To: HLIST
Subject: More from The New American
In response to William Norman Grigg’s article in the John Birch Society
magazine _The New American_ (“Lessons From the Holocaust,”
),
which was critical of Holocaust revisionism, Michael A. Hoffman II sent
in a letter to the editor that was published in Vol. 14, no. 25 (7 Dec.
1998), p. 2:
“Communist Hoax”
William Norman Grigg’s article critiquing World War II revisionism
(“Lessons from the Holocaust,” from the November 9th issue) was wrong on
a number of points, including the ludicrous claim that “confessions”
coerced from Auschwitz camp personnel represent powerful testimony to
the fact of homicidal gassings in Auschwitz.
The gassing of millions in Auschwitz should obviously be well
represented forensically in a murder weapon. But you avoid entirely the
fact that the so-called extermination gas chambers shown to tourists in
Auschwitz all these years were built by the Soviets after the war and
are therefore a Communist hoax about which you are strangely silent.
Since the end of World War II Communist groups and governments have
fervently promoted and concocted anti-German propaganda. Moreover,
Zionist groups are using this agitprop to substitute Auschwitz for
Calvary as the central ontological event of Western history and to
subvert and defame the West as a repository of “hate” and “bigotry.”
Revisionists are not anti-Jewish because they reject an irrational
belief system which is being imposed as a virtual state religion. The
issues are whether or not the facts of the documentary record sustain
the claims of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. Do we have the right
to doubt Jewish shoah theology and Communist and Allied atrocity
propaganda?
And what of the professional German haters? Men like Professor Daniel
Goldhagen of Harvard University, whose fraudulent book _Hitler’s Willing
Executioners_ claims that the German people are homicidally tained, and
Elie Wiesel, who wrote in _Legends of Our Time_ that every Jew must
harbor a “healthy” hate for the Germans?
Michael A. Hoffman II
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
Following Hoffman’s letter (and 2 other ones), Grigg responded (pp.
2-3):
William Norman Grigg replies: Contrary to Mr. Hoffman’s description,
“Lessons from the Holocaust” was not a critique of “World War II
revisionism”; rather, it was a historical commentary illustrating the
murderous potential of the total state. _The New American_ has not
shied away from responsible “revisionism.” We have examined the
origins, outcome, and implications of World War II (“Sowing the Wind:
Myths and Realities of the Second World War,” in our June 11, 1992
issue), discussed the little-understood reasons for the bombing of
Hiroshima (“Dropping the Bomb,” August 21, 1995), and reviewed and
condemned the post-war anti-German atrocities committed under Dwight
Eisenhower’s command (“Eisenhower’s War Crimes” and “American Death
Camps,” May 21, 1990).
“Lessons from the Holocaust” specifically acknowledged that history can
be warped by wartime atrocity propaganda, and that there are many people
who have “honest historical questions.” It did draw a distinction
between principled “revisionist” skeptics and apologists for the
national socialist regime, whose view might be summarized as, “Hitler
only killed a few thousand Jews, and they had it coming.”
Holocaust skeptics of a certain stripe employ what could be called a
“Johnny Cochran” approach to history, casting Allied officials in the
role of Mark Fuhrman — that is, of planting or falsifying evidence as
part of a frame-up inspired by race hatred (in this case, anti-German
prejudice). That there are people and pressure groups that possess an
irrational hatred against Germans as individuals we do not deny. That
the history of the event commonly known as the Holocaust is being
exploited for less than honorable purposes we do not dispute — indeed,
this was specifically mentioned in our article. However, to use Mr.
Hoffman’s phrase, “the facts of the documentary record” — forensic
tests conducted in the immediate aftermath of WWII, written documents
compiled by Nazi authorities, photographs smuggled out of Auschwitz
during the war, and eyewitness accounts offered by both perpetrators and
victims — do indeed “sustain the claims of homicidal gas chambers at
Auschwitz.
Mr. Hoffman’s claim that forensic evidence is missing for an Auschwitz
“murder weapon” is simply untrue. It is true that the “gas chambers”
displayed in recent years were reconstructions of the facilities
destroyed by the retreating Nazis. U.S. Ambassador to Poland Bliss
Lane, in his memoir _I Saw Poland Betrayed_, described an October 1945
visit to the “Oswiecim [Auschwitz] concentration camp”: “Parts of the
metal crematories still remained, but most of the camp, including the
barracks, the asphyxiation chambers and the quarters of the Germans, had
been blown to bits by the Nazis before they retreated.” In 1945 a
scientific examination confirming the lethal use of hydrogen cyanide at
Auschwitz-Birkenau was performed upon the ventilation orifices of
Krematorium II by the Cracow Forensic Institute. In recent years
several “forensic reports” compiled by Holocaust skeptics have been
published, none of which has withstood the scrutiny of qualified
specialists in the relevant fields.
If Mr. Hoffman is aware of any evidence that the confession of SS
officer Josef Kramer, who described the gassings at Auschwitz, was
“coerced,” he should have cited it. The testimony of SS officer Pery
Broad, whose memoir (submitted to British military authorities in July
1945) describes the gassings at Auschwitz in great detail, corroborates
the accounts of both Kramer and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess.
Broad was neither tortured not imprisoned by the British, and he
reiterated his testimony during a public trial in 1959.
The Soviets “liberated” Poland from the Nazis, just as the Nazis had
briefly “liberated” Ukraine from the Soviets. In each case claims were
made by the totalitarian “liberators” regarding atrocities committed by
the previous totalitarian occupier; in each case strong evidence exists
to supplement those claims. Kramer’s confession regarding the
operations at Auschwitz, like the report on the Ukrainian terror famine
filed by Aleksandr Orlov of the Soviet OGPU, provided testimony against
interest confirming the atrocities in question.
Mr. Firestein contends that “there was hardly any socialism in the
[Nazi] party doctrine.” Quite the contrary is true: The platform of
the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party was thoroughly
socialist. William Shirer, who was himself a socialist, recorded that
“Point 11 [of the Nazi Party platform] … demanded abolition of incomes
unearned by work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the
sharing with the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the
abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the
death penalty for traitors, usurers, and profiteers; and Point 16 …
insisted on the communalization of department stores and their lease at
cheap rates to small traders.”
Socialism and “intense nationalism” are by no means mutually
exclusive. As Alfred Cobban pointed out in his 1939 study
_Dictatorship: Its History and Theory_, the German National Socialists
appealed to collectivists “who desired to see a socialistic
reorganization of society, but who rejected theoretical
internationalism.” Josef Pfitzner, a Sudeten German Nazi academic,
insisted that Nazism was “the synthesis of the two great dynamic powers
of the century, of the socialist and national idea….” Where the Nazis
preached the “nationalism” of a unitary totalitarian state, the
“nationalism” favored by Americanists embraces an independent nation
governed by a constitutional republic.
Our article did not portray “the Holocaust as the most heinous crime
against humanity,” as Miss Brown suggests, but rather as a typical —
albeit tragic — product of the collectivist state. The “American
Opinion Extra” describes in detail Stalin’s engineered Ukrainian famine,
and illustrates how Hitler built upon Stalin’s example. The main
article does offer a view of “the context in which … World War II
occurred” — namely, the long-range designs of the Soviet Union to
precipitate a European war and its cultivation of Hitler and his
movement as the “Icebreaker of the Revolution.” While we reject the
idea that the detention of Americans of Japanese ancestry was in any way
comparable to the Nazi regime’s treatment of the Jews, _The New
American_ has condemned the wartime relocation program as an
unconstitutional outrage.
