Did Six Million Really Die?

Introduction to the Third Edition, and Chapters 1 & 2

This booklet which now comes to you electronically is so persuasive that it has been translated into a dozen different languages, and conversely, has been banned or otherwise suppressed in almost as many countries.

Did Six Million Really Die? was originally published by the Historical Review Press in England in 1974. It was an immediate success and even though no bookshop would stock it, word spread fast.

A German edition was published in collaboration with former schoolteacher and author Udo Walendy.  A French edition was distributed by schoolteacher Francois Duprat; however tragedy struck when Duprat was murdered by a car bomb. His wife was also severely injured.

The booklet, despite some errors, had a catalytic effect. Dr Arthur Butz of Northwestern University in Chicago contracted with HRP to publish an entire scholarly book on the subject, The Hoax of the twentieth Century. Dr. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyons-2 in France also began to publish his own findings on the 'Holocaust'. All around the world - in the U.S., in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Sweden - 'Holocaust' Revisionists were popping out of the woodwork - many of them initially influenced by this slim pamphlet. Soon, the powers that be began to sit up and take notice. In 1976 the South African Jewish Board of Deputies applied to the Publications Control Board to have D6MRD? banned From South Africa. The local distributor S.E.D. Brown put up a brave fight hut shortage of funds and his advanced age prevented him from pursuing an effective appeal. To celebrate their brazen and successful censorship, the Deputies then published their 'case' against D6MRD? in book form, Six Million Did Die.   Only a couple of the Deputies' criticisms were legitimate. The rest of the book consists of submissions from Establishment historians and politicians of every stripe, denouncing D6MRD? without presenting any factual critique. Of particular interest are the 'expert' testimony of Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who would later completely discredit his 'expertise' by endorsing the 'Hitler Diary' fraud; and also the submission of the 'reformed' Nazi Albert Speer, whose letter actually provides more evidence for the Revisionist position than it does for the Exterminationists. His letter is reproduced at the end of this edition of D6MRD?

In an attempt to get around the South African ban, HRP temporarily changed the title to Six Million Lost and Found. However, due to the immense popularity of the original title, we have now reverted to it.

Surrogate or 'bootleg' copies of D6MRD? then began to appear, especially in the United States and Canada. Some of these editions were authorised by HRP; many were not. In Toronto, German publisher Ernst Zundel brought out his own edition, with four pages of new introductory material.  He bravely mailed free copies to Canadian Members of Parliament, clergy, journalists and broadcasters. Anxious to create a 'story', one staffer of the Canadian Broadcasting Company showed a copy to a professional 'survivor' Mrs Sabina Citron,who runs her own maverick Holocaust Remembrance Association. Enraged at the existence of such dissident ideas, and put on the spot by the CBC reporter, Mrs Citron filed a private legal complaint against Zundel, under a very obscure and obsolete law, prohibiting the publication of 'False News'. She then insisted that the Crown take over the prosecution of the case at taxpayers' expense.  Even though Mrs Citron's group had been expelled from the Toronto Jewish Federation, and even though she herself had been in trouble with the law, the petrified Crown Attorney's office meekly agreed to her demands. Just for good measure, they also added to the charge a recent flyer Zundel had published (but again, not written). Zundel was arraigned and a preliminary hearing was held in June 1984.

The Crown exhibited eleven witnesses. There were two Holocaust 'experts': John Fried and Raul Hilberg. However, Fried's testimony was so weak, and his political perspective so transparently leftist, that he was not called to the main trial. Two survivors were featured: Mrs Sabina Citron and Amold Friedman. Mrs Citron's narrative of her war-time experiences was so mundane that, much to her chagrin, she too would not be asked to testify at the main trial. Although Zundel had thoroughly prepared for the hearing, by bringing in Revisionist scholars from around the world, his lawyer at that time was totally unfamiliar with the issues. Consequently, Hilberg & Co. smugly thought the main trial would be an easy victory.

