Paul Rassinier was a
FrenchThe French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
pacifistPacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
, political activist, and author. He was also an anti-Nazi
French ResistanceThe French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
fighter, and a prisoner of the
GermanNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
concentration camps at
BuchenwaldBuchenwald concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.Camp prisoners from all over Europe and Russia—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes,...
and
Mittelbau-DoraMittelbau-Dora was a Nazi Germany labour camp that provided workers for the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory in the Kohnstein, situated near Nordhausen, Germany....
. A journalist and editor, he wrote hundreds of articles on political and economic subjects. He was viewed by
Holocaust deniersHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
as the father of their belief system.
Early life
Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906, in
BermontBermont is a commune in the Territoire de Belfort department in Franche-Comté in northeastern France.-References:*...
in the
Territoire de BelfortThe Territoire de Belfort is a department in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France.-Administration:Its departmental code is 90, and its prefecture is Belfort...
, into a politically active family. During World War I Paul's father Joseph, a farmer and a veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present day Vietnam) was mobilized, but was put into a military prison for his pacifist attitudes, something his son Paul never forgot.
After the war, his family favored the post-war socialist revolutions, and he joined the
French Communist PartyThe French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
(PCF) in 1922. He secured a post as a teacher at the Ecole Valdoie, and in 1933, he became a Professor of History and Geography at the College d'Enseignement General at
BelfortBelfort is a commune in the Territoire de Belfort department in Franche-Comté in northeastern France and is the prefecture of the department. It is located on the Savoureuse, on the strategically important natural route between the Rhine and the Rhône – the Belfort Gap or Burgundian Gate .-...
.
In 1927, he served in the
French ArmyThe French Army, officially the Armée de Terre , is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces.As of 2010, the army employs 123,100 regulars, 18,350 part-time reservists and 7,700 Legionnaires. All soldiers are professionals, following the suspension of conscription, voted in...
in
MoroccoMorocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
, where his pacifist views were reinforced by the brutal colonialist repression and military corruption he witnessed. He later described how "We became deadened to scandalous scenes of torture, which had no reason to envy those of the
Middle AgesThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, and saw the apparatus of dictatorship not retreating, but even advancing in the face of an assassination!" Upon his demobilization, he returned to his teaching post and his political activism. It is also around this time that he became a member of
War Resisters' InternationalWar Resisters' International is an international anti-war organization with members and affiliates in over thirty countries. Its headquarters are in London, UK.-History:...
.
Pre-war political activities
Rassinier moved up to become the Party Secretary of the PCF in the Department of Belfort. In 1932, Lucien Carre, the Communist Youth Secretary of Belfort, was arrested, and a leftist coalition made up of several organizations, including the
Section française de l'Internationale ouvrièreThe French Section of the Workers' International , founded in 1905, was a French socialist political party, designed as the local section of the Second International...
(The SFIO), held protest rallies and demonstrations. Rassinier supported Henri Jacob's effort to enlist the middle-class parties, and for this and other acts "betraying the interests of the working class", both Jacob and Rassinier were expelled from the Communist Party in 1932.
Jacob had been slated to be the Communist candidate as deputy for the Canton of Belfort. After his expulsion, he still ran for office and won, which encouraged him, Paul Rassinier, and other alienated Communists to form a separate party, The Independent Communist Federation Of The East. Formed in 1932, Rassinier was the Party Secretary, Jacob the Assistant Secretary. Rassinier was also the editor of the Party newspaper,
The Worker. Neither the party nor the paper became popular, and both were dissolved in 1934.
The
6 February 1934 crisisThe 6 February 1934 crisis refers to an anti-parliamentarist street demonstration in Paris organized by far-right leagues that culminated in a riot on the Place de la Concorde, near the seat of the French National Assembly...
seemed to create new opportunities for the worker's movement, and around this time Rassinier joined the SFIO. He became Secretary of Federation SFIO for the Territory of Belfort, and revived a moribund newspaper,
Germinal, to serve as the party organ. He also ran for office several times, without success. Adopting the ideology of
Marceau PivertMarceau Pivert was a French schoolteacher, trade unionist, Socialist militant and journalist. He was an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.-In the Socialist Party:...
