The Holocaust Historiography Project

The Holocaust (Part A)

Holocausts, we are told, are nothing new to the Jews. They have been suffering regular extermination programs since time began. First the Egyptians and the Persians, then the Romans, then the Spanish, then the Russians, then the Nazis, and today the Arabs. As the candid Jewish psychohistorian Dr. Howard F. Stein wrote in The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1980:

"For the Jews, the term 'holocaust' does not simply denote a single catastrophic era in history, but is a grim metaphor for the meaning of Jewish history. The 'Holocaust' lies at the heart of the Jewish experience of time itself. One is either anxiously awaiting persecution, experiencing persecution, recovering from it, or living in a period that is a temporary reprieve from it.

"'Holocaust' is thus the timeless fabric into which the 1933-1945 period is woven… Thus the 'reality' of the Holocaust is inextricably part of the myth in which it is woven — and for which myth it serves as further confirmatory evidence for the timeless Jewish theme that the world is in conspiracy to annihilate them, one way or another, at least eventually."

Indeed, the Jewish perception of many of these “Holocausts” is strikingly synchronous. We can trace the same feature in all of them: “persecution” by anti-Semites, gassings and/or burnings, sexual and toiletry tortures, and general Jewish suffering and torment. The myths tells us more about the tellers than about the subject characters; for many of these tales are totally or partly fictitious. They do not stand up to scientific examination.

Let us start at the beginning with the alleged plot by the Persian Prime Minister Haman to exterminate the Jewish population. Every year modern Jews still celebrate Haman’s execution, in a festival known as Purim which involves eating pies cooked in the form of human ears. The legend tells us that Haman’s plot was foiled when the King (Ahasuerus) took a Jewish bride, Esther, in place of his current Queen, Vashti. Esther was advised by her cousin Mordecai of Haman’s plot to kill Persia’s entire Jewish population, and so she prevailed upon her husband king to execute Haman, and his ten sons, and some tens of thousands of his followers. However, we read in the Encyclopedia Judaica under “Purim":

"The chronological difficulties such as the identity of king Ahasuerus and the absence of any reference in Persian sources to a king having a Jewish consort; the striking resemblance between the names Mordecai and Esther to the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar; the lack of any reference to Purim in Jewish literature before the first century BC; the language of the Book of Esther — which suggests a later date: all these have moved the critics to look elsewhere than the account in Esther for the true origin of the festival. Various conjectures have been made, but the problem still awaits its solution."

Esther/Ishtar was a Jewish fertility goddess to whom first-born Jewish children were sacrificed by their own parents. She was part of a pantheon of gods that included Moloch the fire god, in whose fiery, Auschwitzian statue, more Jewish babies were burned alive. In numerous Biblical (Old Testament) passages we find heated debate and condemnation of this practice. Nowadays, Jewish parents do not physically sacrifice their children to an altar of Jewish theology; modern Jewish parents just inculcate sufficient guilt, anxiety and worry into their offspring that the destruction of their psychological self-esteem is a much more punitive (and therefore valuable) offering.

Jewish Talmudic literature offers all sorts of outlandish claims for Jewish casualties in the various Jewish revolts against Roman rule. The revolt in 115-117 AD started in Libya and spread along the coast to Egypt and then to Cyprus. However, in most places the Jews did not attack the Roman administrators or soldiers; they attacked the Greek and Roman civilians. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. In response, the Roman army started killing Jews, and the Talmud tells us that In Alexandria the casualty toll was “sixty myriads on sixty myriads". This would appear to be a total of 1,200,000 — a rather remarkable figure, since Alexandria only had a total, Gentile and Jewish, population of some 500,000.

