Mark Weber-Was Hiroshima Necessary?

	Institute for Historical Review

Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided

Was Hiroshima Necessary?

by Mark Weber

On August 6, 1945, the world dramatically entered the atomic age: without either warning or precedent, an American plane dropped a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion utterly destroyed more than four square miles of the city center. About about 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.
Between the two bombings, Soviet Russia joined the United States in war against Japan. Under strong US prodding, Stalin broke his regime's 1941 non-aggression treaty with Tokyo. On the same day that Nagasaki was destroyed, Soviet troops began pouring into Manchuria, overwhelming Japanese forces there. Although Soviet participation did little or nothing to change the military outcome of the war, Moscow benefitted enormously from joining the conflict.
In a broadcast from Tokyo the next day, August 10, the Japanese government announced its readiness to accept the joint American-British "unconditional surrender" declaration of Potsdam, "with the understanding that the said declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler."
A day later came the American reply, which included these words: "From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the State shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Finally, on August 14, the Japanese formally accepted the provisions of the Potsdam declaration, and a "cease fire" was announced. On September 2, Japanese envoys signed the instrument of surrender aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

A Beaten Country

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.
What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.
On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.
Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

Japan Seeks Peace

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.
American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.
In his 1965 study, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (pp. 107, 108), historian Gar Alperovitz writes:

Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...
In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.

A Secret Memorandum

It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

• Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
• Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
• Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
• Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
• Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
• Surrender of designated war criminals.

Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.

Peace Overtures

In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end. On April 7, acting Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu met with Swedish ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo, asking him "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." But he emphasized that unconditional surrender was unacceptable, and that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge relayed the message to the United States, but Secretary of State Stettinius told the US Ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of the matter." Similar Japanese peace signals through Portugal, on May 7, and again through Sweden, on the 10th, proved similarly fruitless.
By mid-June, six members of Japan's Supreme War Council had secretly charged Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo with the task of approaching Soviet Russia's leaders "with a view to terminating the war if possible by September." On June 22 the Emperor called a meeting of the Supreme War Council, which included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the leading military figures. "We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers," said Emperor Hirohito. "We wish that you, leaders of Japan, will strive now to study the ways and the means to conclude the war. In doing so, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past."
By early July the US had intercepted messages from Togo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, showing that the Emperor himself was taking a personal hand in the peace effort, and had directed that the Soviet Union be asked to help end the war. US officials also knew that the key obstacle to ending the war was American insistence on "unconditional surrender," a demand that precluded any negotiations. The Japanese were willing to accept nearly everything, except turning over their semi-divine Emperor. Heir of a 2,600-year-old dynasty, Hirohito was regarded by his people as a "living god" who personified the nation. (Until the August 15 radio broadcast of his surrender announcement, the Japanese people had never heard his voice.) Japanese particularly feared that the Americans would humiliate the Emperor, and even execute him as a war criminal.
On July 12, Hirohito summoned Fumimaro Konoye, who had served as prime minister in 1940-41. Explaining that "it will be necessary to terminate the war without delay," the Emperor said that he wished Konoye to secure peace with the Americans and British through the Soviets. As Prince Konoye later recalled, the Emperor instructed him "to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity."
The next day, July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired ambassador Naotake Sato in Moscow: "See [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov before his departure for Potsdam ... Convey His Majesty's strong desire to secure a termination of the war ... Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace ..."
On July 17, another intercepted Japanese message revealed that although Japan's leaders felt that the unconditional surrender formula involved an unacceptable dishonor, they were convinced that "the demands of the times" made Soviet mediation to terminate the war absolutely essential. Further diplomatic messages indicated that the only condition asked by the Japanese was preservation of "our form of government." The only "difficult point," a July 25 message disclosed, "is the ... formality of unconditional surrender."
Summarizing the messages between Togo and Sato, US naval intelligence said that Japan's leaders, "though still balking at the term unconditional surrender," recognized that the war was lost, and had reached the point where they have "no objection to the restoration of peace on the basis of the [1941] Atlantic Charter." These messages, said Assistant Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss, "indeed stipulated only that the integrity of the Japanese Royal Family be preserved."
Navy Secretary James Forrestal termed the intercepted messages "real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war." "With the interception of these messages," notes historian Alperovitz (p. 177), "there could no longer be any real doubt as to the Japanese intentions; the maneuvers were overt and explicit and, most of all, official acts. Koichi Kido, Japan's Lord Privy Seal and a close advisor to the Emperor, later affirmed: "Our decision to seek a way out of this war, was made in early June before any atomic bomb had been dropped and Russia had not entered the war. It was already our decision."
In spite of this, on July 26 the leaders of the United States and Britain issued the Potsdam declaration, which included this grim ultimatum: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurance of good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
Commenting on this draconian either-or proclamation, British historian J.F.C. Fuller wrote: "Not a word was said about the Emperor, because it would be unacceptable to the propaganda-fed American masses." (A Military History of the Western World [1987], p. 675.)
America's leaders understood Japan's desperate position: the Japanese were willing to end the war on any terms, as long as the Emperor was not molested. If the US leadership had not insisted on unconditional surrender -- that is, if they had made clear a willingness to permit the Emperor to remain in place -- the Japanese very likely would have surrendered immediately, thus saving many thousands of lives.
The sad irony is that, as it actually turned out, the American leaders decided anyway to retain the Emperor as a symbol of authority and continuity. They realized, correctly, that Hirohito was useful as a figurehead prop for their own occupation authority in postwar Japan.

Justifications

President Truman steadfastly defended his use of the atomic bomb, claiming that it "saved millions of lives" by bringing the war to a quick end. Justifying his decision, he went so far as to declare: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
This was a preposterous statement. In fact, almost all of the victims were civilians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (issued in 1946) stated in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base. It was not necessary to destroy a large city. And whatever the justification for the Hiroshima blast, it is much more difficult to defend the second bombing of Nagasaki.
All the same, most Americans accepted, and continue to accept, the official justifications for the bombings. Accustomed to crude propagandistic portrayals of the "Japs" as virtually subhuman beasts, most Americans in 1945 heartily welcomed any new weapon that would wipe out more of the detested Asians, and help avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the young Americans who were fighting the Japanese in bitter combat, the attitude was "Thank God for the atom bomb." Almost to a man, they were grateful for a weapon whose deployment seemed to end the war and thus allow them to return home.
After the July 1943 firestorm destruction of Hamburg, the mid-February 1945 holocaust of Dresden, and the fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, America's leaders -- as US Army General Leslie Groves later commented -- "were generally inured to the mass killing of civilians." For President Harry Truman, the killing of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians was simply not a consideration in his decision to use the atom bomb.

Critical Voices

Amid the general clamor of enthusiasm, there were some who had grave misgivings. "We are the inheritors to the mantle of Genghis Khan," wrote New York Times editorial writer Hanson Baldwin, "and of all those in history who have justified the use of utter ruthlessness in war." Norman Thomas called Nagasaki "the greatest single atrocity of a very cruel war." Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the President, was similarly appalled.
A leading voice of American Protestantism, Christian Century, strongly condemned the bombings. An editorial entitled "America's Atomic Atrocity" in the issue of August 29, 1945, told readers:

The atomic bomb was used at a time when Japan's navy was sunk, her air force virtually destroyed, her homeland surrounded, her supplies cut off, and our forces poised for the final stroke ... Our leaders seem not to have weighed the moral considerations involved. No sooner was the bomb ready than it was rushed to the front and dropped on two helpless cities ... The atomic bomb can fairly be said to have struck Christianity itself ... The churches of America must dissociate themselves and their faith from this inhuman and reckless act of the American Government.

