Klarsfeld Urges Moves to Refute Denials of Nazi Extermination Policy

Beate Klarsfeld, the Paris-based Nazi hunter, warned today that young people could become attracted to Hitler and Nazism unless a strong effort is made to refute the attempts by neo-Nazi and other “revisionists” to deny the facts of the Nazi extermination of six million Jews and others during World War II.

At a press conference at the headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith where she was surrounded by pictures of the Nazi persecution of Jews, Mrs. Klarsfeld said these revisionists are claiming that Hitler was not aware of the extermination of the Jews, that the gas chambers did not exist and that it is an exaggeration to say that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Mrs. Klarsfeld, a German-born non-Jew, said that is why she and her husband, Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and a Jew who is a survivor of the Holocaust, have published at their own expense, a new book, “The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania,” to refute these claims.

The book, edited by Serge Klarsfeld, answers all three of these claims in documented analyses by Dr. Joseph Billig, formerly an historian at the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris, and George Wellers, a Laureate of the French Academy of Science and National Academy of Science.

Mrs. Klarsfeld especially pointed to a report for Himmler by the SS’s Inspector of Statistics, Richard Korherr, which listed the number of Jewish deaths as of Dec. 31, 1942 and March 31, 1943. She noted that Korherr himself was located in Lower Saxony in Germany and photographed so that the neo-Nazis cannot say he did not exist.

CHRISTIANS WANT TO FORGET

Mrs. Klarsfeld, who is returning to Paris today after a five-week lecture tour of the United States and Canada, noted that Christians in Europe want to forget the Nazi era and so they are susceptible to arguments that the Holocaust did not happen. She said more and more newspapers carry articles by “revisionist” historians claiming that the mass exterminations did not happen or that Hitler did not know about them.

She said Hitler’s accomplishments were being stressed, such as his ending of unemployment or the building of highways, and if the murders of Jews and others could be excised from the public mind he might become attractive again, particularly to the young people born after World War II.

Mrs. Klarsfeld also briefly described the efforts by her husband and herself over the past seven years in attempting to force West Germany to extradite Germans who had been convicted in France of being war criminals there during World War II.

She noted that they had previously published three books; one containing 150 documents showing the guilt of Nazis involved in deporting Jews from France; the second particularly aimed at three war criminals now in Germany who headed the deportation operations, and the third listing all 80,000 Jews sent to death camps from France.