The next Jewish revolt was in 132 to 135 AD, under the self-proclaimed “Messiah” Bar Kokhba. According to the Talmud, the revolt ended in the Roman laying siege to Bar Kokhba’s fortress at Bethar, near Jerusalem. We are told that Bar Kokhba was so tough that he would kick catapulted Roman rocks back at them with his knee. The Roman finally captured the fortress and in revenge killed 4 billion “or as some say” 40 million Jews. In order to reassure us of the authenticity of these figures, the Talmud tells us that a tidal wave of Jewish blood, carrying large boulders with it, stained the sea for a distance of four miles out. The Jewish schoolchildren in Bethar — all 64 million or “as some say” 150,000 — were rolled up individually in their parchment scrolls and burned alive. Slain Jews were used as fence posts, and blood left over from the tidal wave was used to fertilize Roman vineyards for the next seven years. Needless to say, the Roman literature of the time does not even mention any massacre at Bethar. Credulity prevents us from accepting the Talmudic massacre allegations and their death toll. But we do detect a certain amount of synchronicity between these ancient yarns and modern Nazi Holocaust allegations.

As regards the Spanish Inquisition, we have already seen how the Chief Inquisitor and burner of Jews at the stake Fray Tomas de Torquemada was himself a Jew whose father had feigned conversion to Christianity. Torquemada enrolled the assistance of pious pamphleteer Fray Alonso de Espina in his rabble-rousing activities against Protestants, Jews and other non-Catholics. Espina, besides being a flaming homosexual, was yet another Marrano, or Jewish pretended convert. Torquemada’s successor Fray Diego de Deja was also a Christianized Jew. So here again, the Jews can hardly complain about a Spanish “Holocaust” when it was in fact other Jews who were doing the persecuting and Jew-burning. If anyone has a complaint it is surely the Protestants, who were tortured and murdered both by Catholics and by Jews pretending to be Catholics. Some Jews have argued that the recitation of the Kol Nidre, or breaking of all vows on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) was necessitated by Jews being forced to adopt Christianity during this period, but of course, Kol Nidre was in regular use long before.

Before the Nazi monster came on the scene, the main character in the Jewish pantheon of demons was the Tsar and his regular pogroms against innocent Jews. However, try as one may, there is no academic authentication that such pogroms ever took place. In fact, western diplomats who investigated such allegations at the time found that the “massacre” stories were a pack of lies. Oxford University historian Goldwyn Smith found that British consuls visited the sites of alleged pogroms and found that nothing of the sort had taken place. What had happened was that Russian workers had rioted against Jewish money-lenders, and Tsarist troops were called in to quell the Russians, which they did. Various British diplomats in Russia at the time fully acknowledged that Jews were resented by the workers and peasants, not because of their creed, but because of their loan-sharking and sharp business practices.

American writers also noted the Jewish predilection for usury in Russia. Mark Twain had various scathing remarks to make. So too did Poultney Bigelow who wrote for Harper's.

The Russian intellectuals also held that rampant Jewish capitalism was solely responsible for anti-Jewish feeling. Alexander Pushkin included several unattractive Jewish usurers in his works, as did the lesser known Nikolai Gogol and Dmitri Reshetnikov. A Russian authoress living in America, Zenaide Ragozin, attempted to present a correct perspective on the “pogrom” tales in the prestigious Century Magazine (April 1882). In a hard-to-find-work, Diary of a Writer, the famed Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “the Jews are draining the soil of Russia".

Of course, we cannot leave a survey of Jewish “persecution” in Tsarist Russia without mentioning the case of our dear friend Levi Davidovich Trotsky, or Bronstein to use his correct name. In his autobiography My Life he tells us that on his father’s estate the workers received no shelter, no meat, and but 10 rubles a month for heavy labor. When they started to deteriorate physically his “father would give them some watermelons, or half a sack of dried fish, and they would go back to work again, often singing…” In the book Trotsky by Francis Wyndham and David King, we learn that Trotsky was so “persecuted” that he was sent off to a toney prep school in the Russian resort of Odessa. Plunging into the largely Jewish radical-chic fraternity life, Trotsky and company quickly set about hatching plots to redirect all that peasant resentment against Jewish capitalists into peasant resentment against the Tsar. When they finally succeeded in having the Tsar deposed by popular unrest in the Spring of 1917, who should be waiting in the wings but Trotsky and his crowd of Jewish radicals. Several months later, the popular democratic government was overthrown by a tiny bunch of Jewish agitators, and Jewish power was finally in total control of the reins of power. Now they could set about really ripping off the Russian workers since there was no Tsar to apply a modicum of regulation. Deals were struck with wealthy Jewish capitalists in the west, such as Armand Hammer, whereby Russian minerals and Russian labor would be ruthlessly exploited for the mutual benefit of the Jewish capitalists in the west, and the Jewish state capitalists in the Soviet Union. What greater profit-base could there be than a country where the labor force was the captive of the government? The always-upward-socially-mobile Jewish landlords and loan sharks merely exchanged their snazzy civilian clothes for commissars' uniforms.

