Paul Rassinier

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Rassinier (born March 18, 1906 in Bermont , † July 27, 1967 in Paris ) was a French politician, pacifist, professor of history, geography and literature. After being a prisoner in Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau during World War II , he became a history revisionist and Holocaust denier after the war . In France he is considered one of the founders of negationism .

Life

Rassinier joined the French Communist Party in 1922, at the age of 16, and very soon developed his doctrine of total pacifism and socialism not geared towards nationalization. With that he came into opposition to the party line and was expelled in 1932. From 1933 to 1943 Rassinier was professor of history at the Collège d'enseignement général in Belfort.

In 1934 he became a member of the federation of the socialist party SFIO in the Territoire de Belfort department and was temporarily its deputy chairman; within the SFIO he belonged to the pacifist wing around Charles Spinasse , a group that was more willing to come to an understanding with Hitler than to go to war against the Third Reich. Marcel Déat , who later became a fascist and collaborator with Nazi Germany, had similar ideas . Representing his thoughts on perfect pacifism brought him into conflict with the then Prime Minister Édouard Daladier .

With the beginning of the occupation of France by German troops, he took part in the development of the non-communist Resistance group Liberation-Nord and tried to introduce the idea of ​​renouncing the use of force. For this purpose he published the illegal newspaper La quatrième republique .

The Gestapo arrested him on November 30, 1943 and interned him first in the Buchenwald concentration camp and then from April 1944 to the liberation in April 1945 in the Dora subcamp .

After the end of the war, marked by his bad health - he was 100% disabled - he returned to the head of the Socialist Party in the Belfort district, came to parliament in autumn 1946 as a replacement for a party friend and was awarded the gold and medal of recognition the highest decoration of the resistance movement, the rosette in crimson. It came to a head when he declared that he had never met most of the men in the resistance movement who spoke on their behalf today. Thus, he turned against the claim of what he believed to be the alleged resistance fighters to be allowed to suppress the Petainists and collaborators, which cost him much of his popularity. After serious arguments with the communists, Rassinier was elected to the Second Constituent Assembly and also appeared in parliament against the use of hatred as a leitmotif for the persecution of part of the French population. This referred to the purations after the end of the war.

In the elections to the National Assembly in November 1946, in which Rassinier led a tough and anti-Semitic campaign, he lost his mandate to the left-liberal mayor of Belfort, Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt.

Historical work

In 1948 Rassinier published his book Le passage de la ligne ("The border crossing"), which later appeared in a revised form as Le Mensonge d'Ulysse ("The lie of Odysseus", printed in German in 1959). In this book Rassinier assumed the existence of gas chambers in the concentration camps , but denied the number of victims of the mass extermination program, since he himself had never seen a gas chamber or even killings in one and, as he says, his fellow prisoners did not, although some later claimed so. For example he writes:

“My opinion about the gas chambers? There were some, but not as many as is assumed. Annihilations by this means also took place, but not as many as is said. The number certainly does not diminish their horror, but the fact that it is a measure ordered by a state in the name of a philosophy or doctrine would greatly increase that nature. Does it have to be admitted that it was so? It is possible, but not certain. The cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of gas chambers and the exterminations has not been properly established with certainty by the texts published by Eugen Kogon , and I fear that the others to which he refers without citing them still consolidate less. "

He also comes to this conclusion because "in the whole of the literature on the concentration camps and also before the court in Nuremberg no document could be produced from which it emerged that gas chambers had been set up in the German concentration camps by order of the government with the intention of to use them for the mass extermination of prisoners ”. In addition, as he explains in the book, some of his former fellow prisoners would sometimes exaggerate or distort the horrors and general conditions of the concentration camp, which he does not deny, or in some cases even completely invent them. Furthermore, he claims that a large part of the mistreatment and deaths did not happen by the SS or on their instructions, but were committed by prisoners who were kapos, block elders, foremen, room attendants etc. themselves. He also sees this own perpetration or its denial or repression as one of the motives for misrepresentations and exaggerations by former prisoners who tried to distract from themselves and their involvement in atrocities.

In 1960 he published the follow-up book Ulysse trahi par les siens ("What now, Odysseus?"), In which he a. a. brought in an exchange of letters and a dispute over factual materials with Eugen Kogon. Here he also noted that concentration camps were not a new invention, but rather: “The historians […] began to write […] that the English had used them against the Boers at the end of the last century, that the French had used them against the Boers in 1938 Spaniards would have accommodated the fact that the Russians had been using them since 1917. "

In 1964 he published Le drame des juifs européens (“The Drama of the Jews of Europe”), and other holocaust-denying works appeared posthumously , including numerous writings in English, which were published under the title Debunking the Genocide Myth by the revisionist book and publisher Noontide Press .

The acquittal

It took Rassinier six years to argue through his statements, especially those in Le Mensonge d'Ulysse ("The Lie of Odysseus"), before several instances of the French judiciary - on complaints from various organizations of resistance fighters - and to provide evidence of their accuracy until the criminal division of the Court of Cassation, as the highest instance, overturned all previous judgments of November 2, 1951 and acquitted him. In a press release of March 24, 1954 it says:

"The Supreme Court accuses the verdict:

  1. To have established the offenses of insult in the criminal field, while the criticisms of patriots contained in this book are unjust and malevolent, but are of a general character and are not directed against any specific person.
  2. To have declared the actions of the FNDR (National Association of Deported Persons and Resistance Fighters) to be permissible in the civil field, while this organization was not directly targeted in the book and none of its members was personally attacked. "

"The court emphasizes that 'the criticisms of patriots contained in this book are unjust and malevolent', but since a criticism is always 'unjust and malevolent' for someone, the author readily deduces a right from it."

In doing so, Rassinier had made numerous assertions which, although they could be factually refuted in the following years, became part of the standard repertoire of negationism. In Germany, among others, the history revisionist and Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf explicitly refers to Rassinier.

Works (selection)

  • The lie of Ulysses. The truth comes out. Publishing house KH Priester , Wiesbaden 1959.
  • What now Odysseus? To deal with the past. Publishing house KH Priester, Wiesbaden 1960.
  • On the Eichmann case - what is truth? or the incorrigible victors . Druffel-Verlag , Leoni 1963. From 1968 under the title: What is truth? The Jews and the Third Reich.
  • The drama of the Jews of Europe. Hans Pfeiffer Verlag, Hanover 1965.
  • Operation “Deputy”. Homage to an unbeliever (with Jutta Groll). Damm, Munich 1966.
  • Les responsables de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Nouvelles Éditions latines, 1967. In German translation as:
The Provocation of the Century - How Germany Was Driven into World War II. With an afterword by the private historian and Holocaust denier David Irving . Grabert-Verlag , Tübingen 1989, ISBN 3-87847-100-9 .
  • The Rassinier case. A trial for the book “What is Truth?” Documentation, Druffel-Verlag, Leoni 1971.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Assemblée nationale: Les députés de la IVe République: Paul Rassinier
  2. ↑ The Lie of Odysseus. Karl Heinz Priester Verlag, 1959, p. 191.
  3. ↑ The Lie of Odysseus. Karl Heinz Priester Verlag, 1959, p. 20.
  4. ↑ Rassinier: What now, Odysseus? Karl Heinz Priester, Wiesbaden 1960, p. 55.
  5. ↑ The Lie of Odysseus. Karl Heinz Priester Verlag, 1959, p. 9.
personal data
SURNAME Rassinier, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, member of the National Assembly, teacher and Holocaust denier
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Bermont
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1967
Place of death Paris