Header Information:
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Denial: Like a poisonous weed…
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project (CANADA)
Archive/File: people/c/conot.robert.e/like-a-poisonous-weed
Last-modifed: 1993/03/07
In reading Robert Conot’s introduction to his 1983 work “Justice at
Nuremberg,” I took note of the final paragraphs, and decided to add them to
the archives. Speaking to the Nuremberg tribunal in his opening address,
“Justice Jackson remarked; `What makes this inquest significant is that
these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world
long after their bodies have returned to dust.'”
“These influences, in fact, have regenerated like a poisonous weed.
Anti-Semitism and the euphemistic catchwords that led to `the Final Solution
of the Jewish Question’ have reappeared hand in hand. A world-wide cult has
arisen claiming that the Holocaust never happened. A hundred books,
booklets, and pamphlets have been printed alleging that the slaughter was
imaginary or exaggerated, and is but a Jewish invention.”
“All of this might be dismissed as the frustrated thrashing about of a
radical, irrational fringe were it not for the haunting parallels to the
pre-Hitler era, and the continuing employment of Nazi propaganda
methodology. A leader of the French neo-Nazis, for example, asserts that
those Jews who died had merely been victims of the wartime food shortage.
The Nazis had, in fact, originally planned to starve the Jews to death,
allocating 186 calories per capita daily for their sustenance, but had
abandoned the scheme for more direct methods after the ensuing epidemics had
decimated not only the Jews but threatened to spread to the relatively
well-fed German population.”
“Similar in nature is the assertion that Zyklon B gas was employed only as a
disinfectant at Auschwitz. This had been the case until the fall of 1941,
when an enterprising SS officer had concluded that if Zyklon B killed lice
it could kill people just as well. Thereafter, the gas had been used, first
to murder thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, and then hundreds of
thousands of Jews – nearly all of them women, children, and old people
unfit for `extermination through work.’ Hitler’s dictum that `the magnitude
of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great
masses of the people … more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a
little one’ has once more come into vogue.”
“The most effective means to combat such distortions is to make the facts
accessibile, and, with them, expose the statements for what they are. At
Nuremberg, General Telford Taylor, the prosecutor of more war criminals than
any other man, said: `We cannot here make history over again. But we can see
that it is written true.'”(Conot, xii-xiii)
Work Cited
Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.
ISBN 0-06-015117-X
