Paul Rassinier

Paul Rassinier (18 March 1906 – 28 July 1967) was a political activist and writer who is viewed as "the father of Holocaust denial".

He was also a member of the French resistance who survived Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps.

A journalist and editor, he wrote hundreds of articles on political and economic subjects.

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

During World War I Paul's father Joseph, a farmer and a veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present day Vietnam) was mobilized, but was put into a military prison for his pacifist attitudes, something his son Paul never forgot.

After the war, his family favored the post-war socialist revolutions, and he joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1922.

In 1927, he served in the French Army in Morocco, where his pacifist views were reinforced by the brutal colonialist repression and military corruption he witnessed.

He later described how "We became deadened to scandalous scenes of torture, which had no reason to envy those of the Middle Ages, and saw the apparatus of dictatorship not retreating, but even advancing in the face of an assassination!"

Upon his demobilization, he returned to his teaching post and his political activism.

It is also around this time that he became a member of War Resisters' International.

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

In 1932, Lucien Carre, the Communist Youth Secretary of Belfort, was arrested, and a leftist coalition made up of several organizations, including the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (The SFIO), held protest rallies and demonstrations.

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 Rassinier were expelled from the Communist Party in 1932.

Jacob had been slated to be the Communist candidate as deputy for the Canton of Belfort.

After his expulsion, he still ran for office and won, which encouraged him, Paul Rassinier, and other alienated Communists to form a separate party, The Independent Communist Federation Of The East.

Formed in 1932, Rassinier was the Party Secretary, Jacob the Assistant Secretary.

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

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

Neither the party nor the paper became popular, and both were dissolved in 1934.

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

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

He also ran for office several times, without success.

Adopting the ideology of Marceau Pivert, he was a prolific author, denouncing the arms race, advocating the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, demanding more workers rights and supporting a pacifist ideology that would not be restricted to France, but become Pan-European.

As war clouds gathered, Rassinier wrote articles condemning Nazism and Fascism, describing their foreign policy as "a policy of gangsters", with warnings that neither Italy nor Germany could be trusted to respect their promises.

But when the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, Rassinier was one of many Frenchman who would describe himself as "an inhabitant of Munich".

Echoing the words of former Prime Minister Léon Blum, his support of the Accords was "without much pride, it is true, but without any shame", since he regarded war as the greatest catastrophe, and didn't believe "that even Mussolini after Ethiopia, even Hitler who makes blood run in the company of Spain, will risk such a madness".

He 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 August 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Rassinier was arrested by French counter-intelligence, who suspected that his newspaper was receiving Nazi funding.

Thanks to the intervention of Paul Faure and the SFIO, he was released a few days later, and when France was invaded in May 1940, he reported to his militia unit, where he and his comrades spent weeks in the barracks waiting for orders that never came.

After France was overrun, he resumed teaching in Belfort.

Many of the "Socialists of Munich" joined in collaboration, but not Rassinier.

In June 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, resistance in France came alive and 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 Ribière.

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

Like others in various nations who were members of War Resisters' International, he practiced non-violent resistance to the Nazi German occupation, both because of his pacifism and his fear that reprisals would fall on innocent people.

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

Using his publishing contacts, he printed false identity papers, and helped establish an underground railroad from Belfort to the Swiss town of Basel, smuggling resistance fighters, political refugees and persecuted Jews to safety.

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

Rassinier wrote articles for the Vichy-friendly newspaper Le Rouge et le Bleu (The Red and the Blue), then, along with J.L. Bruch, Pierre Cochery and Albert Tschann helped found The Fourth Republic, an underground paper that advocated resistance and tried to lay a post-war foundation for France, so "that all those who will survive the war together can and must rebuild peace together, and thus save the country from a civil war."

The Fourth Republic demanded that Germany was to be held accountable for the crimes of Nazism, but the contribution of the Treaty of Versailles would not be ignored, nor would Germany and Italy be held unilaterally responsible for starting the war.

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 Rassinier was already under arrest.