Holocaust Denial and Holocaust PTSD
By Rachel Alebev
“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” Golda Meir
The following informed opinion essay will explore the origins of the holocaust denial propaganda movement that seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime’s systematic mass murder of six million Jews in Europe during World War II.
The roots of holocaust denial can be found in the bureaucratic language of the Nazi policy: “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war crimes trials – displaying their ignorance as coldly as they herded the men, women, and children into cattle cars to die in the “extermination camps.”
In 1979 an organized propaganda movement, holocaust “revisionism” began when Willis Carto, founder of Liberty Lobby, the largest anti-Jewish anti-Semitic propaganda organization in the United States, incorporated the Institute for Historical Review.
The Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is a pseudo-academic enterprise and website where professors with no credentials in history expound historical revisionism.
Historical Revisionism, (pioneered by Harry Elmer Barnes, Taylor Charles Tansill, Paul Rassinier and William H. Chamberlin) strives, in the words of Harry Elmer Barnes, to “bring history into accord with the key facts. In this case it would be IHR’s version of the facts of Nazism, the genocide of Jews and other peoples during World War II.” [1]
Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, Roger Garaudy, Robert Faurisson, and David Irving are the resident deniers and contributors to IHR.
Who publishes this defaming nonsense? Mark Weber is the executive editor, publisher and site architect of www.ihr.org. [2]
IHR hides behind a claim that they are “fighting for freedom and truth” and exist “to combat historical deceit and bigotry,” but the really inconvenient truth is that: IHR is nothing more than an anti-Semitic academic enterprise disseminating disinformation.
Mark Weber wants to end, what he incorrectly refers to as “the reign of Jewish-Zionist power,” in the United States and around the world. [3]
Weber, in a public forum, expressed his disappointment that Germany and the Axis powers didn’t win World War II. [4]
“An axis-dominated Europe, I suggested, would have been prosperous, socially progressive, politically stable and technologically advanced, with an extensive, continent-wide transportation and communications network, conscientious environmental policies, and a comprehensive healthcare system. At the same time, the continent would have remained ethnically and culturally European. Large scale immigration of non-Europeans would have been unthinkable.” [From the IHR meeting on July 31, 2010]
What? IHR wants an axis-dominated Europe?
IHR “Scholars” condemn Israel’s foreign relations policy and U.S. support for Israel because 1) they don’t believe the postwar “confession” of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess, and the testimonies of 20,000 Jewish survivors and 2) they argue there were no concentration camps in the German territory of the pre-1938 German Reich proper [5]
Weber, Butz, Garaudy, Faurisson and Irving question that six million Jews were cruelly uprooted from their homes, forced into overcrowded ghettos and deported to concentration camps.
“The number of Jews who perished in horrendous circumstances under Nazi rule, according to IHR and a leading newspaper of neutral Switzerland, the daily Baseler Nachrichten is no more than 1.5 million European Jews.”
Wait,,,Israel’s foreign relation policy and U.S. support for Israel isn’t justified because only 1,500,000 (1.5) million Jews were cruelly uprooted from their homes, forced into overcrowded ghettos and deported to concentration camps.
IHR is pathetically misinformed and keeps us dangerously close to World War III with their “global struggle for truth, freedom and peace.”
Where were the Jews supposed to go after the war?
Following World War II the Jews, newly liberated from the Nazi concentration camps run by the Germans, find themselves in “displaced persons camps” run by the British.
[From Displaced Jews in Europe – Migration Following World War II in Europe – 1945-1951]
As the Allies were taking Europe back from Germany in 1944-1945, the Allied armies “liberated” the Nazi concentration camps. These camps, which housed from a few dozen to thousands of survivors, were complete surprises for most of the liberating armies. The armies were overwhelmed by the misery, by the victims who were so thin and near-death. A dramatic example of what the soldiers found upon liberation of the camps occurred at Dachau where a train load of 50 boxcars of prisoners sat on the railroad [tracks] for days, as the Germans were escaping. There were about 100 people in each boxcar and of the 5,000 prisoners, about 3,000 were already dead upon the arrival of the army.
