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Paul Rassinier (1906-1967) was a French pacifist, political activist, author and historian. He was also a French Resistance fighter, and a victim of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. A journalist, editor and commentator, he wrote hundreds of articles in dozens of newspapers and magazines on economics, international relations, pacifism, social justice, anti-colonialism, law, and history.

But he is mainly known, depending on one's viewpoint, as the Father Of Holocaust Revisionism or the Father of Holocaust Denial, though in his day, nobody ever called it The Holocaust.

Early life

Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906, in Bermont in the Territory of Belfort. His family was always politically active, and from a young age, Paul was encouraged to do the same. During World War I, Paul's father Joseph, a veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present day Vietnam) was called back into the army, but was put into a military prison for his pacifist attitudes, something his son Paul never forgot.

After the war, his family cheered first the Russian Revolution of 1918, then the German Revolution of 1919, and in 1922, at age 16, Paul Rassinier joined the Communist Party. He completed his schooling, but failed the higher graduation exams that would have gotten him into university. Nevertheless, through the intervention of Emile Rassinier, his uncle and the mayor of Charmois, he secured a post as a teacher of geography and history.

Paul had expected to become a reserve officer in the French Army, but his Communist opposition to Andre Tardieu, the Deputy for the Territory of Belfort, led to his rejection, so his military service was spent as an enlisted man. In 1927, he was sent to Morocco, serving as a secretary/telephonist with the French occupation forces. The Rif War was over, but Belgacern and the Jibalya tribe were still in revolt in the Moroccan south, and French operations were planned against them. Listening in on the party line telephones of the day, Rassinier was startled to hear company commanders at the fort of Erfoud planning to mount attacks against their own positions to impress their superiors, and as an excuse for demanding more supplies.

In a comic scene straight out of Catch-22, Rassinier and his company commander took their evidence to their regimental commander, with the result that both Rassinier and his superior, who was an old veteran of several colonial wars, were reassigned to a distant post far away where they could no longer witness the corruption. This incident, along with the brutal colonialist repression he witnessed, reinforced the pacifist views that Rassinier had held since age 16.

Upon his demobilization, he returned to his teaching post and his political activism.

Pre-war political activities

Rassinier was active with the Parti Communiste France (PCF), becoming the Secretary of the Party in the Department of Belfort, and publishing his first article, "I Show And I Protest", in the Communist newspaper The Sower in 1930. In 1932, Lucien Carre, the Communist Youth Secretary of Belfort, was arrested in connection with anti-militarist propaganda, and for agitation directed at inmates at the prison of Mecharia. A leftist coalition consisting of the Communist Party, Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (The French Section Of The Worker's Internationale, the SFIO), League of Human Rights and at least five other organizations held rallies and demonstrations protesting Carre's arrest. Rassinier was a frequent speaker at these events, but he supported the efforts of Henri Jacob to enlist the mainstream middle-class parties in support of Carre. For this and other acts "...betraying the interests of the working class", both Jacob and Rassinier were expelled from the Communist Party in 1932.

Jacob had been slated to be the Communist candidate as deputy for the Canton of Belfort. After his expulsion, he still ran for office and won, which encouraged him, Paul Rassinier, and other alienated Communists to form a separate party, The Independent Communist Federation Of The East. Formed in 1932, Rassinier was the Party Secretary, Jacob the Assistant Secretary. Rassinier was also the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker. While the newspaper attracted prominent columnists such as Boris Souvarine, neither it nor the party became popular, counting only 125 members at peak strength, and by early 1934, both The Worker and The Independent Communist Federation Of The East were no more.

The Stavisky Riots and attempted right wing coup d'etat against the Third Republic on February 6, 1934 seemed to create new opportunities for the worker's movement, and around this time Rassinier joined the SFIO. He became the Secretary of Federation SFIO for the Territory of Belfort, and revived a moribund newspaper, Germinal, to serve as the party organ. He also ran for public office several times, without success. Adopting the ideology of Marceau Pivert, he was a prolific author, writing articles for Germinal, The Territory, and other publications. In his articles, Rassinier denounced the arms race, which he calculated would bankrupt France; stridently called for revisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which he considered criminally xenophobic and oppressive; continually demanded more rights for the working class and supported a pacifist ideology that would not be restricted to France, but become Pan-European.

