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Monday, May 1, 2017

Mark Weber : Anti-Semitism: Why Does It Exist? And Why Does it Persist?

Anti-Semitism: Why Does It Exist? And Why Does it Persist?
By Mark Weber

Over the centuries, hostility against Jews has repeatedly erupted in terrible violence. Again and again, Jews have been driven out of countries where they’d been living. Why does anti-Semitism exist? And why has rage against Jews broken out, again and again, in the most varied nations, eras and cultures? Closely related to this is the broader issue of relations between Jews and non-Jews – a subject that many writers and scholars have called “the Jewish question.”
All too often, discussions of anti-Semitism and the “Jewish question” have been distorted by prejudice, bigotry and lack of candor. But this important subject deserves careful, informed and honest consideration.

Prominent Jewish leaders claim to be puzzled by the persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and behavior. Insisting that anti-Semitism is a baseless and unreasonable prejudice, they often compare it to a mysterious virus or disease.
Elie Wiesel is one of the best-known Jewish authors and community figures of our age. His memoir of wartime experiences, entitled Night, has been obligatory reading in many classrooms. He’s a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and for years has been a professor at Boston University. Wiesel is considered to be an authority on anti-Semitism, but he says that he’s puzzled by it.
The source and endurance of anti-Semitism in history remains a mystery, he told an audience in Germany in April 2004. /1 In another address he described anti-Semitism as an “irrational disease.” Speaking at a conference in October 2002, Wiesel went on to say: “The world has changed in the last 2,000 years, and only anti-Semitism has remained ... The only disease that has not found its cure is anti-Semitism.” /2
 
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is one of the world’s largest and most influential Jewish-Zionist organizations. It considers itself the foremost center for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, and educating the public about this dangerous phenomenon.
In his 2003 book, Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, ADL national director Abraham Foxman expressed grave concern about what he sees as rising hostility toward Jews: “I am convinced we currently face as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s – if not a greater one.” /3
Remarkably, he too claimed to be perplexed about the reasons for the origin and durability of discord between Jews and non-Jews. “I think of anti-Semitism as a disease,” Foxman writes. “Anti-Semitism also resembles a disease in being fundamentally irrational ... It’s a spiritual and psychological illness.” /4

Charles Krauthammer, an influential Jewish-American writer who is a fervent defender of Israel, is similarly puzzled by the endurance of anti-Jewish sentiment. “The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries,” he wrote in a Washington Post column that also appeared in many other newspapers across the country. /5

Wiesel, Foxman and Krauthammer, along with other prominent Jewish-Zionist leaders, are unable -- or unwilling -- to provide an explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism. They believe, or claim to believe, that because it’s an entirely irrational and baseless “disease,” there’s no relation between what Jews do, and what non-Jews think of Jews. In their view, the strife and tension between Jews and non-Jews that has persisted over the centuries is not caused by, or is even related to, Jewish behavior.

Fortunately, a reasonable explanation for this enduring phenomenon has been provided by one of the most prominent and influential Jewish figures of modern history:
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement. He laid out his views in a book, written in German, entitled The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat). Published in 1896, this work is the basic manifesto of the Zionist movement. A year and a half later he convened the first international Zionist conference.
In his book Herzl explained that regardless of where they live, or their citizenship, Jews constitute not merely a religious community, but a nationality, a people. He used the German word, Volk. Wherever large numbers of Jews live among non-Jews, he said, conflict is not only likely, it’s inevitable. 
“The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in noticeable numbers,” he wrote. “Where it does not exist, it is brought in by arriving Jews ... I believe I understand anti-Semitism, which is a very complex phenomenon. I consider this development as a Jew, without hate or fear.” /6

In his public and private writings, Herzl explained that anti-Semitism is not an aberration, but rather a natural response by non-Jews to alien Jewish behavior and attitudes. Anti-Jewish sentiment, he said, is not due to ignorance or bigotry, as so many have claimed. Instead, he concluded, the ancient and seemingly intractable conflict between Jews and non-Jews is entirely understandable, because Jews are a distinct and separate people, with interests that are different from, and which often conflict with, the interests of the people among whom they live.

Anti-Jewish sentiment in the modern era, Herzl believed, arose from the “emancipation” of Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries, which freed them from the confined life of the ghetto and brought them into modern urban society and direct economic dealings with middle class non-Jews. Anti-Semitism, Herzl wrote, is “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects.” In his diary he wrote: “I find the anti-Semites are fully within their rights.” /7

Herzl maintained that Jews must stop pretending -- both to themselves and to non-Jews -- that they are like everyone else, and instead must frankly acknowledge that they are a distinct and separate people, with distinct and separate goals and interests. The only workable long-term solution, he said, is for Jews to recognize reality and live, finally, as a “normal” people in a separate state of their own. In a memo to the Tsar of Russia, Herzl wrote that Zionism is the “final solution of the Jewish question.” /8

Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, expressed a similar view. In his memoirs, he wrote:
“Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them ... [This] reaction ... cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration, and we cannot shake it off.” /9

Such candor is rare. Only occasionally do Jewish leaders today explain anti-Semitism as a reaction to the behavior of Jews. One of the wealthiest and most influential figures in today’s world is George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire financier. Generally he avoids highlighting his ties to the Jewish community, and only rarely attends purely Jewish gatherings. But in November 2003 he addressed a meeting in New York City of the “Jewish Funders Network.” When he was asked about anti-Semitism in Europe, Soros did not respond by saying that it is an irrational “disease.” Instead, he said that it is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States. “There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” he said. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish," he went on. “I can’t see how one could confront it directly.” /10
 
Jewish community leaders reacted angrily to Soros’ remarks. Elan Steinberg, senior adviser at the World Jewish Congress (and former executive director of that influential organization), said: “Let’s understand things clearly: Anti-Semitism is not caused by Jews; it’s caused by anti-Semites.” Abraham Foxman called Soros’ comments “absolutely obscene.” The ADL director went on to say: “He buys into the stereotype. It’s a simplistic, counterproductive, biased and bigoted perception of what’s out there. It’s blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.” /11

Most people readily accept that positive feelings by non-Jews toward Jews have some basis in Jewish behavior. But Jewish leaders such as Foxman, Wiesel and Steinberg seem unwilling to accept that negative feelings toward Jews might similarly have a basis in Jewish behavior.

Along with all other social behavior over time, conflict between Jews and non-Jews has an evident and understandable basis in history and human nature. The historical record suggests that the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries is rooted in the unusual way that Jews relate to non-Jews. 

