34 - 35 are treated together in this section

34. How could such a mass program have been kept secret from Jews who were scheduled for extermination?

35. If Jews scheduled for execution knew the fate in store for them, why did they go to their death without fight or protest?

Ernst Zündel Replies:
Rebuttal # 34 and 35:
These two questions are two sides of the same coin and will be treated together. The question posed is this: Did Jews know that they were slated for "extermination" - or didn't they? Did they fight, or didn't they?

It is a cop-out on Nizkor's side to say that some did, and some didn't. In order to answer that question intelligently, the premise has to be one or the other. A logical alternative position to take, of course, is to argue that since no "Final Solution" took place, the questions themselves are entirely moot and redundant to begin with.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of historical accuracy and good will for the as-yet-uninformed, let's go over some old ground again already covered in sundry ways in previous parts of this lengthy rebuttal.

Of course some Jews did resist the Third Reich Germans, but not because they fought against perceived "genocide". It was war, and the Germans were on one side, while the Jews were on the other. Therefore, it was logical that the Jews would "resist the Nazis." Many fought, and some fought very hard. The ghetto fighters of Warsaw and other cities have been lionized by Zionism, explicitly or implicitly, as having been engaged in resistance to genocide, but the two are not at all related - the Warsaw uprising was about creating a "front behind the front", a danger in the rear for the hard-pressed Germans on the Eastern front lines, and NOT a reaction against the danger of "being gassed".

And it is patently not true that there was no contact between inmates and the resistance forces outside. That there was contact, for instance, can be seen in this revealing passage, as per Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz in "Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1933-1945":

"A letter smuggled from the camp and dated August 1944 read: 'The Camp Military Council considers the action aimed at liberating the camp, be it partly or entirely, to have tremendous moral significance because of the international importance of Auschwitz as one of the blackest symbols of Nazi Germany. The Camp Military Council would not wish the action aimed at liberating Auschwitz to be treated as a matter of help to the prisoners exclusively. The Camp Military Council regards Auschwitz - from a military point of view - to be an immense potential source of manpower." (p 262)"


It's telling, isn't it? Even then Auschwitz was seen as a political tool - by the very ones whose own people were supposedly mistreated inside! Even supposedly exterminate by gassing on mass! Daily! All the while the Military Council was keenly aware that the inmates were an immense potential source of manpower!

The author continues, shedding more light:

"In Mauthausen, too, many inmates, belonging to the resistance movement, were able to listen to the radio. In September of 1941 a radio set was constructed by Esteban Balough, a Spanish Civil War veteran who was employed as an electrician. Other inmates who also managed to listen to the radio included (Poles, Czechs, and Austrians).

In the Mauthausen sub-camp at Gusen, a French inmate, Pierre Serge Coumoff, also employed as an electrician, listened to and reported on broadcasts; the Frenchman Lean Lafitte, the German socialist Konrad Wegner, and the Yugoslav Hrvoje Macanovic listened to the radio in the sub-camp at Ebensee. . . In the SS garages of the Ravensbruck camp, a Polish mechanic listened to the radio in the car of the camp commandant. In Kaiserwald a Czech Jew, Josef Gertner, employed by the SS as a mechanic, started to monitor broadcasts in the autumn of 1942. In Natzweiler-Struthof prisoners were listening to the radio from 1942 onwards." (p 176 - 177)


There is much more in this source regarding not just awareness of outside resistance but actual limited participation in resistance activities from the inside. Surely word would have gotten out, had there been "gassings" going on, after all the very important letter above smuggled out! Extermination of milions would have been much bigger news then who listened to a radio broadcast. Additional information about these topics can be found by checking the Kulaszka reference. Check on Faurisson, Irving, Felderer etc. These witnesses in the Great Holocaust Trial II cover important aspects, and the book is superbly indexed.

Praise has been heaped from Zionist quarters - and never mind the argument is now a switcheroo! - on the Jewish partisan guerrillas for having tried to forestall "genocide" by horribly destructive sabotage against the German war effort - killing between 700,00 and 1 million German soldiers and civilian personnel. How? By machine-gunning them from behind trees and ruins, by blowing up trains and truck convoys, hospitals and sleeping quarters etc. Here, too, guerrilla activities in resisting the German army in undercover ways were unrelated to the "extermination" of the Jews and had as often as not to do with such "heroic acts" as chasing mine-laden dogs under the treks of fleeing women and children escaping the Red Terror - a brutal ruthless Stalinist terror that had the same ideological godfathers as the "partisan" or guerilla, idea of non-uniformed combat, which was against the Geneva Convention and the Hague Rules of Warfare.

Let's use a little common sense to argue this through to conclusion. During wartime the flow of information and people is generally restricted for security reasons. Such restrictions are routinely practiced by all countries involved in a war. Therefore, had a massive program of extermination been going on, one might have made the argument that, for that reason, the Jews in the concentration camps did not know, and neither did the outside world.

However, reams and reams of so-called "witness" testimony claim just the opposite. The entire Nizkor reply reeks of such "testimony" - replete with silly claims about "the stench of burning flesh" - and never mind that every reputable reference on cremation will state that there has been NO smell associated with cremation since the 1860s! If in doubt, see any good Encyclopedia from 1870s on. It would have helped if Nizkor had consulted some basic references such as the Encyclopedia Britannica on cremation techniques over the past 140 years!