, he was a prolific author, denouncing the arms race, advocating the revision of the
Treaty of VersaillesThe Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
, demanding more workers rights and supporting a pacifist ideology that would not be restricted to France, but become Pan-European.
As war clouds gathered, Rassinier wrote articles condemning Nazism and Fascism, describing their foreign policy as "a policy of gangsters", with warnings that neither Italy nor Germany could be trusted to respect their promises. But when the
Munich AgreementThe Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...
was signed in 1938, Rassinier was one of many Frenchman who would describe himself as "an inhabitant of Munich". Echoing the words of former Prime Minister
Léon BlumAndré Léon Blum was a French politician, usually identified with the moderate left, and three times the Prime Minister of France.-First political experiences:...
, his support of the Accords was "without much pride, it is true, but without any shame", since he regarded war as the greatest catastrophe, and didn't believe "that even Mussolini after Ethiopia, even Hitler who makes blood run in the company of Spain, will risk such a madness". He received condemnation for his pacifist stance, but replied that while it's easy to be a fair-weather pacifist, a true commitment to peace is something done both in and out of season and he expressed his disappointment that so few Socialists were "on this side of the barricade".
In August 1939, after the
Nazi-Soviet PactThe Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
, Rassinier was arrested by French counter-intelligence, who suspected that his newspaper was receiving Nazi funding. Thanks to the intervention of
Paul FaurePaul Faure was a French politician, one of the leaders of the French Section of the Workers' International between the two wars...
and the SFIO, he was released a few days later, and when France was invaded in May 1940, he reported to his militia unit, where he and his comrades spent weeks in the barracks waiting for orders that never came. After France was overrun, he resumed teaching in Belfort.
Wartime years
Many of the "Socialists of Munich" joined in collaboration, but not Rassinier. In June 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union,
resistance in FranceThe French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
came alive and Rassinier first joined up with
The Volunteers Of Freedom, a Republican-Socialist coalition; and then with the Resistance group
Liberation, organized in the north of France by Henri Ribière. Rassinier became the director of
Libération Nord for the territories of Alsace and Belfort. Like others in various nations who were members of
War Resisters' InternationalWar Resisters' International is an international anti-war organization with members and affiliates in over thirty countries. Its headquarters are in London, UK.-History:...
, he practiced non-violent resistance to the Nazi German occupation, both because of his
pacifismPacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
and his fear that reprisals would fall on innocent people. Rassinier, using an expression common at the time, did not feel comfortable "to play with the skin of others".
Using his publishing contacts, he printed false identity papers, and helped establish an underground railroad from Belfort to the
SwissSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
town of
BaselBasel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, smuggling resistance fighters, political refugees and persecuted
JewsThe Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
to safety. In 1986, testimony of resistance member Yves Allain revealed that Rassinier had also worked closely with BURGUNDY, an escape network set up by the
Special Operations ExecutiveThe Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
to smuggle shot-down Allied pilots back home through Switzerland. He wrote articles for the Vichy-friendly newspaper
Le Rouge et le Bleu (
The Red and the Blue), then, along with J.L. Bruch, Pierre Cochery and Albert Tschann helped found
The Fourth Republic, an underground paper that advocated resistance and tried to lay a post-war foundation for France, so "that all those who will survive the war together can and must rebuild peace together, and thus save the country from a civil war."
The Fourth Republic demanded that Germany was to be held accountable for the crimes of Nazism, but the contribution of the Treaty of Versailles would not be ignored, nor would Germany and Italy be held unilaterally responsible for starting the war. BBC broadcasts from both London and Algiers congratulated the founding of the paper, and broadcast some excerpts, though by the time the only wartime edition came out Rassinier was already under arrest.
The local Communist resistance groups of the
Front NationalThe National Front was a World War II French Resistance movement, created in 1941 by Jacques Duclos and Pierre Villon, both members of the French Communist Party...