The “surviving” of Holocausts has become something of a Jewish tradition. There is no greater survival industry than that related to the 1933-1945 period, when 6,000,000 Jews are supposed to have been done to death by the Nazi government of Germany. Again, these claims have been scrupulously examined by academics such as Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University at Chicago, and Dr. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon in France, and have been found to be unsupported. The California-based Institute for Historical Review publishes many books and a quarterly Journal of Historical Review which debunk such outlandish claims. Naturally, the IHR is the subject of much Jewish and Jewish-inspired opprobrium, as were those who expressed the slightest skepticism about earlier Jewish Holocaust claims.

In this Holocaust-to-end-all-Holocausts, the same features are evident as before. The similarity of “gas-chambers” and “gas-ovens” to Moloch’s fiery statue, and to the burning of Shadrak, Meshak and Abednego, is uncanny. The exaggeration of casualty figures beyond the demographic possibilities is the same with the “Six Million” as it was with Bar Kokhba’s “64 Million". The heavy lacing of the narratives with sexual and toiletry torments is synchronistic. We also find many references to rats and dogs eating Jewish flesh, which bring to mind the Biblical accounts of street dogs licking up the blood of Jezebel.

Let us examine a few of such narratives. The New York Times of 4 June 1974 reported on a Holocaust symposium held at the curious locale of St. John’s Catholic Church in Manhattan. The reporter, Israel Shenker, recounted an entire “rap sheet” of Nazi crimes described at the symposium by survivors and by experts. The corpses of Jews were trundled to the ovens in wheelbarrows, he tells us. No water was available to prisoners — all had to “drink mud". Grandparents held hands with their children while “going into the ovens". “Hateful police dogs ate pieces of flesh alive” and rats too “ate up the cheeks of the bodies". Mud is often cited in psycho-analysis as a symbol for excreta. Walking into a horizontal crematory furnace is not physically possible, of course; the narrator is drawing on the Biblical imagery outlined earlier. Dogs and rats eating one’s face is more likely the symptom of a deep neurosis than it is an empirical reality. One woman recounted:

"Then they sent us to Birkenau, into the mud where there was fleas and dirt. We had no water at all. We drank mud. I had malaria; I had typhus; I had everything. But it happened that my heart kept on beating in spite of it… You don’t manage to survive, it just happens. My brother died in the camp. My mother was sent to Auschwitz at the same time. I saw this big fire and I knew my mother’s body was burning, and I was grateful that she should not have to see me burning in front of her or know that I saw her burning in front of me."

Professor Irving Greenberg, of City University New York, also spoke about “burning” but in a more theological sense. He felt that Jews must philosophically learn to expect periods of belief "interspersed with times when the flames and smoke of their burning children blot out faith, though it flickers again".

The symbol of the regeneration of Jewish life through the burning or other sacrificing of Jewish children is one that we have already encountered in our examination of ancient Jewish sacrificial offerings to the fertility goddess Ishtar, and the fire god Moloch. We also recall that when Shadrak, Meshak and Abednego were tossed into the fiery furnace by an enemy king, he was promptly astounded to discover not just the three Israelites walking around in the flames unscathed, but a fourth figure — the Jewish “son of God” — in there with them. We have seen the symbol recycled in the Talmudic accounts of Jewish children being burned in their own Torah scrolls by the Romans.