Israeli and Jewish- Zionist leaders affirm that Jews constitute a “people” or a “nation” – that is, a distinct nationality group to which Jews everywhere are supposed to feel and express a primary loyalty. /12

Some American Jewish leaders have been explicit about this. Louis Brandeis, a US Supreme Court justice and a leading American Zionist, said: “Let us all recognize that we Jews are a distinctive nationality of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station or shade of belief, is necessarily a member.” /13
 Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress and of the World Jewish Congress, told a rally in New York in June 1938: "I am not an American citizen of the Jewish faith. I am a Jew ... Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race, and we are a race." /14 In keeping with this outlook, Israeli leaders also say that the Zionist state represents not just its own Jewish citizens, but Jews everywhere. /15

While affirming -- usually only among themselves – that Jews are members of a separate nationality to which they should feel and express a prime loyalty, Zionists simultaneously insist that Jews must be welcomed as full and equal citizens in whatever country they may wish to live.
While Zionist Jews in the US such as Abraham Foxman speak of the “Jewish people” as a distinct nationality, they also claim that Jews are Americans like everyone else, and insist that Jews, including Zionist Jews, must be granted all the rights of US citizens, with no social, legal or institutional obstacles to Jewish power and influence in American life.
In short, Jewish-Zionist leaders and organizations (such as the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee) demand full citizen rights for Zionist Jews not only in “their country,” Israel, but everywhere.
Major Jewish-Zionist organizations, and, more broadly, the organized Jewish community, also promote “pluralism,” “tolerance” and “diversity” in the United States and other countries. They believe this is useful for Jews.

“America’s pluralistic society is at the heart of Jewish security,” wrote Abraham Foxmam. “In the long run,” the ADL director went to explain, “what has made American Jewish life a uniquely positive experience in Diaspora history and which has enabled us to be such important allies for the State of Israel, is the health of a pluralistic, tolerant and inclusive American society.” /16

For some time, the ADL has promoted the slogan “Diversity is Our Strength.” In keeping with this motto, which it claims to have invented, the ADL has devoted effort and resources to persuading Americans -- especially younger Americans -- to welcome and embrace ever more social, cultural and racial “diversity.” /17

This campaign has been very successful. American politicians and educators, and virtually the entire US mass media, promote “diversity,” “multiculturalism” and “pluralism,” and portray those who do not embrace these objectives as hateful and ignorant. At the same time, influential Jewish-Zionist organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) insist that the US must recognize and defend Israel as a specifically Jewish ethnic-religious state. /18 Pluralism and diversity, it seems, are only for non-Jews. What’s good for Jews in their own homeland, Jewish-Zionist leaders seem to say, is not pluralism and diversity, but a tribalistic nationalism.

What Jews think is important because the Jewish community has the power to realize its goals. In a remarkable address in May 2013, Vice President Joe Biden said that the “immense” and “outsized” Jewish role in the US mass media and cultural life has been the single most important factor in shaping American attitudes over the past century, and in driving major cultural- political changes. “I bet you 85 percent of those [social- political] changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense,” he said. “Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that’s a fact,” he added. /19
Biden is not alone in acknowledging this clout. “It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture,” wrote Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic in 1996. /20 Joel Stein, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in 2008: “As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood ... I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.” /21

Even though Jews have more influence and power in US political and cultural life than any other ethnic or religious group, Jewish groups are uncomfortable when non- Jews point this out. In fact, says Foxman and the ADL, one sure sign that someone is an anti-Semite is if he agrees with the statement that “Jews have too much power in our country today.” /22 For Foxman, apparently, there can never be “too much” Jewish influence and power.

Anti-Semitism is not a mysterious “disease.” As Herzl and Weizmann suggested, and as history shows, what is often called anti-Semitism is the natural and understandable attitude of people toward a minority with particularist loyalties that wields greatly disproportionate power for its own interests, rather than for the common good.

Source Notes

  1. “Wiesel Calls for 'Manifesto' on Anti-Semitism.” The Jewish Federations of North America. April 30, 2004.
    ( http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=64683 )
  2. “A Call to Conscience: Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel Opens ADL Conference on Global Anti-Semitism.” Anti-Defamation League. October 31, 2002
    ( http://archive.adl.org/Anti_semitism/conference/as_conf.asp )
  3. Abraham H. Foxman. Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism. (HarperCollins, 2003), p. 4.
  4. Abraham H. Foxman. Never Again? (2003), pp. 42, 43.
  5. Charles Krauthammer, “How to fight academic bigotry,” The Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2014.
    ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-how-to-fight-academic-bigotry/2014/01/09/64f482ee-795e-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html )
  6. Th. Herzl, Der Judenstaat. ( http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Judenstaat ; http://www.zionismus.info/judenstaat/02.htm )
  7. Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents (Praeger,1998), pp. 45, 48. Ref. cited: R. Kornberg, Theodore Herzl (1993), p. 183.
  8. Memo of Nov. 22, 1899. R. Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: 1960), Vol. 3, p. 888. Also cited in: M. Weber, “Zionism and the Third Reich,” The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1993, p. 29. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p29_Weber.html )
  9. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (1949), p. 90. Quoted in: Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 277.
  10. Uriel Heilman, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). “In Rare Jewish Appearance, George Soros Says Jews and Israel Cause Anti- Semitism.” Nov. 10, 2003
    ( http://www.jta.org/2003/11/10/archive/in-rare-jewish-appearance-george-soros-says-jews-and-israel-cause-anti-semitism )
  11. U. Heilman, JTA. “In Rare Jewish Appearance, George Soros Says Jews and Israel Cause Anti-Semitism.” Nov. 10, 2003.
  12. Abraham H. Foxman. Never Again? (2003), pp. 18, 4.
  13. Louis D. Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve It.” Speech of April 25, 1915. ( http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/sources_document11.html / http://www.law.louisville.edu/library/collections/brandeis/node/234 )
  14. “Dr. Wise Urges Jews to Declare Selves as Such,” New York Herald Tribune, June 13, 1938, p. 12.
  15. Israel even claims to speak on behalf of Jews who lived and died before the state was established. “Holocaust Victims Given Posthumous Citizenship by Israel,” The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1985.
    ( http://articles.latimes.com/1985-05-09/news/mn-6754_1_posthumous-citizenship )
    See also: M. Weber , “West Germany's Holocaust Payoff to Israel and World Jewry,” Summer 1988.
    ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p243_Weber.html )
  16. Foxman letter of Nov. 11, 2005. Published in The Jerusalem Post, Nov. 18, 2005.
    ( http://archive.adl.org/media_watch/newspapers/20051111-JPost.htm )
  17. ADL On the Frontline (New York), Summer 1997, p. 8. This issue of the ADL bulletin also noted with some pride that President Clinton, in his Feb. 1997 “State of the Union” address, had given an unexpected boost to what it called the “ADL tag line.” In that address, Clinton said: “My fellow Americans, we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness. It is our greatest strength.”
  18. Note the address by US ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro, Sept. 6, 2011. See also: M. Weber, “Behind the Campaign For War Against Iran.” April 2013.
    ( http://www.ihr.org/other/behindwarcampaign )
  19. Jennifer Epstein, “Biden: 'Jewish heritage is American heritage',” Politico, May 21, 2013.
    ( http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/05/biden-jewish-heritage-is-american-heritage-164525.html ); Daniel Halper, “Biden Talks of 'Outsized Influence' of Jews: 'The Influence Is Immense',” The Weekly Standard, May 22, 2013.
    ( http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/biden-talks-outsized-influence-jews-influence-immense_728765.html )
  20. M. Medved, “Is Hollywood Too Jewish?,” Moment, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1996), p. 37.
  21. J. Stein, “How Jewish Is Hollywood?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 2008.
    ( http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column ).
  22. Abraham H. Foxman. Never Again? (2003), p. 14.
     