At the time the main trial opened in January 1985, Zundel had located a new lawyer, a dynamic, aggressive and talented Westerner, Doug Christie. Although he had had no previous exposure to Revisionism he grasped the arguments immediately.  Again, Zundel brought in teams of his own experts, both to prepare the research for Christie, and themselves to testify during the Defence portion of the case. Ironically, both the Defence and Prosecution agreed that D6MRD? was largely correct and that only small points were in error. But the Crown had set out to prove that the entire Revisionist thesis was incorrect, and thus it turned out that it was actually the 'Holocaust' which was on trial. Christie took full advantage of the situation by ruthlessly grilling the entire slate of prosecution witnesses. A stunned Hilberg retreated futher and further in his testimony; so much so that he was later chastised by American Jewish groups for putting up such a feeble performance.

Although the judge at the preliminary had been a disinterested 'good ol' boy' the main trial was presided over by an extremely hostile and biased judge Hugh Locke. It was later discovered that when he was a barrister his own law-firm had done legal work for Mrs Citron's Holocaust Remembrance Association! Locke allowed the Crown to introduce all kinds of hearsay evidence, particularly an emotive movie film.

After seven and a half weeks the jury eventually found Zundel guilty regarding D6MRD? (but not guilty as regards the other leaflet) He was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, with automatic deportation afterwards. Despite the severity of the sentence Canadian Jews were despondent, and many complained bitterly and openly that the trial had only given the Revisionists a platform for their 'obnoxious' views. Indeed, Zundel regarded the outcome as a victory. He had aired Revisionist arguments to the public; there had been very heavy and fairly accurate media coverage throughout the trial. And as a result he had recruited vast numbers of new supporters who had never heard his message before.

In Britain, where it is not an offence to deny the Holocaust, an official of the Jewish Board of Deputies said that a prosecution would only bring undesirable publicity. However, other members of the Jewish community had different ideas.

In 1980 a Jewish journalist employed by a communist publication misnamed Searchlight decided; with accomplicies, to destroy the premises of a firm thought to be producing D6MRD? causing damage to the extent of 60,000 British pounds. This man, with two previous convictions, was quickly apprehended and later sentenced to an inadequate prison term of two and a half years. In May 1987 a man, quite properly, was sentenced to 4 years for arson against a Jewish Synagogue: damage; 500 pounds. He had no previous convictions. His defence was that his father had been murdered by Jews in Palestine.

Since we here at Historical Review Press value accuracy, we have responded to criticisms of D6MRD? by correcting in this third edition those few errors which existed. Most of these mistakes were transposed into the earlier editions from previous works. It should be borne in mind that Rassinier, for example, was totally alone and without resources, so it is not surprising that his pioneering studies contained some errors, which would be later repeated in earlier editions of D6MRD? We hope that we have now eliminated all of these.

We are extremely grateful to the Canadian government for drawing our attention to these few errors, so that we can correct them, but we do question whether it was worth them spending millions of their taxpayers' dollars in the process, when a 50c stamp on a letter to us would have sufficed.

CHAPTER 1

GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR

Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany's cultural life. This was held to be particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a position of remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in law, finance and the mass media, even though they constituted only one percent of the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the leadership of communist movements in Germany also tended to convince the Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish people.

It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures against them were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable proportion of their assets.  Never at any time had the Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.

JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION 'EXTERMINATION'

ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED

CHAPTER 2

GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

With the coming of the war the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically. It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile force. On September 5, 1959 Chaim Weizmann, the principal Zionist leader, had declared war against Germany on behalf of the world's Jews, stating that "the Jews stand by Great Bitain and will fight on the side of the democracies... The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources etc..." (Javish Chronicle, September 8, 1939).

DETENTION OF ENEMY ALIENS 
 

All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German Reich and, as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were eventually to begin the policy of internment. It is worth noting that the United States and Canada had already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent in detention camps before the Germans applied the same security measures against the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence or declaration of disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as hadbeen given by Weizmann. The British too, during the Beer War, interned all the women and children of the population and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense could the British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Beers.

The detention of Jews in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential purposes from the German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and subversion; Himmler informed Mussolini on October 11, 1942 that German policy towards the Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of military security. He complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions were conducting partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by official Soviet information given to Raymond Arthur Davis that no less than 35,000 European Jews were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a result, Jews were to be transported to restricted areas and detention  camps,  both  in Germany, and especially after March 1942, in the Government-General of Poland.

