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By Richard A. Widmann-

This week, Russian lawmakers passed a bill that would make Holocaust revisionism illegal.  The bill introduces criminal charges for “denying facts” established by the Nuremberg tribunal regarding the crimes of the Axis powers, as well as “disseminating false information about Soviet actions” during the war.  Punishment for such violations would range from a fine of 300,000 rubles ($9,230) and up to five years imprisonment.

While time is expected to reduce the emotions surrounding war, the Second World War is an exception.  The myths of the past are being canonized not only into popular expression but into law itself.  The Soviet Union’s atrocities during this period rarely fall under scrutiny.

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By Richard A. Widmann-

Recent news accounts tell how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have located the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg.  While it is certainly surprising, to me at least, that ICE and Homeland Security spend their time looking for lost documents from the Second World War, the discovery is certainly of interest to historians and those interested in National Socialist Germany and the Holocaust.

The diary of Rosenberg, who served as Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories) has been missing since the Nuremberg trials.  News accounts suggest that researchers will find a vast treasure-trove of new information regarding the Holocaust, but will they?I suspect that the story will quietly disappear after no bomb-shells or even evidence of a program to murder Europe’s Jews is discovered within the diary’s pages.  There may be a minor discovery based on a tortured translation, but nothing more.  The diaries will then likely be sealed up and only allowed review under the watchful eye of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum lest anyone reveal some inconvenient history.

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By Thomas Kues

On 25 November 2010 the AFP news bureau reported the following:

“A Lithuanian historian quit his civil service job Thursday after seven ambassadors from fellow European nations accused him of denying the Holocaust. Lithuania’s interior ministry said that Petras Stankeras, an independent historian who also held a middle-ranking post in its planning department, had left at his own request. Interior Minister Raimundas Palaitis said Stankeras’s views were personal.

‘Such interpretations have nothing in common with the position of the interior ministry with regard to the Jewish genocide,’ Palaitis said in a statement.

The announcement came a day after the ambassadors of Britain, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden slammed an article by Stankeras in the mainstream weekly Veidas on the Nuremberg trials, where the victorious Allies tried top Nazi German officials after World War II. Stankeras wrote that the trials ‘provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million purportedly murdered Jews’. (Read more…)

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By Thomas Kues-

In 1945, the World Jewish Congress prepared a report on the “Criminal Conspiracy” against the Jews perpetrated by the Third Reich for the authorities in charge of bringing about the International Military Tribunal. Of this report, the chapter “Charge Eight: Mass Annihilation, part II” is of special interest. The document, which is found among the records of the World Jewish Congress at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, can be read online, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum website:

What did the World Jewish Congress want the “international justice” to believe about the supposed Nazi extermination conspiracy? In what way did they describe the origin and the implementation of it in form of the infamous “death camps? What were the sources behind the report? (Read more…)

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At the end of WWII, the Allies decided to try the German leadership for alleged war crimes. The background to this decision was spelled out in some detail in the “Moscow Declaration” of October 30, 1943. The Russians (I know that it is politically correct to call them “Soviets”, but just like the “Nazis” were Germans, so were the “Soviets” Russians) were ahead of this, as they already in November 1942 had created the: “Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices”. (Read more…)