A leading American Catholic voice, Commonweal, took a similar view. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine editorialized, "are names for American guilt and shame."
Pope Pius XII likewise condemned the bombings, expressing a view in keeping with the traditional Roman Catholic position that "every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man." The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano commented in its August 7, 1945, issue: "This war provides a catastrophic conclusion. Incredibly this destructive weapon remains as a temptation for posterity, which, we know by bitter experience, learns so little from history."

Authoritative Voices of Dissent

American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.
When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.
Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."
Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials."
Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."

US Strategic Bombing Survey Verdict

After studying this matter in great detail, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey rejected the notion that Japan gave up because of the atomic bombings. In its authoritative 1946 report, the Survey concluded:

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Navy Minister had decided as early as May of 1945 that the war should be ended even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms ...
The mission of the Suzuki government, appointed 7 April 1945, was to make peace. An appearance of negotiating for terms less onerous than unconditional surrender was maintained in order to contain the military and bureaucratic elements still determined on a final Bushido defense, and perhaps even more importantly to obtain freedom to create peace with a minimum of personal danger and internal obstruction. It seems clear, however, that in extremis the peacemakers would have peace, and peace on any terms. This was the gist of advice given to Hirohito by the Jushin in February, the declared conclusion of Kido in April, the underlying reason for Koiso's fall in April, the specific injunction of the Emperor to Suzuki on becoming premier which was known to all members of his cabinet ...
Negotiations for Russia to intercede began the forepart of May 1945 in both Tokyo and Moscow. Konoye, the intended emissary to the Soviets, stated to the Survey that while ostensibly he was to negotiate, he received direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity ...
It seems clear ... that air supremacy and its later exploitation over Japan proper was the major factor which determined the timing of Japan's surrender and obviated any need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date of the planned American invasion], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Historians' Views

In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:

The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.

In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):

... By April 1945, Japan's leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him ...
Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas.

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender."
General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."

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From The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1997 (Vol. 16, No. 3), pages 4-11.

Mark Weber-The Elusive 'Six Million'