        -- December 2013. Revised January 2014.
About the Author
Mark Weber is a historian, author and current affairs analyst. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).

For Further Reading
Norman F. Cantor. The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews. New York: Harper, 1994.
Benjamin Ginsberg. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993.
Peter Harrison, “What Causes Anti-Semitism?” Review of Macdonald’s Separation and Its Discontents. The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1998.
( http://ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n3p28_Harrison )
Stanley Hornbeck. Review of Macdonald’s The Culture of Critique. American Renaissance, June 1999.
( http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/review-AR.html )
Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. Jews and the New American Scene. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. Praeger, 1994.
Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. Praeger,1998
Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Praeger, 1998 (Softcover edition, 2002).
W. D. Rubinstein. The Left, The Right and the Jews. New York: Universe Books, 1982.
Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish Religion. London: Pluto Press, 1994,
Goldwin Smith. “The Jewish Question.” From: Essays on Questions of the Day. New York: Macmillan, 1894.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n1p16_Smith.html )
Mark Weber, “A Straight Look at the Jewish Lobby”
( http://ihr.org/leaflets/jewishlobby.shtml )
Mark Weber, “Holocaust Remembrance: What's Behind the Campaign?” Feb. 2006.
( http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/holocaust_remembrance.shtml )
Mark Weber, “Jews: A Religious Community, a People, or a Race?,” March-April 2000.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n2p63_Weber.html ) ;
Mark Weber, “Straight Talk About Zionism: What Jewish Nationalism Means.” April 2009.
( http://www.ihr.org/zionism0409.html )
Mark Weber, “The Weight of Tradition: Why Judaism is Not Like Other Religions.” Oct. 2010.
( http://www.ihr.org/judaism0709.html )
Mark Weber, “Vice President Biden Acknowledges 'Immense' Jewish Role in American Mass Media and Cultural Life,” July 2013.
( http://ihr.org/other/biden_jewish_role )

Robert Faurisson : A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel

A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel

By Robert Faurisson

Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: [1]
These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.
But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of extermination? 

In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. [2]

He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that!

Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains.

The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. [3] The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. [5]

The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies. He writes: [6]
Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)
A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks."
An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: [7]
Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.
These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes.
That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a miracle. He says that: [8]
In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?
In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: [9]
Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the imposture.
Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.

Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, [11] little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.
Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA).
This nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14]

Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others.

We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: [15]
Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.
At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in the process of reconciliation." [16] That is what might be called "going from National Socialism to national masochism."
Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:
Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."
As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a recognizable truth." [17]

Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs. [18]

On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians keep quiet.

But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never was one. [19]

The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored methods of historical criticism.

Summary

Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other "eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.
When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors.
It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.

Notes

  1. Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page. 
  2.  
  3. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and the crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or "crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.) 
  4.  
  5. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
  6. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
  7. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
  8. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.
  9. Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.
  10. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.
  11. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
  12. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
  13. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
  14. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
  15. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
  16. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New York).
  17. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
  18. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
  19. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
  20. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
  21. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.


About the Author Robert Faurisson, born in 1929, has for years been regarded as Europe's leading Holocaust revisionist scholar.
He was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as associate professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis. After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in articles published in 1978 in the French daily Le Monde. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in several books and numerous scholarly articles.


http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/wiesel.shtml
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Tony Martin : Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech

Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech
By Prof. Tony Martin


First of all, thank you very much, Greg, for the introduction. I’d like to thank also the IHR and Mark Weber particularly for inviting me here. I’m very happy to be here, to be part of this event. I like long-winded topics, at least topic titles, so I’ll read the topic which I have selected for today.

It’s as follows: “Jewish Tactics as Exemplified in the Controversy Over Jewish Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” So I won’t be speaking that much on the controversy itself. What I’m trying to do is to use my subjective experience, that is, the experience I’ve had, for close to a decade now, in dealing with this controversy.

And what I’m going to try to do now -- to use my concrete, subjective experience on the firing line, so to speak. And I’m going to try to extract from my experience certain basic sort of tactics that I think the Jewish lobby has used over the years pertaining to my particular situation.
But in trying to extract these tactics from my own situation, I suspect that I may very well resonate with the experience of some other people here, because my suspicion is that there tends to be a generalized practice which transcends your particular situation. So, even though in my case I was dealing with a specific situation -- the transatlantic slave trade -- my suspicion is that the kinds of tactics which were used against me may be not very dissimilar to those experienced by many other folks who have been involved in other kinds of disputes with this particular lobby.
 ----------

The first thing I should do by way of introduction is just to basically summarize precisely what my controversy was. I know it’s familiar to many people here, but I’m sure not to everybody in this audience. As was mentioned a minute ago in the introduction, I teach at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. For many years I’ve taught a survey course in African-American history. This is a one semester course, that moves very rapidly over the whole gamut of African-American history.
In 1993 I introduced to this course a book which is on sale here, a book which then was fairly new, a book which I myself had only just recently become introduced to.
This book, which is published by the historical research department of the Nation of Islam, is entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. And what that book did, relying primarily on sources written by Jews, and Jewish sources of a variety of types, is to try to sort of synthesize the existing information on Jewish involvement in the slave trade, the bringing of Africans as slaves from Africa to the so-called new world.
There wasn’t that much in the book that was new -- all the information, practically, was secondary information, which had been already published, although hidden away to a large extent in very esoteric Jewish journals, which the average Jew, I discovered later, had no idea about.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t new information. It was new to many people, including myself, and I found it very interesting that even though I had taught African-American history for many years, I had been only dimly aware of the role of Jews in that slave trade.
What I discovered was that the Jewish role in that slave trade had been very cleverly camouflaged for many, many years. 
Where Jews were involved, usually they tended not to be identified as Jews, whereas where Christians were involved, or where Muslims were involved. there was ready identification of such persons by their ethnicity, by their religious affiliation, and so on. In the case of Jews, they would be called other things -- Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian, whatever. But, you know, that crucial identification tended to be obscured. So, as a good professor – I think I’m a good professor.
I’m always on the lookout for new information, to enrich my classes. So I was very fascinated by this new information, and decided to add a few readings from this book in my class. And that’s when, as the saying goes, all hell broke loose. [Laughter]

Apparently, I didn’t realize it, but I actually stumbled into a controversy which was already brewing because the book had apparently caused some consternation in Jewish circles. And it’s only afterwards, when I went back and did my research, that I discovered that one or two editorials had already appeared, by way of the Jewish power structure, in a sense warning people like myself to stay away from the book.

