Denying Holocaust Forgeries, Hoaxes, and Fabrications

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“While in the United States, protected as it is by the 1st Amendment, the Holocaust has become a secular religion, with state support in the form of a national museum. Accusations of ill will or bad faith are often made against anyone with reservations about the elevation of this project into something combining a cult, an entertainment resource and an industry, each claiming to represent the unvoiced dead”—Christopher Hitchens[1]

    …by  Jonas E. Alexis

Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Jewish writer and historian D. D. Gunttenplan declares that Lipstadt came to teach at Emory not because of her serious scholarship, but because of the Jewish influence.[2]

One can say that Lipstadt’s scholarly endeavor began when she started to assign the book Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948 to her students.

Written by Benjamin Wilkomirski, the book came out in 1995 and received immediate success. The book was also translated into nine languages.[3]

Journalist Melissa Katsoulis writes that sales

“across Europe and the English-speaking world were impressive. It won the prestigious Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France, the Jewish Quarterly’s prize in London and also its American equivalent, the National Jewish Books Award. Feted by critics, historians and book-buyers alike, Wilkomirski found himself finding off interview requests from television, newspaper and magazine editors, and for the next three years rose to become one of the most sought-after and well-loved survivors of Hitler’s astrocities. He was even sent on a lecture tour of America by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.”[4]

Jewish professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard, who also has been known for summoning historical fiction and fabrication,[5]also supported the book,[6] as well as major newspapers such as Publishers Weekly and the Jewish Quarterly.[7]

The sad part of the story is that the whole story turned out to be a complete hoax, a fabrication by a non-Jew. As Norman Finkelstein puts it, “Half-fruitcake, half-mountebank, Wilkomirski, it turns out, spent the entire war in Switzerland. He is not even a Jew.”[8]

After three years, Wildomirski was discovered to be a liar by a real Jew, Daniel Ganzfried, “himself the child of a survivor…Writing for the news magazine Weltwoche, he presented his dossier of research into the man he had been secretly studying for over a year: a close reading of Fragments, he argued, showed that the author had not actually been in the camps at all—his accounts of the workding, layouts and customs of those places simply did not chime with the testimonies of those whose presence in them could easily be verified (which Wilkomirski’s could not).”[9]

Though Wilkomirski defended the book’s accuracy, the fraud was obvious to Ganzfried. To set the record straight, his literary agent Eva Koralnik hired Stefan Machler, a historian, to “separate fact from fiction…Six months later, in 1999, Marchler’s report was complete.”[10]

When Fragments was discovered to be a hoax, Wilkomirski faded into obscurity. “I feel pity for him because I know him personally,” declares Heide Grasnick, one of his editors, “He’s not a happy person.”[11]

 But the fraud and complete fabrication do not matter to publishers who want to cash in on the hoax: “Arthur Samuelson (publisher): ‘[It] is a pretty cool book…It’s only a fraud if you call it non-fiction. I would then reissue it, in the fiction category. Maybe it’s not true—then he’s a better writer!”[12]

A better writer? What about the thousands of people who spent money to buy a real memoir? Are they just losers? Doesn’t Samuelson owe them an apology?

As the late Jewish historian Raul Hilberg himself wrote, “How did this book pass as a memoir in several publishing houses? How could it have brought Mr. Wilkomirski invitations to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as recognized universities? How come we have no decent quality control when it comes to evaluating Holocaust material for publication?”[13] Hilberg continues to say that the book “hovers between the highly unlikely and the utterly impossible.”[14]

Despite the revelation of Fragments as a hoax, Deborah Lipstadt stated that the book was still “powerful as a novel.”

The problem with this vacuous assertion is that Wilkomirski did not write a novel and never intended his book to be read as such! Wilkomirski went around telling the entire world that the story was true. Lipstadt was supposed to seize that moment and issue an apology, which would have placed her in a historical context. But she once again had to succumb to ideology and in the process knock herself out of any meaningful historical discussion.

Moreover, on behalf of her website hdot.org, Lipstadt claims that she received $120,000 from the Claims Conference, the Jewish organization we have exposed in the article entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Holocaust Industry.”[15]

This brings to light the driving ideology behind those who use the Holocaust as a weapon to subvert history.

 As the Israeli writer Boas Evron once declared, “The memory of the Nazi extermination” became “as a powerful tool in the hands of the Israeli leadership and Jews abroad.”[16]

This tool is powerful because the Jewish establishment tells us who can and cannot wear the badge of the Holocaust.

