Parallax

Auschwitz was a world unlike any other because it was created and governed according to the principles of absolute evil. Its only function was death. The first question, then, is whether we see Auschwitz as the epitome of life itself, an incarnation of the darkest principles of Machiavelli and Hobbes, or whether we see it as a mirror image of the true life, a Satanic perversion of some divine plan that we have not yet discovered. From that central enigma, flow all the lesser contradictions that still bedevil anyone who seeks to understand the mystery of Auschwitz. Did it represent the ultimate evil of the German nation, and was that the evil of German rationality or of German irrationality? Or did it represent, conversely, the apotheosis of Jewish suffering? And was that suffering simply the result of centuries of anti-Semitism, or was it part of the fulfillment of the prophecy that the tormented Jews would someday return to Palestine, return, as Ezekiel had written, to “the land that is restored from the ravages of the sword, where people are gathered out of many nations upon the mountains of Israel”?

It can be argued that Auschwitz proves there is no God, neither for the Jews nor for the Catholics, neither for atheists nor for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who all went equally helpless to their death. “If all this was possible,” wrote one Hungarian survivor, Eugene Heimler, “if men could be herded like beasts toward annihilation, then all that I had believed in before must have been a lie. There was not, there could not be, a God, for he could not condone such godlessness.” But such declarations have been made at every moment of extreme crisis by those who see God only in success and happiness. Since all efforts to prove or explain God’s purpose demonstrate only the futile diligence of worker ants attempting to prove the existence of Mozart, Auschwitz can just as well prove a merciful God, an indifferent God, or, perhaps best, an unknowable God.

From The Kingdom of Auschwitz by Otto Friedrich

Reviews

The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry

Arthur R. Butz

Bergen-Belsen: country club or death factory? Holocaust as Zionist fraud. Chapters include “Camps,” “Washington and New York,” “Auschwitz,” “The Final Solution,” “The Role of the Vatican,” “Trials, Jews and Nazis,” and “The Gerstein Statement.”

Publisher: Institute for Historical Review
Paperback: 397 pages
Illustrated

The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses

Paul Rassinier

“‘You have to reckon with the complex of Ulysses’s lie… Everyone hopes and wants to come out of this business with the halo of a saint, a hero or a martyr and each one embroiders his own Odyssey without realizing that the reality is quite enough in itself.‘ These words, spoken to Frenchman Rassinier by a fellow inmate at Buchenwald, became emblematic of his own courageous odyssey. Although his health was broken in Hitler’s concentration camps, this French socialist, pacifist and highly decorated member of the Resistance would not bear false witness against his captors by exaggerating their crimes. Neither could Rassinier keep silent about the lies of fellow survivors who fabricated gas chambers and other atrocity stories in the fevered postwar atmosphere… His training as a historian and his experience in the camps enabled Rassinier to formulate a devastating critique of concentration-camp ‘eyewitnesses’ and ‘Holocaust’ historians alike. The half-dozen books which Rassinier completed before his untimely death in 1967 have earned him the title of ‘father of Holocaust Revisionism.’”

Publisher: Institute for Historical Review
Paperback: 450 pages

I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror

Pierre Seel

In 1941, a young gay boy in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, Alsace, only 17, is summoned by the Gestapo, tortured at Gestapo headquarters, and sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbruch work camp. A haircut in the shape of a swastika, bouts of dysentry, beatings, starvation. “Monstrous” medical treatments were part of his internment: “There were half a dozen of us, bare-chested and lined up against the wall. I have very clear memories of white walls, white shirts and the laughter of the orderlies. The orderlies enjoyed hurling their syringes at us like darts at a fair. During one injection session, my unfortunate neighbor blacked out and collapsed: the needle had struck his heart. We never saw him again.” The worst was witnessing the slaughter of his young lover, who was stripped naked in front of hundreds, then had a bucket placed over his head, then was torn apart screaming by guard dogs. The bucket was used to amplify his screams. Written with “poignant dignity and simplicity.” GR