“Thousands of “survivors” died in the days and weeks following liberation, the military buried the dead in individual and mass graves. Generally, the Allied armies rounded up concentration camp victims and forced them to remain in the confines of the camp, under armed guard.” [End of excerpt from Displaced Jews in Europe]
Although the Jewish refugees had no place to go after the war, IHR maintains the survivors should not have been allowed to immigrate to Palestine because the Nazis didn’t kill enough of them.
Mark is serious and is saying:
- It was acceptable to systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers and make soap and fertilizer from Jewish corpses as long as the number was 1,500,000 (1.5) instead of six million.
- We should remove all evidence of the horrific photos of dead and dying inmates found in concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Nordhausen because only 1.5 died instead of six million.
- If “the breakdown of the German transportation system made it impossible to supply adequate food and medicine to the camps” Israel would be justified if six million Jews starved to death instead of 1.5 million.
- The Jews are not entitled to any special treatment because Stalin and Mao killed more than 1.5 million.
- The laws against “Holocaust denial” should be repealed, the “Holocaust remembrance,” campaigns should be stopped and the Holocaust Museums should be closed because only 1.5 died instead of six million.
The Holocaust resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so intense that when the Jews were asked in a survey to indicate their first and second choice of migration, both answers were Palestine. In one survey the victims were told to pick a different second answer. A significant proportion of them wrote “crematoria.”
Fortunately IHR is running out of money.
“By donating to IHR, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are raising public awareness about the most important issue threatening world peace and thereby helping to build a future that is more sane, socially healthy, and just.” Mark Weber
Thank God IHR doesn’t have enough money because they are one of the major threats to world peace. IHR and David Irving, the tireless re-writer of Nazi history, are keeping the Israeli/Palestinian conflict alive until, “God forbid,” the conflict in the Middle East turns into World War III.
“Revisionist historians” have an irrational, incessant need to be right in their obsessive mission to get history in line with IHR facts.
Often overlooked is the fact that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from the Holocaust wasn’t limited to the Jews who were alive at the end of World War II. Thanks to endless replays of documentaries showing emaciated bodies piled high, and being bulldozed into mass graves, everyone, everywhere, anytime since World War II who considers themselves Jewish now has a terminal case of vicarious or secondary traumatic stress disorder (STSD, VTSD).
The four most common characteristics of PTSD, STSD, VTSD are: visualization- flashbacks, the ability to recall, see in the mind’s eye a terrible event or trauma: reenactment- the trauma unconsciously acted out to restore power and control: fear of intimacy, pain, loss of control, victimization associated with relationships: and a sense of hopelessness.
PTSD is a normal response by normal people to the trauma and persecution suffered by the Jewish people during World War II.
Knowing a people as cultured and as educated as the Germans could produce Nazi Germany and living with a threat of annihilation from Iran, has taught the Jewish people that they can never completely trust a non-Jewish nation.
The image of the dark numbers tattooed on the white arms of the Jews had a chilling effect that will never fade away. Jewish people living in the 21st century are “children” of the Holocaust and have difficulty coping with guilt, fear, rage, and feelings of mistrust; they no longer know to act or what to expect in order to survive.
The cruel deaths of millions of Jews was so extraordinary and severe that just about everyone [except IHR] can understand why Israel’s foreign policy exhibits the classic symptoms of PTSD: impaired self esteem, hyperactivity, poor reality testing, and aggressive behavior.
Does the following sound familiar?
Who was responsible for the Jewish Genocide?
The decision to carry out genocide against the Jewish people was made by the political party in power in the Weimar Republic of Germany. This was the National Socialists Party, popularly known as the Nazis. Three figures from the Nazi party controlled the government in 1933: Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess. This Nazi trio relied on other members of the National Socialists Party appointed to high government posts and assigned to military commands to carry out the Jewish Genocide.
In addition to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior, the Nazis also relied on a newly-created secret outfit which they manned with convicts and irregular troops, called The Gestapo (secret state police) under Heinrich Himmler.
Its primary function was the carrying out of the mass slaughter of the deported Jews. In charge of the Special Organization was Josef Mengele, a medical doctor.
