Hoaxer Claude Lanzmann dead at 92; purveyer of holocaust by testimony

By Carolyn Yeager

SHOAH IS 'CATASTROPHE' IN HEBREW. No doubt about it, the laws passed in Germany were seen as a catastrophe for Jews by Jews, but what took place after that never rose to the level of a “Holocaust.”

Jews were encouraged, and even helped financially and otherwise, to emigrate out of Germany. Most Jews, knowing the nature of the German people, preferred to believe the threat would “blow over”, or was something they could manage to survive, or thought they were too highly placed to be affected by it (like the Warburgs).

Because World Jewry AND the British-French empires declared and carried on war against Germany (with the help of their powerful British-French Jewish citizens), events soon became catastrophic for Germany also. Thus Total War developed and the Jewish population living in German-controlled territory was put to work in labor camps. As war-atrocity propaganda is always present in wartime, the gas chamber stories began to circulate, helped along by typhus epidemics.

Claude Lanzmann, a French citizen, entered the fray in 1944 as a 17-18 year old by joining the so-called French Resistance as an illegal partisan saboteur, with the goal of killing German officers and troops in central France. The fact that the resistance was condemned under the prevailing laws of war that all European parties had signed on to was ignored by the Allies, who supported these lawbreakers in every way they could.

With this background in mind, what is the story of Claude Lanzmann? The NYTimes writes that his parents were “assimilated Jews” who had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe (no specific region mentioned). But, if this first generation French couple were assimilated, why didn't Claude and his brother enlist in the French Army and fight against the Nazis with real French soldiers? Instead, they joined the Communist resistance—yes, Jewish and Communist, not really French—alongside their father. Jews came first.

Lanzmann's mother left her husband and 3 children in 1934 (why do non-orthodox Jewish marriages tend not to last?)—Claude would have been 9—and when the war broke out, the motherless family moved to a farm in central France with their father. He taught them the most important rules for partisan warfare which they later used to disrupt German deployment of troops to Normandy, according to what Lanzmann wrote in his memoir “The Patagonia Hare.” After the war, Lanzmann lived in Israel for awhile. Upon returning to France, he lived with Simone de Beauvoir from 1952 to 1959 (she apparently liked short, ugly men) and edited the communist literary journal Les Temps Modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir.

Lanzmann's first film, Israel, Why, was released in 1973. It was shortly thereafter that he began traveling in Poland, searching for holocaust survivors to interview. He got financial support from German public television; it's film department director at that time, Wilfried Reichart, said, "We gave him absolutely free rein because it was quite clear to us that this was a huge topic and Lanzmann was the right person to cover it."

Not a documentary or oral history

The nine-hour film that resulted, in two parts, doesn't include any so-called archival material at all (eg. film of emaciated corpses or burial pits intended to prove evil deeds were done nor reference to any documents). On this, Lanzmann said in 1994 (Le Monde):

“In Shoah there is no time spent on archival material because this is not the way I think and work, and besides, there isn’t any such material. If I had found a film – a secret film, because filming was forbidden – shot by the SS, in which it is shown how 3000 Jews – men, women, and children – die together, suffocated in the gas chamber of crematory II in Auschwitz, then not only would I not have shown it, I would have even destroyed it. I cannot say why. That happens on its own.”

Instead, Shoah suggests, through eerie atmospherics and misty camera scenes, what Lanzmann wants the viewer to imagine they are seeing. It is comprised of the director questioning unsophisticated Polish Jews about what they can be encouraged to remember from 40 years ago, leading them to “go through the motions they went through as they relay their experiences. He turned them into actors” … and “managed to stage things so that we – as viewers – do not perceive what we are seeing as role-playing.” (Philipp Jedicke and Gertrud Koch, DW) 

Another reviewer, the New York Times' Daniel Lewis wrote that “Shoah” was never intended as a straightforward documentary or oral history, but rather what Lanzmann called “a fiction of the real … consciously artful” and this was done in order to “make the unbearable bearable.” Oh sure. It's more bearable to sit through 9 hours of nothing more than interminable talk and blank stares into the distance than it is to see something real happening. But Lanzmann's philosophy is that what allegedly was done to the Jews is too obscene to ever see or even think about, but only to know.

For example, in the film’s opening segment, Simon Srebnik comes back to Poland from living in Israel as a middle-aged man and is filmed by Lanzmann as one of only 2 or 3 Jews who survived Chelmno out of a projected 140,000 who died, and at the age of 13 yet. Believable? And Franz Suchomel, a former SS guard at Treblinka who had been convicted of war crimes and spent six years in prison, bragged to Lanzmann's hidden camera that it was not true, as some Jews claimed, that 18,000 a day were gassed at Treblinka. It was 12,000 to 15,000, he said, and noted with pride that when things were going well, the operation would take about two hours, from the arrival of a trainload of Jews until their incineration in the ovens. [A total impossibility, especially as Treblinka had no crematory ovens at all, but allegedly relied on open-air burnings on grates, using tons of firewood!]

Lanzmann filmed 350 hours of this, using the material also for later films he made between 1997 and 2010.

The New York Times' Daniel Lewis writes: “A relentless interviewer, he used whatever it took—filming surreptitiously, posing as a French historian trying 'to set the record straight'—to pry astonishing stories out of his subjects." Astonishing—but not genuine? Lanzmann is duly recognized and honored according to the current political climate, but those with some knowledge of holocaust lore and some self-respect are rightly wary of going all out in their personal praise. A masterful con job is more like what Claude Lanzmann accomplished.