Twenty years after the end of World War II and the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, a trial was under way here today in which surviving inmates of the Nazi death camps testified that the camps had in fact existed.
The suit was brought by Paul Rassinier, French author, former Socialist Deputy and himself a Nazi camp survivor, against the International League Against Anti-Semitism and its president, Bernard Lacache. Rassinier has claimed in recent years that the number of Jewish victims of the Nazis has been “grossly exaggerated” and that most victims died as a result of the brutality of their fellow-inmates. He has also implied that the gas chambers which were the principal means used by the Nazis to kill their victims did not really exist.
The defense strategy was aimed at demonstrating that the concentration camps and mass murders did take place. Attorneys for the plaintiff sought to show that neither the League nor its president could prove that Rassinier was “an agent of the Hazi International,” as Lacache had presumably charged. Rassinier, in denying the record of the Nazi camps, said that such statements were part of Jewish “propaganda.”
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