Institute for Historical Review Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive 'Six Million' by Mark Weber So ingrained has the Six Million figure become in the popular consciousness that while the average American may be quite sure that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans in the Second World War -- that is, in what is now called "the Holocaust" -- he has no idea of how many British, Poles, Russians, or even Americans died during that global conflict, or, for that matter, of how many of his fellow countrymen lost their lives in the American Civil War. This is hardly surprising, considering how relentlessly the Six Million figure is hammered into the public consciousness, not only in newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and television, but also routinely in our schools, and even by a special taxpayer-funded U.S. federal government agency, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which runs the imposing U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The familiar World Book Encyclopedia tells readers, for example: "By the end of 1945, the Nazis had slaughtered more than 6 million Jewish men, women and children -- over two-thirds of the Jews in Europe." [See note] German president Richard von Weizsäcker, in his much cited commemorative speech of May 8, 1985, spoke of "the six million Jews who were murdered in German concentration camps." Anglo-Jewish historian Martin Gilbert, a prolific writer who is also the "official" biographer of Winston Churchill, has referred to "the systematic murder of six million Jews." [See note] The Encyclopaedia Judaica states flatly: "There can be no doubt as to the estimated figure of some six million victims." [See note] An information sheet issued by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council describes the grand Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, as a "living memorial to the six million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi fanaticism who perished in the Holocaust." Just what is the basis for this familiar figure? Even before the end of the Second World War in Europe, that is, before any careful or detailed investigation was possible, the Six Million figure was already in wide circulation. For example, in essays published in late 1944 and early 1945, the prominent Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg repeatedly told his many readers that "the Germans" had killed six million Jews. In an article published in March 1945, for instance, in the English-language London weekly, Soviet War News, he wrote: "The world now knows that Germany has killed six million Jews." [See note] Some weeks later, as David Irving has related, this figure was affirmed in New York by representatives of major Jewish organizations: [See note] In June 1945, just a few weeks after the end of the war in Europe, three Jewish lawyers who represented major Jewish organizations, met in New York with Robert Jackson, who would soon be serving as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the so-called "International Military Tribunal" in Nuremberg. Jackson asked how many Jews had lost their lives in all Nazi-occupied lands. The number, he was told, was six million. By remarkable coincidence, some twenty-five years earlier the American Jewish community had been warning of a "holocaust" of six million Jews in Europe. In an address published in 1919 in a leading Jewish American paper, the American Hebrew of New York City, under the headline "The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!," the former governor of New York state, Martin Glynn, spoke repeatedly of "six million" European Jews who were "dying" and "being whirled toward the grave" in a "threatened holocaust of human life." [See note] Given all this, it is hardly surprising that someone was found to provide "proof" for the Six Million figure at the most extravagant judicial undertaking in history, the 1945-46 trial in Nuremberg of Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and other high-ranking Third Reich personalities. The legendary figure was fixed in history at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, where it was cited by chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross in his closing address, and by the Allied judges in their final judgment. [See note] This figure was not the result of any careful investigation, research, or calculation. The only specific evidence presented for it to the Nuremberg Tribunal was the hearsay testimony of former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl (sometimes spelled Hoettl), who said that he recalled it from a remark by Adolf Eichmann, the wartime head of the Jewish affairs section of Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Höttl, who also served with the RSHA during the war, stated in an affidavit dated November 26, 1945, and provided to the U.S. prosecution at Nuremberg, that Eichmann confided to him in August 1944 that some four million Jews had been killed in the "various extermination camps," and another two million had been killed in other ways, mostly in shootings by Einsatzgruppen forces in the course of the military campaign in Russia.[See note] Eichmann himself, it should be noted, later called the Höttl story "nonsense," vigorously denied ever having made the alleged remark, and speculated that Höttl may have picked up the figure from a radio or newspaper report. [See note] If it were not for Wilhelm Höttl's role in branding into the world's consciousness the trademark Six Million figure, his place in history would likely be little more than a footnote. Who was this man, and how reliable is his historic affidavit? He was born in Vienna in March 1915. In 1938, at the remarkably young age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. While still a student there, he joined the National Socialist party and the SS. From 1939 until the end of the war in Europe, Höttl was employed almost without interruption by Germany's central intelligence agency, the RSHA. He was first stationed in Vienna with the "foreign bureau" (Amt Ausland, later Amt VI), and then, from early 1943, in Berlin in the "Southeastern Europe" branch E of Amt VI, with the SS rank of major (Sturmbannführer). In March 1944 Höttl was assigned to Budapest, where he served as second in command to Himmler's SS representative in Hungary, and as political advisor to Hitler's ambassador there, Edmund Veesenmayer, who reported to Berlin, for example, on the large-scale deportations in 1944 of Jews from Hungary. On May 8, 1945, as German forces were unconditionally surrendering to the Allies, American troops arrested Höttl in Austria, and for several years after that he worked as an intelligence agent for the United States. He died in 1999, not long after the publication of his self-serving memoirs. In April 2001 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency made public thousands of pages of long-suppressed documents from its files of major German wartime figures, including the bulging Höttl file. Along with the release of these documents, two U.S. government employees wrote and issued a detailed report about Höttl based on those recently declassified CIA files, which sheds revealing light on his wartime and postwar career. This report, entitled "Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Hoettl," was written by two "historical researchers" of the U.S. government's "Interagency Working Group" (IWG), Miriam Kleiman and Robert Skwirot.[See note] These documents establish that Höttl was a completely unreliable informant who routinely fabricated information to please those who were willing to pay him. In their report, the two U.S. government researchers write: Hoettl's name file is approximately 600 pages, one of the largest of those released to the public so far. The size of the file owes to Hoettl's postwar career as a peddler of intelligence, good and bad, to anyone who would pay him. Reports link Hoettl to twelve different intelligence services, including the U.S., Yugoslav, Austrian, Israeli, Romanian, Vatican, Swiss, French, West German, Russian, Hungarian and British. Soon after his arrest by the Americans in May 1945, Höttl began working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then for the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). As the two U.S. government researchers put it: "Upon his arrest, Hoettl played to the interests of his captors ..." It was during this period, while he was secretly working for American intelligence, that Höttl provided his historic and damning "six million" affidavit for submission by the American prosecution at the Allied-run tribunal at Nuremberg. Höttl benefited from his readiness to tell those who paid him what they wanted to hear, but this eventually proved his undoing. All the same, it took several years for U.S. intelligence to firmly conclude that it was being had. In June 1949 one U.S. intelligence official cautioned against using Höttl for any reason, calling him "a man of such low character and poor political record that his use for intelligence activities, regardless of how profitable they may be, is a short-sighted policy by the U.S." In August 1950, CIA messages referred to Höttl as a "notorious fabricator [of] intelligence." A U.S. Army CIC report in early 1952 deemed his information useless, noting that Höttl "is involved in extensive intelligence activities for almost anyone who is willing to purchase his findings." In April 1952 his reports were called "worthless and possibly inflated or fabricated." Interestingly, numerous U.S. intelligence reports identify connections between Höttl and Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known "Nazi hunter." One U.S. Army CIC document described Wiesenthal as the "Chief Austrian Agent of the Israeli Intelligence Bureau." A U.S. Army CIC report in January 1950 noted that for the last three or four months Wiesenthal had "recruited the services of Wilhelm Höttl," and had hired him to gather information for reports by the "Nazi hunter." In July 1952, when U.S. Army intelligence finally broke completely with Höttl, a letter on U.S. Army stationery warned: Dr. Höttl has long been known to this headquarters and other allied military organizations in Austria as a fabricator of intelligence information. His reports normally consist of a fine cobweb of fact, heavily padded with lies, deceit, conjecture and other false types of information. This organization will have absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Höttl or any members of his present entourage. He is persona non grata to the American, French and British elements in Austria. In their report on his postwar career, U.S. government historical researchers Kleiman and Skwirot conclude: The voluminous materials in Wilhelm Höttl's personality file ... trace the activities of a notorious intelligence peddler and fabricator, who successfully convinced one intelligence service after another of his value, and then proceeded to lose