The Holocaust before It Happened

Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust: Jewish Fundraising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims during and after World War One, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003, pb., 140 pp., $9.95.

George Santayana was famous for his aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Perhaps those who believe in the myth of the `six million' have forgotten that Jews were making substantially similar claims regarding `six million' Jews about to perish in the aftermath of World War One.

Don Heddesheimer has written a fascinating account of these claims in The First Holocaust: Jewish Fundraising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims during and after World War One. Again and again the pages of the New York Times and other journals were filled with allegations that Jews in Poland and other war-torn countries, all `six million' of them, were threatened with imminent extinction through starvation and disease unless large sums of money were raised and sent overseas. As a matter of fact there was much starvation and disease in Germany and other war-ravaged lands but it did not primarily affect the Jews. Rather, as numerous American military and diplomatic personnel observed, the common people suffered while wealthy Jews lived high on the hog. Then as now, Jews sought to elevate their suffering above that of all others.

Heddesheimer establishes that despite much hand wringing over real and alleged suffering the bulk of the money for Jewish relief actually went to "constructive undertakings" – meaning such things as establishing cooperative banks in Poland, financing tradesmen and artisans, and, in particular, promoting Jewish agricultural settlements. It should be emphasized that this Jewish fundraising was conducted within the context of three key concurrent historical events: 1) the communist revolution in Russia; 2) the rise of Zionism in Palestine together with the incipient Palestine Mandate; and 3) the effort to secure `minority rights' (better, Jewish rights to a state within a state) in anti-Semitic Eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish relief served as camouflage for much broader political objectives.

Much of the money was channeled through the Joint Distribution Committee, an organization which still exists today. The Joint Distribution Committee was charged by many informed American diplomats and military men, such as Hugh Gibson, the U.S. ambassador to postwar Poland, with involvement in supplying the Bolsheviks (an activity that would have been facilitated by the fact that most Polish Bolsheviks were Jewish, according to Gibson). Such wealthy American Jews as Felix Warburg of the Kuhn-Loeb bank in New York helped finance Jewish agricultural colonies in Soviet Russia with the cooperation of the Soviet government. By 1928 there were 112 Jewish agricultural settlements in the Crimea alone.

Two organizations, in particular, were involved in the Soviet-Jewish collaboration: the aforementioned Joint Distribution Committee, and the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation – the so-called Agri-Joint, to which Julius Rosenwald, the owner of Sears, was a generous donor. Heddesheimer does an excellent job of putting this collaboration in proper historical context. He points out that many of these Jewish agricultural colonies were Zionist and were intended as training centers for eventual transfer to Palestine. He also makes clear the interrelatedness of the Zionist and communist movements by referring to several significant facts that have been largely forgotten. Thus, he quotes or paraphrases Dov Ber Borochov's The National Question and the Class Struggle, in which the Zionist desire for a Jewish state in Palestine was represented as a Marxist struggle by an oppressed nationality for its own autonomy. Heddesheimer also cites Nahum Sokolow on how, during the 1917 Communist uprising in the port of Odessa, entire battalions of Jewish revolutionaries marched in the streets behind banners proclaiming "Liberty in Russia, Land and Liberty in Palestine!"

There is a saying that "The more things change, the more they remain the same." This is the basic message of The First Holocaust. The essential elements of the post-World War II charge of the virtual annihilation of East European Jewry are already present in the post-WWI claim of the impending starvation of the `six million.' The only significant difference is the addition of the gassing claim twenty-five years later. Yet The First Holocaust does more than merely trace the antecedents of the latter extermination accusation. It demonstrates that organized Jewish power was already both massive and ominous even before World War One, able to achieve, for one, the abrogation of the longstanding trade treaty between the United States and tsarist Russia through pressure brought on the U.S. government almost entirely by Jews.

At 140 pages, The First Holocaust is a compact book, but it packs an enormous amount of thought-provoking data into a highly informed historical context. Scholars of the Holocaust and of the Jewish question will learn almost as much from The First Holocaust as will interested laymen.