As war clouds gathered, Rassinier wrote several articles condemning Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, describing their foreign policy as "a policy of gangsters", with warnings that neither Italy nor Germany could be trusted to respect their promises. Nevertheless, when the Munich Accords were signed in 1938, Rassinier was one of many Frenchman who would describe himself as "an inhabitant of Munich". Echoing the words of former Prime Minister Léon Blum, his support of the Accords was "without much pride, it is true, but without any shame", since he regarded war as the greatest catastrophe, and didn't believe "...that even Mussolini after Ethiopia, even Hitler who makes blood run in the company of Spain, will risk such a madness". He received condemnation for his pacificist stance, but replied that while it's easy to be a fair-weather pacifist, a true commitment to peace is something done both in and out of season. He also expressed his disappointment that, when it came to pacifism, so few Socialists were "on this side of the barricade".

In August of 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Paul Rassinier was arrested by French counter-intelligence, who suspected that his newspaper was receiving Nazi funding. He was released a few days later thanks to the intervention of Paul Faure. After France was overrun in 1940, he avoided becoming a prisoner and continued teaching in Belfort.

Wartime Years

Many of the "Socialists of Munich", as they were sometimes called, joined in the ranks of collaboration, but not Paul Rassinier. In June of 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, resistance in France came alive and Rassinier first joined up with the The Volunteers Of Freedom, a Republican-Socialist coalition; and then with the Resistance group Liberation, organized in the north of France by Henri Ribière. Rassinier became the director of Liberation-North for the Territories of Alsace and Belfort. He advocated non-violent resistance to the German occupation, refusing even to build clandestine arms caches, both because of his pacifism and his fear that the inevitable reprisals in the face of armed resistance would fall on innocent people. Rassinier, using an expression common at the time, did not feel comfortable "to play with the skin of others".

Using his press and publishing contacts, he printed false identity papers, and helped establish an underground railroad from Belfort to the nearby Swiss town of Basil, smuggling resistors, refugees and even some Jews to safety. Along with J.L. Bruch, Pierre Cochery and Tschann, he founded an underground newspaper, The Fourth Republic, that not only advocated resistance to the occupation, but also tried to lay a post-war foundation for France, so "...that all those who will survive the war together can and must rebuild peace together, and thus save the country from a civil war". The Fourth Republic demanded that Germany was to be held accountable for the crimes of Nazism, but the contribution of the Treaty of Versailles would not be ignored, nor would Germany and Italy be held unilaterally responsible for starting the war. BBC broadcasts from both London and Algiers congratulated the founding of the paper, and even broadcast some excerpts.

The local Communist resistance groups were hostile to Rassinier's idea of non-violent struggle against the Nazi occupation, and were enraged when Rassinier published articles in The Fourth Republic condemning Stalin and Soviet Communism equally with Nazism. After several warnings, the Communists condemned him to death. It was an ironic twist of fate that saved Rassinier's life. In reaction to attacks on Germans at a local pharmacy and coffee house, both German and Vichy French police launched a series of raids that led to several arrests, one of them a person with a forged identity card. He broke under interrogation and revealed how he had obtained it, and so on October 30, 1943, Paul Rassinier was arrested in his classroom by agents of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). His wife and 2 year old son were also arrested, but released a few days later. For eleven days, Rassinier was interrogated, the beatings involved leading to a broken jaw, crushed hand and ruptured kidney.

After fifty-nine more days of imprisonment, first in Friedrich then in Compiegne, Rassinier was deported from France to Germany, enduring a three-day rail transport with little food or water that ended, on January 30, 1944, at Buchenwald concentration camp. After three weeks in quarantine, he became prisoner number 44364 and like most French prisoners, was transported to Dora, where V1 and V2 rockets were built in underground tunnels. Work conditions there were terrible. Hunger, disease, overwork, physical abuse by the S.S. and the corrupt mafia of the Communist-dominated Haftlingsfuhrung (prisoner government) resulted in a catastrophic death rate.

