German Holocaust Survivor’s Christmas Memory

A German Holocaust Survivor’s 

Christmas Memory

Michael Hoffman’s Note: Ingrid Rimland, the wife of the late German revisionist Ernst Zündel, died at the age of 81 in October, after a brief illness. Though no one is permitted by the mass media to be termed a Holocaust Survivor™ unless they were a Judaic victim of the Third Reich, Ingrid was indeed a person who had survived a holocaust, having only barely escaped Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s attempt to enslave, extrude and exterminate ethnic Germans in the territory of the USSR. 

During the Second World War, Ingrid witnessed Germans in Russia rounded up and deported to Siberia, or killed. Born in the Soviet Union among the Mennonites from Germany who had resided there since the time of Catherine the Great, she was with her family as they fled Stalin’s holocaust, seeking safe haven in Germany, on a perilous western trek with little food or clothing, pursued by Communist troops.

The following brief remembrance demonstrates the indomitable, never-surrender spirit of these “Volksdeutsche.” May it serve to inspire our people to endure in the midst of the peculiar 21st century genocide which destroys us by psychological rather than military warfare, seeking to impose feelings of worthlessness and a mentality of spiritual suicide. 

Dr. Ingrid Rimland Zündel:

“A scene of many years ago, somewhere in Russia or Poland, is burned into my memory: a freezing, hungry Christmas on the trek, on rickety wagons pulled by exhausted horses that left their bloody footprints in the snow. We Volksdeutsche, thousands and thousands of us, were fleeing the murderous hordes of the Red Army. We stopped somewhere at night and there was nothing but ice and dark sky in the snow-laden forest. Many had died on the road. Many more would die on the road ahead. Only four in my family were still alive — my mother, my grandmother, my baby-sister and this writer, then seven years old.

“I lay curled up beneath snow-sodden blankets, sobbing my heart out. I watched as my grandmother climbed down from the wagon, tears freezing on her cheeks. She had nothing to give me but this — she broke off a twig from a fir tree, and with her trembling, frostbitten hands she put a match to it against the wind, and when it threw sparks she held it up to my nose with these words, “Sei still! Halt aus! So duftet Weihnachten im Vaterland’ (‘Be quiet! Endure! That is how Christmas smells in our homeland”).

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Does anyone remember The Great Holocaust Trial?

Late last year we raised the funds to reprint "THE GREAT HOLOCAUST TRIAL," a book which had been a bestseller for the Institute for Historical Review 25 years ago. Many people have approached this writer over the years to say they became a revisionist as a result of having read it.

This book is the only report in print on the first of the two trials in Toronto of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zundel. Some people regard his second, 1988 trial as the really important one because it was there that the Leutcher Report was first presented to the world.

For this writer both trials are of tremendous significance; the first, in 1985, no less so, for the reason that it represented one of the first times in history that so-called "Holocaust Survivors" were cross-examined by an adversarial attorney (barrister Doug Christie) for the defense.

As a result, every single "infallible eyewitness to the gassings," including one of the super-stars of survivordom and eyewitnessdom, Rudolf Vrba, author of I Cannot Forgive were shown to be very fallible indeed.

The top "Holocaust" scholar at the time, Dr. Raul Hilberg, author of the monumental tome, The Destruction of the European Jews, also testified. (Hilberg went on to become Norman Finkelstein's mentor; Dr. Finkelstein has nothing but praise for Hilberg, notwithstanding Hilberg's assistance to the prosecution in a case aimed at sending a book publisher to prison).

Hilberg was cut to shreds by Christie's cross-examination, which was fueled by the French revisionist historian Dr. Robert Faurisson, a member of the defense team. It was actually a debate between the two academics, with Mr. Christie acting as Faurisson's polemically-skilled mouthpiece.

Consequently, with the 1985 Great Holocaust Trial we have two astonishing landmarks: the collapse of supposed "eyewitness" testimony of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz, and the defeat of the most prominent "Holocaust" historian in the world.

The book has been out of print for fifteen years. A whole generation of new recruits to revisionism have never read it. We could not afford to print a huge print run. We went the frugal, print-on-demand route and published several hundred copies. We gave away what we could afford to -- a few dozen -- to reviewers and prominent revisionists -- in order to stimulate publicity, reviews and distribution.

Thus far this book gathers dust. We have sold perhaps 90 copies. The apathy is incredible. I knew revisionism was in rough straits with the collapse of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), but I had no idea it was this sunk in paralysis and indifference.

Every major revisionist contacted has either said nothing or mentioned it in the briefest possible way. A few fulfilled their "duty" by briefly alluding to Dr. Faurisson's reflection on the fate of Fred Leutcher which jogged his memory after having read this writer's new introduction to the book; that's been the sum total of the matter.