(FN) were hostile to Rassinier's idea of non-violent resistance and were enraged when Rassinier published leaflets condemning Soviet
CommunismCommunism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
equally with the
National SocialismNazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
of Hitler. After several warnings, the Communists condemned him to death. Rassinier's life was saved when in reaction to attacks on Germans at a local pharmacy and coffee house, both German and Vichy French police launched a series of raids that led to several arrests, one of them a person with a forged identity card. He broke under interrogation and revealed how he had obtained it, and on October 30, 1943, Rassinier was arrested in his classroom by agents of the
SicherheitsdienstSicherheitsdienst , full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was often considered a "sister organization" with the...
(SD), his arrest observed by a Liberation-North agent who was delivering forged identity and ration cards to him. His wife and two year old son were also arrested, but released a few days later. For eleven days, Rassinier was interrogated, the beatings involved leading to a broken jaw, crushed hand and ruptured kidney.
Rassinier was then deported to
GermanyNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
, enduring a three-day rail transport that ended on January 30, 1944, at
Buchenwald concentration campBuchenwald concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.Camp prisoners from all over Europe and Russia—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes,...
. After three weeks in
quarantineQuarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....
, he became prisoner number 44364 and was transported to Dora, where V1 and V2 rockets were built in underground tunnels. Work conditions were terrible. Hunger, disease, overwork, exhaustion and physical abuse by the
S.S.The Allgemeine SS was the most numerous branch of the Schutzstaffel paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany. It was managed by the SS-Hauptamt...
and the corrupt mafia of the
Häftlingsführung (camp lower administration made of prisoners themselves; see "Prisoner functionary") resulted in a catastrophic death rate.
In his first book
Crossing the Line, he says several factors contributed to his survival. Beginning in April, 1944, his wife mailed him food parcels, though this stopped in November. His friendship with his Block Chief resulted in his parcel being delivered directly to him without first being plundered by the prisoner government. For a time, he landed a cushy job in "Schwung" (a position somewhere between orderly and manservant) to the S.S.
Oberscharführer commanding the guard dog company, and got the opportunity to observe the S.S. at close range. Also, partly as a result of his interrogation, he came down with
nephritisNephritis is inflammation of the nephrons in the kidneys. The word "nephritis" was imported from Latin, which took it from Greek: νεφρίτιδα. The word comes from the Greek νεφρός - nephro- meaning "of the kidney" and -itis meaning "inflammation"....
, and spent no less than two hundred and fifty days of his imprisonment in the
Revier (infirmary).
On April 7, 1945, he was evacuated from Dora on what became a death train, endlessly traveling the German rail network from one bombed-out destination to another, with no food, water, or shelter. After several days, as the train rounded a bend and in spite of his terrible physical condition, he jumped off and thanks to the angle, escaped the S.S. gunfire. American soldiers rescued him the next day.
He returned to France in June 1945, and was awarded the Vermilion Medal of the French Recognition and the Rosette of Resistance. He was also classified as 95 percent an invalid (later to be revised to 105 percent). He returned to his teaching post, but because of his physical condition, was prematurely retired in 1950.
Post-war political activities
In 1945, Rassinier resumed his positions as head of the Belfort Federation SFIO and editor of
The Fourth Republic. He ran for office, and in June 1946 was elected as the substitute for Rene Naegelen, Belfort's Deputy to the National Assembly. Naegelen did relinquish the post, and for two months Rassinier served in the National Assembly of France, only to be beaten in the next election by Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt, an old rival. His wife Jeanne had a dim view of his future in politics, and he never again ran for office. He continued with other political activities, such as working with
André BretonAndré Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
,
Albert CamusAlbert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
,
Jean CocteauJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
,
Jean GionoJean Giono was a French author who wrote works of fiction set in the Provence region of France.-First period:...
,
Lanza del VastoLanza del Vasto, , was a philosopher, poet, artist, catholic and nonviolent activist.He was born in San Vito dei Normanni, Italy and died in Elche de la Sierra, Spain....
and Father Robert Treno in agitating for the rights of conscientious objectors.