Several factors contributed to Rassinier's survival. Beginning in April, 1944, like all prisoners except the very few held under Nacht und Nebel conditions, he was allowed correspondence with his family, and every day his wife mailed him a food parcel. His friendship with his Haftlingsfuhrung Block Chief resulted in his food parcel being delivered directly to him without first being plundered by the prisoner government. For a time, he landed a cushy job in "Schwung" (a position somewhere between orderly and manservant) to the S.S. Oberscharführer commanding the guard dog company, and he got the opportunity to observe the S.S. at close range. Finally, partly as a result of the beating during his interrogation, he came down with nephritis, and spent no less than two hundred and fifty days of his imprisonment in the Revier (infirmary).

On April 3 and 5, 1945, during the Allied bombings of Nordhausen, he assisted in the infirmary. On April 7, he was evacuated from Buchenwald on what became a death train, endlessly traveling the German rail network from one bombed-out destination to another, with no food, no water and no shelter from the elements. After several days, as the train rounded a bend, and in spite of his terrible physical condition, he jumped off the train and, thanks to the angle, escaped the S.S. gunfire. He was rescued the next day by American soldiers.

He returned to France in June of 1945, and was awarded the Vermilion Medal of the French Recognition and the Rosette of Resistance. He was also classified as 95 percent an invalid (later to be revised to 105 percent!). He returned to his teaching post, but because of his condition, was prematurely retired in 1950.

Post-war activities

Political Activities

Upon his return to France, Rassinier resumed his position as head of the Federation S.F.I.O. in Belfort, and also as editor of The Fourth Republic. He ran for office again, and in June of 1946 was elected as the substitute for Rene Naegelen, Belfort's Deputy to the National Assembly. Naegelen did relinquish the post, and for two months Rassinier served in the National Assembly, only to be beaten in the next election by the Communist candidate. His wife had a dim view of his future in politics, and he never again ran for office. He continued with other political activities, such as working with André Breton, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono and Lanza del Vasto in agitating for the rights of conscientious objectors.

Revisionist Historian

By this time, Paul Rassinier had been a history teacher for over 23 years, and he took a keen interest in history and its connection to current events. He was distressed to hear and read stories about the concentration camps and deportations that he claimed were not true. In addition, he attended a series of trials of alleged collaborators where evidence that he believed to be false was accepted anyway, and he was appalled at the unilateral condemnation of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity that he knew were hardly unique. As he put it:

"...one day I realized that a false picture of the German camps had been created and that the problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists. The deportees — many of whom were Communists — had been largely responsible for leading international political thinking to such an erroneous conclusion. I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence."

Rassinier's first book, Crossing The Line was published in 1949 and was an immediate success. A personal account of his time in Buchenwald and Dora, it was praised for its objectivity and lack of chauvinism. In this book, he, along with the British writer Christopher Burney, were among the first to point out that many of the brutalities in the camp were committed not by the S.S., but by the privileged prisoners, mainly Communist, who took over the Haftlingsfuhrung and ran the internal affairs of the camps for their own benefit. Rassinier blames the high death rate at Buchenwald and Dora on their corruption.

Trouble started with his next book, The Lie Of Ulysses, published in 1950 and subtitled "A Glance At The Literature Of The Concentration Camp Inmates". In this book, Rassinier critically examines what he considers to be representative books on the concentration camps, and further condemns the Communists in the Haftlingsfuhrung. He denounces exaggerations, such as a poem by the Abbot Jean-Paul Renard describing thousands being gassed at Buchenwald. As Rassinier dryly noted, "I was there, and there were no gas chambers". He also condemns authors such as Eugene Kogon for making excuses for the behavior of the Communists in the camps, and for the first time, expresses his doubts on the existence of gas chambers and that the Nazi government had ever decided on a policy of extermination.

