Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYI am Fascinated by the Deconstruction of Elie WieselFor a survivor of Third Reich persecution to parley a 120-page“memoir” into the basis of an industry and himself into an icon of moralauthority, sought by Presidents and Prime Ministers the world over, isan astonishing feat worthy of a Nobel Prize and every other civilianhonor. Yet it is Elie Wiesel’s very testimony that gives credence to thedoubts of Holocaust revisionists. And his vehement denunciation ofHolocaust denial leads careful readers to think this “windbag and poseur”5 doth protest too much.The tenet of a deliberate Nazi policy to exterminate all the Jews ofEurope is undermined by the fact that the Wiesel family and other HungarianJews were not arrested and sent to labor camps until May 1944,when the war had already turned against the Germans. Elie and his twoolder sisters survived two concentration camps in the worst period ofthe war; his father died of disease; his mother and little sister likely perishedwith typhus. Most of Wiesel’s other relatives survived; none wasgassed that we know of.Yet Wiesel conflates a “crematorium” with a “gas chamber” andclaims there were “thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitzand Birkenau, in the crematoria […].” 6 Surely he knows that this is nottrue; crematoria are used to dispose of the bodies of those who havealready died; they are not used as an instrument of mass murder. Mostof those who died in concentration camps in 1944-45 died of disease orwere executed by shooting. Of course others died from overwork, exhaustion,hanging, beating, etc. – but thousands did not die daily in thecrematoria.Wiesel insists Auschwitz was a death camp, part of Hitler’s FinalSolution, which he defines as a deliberate plan to exterminate all EuropeanJews. But his description of an ambulance at Auschwitz to take asick prisoner to the hospital, 7 his joy of being put in a hospital bed withwhite sheets, and his statement that “Actually, being in the infirmarywas not bad at all: we were entitled to good bread, a thicker soup,” allsupport the revisionists’ opinion that Auschwitz was a labor complexand a transfer camp, not one designed to exterminate enemies of theThird Reich.567www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010219&s=hitchensNight, p. 62.Ibid., p. 7713