such support. Indeed, and as already noted, Höttl "successfully convinced" the American and British prosecutors, and the judges, of the inter-Allied tribunal in Nuremberg, and many others around the world ever since, that German authorities killed six million Jews during the Second World War. And even though U.S. intelligence services and U.S. government researchers have, finally, as it were, discredited him, Höttl's most historically important claim remains widely, and even officially accepted. The recently released U.S. intelligence documents on Höttl, and the U.S. government report about his postwar career, confirm what some revisionist scholars have contended for years. In his pathbreaking book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first published in 1976, Dr. Arthur Butz cited sources that were publicly available even in the 1950s to show that, during the war, Höttl had gotten into trouble more than once with SS authorities. His involvement in a shady Polish land deal led in 1942 to an SS investigation of his activities. An internal SS report characterized him as "dishonest, scheming, fawning,... a real hoaxer," and concluded that he was not fit even for SS membership, let alone a sensitive intelligence service position. [See note] Höttl was, accordingly, demoted. But his luck improved after his friend and fellow Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was appointed in 1943 to head the RSHA. It seems that Kaltenbrunner protected him from a second disciplinary action, this one for misappropriation of security service funds. Regardless of the unreliability of Höttl's infamous affidavit, the more important question remains: How valid is the six million figure? The most common technique used by Holocaust historians to calculate figures of between five and six million Jewish extermination victims is to compare prewar and postwar estimated Jewish population figures for various European countries and areas, and then assume that the differences between the figures were all killed. This was the method used, for example, by Jacob Lestchinsky to produce a figure of 5,957,000 Jewish Holocaust deaths, in his important 1946 World Jewish Congress report. [See note] It is also the technique used by the late Lucy Dawidowicz, another prominent Jewish Holocaust historian, who estimated a total of 5.9 million Jewish victims. [See note] However, this method fails to take into account substantial numbers of Jews who emigrated or fled to Allied or neutral countries during the war years. It also ignores the fact that many Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe, did not return to their original homelands at the end of the war, but instead emigrated to Palestine, the United States, and other countries beyond Europe. It further assumes that all Jewish deaths (or "losses") were due to German or Axis policy. Thus, all Jews in areas under German or Axis control who died during the war years are routinely and misleadingly counted as "victims of the Holocaust," regardless of the cause of death. This includes Jews who died of natural causes, perished in Allied bombings of cities and concentration camps, who died as Allied soldiers, particularly in the Soviet military, or who -- like hundreds of thousands of German civilians -- succumbed to exhaustion, disease, and exposure in the particularly catastrophic final months of the war. Raul Hilberg, probably the most prominent Holocaust historian, acknowledges that a distinction should be made between "Jewish losses" and "Holocaust victims." He notes, for example, that the average age of Jews in Germany at the outbreak of the war was abnormally high anyway. [See note] It is unlikely that there were ever six million Jews under German control during the war. The wartime representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, Gerhard Riegner, confidentially reported to London and Washington in August 1942 that the total number of Jews in the countries occupied or controlled by Germany was three and a half to four million.[See note] This figure presumably referred to Jews in the "Greater" German Reich (including Poland), as well as in France, Holland, Belgium, Slovakia, and the occupied Soviet territories. If one adds the approximately 1.2 million Jews estimated to be living in Hungary and Romania, the total number of Jews that came under direct or indirect German control during the war years could not have been more than 5.2 million. The unreliable character of the legendary Six Million calculation is also shown in the manipulation of Holocaust statistics in the cases of specific countries. In this regard, it is much more fruitful to examine Jewish losses in western European countries, where much more reliable statistics and other data are available, than to attempt to estimate Jewish losses in such eastern territories as Poland, where reliable data is not available. (In the case of Poland, even the country's borders changed drastically during and just after the war.) An important feature of these manipulations is that even though figures of alleged Jewish wartime losses in individual countries may be inflated and deflated over the years, there is an obvious effort to juggle figures so that the overall total is kept as high as possible. The Case of Denmark Consider, for example, the case of Denmark. In 1946 the "Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry" announced in its widely quoted report that, out of a total of 5.7 million European Jews who perished during the war years, 1,500 were Danish Jews. [See note] Raul Hilberg, in his highly regarded, three-volume 1985 study, gave a similar figure of 1,000 Danish Jews "lost" during the war years. [See note] In fact, fewer than 500 Jews were ever even deported from Denmark. (Most Danish Jews fled to Sweden in 1943.) All of these deportees from Denmark were sent to the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt (or Terezin) where precisely 51 Danish Jews (mostly elderly) died, all of natural causes. [See note] Thus, even if these 51 are counted as "Holocaust victims," Jewish "losses" for Denmark were exaggerated approximately 30 times by the supposedly authoritative "Anglo-American Committee," and 19 times the true figure by Hilberg. The Korherr Report At the beginning of 1943 SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered his "Inspector for Statistics," Richard Korherr, to prepare a report on the "Final Solution of the European Jewish Question." Relying for the most part on information and figures supplied by the Reich Security Main Office, Korherr wrote a sixteen-page statistical survey that he submitted to Himmler on March 23, 1943. A few weeks later he produced a shorter supplemental version with the same title.[See note] Even though, as Hilberg has pointed out, much about these reports, including their origin and purpose, "remains obscure," they are nevertheless the most authoritative wartime statistical records available on the fate of Europe's Jews. [See note] These top level, secret German documents contain no mention of an extermination program or mass killings of Jews, a fact that seems hardly possible if such a program had existed. Furthermore, as Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger noted, they suggest that nothing like six million Jews could have been killed, even assuming the most sinister interpretations of the data. [See note] Korherr, a staunch Catholic, declared after the war that he had not been aware that his reports had any sinister or murderous significance. [See note] Jewish Restitution Claims Another important indication that the Six Million figure is not accurate is the large number of Jewish "Holocaust survivors" who have received restitution payments (Wiedergutmachung) from the German government in Bonn and, more recently, in Berlin. Individuals who were "persecuted for political, racial, religious or ideological reasons" by the wartime German regime have been eligible for money from the Bonn and Berlin government under the terms of the Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1953 and 1956. This includes Jews who were interned in camps or ghettos, were obliged to wear the star badge, or who lived in hiding. [See note] As of January 1984, there were 4.39 million successful individual BEG restitution claims. The great majority of these were from Jews. Raul Hilberg has said that "about two thirds" of the allowed claims have been from Jews. [See note] This is a realistic but possibly conservative estimate. Approximately 40 percent of those receiving payments were living in Israel, 20 percent in West Germany, and 40 percent in the United States and other countries. [See note] The Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper reported in 1985 that an estimated 50 percent of Jewish "survivors throughout the world are on West German pensions." [See note] But this estimate is very probably too high. For example, Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were not eligible for restitution, at least not at that time. [See note] In the United States, only about 66 percent of the Jewish "Holocaust survivors" in the Atlanta (Georgia) area in 1985 had received German restitution money. [See note] If one conservatively estimates that two thirds of the 4.39 million individual claims for German restitution have come from Jews, that would mean some 2.9 million Jewish claims. And if half of the Jewish "Holocaust survivors" around the world have not received any restitution (which is probably a low figure), and granted that the number of claimants may be somewhat larger than the number of claims, it would appear that some six million European Jews "survived" the Second World War. (Of course, some European Jews who lived through the war years died before the German BEG restitution law was enacted in 1953.) And given that there were no more than some eight million European Jews under German wartime control, [See note] the number of Jews who died in Europe during the Second World War must be fewer than three million. As we shall see, the actual figure of Jewish wartime dead is substantially lower. Finally, estimates of "Holocaust survivors" provided in recent years by authoritative Jewish sources cannot be reconciled with the generally accepted "Holocaust" story or the Six Million figure. Before going further, it is a remarkable fact that, in recent years, the number of "Holocaust survivors" has actually been increasing. This is because -- as Norman Finkelstein stresses in his important book, The Holocaust Industry -- Israel, the World Jewish Congress, and other major Jewish organizations, all of which demand and collect billions in the name of "Holocaust survivors," have an interest in inflating figures both of wartime victims and of postwar survivors. A report issued in July 1997 -- that is, fifty-three years after the end of the war -- by a committee organized by the Israeli prime minister's office estimated the number of "Holocaust survivors" (admittedly defined rather broadly) at between 834,000 and 