There already apparently had been a full-page op ed piece in The New York Times, one that, I was told, was the largest, longest op ed that had ever been published in that paper. It was actually typeset in the form of a Star of David. It was written by someone called Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard University, one of the black spokesmen for the Jewish lobby. Even the paper from my basic home town, the Boston Globe, had carried an editorial, which I was unaware of at the time, not long before I began to use the book. And in a sense, the purpose of these editorials and op eds was to warn folks to stay away from that book, or else. But me, in my foolhardiness, ignored the warnings, being largely unaware of the warnings in the first place. And so I stumbled into this problem.

In fact Jews had been involved not only in the African slave trade, but also, and for a very long period of time, in a variety of other slave trades as well. Apparently, they had actually dominated slavery and the slave trade in medieval times.
A couple of days ago, while on the plane on the way here, I was re-reading a Ph. D. dissertation from 1977 [“The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations through 1900”] by a man called Harold D. Brackman, who is a functionary of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
In his dissertation, which details Black-Jewish relations from ancient times up to 1900, he actually acknowledges the fact that Jews were the principal slave traders in the world for several hundred years -- although, and in typical fashion, he puts a very interesting spin on it.
He acknowledges, as I guess he has to, that Jews were the major slave traders in the world, trading slaves everywhere from Russia to western Europe, to India, to China -- but he says that they dominated the world trade only for a few hundred years -- only. [laughter]
He said that they were the main slave traders from the eighth century to the twelfth century -- but that was no big thing. It was only a few hundred years.
I discovered also that the Jews were very instrumental in the ideological underpinning for the African slave trade -- the notorious Hamitic myth -- which more than anything else has provided a sort of ideological underpinning or rationale for the slave trade. This comes out of the Talmud.
In fact, Harold Brackman himself acknowledges that this was the first explication of the story in the Biblical book of Genesis about Ham, the so-called progenitor of the African race, having been cursed by Noah, and so on.
But apparently, according to Brackman, the Talmud was the first place that put a racist spin on this story. The Biblical story was racially neutral, but the Talmud apparently put a very awful racist spin on this story, which later on became the basis, the ideological underpinning, for the African slave trade. So all of this I was to discover as I became embroiled in the controversy.

One of the things that interested me, too, was that the Jewish element was apparently also a major element in what came to be known in the 19 th century as the white slave trade. The white slave trade was a major multinational, international trading in women for immoral sexual purposes, as prostitutes, and so on. And I found, too, that Jewish entrepreneurs in Europe apparently were also major figures in that so-called slave trade.

So I became aware of all of this. Just to summarize briefly what I discovered in the book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, and in the subsequent readings, with regard to the African slave trade, is that once it got going in the 15th century, the Jews again were a very important part of it.
The book was not suggesting, just I have never suggested, that the Jews were the only people involved, or even the major people involved. My basic point has always been that whereas everybody else that I’m aware of who was a part of the slave trade has acknowledged being part of it. In fact, many of the people who were a part of the genesis of the slave trade later also became part of the abolitionist movement to end the trade.
But as far as I know, the Jewish element is the only one that has resisted acknowledging its participation in this trade. 
In fact, it has gone beyond merely resisting knowledge of this information coming out. It has become very upset when this information has come to the fore.
And that has been my basic problem. Why? What’s so special about this group that places itself beyond the pale, so to speak -- no pun intended -- beyond the pale of criticism. And whereas any other group can be criticized, this group -- it seems to me -- is beyond criticism.
Especially for me as a black person, I become very upset if someone tries to walk into my classroom to tell me that I, as a black person teaching black history, have to sort of regard their involvement in my history as somehow out of bounds.

So, after becoming involved in this history, via the Hamitic myth, Jews were some of the important financiers of this slave trade in the very early periods. 
One of the major multi-national corporations that financed the Atlantic slave trade very early on was the Dutch West India Company. As we know, the Jews had been chased out of Spain, and chased out of Portugal. The Netherlands was the one area which welcomed them to some degree. And this was right around the same time, the 15th century, that the slave trade was gearing up -- so they were positioned, geographically and in other ways, to become an important element in the financing of the Dutch West India Company, a major multinational corporation that was involved in the slave trade.

In the early 17th century Jews were, in fact, a major element in the slave trade in places like Brazil and Surinam in South America, in places like Curacao in the West Indies, and in Jamaica, Barbados and other places. I discovered that they were also very well positioned in this country -- that many of the traders in colonial times who brought slaves across the Atlantic to this country were in fact Jewish ship-owners and slave traders. Some of the best known names in colonial North America who were involved in that traffic were people like Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island, who was one of the best-known names of all.

I discovered that Jews owned many of the ancillary corporations that sort of fed into the slave trade. For example, rum distilling was a major business that was ancillary to the slave trade because rum was used as an item of trade, to exchange for slaves in West Africa. And most of the rum distilleries in places like Boston and elsewhere in New England were, I believe, owned by Jews, and so on.

I discovered that according to the 1830 census, even though Jews were a small proportion of the population in North America, nevertheless they were inordinately represented among the slave owners. Yes, they were a small portion of the population overall, but on a percentage basis that were significant.
Jewish historians who have analyzed the 1830 census have discovered that whereas something like 30-odd percent of the white population may have owned one or more slaves in the South, for Jewish households it was over 70 percent. So according to an analysis of the 1830 census by Jewish historians, Jews were more than twice as likely, on a percentage basis, to own slaves.

I also discovered that Jews, despite their involvement in the slave trade, were very few and far between in the abolitionist movement. They were much, much less likely than other groups to be involved in this movement. So that in a nutshell, then, is the set of facts that caused me to become involved in this interesting controversy.
And what I want to do, then, is to dwell not on the facts themselves, but on what I perceive to be the main tactics that were used, because I found myself, like I said, on the front line of this situation, and I became very fascinated, looking at their tactics. And the more I began to read around this question, the more I saw patterns emerging.
----------

The first and major tactic that I discovered in their attack on me was their reliance on lies -- just straight-up lies. There’s no other way to describe it, just telling lies.

 Many of the categories that I will enumerate overlap, and many of them could also come under this general rubric of telling lies. But I think that if one had to isolate a single tactic, it was a tactic of telling lies. I think they’ve elevated telling lies to a very high artistic form. [Laughter].
For example, very early in my controversy, the major Jewish organizations became involved. And this is very fascinating. Here am I, a professor in a very small college, teaching a class of maybe 30 students, but they attached such great importance to this, that within a very short space of time the major Jewish organizations became involved, and it became a national event.
For example, one Sunday morning on the ABC network television program “This Week With David Brinkley,” there was a whole segment dealing with this question -- about my telling my students that Jews were involved in the slave trade.
Up to that point I was still a little astounded, considering the prominence given to what, to me, was a totally inconsequential thing. Shortly after all of this started, four of the major Jewish organizations issued a joint press release attacking me: the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston.