The big revisionist news is Samuel Crowell’s The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes which we have mentioned here. (Buy it here: http://ninebandedbooks.com/?p=312)

In fact, we not only included ordering information, we drew attention to a lengthy and highly interesting interview with Mr. Crowell which the book's backers did not ask us to promote.

Crowell's book is an important contribution. I hope the generation of revisionists that has been recruited in the past ten or fifteen years will study it and I hope they will do the same with The Great Holocaust Trial.

We have no ego-investment and not much financial investment in The Great Holocaust Trial. It was a bestseller for the IHR throughout the 1980s and heavily promoted around the world. Anyone who promotes it now is welcome to omit my name from any review or advertisement.

We would have liked to have published it at a price lower than $19.95 (plus shipping). But to do that we would have had to publish at least 1,000 copies. With that quantity the economy of scale creates a lower production cost; but the venture capital was not there. We saved our "nickels and dimes" and approached a print-on-demand publisher. When you print four hundred books rather than a thousand, you pay a lot more and those costs, unfortunately, raise the price of the book.

So this is not a get rich quick scheme or an ego trip. I'm not sure why I even have to say as much, except that I cannot comprehend how the only revisionist account of Mr. Zundel's world historic trial in 1985 is being allowed to slide down the memory hole. It's inconceivable.

I've had some folks who don't know what kind of dynamite this book represents, ask why they can't buy it online from an online store. I forgive your naiveté. Ernst Zundel was imprisoned for seven years in six different prisons in three separate countries, having been released in Germany only a year ago under a draconian gag order that silences one of the most eloquent voices of defense of the German people.

If we discard the Canadian and German government alibis, we discover that Mr. Zundel was imprisoned all those years because he knocked so gigantic a hole in the gassings tale that the "never forgive, never forget" crowd sought vengeance. And they achieved it.

Furthermore, I cannot set foot in the native Germany of my ancestors because I will be jailed within hours or days for the “crime" of having written The Great Holocaust Trial.

If it was sold online, the online store would be closed in short order (except for Amazon which is too big to be shut down - see below).

The vengeance of the enemies of truth will be doubled or tripled in exacerbating impact if we allow Zundel's struggle to be forgotten; part of his heroic struggle is recorded in The Great Holocaust Trial.

I'm a writer. I'm not an impresario, p.r. man or three-ring circus coordinator. Sometimes I wish I were because that kind of flash and energy can make the difference between circulation and oblivion. I rely on others to get the word out, set up the distribution networks and get behind something truly worthwhile.

To the average guy with curiosity about the unofficial and damned side of World War II history I can only say, "Buy a copy."

To the full and part-time revisionists who have ignored this book I can only wonder to myself aloud, how do they imagine we will ever build a movement with so little unity and so much ennui?

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THE GREAT HOLOCAUST TRIAL

The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West's Most Sacred Relic

Large format (7 x 10) illustrated, quality paperback. 181 pages.

This title can be ordered at this time only by postal mail or from Amazon

$19.95 PLUS shipping: $3.50 shipping in the U.S.A. 

ADD $8 shipping to Canada. $12 shipping overseas. 

Orders without correct payment shipping added cannot be mailed.

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Order from:

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2700 people killed in Auschwitz gas chambers in 24 hours

Holocaust survivor shares story at genocide symposium

by Liz Barry (lbarry@newsadvance.com) 

The News and Advance (Lynchburg, Virginia) |  Feb. 16, 2011

Irving Roth speaking to law students Feb. 16 at Liberty University’s law school symposium on genocide and religious persecution.

From the podium at (the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s) Liberty University, Holocaust survivor Irving Roth — who narrowly escaped death at Auschwitz and Buchenwald — rolled up his shirt sleeve to show the numbers tattooed on his left forearm.

“The denial of the Holocaust is not simply denying the Holocaust. It’s a tool to denigrate the Jews. It’s a tool of anti-Semitism …” said Roth, a native of Czechoslovakia. “That’s why I come to you and tell you about it. I lived through this.”

Roth spoke to a packed audience Wednesday night during a symposium on genocide and religious persecution at Liberty’s law school. His firsthand account, which wove together humor and bone-chilling accounts of life at the death camps, ended with a standing ovation from the audience.

The goal of the two-day symposium was to raise awareness in Lynchburg of past and present genocides, said law school dean Mathew Staver. Roth was among about a dozen speakers from academia, nonprofits and the government who took on the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and other conflicts.

Roth’s story chronicled the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the horrors of the Holocaust that killed his brother, grandparents and millions of other Jews.

