Churchill and the British as Masters of War PropagandaDuring the First World War, the British cynically exploited all the resources of propaganda based on wholly fictitious atrocity stories. note 50 During the Second World War they remained true to form.
Today people widely condemn Neville Chamberlain for his policy of "appeasement" in dealing with the Germans, whereas people hold, or pretend to hold, Winston Churchill in high esteem for his determination to carry on war against Germany. It is not yet certain that history, with time, will uphold this judgment. New discoveries concerning Churchill's personality and wartime role raise questions about the dubious justifications for that determination, along with questions about the fruits of his policies. At least Chamberlain had foreseen that even a British victory would entail disaster for his country, her empire, and for other victors as well. Churchill did not see this, or did not know how to see it. He promised "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," to be followed by victory. He did not anticipate the bitter morrow of victory: the hastened disappearance of the empire he held dear, and the handing over of nearly half of Europe to Communist imperialism.
During an address given several years ago, David Irving, Churchill's biographer, showed the illusory nature of the justifications given by Churchill, first, to launch his countrymen into the war, and then to keep them in it. The business, if one may so term it, was carried out in four phases.
In the initial phase, Churchill assured the British that it was their obligation to go to the aid of a Poland that had fallen victim to Hitler's aggression but, two weeks into the war, this motive was nullified by the Soviet Union's aggression against the same ally.
In the next phase, he explained to his countrymen that they must carry on the war in order to safeguard the British empire. He rejected Germany's repeated peace proposals, and in May 1941 he had the peace emissary Rudolf Hess incarcerated. Whereas Germany wanted to preserve and maintain the British empire, he chose to conclude an alliance with the empire's worst possible enemy: the American Franklin Roosevelt. Thus the second motive was then nullified.
In a third phase, Churchill told the British that they were duty-bound to fight for Democracy, including its most paradoxical variety: the Soviet Socialist. He held that a second European front must be opened to relieve the burden on Stalin. This of course meant aiding a dictatorship that had assaulted Poland on September 17, 1939, and which was preparing a new conquest of that country.
As late as one month before the end of hostilities in Europe (May 8, 1945), British propaganda was generally lacking in coherence, while many British and American soldiers were appalled to learn the extent to which their bombers had ravaged Germany.
It was then that suddenly, in April 1945, there occurred a miracle that enabled Churchill to find his fourth, and really good motive: the discovery of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp prompted him to assert that, Britain's difficult fight over nearly six years, wreaking and enduring so much havoc, was for no less a cause than that of civilization itself. To be sure, on more than one occasion he had already spoken to his countrymen, in his customarily high-flown rhetoric, about Britain as the cradle of a civilization threatened by the Teutonic hordes (the "Huns," as he called them), but these oratorical devices no longer worked so well. The godsend was the discovery in April 1945 of a pestilence-ravaged camp: a boon for Churchill and for British propaganda.
At Bergen-Belsen, the British Introduce the 'Nazi Crime' Media SpectacleSituated near Hannover, Bergen-Belsen was originally established as a camp for wounded soldiers. In 1943 it became a detention center for European Jews who were to be exchanged for German civilians held by the Allies. In the middle of the war, Jews were transferred from that camp to Switzerland or, by way of Turkey, even to Palestine (yet another proof, as may be pointed out in passing, of the absence of an extermination program).
Until the end of 1944, conditions for inmates at Bergen-Belsen were about normal: then, along with a convoy of deportees brought from regions in the East facing the imminent Soviet onslaught, there arrived epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and exanthematic typhus. The resulting disaster was aggravated by the Anglo-American bombing raids that severely hampered deliveries of medicine, food, and -- most devastating of all -- water. The rail transports of Jews from the East no longer took just two or three days to reach the camp, but rather one or two weeks. Because of Allied air bombardment and strafing, the trains could proceed only at night. As a result, the trains arrived containing only dead and dying, or exhausted men and women unfit to withstand such epidemics. On March 1st, 1945, camp commandant Josef Kramer sent a letter to General Richard Glücks, chief of concentration camp administration, in which he described this "catastrophe" in detail, concluding with the plea: "I implore your help in overcoming this situation." note 51
Germany, on its last legs, could no longer deal with the influx of its own eastern refugees arriving by the millions. It could no longer manage to supply its army with weapons and ammunition, or its population with food. Finally, it could no longer remedy the tragic conditions in camps where even guards were dying of typhus. Himmler authorized Wehrmacht officers to establish contact with the British to warn them that they were approaching, in their advance, a frightful den of infection. Negotiations followed. A wide truce area was declared around Bergen-Belsen, and British and German soldiers decided, by mutual consent, to share the task of camp surveillance.
