Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYlar thesis be sustained about the voluntary and deliberate assistance ofmajor parts of the ruling classes, even of the German people?Yehuda Bauer drew attention to the fact that “Ukrainian forces wereheavily involved” during the pogroms in Lemberg in early July 1941, 15and he thus indirectly raises the question about the European, especiallythe east European anti-Semitism as a prerequisite for the realization ofthe “final solution.” Yet he does not mention the precedents either,namely the mass murders of the retreating NKVD in Lemberg, whichwere given a massive and possibly grossly exaggerated publicity inGermany.Another one of Hilberg’s considerations points at the fact that in SSdocuments hearsay is astonishingly important: “For instance we hearonly from a man like Eichmann, who has heard from Heydrich, whohad heard from Himmler what Hitler had said. Needless to say that thisis not the best source for the writers of history.” 16 But if the “Fama”[rumor], the inaccuracy of knowledge, was so important even for thehigher echelons of the perpetrators, how could it not have been of centralimportance also for the victims, and it is indeed known from theaccounts of intellectual witnesses such as Benedikt {p. 18} Kautskysthat the camps as a whole were breeding grounds for rumors. Nothing ismore comprehensible and easier to explain than this, but for the publicit is apparently still not self-evident that science is obligated to separate“rumors” from “reality” as clearly as possible. Once more it needs to beascertained that the established science’s critique of numerous earlierallegations about the methods of mass murder – blowing in steam, orpumping out air, or killing on gigantic electric plates or in train cartsfull of unslaked lime – occurred not explicitly but by tacit omission, nodifferent than in the case of Gerstein’s statements.An explicit and thorough critique of the “rare and unreliable” eyewitnessstatements about the gas chambers, so Arno Mayer, 17 was doneby Jean-Claude Pressac in his monumental, hardly obtainable book withthe misleading title Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.Although he does not dispute the essential correctness of the accountsby men such as Paul Bendel and Miklos Nyiszli, he nevertheless concludesthat all the numbers given by these witnesses have to be dividedby four. 18 In his most recent work Die Krematorien von Auschwitz [TheCrematories of Auschwitz] he also comments on the total number ofvictims in Auschwitz, and in the German edition he arrives at the allegation,although in a not quite transparent way, that the total number of272