The picture above depicts the old memorial plaque for the victims of the former concentration camp in Auschwitz. In 1995, the Polish authorities under President Lech Walesa officially reduced the number of victims from four to one and a half million, consequently the memorial plaque shown below was also changed. Nonetheless it still remains a criminal offence in some countries to deny the figure of six million Jewish Holocaust victims.

By Bill Wright

Some Books to Help you Research this Question:

Item No. 92:
Don Heddesheimer: The First Holocaust. Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War I. 2nd edition.
Six million Jews in Poland and Russia threatened with imminent holocaust: this allegation was appearing in such sources as The New York Times -- but the year was 1919! Don Heddesheimer's compact but substantive First Holocaust documents post-WWI propaganda that claimed East European Jewry was on the brink of annihilation, regularly invoking the talismanic six million figure. It gives details how that propaganda was used to agitate for minority rights for Jews in Poland, and for Zionism and Bolshevism in Poland and Russia; and demonstrates how Jewish fundraising operations in America raised vast sums in the name of feeding Polish and Russian Jews, then funneled much of the money to Zionist and Communist constructive undertakings -- including banks, unions, and kibbutzes -- rather than to starving Jews. The First Holocaust, which includes eye-opening testimony from American diplomats and military attachés stationed in Poland and Russia that contradicted Jewish persecution claims, is a valuable study of American Jewish institutional operations at a fateful juncture in Jewish and European history, an incisive examination of a cunningly contrived campaign of atrocity and extermination propaganda, two decades before the alleged WWII Holocaust -- and an indispensable addition to every revisionist's library.

Item No. 190:
Roger Garaudy: The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
In this headline-making work, a prominent French scholar delivers one powerful blow after another to the pernicious historical myths cited for decades to justify Zionist aggression and repression, including the Israeli legend of a "land without people for a people without land," and the most sacred of Jewish-Zionist icons, the Holocaust extermination story. For financial gain, as an alibi for indefensible policies, and for other reasons, Jews have used what the author calls "theological myths" to arrogate for themselves a "right of theological divine chosenness." The wartime suffering of Europe's Jews, he contends, has been elevated to the status of a secular religion, and is now treated with sacrosanct historical uniqueness.
This readable, thoroughly documented study examines the brutal dispossession and mass expulsion of Palestine's Arabs, exposes the farce of the Nuremberg victors' show trial, and shows that the notorious German "final solution" term referred to a "territorial" program of resettlement, not extermination. Founding Myths details the secret collaboration of prominent Jews with the young Nazi regime, and the 1941 offer by some Zionists, including a future Israeli prime minister, to join Hitler's Germany in a military alliance against Britain. The author presents a frank assessment of the powerful Jewish-Zionist lobby in the United States, showing how it effectively controls US policy regarding Israel, and plays a crucial role in shaping American public opinion.
For decades Roger Garaudy was prominent in the French Communist Party, making a name for himself as a Communist deputy in the French National Assembly, and as a leading Marxist intellectual and theoretician. Later he broke with Communism, eventually becoming a Muslim. When Founding Myths first appeared in France, it touched off a storm of controversy among intellectuals and a furious uproar in the media. Soon Garaudy was charged with violating France's notorious Gayssot law, which makes it a crime to "contest" the "crimes against humanity" as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46. A Paris court found him guilty and fined him $40,000. His trial and conviction for Holocaust heresy prompted wide international support, above all from across the Arab and Muslim world.
Relying on a vast range of Zionist, Soviet, American, and German source references, this well-documented study is packed with hundreds of eye-opening quotations, many by prominent Jewish scholars and personalities. Here, at last, this important work is available in a handsome, professionally edited English-language edition, with a valuable foreword by Theodore J. O'Keefe.

Item No. 85:
Arthur R. Butz: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry
The first book to treat the central questions of the Holocaust allegation -- the evidence for a German extermination program, for mass killings by poison gas, and for the deaths of some six million Jews -- with academic rigor, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century created Holocaust revisionism as a discipline with its appearance in 1976. Few professional historians could have devised the brilliant investigative strategy that is central to The Hoax: author Arthur Butz's focus on the information long available to the Allies on the operations of Auschwitz, a strategically important petrochemical center (Butz correctly surmised the existence of U.S. aerial photos of the camp years before it was admitted). The Hoax's several chapters on the question of Allied knowledge of Auschwitz have busied orthodox experts for nearly three decades with trying to explain how mass operations seem to have gone unnoticed for several years -- to no avail. The Hoax remains at the center of the revisionist inquiry, valuable even in those few areas in which it has been superseded by subsequent revisionist research: a book that, especially in this handsome new design and printing, needs to be read, and re-read, then read again, by every serious revisionist.
This new edition comes with several supplements adding new information gathered by the author over the last 25 years.