1949–1967: The author
By 1948, Paul Rassinier had been a history teacher for over twenty-two years, and was distressed to read stories about the concentration camps and deportations that he claimed were not true. He was also appalled at the unilateral condemnation of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity that from his experience in Morocco, he didn't consider unique, and feared that nationalistic hatreds and bitterness would divide Europe. As he explained it in
The Lie of Ulysses:
...one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists. The deportees—many of whom were Communists—had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence.
Rassinier's first book,
Crossing the Line (1949), an account of his experience in Buchenwald, was an immediate critical and commercial success, one reviewer describing it as "the first testimony coldly and calmly written against the demands of resentment, idiotic hatred or chauvinism". The Trade Union of Journalists and Writers also praised it, and it was recommended reading by the SFIO. It is notable for its criticism of the prisoner government. Rassinier claims that effective resistance was found only among the Russian prisoners, and that many brutalities in the camp were committed not by the S.S., but by the mainly Communist prisoners who took over the
Haftlingsfuhrung and ran the internal affairs of the camps for their own benefit. Rassinier blamed the high death rate at the two camps he saw on their corruption.
His second book,
The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance at the Literature of Concentration Camp Inmates (1950) caused controversy. Rassinier examined what he considered to be representative accounts of the camps. He criticized exaggerations and denounced authors, such as Eugen Kogon, who in
L'Enfer Organisé (1947) claimed that the Buchenwald prisoner government's main objective was "to keep a nucleus of prisoners against the S.S." Rassinier asserts that this nucleus of prisoners were only looking out for themselves, and further claims that the Communists were trying to save their own skins after the war, saying that: "by taking by storm the bar of the witnesses and with extreme shouting, they avoided the dock". He also describes his visits to
Dachau and
MauthausenMauthausen is a small market town in Upper Austria, Austria. It is located at about 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz, and has a population of 4,850 .During World War II, it became the site of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex....
, noting that in both places, he got contradictory stories on how the gas chambers were supposed to have worked, and for the first time expresses his doubts on the existence of gas chambers and a Nazi policy of extermination.
The book created a scandal, and on November 2, 1950, was even attacked on the floor of the French National Assembly. More because of the foreword by Albert Paraz than for the content of the book, both Rassinier and Paraz were sued for slander by various organizations. After a see-saw round of trials and appeals, both Rassinier and Paraz were acquitted, and an expanded edition of
The Lie of Ulysses was published in 1955, which sold well. However, the uproar led to complaints from members of the SFIO, and on April 9, 1951, Rassinier was expelled from the party "in spite of the respect which his person imposes", as the expulsion document noted. A rehabilitation effort by
Marceau PivertMarceau Pivert was a French schoolteacher, trade unionist, Socialist militant and journalist. He was an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.-In the Socialist Party:...
was rejected.
Rassinier spent the rest of the 1950s advocating socialism and pacifism. He wrote articles for
Defense of Man and
The Way of Peace, condemning the wars in Indochina and Algeria, along with French post-war financial policy. He also wrote for the libertarian review
Contre-Current and the bulletin of the anarchist SIA (Solidarite International Anti-Fasciste), as well as many other publications. In 1953, he published
The Speech of the Last Chance - An Introductory Essay to the Doctrines of Peace, describing the ideology of pacifism, and in 1955
Parliament in the Hands of the Banks, a condemnation of capitalism and French financial policy. His 1960 essay,
The Equivocal Revolutionary was his only theoretical work, a metaphysical and dialectical examination of revolutionary thought applied in the second part to a socialist analysis of the
1956 Hungarian RevolutionThe Hungarian Revolution or Uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the People's Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956....
. It was serialized in several papers, and a mildly successful book version was published in 1961.
Also in 1961, he returned to his earlier themes with
Ulysses Betrayed By His Own, an anthology of the speeches he gave during a twelve-city lecture tour of Germany built around a third edition of
The Lie. This tour had been sponsored by
Karl-Heinz PriesterKarl-Heinz Priester was a German far right political activist. Although he played only a minor role in Nazi Germany he became a leading figure on the extreme right in Europe after the Second World War.-Under the Nazis:...