Almost every day, when one picks up a newspaper, one reads survivors' accounts of the Holocaust which include such Talmudic symbolism. In the University of Tulsa Collegian dated 11 February 1982 we read of a lecture by Jack Glocer, yet another survivor of Auschwitz, who says:

"… he will never forget his work on the crew that was responsible for burying babies alive. It was not only the most inhumane thing ever done by this man who says 'I probably couldn’t kill a chicken if I had to'. It also marked the only time he viewed a Nazi act with 'compassion'.

"'There was a Nazi sergeant guarding us as we buried live babies,' Glocer said in his Polish-accented English. 'All of a sudden he pulled a grenade from his belt and tossed it into the ditch. Then a superior officer walked by and told him that the next time he did something like that, disciplinary actions would be taken.'

"'I had a cousin who had a 3-month-old daughter on the train we took to Auschwitz,' Glocer remembers 'When we arrived at Auschwitz the child was grabbed by a Nazi soldier and thrown on top of a pile of burning babies.' “

Other parts of the Talmud are recalled when we study various descriptions of “excremental assault", a survey of which appears in Terrence des Pres' thesis The Survivor:

"Everybody in the block had typhus … it came to Bergen-Belsen in its most violent, most painful, deadliest form. The diarrhea caused by it became uncontrollable. It flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and mixed with blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor of the barracks."

Here we go with “mud” again. About the only bodily emission that does not get a look in is semen; a vat of which Jesus was boiled in, according to the Talmud. The wicked Nazis even tormented their captives by providing only one latrine for “30,000 to 32,000 women". This inadequacy yet again caused the Jews to foul each other, for:

"We stood in line to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies…"

Even the luckier inmates, who worked in the camp hospital, “had to step into human excreta, into urine soaked with blood, into stools of patients suffering from highly contagious diseases". And:

"Some of the patients died before they ever reached the gas chambers. Many of them were covered all over with excrement, for there were no sanitary facilities."

Having just one latrine for all those 30,000+ prisoners apparently caused the inmates to resort to unconventional toilets.

"Many women with diarrhea relieved themselves in soup bowls or the pans for coffee; then they hid the utensils under the mattress to avoid the punishment threatening them for doing so: 25 strokes on the bare buttocks, or kneeling all night long on sharp gravel, holding up bricks. These punishments often ended in the death of the guilty."

Des Pres scoffs at attempts by (Jewish) psychoanalysts to describe the camp experience as a reversion to “infantile” or “anal fixated” levels. He explains that in a deprived environment it is only normal to focus totally on food and excretion. He points out that infants are not “forced to wet and soil themselves” whereas prisoners had no other choice. If they attempted to go to a proper lavatory, they would be attacked by guard dogs or assaulted by guards. He goes on to describe various depraved tortures that the guards would inflict. Prisoners would be forced to urinate into each other’s mouths. Soup bowls would be tossed into latrines. At Buchenwald, “ten prisoners suffocated in excrement (pits) in October 1937 alone".

Unfortunately, none of these allegations stands up to scientific scrutiny. At Auschwitz today one can still see the remarkable recreation facilities provided for prisoners, including a swimming pool, a soccer field, a sports stadium, a volley-ball court and a theater. Hygiene was very strictly regulated, with all incoming internees being processed through a delousing facility that involved the fumigation of their clothes in fumigation closets (hence the so-called “gas chambers"). At various sites, British POWs were used to assist in the delousing processes. A report by one of the POWs appeared in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps of September 1946. It is quite true that later in the war there were serious outbreaks of typhus in many of the camps, but this was due to the breakdown of the delousing processes, and the general chaos caused by the Allied bombing campaigns. Evacuees were coming in from the east where typhus was endemic. Thousands of Germans, including camp staff, died of this disease. It was not something the Germans would encourage through inadequate hygiene — on the contrary it is something they would rigorously try to stamp out. Posters in German and Polish were posted everywhere advising of the fatal dangers of louse infestation.

Go to Part B