Swindler's Mist: A Critical Review of Steven Spielberg's Film, "Schindler's List"

Swindler's Mist: Spielberg's Fraud in 'Schindler's List'

Copyright 1994 By Alan R. Critchley and Michael A. Hoffman II.

The following is an abridgement of a more comprehensive article, "Swindler's Mist" first published in Michael A. Hoffman II's Revisionist Researcher newsletter. http://www.hoffman-info.com

Hollywood illusionist Steven Spielberg's mendacious anti-German libel, "Schindler's List," is based upon a novel, that is to say, a work of fiction, titled in its first edition, "Schindler's Ark," by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally (the book's name was later altered to coincide with the title of the movie).

Keneally's work is riddled with errors. For example, in chapter 33 he states that when the Russians arrived at Lublin/Majdanek, they uncovered the secret of the extermination centers by discovering: "furnaces containing human bones and over 500 drums of Zyklon B. News of this was published throughout the world, and Himmler...was willing to convey promises to the Allies that the gassings of Jews would stop."

As a matter of fact, all large German concentration camps had cremation facilities, all of which burned human bones. All German concentration camps used Zyklon B as a life-saving disinfestation agent for killing body lice, the carrier of typhus.

If the Russian discovery proves extermination, then all German concentration camps were "extermination camps," which, unknown to the general public, no historian of World War II, either Jewish or non-Jewish, claims.

Furthermore, Heinrich Himmler never admitted to the Allies that the Germans were gassing Jews. In fact, he condemned the allegation as Allied propaganda.

There are certain aspects of Keneally's book which Spielberg omitted from the movie. Keneally mentioned that Schindler worked for the powerful Hungarian Jew Rudolf Kastner.

Nowhere will this information be found in Schindler's List because in 1944 Kastner helped Eichmann deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, in return for favorable treatment for Kastner's Zionist cronies. The fact of high level cooperation between Nazis and Zionists was too embarrassing to be included in Spielberg's pro-Zionist film.

Although there were orders to administrators from the National Socialist government that concentration camp inmates were not to be brutalized, the camps themselves varied from well-run, fundamentally decent places of confinement, to pure hell-holes, depending to a large degree on the quality of the Nazi leadership in each concentration camp.

Some commandants such as Amon Goeth and Karl Otto Koch were little more than criminals, while others like Hermann Pister were incorruptible and supervised the most humane facilities they could under the circumstances, given the scarcity of food and medicine in wartime Germany under conditions of saturation bombing by the Allied air forces.

There are many instances of attempts by the German military to secure humane conditions within the concentration camps. For example, in 1943 SS Judge Konrad Morgen of the Haupt Amt Gericht (SS-HAG) was assigned to investigate and prosecute brutality at Buchenwald.

Morgen was so successful in correcting conditions there that Himmler gave him an expanded staff and unlimited investigative authority in the camps. Morgen's next target of inquiry was Krakau-Plaszow and its commandant, Amon Goeth, the arch-fiend of Speilberg's film.

In Spielberg's "Schindler's List" Morgen's entire investigation of Goeth was reduced to a scene in which fleeting reference is made to Goeth having his books "audited." If you blinked, you missed it.

The crucial truth that Steven Spielberg withheld from his audience is that in September of 1944, Goeth was arrested by the Central Office of the SS Judiciary and imprisoned on charges of theft and the murder of concentration camp inmates.

Spielberg was certainly aware of this fact, since the arrest is mentioned in chapter 31 of the book by Keneally upon which the movie is allegedly based.

[Verification of the arrest and/or prosecution of Commandant Goeth by the SS can be found in Reuben Ainsztein's Jewish Resistance in Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe, p. 845; in the affidavit of Obersturmbannfuhrer Kurt Mittelstaedt, chief of the SS Central Judiciary at Munich and Morgen's immediate superio; and in the testimony of Morgen himself (cf. vol. 42, IMT "Blue series," p. 556].

Spielberg whitewashes the guilt of the OD (Ordnungdienst: Jewish ghetto police) who worked for the Nazis. Though occasionally shown taking bribes and helping the Nazis control Jewish crowds, their main role in the movie is that of bystanders and traffic monitors. In real life however, many OD were ruthless killers.

Toward the end of the movie, Schindler is shown being presented with an inscribed gold ring by the Jews he rescued. We are told that the inscription is from the Talmud, "He who saves a single life, saves the entire world." (This quotation also appears on posters advertising Schindler's List in video stores and schools, apparently having been selected as the film's motto by its promoters).

The saying has a nice, warm, humanistic tenor, but there's just one problem: that's not what the Talmud says. The actual Talmud verse states, "Whosoever preserves a single soul of Israel, Scripture ascribes to him as if he had preserved a complete world" (Tractate Sanhedrin 37a). The Talmud only praises the saving of Jewish lives. In Spielberg's non-stop deception, even the documented contents of Jewish books are falsified.

Much has been made of the supposed "conciliatory nature" of Schindler's List because it shows exactly two Germans (Mr. and Mrs. Schindler) acting decently. However it depicts every member of the German military as either a monster or a homicidal robot. The perpetuation of this false stereotype constitutes hate propaganda.

If a Muslim director were to make a film that depicted only two benign Jews and then portrayed the entire Israeli army as consisting of monsters and homicidal automatons, the American and European media would undoubtedly condemn it for hatefully stereotyping the whole of the Israeli army. Media perspicacity is not so acute when it comes to detecting the mechanics of Spielbergian hatred concealed in a human rights mask.

"Schindler's List" is more sophisticated than other "Holocaust" propaganda films, having been crafted by the most successful director in Hollywood, who is clever enough to give his villains some characteristics of self-doubt, complaint and fatigue. But the film is nonetheless historically fraudulent. In the course of mounting a defense against revisionist charges of a Jewish gas chamber hoax, Mr. Spielberg has perpetrated a hoax of his own.

Copyright 1994 by Alan R. Critchley and Michael A. Hoffman II

 

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