The Work of Paul Rassinier

THE FRENCH professor Paul Rassinier (1906-1967) was one of the earliest scholars on what is known today as the Holocaust. What made Rassinier’s study invaluable was that he had been an inmate at Buchenwald himself and, as a Communist opposed to the Hitler government, his impartiality was not in doubt. He had no vested interest in defending the National Socialists.
In his book Did Six Million Really Die?, Richard Harwood describes Rassinier’s work for English-speaking readers:
Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of French academic Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post war years until his death in l966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism.
From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a teacher of history in the College d’Enseignement General at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille de la Resistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in November 1946.
Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed “extermination” of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely been translated from the French, although some of his writings appeared in English in 1978. His most important works are: Le Mensonge d ‘Ulysse (The Lies of Ulysses’, Paris, 1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences of them; and Ulysse ‘trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le Veritable Proce’s Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs Europ’een (1964), in which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and financial significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers. (more…)








