© Copyright 1993, H. David Kirk

[Continued]

Attack as Defense

From a recent article on "revisionists" in Britain:

Irving makes no bones about his antisemitism (except when he denies it). He thinks the Jews are "very foolish not to abandon the gas chamber theory while they still have time." Still have time? Yes, he indulges in "prophesy" which could be self-fulfilling. He "foresees" (much like Hitler) "a new wave of antisemitism" (which he helps to create), because "the Jews have exploited people with the gas chamber legend."'[14]

The motto "attack as defense" has its pedigree in Hitler's Propaganda Minister Goebbels:

Now what was the Nazis' reaction when the crimes were for the first time officially denounced...? Dr. Goebbels had already an inkling that "British propaganda is taken up so much with the alleged and-Jewish atrocities in the East" that he "believes the time had come to do something about this propaganda campaign." It was, he confessed at a secret departmental conference on 12 December 1942, a "rather delicate subject," especially "'the maltreatment of the Jews in Poland" which "had better not be touched on at all." Generally, the line to be followed was "not to engage in polemics but instead give particular prominence to British atrocities in India, Iran and Egypt," because "our best weapon is an offensive" designed to ensure that the anti-British "atrocity stories really do make an impact."'[15]

To reinforce what has been said about the "revisionists" equating Allied and Nazi atrocities, there is this further insight into the Goebbels technique:

At another secret conference on December 16 (1942) Goebbels believes "a general hullabaloo about atrocities is our best chance of getting away from the embarrassing topic of the Jews. Things must be so arranged that each party accuses every other of committing atrocities." This general hullabaloo would "eventually result in this subject disappearing from the agenda."[16]

Goebbels' recipe for "even-handed" propaganda is evidently being put to "good" use by other "revisionist" craftsmen besides Irving. A 1989 book called Other Losses [17] by James Bacque: Bacque accused General Dwight Eisenhower, when he was commanding officer of the Allied Forces stationed in Europe, of having willfully caused the death of approximately one million German prisoners of war. That revisionist thesis was given serious reviews in major Canadian newspapers, suggesting that here was suppressed dirt from our own side in World War II. Educated readers, particularly Jewish ones, might have been expected to be wary. One who fell for the hoax wrote a letter to the editor of a Canadian Jewish paper." He referred to Bacque's "careful research," "ample evidence," and "obviously willful murder."

Another correspondent,[19] commenting on the misconceptions of the previous letter writer and on Bacque's thesis, wrote:

... the German historian Bert Engelmann, (has) shown Bacque's story of German prisoners being willfully starved to death to be false.... Eisenhower declared time and again that he did not have the men or the means to take care of the surrender of a full-sized army and finally closed the American lines and refued to accept surrendering German forces. My German source confirms that the situation in the American sector (Kreuznach and Freudenstadt) was very bad, worse than in the British and French sector But I am asking: what is behind this obviously strange publication coming 45 years after the end of the war?

As you see, already in 1942 Goebbels had created the perfect recipe for Holocaust denial.

[Continued]

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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