“We are loud, we are proud, and the best of all: we are right!”1
“When growing up in Germany, I was conditioned to feel guilty about being German; to apologize to anyone noting anything wrong with my country, its people, culture and history. I was a compulsive apologizer, as almost all Germans are when it comes to their ethnic and national identity.”2
“The bottom line is that no student, no researcher and no layman should believe any facts to be ‘conclusively proven,’ even if the textbooks present them as such...”3

“This head physician of Auschwitz [Dr. Eduard Wirths] was in charge of Zyklon B and how it was used; he ordered all physicians to perform ‘selection’ among the inmates – healthy and sick – and he was co-responsible as to how the crematories were being designed and used, among many other duties. Now you tell me: How can it be that the top doctor of Auschwitz, who according to the orthodox narrative should have been the devil incarnate, was seen as a guardian angel by the Auschwitz inmates and exactly because of this as a hero even by his SS superiors in Berlin?”4

The first two quotations above, the latter one from the main subject of this article, hardly seem to go together. The first is a ringing phrase from an early revisionist, David Cole, who made a fascinating video of Auschwitz from the revisionist perspective,5 but who later disappeared from the scene. Since then he has kept appearing and disappearing. He achieved quite a bit, even if this later led to others making bigger breakthroughs.

The second quotation comes from the person who is probably the leading revisionist in the world in relation to the Holocaust, namely Germar Rudolf. The terms of the quotation hardly seem to signal a successful future, and for a long time all of his prospects seemed in grave doubt. But, he carried on battling and in terms of the quality of the evidence he has produced in support of revisionism, he has triumphed, whether or not that is recognized on all sides.

The third quotation, from Professor Walter Nagl, captures what Germar Rudolf is really about. No loud emotional appeals, but guilt replaced by rationality. Evidence, objectivity, and reasoned analysis are at the heart of his writings. This article will reflect on this and attempt to review his work. This is a daunting task and cannot be done anywhere near in full in just one article. Rudolf’s writings are massive in quantity and, it is submitted, excellent in quality.

The fourth quotation brings out the important fact that the subject of revisionism is full of paradoxes, as life itself can be and often is. Life is also composed in many ways of heroism and tragedy, to which the story relating to this last quotation is also intimately bound. In addition, one can never be sure in human affairs of what is certain and what uncertain. We can only look at the evidence and try to be objective and fair, even more so when issues of life and death, good and evil, are concerned and interlinked, as they are here. The present writer asks the reader to keep these four quotations in mind whilst examining the contents of this article. It is also the case that the major works referred to are given when possible an online reference where they can be read in full. This is usually at the remarkable Archive.org website and at Holocausthandbooks.com, and will enable readers to check the references given.

There are also two other very important matters to be kept in mind at the same time. These were expressed by the present writer in an earlier article in Culture Wars6 on a similar theme, which involved the case for Holocaust revisionism made by another revisionist, Robert Faurisson. The first point to be made has been expressed very well by yet another noted revisionist writer, Dr. Thomas Dalton:

There can be no denying the Holocaust of the mid-twentieth century: It was called World War II. Roughly 50 to 60 million people died worldwide – about 70 per cent of whom were civilians. They died from a variety of causes including guns, bombs, fire, disease, exposure, starvation, and chemical toxins. Within this greater Holocaust there existed many lesser holocausts: the Allied fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne; the killing of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians by the victorious Allies after the formal end of the war; the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which incinerated 170,000 women, children, and elderly; and the Jewish Holocaust of Nazi Germany. It is this last Holocaust which has been the topic of heated debate over the years.7

The second point was expressed by the present writer in his earlier article as follows:

To turn to the question of the Holocaust, then, one crucial matter that has to be understood is that no one holds the view often characterized as “Holocaust denial” in the sense of denying completely that there was ever any persecution of the Jews at that time. Of course, there was. In fact, at any moment in history evil things have been done and the Jews have been the subject of such things. There have been bad words and actions: slander, libel, internment, deportations, pogroms, even massacres. But these things have happened to other people as well, and in great numbers. In addition, the Jews are not blameless themselves, since no human beings are.8

As Dr. Thomas Dalton has also stated, “Holocaust revisionists are often called ‘Holocaust deniers’ by mainstream writers. This appellation is both derogatory and, technically, almost meaningless.”9 What is needed, as was stated in the earlier article, is a recognition that an objective investigation of empirical issues can arrive at the truth, and that it is essential to state the truth in love. What follows is an attempt once more to do exactly that, setting it in the context of two lives and two struggles, those of Germar Rudolf and of Eduard Wirths.