Item No. 106:
Norman G. Finkelstein: The Holocaust Industry. Reflexions on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
Jews lie and exaggerate about their sufferings during the Holocaust in order to attain an unassailable image as victims, which they then use as a shield against any attempt to criticize them, with the goal of gaining unlimited political and cultural influence and of extorting billions of dollars from nations all over the world.' This summarizes, in a somewhat unsubtle way, the content of this perhaps most provocative book ever written by a Jewish scholar. The establishment's reaction has been swift: Prof. Finkelstein lost his job as a lecturer at New York's City College, was unable to find another teaching position in New York, and faces law suits by Jewish groups in Europe for incitement to hatred (the truth is hatred for those who hate the truth!).
This book, the definitive exposé of the Holocaust racket by the son of concentration camp survivors, is a must read for everybody who desires or needs to learn' in a detailed, knowledgeable account of the abuse of the so-called 'Holocaust' for political and financial gain. The perfect introduction to an understanding of why the 'Holocaust' propaganda is so important and indispensable to the organized Jewish interest, and to why its critical analysis -- called revisionism -- should by of primary importance to the rest of the world.

Item No. 39:
Robert Lenski: The Holocaust on Trial. The Case of Ernst Zundel
A superb account of the second Zündel trial that focuses squarely on the dramatic courtroom testimony of the world's leading revisionists. The Holocaust on Trial lays out the meat of what Robert Faurisson, Fred Leuchter, David Irving, Mark Weber, and a score of other witnesses told the court on the evidence against homicidal gassings, on the actual performance of the crematoria, on the number of Jews who likely died in the war, on actual German policy, and the missing Hitler order. Learn how the revisionist scholars, experts, and activists such as Bradley Smith defended their testimony under withering cross-examination from Canadian prosecutors carefully coached by exterminationist authorities and read how the exterminationist scholars fared at the hands of Doug Christie. The Holocaust on Trial is the book on the legendary legal joust that resulted in the Leuchter Report (and thus all that the Auschwitz forensic studies that have followed), the eventual overturning of the "false news" statute, under which Zündel was convicted, and the vast infusion of energy and confidence into the revisionist movement that followed. An entertaining as well as a valuable book, full of unique photographs, for everyone who is interested in the advance of Holocaust revisionism and the career of its Canadian martyr, Ernst Zündel.

Item No. 93:
Michael Hoffman, Moshe Lieberman: The Israeli Holocaust against the Palestinians
Israel has made crystal clear that it will not even accept a Palestinian homeland. It seems as if Israel is gearing up to "transfer" (i.e., expel) the bulk of the Palestinians: since September 2000 Israeli troops and police have violated Muslim shrines, invaded Palestinian territory, shot down youthful demonstrators, shelled, rocketed, and machine-gunned civilian settlements with U.S.-provided ordnance, cold-bloodedly murdered suspected adversaries and civilian bystanders alike, hauled off thousands of Palestinians to concentration camps, where many of them have been tortured, taken hostages for use as human shields during their forays into Palestinian towns, blown up or bulldozed the homes of relatives of alleged guerrillas in a Sippenhaft policy reminiscent of the latter days of the Third Reich, and destroyed as much of the Palestinians' economy as has seemed practical. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is being so totally concealed by America's media that most Americans remain fixated on the sporadic Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis rather than the far bloodier policies that provoke them.
Michael Hoffman, a seasoned journalist, and Moshe Lieberman, a researcher for the late Israeli dissident Israel Shahak, go a good way toward setting the record straight in The Israeli Holocaust against the Palestinians. Part compilation of previously published reports by objective journalists from around the world, part sharp and sometimes impassioned analysis, and part historical background, the book provides compelling and graphic evidence in pictures and print of the ongoing atrocity of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.

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