The Holocaust Historiography Project

Holocaust on parade:

Bergen-Belsen Gassing Lies

Fraudulent Holocaust claims about magical gas chambers and miraculous survival in wartime German camps are all too familiar. Occasionally, though, we come across a claim so breathtaking in its mendacious effrontery that it deserves special notice.

In an article (reproduced here) in The Gazette of Montreal (Canada), August 5, 1993, and in a memoir, Moshe Peer recounts his wartime ordeal as an eleven-year-old in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Peer claims that he “was sent to the [Bergen-Belsen camp] gas chamber at least six times.” The Gazette account goes on to relate: “Each time he survived, watching with horror as many of the women and children gassed with him collapsed and died. To this day, Peer doesn’t know how he was able to survive.” In an effort to explain the miracle, Peer muses: “Maybe children resist better, I don’t know.” (These days, not a single reputable historian claims that anyone was ever “gassed” in the Bergen-Belsen camp.)

How was such horror possible? In Peer’s view, the “rest of the world stood by and let the Holocaust happen.” The evil Germans, he says, “had the permission of the world” to kill Jews. Although Peer claims that “Bergen-Belsen was worse than Auschwitz,” he acknowledges that he and his younger brother and sister, who were deported to the camp in 1944, all somehow survived internment there.

Sarajevo Worse Than Auschwitz, Says Former Inmate

According to at least one former inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, conditions today in Sarajevo, the capital of wartorn Bosnia, are worse than in the notorious German camp during the Second World War.

Danica Bagaric, an ethnic Croat, was a 17-year-old partisan fighter with Tito’s Communist forces when she was captured by the Germans in April 1943. During the next two years, she was interned in four German camps, including (she says) 14 months in Auschwitz-Birkenau, perhaps the most notorious German wartime internment centerBagaric’s statements are reported in a Reuter news agency feature article dated July 27, 1993. This item has appeared in a number of daily newspapers, including Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald of July 30 (reproduced here).

'Danger' of Holocaust Revisionism Spreading, Says Israeli Scholar

Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer is worried. In an article in the Israeli English-language daily Jerusalem Post, August 7, 1993, he warns that “America is the center of a world-wide Holocaust denial movement.”

According to the article, headlined “US is center of Holocaust revisionism,” Bauer also “named France as the second major center, followed by Sweden. He said the danger is spreading from South America and from France to the rest of the European continent, to the Third World, India and Japan.”

“Only a small percentage of people in different countries believe what is being spread by the revisionists,” Bauer went on. “In some countries it is eight percent, in others it is ten or twelve percent.”

Yehuda Bauer is head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Israel’s Hebrew University. As one of the world’s most prominent Holocaust experts, it has been his unenviable task to announce awkward but unavoidable concessions to truth — and thus to revisionist critics of the Holocaust story. In April 1990, he publicly acknowledged that the widely-repeated Holocaust tale that the Germans had manufactured bars of soap from the bodies of murdered Jews is a myth. A few months later, he had the equally unhappy task of acknowledging that the long-standing allegation that the Germans killed four million people at Auschwitz — a claim that was supposedly proven at the Nuremberg Tribunal — is likewise not true.

In the Jerusalem Post article, Bauer specifically mentions David Cole’s videotape about Auschwitz, calling it “a powerful video.” ("David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper” is available on VHS from the IHR for $49.00, plus $ 2.50 for shipping.)

“Producer of the video is the Institute for Historical Review,” Bauer inaccurately goes on to say. (In fact, the IHR had nothing to do with the video’s production.) Israel, Bauer said, “lags behind the rest of the Western world” in producing video material to counter Holocaust revisionism.


Bibliographic information
Author: [Various]
Title: Holocaust on parade
Source: The Journal for Historical Review
Date: November/December 1993
Issue: Volume 13 number 6
Location: page 24
ISSN: 0195-6752
Attribution: “Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA.”
Please send a copy of all reprints to the Editor.