960,000. A similarly authoritative report issued in June 2000, that is, fifty-five years after the end of the war in Europe, estimated the number of Jewish "Holocaust" survivors at between 832,000 and 935,000. [See note]These figures, Robert Faurisson has written, suggest that there were slightly more than three million Jewish "survivors" in Europe at the end of the 1939-1945 war. [See note] Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at Hunter College in New York, and author of The Holocaust Industry, has commented that, on the basis of these Israeli or Jewish figures, there would have been eight million Jewish "Holocaust survivors" in Europe at the end of the war in May 1945. Remarking on this, Finkelstein has said: [See note] There were fewer than eight million Jews in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. In other words, if these numbers are correct, the Holocaust didn't happen. As my mother used to say, if everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill? How many Jews did die during the Second World War? A year after the end of the war, an apparently impartial Swiss analysis entitled "How high is the number of Jewish victims?" concluded that no more than 1.5 million European Jews could have perished (of all causes) under German rule during the war. It appeared in June 1946 in the respected daily Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland. [See note] The widely-cited figures of between five and six million Jewish dead, the analysis noted, were not based on official sources, but merely private and semi-official estimates that greatly exaggerated the number of Jews that ever came under German control. Stephen F. Pinter, a U.S. War Department attorney who was stationed in Germany after the war, published a statement in 1959 in which he condemned what he called "the old propaganda myth that millions of Jews were killed by the National Socialists." He went on to write: [See note] From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject. Some revisionist historians have reached similar conclusions. Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson have written that as many as one million European Jews may have died of all causes during the war years (not counting those serving in military forces). [See note] Walter Sanning, a European-American scholar and university lecturer, concluded in his detailed 1983 study that total Jewish losses during the Second World War were "in the neighborhood" of 1.25 million, many of whom died as Red Army soldiers or in Soviet camps and forced evacuations. [See note] A common rejoinder to expressions of skepticism about the Six Million is rhetorically to ask: "What difference does it make how many were killed? It would be terrible if just one million, or even one thousand, Jews were murdered." To many people, efforts to establish the true numbers seem like insensitive and perhaps irrelevant quibbling. But the skeptics are not the ones who incessantly and insistently go on about Six Million murdered Jews. It is not the revisionists who have made a totem of this legendary figure, or who invoke it as quasi-sacrosanct ritual symbol. In any case, striving for historical exactitude, even about the iconic Six Million, is precisely what historians are supposed to do. Notes World Book Encyclopedia, 1984 edition, s.v. "Holocaust." vol. 9, pp. 263-264. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986), p. 811. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971 edition, s.v. "Holocaust." The Ehrenburg essays, published in Soviet War News (London), Dec. 22, 1944, Jan. 4 and March 15, 1945, are reprinted in facsimile in the fifth edition of Joachim Hoffmann's detailed study, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Munich: Herbig, 1999), pp. 390-393 (see also p. 183), and in Hoffmann, Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945 (Capshaw, Alabama: TADP, 2001), pp. 189-190, 402-405. David Irving, Nuremberg: The Last Battle (London: Focal Point, 1996), pp. 61-62. The American Hebrew (New York), Oct. 31, 1919, p. 582. Facsimile in The Journal of Historical Review 15, no. 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1995), p. 31. Also cited in Irving, Nuremberg, p. 62. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), vol. 1 (Nuremberg: 1947-1949), pp. 252-253; IMT, vol. 19, p. 434; and IMT, vol. 22, p. 496. Höttl affidavit of Nov. 26, 1945: 2738-PS (USA-296) in IMT, vol. 31, pp. 85-87, and Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (NC&A), vol. 5 (Washington, DC: 1946-1948), pp. 380-382; 2615-PS in NC&A, vol. 5, pp. 338-339. On the ad hoc and self-serving origins of the Höttl affidavit, see Otto Skorzeny's letter of Dec. 14, 1956, in Gerd Honsik, Freispruch für Hitler? (Gibraltar and Barcelona: 1994), pp. 196-197. R. Aschenauer, ed., Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni [Bavaria]: Druffel, 1980), pp. 460-461, 474; Jochen von Lang, ed., Eichmann Interrogated (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), pp. 117-118. Dieter Wisliceny, another former SS officer, made a statement similar to Höttl's at Nuremberg on Jan. 3, 1946, but spoke of "only" four or five million Jews killed. IMT, vol. 4, p. 371. Eichmann later called Wisliceny's comments "theater," and said that he never had any figures of "exterminated" Jews. See von Lang, ed., Eichmann, pp. 164-165, 94-95, 110-117. The report is posted on the U.S. National Archives web site: http://www.nara.gov/iwg/declass/hoettl.html Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Newport Beach, CA: IHR, 1997), p. 81. Jacob Lestchinsky (Leszczynski), "Balance Sheet of Extermination," 1946 and revised in 1955. Cited in Nora Levin, The Holocaust (New York: Crowell, 1968), p. 718; Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), p. 335 (Revue d'histoire..., Oct. 1956); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), p. 1202. Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), p. 381; Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam [pb. ed.], 1976), p. 544. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1206. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston: Little Brown, 1980; New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 77. Levin, Holocaust, p. 715; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Sphere Books [pb., 2nd ed.], 1971), p. 546; Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Colloquium, 1960), p. 114. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1048. Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry (Philadelphia: JPS, 1969), p. 318; Dawidowicz, The War, p. 505. Documents NO-5193 through NO-5198. Complete texts in German and English in: Serge Klarsfeld, ed., The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York: B. Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978), pp. 165-211 (appendices). Also published in: John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes (New York: Garland, 1982), vol. 12, pp. 210 ff. (The two reports are sometimes together referred to as "the Korherr report.") See also Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1204-1206; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 136, 138; von Lang, ed., Eichmann, pp. 112-115. Raul Hilberg, "The Statistic," in: François Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 158. Reitlinger, Final Solution, pp. 534-535. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (New York: Viking/Compass [pb.], 1968), pp. 221-223; Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1205-1206. In a letter to Der Spiegel (Nr. 31, July 25, 1977, p. 12), Korherr specifically stated that the term "special treatment" in a report's first draft did not refer to killing. Focus on "Restitution in Germany," No. 1, May 1985, p. 3. (Information bulletin of the German Information Center, New York City, an agency of the German Federal government); see also: Hilberg, Destruction, pp. 1165, 1166; Mark Weber, "West Germany's Holocaust Payoff," JHR 8, no. 2 (summer 1988), pp. 243-250. Hilberg testimony in Zündel case, Toronto District court, Jan. 18, 1985. Transcript page 1229. Focus on "Restitution in Germany" (German Information Center), May 1985, p. 3. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday, March 31, 1985, p. 15 A. Hilberg, Destruction, p. 1170; D. Margolick, "Soviet Emigre Lawyer...," New York Times, March 10, 1983, p. B2. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 31, 1985, pp. 15 A, 17A. Jacob Lestchinsky, statistician for the American Jewish Congress, estimated that in 1939 there were 8.25 million Jews in the lands that came under German or Axis control. "Balance Sheet of Extermination," in Levin, Holocaust, p. 718. Lucy Dawidowicz estimated that the "pre-Final Solution population" of the lands that came under Axis control was 8.86 million. Dawidowicz, The War, p. 544. Number of Living Holocaust Survivors, July 27, 1997, report of the "Spanic Committee," organized by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office (with estimates slightly revised in May 1998), and the "Ukeles" report, June 28, 2000, commissioned by the "Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany," a semi-official Jewish agency. Both cited in: "Special Master's Proposed Plan of Allocation and Distribution of Settlement Proceeds," (Sept. 2000, also referred to as the "Gribetz Plan"), Volume I, Annex C, "Demographics," pp. C-2, C-8, C-9. Posted on line at the "Official Information Web Site for the Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation Against Swiss Banks and other Swiss Entities": http://www.Swissbankclaims.com/media Robert Faurisson, "Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism," JHR 19 (Jan.-Feb. 2000), pp. 9, 28 (n. 24). Interview with Norman Finkelstein, by Viktor Frölke, in Salon.com, "Shoah business," August 30, 2000. Posted on-line at: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2000/08/30/finkelstein/index.html See also: N. Finkelstein, "How the Holocaust Industry Stole the Swiss Monies," June 2001, Postscript to Foreign Translations. Posted on-line: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id112.htm "Wie hoch ist die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer?," Baseler Nachrichten (Abend-Blatt), June 13, 1946, p. 2. (This newspaper, founded in 1845, is no longer published.) Pinter letter in the national Catholic weekly, Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959, p. 15. Butz, Hoax, p. 239; Robert Faurisson interview with Storia Illustrata (Italy), August 1979. Authorized translations in: Serge Thion (with Robert Faurisson), Vérité historique ou vérité politique? (Paris: 1980), p. 197, and JHR 2 (winter 1981), p. 348. Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry (Newport Beach, CA: IHR, 1983), pp. 198, 196. From The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Dec. 2001 (Vol. 20, No. 5-6), pages 25-32. This essay is adapted from Mark Weber's address at David Irving's "Real History" conference in Cincinnati, August 31, 2001.

