment that Zundel was wrong, that his then publisher should not have written the pamphlet praising Hitler. Let us further assume that Zundel was a vicious anti-Semite for doing so. Are we going to apply the same logic to Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised the Red Army which ended up killing more than twenty million innocent men, women, and children?[7] Is Netanyahu’s palace going to be razed to the ground any time soon for praising Bolshevism? Why the double standard?

Moreover, organized Jewry will not ban Hollywood, despite the fact that Hollywood collaborated with Hitler![8] David Mikics of Tablet Magazine calls this a “creepy love affair.”[9] Mikics says that “some of the Hollywood studio heads, nearly all of whom were Jewish, cast their lot with Hitler almost from the moment he took power, and that they did so eagerly—not reluctantly.”[10]

Since Hollywood has largely and progressively become a Jewish town,[11] and since Zundel does not ally with that particular town, Zundel was ontologically an anti-Semite who deserved to be punished.

The simple fact is that Zundel never denied that Jews suffered and died at the hands of Nazi Germany. What he questioned was “did six million really die?” If we take a number of Jewish historians seriously (Bauer and Reitlinger), the answer is no.

The 1985 Trial

The late Douglas Christie

The gas chamber controversy again became an issue that refused to go away in 1985 when Raul Hilberg was summoned to testify at the trial of Zundel, who was also accused of “spreading false news.” (Keep in mind that Hilberg was the first Holocaust historian and many Holocaust historians and scholars had relied on his voluminous work, The Destruction of the European Jews, which was first published in 1961. It was reprinted intact in 1967 and 1979.)

All of that changed in 1985. Zundel’s attorney, Douglas Christie, pressed Hilberg to give historical evidence of an Hitler order to exterminate all Jews in Germany, a claim which Hilberg made in The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg eventually confessed that no such order existed. Then Christie on moved on to his next point: evidence for the gas chamber theory.

“What do you mean by a scientific report?,” asked Hilberg.

“I don’t usually have to define simple words,” said Christie, “but by ‘scientific report’ I mean a report conducted by anyone who purported to be a scientist and who examined physical evidence. Name one report of such a kind that showed the existence of gas chambers anywhere in Nazioccupied territory.”

“I still don’t quite understand the import of your question,” said Hilberg.

“Are you referring to a German, or a post-war—”

“I don’t care who—German, post-war, Allied, Soviet—any source at all. Name one,” said Christie.

“To prove what?,” asked Hilberg.

“To conclude that they have physically seen a gas chamber. One scientific report,” repeated Christie.

“I am really at loss. I am very seldom at such a loss, but…”

Judge Locke interrupted: “Doctor…do you know of such a report?”

“No,” replied Hilberg.[12]

The debate became interesting when Christie asked Hilberg about some of his sources, particularly Kurt Gerstein, who allegedly witnessed the gassing of some 3,000 Jews in camps such as Belzec and Treblinka.[13] Gerstein maintained that there were between 28 and 32 people per square meter in a room 1.8 meter high.

Moreover, he maintained before he committed suicide in a French prison that at least 20 million people were gassed. Hilberg used Gerstein as a testimony six times in his book.[14] Christie told Hilberg that a person like that would be either crazy or a liar, to which Hilberg responded:

“Well, on this particular datum I would be very careful because Gerstein, apparently, was a very excitable person. He was capable of all kinds of statements…”

Christie produced the Gerstein statement and proceeded to ask Hilberg whether certain statements appeared in the statement. Hilberg agreed that in his statement, Gerstein alleged that 700-800 persons were crushed together in 25 square metres in 45 cubic metres; he also agreed that he had ignored this part of Gerstein’s statement in his book…

“And he refers to Hitler and Himmler witnessing gassings, right?,” asked Christie.

Hilberg agreed that Gerstein had made this statement and that it was ‘absolutely’ and ‘totally’ false…

Christie asked Hilberg whether he considered Gerstein’s statement—that at Belzec and Treblinka nobody bothered to make a count and that in fact about 25 million people, not only Jews, were actually killed—was credible?

“Well, parts of it are true, and other parts of it are sheer exaggeration, manifest and obvious exaggeration. To me, the important point made in this statement is that there were no counting at the point at which people entered the gas chamber,” said Hilberg.[15]

Raul Hilberg

Hilberg eventually admitted that the evidence for mass murder in the eastern camps came directly from the Soviets.

“The whole site,” suggested Christie, “was within the Soviet sphere of control, and nobody from the west was allowed into those camps to investigate, isn’t that right?”

“Well, I don’t know of any requests made to investigate…When you say no one was allowed, it implies some request,” said Hilberg…“All I could say is, I know of no Western investigators early on in Auschwitz, or any of…”

“Treblinka?,” asked Christie.

“Well, there was no more Treblinka in 1945.”

“Sobibor?”

“That was no more.”

“Majdanek?”

“Majdanek is another matter.”

“Was there anybody from the West that went to Majdaneck?,” asked

Christie.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Belzec?”

“Belzec was the first camp to have been obliterated.”