He recalled the day, at age 9, when a police officer barred him from playing soccer at his favorite park. The officer pointed to a new sign that read, “Jews and dogs are forbidden to enter,” he said. He recalled the moment, five years later, when he was delivered to Auschwitz in a train packed with 3,000 Jews. “I’m a 14-year-old. I don’t know where I am. All I know is I am some place which is not good,” Roth said.

Of the 3,000 people who arrived with Roth, all but 300 were killed in gas chambers within 24 hours of arriving at Auschwitz, he said. Roth was among the few who were assigned to work in the death camp. By the time Roth was rescued by American soldiers, he had been transferred to the German concentration camp Buchenwald and weighed roughly 75 pounds.

By what Roth calls “one of many miracles,” his parents survived the war by hiding with a Christian family in Budapest. Despite grave risk to her family, a Christian woman with a husband serving in the armed forces of Nazi Hungary took Roth’s parents in and protected them until the war’s end, he said. At the end of his story, Roth urged the audience to emulate the woman who saved his parents.

“My parents survived. Why?” he said. “Because somebody cared. Someone look at two people whose death were imminent and said ‘I need to interfere’ . . . She said, ‘I do not stand by and do nothing. I’ll stand up and be counted.’”

(Emphasis supplied)

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“Holocaust survivor” self-mythologizing

A new book on Adolf Hitler has been published (he seems to have  as many would-be biographers as Abe Lincoln). It is titled “Hitler’s First War” by Thomas Weber and it is not the typical lurid screed. It’s actually impressive, in certain respects. It concerns both the reality of Hitler’s World War I military service and how that service was distorted by propaganda later. The author and his publisher (Oxford University) enjoy sneering at Hitler’s own account of his actions during World War I (in "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere) as “self-mythologizing.”

Hitler is of course easy to attack and critique. It takes no courage to go after Der Fuhrer anymore than it does to assail Muslims.  Both are perennial and popular targets in American media and politics. Consequently, the sneer at Hitler for "self-mythologizing," while perhaps accurate in many respects, is not particularly impressive.

I doubt that either Thomas Weber or Ann Farmer, a reporter for the New York Times, would ever ascribe that epithet to a saintly “Holocaust survivor.” Even  if the charge were true, it would take considerable audacity to make it in public and risk one’s career.

Like many World War II revisionists, this writer collects "Holocaust Survivor" Tall Tales. I have a thick file of fairy tales and tales of miracles and relics invented by the these media-canonized saints, including one about the Seven Dwarves of Auschwitz! I have another in which “Trudy, the Wonder Child of the Camps” was made to clean the entire kitchen floor of Auschwitz with her tongue! The false witness these characters spew about the Germans knows no limit — and they can always find a gullible New York Times scribe to report their tales to the world without the least tinge of skepticism.

The most devastating observation on the credibility of these yarn-spinners was made by a Judaic sociologist sixty years ago:  "...most of the memoirs and reports [of 'Holocaust survivors'] are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks...”

--Samuel Gringauz, "Jewish Social Studies" (New York), January 1950, Vol. 12, p. 65.

Just for fun, I wish to share with you the latest entry in my file. It’s about a famous and wealthy Judaic tailor now working in Brooklyn, who makes suits for presidents and movie stars, and whose life was saved in Auschwitz by the fact that he regularly wore an SS officer’s shirt around the camp!

The Magic Shirt

“He looked like a somebody"

A Meticulous Tailor, Called Upon by Designers and Politicians Alike

by Ann Farmer | New York Times | Nov. 6, 2010 [p. A18]

...for more than 60 years, Martin Greenfield has been an influential face of men's fashion in New York City...Mr. Greenfield, 82, is still old-school in his devotion to the labor-intensive, exacting and vanishing art of making tailored garments by hand...(He works) on the second floor of the factory in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he and his two sons oversee 117 workers...

Mr. Greenfield first grasped the importance of appearances while trying to survive the Holocaust. When he was 14, he and his father, mother, two sisters and a brother were taken from their home in Pavlova, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and later delivered to Auschwitz.

He was assigned to wash clothes in the camp's alteration shop, and one day he accidentally ripped an SS officer's shirt, an affront for which he was beaten. The officer threw the shirt at Mr. Greenfield, who mended it and started wearing it instead of the uniforms the other prisoners wore. From then on, he said, the guards and prisoners began treating him with respect.

"He looked like a somebody," said Jay Greenfield, 52, Mr. Greenfield's oldest son and the executive vice president of the company, Martin Greenfield Clothiers, explaining that his father attributes his survival to that shirt.

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Child survivor of Israeli holocaust in Gaza gives video testimony

January, 2009: 10-year-old Palestinian Mona Samouni describes how she became one of the very few survivors of the extended Samouni family, after the Israeli army's slaughter in the densely populated Zeitoun district in Gaza. Warning: Contains footage of holocaust victims that some viewers may find distressing.

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