The book created a scandal, and was even attacked on the floor of the French National Assembly. More because of the strident forward by Albert Paraz than for the content of the book itself, both Rassinier and Paraz were sued for slander by various organizations. After a see-saw round of trials and appeals, both Rassinier and Paraz were acquitted of any wrongdoing, and an expanded edition of The Lie Of Ulysses was published in 1955. However, the uproar over the book led to complaints from members of the S.F.I.O, and in 1951, Rassinier was expelled from the Socialist Party. He began writing and becoming an advocate for anarchist organizations.

He wrote articles for the newspapers Defense of Man and The Way Of Peace. In 1953, he published The Speech Of The Last Chance - An Introductory Essay To The Doctrines Of Peace, a book describing the ideology of pacifism and the necessity for the redistribution of wealth along socialist lines. Beginning in 1963, Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy was translated and performed in several languages. Rassinier was outraged by Hochhuth's thesis that Pope Pius XII stood silently by while the Jews of Europe were exterminated. In 1965, he published Operation Vicar, a defense of Pope Pius that called into question the motives of the Protestant critics of the Pope. Rassinier pointed out that Catholic opposition to Hitler compared favorably with Protestant support of him, and drew attention to Pope Pius' strident pre-war condemnations of Nazism and unceasing efforts for peace, which drew Rassinier much praise from the Vatican.

In 1962, Rassinier, after following the trial in Jerusalem, published The True Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors, a condemnation of the hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Trials and Adolf Eichmann trials. Rassinier pointed out that Germany had not invented concentration camps, in fact, every industrial nation had used them at one time or another. He questioned the legitimacy of Eichmann being tried in Israel, a nation that did not exist until 1948 and the implications of trying somebody under ex post facto laws. He denounced the procedures of evidence and discovery at both trials, and also at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1962, from which he had been banned by the new West German government.

But it was in 1964, with the publication of The Drama Of The European Jews, that Rassinier concluded that there was never a policy by Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews of Europe, nor were there any gas chambers in concentration camps. He unequivocally states that the crime was "not that six million of them were exterminated, as they claim, but only in the fact that they claimed it". Rassinier had followed the Nuremberg trials, and had critically reviewed testimonies and documents. In addition, whenever he heard of somebody who claimed to be an eyewitness to gassings in concentration camps, he tried to meet with the person and question them. In every case, under his questioning, the witness recanted and was forced to admit that he had not actually seen gassings, but had only heard of them. He again explored the motivations for the Communists to lie about the camps, particularly to save their own skins, noting that "By taking by storm the bar of the witnesses and with extreme shouting, they avoided the dock", and came to the conclusion that the Communists were using the issue of Germany's "crimes against humanity" as a means of disorganizing and demoralizing Europe in preparation for a Communist takeover.

He also questioned the technical feasibility of methods of extermination that were claimed to have been used. He examined testimonies from several witnesses, including Kurt Gerstein and Myklos Nyiszli, and found them to be outrageously exaggerated. He dismissed the confessions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess as being forced out of him with "..riding crop and whiskey". He also visited the concentration camps at Dachau and Mauthausen, and noted that in both places, he got contradictory stories on how exactly the gas chambers were supposed to have worked.

It is also here that Rassinier first claimed that Zionist and Jewish organizations were conspiring to use Nazi crimes as a pretext to extort money out of Europe to fund themselves and the State Of Israel, almost four decades before Norman Finkelstein came to the same conclusion in his book, The Holocaust Industry.

The book also contains a long statistical study, countering the studies of Leon Poliakov and Raul Hilberg. Rassinier claimed that they counted Jewish population decline in Europe while ignoring Jewish population increases in other countries during the same period. Rassinier conclude that Jewish deaths during World War II numbered from 1-1.5 million, and that only a fraction of those were actually killed by the Nazis.