There are other powerful novels that turned out to be complete forgeries. Norman Finkelstein writes,

“The first major Holocaust hoax was The Painted Bird, by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski. The book was ‘written in English,’ Kosinski explained, so that ‘I could write passionately, free from the emotional connotation one’s negative language always contains.’ In fact, whatever parts he actually wrote—an unresolved question—were written in Polish. The book was purported to be Kosinski’s autobiographical account of his wanderings as a solitary child through rural Poland during World War II…The book’s motif is the sadistic sexual torture perpetrated by the Polish peasantry….

“In fact, Kosinski conjured up almost all the pathological episodes he narrates. The book depicts Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic. ‘Beat the Jews,’ they jeer. ‘Beat the bastards.’ In fact, Polish harbored the Kosinski family even though they were fully aware of their Jewishness and the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.”

In the New York Times Book Review, Elie Wiesel acclaimed The Painted Bird as ‘one of the best’ indictments of the Nazi era, ‘written with a deep sincerity and sensitivity.’ Cynthia Ozick later gushed that she ‘immediately’ recognized Kosinski’s authenticity as ‘a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust.’ Long after Kosinski was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his ‘remarkable body of work.’”[17]

Here is more bad news: “The Painted Bird became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading for high school and college classes.”[18]

Wiesel also falls under the category of Holocaust fabrication. He says he is a Nazi survivor and has made claims that he saw Jewish babies “thrown into flames…with my own eyes.”[19] Not only that, Wiesel claims that he read Emmanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish.[20]

There is more: Wiesel recalled that he once got hit by a taxi in Times Square and “I flew an entire block. I was hit at 45^th Street and Broadway, and the ambulance picked me up at 44^th.” Just in case you think that Wiesel was simply dreaming about being a superhero, he laid all doubts to rest when he went on to say, “The truth I present is unvarnished. I cannot do otherwise.”[21]

Pierre Vidal Naquet, a French-Jewish historian whose book Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of Holocaust we shall examine in the future, declared that “You just have to read parts of Night to know that certain of his descriptions are not exact and that he is essentially a Shoah merchant. . . who has done harm, enormous harm, to historical truth.”[22]

The late Christopher Hitchens, who found out late in life that he was Jewish, said, “Is there any more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions.”[23]  Wiesel used to work for the newspaper Zion in Kampf, a propaganda machine for a terrorist group named the Irgun.[24]

Wiesel, like Simon Wiesenthal, turned out to be a pathological liar who cooked up his story as he went along.[25] Wiesel, like Wiesenthal and in many cases Deborah Lipstadt and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, has the tendency to force his subjective fantasy into historical and objective reality as opposed to letting historical reality undergird his weltanschauung.

Moreover, virtually everyone has to be subservient to this weltanschauung. How else could Wiesel have gotten a Nobel Peace Prize? How else could he have been called a “messenger to mankind” by the Norwegian Nobel Committee?[26]

And how else could he have gotten honorary degrees from major institutions such as Lehigh University, DePaul University, Seton Hall University, Michigan State University, University of Vermont, Bucknell University, Washington University, University of British Columbia, University of Warsaw, etc?[27]

Wiesel did not like the publication of Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry. The book probably would have slipped into obscurity had it not been endorsed by Raul Hilberg. Wiesel and the U.S. Holocaust Museum, says Finkelstein, “relentlessly pleaded with [Hilberg] to retract his endorsement of my book. He refused.”

After David O’Connell exposed Wiesel for the lies and contradictions that his own testimony entailed, thought police Deborah Lipstadt tried to get O’Connell fired from Georgia State University, where he teaches French. The university took almost a year to straighten the facts out, and found out that the errors were not O’Connell’s but Wiesel’s.

Although Lipstadt was upset that O’Connell did not get fired, she found out to her surprise that, as E. Michael Jones put it, “academic life still had a remnant of integrity.”[28] But it would have been very interesting if the university fired O’Connell. E. Michael Jones wrote:

 “There is probably another reason why the attempt to oust Professor O’Connell failed. The administration at GSU knew if they fired O’Connell on trumped up charges of fraud, that he would then sue them, and the lawsuit would lead to a discovery process that would have been disastrous for both the university and the system of thought control run by the powerful Jews who were orchestrating the campaign, demanding vengeance.