“Chelmno or Stuftthof?”

“No, sir.”

“Auschwitz or Birkenau?”

“No.”[16]

Finally, Christie confronted Hilberg with another source which he had quoted as a witness for mass murder—Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss, who was an SS lieutenant colonel from 1940 to 1943, and was one of the first commandants of Auschwitz. Hilberg cites Hoss as one of his authorities, but Christie asked Hilberg why he mentioned Wolzek, a non-existent camp, in his book:

“Yes, I have seen that garbled reference,’ said Hilberg. ‘It may have been Belzec. It’s very hard, if the man did not write anything, if he said things, if he was tired, if he was misunderstood, if he misspoke himself…”

Christie pointed out that Hoss referred to Belzec as well as Wolzek.

“I suggested to you,” he said to Hilberg, “that there is a reason to believe that this man was not only being obliged to sign a confession in a language he didn’t understand, but things were being put into a statement for him that were patently absurd, like Gerstein.”

“There was obvious confusion in this one statement,” said Hilberg.

Christie produced Nuremberg document 3868-PS, the Hoss affidavit. Hilberg agreed he had seen the document before and agreed he had seen the Wolzek reference. “Yes, I’ve seen that reference. It’s terrible.”

“It’s obvious that something wasn’t quite right about that individual, would you agree?,” asked Christie.

“No, I wouldn’t say that something wasn’t quite right about the individual,” said Hilberg. “I would say that something wasn’t quite right about the circumstances under which this was made as an affidavit.”[17]

Hilberg’s second edition of his voluminous work was ready to go to press that same year. Within weeks after the trial, Hilberg made sure thata Hitler order for the “Final Solution,” a point which he argued in the first edition, was removed completely, without an explanation.

Historian Christopher Browning, who believes that Hitler’s 1941 speech to the Gauleiters may have alluded to a Hitler order and who also believes that “the argument over whether Hitler gave an order or not is not commonly part of the issue of Holocaust denial” because enough reputable historians like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat do not believe in it,[18] was quite surprised that Hilberg would make such a decision.[19]

Yet in an interview with journalist D. D. Guttenplan, Hilberg said that he made the change “in the interest of precision about the evidence,”[20] and never mentioned the trial during which he was asked to provide evidence for the assertion and could not. Deep down Hilberg believed a Hitler order still existed, even though he had no evidence.[21]

In 1988, Hilberg was asked to testify against Zundel by prosecutor John Pearson, but this time he refused. Here is a “confidential” letter, which Hilberg sent to Pearson, in which he laid the whole issue out:

“I have grave doubts about testifying in the Zündel case again. Last time, I testified for a day under direct examination and for three days under cross-examination. Were I to be in the witness box for a second time, the defense would be asking not merely the relevant and irrelevant questions put to me during the first trial, but it would also make every attempt to entrap me by pointing to any seeming contradiction, however trivial the subject might be, between my earlier testimony and an answer that I might give in 1988.

“The time and energy required to ward off such an assault would be great, and I am afraid that the investment of time alone would be too much, given all the commitments and deadlines I am facing now.”[22]

The interesting thing is that Michael Shermer never even remotely mentioned the Zundel trial in his entire book!

It is now obvious that the Holocaust establishment is a package deal, and that package deal is riddled with unanswered questions. Once again we are forced to ask: how was the establishment able to persecute Zundel when he was simply asking for serious evidence for extraordinary claims?

Well, J. J. Goldberg and other Jewish writers and scholars have always had the freedom to brag about “Jewish Power.”[23] It’s only the Goyim who can’t talk about these issues without being called disgusting names.

---

[1] See Michael Shermer and Alex Grubman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

[2] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[3] R. H. S. Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny (New York: Prometheus Books, 2011), 11.

[4] Ibid., 11, 12, 17.

[5] Carl Rollyson, “Biography Review: ‘Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny,’” Star Tribune, January 14, 2012.

[6] Mimi Frank, “Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny,” Jewish Book Council, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/hitler-beyond-evil-and-tyranny.

[7] For similar studies, see for example Jean-Louis Panné and Andrzej Paczkowski, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocide(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2010); Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[8] See for example Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

[9] David Mikics, “Hollywood’s Creepy Love Affair With Adolf Hitler, in Explosive New Detail,” Tablet Magazine, June 10, 2013.

[10] Ibid.

[11] See for example Neal Gabler, Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor Books, 1988).

[12] Jurgen Graf, The Giant with Feet of Clay (Chicago: Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001), 113-114.

[13] Saul Friedlander, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of God (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1969), 112.

[14] Graf, The Giant with Feet of Clay, 92-93.

[15] Ibid., 114-115.

[16] Ibid., 115-116.

[17] Ibid., 116.

[18] D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 212-213.

[19] Graf, The Giant with Feet of Clay, 26.

[20] Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial, 303.

[21] Ibid., 303.

[22] “The ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zundel—1988,” Institute for Historical Review.

[23] J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Establishment (New York: Perseus Book, 1997); Benjamin Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

 

Source: veteranstoday