 Afterwards they said that this was somewhat unprecedented for these major Jewish organizations to combine their efforts to attack one little obscure professor at a small school. They also admitted that it was unusual to issue this press release in the middle of one of their high holy days -- of which there are quite a few, I understand -- to sort of disturb the sanctity of this high holiday by issuing something along these lines.

Now, I actually saw one of the original press releases, which I have likened to a medieval scroll. It reminded me of a movie I saw as a boy, with Robin Hood, in which the Sheriff of Nottingham went into Sherwood Forest [laughter], and he would unroll a long proclamation and tack it on a tree, saying “Robin Hood, beware. We’re looking for you.” That kind of a thing. [laughter]. This was literally a scroll. You couldn’t read it without having to unroll it. I’ve never seen anything like it. It had the logos of these four organizations. And this opened my eyes to the proclivity of these folks to tell lies.

This proclamation told the world that I was refusing to let my students discuss this information. First of all, it presented me as providing wrong information -- blatantly false information, as another Jewish person described it to my classroom. And it said that in the classroom I was apparently ramming this stuff down my students’ throats, and forbidding any discussion -- a claim that was absolutely, hideously untrue. It said that I had a history of all kinds of problems with my school, and that my colleagues had been complaining about me for many years. Up to now I have had no inkling of what these complaints could possibly be. I know of no such incidents, certainly not before this time.

I was able to take this press release and read it out to my class. It was a very good learning experience for the students, because here were the students who I was accused of misleading and whatnot, and I was able to show them the kind of information that gets into the major media.
One of the interesting lies that came out around this time was by the campus rabbi. She came into my office -- yes this was a “she,” actually -- complaining about my teaching this information.
So I told her: Well look, if you think this information is false, why don’t you come to my class? I will invite you to my classroom. I will allow you to stand up in front of my class and explain what’s wrong with this information, and then we can have a debate in front of the class. And she agreed. But of course she quickly changed her mind. And not only did she change her mind, but then she put it out that I had refused to discuss the material with her. [laughter].

So point number one is the proclivity to tell lies. Point number two was a very interesting proclivity towards attempting to damage one’s professional credibility. There was a tendency to libel and slander whoever they were upset with. In this case it was me. There was one Jewish gentleman, about 50 years old, who began making anonymous calls, random calls, to the campus. He would call the dorms, he would call people’s offices, just randomly. And he would tell them he was a Jewish student at Harvard University. He would tell them that he had discovered that I did not really have a PhD, and that I was not qualified to be teaching at Wellesley College. This was one of the more bizarre examples of the attempt to discredit me professionally.

There was a gentleman who I subsequently brought a libel case against, and lost.
I brought three cases, but lost them all. This gentleman suggested that I was an affirmative action PhD, and that the only reason I got a PhD was because of affirmative action. He said the only reason I got tenure at Wellesley College -- I was one of the youngest professors ever tenured there -- was because they were afraid of me. I was portrayed as this great, black, loudmouthed person, so just to keep me quiet they decided to give me tenure. [laughter].

One of the most interesting of these efforts to discredit me was by a gentleman called Leon Wieseltier, who describes himself as a literary editor of the New Republic magazine. Now in 1994, I think it was, at the height of all this hysteria, The Washington Post Book World invited me to review four new books for an issue, which I did. They gave my review a lot of space. It was the longest book review in that issue.

And in the very next week’s issue, there were, predictably, two or three outraged letters from Jewish individuals asking The Washington Post Book World if had been aware of who this person was -- the great anti-Semite Tony Martin. Don’t you know who this is? [laughter]
How can you let him write in this prestigious periodical?
And this guy Wieseltier went a step further. The title of my book is The Jewish Onslaught, and the subtitle is “Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.”
Now, I spell despatches “d-e-s.” Most Americans spell it “d-i-s.” I grew up in a British tradition, in a British colony, and to this day I spell honor “h-o-n-o-u-r.” Most of you do not. The “e” in “despatches” is a British spelling. And this idiot [laughter] obviously didn’t realize that there are alternative spellings of the word. Again, so anxious to try to discredit someone they disagree with, this guy actually told The Washington Post Book World in his letter that I was so ignorant and stupid that I couldn’t even spell the word “despatches.” [laughter].
Look at how stupid I was, who had been allowed to publish in their journal. Luckily for me, the editor of The Washington Post Book World was one of those rare persons who was apparently not too cowed by the Jewish onslaught.
And she wrote a very nice rejoinder telling Wieseltier that she had checked two dictionaries, and in both of them she saw “despatches” -- spelled with an “e” -- as one of the optional spellings of the word. [Applause]

Then there was Mary Lefkowitz, one of my colleagues at Wellesley College. In a little literary magazine I’d never seen before. she actually alleged that I had pushed, had physically assaulted, a white student. Now, I teach at a women’s college. So, here she is playing into, I guess, all these perceptions of a big, black rapist or whatever. But she actually alleged that I physically pushed down a white student. This would be a white woman, and the woman fell down. Then, she said, I bent over her and raged. That was the word she used: I bent over her and raged. One had a vision of a raging animal. [laughter].
So of course I brought a libel suit against her.
And one of the things I discovered was that these folks are very, very well positioned in the court system.
In fact, after having lost, well, I guess, two libel suits, I was beginning to think they must have had something to do with fashioning the libel laws in this country. [laughter]. Because in this case, you know, Lefkowitz actually acknowledged that what she said was wrong, and she acknowledged that she had not taken due care in ascertaining the facts. But even those acknowledgements were not enough for me to win the case. I had to prove that she had acted with reckless abandon, and all kinds of things. But it was a very interesting learning experience for me. The way libel laws work in this country, once they identify you as a “public person,” anyone basically has carte blanche. A person can say anything he wants. It can be true. It can be false. He doesn’t have to do research. He can say anything he wants. It’s almost literally that bad.

So, those are some of the efforts that were made to discredit me. Of course, I don’t think they succeeded. But again, this was a very persistent effort to sort of tarnish my image. And very much aligned with this, of course, was the generalized question of character assassination. This was part of that effort to damage one’s credibility.

There was also the tactic of what I describe as dirty tricks. Of course, this too is a subset within the general rubric of lies, I suppose. At Wellesley College there is a Hillel group. Hillel is the Jewish student organization that exists on campuses around the country. I remember reading in Paul Findley’s book, They Dare To Speak Out, that the Hillel people are formally trained, apparently by the ADL and other organizations, in tactics: how to disrupt meetings, how to push false propaganda on campuses, and so on. And even though I don’t know it for a fact, certainly those Hillel students who were part of the campaign did appear to be professionally trained.
In fact, the whole campaign against me was initiated by students from the Hillel group. They sat in on my class on the first day of the semester, just for one day. And somehow from that one day’s class they somehow figured out that I was teaching this book as fact. Apparently they figured that if I was teaching the book as “hate literature,” quote unquote, that would be okay. But the fact that I was teaching the book just as any other book, as one having some basic academic credibility -- they considered that, of course, to be a grossly anti-Semitic thing. And they were the ones who raised the hue and cry.