, a former SS officer and propagandist for
Joseph GoebbelsPaul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
(and once a U.S. intelligence asset). Priester was one of the organizers of the right-wing
Deutsche ReichsparteiFor the party that existed in Imperial Germany, see Free Conservative Party.The Deutsche Reichspartei was a nationalist political party in West Germany...
, and this, along with his increasing association with right-wing activists such as
Maurice BardècheMaurice Bardèche was a French essayist, literary and art critic, journalist, and one of the leading exponents of Neo-Fascism in post-World War II Europe...
led to him being denounced as an anti-semite by people such as Olga Wormser-Migot, who stated that Rassinier "belongs to the spiritual family of
Louis-Ferdinand CélineLouis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
", a writer often criticized as anti-semitic.
In 1962, after the Jerusalem trial, Rassinier published
The True Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors, a condemnation of the
Nuremberg TrialsThe Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
and
Adolf EichmannAdolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
trials, and in an expanded second edition, of the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trialsThe Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, known in German as der Auschwitz-Prozess or der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, was a series of trials running from December 20, 1963 to August 10, 1965, charging 22 defendants under German penal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the...
, from which he had been forcibly excluded by the West German government. At the end of the expanded edition, he argued that continuing war crimes trials were part of a Zionist and Communist strategy to divide and demoralize Europe. Further denunciations of Rassinier came in the press, such as when journalist Bernard Lecache described him as an "agent of the Nazi Internationale".
It was in 1964, with
The Drama of the European Jews, that Rassinier came to the conclusion that there was never a policy of extermination by Nazi Germany. He criticized
Raul HilbergRaul Hilberg was an Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the world's preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as a seminal study of the Nazi Final...
's book
The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), again critiqued witness testimony, and questioned the technical feasibility of the claimed methods of extermination. His critique of
Doctor At Auschwitz by Myklos Nyiszli was partially confirmed twenty-five years later by the forensic historian
Jean-Claude PressacJean-Claude Pressac was a French chemist and pharmacist who later became a published authority on the Holocaust of World War II....
. He cited the Zionist book
L'Etat d'Israel (1930) by Kadmi Cohen to again assert that Zionist and Jewish organizations were conspiring to use Nazi crimes to extort money to fund themselves and the State of Israel. Part II of the book contained a statistical study intended as a reply to those of
Leon PoliakovLéon Poliakov was a French historian who wrote extensively on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.Born into a Russian Jewish family, Poliakov lived in Italy and Germany until he settled in France....
and Hilberg. Rassinier claimed an advantage by using as his starting point the 1934 study
The Jews in the Modern World by
Arthur RuppinArthur Ruppin was a Zionist thinker and leader. He was also one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv, and a pioneering sociologist credited as being "The Father Of Jewish Sociology", directing Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics and Demography from 1902 to 1907...
. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a frequent critic of Rassinier's who had exchanged correspondence with him, criticized this in 1980 in
A Paper Eichmann - Anatomy of a Lie.
The Drama generated little interest and languished in obscurity until 1977, when Georges Wellers, editor of the magazine
Le Monde Juif, dissected the book in the first attempt at a detailed rebuttal of any of Rassinier's writings. Wellers lists errors, omissions and misquotes by Rassinier, some of them egregious. For instance, Rassinier claims that Nazi Germany was first accused of using gas chambers in
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) by
Raphael LemkinRaphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos and -cide...
. Wellers points out that Lemkin's book never once mentions gas chambers. At one point in the essay, Wellers condemns Rassinier's arguments as "a model of hypocrisy and the outrageous deceit typical of all the procedures currently employed by Rassinier."
Also in 1964, in the course of a libel lawsuit brought by the French communist
Marie-Claude Vaillant-CouturierMarie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, , whose real name was Marie-Claude Vogel, was a member of the French Resistance.-Photographer:...