But what they found in the camp, including barracks and tents flooded with excrement, and the unbearable odor of decomposing bodies, quickly had the British feeling indignant. They came to believe, or were allowed to believe, that the SS had deliberately chosen to kill the inmates or to let them die. And, despite their own best efforts, the British were unable to curb the terrible mortality rate.
Then, like a swarm of vultures, journalists swooped down on the camp, filming and photographing every possible horror. They also proceeded to arrange certain scenes of their own making: a famous one, shown for example in the film "Night and Fog," is that of a bulldozer pushing corpses into a large pit. Many viewers have been led to believe that they are seeing "German bulldozers." note 52 They didn't notice that the bulldozer (just one) is driven by a British soldier who, doubtless after a body count, is pushing the corpses into a large trench that had been dug after the camp's liberation. The Jew Sydney Lewis Bernstein, London head of the Home Office cinema section, called on Alfred Hitchcock to make a film on these "Nazi atrocities." Hitchcock accepted, but, in the end, only fragments of his film were made public, probably because the complete version contained assertions that might cast doubt on its authenticity. note 53
On the whole, the "shock of Bergen-Belsen" was a great success for Allied propaganda. In every possible way, the media exploited it to show dead and dying camp inmates to the world at large, but while at the same time leading viewers, through commentary, to think that these inmates had been killed, murdered, or exterminated, or else were walking corpses condemned to perish as victims of killing, murder, or extermination. Thus, on the basis of the ghastly conditions in a camp that, as already noted, had neither crematories nor (as conventional historians acknowledge) any homicidal gas chamber, was built the general myth of the existence and use, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, of "gas chambers" coupled with crematories.
Among the most famous casualties of epidemics in that camp were Anne Frank and her sister Margot who, for nearly 40 years, were widely and persistently said to have been gassed at Auschwitz (from where, in fact, they had been brought), or killed at Bergen-Belsen. Today, it is generally conceded that they died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February-March 1945.
The "shock of Bergen-Belsen" was very quickly imitated by the Americans who, turning to Hollywood, shot a series of motion pictures on the liberation of the German camps. After editing the extensive footage (6,000 feet of film, of a total of 80,000), they produced a film that was shown on November 29, 1945, at the Nuremberg trial. Everyone, including most of the defendants, found it quite disturbing. A few of the defendants sensed the deceit, but it was too late: the great lie's bulldozer had been set in motion. It is still running today. The viewers of all the many horror films on the "Nazi camps" have, over time, been conditioned by the choice of images and the commentary. A section of wall, a heap of shoes, a smokestack: it has taken no more than these for the public to believe that they have seen a chemical slaughterhouse.
Fifty-two years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, Maurice Druon, secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française, testified at the trial of Maurice Papon, accused of "collaboration" in the "Final Solution." Here is an extract of his deposition mentioning gas chambers at that camp (which, as all historians today acknowledge, had none), the famous bulldozer, and the "hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other": note 54
When speaking today of the camps, one has in one's eyes, and the jurors present have in their eyes, those horrid images that the films and the screens offered and offer to us; and it is quite right to do so [that is, to show them], and they ought to be re-shown each year to every secondary school graduating class. But those images, of the gas chambers, of the mounds of hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other, of those children playing among the corpses, and of those bodies so great in number that they had to be pushed into a pit by a bulldozer, and of those troops of skeletons, staggering and haggard, in striped pajamas, with death in their eyes, those images, and I hereby bear witness, I was, in my modest capacity of information officer, one of the 20 Allied officers to "view" them first, when the uncut footage, as it is called, arrived just after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the English. But that was in the spring of 1945. Until then, no one knew. -- We must not judge with our trained eyes [sic] of today, but with our blind eyes of yesterday.
Maurice Druon, in reality, had "trained eyes" yesterday and has "blind eyes" today. More than 50 years of propaganda have blinded him. But already during the war, were not he and his uncle Joseph Kessel, both Jewish, blinded by their hatred of the German soldiers when they wrote the atrocious "Partisans' Song," which includes the exhortation "Killers by bullet and by knife, kill quickly!"?