Moreover, ideologists such as Joseph Goebbels propagandized through the media on behalf of the National Socialists Party by promoting a pan-German “New Order” in Europe: the creation of a new empire stretching from Greece into the European subcontinent including Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland and Sweden (Greater Germany) whose population would be exclusively Aryan.
These concepts justified and popularized the secret Schutzstaffel (SS) plans to liquidate the Jews of the German Empire. The Nazi SS conspirators, other leading figures of the wartime German government, members of the National Socialists and the Gestapo Central Committee, as well as many provincial administrators responsible for atrocities against the Jews were indicted for their crimes at the end of the war. The main culprits evaded justice by fleeing the country. Even so, they were tried in absentia and found guilty of capital crimes.
The massacres, expulsions, and further mistreatment of the Jews between 1941 and 1944 were carried out by the German Nationalists – the Nazis who represented a new political movement and shared a common ideology of ethnic exclusivity.
How many people died in the Jewish Genocide?
It is estimated that 1,500,000 million Jews perished between 1937 and 1945. There were an estimated 2 million Jews living in the Weimar Republic of Germany on the eve of W.W.II. Well over 1 million were deported in 1933. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps.
At first, many Jews living along the periphery of the German Empire escaped the fate of their countrymen in the neighboring European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland).
In 1940, however, the Nazi regime took the war into the geopolitical border between Europe and Asia. German forces advancing through Eastern Poland and Russia engaged in systematic massacres here as well.
The expulsions and massacres carried out by the Nationalist Socialists between 1941 and 1943 added tens of thousands of more victims.
[End of “Does the following sound familiar?”]
Stop? You probably thought you were reading about the horrors of Nazi Germany during World War II.
If so, I achieved my goal of demonstrating that the Nazi genocide was not unique.
What you just read was the decision by the Committee of Union and Progress Central Committee, and the Special Organization during the Ottoman Empire, to deliberately destroy the Armenian population (genocide). Endnote [6] includes the original text with the substitutions. Thirty years went by before the Armenian massacre was recognized by the United Nations and the world as genocide. The Jewish people were not willing to wait thirty years for the world to recognize what they went through during World War II.
The creation of a Jewish state in 1948 and Israel’s foreign policy is a normal response by normal people who were subjected to decades of persecution and anti-Semitism at the hands of non-Jews.
The Jewish people are entitled to the empathy and sympathy of the world even if IHR is correct that only 1.5 million Jews died during the war. [7]
Past attempts at resolution of the age-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict ultimately failed because Middle East peace proposals did not take into account the role SPTSD now plays in the thoughts, behaviors, and the modern social identity of the Jewish people.
Rachel Alebev was born in Israel in 1957 and served in the Israeli army. In 1994 she earned her PhD at King’s College, London.
Endnotes
[1] For example, the late Revilo P. Oliver was a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher; Robert Faurisson earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz is an engineer at Northwestern University. IHR writers have no formal academic certification such as David Irving, Henri Roques and Bradley Smith.
[2] Mark holds a Master’s degree in modern European History from Indiana University.
[3] The term “Jewish-Zionist Power” is misleading, inflammatory and anti-Semitic.
IHR knows the Jewish people who support a secular Jewish state are not the power behind Israel’s foreign policy.
Mark Weber, if he really wanted peace in the Middle East, would have written Khazar-Redshieldist power. Let me explain…
At the end of the 19th century a few wealthy Khazars, the Redshields, purchased 90,000 acres in Palestine, for Israel’s future initially as an agricultural society.
Khazaria is a country which occupied the land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea that today is predominantly occupied by Georgia. The king of Khazaria, Bulan (also called the Khagan) was concerned about the evil running rampant in his country and decided the Khazars needed religion. Judaism was selected because Jewish law forgives your debts after seven years. One Khazarian family the Bauers, who later changed their name to Redshield refused to give up their evil ways.
From Bauer to Redshield
The Bauer family gained immense wealth and power and influence when they exploited the Battle of Waterloo. The House of Bauer after the battle attained complete financial control of Europe, and soon after, the world.