But no - Nizkor blithely ignores common sense, science, economics, command structure and hierarchy and simply hauls to the fore yet one more helping of soggy "survivor testimony" - hoping that, yet one more time, massive bull will baffle unsuspecting brains.

In that regard, the Eichmann "testimony" regularly comes up. How much that testimony is worth has to be judged against the known fact that Eichmann was kept in total isolation under the mind- and information control of his Israeli captors. He is supposed to have indicated that Jews living under German occupation "heard" the stories of the extermination, but did not believe they were true. The Germans were allegedly so clever, according to this version, that they fooled the Jews into a false sense of security.

Therefore, even the assumption behind the question - that the Jews were, in fact, aware of the fate planned for them--is full of holes.

As unlikely as it sounds, let us assume, however, for the sake of the argument that Jewish passivity and even cooperation with the Germans even up to the end of the war was simply because they were ". . . unaware they were being exterminated . . . "

It does not, of course, then fit into the thousands of "witness" confabulations of people having smelled burned flesh, having seen huge flames shooting out of crematory chimneys, of children being thrown alive into open pits (as reported by Vrba) or onto open air burning pyres etc.

More specifically, those Jews who were working for the Germans in the concentration camps making munitions for the German Army in the shadow of the crematories at Auschwitz would have had no excuse for not having spoken up. If an extermination had, in fact, been taking place under their noses, surely they would have known and spread the word to those back in the ghettos. (Check David Irving's testimony, specifically, on page 376 in the Kulaszka book!)

But no credible effort to do this was made. This indicates clearly that Jews who spent as much as two years at Auschwitz were as unaware of an "extermination program" as those still in the ghettos. There were rumors, as the Red Cross delegate visiting Auschwitz stated, but when they checked, the Red Cross could not find any evidence either.

There is not even consistency or agreement within the Holocaust Promotion camp itself. Up until the Eichmann trial, Palestine's Zionists derisively referred to Jewish survivors of the war who settled in Palestine after the war as "sheep" or "soap" because of their notorious lack of resistance to the Holocaust. The non-reaction of Europe's Jews to the alleged news of the "extermination" has been criticized elsewhere by the Jewish community living outside Nazi control for its passivity. Leaders of various organizations as well as Holocaust history writers have disparaged the inaction of the Western Allies with regard to the fate of Europe's Jews on many occasions, but they seldom attempt to explain the cooperation the Nazis received from the Jews through the "Judenräte in the ghettos and elsewhere themselves in implementing the alleged "Final Solution". Though this passivity is conveniently blamed on ignorance, most common-sense readers will not find this a credible explanation.

After all, despite the war, secrets were very hard to keep. Zionist leaders outside Europe were supposedly aware of the extermination; Jewish organizations outside Europe should have been making an effort to warn them about it. Did it happen? No, if you discout the propaganda leaflets concocted by the Psychological Warfare Directorate in England!

After the war, Jewish sources have tried to lay huge guilt trips on all sorts of individuals and organizations - from the Pope to the Catholic Church to US President Roosevelt to the Allied military. Even the Red Cross was blamed for a "conspiracy of silence" and being deaf and dumb to the desperate plight of the Jews.

All these people could not have been in collusion with the enemy - but since nothing much out of the ordinary was going on, and since all Allied nations, for their part, interned people in concentration camps, German policy was nothing to get excited about. Everybody had camps for prisoners for aliens, for security risks etc. There is plenty of documentation that there were anti-Nazi resistance organizations in a wide range of political hues operating in occupied Poland and Russia - many composed of a large percentage of Jews - who could have gathered the needed proof and alerted ghetto leaders to the gas chamber threat. Nothing of the sort happened - because there was nothing to report except standard public health measures adopted by the Germans as was done by America, England and Russia - namely mass delousings.

Finally, Zionist spokesmen in Monday Morning Quarterback fashion have frequently criticized the Western Allies for not bombing the gas chambers or the rail lines leading to them ". . . in order to stop the extermination of the Jews." Yet the guerrillas on the ground in Poland, much closer to the action and much better informed through smuggled messages out of the camps, also did nothing to destroy the rail lines or the "gas chambers" either.

It does not appear they felt any alarm or saw the need to do anything to warn the Jews who were supposedly shipped to be "gassed". They did not do so even for their own Poles or Soviet soldiers, who, it is claimed, were the first "experimental gassing victims". It would have been easy to do. There was certainly a line of communication to the USSR from German-occupied territory, for a network of communist agents and hundreds of thousands of armed guerrillas were left behind as the Soviet army retreated in 1941.

No warnings of the gas chambers came from them either to alert the ghettos, much less to save the Jews - even though Stalin's Army and political apparatus was packed with powerful Jews.

In short, there were many clandestine avenues for news during the war to travel to the Jews outside the camps or in other countries, but it seems no credible effort was ever made to warn the Jews of their impending doom. It therefore stands to reason that there WAS no reason to do so. You cannot address yourself to a problem if the problem does not exist. There have been many unsatisfactory attempts to "explain" this behavior, but all of them ring hollow.

There IS no satisfactory explanation for Jewish inaction if they were, indeed, aware of their planned fate. There is no satisfactory explanation how this fate could have been kept from them. What you have, instead, is yet more soggy, so-called "witness stories." Cremation science defeats these liars. It defeats their facile lies on every front.

Nizkor can't have it both ways. Either "genocide" was a well-kept secret or it was not a well-kept secret.

Which was it?

Perhaps an answer for Jews' "inexplicable behavior" will be found in the next fifty years, since it has not been found in the last fifty.