The Americans and the Soviets Outdo the BritishIn 1951, anyway, the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt had the honesty to write: note 55
It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in ... The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany.
Let us once more recall that the expression "extermination camps" is a creation of Allied war propaganda.
Eisenhower thus followed Churchill's lead and set about building, on an American scale, such a propaganda edifice, based on atrocity stories, that soon everything and anything came to be allowed, as much in regard to the vanquished as to the simple, factual truth. In news reports about the German camps there were added to the true horrors, as I have said, horrors truer than life. Eliminated were the photographs or film segments showing inmates with beaming faces, such as that of Marcel Paul, note 56 or those in relatively good health despite the severe shortages or epidemics, or, as at Dachau, the healthy Hungarian Jewish mothers with their babes-in-arms. Instead, the public was only shown images of the sickly, the wasted, the human rags, who were actually just as much victims of the Allies as of the Germans, for the former, with their carpet-bombing of the whole of Germany and their systematic aerial strafing of civilians -- even of farm workers in the fields -- had brought about an apocalypse in the heart of Europe.
Respect for the truth will oblige one to remark that neither Churchill, nor Eisenhower, nor Truman, nor de Gaulle was impudent enough to lend credence to the tales of chemical slaughterhouses. They left that job to their propaganda specialists and to the judges of their military tribunals. Appalling tortures were inflicted on the Germans who, in the eyes of the Allies, were guilty of all of those "crimes." Reprisals were carried out against German prisoners and civilians. As late as 1951 German men and women were being hanged. (Even in the 1980s, the Soviets were still shooting German or German-allied "war criminals.") British and American soldiers, at first quite taken aback at the sight both of the German cities reduced to rubble, and of their inhabitants turned into cave-dwellers, could return home with peace of mind. Churchill and Eisenhower were there to vouch for the Truth: the Allied forces had brought down Evil; they embodied Good; there was to be a program of "re-education" for the defeated Germans, including the burning by the millions of their bad books. All told, the Great Slaughter had come to a happy ending, and had been carried out for a righteous cause. Such was the fraud made holy by the Nuremberg show-trial.
A Fraud at Last Denounced in 1995It took no less than 50 years for a historian, Annette Wieviorka, and a filmmaker, William Karel, to reveal to the general public, in a documentary entitled Contre l'oubli ("Against Forgetting"), the 1945 American and Soviet stagings and fabrications carried out in the context of the liberation of the camps in East and West.
Wieviorka, a French Jew, and Karel, an Israeli who has lived in France since 1985, have manifestly been influenced by the French revisionist school. Although quite hostile toward the latter, they have nonetheless admitted that the time has at last come to denounce some of the exterminationist propaganda's most glaring fictions. On this subject one may refer either to an article by the journalist Philippe Cusin note 57
or, especially, to another article that Béatrice Bocard prepared for the repeat broadcast of "Against Forgetting" on Antenne 2 television, a piece whose title alone says a great deal: "The Shoah, from reality to the spectacle. The indecent stagings by the liberators in the face of the deportees' accounts." note 58
In it Bocard wrote:With only slight exaggeration, it might be said that the liberation of the concentration camps introduced the reality shows ... The first signs of the genre of spectacles that television channels like CNN were to make commonplace 50 years later were already there, with attempts to outdo [one another] at indecency, at voyeurism, and with recourse to staging ... The least infirm of the survivors were made to repeat their script before the cameras: "I was deported because I was Jewish," says one of them. Once, twice ... Not to be outdone by the American "show," the Soviets, who had done nothing at the time of the Auschwitz camp's liberation, shot a "fake liberation" a few weeks afterwards, with Polish extras enthusiastically greeting the soldiers ... "William Karel is the first to have dissected these false images that we had always been told, until quite recently, were genuine," says Annette Wieviorka. How had it been possible to accept them? "People are not in the habit of questioning images as they question texts," the historian explains. "The example of the [purported] mass graves at Timosoara [Romania, December 1989] is not too distant."
It goes without saying that, in this article by Bocard, the manipulations were presented as being offensive ... for the internees. Some German soldiers and civilians denounced this sort of fakery as early as 1945 but, instead of being believed, they were accused of Nazism or anti-Semitism.http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n1p-2_Faurisson.html 