There’s a group on campus called “The Friends of Wellesley Hillel.” This is a group of faculty and alumni who work very closely with the Hillel students. In the midst of this campaign they actually put together a packet of mostly libelous information, and mailed it to the mother of one of the students who was very, very vocal on my behalf. The students rallied around me. It’s quite incredible the extent to which these folks would operate. This is a group of grown people, such as deans of the college, professors, who take the time to sit on committees to put together a packet of basically lies and misinformation, and send it out. They actually targeted this one student because she was a leader of the students who were supporting me, and they sent this information to her mother.

Somebody came and tacked up a flyer around my office one day -- I wasn’t in the office at the time – alleging sexual misconduct between myself and this same student who was vocal on my behalf. Fortunately for me, it didn’t work. And at one point they started a rumor that if I wrote recommendations for those students, they would not get jobs and would not get entry into graduate school, or anything. These are some of what I call dirty tricks. 

There was also the tactic of what I call “going for the economic jugular” -- to remove my ability to survive economically. An example of that was a joint press release that called for my expulsion from the college. It called for my tenure to be revoked. So again, that’s one of the hallmarks of their tactics, it seems to me. And I am sure that this is of wider application than in just my own case.

There was also the tactic of what I call Great Presumptuousness. I heard somebody last night mention the word “chutzpah.” I call it presumptuousness -- the idea that a rabbi, a student chaplain, could come into my office to demand an explanation for why am I teaching this information. That to me is sheer presumptuousness. Even though I was polite, the essence of my response was, basically, “Who the hell are you to come here to tell me what I must teach [laughter] in a black studies class. I’m an expert on black studies. Who the hell are you?” I didn’t say it in those terms, but that was the import [applause] of what I was saying.

Before this Jewish onslaught began with me, just by sheer coincidence a few months earlier, I had been doing some research in a Jewish archive in New York City, and at that time a case similar to mine had just erupted concerning Professor Leonard Jeffries at City College in New York City. He had made a speech in Albany in which he had pointed out that Jews had a very large hand in fashioning Hollywood. 
 In fact, there’s a book by a Jewish author, Neil Gabler, called An Empire of Their Own. And the subtitle, interestingly enough, is “How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” [Laughter]. What could be more explicit than that? The author is boasting about the way Jews basically shaped American popular culture.
So Len Jeffries, in his speech in Albany, had said Well, okay, so you all [Jews] invented American popular culture. You therefore have to take a large portion of the blame for the negative stereotypes concerning black folk that have been nurtured by Hollywood over the years. But of course they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to invent Hollywood, but they don’t want to take responsibility for the negative elements coming out of Hollywood. So Jeffries was branded as anti-Semitic, as usual, for having said that. So at that time, when I was visiting the Jewish archive, my own case had not yet emerged. But they tried to put me through this litmus test. It was almost as though they would not let me use the archives unless I disavowed any kind of association with Jeffries. The woman in charge asked me: “Do you know Len Jeffries?” I said Yes, I know him. He’s a good friend of mine, a colleague of mine. And she was very upset.

Again there’s this presumptuousness, this feeling that they have a right to put you through all these litmus tests -- a right to demand of you why you are doing something that, to anybody else, is totally correct, and totally inoffensive.
 
Another tactic which I think I can distill out of my experience is a tendency to sidestep the real issues. I discovered that throughout this whole period of almost ten years now, they would almost never engage me on the facts of the matter. They would say: Okay, you say that Jews were involved in the slave trade. You’re a big anti-Semite. So I’ll say: Okay, let’s discuss it. Were Jews indeed half of the slave owners in Brazil in the 17th century? I’ll say, look at your own Encyclopaedia Judaica. It says that Jews were half the slave owners in Brazil. But they would never engage in that kind of factual debate. Never. They would always go off on a tangent, trying to besmirch your character, trying to take away your economic wherewithal, and so on. But they studiously avoid ever engaging in a discussion of the actual facts of the matter.

I had a graphic illustration of this just a few weeks ago when this question flared again, very briefly, on my campus. Somebody mentioned that ten years ago I had taught these [allegedly] blatant falsehoods, and whatnot. So I responded in the newspaper. And a couple of Jewish students wrote back, responding to me. And again, although I laid out several examples of Jewish historians acknowledging the Jewish involvement in the slave trade, there was no reference to this at all by the Jewish students. Instead, they began talking about stories from Europe in the Middle Ages, or some other era, about Jews killing white kids to take their blood and put it in matzos, and stories of their Jewish holocaust. In short, all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with anything. In fact, I responded asking them what any of this has to do with the point that I was making. They did not read my article. They did not acknowledge the evidence I had given concerning Jewish involvement in the slave trade. What do stories of Jews killing somebody for their blood to put in matzos have to do the slave trade? But this was always their tendency. They would studiously avoid the facts and avoid the issue at hand, but instead bring in what we call Red Herrings -- off the wall stuff. And this was a very persistent tactic, which I’ve been able to discern.

Another tactic -- which may be just saying the same thing in a different way -- is the tendency to introduce “straw men.” For example, I’m discussing Jewish involvement in the slave trade, but somebody responds by writing an article saying that I alleged – which is not true – that Jews were genetically predisposed towards enslaving others. This has nothing to do with anything that I was talking about. But again, they would totally disregard the facts of the case and introduce something totally different. They would introduce a “straw man,” get it on the record, and then they would attack the “straw man” they’ve created. And because they have such great influence in the media, this “straw man,” this false information, all of a sudden becomes part of the record. Even in court they’ll reference the same lies that they put in the newspaper, as though this is some disinterested source, some third party. And then this brings me to my next point -- their ability to plant misinformation in the record, and then use that misinformation as though it’s some kind of well-documented, primary source.

Point number ten. This is what I call the use of quislings or surrogates, or what we in the black community call Uncle Toms. They have developed this art to a very high level -- at least in my case, or in the black community.
I’ve mentioned Henry Louis “Skip” Gates. There are many other notorious figures like that in the black community, who are all too willing to do their bidding.
I must say that these folks are very, very well recompensed. These folks have been given incredible prominence. They go around the world speaking, sometimes for fifteen thousand dollars at a time. Those are the kind of honorariums these folks get. They’ve been given endowed chairs in their universities. Many of them can hardly put two sentences together. But because they’ve been willing to play this game, they’ve been elevated to prominence.