FIGHTING AGAINST ADVERSITY

Germar Rudolf’s story is told by himself in his book Hunting Germar Rudolf (2016). He was born on October 29, 1964 in Limburg an der Lahn, Hesse, in Germany. He studied chemistry at the University of Bonn. As a student he adopted the position of the German federal government, which agreed to the stationing of Pershing middle-range nuclear missiles in Germany by the U.S. armed forces. In October 1983, he joined a Catholic student fraternity. With the knowledge and support of the Catholic Church, he attempted to smuggle theological and political books to a Catholic congregation in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where the Church was being suppressed by the then Stalinist government. They were arrested at the border and transferred to a prison. After being kept there and undergoing interrogation on two occasions, Rudolf was released, although a fraternity brother was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. After this adventure he took the conservative position politically, for example approving of the Englehard Law under which the act of disputing, diminishing, or justifying the subsequently defined “crimes” of the National Socialist regime, or any other tyrannical regime, would be prosecuted automatically, without anybody needing to file a complaint. At this stage, as he put it, “I was a firm believer in the standard historical account of the extermination of the Jews.”10

Shortly afterwards, however, Rudolf got into an argument with a political colleague about the very question of the extermination of the Jews. The other person insisted that the “established description” was incorrect and that there were not, in reality, six million victims, only three million at most. Rudolf’s reaction to this was to be appalled. Why? Because, the issue to him was not really the actual numbers, but the intention behind the deed.

My belief at that time was that Hitler had planned to exterminate the Jews, and had done whatever he had been able to, to accomplish this goal. The actual “how” and “how many” were of secondary importance.11

An additional reason was that he “could not, and cannot, take seriously any position maintained for obviously or merely imputed political reasons.”12 In the following few years, latterly in Frankfurt, Rudolf concentrated on his undergraduate and post-graduate studies. However, he remained committed to the principle of the reunification of Germany. During this period he did much reading before beginning his PhD studies in Stuttgart.

How did Germar Rudolf become a revisionist? Here there is a most interesting similarity with the route pursued to this end by Robert Faurisson, the subject of the earlier article by the present writer. This is that one of his friends recommended that he read Was ist Wahrheit (“What Is Truth”), by Paul Rassinier. In other words, he was brought to one of the very texts that Faurisson first came across in his intellectual journey. This is of course the very first fully revisionist book ever published. It deals with the supposed extermination of the Jews from the point of view of a former member of the French Resistance who had been held by the Germans in two concentration camps, Buchenwald and Dora, during World War II.

The remarkable thing about the book is its author. Since he was incarcerated in several concentration camps as a member of the Resistance and was a pronounced left-winger – after WWII, he was a short-time member of the French parliament for the leftist socialists – he could not be accused of wanting to whitewash anything or of having any kind of political agenda. Written in a factual and balanced style, the book was easy to read; we discussed it, and that was all. I felt no need to devote myself further to the subject, either through the examination of further revisionist or establishment literature or through undertaking my own investigations.13

Another and most important source of Rudolf’s eventually pursuing further the problem of the Holocaust occurred in 1989 when he obtained the book Der Nasenring: Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“The Nose Ring – In the Thicket of Coming to Terms with the Past”) by the Swiss political scientist Dr. Armin Mohler. This book examined “how and when German attempts to come to terms with their National Socialist past – originally for purely moral reasons – became a weapon in day-to-day political discussion and intrigues.”14 What turned out to be crucial here is that in the later editions of the book Mohler, someone who seemed politically neutral, and who was non-partisan, also discussed in the context of the Holocaust a matter directly concerning a discipline in which Rudolf was about to complete his diploma examination: namely chemistry!

This Swiss author also reported about an American study on the alleged “gas chambers” at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. This study, said Mohler, had been prepared by a U.S. expert in execution technologies, who had come to the conclusion that there had never been any gassings with poison gas in Auschwitz. One of his main arguments was the absence of traces of the supposedly used poison gas in the walls of those locations identified as homicidal gas chambers.15

The study mentioned by Dr. Mohler was of course the Leuchter Report (1988), a copy of which Rudolf obtained at once. He was not immediately convinced by it, since it “was inexact at points and contained sloppy errors,”16

I found factual mistakes and deficiencies galore which, as it turned out later, were only the tip of the iceberg... Something had to be done to iron out those shortcomings and to put that entire matter on a solid foundation. But who would tackle such a hot potato?17

However, he did find the work of Leuchter very powerful and recalls that because of it the thorn of doubt had been deeply embedded in him. He also found himself feeling guilty about this, no doubt something to do with the problem of coming to terms with the past, referred to above. As he put it, “I ... felt guilty, because in western societies we are indoctrinated from early childhood on that the orthodox Holocaust narrative is the purest truth, and that those who doubt or deny this are evil or insane: extremists, Nazis, Jew-haters, racists, weak-minded, morons, idiots, fruitcakes, cranks, crooks, anti-Semites, and so forth.”18 Thankfully, he knew that it was not right to feel guilty for doubting. This angered him then and later. He also knew that

[…] This is just an excerpt from the July/August 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)