“In a way, it’s a shame this case didn’t go to trial. It would have been interesting to learn how Professor Lipstadt heard about Professor O’Connell’s article in the first place, and it would have provided a nice counterpoint to the Lipstadt-Irving libel trial in London. It would also have exposed the inner workings of Jewish thought police like Deborah Lipstadt and the role she plays as an enforcer of the Jewish hegemony over academe today…Professor O’Connell has challenged Professor Lipstadt to a debate, but…Professor Lipstadt doesn’t debate Holocaust deniers.”[29]

 Another individual who fooled the public, particularly Oprah Winfrey, about his experience during the Holocaust was Herman Rosenblat. Rosenblat told the entire world that

“he met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year. Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance ‘the single greatest love story’ she had encountered in her 22 years on the show.”[30]

This “single greatest love story” also turned out to be one of the greatest hoaxes ever concocted in Holocaust history. Later, Rosenblat had to issue a letter of apology declaring, “To all who supported and believed in me and this story.

I am sorry for all I have caused to you and every one else in the world. Why did I do that and write the story with girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world.”[31]

The sad part is that Rosenblat’s tory had previously and approvingly appeared in books such as Chanukah by Shimon Apisdorf way back in 1997.[32] Rosenblat’s story got another boost by two psychologists Greg Smalley and Shawn Stoever back in 2009.[33] Rosenblat had also “won a contest sponsored by the New York Post for ‘the best love story sent in by a reader.’”[34] Marjorie Gaber of Harvard writes:

 “When the Rosenblats returned to The Oprah Winfrey Show eleven years later, Winfrey lauded their romance as ‘the single greatest love story, in twenty-two years in doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air.’ The story was picked up in the ‘couples’ volume Chicken Soup for the Soul…”[35]

 Fabrications and forgeries like these happen precisely because in certain arenas individuals are condemned if they question the veracity of popular “historical” events.

Yet this abuse of the truth should compel honest historians to challenge the damage that has been done in the name of the Holocaust. As Finkelstein puts it, when falsehood is passed off as historical evidence, “restoring the integrity of the historical record and the sanctity of the Jewish people’s martyrdom”[36]  gets overlooked.

We certainly want everyone to know what the historical records allow and do not allow. The physical persecution of all people, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Russians, etc., must never be overlooked.What everyone should resent is the elevation of one group almost to the exclusion of everyone else.

Current events have taught us that the people who are being physically persecuted are the precious Muslims and Christians in the Middle East by the Zionist ideology. We have seen at least 500 people die by violence in Iraq alone.[37] Who cares about those people, since they are not Jews? Who cares about their lives and children?

This Zionist dream is being spread virtually all over the West. How else would John McCain ally with terrorist groups such as the Syrian rebels?

Here’s a man who knows very well that the rebels are terrorist groups, but he still goes out of his way to say “hi” to them in Syria! “Every single day, more and more extremists flow in…” McCain declares in a recent interview, “But they still do not make up a sizeable portion.”[38] 7,000 terrorists cannot be considered as a great portion? The only way that McCain can come up with nonsense like this is because he is trapped in Zionist matrix.He has to think “zionistically.” As some have already pointed out, should we send McCain to Guantanamo for associating with terrorists?

 An Issue of Great Importance

 In the next few articles, we will be discussing history as it relates to Nazi Germany. To this end, the reader is asked to put on his or her thinking cap in order to examine the issues that will be raised and thoroughly discussed.

Emotion, by the way, is not part of our thinking cap. While emotion can be a good virtue, if used properly, when it comes to truth, facts, and objective reality, emotion should take a back seat.

Professor Walter E. Williams once said that “There are some ideas and feelings that sound plausible but given just a wee bit of thought can be shown to border on lunacy.” In a similar vein, Thomas Sowell declared, “Fallacies are not just crazy ideas. Usually they are notions that sound very plausible, which is what enables them to be used by politicians, intellectuals, the media, and all sorts of crusading movements, to advance their causes or their careers.”[39]

I disagree with both gentlemen on many issues, and this will be pointed hopefully in the fall. But they are both correct here.

We will give fallacies about the history of Nazi Germany a wee bit of thought and will discover that those fallacies, whether held ignorantly or willfully, border on flimsiness. Therefore, I ask the reader to drop emotional feeling and be ready to look at the facts through the lens of logic, reason, and historical and intellectual honesty.

But before we move on to this extremely important topic, we need lay out what history is about and what serious historians ought to be doing. Our story will begin with the next article entitled, “What is history?” In the process, we will meet one of the most controversial historians of our time and discover that much of what he has said so far has been right in line with historical thought.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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