, it was revealed that Rassinier had written articles in the right wing magazine
Rivarol under the nom de plume Jean-Paul Bermont, and he was forced to terminate many of his anarchist contacts.
In 1965, Rassinier published his last successful book.
Rolf HochhuthRolf Hochhuth is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy and remains a controversial figure for his plays and other public comments, such as his insinuation of Pope Pius XII's sympathies for Hitler's extermination of the Jews in the 1963 play The Deputy and...
's 1963 play
Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches TrauerspielThe Deputy, a Christian tragedy , also known as The Representative, is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which indicts Pope Pius XII for his failure to take action or speak out against The Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages...
(The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy) had been performed in several languages and many countries. Rassinier was a declared atheist, but was outraged by Hochhuth's thesis that
Pope Pius XIIThe Venerable Pope Pius XII , born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli , reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958....
stood silently by while the Jews of Europe were exterminated, and saw in the play only an incitement to divide Europe by religious hostility (
anti-CatholicismAnti-Catholicism is a generic term for discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed against Catholicism, and especially against the Catholic Church, its clergy or its adherents...
) and xenophobia. He traveled to Rome, and was given access to the Vatican archives.
Operation Vicar was a defense of Pope Pius XII that called into question the motives of Pius' Protestant and socialist critics. Rassinier demonstrated that Catholic opposition to Hitler compared favorably with Protestant support of him, and drew attention to Pope Pius' pre-war condemnations of Nazism (e.g.
Mit brennender SorgeMit brennender Sorge is a Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published on 10 March 1937 . Written in German, not the usual Latin, it was read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches on one of the Church's busiest Sundays,...
) and efforts for peace, which brought Rassinier praise from the Vatican.
From 1965–67, Rassinier continued to write, and his last series of articles, "A Third World War for Oil" were published in
La Défense De l'Occident from July through August 1967. His last book was entitled
Those Responsible For The Second World War.
The father of Holocaust denial
During the early 1960s, Rassinier corresponded with the American
Holocaust denierHolocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
Harry Elmer BarnesHarry Elmer Barnes was a prominent American historian in the 20th century. A "progressive who had some classical liberal impulses," he was associated for virtually his entire career with Columbia University.-Early career:...
, who arranged for the translation of four of his books. In 1977, these were collectively published by Noontide Press under the title
Debunking The Genocide Myth. While some of Rassinier's books had been reviewed before in America, for most of the English speaking world this was their first introduction to Rassinier's writings.
Besides Barnes, whose critical writings of the origins of the First World War were admired by Rassinier, another of his influences was Jean Norton Cru and his titanic 1929 study:
Witnesses: Tests, Analysis and Criticism of the Memories of Combatants Published in French from 1915 to 1928. In
The Lie, Rassinier claims Cru's book gave him the tools he needed to evaluate witness testimony.
Final years
Paul Rassinier's lifelong dream was to write the history of Florence during the age of
MachiavelliNiccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
, but he did not live to realize it. His kidneys had been badly damaged from his torture at the hands of the SS and his fifteen months in Buchenwald and Dora, and he never recovered. He was an invalid for the last twenty-two years of his life, with hypertension so bad that it was dangerous for him to stand up. He died on July 28, 1967, in the Parisian suburb of Asnieres, while working on yet more books,
The History of the State of Israel and a book version of
A Third World War for Oil.
Works
- Crossing the Line: The Human Truth, 1949
- The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance at the Literature of Concentration Camp Inmates, 1950
- The Speech of the Last Chance: An Introductory Essay to the Doctrines of Peace, 1953
- Candasse or the Eighth Capital Sin, A History Over Time (Rassinier's autobiography), 1955
- Parliament in the Hands of the Banks, 1955
- Ulysses Betrayed By His Own, 1961
- The Equivocal Revolutionary, 1961
- The True Eichmann Trial or the Incorrigible Victors, 1962
- The Drama of the European Jews, 1964
- Operation Vicar. The Role of Pius XII Before History, 1965
- Those Responsible for the Second World War. 1967
External links