The Bauers adopted the Red Hexagram/Red Shield, the six pointed star, as the family’s symbol and later changed their name to Redshield, which means Rothschild.
The family was known as the House of Redshield. Throughout the Middle Ages the Hexagram (Seal of Solomon was used in the ancient mystery religions as the symbol of, “Moloch,” (New World Order), and, “Astaroth,” described as the Lord Treasurer of Hell).
The six pointed star geometrically and numerically translates into the number 666. The Hexagram is considered the most powerful magic charm pictogram in witchcraft [The Occult]. The Hexagram unlike the “Menorah,” is not a Jewish symbol. May 14, 1948 in the face of formidable opposition the flag of Israel, under Redshield instruction, is unveiled and is a blue colored version of the “Red Hexagram or Sign.” 
The Hexagram was also used to represent Saturn, which has been identified as the esoteric name for, “Satan.” This indicates that anyone killed in the name of Israel is actually a sacrifice to Satan.
The Redshields, not the Jewish people, unilaterally decided the Jews needed their own state to escape persecution. The first meeting of the Zionist Congress was scheduled in Munich. Vociferous opposition for social, political and religious reasons came from every direction. The majority of Jews living in Europe at the time enjoyed complete social, civil and legal rights. The German Jews, the most assimilated of all of the Jews in Europe, forced the meeting to be moved to Basle, Switzerland.
The meeting is held on August 29, 1897. Theodor Herzl, an agent of the Redshields, chairs the meeting and adopts the, ” Hexagram or Sign,” as the Zionist flag.
Religious Jews believe that Zionism at the end of the 19th century is “the work of Satan, a sacrilege and a blasphemy. The Old Testament does not allow the Jewish people to establish their own state in the holy land until the messiah comes back (the Jews are still waiting for the messiah).
In other words the reader needs to make the distinction between an irrational movement in 1897 by a few wealthy Khazars, The Redshields, and a rational movement after 1933 by thousands of people who believed they needed their own state to escape persecution.
“it was estimated the House of RedShield controlled almost half the wealth of the world.” National Cyclopaedia d American Biography by Antony Sutton. The World Order by Eustice Mullins, Staunton, VA: Ezra Pound Institute of Civilization, 1985, p.92.
[4] What if the Nazis won the War?
Tragically Mark Weber is so misinformed that he participated in a public forum where he expressed disappointment that Germany and the Axis powers didn’t win World War II. [From two informed talks on plans for the postwar era by leaders in Germany and other Axis nations during World War II, and their vision of a prosperous and secure European community]
Adrian Davis, an English attorney and lecturer, and I presented views on how Europe might have developed if the Soviet Union had been vanquished in 1941, and British leaders had made peace with Germany. Munich Agreement. During the war, said Davies, the German leadership stressed stability above ideology, and generally did not try to impose its own social-political system on other nations. A major problem, he went on, was that the national-patriotic character of the various European regimes has fueled rivalries and antagonisms. If the Axis alliance had won, he said, the post war European order would have been more “traditionalist” and less pan-European than many imagine.
In my talk, I cited wartime policies, along with writings and speeches by German political and business leaders, as well as analysis by postwar scholars, to sketch the outlines of the Pax Europa that likely would have developed in the aftermath of the war.
An axis-dominated Europe, I suggested, would have been prosperous, socially progressive, politically stable and technologically advanced, with an extensive, continent-wide transportation and communications network, conscientious environmental policies, and a comprehensive healthcare system. At the same time, the continent would have remained ethnically and culturally European. Large scale immigration of non-Europeans would have been unthinkable. [From the IHR meeting on July 31, 2010]
[5] Mark Weber says there were only six camps that gassed Jews in what is now Poland: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec..
IHR questions the testimony of the 20,000 Jewish survivors [and wants the US to abandon the support for Israel] because the testimonies contained some contradictions, errors and ambiguities. But would anyone question Earl G. Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School who was sent by Truman to investigate the concentration (Displaced Persons) camps after the war?
[6] [From http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/recognise-the-armenian-genocide-of-1915.html] Who was responsible for the Armenian [Jewish] Genocide?
