Robert Faurisson at the second Zündel trial in Toronto (1988) – Part 1/4
Extract from the transcripts as edited by Barbara Kulaszka, “Did Six Million Really Die?” Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988, p. 604-624.
[Dr. Robert Faurisson testified for six days on April 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 1988. He was the eighteenth witness called by the defence.]
Dr. Robert Faurisson had testified previously at the first Zündel trial in 1985 as an expert witness, on the same basis that Dr. Hilberg was allowed to testify, namely, whether the German government from 1933 to 1945 deliberately embarked on a scheme to exterminate Jews in Europe. (29-7963, 7973) Faurisson was qualified to testify in the same manner in the second trial by Judge Ron Thomas. (29-8001)
Dr. Robert Faurisson was born in 1929 near London, England. His father was French and his mother Scottish. Part of his youth was spent in Singapore and Japan and he attended Catholic schools in France from 1937 to 1946. From 1946 to 1955, Faurisson attended the University of Sorbonne, achieving in 1956 the Agrégation des Lettres in Greek, Latin and French, the highest level in France. In 1972, Faurisson obtained the highest of three doctorate awards available in France, the Doctorat d’Etat of Lettres and Sciences Humaines (State Doctorate). (29-7965, 7966)
From 1956 to 1968 Faurisson taught high school and from 1969 to 1974 he taught Modern French literature at the Sorbonne. From 1974 to 1979, he taught Modern Literature and Text and Document Criticism at the University of Lyon where he obtained status as a tenured professor. Since 1979, however, Faurisson had been unable to teach because of his writings. (29-7966, 7967)
With regard to literature, Faurisson had published four books and articles totalling about 1,000 pages; with respect to Text and Document Criticism, he had written books and articles totalling 750 pages in French and 300 in English. (29-7974)
Faurisson’s preliminary research into the Holocaust began around 1960 or 1961 and continued until about 1973. Said Faurisson: “It involved books like those of Raul Hilberg, of Gerald Reitlinger, on one side, and on other side, Paul Rassinier…” Faurisson termed as “exterminationists” those who believed, like Poliakov and Wolfe as well as Hilberg and Reitlinger, that there was an extermination of the Jews or an attempted extermination. On the other side were such people as Paul Rassinier and other revisionists who believed that they were able to demonstrate there was no such extermination or attempted extermination. (29-7967, 7968)
From 1974 to 1988 Faurisson’s research became centred on a systematic appraisal of documents located at the Jewish archive centre, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, France. He had also conducted research at the National Archives in the United States, the State Museum in Auschwitz, Poland, and the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, West Germany, and made attempts to gain access to the documents at [the International Tracing Service] in Arolsen, West Germany. (29-7968, 7969, 7970) He had accessed the personal files of Holocaust revisionist Paul Rassinier, who died in 1967. (29-7970)
When researching out of France, Faurisson usually stayed only a few days, but used a contact person at the location to obtain copies of the documents for him. He also wrote to the State Museum at Auschwitz to ask for documents. (29-7969)
Faurisson conducted on-site examinations of Auschwitz-Birkenau for one day in 1975 and for 10 days in 1976. He also examined other German concentration camps, including Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim Castle, and Struthof-Natzweiler. (29-7970, 7971)
In the course of his research Faurisson had investigated the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank. For this purpose, Faurisson had travelled to Basel, Switzerland to speak to the father of Anne Frank and also to Amsterdam to visit the Anne Frank Foundation and to interview people who had known Frank. He had spoken to Anne Frank’s father for five hours one day and four hours the next. The purpose of the investigations was to determine whether Anne Frank had written the diary. (29-7971, 7972)
Faurisson was, to his knowledge, the first person to publish the plans of Krema I and Kremas II and III. These crematories, located at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were the buildings which allegedly contained the homicidal gas chambers. For the purpose of studying gas chambers, Faurisson had gone to Baltimore, Maryland in the United States to investigate and photograph American gas chamber facilities. His objective was to see how convicts condemned to death were killed in the facilities through use of hydrocyanic acid. This was relevant to the study of the German gas chambers since the agent allegedly used to kill the Jews, Zyklon B, contained hydrocyanic acid. (29-7972, 7973)
Since 1980 Faurisson had been a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of The Journal of Historical Review published by the Institute for Historical Review in Los Angeles, California. (29-7973)
Publications by or about Faurisson included Vérité historique ou vérité politique?: Le dossier de l’affaire Faurisson: la question des chambres à gaz (Historical Truth or Political Truth?), a book about the question of the gas chambers; in 1980, Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’Histoire. La question des chambres à gaz (Memorandum in Defence Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History/The Question of the Gas Chambers) with a foreword by Noam Chomsky; in 1982, Reply to Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and, under the pen name “J. Aitken” (“Aitken” being the maiden name of his mother) the book Epilogue judiciaire de l’affaire Faurisson (Judicial Epilogue of the Faurisson Case). He had also published a number of pamphlets, on such subjects as Élie Wiesel, the film Shoah, and the Müller document revealed by Emil Lachout. A book which examined his work was L’Incroyable Affaire Faurisson, which reproduced on 44 pages the plea which Faurisson had made to the Court of Appeal in Paris. (29-7974, 7975, 7976)