When you pick up The New York Times, you’ll see them on the cover of the Sunday magazine section with regard to issues that pertain to black folk. And it doesn’t matter what it is specifically. It can be the history of Africa. It can be contemporary politics in the Caribbean. It doesn’t matter. They are quoted as the authorities, and so on. You’ll also see them on PBS television, on multi-million dollar programs and documentaries, and so on. And this has been a very effective tactic on their part; to pick out people from within, in this case, my own group -- that is, people who are willing to, in a sense, sell themselves for the admittedly very ample rewards they’re given as a result.

Another tactic is their ability to leverage off of the influence which they undoubtedly have in high places. At Wellesley College, for example, a new president was coming on just as my case was moving to its climax, so to speak. And this new college president came in not knowing anything about what had been happening. And somehow these folks got her to write a letter, which I suspect they must have drafted themselves because she had no real knowledge of the background of what was happening. This was a letter condemning me for teaching that Jews were involved in the slave trade. This letter, according to newspaper reports, was sent out to maybe 40 to 60 thousand people. So you had the incoming president of Wellesley College sending out 40 to 60 thousand letters. This must be unprecedented in the annals of American higher education, I think. This is something for the Guinness Book of World Records [Laughter].
A university president sending out as many as 60, that’s six-zero, thousand letters, condemning one of her own professors for teaching something that is historically true. I’ve never, ever heard of such a case. Maybe I should indeed write to the Guinness Book of World Records and see if they can immortalize me by mentioning this.
Then there was the American Historical Association. Three Jewish historians actually went to the American Historical Association and got it to decree – that’s the only term I can use – to decree, by executive fiat, that the Jews were not involved in the slave trade. [Laughter] I’ve never ever heard of any such thing. This is totally antithetical to the way that academia operates. Who’s ever heard of such a thing: historical fact being determined by presidential decree from the American Historical Association.
“We decree…” [mocking]. It’s like a Papal Bull in the Middle Ages… “We decree: The Jews were not involved in the slave trade.” [Laughter] It is absolutely amazing, but they actually succeeded in having this done.

Then there’s one of the most amazing cases of all. I was invited to speak in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, by Worcester State College, round about 1994 or 95. And the Jewish groups were actually able to get the mayor of Worcester – one of the largest cities in the state – to call together a special press conference, in which he had leaders of all the major religions. He had a Roman Catholic head. He had a Baptist head -- heads of various Protestant denominations -- and rabbis, ADL types, and so on. The mayor assembled an entire coalition of religious and apparently civil rights organizations. For what? To denounce me prior to my appearance at Worcester State College. They had already tried to put pressure on the college, and on the people who’d invited me. To their great credit, those people stayed strong. They refused to bow, and I spoke. You would think that the mayor had more important things to do. [Laughter]. But here these groups were powerful enough to get the mayor of a major city to pull together a special conclave on a Jewish press release to denounce me.

Of course, the result was that my speech, when indeed it did take place, drew the largest audience in the history of the school. [Laughter and applause] Actually, I didn’t originally include this in my talk, but I really should mention their tendency on occasion to shoot themselves in the foot. [laughter] If they had left me alone, I think the only people who would have known of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade would have been my 30 students and myself. [Laughter, applause].
But now, of course, the whole world knows about it. And, as a result, the question of African slavery will never ever again be raised without the question of the Jewish role being part of the discussion. It’s now in the forefront of people’s consciousness. And that’s due to them. I mean, I never could have promoted this idea the way that they did. [Laughter].

Another tactic, of course, is their use of the major media. They become very agitated when one speaks of their control of the media. That’s one of the worst anti-Semitic things it’s possible for anybody to say. And yet, as in the case of the Jewish involvement in Hollywood, they themselves boast about their prominence in the media. In fact, in my book, The Jewish Onslaught, I quote Charles Silberman, a Jewish author, who wrote a book in the 1980s called A Certain People. And in it he boasts that of the seven top editors of The New York Times, all seven were Jews. He wrote about the major TV networks, and although I forget the precise figure, he mentions that the majority of the senior television network producers were Jews, and that it’s these producers who really determine what gets on the news, what stays out, what spin is put on information, and so on. So the people who are crucial to spinning the news, he wrote, are primarily Jews. He named names. And I quoted him in my book. But I was anti-Semitic for quoting him [laughter], which was not unusual.

When that huge scroll, that press-release scroll, was issued by the four major Jewish organizations, the Boston Globe, the city’s leading newspaper, published four major articles, including editorials and op eds, within about six days, attacking me on that question. That included an op ed in the Sunday paper and a major editorial on the editorial page. Again, these were filled with lies and distortions. I responded with a letter, which they refused to publish. So they had four major items attacking me in less than a week, but they refused to publish my rejoinder. And so, because these folks have such a sway over the major media, it gives them a very great advantage.

I remember being interviewed for the Fox front page program. They interviewed me for over an hour, but I guess that my responses to their questions were so tight that they could not find any sound bite to extract to make me look bad. So they gave me a couple sound bites, maybe half a second each, but instead of letting me talk, they had a narrator of some kind who spent about five minutes telling folks what I had said, but not letting me say anything, practically. And that, too, is one of their tactics.

The use of organizations is another tactic. Of course, I don’t have to tell this audience about the Anti-Defamation League. I think I also have pride of place on the ADL website. Although I haven’t checked recently, for several years I had Honorable Mention every year in their listing of anti-Semitic occurrences, and so on. In their listing of anti-Semitic occurrences of the previous year, there would be an item like, “Tony Martin gave a lecture at XYZ college.” That would in itself be cited as an anti-Semitic event -- the fact that I gave a lecture someplace. The ADL actually issued a book about me. And although I’ve had it for years, I haven’t got around to reading it. They took the title of my book and turned it around. This ADL report is titled Academic Bigotry: Professor Tony Martin's Anti-Jewish Onslaught

Another tactic is what I call their unseemly histrionics. When I spoke at Worcester State College, there was a Jewish lady (I think her name was Schneider) who was on the College’s board of trustees. Amidst great fanfare, she resigned from the board because of the school’s invitation to me. But that’s what I call nothing but stupid histrionics. It got a lot of press, of course. It created a lot of media interest. But again, this was a case of shooting herself in the foot. As I remember they had initially scheduled me to speak in an auditorium that held about a hundred people. But after all the hysteria, which they themselves had generated, they had to change the venue to the largest auditorium they had, which held about 300 people. And even that wasn’t big enough. So eventually, when I turned up on a cold, wintry morning in February, they had that 300-capacity auditorium totally full. Then they had to run closed-circuit televisions outside for another 300 people to hear what I had to say. And of course, my speech got to be front-page news the next morning in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and so on.

Another thing they try to do is to pin what I call a nickname on you. They try to find some little slip of the tongue, or some little thing they can take out of context. And if they find it, then every time your name is mentioned in the media, they stick that on you. For example, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam once made a slip. He was talking about a fact, as I mentioned earlier, that 75 percent of Jewish households in 1830 owned slaves. But he kind of got it wrong, as one often does in the midst of a speech -- a slip of the tongue. And it came out, when he said it, that Jews owned 75 percent of the slaves. It was obviously a slip of the tongue. But they mentioned it repeatedly ever since, often using that sound bite to make it look like he was a great distorter of the truth.

