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Book Review Febuary 22, 1979 by D. Philip Rosen THE HOLOCAUST AND NEO-NAZI MYTHOMANIA, edited by Serge Klarsfeld. Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1978, 215 pages. $10. Now that Hitler has been dead 34 years, there are those revisionists of World War II history that seek not to bury Hitler but to praise him. Crucial to this task is the mythify-ing of the Holocaust, the falsifying of the Final Solution. MASS MURDER MADE THE HITLER regime particularly odious, and those who admire National Socialism or those who are nostalgic about it, while they may not yet justify the enormous crime, try to reduce it. The purpose of The Holocaust and Neo-Nazi Mythomania is "to provide people of good faith with the precise facts which incontestably refute the lies of Neo-Nazi propaganda relevant to the Holocaust." That propaganda states that the Holocaust never happened, the gas chambers were not used for murder and the number of Jewish victims has been considerably exaggerated. Behind the propaganda is the desire to elevate the Hitler regime to that of Napoleon's, a glorious, but unsuccessful chapter in history; to vilify and discredit the Jewish people; and to attack the Jewish state as a creation based on the falsehood of the Holocaust. The Holocaust and Neo-Nazi Mythomania is a documentary work. It consists of two studies — "The Launching of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question" and "Reply to the Neo-Nazi Falsification of Historical Facts Concerning the Holocaust." Sandwiched in between are extensive footnotes, letters and a bibliography relating to the genocide. Appended is a coup, a "first," the unabridged publication of two "Korhen Reports" in German and English. RICHARD KORHERR IS STILL ALIVE, although Neo-Nazis claim he never existed. Right in the text is his photograph and the data which the former inspector of "statistics of the SS prepared for Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler on Jewish losses in Nazi occupied areas. These statistics are important in calculating the Final Solution. The first study, "The Launching," is written by Joseph Billig, French combat veteran, POW, historian-adviser at the Nuremberg trials. Billig, with painstaking research, documents the step-by-step Nazi moves toward genocide. He employs SS papers, orders and Der Fuhrer's pronouncements, demolishing revisionist attempts to disassociate Hitler from the Final Solution. Most interesting are the details of the Nazi encouragement of Zionism. Study two", "Reply to the Neo-Nazi Falsification," is almost a line-by-line refutation of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Butz substituted the word "hoax" instead of "myth" in deference to his intellectual precursor (and probable mentor), the notorious anti-Semite Houston Chamberlain. Chamberlain, the Aryan worshipper, wrote a vicious Jew-hating pseudo-scientific work entitled, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century." Georges Wel-lers, a Russian-born French scholar, author of the refutation and a. survivor of Auschwitz, draws upon Butz's sources to show how the Northwestern University engineering professor distorted them. The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania is edited by Serge Klarsfeld and published by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. The Klarsfelds are active in the fight to obtain trials for Nazi war criminals. Beate attracted international attention when in 1968, she publicly slapped Kurt Georg Kiesinger, then chancellor of West Germany and a former Nazi propagandist. THE FOUNDATION, INCORPORATED in Paris and New York (515 Madison Ave.) is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization seeking to "advance public awareness of the persecution of the Jews .... educate the public about genocide . . . , and expose the survival and resurgence of anti-Semitism." |