Publisher: Basic
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation

Isaiah Trunk

Judenrat is a massive undertaking which purports to raise and answer a number of uncomfortable questions concerning the role of Jews who “collaborated” with the Nazis during World War II, although the author is careful to assign ultimate guilt to the Nazis. The description of the Ghetto Police, who were comprised of Jews, is particularly harrowing: “Horrible stories are told about the Jewish Policemen at the Umschlagplatz. For them the victims were not human beings but heads for which money could be extorted. Ransom could be paid in cash, diamonds, gold, etc. The price of a head ranged from 1,000 to 2,000 zlotys at the beginning, until it grew to 10,000 zlotys per head… The policemen knew no mercy, even in regard to the most respected man. If he could not pay, or if there were no relatives ready to pay, he was shipped off. There were known cases when policemen demanded payment in kind—the flesh of women in addition to cash. The people apprehended… particularly women, put up resistance. All these factors created an unbearable situation for the policemen. They went berserk, committing unspeakable acts.” JB

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 700 pages
Illustrated

The Killing Fields

Edited by Chris Riley and Douglas Niven

A most disturbing and depressing photographic essay about the Khmer Rouge, who were in power under Pol Pot in Cambodia for over three years. After seizing power in ‘75 they started “cleaning house” and taking prisoners. Photographs of each prisoner before interrogation, torture and ultimately the execution of some 14,000 people. Believing, it seems, that they were destroying traitors who were infecting the Communist Party. The photos and documentation were apparently meant to be used by officials as an example of their “progress” against the enemies of the revolution.Only seven of the people pictured survived. One survivor named Nath tells his grim story of torture and starvation in a Cambodian prison. S-21 is the innteragation facility at Tuol Sleng Prison, the Cambodian equivalent of Auschwitz. One day Nath was “appointed” to cut rattan in the forest. He said goodbye to his family and not knowing his fate, left and was taken to Tuol Sleng. But he was an honest man and didn’t know why he was arrested. At the prison, torture and forced confessions were the order of the day, although the people confessing were usually innocent of the crime they confessed to, Pol Pot and Duch (the chief of the prison) being the guilty ones with paranoid delusions. Vietnamese troops finally overthrow their regime. Nath escaped with his life and managed to find his wife but learned his children had died of disease and starvation. Later that same year the Museum of Genocide was created on the grounds of the former prison were these photos were taken, bleak reminders of that inhumane cruelty. One look and one can sense the impending doom; one look and one is inside S-21. DW

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 124 pages
Illustrated

Lethal Laws: “Gun Control” Is the Key to Genocide

Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman and Anne M. Rice

Lethal Laws takes as its premise the idea that guns have been outlawed so that Jews could be murdered more than any other nationality. Thus, they argue, guns should be legal everywhere. The authors took great pains to reproduce documentation regarding the regulation of firearm sales and ownership in many foreign countries. JB

Publisher: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
Paperback: 350 pages
Illustrated

The Leuchter Report: The First Forensic Examination of Auschwitz

Fred A. Leuchter

“Leuchter, 45, is an engineer living in Boston, Massachusetts, who specializes in the design and fabrication of execution hardware used in prisons throughout the United States. One of his major projects was the design of a new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City.”—Robert Faurisson
“The purpose of this report and the investigation upon which it is based is to determine whether the alleged execution gas chambers and crematory facilities at three sites in Poland—namely: Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek—could have operated in the manner ascribed them in Holocaust literature.”—Fred Leuchter

Publisher: Smith
Paperback: 66 pages
Illustrated

Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

Klaus Theweleit

“The first volume deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior—visions reflecting hatred and fear, culminating in a series of liquid metaphors—red tide, lava, mud—that threaten to engulf the male ego.”

Publisher: University of Minnesota
Paperback: 517 pages
Illustrated

Male Fantasies, Volume 2: Male Bodies—Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

Klaus Theweleit

“In Volume 2, Theweleit shifts his attention to the male self-image. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid and the ‘feminine’ emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by the mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into ‘a man of steel.’ As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.”

Publisher: University of Minnesota
Paperback: 480 pages
Illustrated

Mass Murderers in White Coats

Lenny Lapon

“Documents the mass murder of ‘mental patients’ by psychiatry in Nazi Germany and in the United States. Shows how the killing of thousands of psychiatric inmates and other ‘useless eaters’ in Hitler’s Third Reich set the stage in a practical and ideological way for the later extermination of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. Presents lengthy excerpts from conversations the author had with 11 psychiatrists who are members of the American Psychiatric Association and who are also connected in various ways to Nazi Germany.”

Publisher: Psychiatric Genocide Research Institute
Paperback: 291 pages