Mark Weber-The Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power

The Challenge of Jewish-Zionist Power in an Era of Global Struggle An address by Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, delivered at an IHR meeting in New York City on July 16, 2005.  (A report on the meeting is posted at http://www.ihr.org/news/071605NYIHRMeeting.html) During World War II, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, coined the term “The American Century” to refer to the twentieth century. And in the years since then the term has been used many times. In the decades since the end of World War II, the United States has indeed been the world’s foremost military, economic and financial power, and the most important cultural factor. But that title is not the only one that’s been given to that century. A few months ago Princeton University Press issued a remarkable book by a Jewish scholar, Yuri Slezkine, that explains why the Twentieth Century is, or has been, the century of preeminent Jewish influence and power. In fact, the book is entitled The Jewish Century. In that spirit, the prominent French Jewish writer Alain Finkielkraut was moved to write in 1998, in an essay published in the prestigious Paris daily Le Monde:  “Ah, how sweet it is to be Jewish at the end of this 20th century! We are no longer History’s accused, but its darlings. The spirit of the times loves, honors, and defends us, watches over our interests; it even needs our imprimatur. Journalists draw up ruthless indict ments against all that Europe still has in the way of Nazi collaborators or those nostalgic for the Nazi era. Churches repent, states do penance...” / 1 But that was then, and this is now. There are good reasons to believe that both American power and Jewish power have crested. The twentieth century – what has been called “the American Century” and “the Jewish century” – is passing, both literally and figuratively, into history. Although the US is still the world’s most important military and economic factor, its relative military and economic power in the world has been declining over the past 20-30 years, and will continue to decline in the years ahead. In the Middle East, Israel is still the foremost military power in the region. It is the only state in the area with a nuclear arsenal, for example. All the same, Israel's stature in the world, and – more generally – Jewish-Zionist power, are declining from the high point of the 1980s and 1990s. Tony Judt, another Jewish writer, put it well in an essay published last year in The Nation. He wrote: / 2 "Following the invasion of Lebanon, and with gathering inten sity since the first intifada of the late 1980s, the public impression of Israel has steadily darkened. Today it presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering 18-year-olds with M-16s taunt helpless old men ("security measures"); where bull dozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks ("rooting out terrorists"); where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets ("targeted killings"); where subsidized settlers frolic in grass-fringed swimming pools, oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and rot in the worst slums on the planet; and where retired generals and Cabinet ministers speak openly of bottling up the Palestinians "like drugged roaches in a bottle" (former Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan) and cleansing the land of its Arab cancer (former Housing Minister Effi Eitam). " Israel is utterly dependent on the United States for money, arms and diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto accomplices in ignoring inter national treaties and secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons. But outside Washington, Israel has no friends -- at the United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America's staunchest allies. Despite the political and diplomatic in competence of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]... ; despite the manifest shortcomings of the Arab world at large... ; despite Israel's own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish state today is widely regarded as a -- the -- lead ing threat to world peace. After thirty-seven years of mili tary occupation, Israel has gained nothing in security. It has lost everything in domestic civility and international re spectability, and it has forfeited the moral high ground for ever." What is emerging is a new bi-polar world, with the United States and Israel on one side, and the rest of the world on the other. This new alignment of forces, this shift in power relationships in the world, is strikingly reflected in the United Nations, where, time and time again, votes on issues in both the General As sembly and the Security Council pit the United States and Israel on one side, and virtually the entire rest of the world on the other. On October 21, 2003, for example, there was a vote in the UN General Assembly on a resolution condemning Israel’s so-called “security barrier,” a grotesque thing, parts of it larger and more formidable than the Berlin Wall, that Israel has built on occupied Palestinian territory. Supporting the resolution were 144 countries, representing nearly the entire world’s population. Twelve countries abstained. Just four countries opposed the resolution. They were:  Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia. The latter two member states, small island countries in the Pacific ocean with a combined population of 180,000, are utterly dependent on the US. And on December 9, 2003, the members of the UN General Assem bly considered a resolution re-affirming the principle of Pal estinian sovereignty. It received the backing of 142 states, including all the nations of Europe and South America. In this case as well, just four countries voted against the resolution: Israel, the US, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia.  This reminds me of a story. A senior citizen whose brain didn’t work as well or as quickly as it once did, was driving on the freeway when his cell phone rang. He answered it, and heard his wife urgently warning him, “Charles, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on the freeway. Please be careful!" Charles immediately replied: “Honey, it's not just one car. It's hundreds of them!" Well, like Charles, President Bush and Israeli premier Aerial Sharon insist that everyone else is recklessly going the wrong way. And as the United States and Israel increasingly regard the rest of the world as "out of step," most of humanity views the USand Israel with mounting distrust, hostility and fear. United States support for Israel did not come about because Americans are markedly more intelligent, humane or enlightened than, say, Norwegians, Japanese or Irish. No, the US-Israel alliance is, rather, a consequence, a result, of the Jewish-Zionist grip on American political and cultural life. Awareness of this fact is growing everyone. And along with that, ever more people understand the crucial factor behind the US invasion of Iraq was concern for Israel and its interests. Jewish-Zionist plans to overthrow the Iraqi regime by force were already in place well before George W. Bush became president. A group – a cabal -- of high-level, pro-Israel "neoconservative" Jews in the Bush administration -- including Paul Wolfowitz, Dep­uty Secretary of Defense; Richard Perle of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; David Wurmser in the State Department; and Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy – played a decisive role in prodding the United States into war in Iraq. / 3 This is so widely understood by Washington insiders that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved last year to declare that Iraq was invaded, as he put it, to “secure Israel,” and that “everybody” – his word -- knows it. Referring to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to openly acknowledge this real ity, Hollings said that “nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on.” With few exceptions, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies due to what Hollings called, “the pressures that we get politically.” / 4 In Britain, a veteran member of the House of Commons candidly declared in May 2003 that pro-Israel Jews had taken control of America’s foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US and Britain into war in Iraq. “A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians,” said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy known as “Father of the House” because he is the longest-serving Member of Parliament. “There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States,” he added. / 5 By supporting Israel and its policies, the United States betrays not only its own national interests, but the principles it claims to embody and defend. The truth is, that if the United States held Israel to the same standards that it has applied to Iraq, Serbia, and other countries, American bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and we’d be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Americans have already paid a high price for the US alliance with Israel. This includes tens of billions of dollars in economic and military aid to the Jewish state, the cost of the Iraq war and occupation, now more than $200 billion, and the deaths of more than fifteen hundred Americans there. Directly and indirectly, America's "special relationship" with Israel has also generated unprecedented distrust, fear and loathing of the United States around the world. In the years to come, the cost of the US alliance with Israel is certain to rise much more. As some Jewish leaders have openly acknowledged, the Iraq war is merely part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, has been for years editor of Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the September 2002 issue he wrote: “The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends’ of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt ’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.”  / 6 Now the world watches anxiously as the danger grows of war with Iran. Israel has threatened to attack Iran if it builds a nuclear reactor, and Iran has vowed to retaliate forcefully against any such assault. The US could easily be drawn into such a conflict, which would be much more destructive than the Iraq war. There are some who object to the power of the “Jewish lobby” because it supports, or, rather, makes possible, Israel ’s oppression of Palestinians. Others object because they are un happy with this or that aspect of the lobby’s agenda. But to me this seems beside the point. Apart from the harmful consequences of this or that particular policy enforced by the Jewish lobby is the injustice and danger inherent in permitting any distinct minority group or interest to wield immense, disproportionate power and influence -- and especially in the country that is the world’s foremost military, economic and financial power, and most important cultural factor. Imagine the response, for example, if Mormons, or evangelical Christians, or African-Americans, or the tobacco companies, were to secure a grip on the American media and on America ’s political life comparable to that held by Jews. In reality, the Jewish hold on American life is far more dangerous than one that, in theory, might be held by any of the other groups I’ve mentioned. There are two main reasons for this: First, Jews in America have, manifestly, a staunch loyalty to a foreign country, Israel, that since its founding in 1948 has been embroiled in seemingly endless crises and conflicts with its neighbors, and which is now an formidable military power with a large nuclear arsenal. Second, because of the distrustful and even adversarial way that Jews view the rest of us. This latter remark may seem overstated, so I’ll try to explain. It is not merely that such great power is wielded by a small minority group, it’s that it is wielded by a group that, more than any other, has a pronounced sense of sep arateness from the rest of humanity, and which, accordingly, views its interests as quite distinct from those of everyone else. This Us vs. Them attitude, this mindset that sees Jews as dis tinct from, and superior to, the rest of humanity, is deeply rooted in the Jewish psyche. It is laid out in the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, or, as most Christians call it, the Old Testament. / 7  In the book of Deuteronomy, for example, we read: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.”  Jews or Hebrews are also referred to as a People that Shall Dwell Alone, or, in another translation, as “a people dwelling alone, and not reckoning itself among the nations.” In the book of Exodus, we read of the Jews as a people “distinct... from all other people that are upon the face of the earth.” In another passage, we are told, God says to his chosen people: “This day I will begin to put the dread and fear of you upon the peoples that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear the report of you and shall tremble and be in anguish because of you.” The ancient Jewish sense of alienation from, and abiding distrust of, non-Jews is also manifest in a remarkable essay published in April 2002 in the Forward, the prominent Jewish community weekly. Entitled “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” it is written by Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney and a member of the Jewish Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. Rabbi Fischer is also national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. / 8 So this essay was not written by an obscure or semi-literate scribbler, but rather by a prominent Jewish community figure. And it did not appear in the some marginal periodical, but rather in what is perhaps the most literate and thoughtful Jewish weekly in America, and certainly one of the most influential. In his essay, Rabbi Fischer tells readers: “If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. .... Our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.” He goes on:   “We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and the Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettos and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry. “The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently -- or actively participated in murdering us -- and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong. “Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate the half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done -- and what’s what. ... “We remember that the food they [Europeans] eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria... “Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn’t change a thing, but after 25 centuries it’s nice to know.” I can’t resist mentioning that some of the Rabbi’s remarks here are stupefying distortions of history. To speak, as he does, for example, of “a century’s persecution of Soviet Jewry” is a breathtaking falsehood. For one thing, the entire Soviet period lasted 72 years, not 100. And during at least some of that period, above all during the first ten years of the Soviet era, Jews wielded tremendous, if not dominant power in the Bolshevik regime. Or did Rabbi Fischer forget such figures as Leon Trotsky, com­mander in chief of the young Soviet state’s Red Army, Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, or Yakov Sverdlov, the first Soviet president. / 9 The Rabbi’s essay is noteworthy not so much for his distortions of fact, as it is for what it reveals of the mentality of the man who wrote it, and of the literate Jews who published and read it -- and for what it says about our times. For example, Fischer pins blame for “the Holocaust” -- that is, for the event that Jews routinely regard as the single most horrible crime in history, collectively on non-Jewish humanity. This view, which has gained wider acceptance in recent decades, represents a drastic re-writing of history. During World War II itself, of course, Jews did not dare say to non-Jewish Americans that they actually shared blame and guilt with “the Nazis” for murdering innocent Jews in Europe. During the war, Jews said just the opposite. During World War II, and for about some years after, the official story, the “party line,” if you will, was that responsibility and blame for the horrors of the Nazi era lay with Hitler and his “Nazi henchmen.” The official story in those days was that most Europeans -- French, Austrians, Poles, Hungarians, and so forth, and even most Germans – were victims of the evil Nazis. In recent decades the circle of guilt -- the list of perpe trators -- has grown steadily, so that not merely Hitler, or “the Nazis,” or “the Germans,” but now the French, the Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, the Vatican -- in short, all of Europe, indeed all non-Jewish humanity -- is held to be collectively responsible for this allegedly greatest of all human crimes. The most direct and obvious victims of Jewish-Zionist power are, of course, the Palestinians who live under Israel’s harsh rule. But we Americans are also victims. Through the Jewish-Zionist grip on the media, and the organized Jewish-Zionist corruption of our political system, we are pressured, seduced, cajoled, and deceived into propping up the Jewish state, providing it with billions of dollars yearly and state-of-the-art weaponry, and even sacrificing American lives. But it is also the truth that we Americans share some responsibility for all this. We have allowed immense power, affecting every aspect of our lives and our future, to be wielded by members of an ethnic-religious minority group who view the American people as fu ture enemies and potential murderers. Put another way, Americans have permitted people who regard them with profound distrust to play a major role in determining how we live our lives, and in determining our future both as individuals and as a nation. To permit such power to pass into the hands of people who clearly do not have our best interests at heart -- indeed, do not even trust us -- is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. I want to emphasize here that to deal candidly with the reality of Jewish-Zionist power is not, as some may claim, “anti-Semitism” or “hate.” We do not wish harm to any individual, Jewish or not, because of his or her ancestry, religion or background. At the same time, we should not let smears or malicious accusations, no matter how vehemently expressed, keep us from saying the truth, or doing what is right. One of the most important centers of Jewish-Zionist power is the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it reports a membership of more than 300,000 and an annual income of $27 million, including $10 million in taxpayer funds. The Center and its head, Rabbi Marvin Hier, wield considerable political power. According to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, "Hier has accrued unprecedented clout in the Legislature, on Capitol Hill, in the city's boardrooms and even in Hollywood.” / 10 The Center’s imposing “Museum of Tolerance” in West Los Angeles, which presents a relentlessly Jewish-Zionist version of history, reportedly draws 350,000 visitors yearly, including tens of thousands of school children. Although it claims to promote “tolerance,” the Center’s real agenda is a narrowly Jewish-Zionist one. It is a staunch supporter of Israel and its Jewish supremacist regime. It fervently defends Israel’s policies of oppression, occupation, dispossession, and institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews. The Center supports Israeli policies that violate United Nations Security Council resolutions. It applauds Israel ’s “security fence,” a hideous barrier that is part of a long-term Zionist effort to seize land of non-Jews, and which the International Court of Justice says is illegal.   While the Center denounces violence and terrorism against Jews, it sanctions Zionist terrorism. It has publicly honored two Israeli leaders – Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – each of whom has a well-documented record as a terrorist. The Center has a long record of reckless propaganda for war. For years it had been pressing for an American attack against Iraq, backing its warmongering with alarmist claims about the supposed danger posed by the Baghdad regime. As long ago as November 1990, Rabbi Hier was telling readers of a piece he wrote that appeared in Newsweek magazine: “I think the United States should go in. Maybe not tomorrow, but very soon… Three years from now, Iraq will have nuclear weapons.”  / 11 In the Spring 1991 issue of its glossy magazine, Response, the Center was claiming that Iraq was killing Iranian prisoners in German-built gas chambers. The Center’s magazine went on to claim that German firms were producing Zyklon B gas in Iraq, "the chemical used by the Germans to murder millions of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust." Iranian prisoners of war, the Center’s magazine said, were being killed with Zyklon B "in gas chambers specially designed for the Iraqis by the German company Rhema Labortechnik… An eyewitness reported the [Iraqi] gas chambers were tiled to look like operating rooms, with a separated observation room for each gas chamber with reinforced glass visibility."  / 12 Of course, these fantastic claims had no basis in reality. In a statement issued in October 2002, several months before the US invasion of Iraq, the Wiesenthal Center insisted that war was necessary because the Saddam Hussein regime had been “continuing to stockpile weapons of mass destruction.” Moreover, the Center went on to assert: “For while there are other tyrants, Saddam alone stands as a menace to world order and stability. While there are others who possess chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, only Saddam has shown an eagerness to use them.” / 13 As the world now knows, these claims were not true.    In the view of  Dr. Frank Knopfelmacher, a prominent Australian Jewish scholar, the Wiesenthal Center foments "ethnic hatred.” Australia government officials, he says, should have "banned the members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center from entering Australia and should have deported those who were here.” / 14 Through its Museum, its glossy magazine, Response, and other propaganda materials, the Center relentlessly exploits painful memories of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering during World War II to raise millions of dollars annually. In a book entitled One, by One, by One, author Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who has been in the news a lot lately, wrote:  “The enormous success of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has given new meaning to what was once a macabre in-house joke ... 'There is no business like Shoah business'."  / 15  (“Shoah" is the Hebrew term for Holocaust.) A few years ago, the director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center said: “Rabbi Hier and the Wiesenthal Center are, in my opinion, the most extreme of those who utilize the Holocaust. The Jewish people does many vulgar things, but the Wiesenthal Center [has] raised it to a complete level: The optimum use of sensitive issues in order to raise money…” / 16 The Wiesenthal Center has been a major player in what American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls the “shakedown” campaign by Israel and organized Jewry to extort billions of dollars from European countries and corporations. Finkelstein, author of the bestselling study, The Holocaust Industry, calls the Center “a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything for a dollar.” / 17 At a time of belt-tightening by California and other states, with money short for schools and highways, it is all the more outrageous that millions of dollars in taxpayer funds go to support this wealthy bastion of Jewish-Zionist power, and its bigoted, self-serving agenda. The Wiesenthal Center deserves the scorn and contempt of every decent person. And that’s why, on Friday, July 29, we’ll be rallying at the Wiesenthal Center’s offices in Los Angeles to focus attention on the Center’s record of lies in support of war, Zionist oppression and Jewish supremacism, and to protest the giveaway of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to this bulwark of Jewish-Zionist power.  *  *  *  *  A few of those who are here this evening have come, perhaps, out of simple curiosity, or to meet others who are attending. But for most of us, we are here this evening because we care. We care about what is right and wrong. We care about what is true and not true. We care about the past and, more importantly, we care about the future. We care about the world we live in. We feel a sense of responsibility for the world we’ve inherited, and for the world of the future. We want to make a difference – to make this a better world – a world that, even beyond our own lifetimes, is more just and right. Some of us may feel a special concern for the cause of peace, mindful of the destruction, suffering, and death of war. Some may feel a special concern for justice, perhaps especially for the people who have lived for decades under Zionist occupation. Some of us may feel a special concern for the welfare and future of his or her own culture, race or nation, while others may feel a responsibility for the future of all mankind. Regardless of the particular causes or principles that most move us, that are closest to our hearts, no issue is of greater urgency than breaking the Jewish-Zionist grip on American political, social and cultural life. As long as this power remains entrenched, there will be no end to the systematic Jewish distortion of history and current affairs, the Jewish-Zionist domination of the US political system, Zionist oppression of Palestinians, the bloody conflict between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East, and the Israeli threat to peace. Throughout history Jews have time and again wielded great power to further group interests that are separate from, and often contrary to, those of the non-Jewish populations among whom they live. This creates an inherently unjust and unstable situation that, as history shows, never endures. Now we are engaged in a great, global struggle -- in which two distinct and irreconcilable sides confront each other. A struggle that pits a self-assured and diabolical power that feels ordained to rule over others, on one side,  and all other nations and societies -- indeed, humanity itself -- on the other. This struggle is not a new one. It is the latest enactment of a great drama that has played itself out again and again, over centuries, and in many different societies, cultures and historical eras. In the past this drama has played itself out on a local, national, regional, or, sometimes, continental stage. Today this is a global drama, and a global clash. It is a struggle for the welfare and future not merely of the Middle East, or of America, but a great historical battle for the soul and future of humanity itself. A struggle that calls all of us here this evening – and many more across the country and around the world – who share a sense of responsibility for the future of humankind. Some of those here this evening have already done much. But so much more still needs to be done. To expose and stand against this insidious power is often difficult and disheartening work, but it is absolutely necessary. During this momentous historical era, we pledge to carry on in this struggle, for the sake not only of our own nation and heritage, but for all humanity. Notes 1. A. Finkielkraut, "Mgr Stepinac et les deux douleurs de l'Europe,” Le Monde, Oct. 7, 1998, p. 14. Quoted in: R. Faurisson, “Paying Tribute to Jewish Power: `Ah, How Sweet It Is To Be Jewish…’,” The Journal of Historical Review, Nov.-Dec. 1998, pp. 11-12. Posted at:  http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n6p11_Faurisson.html 2. Tony Judt, “Rootless Cosmopolitan," The Nation, July 19-26, 2004, p. 34. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040719&c=6&s=judt 3. M. Weber, “ Iraq : A War for Israel.” Posted at: http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/iraqwar.shtml 4. M. Weber, “'Iraq was Invaded to Secure Israel,' Says Senator Hollings, and 'Everybody Knows It',” July 16, 2004.http://www.ihr.org/news/040716_hollings.shtml 5. F. Nelson, “Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The Scotsman (Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy," The Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.  Quoted in: M. Weber, “ Iraq : A War for Israel.” (cited above). 6. N. Podhoretz, “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine,” Commentary, Sept. 2002. Posted, for example, at: http://www.ourjerusalem.com/opinion/story/opinion20020904a.html 7. The four biblical quotations here are from Deuteronomy 7: 6, Numbers 23: 9, Exodus 33: 16, and Deuteronomy 2: 25. See also: Deuteronomy 6: 10-11, 14: 2, 23: 10-20, 33: 29, Genesis 27: 28-29, Isaiah 60: 10-14, 61: 5-6, Joshua 24: 13, Psalms 2: 8. 8. Dov Fischer, “We’re Right, the Whole World’s Wrong,” Forward (New York), April 19, 2002, p  11.  http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.04.19/oped3.html 9. See:  M. Weber, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime," The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994. Posted at: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html 10.  “The Unorthodox Rabbi,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 15, 1990, p. 9. 11. Marvin Hier, “Crisis in the Gulf,” Newsweek, Nov. 26. 1990. Facsimile in Christian News, Nov. 26, 1990, p. 4. 12. “German Firms Produce Zyklon B in Iraq," Response: The Wiesenthal Center World Report, Spring 1991, pp. 2, 4. 13. Simon Wiesenthal Center news release of Oct. 7, 2002. “ Wiesenthal Center Supports Congressional Resolution on Iraq.”  Posted at:  http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/s/content.asp?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=253162&ct=286230 14.  The Australian, July 31, 1990. Cited in “Influential Australian Jewish Figure Condemns `Nazi Hunters’ and Simon Wiesenthal Center,” IHR Newsletter, April 1991, p. 5. 15. Judith Miller, One by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster/ Touchstone, 1990), p. 237. 16.  Ha'aretz (Israel), Dec. 16, 1988. Reported in: David Sinai, "News We Doubt You've Seen," The Jewish Press (Brooklyn, New York), Dec. 23, 1988. 17. “A Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein.” Conducted by Don Atapattu, Dec. 13, 2001. Posted athttp://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein1.html