BEST-SELLER A HOAX Of the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank, and the truth concerning this book is only one appalling insight into the fabrication of a propaganda legend . First published in 1952, The Diary of Anne Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then it has been republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was made into a successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank, the girls father, has made a fortune from the sale of the book, which purports to represent the real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its direct appeal to the emotions, the book and the film have influenced literally millions of people, certainly more throughout the world than any other story of its kind. And yet only seven years after its initial publication, a New York Supreme Court case established that the book was a hoax. The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote at the age of 12 while her family and four other Jews were hiding in the back room of a house during the German occupation. Eventually, they were arrested and detained in a concentration camp, where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was 14. When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end of the war, he returned to the Amsterdam house and found his daughters diary concealed in the rafters. The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the diary and was demanding payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish articles appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows: History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life than truth, and may become more effective than truth. The Western World has for some years been made aware of a Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to be her personally written story, Anne Franks Diary. Any informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to have been impossible as the work of a teenager. A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levins work on the Anne Frank Diary. Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,0OO because he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and implanted it in the diary as being his daughters intellectual work. Further inquiries brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: I was the attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That award was later set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner required by law. The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from Judge Colemans decision was pending. I am afraid that the case itself is not officially reported, so far as the trial itself, or even Judge Colemans decision, is concerned. Certain procedural matters were reported in 141 New York Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second Series 181. The correct file number in the New York County Clerks office is 2241 -- 1956 and the file is probably a large and full one . . . Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of frauds perpetrated in support of the Holocaust legend and the saga of the Six Million. Of course, the court case bearing directly on the authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary was not officially reported. A brief reference may also be made to another diary, published not long after that of Anne Frank and entitled: Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958). Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and executed in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the usual rumours allegedly circulating about the extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared under exactly the same Communist auspices as the so-called Höss memoirs. McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American edition, admit that they were denied access to the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and instead faithfully followed the expurgated volume published by the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952. All the proofs of the Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this kind are worthless as historical documents. ACCUMULATING MYTHS Since the war, there has been an abundant growth of sensational concentration camp literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments of truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures, relentessly creating an edifice of mythology in which any relation to historical fact has long since disappeared. We have referred to the type already - Olga Lengyels absurd Five Chimneys (24,000 corpses handled every day), Doctor at Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented person, This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Philip Friedman, and so on ad nauseam The latest in this vein is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray specialised in selling fake antiques to America before turning to concentration camp memoirs. The circumstances surrounding the publication of his book, however, have been unique, because for the first time with works of this kind, serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of its contents. Even Jews, alarmed at the damage it might cause, denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all, while B.B.C. radio pressed him as to why he had waited 28 years before writing of his experiences. It was interesting to observe that the Personal Opinion column of the London Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it roundly condemned Grays book, nevertheless made grandiose additions to the myth of the Six Million. It stated that: Nearly a million people were murdered in Treblinka in the course of a year. 18,0OO were fed into the gas chambers every day. It is a pity indeed that so many people read and accept this kind of nonsense without exercising their minds. If 18,000 were murdered every day, the figure of one million would be reached in a mere 56 days, not in the course of a year. This gigantic achievement would leave the remaining ten months of the year a total blank. 18,000 every day would in fact mean a total of 6,480,000 in the course of a year. Does this mean that the Six Million died in twelve months at Treblinka? What about the alleged three or four million at Auschwitz? This kind of thing simply shows that, once the preposterous compromise figure of Six Million had scored a resounding success and become internationally accepted, any number of impossible permutations can be made and no one would even think to criticise them. In its review of Grays book, the Jewish Chronicle column also provides a revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations concerning gas-chambers: Gray recalls that the floors of the gas chambers sloped, whereas another survivor who helped to build them maintains that they were at a level ... Occasionally, books by former concentration camp inmates appear which present a totally different picture of the conditions prevailing in them. Such is Under Two Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She was. a German-Jewish woman who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive conditions of a Russian prison camp before being sent to Ravensbrück, the German camp for women detainees, in August 1940. She noted that she was the only Jewish person in her contingent of deportees from Russia who was not straight away released by the Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast between the camps of Soviet Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor, disorder and starvation of the Russian camp, she found Ravensbrück to be clean, civilised and well-administered. Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her earlier experiences, and her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet porridge and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another camp inmate whether August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special occasion. She observed, too, that the barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably spacious compared to the crowded mud hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions, the causes of which we shall examine later. Another account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was also interned at Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the authors statement that rumours of gas executions were deliberate and malicious inventions circulated among the prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not accept Margarete Buber because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact that Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of Ravensbrück camp personnel in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the extermination legend.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:03:45 +0000
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