For many Revisionists, Steven Spielberg's Hollywood blockbuster - 'Schindler's List' - appears to epitomise the kind of global manipulation which more genuine seekers of historical truth and accuracy are really up against. Indeed, due to the way in which the film was gratuitously commended to all and sundry by the Zionist mass media, one could be forgiven for noticing the multifarious similarities between Joseph Goebbels' earlier position as Nazi Propaganda Minister and Spielberg's more contemporary role of manipulating the minds of the unsuspecting goyim on behalf of Imperial Zion.
However, the celluloid opus which in many ways provided the vociferous and scheming denizens of Organised Jewry with their most successful method of circumvention to date has, at least to some extent, already been dissected, demolished and dismissed by some of the Revisionist world's most erudite scholars. I will not, therefore, attempt to dwell upon the particulars of the film by reiterating what has already been said. On the contrary, this article will simply concentrate upon an exterminationist document which has been produced in the wake of Spielberg's much-vaunted epic.
On May 9th, 1995, exactly fifty years after Oskar Schindler's Jewish workers had been 'liberated' from the Emalia factory in Krakow, Carlton Television decided to broadcast a documentary about Victor Dortheimer. Whilst the reader will be introduced to Mr. Dortheimer in due course, the bulk of this article concerns a specially commissioned booklet which was published to accompany the programme, entitled 'A Schindler Survivor: The Story Behind The Documentary'. This booklet is little more than an exterminationist's travelogue, in which Dortheimer and a fawningly credulous television crew visit various sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Occupied Palestine. As a result of the fact that this whole episode was part of a Community Programmes Unit series called 'Londoners At War', the booklet - written by the programme's producer, Ron Fisher - was distributed en masse to schools, colleges and libraries across the length and breadth of England's capital city. What follows is a critical analysis of the booklet and a summary of the main reasons for its publication.
In 1943 Victor Dortheimer was twenty-five years of age and an inmate of Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. Born in 1918 Dortheimer was a young painter and decorator who had been interned for no other reason than the simple fact that he was a Jew and, therefore, viewed - along with many others - as a potential risk to the long-term stability of Hitler's Third Reich. According to Dortheimer himself, 1943 was the year in which he was comissioned to work at Oskar Schindler's Emalia factory rather than face deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place where - even at the best of times - imaginations tend to run wild and even aspiring exterminationists like Ron Fisher are forced to admit that 'Auschwitz the death camp seems at times to be almost eclipsed by Auschwitz the theme park' ['A Schindler Survivor: The Story Behind The Documentary' by Ron Fisher, Carlton UK Television, 1997, p. 23].
But those of you already familiar with some of the Jewish names which appear on the roll-call in Thomas Keneally's well-publicised novel, 'Schindler's Ark', or in Spielberg's aforementioned 'Schindler's List' for that matter, will be aware that Victor Dortheimer does not receive a single mention. Ron Fisher even admits as much in his booklet:
'We contacted Universal Pictures head office in London to dig around for some basic TV research material. We were absolutely astonished to be told by their press department that there was no Victor Dortheimer - or anyone else by the name of Dortheimer, come to that - on their list of Schindler survivors. The alarm bells rang in our heads' [Fisher, p. 7]. But whilst Dortheimer's name was soon conveniently unearthed by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and Archive Centre in Jerusalem - who, incidentally, have been known to list the names of living Jews amongst the names of those said to have perished at the hands of the Nazis - Fisher takes a swipe at the Hollywood film industry by asking:
'Did Spielberg's researchers bother to count the number of survivors on their lists? They certainly didn't seem the slightest bit concerned that at least three survivors did not seem to exist as far as Universal Pictures was concerned' [Fisher, p. 8]. But this statement merely leads one to speculate whether Fisher himself is simply trying to appear meticulous in his determination to excuse the fact that he and his television crew had suddenly been presented with a far lesser specimen of survivus bullshitius than originally envisaged. Dortheimer is certainly unique in that when he and his chaperones from Carlton Television visited Auschwitz, the baggy-faced old rogue was entering the camp gates for the very first time. At least when Dortheimer began to elucidate upon the perceived fate of his co-racialists he was echoing the absurd sentiments of his peers, rather than attempting to indulge in a spot of historical embroidery himself. At last! A Jew who does not personally claim to have see any so-called 'gassings' but who, due to his total absence from Poland's main concentration camp, does not feel obliged to invent a series of macabre stories in order to justify the fact that he survived the horrors of the Third Reich.
