Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

The First Holocaust: Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War I, by Don Heddesheimer. 2003

Beyond Holocaust Denial. Easily-Verifiable Proof That Jews Have Often Greatly Exaggerated Pogrom Death Tolls. Implications for Old and New Accusations Against Poland

The author presents an impressive set of WWI-era newspaper accounts (e.g., the NEW YORK TIMES), some reproduced in the back of the book in their entirety, that wrote of millions of eastern European Jews on the verge of starvation, or of victims of pogroms. Some of them actually use the figure of 6 million impending Jewish deaths, and even use the term holocaust.

FANTASTIC TALES, IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, OF MASSIVE JEWISH POGROM DEATHS

The author does not believe that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews during WWII. However, this book has value, to the reader who is not a Holocaust denier, in vividly showing that Jewish accounts of persecution are often exaggerated, untruthful, or even fantastic. For example, consider the January 9, 1922 (p. 19) issue of the NEW YORK TIMES (The entire article is on p. 117 of this book). The Very Rev. Joseph H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, declared that 1,000,000 Jews had been slaughtered in the Ukraine. [Because Heddesheimer is, or is reputed to be, a Holocaust denier, some readers may question his credibility. For this reason, I have checked this NYT citation, and found it accurate.]

Accounts of extreme Jewish victim-hood, of course, did not end around WWI. In 1937, at a conference in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Samuel Untermeyer declared that at least 2 million of Poland’s 3 million Jews are virtually starving, and that the entire population of 3 million Polish Jews is threatened with what Untermeyer calls annihilation. (p. 62). This information was taken from the December 6, 1937 issue of the NEW YORK TIMES. [I checked the NYT citation and found it accurate. It is on page 18, and the total of Polish Jews is given as 3,150,000, not 3,000,000. Apparently, this was due to rounding]

The reader should consider the implications of the statements of Rabbi Hertz and of Samuel Untermeyer. These were not Jewish cranks or extremists. They were very respected Jews. In addition, the publication was not some tabloid. It was the NEW YORK TIMES, at that time one of the most prestigious of all newspapers.

UNSTATED IMPLICATIONS FOR POLAND AS THE TARGET OF MENDACIOUS JEWISH ACCUSATIONS

One shortcoming of this book is that author Heddesheimer fails to mention the alleged 1918-era pogroms in Poland. Various accounts had written of as many as 30,000 Jews killed by Poles. A commission, headed by Henry Morgenthau, a high-ranking Jew in the Wilson administration, found that they were 99% bogus:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/massive-pogroms-1918-fake-news-morgenthau/

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Now let us examine some supplementary information:

Long after WWII, there was a widely read book, THE PAINTED BIRD, authored by Polish Jew Jerzy Kosinski-Lewinkopf. He alleged that Polish peasants, under the Nazi occupation, acted in a sadistic manner to fugitive Polish Jews. Later investigation showed that these accounts were all bogus. See Czarny ptasior (Polish Edition), and read the detailed English-language Peczkis review.

LIKE 1918 LIKE 2018: LURID TALES OF POLISH JEW-KILLERS

There has been, in recent years, a new round of WWII-era pogrom tales about Poland, this time propounded by neo-Stalinists such as Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski. This includes the media fake news about 200,000 fugitive Jews killed by Poles during WWII.

The long history of untruthfulness of such accounts should behoove the reader not to believe such accounts unless they are independently corroborated.