Rassinier's writings, and his increasing association with right-wing nationalist organizations and individuals such as Maurice Bardèche in France and Germany led to him being denounced as an anti-semite, and he unsuccessfully sued a writer who labeled him a Neo-Nazi. His son Jean-Paul, a medical student, was briefly refused entry into Israel, and he was banned from Germany after holding a series of lectures sponsored by Karl-Heinz Priester, a former propagandist for Joseph Goebbels (and, possibly a CIA agent). He was also forced to terminate many of his anarchist contacts after it was revealed that he had written several articles in the right-wing magazine Riverol under the nom de plume Jean-Paul Bermont. Nevertheless, he continuing with his pacifist and historical writings, although his increasingly bad health limited his ability.

The father of Holocaust Revisionism

In his lifetime, Rassinier never heard of the phrase "The Holocaust", and would never have defined himself as a "revisionist" historian. During the early 1960's, Rassinier frequently corresponded with the American revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes, who arranged for some of his articles to be published in English. Barnes translated four of Rassinier's books, Crossing The Line, The Lie Of Ulysses, The Real Eichmann Trial Or The Incorrigible Victors and The Drama Of The European Jews, and in 1977 they were collectively published by Noontide Press under the title Debunking The Genocide Myth. While some of Rassinier's books had been reviewed before in the West, and many of his anarchist and pacifist writings had been quoted before by various groups in America and Canada, for most of the English speaking world this was their first introduction to Rassinier's writings.

Besides Barnes, whose critical writings of the origins of the First World War were deeply admired by Rassinier, another of his major influences was Jean Norton Cru and his titanic 1929 study: Witnesses: Tests, Analysis and Criticism of the Memories of Combatants Published in French from 1915 to 1928. Cru's book gave Rassinier the tools he needed to evaluate witness testimony.

Aside from his criticism of the Häftlingsführung, which was echoed by others, Rassinier's application of historiographical techniques to what would later be called The Holocaust is his unique contribution, which truly does make him the Pioneer of Holocaust Revisionism.

Almost all current revisionist work now follows the techniques devised by Paul Rassinier: Questioning the testimonies of victims, checking if they correspond to timelines and physical possibilities and, where necessary, refuting them; a deep skepticism towards the confessions of former Nazis, not one of which was ever made from freedom; evaluation and criticizing sources and where necessary disputing the authenticity and credibility of documents and photographs; and finally, using the laws of nature for the outlines of a physical, chemical and technical refutation of the crematoriums, gas chambers, and gas vans.

Final years

Paul Rassinier's lifelong dream was to write the history of Florence during the age of Machiavelli, but he did not live to realize it. His kidneys had been badly damaged from his torture at the hands of the SD and from his fifteen months in Buchenwald and Dora, and he never recovered. He was an invalid for the last twenty-two years of his life, with hypertension so bad that it was dangerous for him to stand up for very long. He died on July 28, 1967, in Asnieres while working on yet more books, The History Of The State Of Israel and A Third World War For Oil.

Sources: Candasse, by Paul Rassinier; Paul Rassinier: Socialist, Pacifist and Revisionist by Jean Plantin; Evolution Of An Anti-Semite by Nadine Fresco, and various articles written by Rassinier in various publications.

Bibliography

1949: Crossing The Line: The Human Truth, 1950: The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance At The Literature Of Concentration Camp Inmates, 1953: The Speech Of the Last Chance: An Introductory Essay To The Doctrines of Peace, 1955: Candasse or the Eighth Capital Sin, A History Over Time (Rassinier's autobiography), 1955: Parliament In The Hands Of The Banks, 1961: Ulysses Betrayed By His Own, 1961: The Equivocal Revolutionary, 1962: The True Eichmann Trial Or The Incorrigible Victors, 1964: The Drama of the European Jews, 1965: Operation Vicar. The Role of Pius XII Before History, 1967: Those Responsible For The Second World War

External links

• Debunking The Genocide Myth
• A Paper Eichmann - Anatomy Of A Lie

• Holocaust denial
• French historians
• 1906 births
• 1967 deaths