As the war proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for labour in the war-effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering the alleged plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the latter would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts. Certainly after the attack on Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for Jewish emigration. The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17, 1943, reveals that the German leader personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane programme" of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endliisung, Berlin, 1956, p. 478).  This took place at a time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to exterminate the Jews, but Hitler's request clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding his labour force.

In harmony with this programme, concentration camps became, in fact, industrial complexes. At every camp where Jews and other nationalities were detained, there were large industrial plants and factories supplying material for the German war-effort: the Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and 1.IG. Farben Industrie at Auschwitz, and the electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbriick. In many cases, special concentration camp money notes were issued as payment for labour, enabling prisoners to buy extra rations from camp shops. The Germans were determined to obtain the maximum economic return from the concentration camp system, an object wholly at variance with any plan to exterminate millions of people in them. It was the function of the S.S. Economy and Administation Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that the concentration camps became major industrial producers.

EMIGRATION STILL FAVOURED 

It is a remarkable fact however, that well into the war period, the Germans continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther, Secretary of State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and December 1940, when they were terminated by the French. A circular from Luther's department dated August 15, 1940 shows that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann, for it is signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been commissioned in August·to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was employed in research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 77).

The proposals of August 15 were that an inter-European bank was to finance the emigration of four million Jews by means of a phased programme. Luther's 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich had obtained Himmler's approval of this plan before the end of August and had also submitted it to Goering. It certainly met with Hitler's approval, for as early as June 17 his interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to Mussolini that "One could found a State of Israel in Madagascar" (Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter, London, 1951, p. 178).

Although the French terminated the Madagascar negotiations in December 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre of Jewish Documentation in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued the scheme and that Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941. Eventually however it was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in particular by the situation after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10, 1942 the Foreign Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling, sent to the Foreign Office by Luther's assistant, Rademacher, is of great importance because it demonstrates conelusively that the term "Final Solution" meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern ghettos and concentration camps such as Auchwitz constituted nothing but an alternative plan of evacuation.

The directive reads: "The war with the Soviet Union has in the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the Fiihrer has decided that the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final Solution" (Reitlinger, ibid. p. 79). The details of this evacuation had been discussed a month earlier at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, which we shall examine below.

Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of "extermination". Only a month later, however, on March 7, 1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a "Final Solution" of the Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels' memoranda also stress deportation to the East (i.e.-the GovernmentGeneral of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the operation. It is perfectly clear from the foregoing that the term "Final Solution" was applied both to Madagascar and to the Eastern territories and that therefore it meant only the deportation of the Jews.

Even as late as May 1944 the Germans were prepared to allow the emigration of one million European Jews from Europe. An account of this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a prominent Soviet Jewish scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Cologne, 1956). Weissberg, who spent the war in Cracow though he expected the Germans to intern him in a concentration camp, explains that on the personal authorisation of Himmler, Eichmann had sent the Budapest Jewish leader Joel Brand to Istanbul with an offer to the Allies to permit the transfer of one million Euiopean Jews in the midst of the war. (if the 'extermination' writers are to be believed, there were scarcely one million Jews left by May, 1944.) The Gestapo admitted that the transportation involved would greatly inconvenience the German war-effort but were prepared to allow it in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used exclusively on the Russian front.

Unfortunately, the plan came to nothing: the British concluded that Brand must be a dangerous Nazi agent and immediately imprisoned him in Cairo while the Press denounced the offer as a Nazi trick. Winston Churchill, though orating to the effect that the treatment of the Hungarian Jews was probably "the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world" nevertheless told Chaim Weizmann that acceptance of the Brand offer was impossible, since it would be a betrayal of his Russian Allies.

Although the plan was fruitless it well illustrates that no one allegedly carrying out "thorough" extermination would permit the emigration of a million Jews and it demonstrates, too, the prime importance placed by the Germans on the war-effort.

Proceed to Chapters 3, 4, & 5