Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYVierteljahreshefte can be considered as a continuation of the [book]Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte. The circle of authors has increased considerably,but a core remains recognizable, first of all of course Rudolfhimself.I have not been able to concern myself even remotely as much withthe journal as back then with the book. I have only read several essaysin it – mainly those by the Italian author Carlo Mattogno – which alreadyat first sight testify of extraordinarily extended studies in archivesof the former eastern bloc, not least in Moscow, which have hithertobeen difficult to access: These articles fulfill all formal criteria of beingscientific in nature. However, I have also seen quite a few very polemicalarticles mainly directed against “established” scientific historiographyand several caricatures, which attest to bad taste, but which, mutatismutandis [with the necessary adjustments], have become surprisinglytopical during the past weeks due to the controversy about theMohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper.I therefore think that my expert report is not “outdated,” but I wantto take a brief look at the development of the reasoning about the NationalSocialist attempt at a “final solution of the Jewish question” bymeans of comprehensive measures of extermination.First it has to be ascertained that the “reduction of the victim numberof Auschwitz” by “established” historians has continued without anylegal sanctions ensuing from this: After the “official” reduction byFranziscek Piper from four million to 1.1 million and a correspondingchange of the memorial plaques in the early 1990s {p. 2} Jean-ClaudePressac reduced the number to 630,000, and in his 2002 article in thejournal Osteuropa Fritjof Meyer expressly separated the “gas victims”from the “victims by epidemics” and arrived at a number of 360,000.Insofar the doubts which the revisionists had articulated right from thestart have turned out to have been justified, although Meyer’s resultscan certainly not be deemed final and unimpeachable. No reasonableperson could still doubt, though, that all figures mentioned immediatelyafter the end of the war were uncertain to a high degree and in need ofcorrection – be it downward or upward, for the figures of Soviet warlosses were more and more considered to be too low. In my view it wasa misfortune that the terms final solution or Holocaust have been linkedso closely to the actual Auschwitz camp in Upper Silesia and to the“(homicidal) gas chambers,” because the final solution was in reality amuch more encompassing process, which could not to be exhausted by286