45 Facts About Paul Rassinier

Paul Rassinier was a French political activist and writer who is viewed as "the father of Holocaust denial".

Paul Rassinier was born on 18 March 1906 in Bermont in the Territoire de Belfort, into a politically active family.

Paul Rassinier secured a post as a teacher at the Ecole Valdoie, and in 1933, he became a Professor of History and Geography at the College d'Enseignement General at Belfort.

Paul Rassinier moved up to become the Party Secretary of the PCF in the Department of Belfort.

Paul Rassinier supported Henri Jacob's effort to enlist the middle-class parties, and for this and other acts "betraying the interests of the working class", both Jacob and Paul Rassinier were expelled from the Communist Party in 1932.

Paul Rassinier was the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker.

The 6 February 1934 crisis seemed to create new opportunities for the worker's movement, and around this time Paul Rassinier joined the SFIO.

Paul Rassinier became Secretary of Federation SFIO for the Territory of Belfort, and revived a moribund newspaper, Germinal, to serve as the party organ.

Paul Rassinier received condemnation for his pacifist stance, but replied that while it's easy to be a fair-weather pacifist, a true commitment to peace is something done both in and out of season and he expressed his disappointment that so few Socialists were "on this side of the barricade".

In June 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, resistance in France came alive and Paul Rassinier first joined up with The Volunteers Of Freedom, a Republican-Socialist coalition; and then with the Resistance group Liberation, organized in the north of France by Henri Ribiere.

Paul Rassinier became the director of Liberation Nord for the territories of Alsace and Belfort.

Paul Rassinier, using an expression common at the time, did not feel comfortable "to play with the skin of others".

In 1986, testimony of resistance member Yves Allain revealed that Paul Rassinier had worked closely with BURGUNDY, an escape network set up by the Special Operations Executive to smuggle shot-down Allied pilots back home through Switzerland.

BBC broadcasts from both London and Algiers congratulated the founding of the paper, and broadcast some excerpts, though by the time the only wartime edition came out Paul Rassinier was already under arrest.

Paul Rassinier's life was saved when in reaction to attacks on Germans at a local pharmacy and coffee house, both German and Vichy French police launched a series of raids that led to several arrests, one of them a person with a forged identity card.

Paul Rassinier broke under interrogation and revealed how he had obtained it, and on 30 October 1943 Rassinier was arrested in his classroom by agents of the Sicherheitsdienst, his arrest observed by a Liberation-North agent who was delivering forged identity and ration cards to him.

For eleven days, Paul Rassinier was interrogated, the beatings involved leading to a broken jaw, crushed hand and ruptured kidney.

Paul Rassinier was then deported to Germany, enduring a three-day rail transport that ended on 30 January 1944 at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Paul Rassinier returned to France in June 1945 and was awarded the Ribbon of Resistance.

Paul Rassinier was classified as 95 percent an invalid.

Paul Rassinier returned to his teaching post, but because of his physical condition, was prematurely retired in 1950.

In 1945, Paul Rassinier resumed his positions as head of the Belfort Federation SFIO and editor of The Fourth Republic.

Paul Rassinier ran for office, and in June 1946 was elected as the substitute for Rene Naegelen, Belfort's Deputy to the National Assembly.

Naegelen did relinquish the post, and for two months Paul Rassinier served in the National Assembly of France, only to be beaten in the next election by Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt, an old rival.

Paul Rassinier continued with other political activities, such as working with Andre Breton, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono, Lanza del Vasto and Father Robert Treno in agitating for the rights of conscientious objectors.

Paul Rassinier blamed the high death rate at the two camps he saw on their corruption.

Paul Rassinier examined what he considered to be representative accounts of the camps.

Paul Rassinier describes his visits to Dachau and Mauthausen, noting that in both places, he got contradictory stories on how the gas chambers were supposed to have worked, and for the first time expresses his doubts on the existence of gas chambers and a Nazi policy of extermination.

However, the uproar led to complaints from members of the SFIO, and on 9 April 1951 Paul Rassinier was expelled from the party "in spite of the respect which his person imposes", as the expulsion document noted.

Paul Rassinier spent the rest of the 1950s advocating socialism and pacifism.

Paul Rassinier wrote articles for Defense of Man and The Way of Peace, condemning the wars in Indochina and Algeria, along with French post-war financial policy.

Paul Rassinier wrote for the libertarian newsletter Contre-Courant and the bulletin of the anarchist SIA, as well as many other publications.

Priester was one of the organizers of the right-wing Deutsche Reichspartei, and this, along with his increasing association with right-wing activists such as Maurice Bardeche led to him being denounced as an anti-semite by people such as Olga Wormser-Migot, who stated that Paul Rassinier "belongs to the spiritual family of Louis-Ferdinand Celine", a writer often criticized as anti-semitic.

In 1962, after the Jerusalem trial, Paul Rassinier published The True Eichmann Trial or The Incorrigible Victors, a condemnation of the Nuremberg Trials and Adolf Eichmann trials, and in an expanded second edition, of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, from which he had been forcibly excluded by the West German government.

Paul Rassinier criticized Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews, again critiqued witness testimony, and questioned the technical feasibility of the claimed methods of extermination.

Paul Rassinier cited the Zionist book L'Etat d'Israel by Kadmi Cohen to again assert that Zionist and Jewish organizations were conspiring to use Nazi crimes to extort money to fund themselves and the State of Israel.

Paul Rassinier claimed an advantage by using as his starting point the 1934 study The Jews in the Modern World by Arthur Ruppin.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a frequent critic of Paul Rassinier's who had exchanged correspondence with him, criticized this in 1980 in A Paper Eichmann - Anatomy of a Lie.

Also in 1964, in the course of a libel lawsuit brought by the French communist Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, it was revealed that Rassinier had written articles in the far-right magazine Rivarol under the nom de plume Jean-Paul Bermont, and he was forced to terminate many of his anarchist contacts.

Paul Rassinier was a declared atheist, but was outraged by Hochhuth's thesis that Pope Pius XII stood silently by while the Jews of Europe were exterminated, and saw in the play only an incitement to divide Europe by religious hostility and xenophobia.

Paul Rassinier traveled to Rome, and was given access to the Vatican archives.

From 1965 to 1967, Paul Rassinier continued to write, and his last series of articles, "A Third World War for Oil" were published in Defense de l'Occident from July through August 1967.

Paul Rassinier's kidneys had been badly damaged from his torture at the hands of the SS and his fifteen months in Buchenwald and Dora, and he never recovered.

Paul Rassinier was an invalid for the last twenty-two years of his life, with hypertension so bad that it was dangerous for him to stand up.

Paul Rassinier died on 28 July 1967 in the Parisian suburb of Asnieres, while working on yet more books, The History of the State of Israel and a book version of A Third World War for Oil.