In my case, fortunately for me, the most they could pin on me was the term “controversial.” So every time they mention me, I get to be the “controversial” professor. [Laughter]. They’re also very good at the good cop/bad cop game. While someone is trying to destroy you on one side, someone will come on the other side, all smiley and whatnot. But beware of the good cop. Very often it’s better to deal with the bad cop because the good one will often get you in jail much more quickly and smoothly than the bad one. 

And sometimes they try to play you for a fool. At the same time they’re trying to destroy you, they’re trying to give you advice. [laughter] Last year, for example, when I decided to accept David Irving’s invitation to speak in Cincinnati, there was guy whose name I don’t recall who sent me an e-mail telling me what a racist David Irving was. He sent me this copy of some poem that Irving had written, saying he didn’t want his daughter to marry a Rastafarian or something -- which is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. If he wants he wants his daughter to marry a Rastafarian or anybody else, or not marry them, So what? That has nothing to do with anything as far as I’m concerned. But again, here are people who are trying to destroy me, people who have spent the last ten years trying to portray me as all kinds of things, trying to take my livelihood away. and these same people can have the chutzpah, I guess, to warn me against somebody else. The whole idea is just totally amazing to me. Of course, I didn’t pay any great attention to what these guys are trying to say.

Another one of their tactics is hate mail. Their propensity for hate mail, I discovered, is absolutely amazing. Up to now, I still get a lot of hate emails. And a few days ago I got a hate postcard. On the one hand they try to portray themselves in public as these great liberals and nice folks and whatnot, but at the very same time they’re getting out this other kind of stuff.

Which also reminds me of the tendency towards violence. There was one Jewish guy, he said he was a Russian Jew, called Alexander Nechaevsky, who actually came onto my campus saying that he had come to get me. Luckily I wasn’t there to be gotten that day. I was somewhere out of town. But he came to the office, saying he had come to get me, and whatnot. They had to call the campus police, and he was given an order -- a trespass order, I think they called it -- not to appear on the campus again.

So these, then, are some of the kinds of tactics that I’ve been able to distill from my interaction with these folks over the last nine or ten years. Again, I’ve been very fascinated by the fact that I’ve become more broadly aware of similar situations involving others so that, it seems to me, many of these tactics may be of much more generalized application.
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I don’t necessarily know the best way to respond. But I can just maybe outline, very quickly, the ways that I have tried to respond. I have tried to respond, first of all, by trying to stand on principle. From the very beginning, as far as I’m concerned, I’m talking the truth. I’ve said that the Jews were indeed involved in the slave trade. And as long as I am convinced in my own mind that I’m talking the truth, then that’s it. I’ve tried to disregard all of the other foolishness, and I’ve tried to stand on the truth. I’ve been on TV many times, debating people from the American Jewish Committee, and so on. And again, in such face to face debate, all of these tactics come into play. They try to attack your credibility, your character. But what I’ve always tried to do in those exchanges is to ignore, as far as I can, all of the ad hominem attacks, and concentrate on the facts. So they’ll say “Tony Martin is an anti-Semite.” I’ll just ignore it. I’ll say, 75 percent of Jewish households owned slaves, according to the 1830 census. I’ll stick to the facts, and I’ll use those kinds of media appearances as an opportunity to inform whoever happens to be listening.
I’ve also tried , where I could, to myself leverage off of their media power. There have been times when they have unwittingly given me an opportunity to appear before the mass media, and I’ve used those opportunities to the hilt -- again, to push facts. I know in advance that I have only 30 seconds, so I try to ram as many facts into those 30 seconds as I can, and just forget all the anti-Semitic stuff. I can deal with that later.

I’ve also tried to develop, to the best of my limited resources, some kind of independent response. I find that independence is a very, very great benefit. I started my own little publishing company. It’s a little company, but it was very, very effective. My book, The Jewish Onslaught got out and sold like hotcakes. It’s really made a difference, just to have some kind of an independent medium. It wasn’t a major corporation or anything, but it was independent. I controlled it, and I was able to fight back to some degree.

I also think it’s important to have some kind of a support structure. I was very fortunate. They attacked me at a time when I already had established a pretty good sort of a support structure in academia. I was relatively well known. It wasn’t as easy for them to destroy my credibility as it might have been for people who were perhaps less accomplished. But I found that having a support structure and being able to avail oneself of it was very important.

And finally, in my case I tried wherever possible to take the matter to them. I didn’t sit back and wait, once the battle was joined. I found it, in fact. In the early days especially I think that they weren’t used to having people fight back the way that I did. I think it sort of threw them off balance. They came at me with all their usual bag of tricks, expecting me to fold immediately. But I once I was able to fight back, and once it began to appear to them that they had a long protracted struggle on their hands, and not an easy victory, it took them a while to actually try to regroup and figure out what to do.

So, I just offer these as perhaps things for folks to think about in their response. Thank you very much.

This is an edited transcript of Prof. Martin’s address given in June 2002 in Irvine, California, at the 14th Conference of the Institute for Historical Review.


About the Author

Tony Martin, a historian, was best known as a specialist of African American history. For years he served as a professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College (Massachusetts).
He was born in 1942 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. He earned a B.Sc. honors degree in economics at the University of Hull (England), and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history at Michigan State University. He authored, compiled or edited 14 books. He was perhaps best known for his work on the life and legacy of the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Martin’s many articles and reviews appeared in a variety of academic journals and popular periodicals, as well as in reference works and anthologies. He was also a popular lecturer, and addressed general and scholarly audiences across the US, in Canada, and in other countries. Martin retired in June 2007 as professor emeritus after 34 years with Wellesley College’s Africana Studies Department. He died in January 2013 at the age of 70 in Trinidad.



http://www.ihr.org/other/TonyMartin2002.html

In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers

In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps':
A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers


Martin Brech




In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the "Battle of the Bulge," my training was cut short, my furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot" (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.

In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine.
I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire.

The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.

Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.

Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.

When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me.
I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.

This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. 

Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.

These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.

Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.

The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when. I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four a.m. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something. I had to investigate.

When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.

I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.

Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades, and could only admire their courage and devotion.

On May 8, V.E. Day [1945], I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone [of occupation], where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.

On this day, however, we were happy.
As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at their request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other, or that I had learned in high school German class ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket," and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy.
I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.

Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields."

When I finally saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some, and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment.

More and more I was used as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work."

Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.

When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.

Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.

"So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded, while ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history.
This is why I am speaking out now, 45 years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy.
We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.

I realize it's difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me.
And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed.
But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, that perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.


About the author
Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master's degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)


For Further Reading
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)
James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)
John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)
Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.
Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)
Mark Weber, "New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two" (Summer 2007)
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )


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