Does the following sound familiar?
The decision to carry out a genocide against the Armenian [Jewish] people was made by the political party in power in the Ottoman Empire [Weimar Republic of Germany]. This was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) [National Socialists Party], popularly known as the Young Turks [Nazis]. Three figures from the CUP [Nazi] controlled the government; Mehmet Talaat, Minister of the Interior in 1915 [Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany in 1933] and Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) in 1917 [Heinrich Himmler]; Ismail Enver, Minister of War; Ahmed Jemal, Minister of the Marine and Military Governor of Syria [Rudolf Hess]. This Young Turk [Nazi] triumvirate relied on other members of the CUP [National Socialists Party] appointed to high government posts and assigned to military commands to carry out the Armenian [Jewish] Genocide.
In addition to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior, the Young Turks [Nazis] also relied on a newly-created secret outfit which they manned with convicts and irregular troops, called the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) [The Gestapo (secret state police) under Heinrich Himmler].
Its primary function was the carrying out of the mass slaughter of the deported Armenians [Jews]. In charge of the Special Organization was Behaeddin Shakir [Josef Mengele], a medical doctor.
Moreover, ideologists such as Zia Gokalp [Joseph Goebbels] propagandized through the media on behalf of the CUP [National Socialists Party] by promoting Pan-Turanism [pan-German “New Order” in Europe], the creation of a new empire stretching from Anatolia into Central Asia [Greece into the European subcontinent including Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland and Sweden (Greater Germany)] whose population would be exclusively Turkic [Aryan].
These concepts justified and popularized the secret CUP [Schutzstaffel ,the “SS”] plans to liquidate the Armenians [Jews] of the Ottoman [German] Empire. The Young Turk [Nazi SS] conspirators, other leading figures of the wartime Ottoman [German] government, members of the CUP [National Socialists and the Gestapo] Central Committee, and many provincial administrators responsible for atrocities against the Armenians [Jews] were indicted for their crimes at the end of the war. The main culprits evaded justice by fleeing the country. Even so, they were tried in absentia and found guilty of capital crimes.
The massacres, expulsions, and further mistreatment of the Armenians [Jews] between 1920 and 1923 [1941 and 1944] were carried by the Turkish [German] Nationalists, the Nazis who represented a new political movement and shared a common ideology of ethnic exclusivity.
How many people died in the Armenian [Jewish] Genocide?
It is estimated that one and a half million Armenians [Jews] perished between 1915 and 1923. [1937 and 1945] There were an estimated two million Armenians [Jews] living in the Ottoman Empire [Weimar Republic of Germany] on the eve of W.W.I. [II] Well over a million were deported in 1915 [1933] . Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps.
Among the Armenians [Jews] living along the periphery of the Ottoman [German] Empire many at first escaped the fate of their countrymen in the central provinces of Turkey [neighboring European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland).]
In 1918 [1940], however, the Young Turk [Nazi] regime took the war into the Caucasus. Ottoman [German] forces advancing through East Armenia and Azerbaijan [Eastern Poland and Russia] here too engaged in systematic massacres.
The expulsions and massacres carried by the Nationalist Turks [Socialists] between 1920 and 1922 [1941 and 1943] added tens of thousands of more victims.
[7] The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Clearly this definition applies in the case of the atrocities committed against the Armenians. Because the U.N. Convention was adopted in 1948, thirty years after the Armenian Genocide, Armenians worldwide have sought from their respective governments formal acknowledgment of the crimes committed during W.W.I. Countries like France, Argentina, Greece, and Russia, where the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants live, have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. However, as a matter of policy, the present-day Republic of Turkey adamantly denies that a genocide was committed against the Armenians during W.W.I. Moreover, Turkey dismisses the evidence about the atrocities as mere allegations and regularly obstructs efforts for acknowledgment. Affirming the truth about the Armenian Genocide, therefore, has become an issue of international significance. The recurrence of genocide in the twentieth century has made the reaffirmation of the historic acknowledgment of the criminal mistreatment of the Armenians by Turkey all the more a compelling obligation for the international community.