[4] 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!

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.

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".

[11] 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.

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.

For eleven days, Rassinier was interrogated, the beatings involved leading to a broken jaw, crushed hand and ruptured kidney.

On 7 April 1945 he was evacuated from Dora on what became a death train, endlessly traveling the German rail network from one bombed-out destination to another, with no food, water, or shelter.

He claimed that he was awarded the Vermilion Medal of the French Recognition but there is no trace of it in the Journal Officiel's lists (Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d'un antisémite, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1999, p. 760, n. 178).

[17] Naegelen did relinquish the post, and for two months Rassinier served in the National Assembly of France, only to be beaten in the next election by Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt, an old rival.

By 1948, Paul Rassinier had been a history teacher for over twenty-two years, and was distressed to read stories about the concentration camps and deportations that he claimed were not true.

He was also appalled at the unilateral condemnation of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity that from his experience in Morocco he did not consider unique, and claimed to fear that nationalistic hatreds and bitterness would divide Europe.

I suddenly felt that by remaining silent I was an accomplice to a dangerous influence.Rassinier's first book, Crossing the Line (1949), an account of his experience in Buchenwald, was an immediate critical and commercial success, one reviewer describing it as "the first testimony coldly and calmly written against the demands of resentment, idiotic hatred or chauvinism".

After a see-saw round of trials and appeals, both Rassinier and Paraz were acquitted, and an expanded edition of The Lie of Ulysses was published in 1955, which sold well.

However, the uproar led to complaints from members of the SFIO, and on 9 April 1951 Rassinier was expelled from the party "in spite of the respect which his person imposes", as the expulsion document noted.

He wrote articles for Defense of Man and The Way of Peace, condemning the wars in Indochina and Algeria, along with French post-war financial policy.

In 1953, he published The Speech of the Last Chance – An Introductory Essay to the Doctrines of Peace, describing the ideology of pacifism, and in 1955 Parliament in the Hands of the Banks, a condemnation of capitalism and French financial policy.

Also in 1961, he returned to his earlier themes with Ulysses Betrayed By His Own, an anthology of the speeches he gave during a twelve-city lecture tour of Germany built around a third edition of The Lie.

[23] At the end of the expanded edition, he argued that continuing war crimes trials were part of a Zionist and Communist strategy to divide and demoralize Europe.

He criticized Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), again critiqued witness testimony, and questioned the technical feasibility of the claimed methods of extermination.

His critique of Doctor At Auschwitz by Miklós Nyiszli was partially confirmed twenty-five years later by the forensic historian Jean-Claude Pressac.

[26] The Drama generated little interest and languished in obscurity until 1977, when Georges Wellers, editor of the magazine Le Monde Juif, dissected the book in the first attempt at a detailed rebuttal of any of Rassinier's writings.

"[citation needed] Also in 1964, in the course of a libel lawsuit brought by the French communist Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, it was revealed that Rassinier had written articles in the far-right magazine Rivarol under the nom de plume Jean-Paul Bermont,[28] and he was forced to terminate many of his anarchist contacts.

[29] From 1965 to 1967, Rassinier continued to write, and his last series of articles, "A Third World War for Oil" were published in Défense de l'Occident from July through August 1967.

Barnes would posthumously publish a favorable short review of Rassinier's book The Drama of the European Jews, entitled Zionist Fraud for the American Mercury.