Commenting on the Auschwitz Museum, however, Fisher makes the ridiculous assumption that:
'. . . inmates who arrived with blue ink engraved on their forearm had a chance of life. If you had a number you were a person - without a number you were due to be a dead person - you didn't exist - no record - no person. These were the Jews who went straight up the railway line three miles beyond Auschwitz to the Birkenau death camp. Off the platform and straight to the gas chambers' [Fisher, p. 24]. He never quite explains, however, why hundreds of those who did perish at Birkenau - for whatever reason - also had distinctive tattoos on their forearms.
Despite Fisher's claim that Dortheimer's 'memory of those days is near perfect' [Fisher, p. 4], once he is back on home ground - in this case that of Plaszow railway station - he soon demonstrates that his own imagination is just as lucid as the Simon Wiesenthals and Kitty Harts of this world. Indeed, as a couple of obliging Polish guards prised open the heavy doors of a nearby railway carriage, Dortheimer announced: 'This is the wagon that we special Schindler workers were taken to Grossrosen camp' [Fisher, p. 16]. According to Ron Fisher: 'Either Victor almost believed that this was the very wagon he was transported in, or his grammar had slightly altered his meaning!' [Ibid.]. Yes, quite. And perhaps his over-active imagination was simply beginning to run away with him?
In 1944, as the Second World War was drawing to a close and Russian communists were set to consolidate their victory in Eastern Europe, Oskar Schindler took his 1,000 Jewish employees to a new factory at Brunnlitz in what is now the Czech Republic. But despite the fact that Schindler himself was just a greedy capitalist swine who was only ever interested in having a ready-made army of workers at his beck and call, Fisher maintains that:
'. . . the whole factory was a sham. Schindler had no intention of producing a single shell fr the German war effort. In fact he deliberately miscalculated measurements which made the weapons too big or too small' [Fisher, p. 28]. In addition, Dortheimer claims: 'We produced nothing for the war - this whole factory was a camouflage to protect us.' [Ibid.]. This is complete and utter nonsense. Schindler's factory played a key role in the German armaments industry and was heavily scrutinised by Nazi officials from Berlin. Firstly, of course, Dortheimer may be trying to distance himself from the fact that both he and his alleged co-workers had received a greater degree of preferential treatment than those Jews who had been packed off to the concentration camps. After all, a 'survivor' who had conveniently avoided being sent to Auschwitz would hardly make things worse for himself by admitting to having contributed to the Nazi armaments industry. Secondly, we must take into account Alan R. Critchley's view that:
'Schindler was working as an informant for the powerful Hungarian Jew Rudolf Kastner. Spielberg omits this connection in 'Schindler's List'. Why? Because in 1944 the Jew Kastner helped Adolf Eichmann deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, in return for favourable treatment for Kastner's Zionist cronies. The fact of high-level co-operation between Nazis and Zionists was omitted from Spielberg's pro-Zionist film' ['Autopsy On An Epic' by Alan R. Critchley in 'Action Report', Ed. David Irving, September 1994, p. 6]. In fact as the Jewish historian, Lenni Brenner, writes in 'Zionism In the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal [Croom Helm, 1983], Kastner played a key role in the Nazi-Jewish plot to send Jews to Palestine so that they could forcibly obtain that land from the indigenous Arab people. Returning to Schindler's motives for arranging that certain Jews should be under his own jurisdiction rather than be interned in concentration camps, Dortheimer confirms the fact that Schindler himself was only ever concerned with the advancement of his own financial interests by referring to an incident after the war:
'He had a drink problem. This was so bad that when he was very poor he sold the gold ring that the survivors had made for him from the gold tooth of a Brunnlitz prisoner. He bought a bottle of whiskey with the money' [Fisher, p. 37]. So much for Schindler's self-sacrificing idealism!
Finally, I wish to conclude by accounting for Victor Dortheimer's less-than-honourable motives in collaborating with Ron Fisher's production for Carlton Television. According to Dortheimer's second wife, Lydia: 'For nearly thirty-five years since Victor and I got married, he never spoke about what happened. He did not think anyone was interested' [Fisher, p. 39].
On the contrary, Victor Dortheimer soon emerged from the shadows once he realised that he could make a shekel or two by becoming a professional 'survivor'. And, furthermore, judging by the following colourful and descriptive anecdote he is getting to be rather good at his new profession:
'I used to have the same nightmare about being beaten by the SS guards. I have also been woken in the middle of the night by a fear of being hungry. Until a few years ago, I would go to bed every night with a piece of bread by the bed. This mae me feel secure, that I need not be frightened' [Ibid.]. As Ron Fisher rightly concedes:
'There's also a bit of an actor in him - perhaps if it had not been wartime, Victor might have forged a career as a screen actor' [Fisher, p. 40].