In 1986 Faurisson worked with Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, the author of The Auschwitz Myth, in translating the book from German to French. Faurisson wrote a postscript for the French version of the book of some 25 pages, with documents. (29-7976)
Faurisson had interviewed Emil Lachout in December of 1987 for nine hours, and published an article concerning him in the quarterly French review, Annales d’Histoire Révisionniste. (29-7976)
He had been referred to by Raul Hilberg in 1982 in a published interview as someone who had raised questions that had the effect of engaging historians in fresh research. (29-7977)
This ended the examination of Faurisson by defence attorney Doug Christie for the purpose of qualifying him as an expert witness in the subject of whether or not the German government, from 1933 to 1945, deliberately embarked on a scheme to exterminate Jews in Europe. Crown Attorney Pearson rose to cross-examine Faurisson on his qualifications. (29-7963, 7978)
Faurisson indicated that although his formal education was in Greek, Latin, French and text and document criticism, the study of the Holocaust amounted to the same thing: “the meaning of texts…,” whether those texts were Greek or Latin or French, or, in Holocaust revisionism, the meaning of testimony and documents. (29-7979) With respect to French literature, Faurisson had worked especially with works which had the reputation of being difficult to understand; those of the 19th or 20th century, particularly poets such as Rimbaud. (29-7985)
He did not speak German but could read the language. He liked to double check with someone else when working in German-language documents. (29-7983, 7984)
Faurisson agreed that he had taken no courses dealing with the Holocaust in the formal education leading up to his doctorate. Nor did his thesis deal with the subject; it dealt with an author of the 19th century. However, said Faurisson, the way he checked the text of this French author to understand his meaning, was the same way he tried to understand the text of the Wannsee protocol. He freely admitted that he needed and sought help in translating the Wannsee protocol, which was in German, and the diary of Anne Frank, which was in Dutch. While he had taken no courses in history proper, he had been obliged in his work to determine and understand texts “and history is text.” (29-7990 to 7992)
Pearson put to Faurisson that his views were considered unreasonable in the historical community. Faurisson replied that he had been asked this question earlier in the trial [during a voir dire] and supposed that he had agreed that his views were perhaps considered unreasonable by some but not all; his views were not considered unreasonable by Raul Hilberg, Robert Wolfe of the National Archives [of the United States] or by Michel de Boüard. (29-7992 to 7995)
Faurisson testified that he had no formal education in chemistry, architecture or gas chambers, “but that’s why I go and ask specialists. I consult specialists, plural, never one. At least two.” (29-7996)
Much of his work which was published in English was published by the Institute for Historical Review. (29-7996)
Pearson asked Faurisson why he had published under the name “J. Aitken”? Faurisson replied: “For a stupid material reason. I was asked to… write something about a judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris, 26th of April, 1983, and… I decided to write it [in] the third person. For instance, instead of saying ‘I’, I wrote ‘Robert Faurisson’, to make it as impartial as possible, and when I ended my work, I said, oh, that’s too late, it would be stupid to put the book ‘Robert Faurisson’ with Robert Faurisson saying ‘Robert Faurisson’, and that’s all, and I felt that I could do that for my mother.” [Jessica Faurisson née Aitken – ed.] (29-7997, 7998)
Don’t you think it would be rather misleading for the reader?, asked Pearson. “I don’t care for the nom de plume,” replied Faurisson, “… I prefer to put my own name, but… you know very well, Mr. Pearson, that I’m not afraid of the consequences of what I say. I signed so many books and papers before this one, and after this one… I am not the kind of man who, when he… says something, does not stick to his guns. I came to Toronto in [1985], and I’m coming back.” Faurisson indicated the use of the pen name was as misleading as the use of the names Shakespeare and Molière, both of which were pseudonyms. (29-7998, 7999)
Faurisson was qualified by Judge Ron Thomas before the jury to give expert opinion evidence “as to whether the German government deliberately embarked on a scheme, during World War II, to exterminate the Jews of Europe, much in the same fashion as Dr. Hilberg was permitted to testify. His expertise comes not from formal training, per se, but from practical experience involving his study of the subject, and in subsequent writings.” (29-8001)
Christie commenced Faurisson’s examination-in-chief by asking him for an explanation of the term “Holocaust.” Faurisson replied: “What in Canada or in USA is called ‘Holocaust’, we call that ‘genocide’ in France, and it is that extermination of the Jews during the World War II, but it’s difficult to give a definition because some people do not agree with that. Some say that the ‘Holocaust’ begins in 1932. Others say that there was an attempted extermination, others say, of six million…” Faurisson’s own definition was “the extermination of the Jews.” (29-8002)
“Exterminationism” was the term used by revisionists to describe the belief or the doctrine of those people who believed that there actually was an extermination of the Jews. “Revisionism” was the doctrine or belief of those people who believed that generally-accepted opinion regarding the Holocaust must be checked to see if it was true or not: “And those people,” said Faurisson, “concluded that it’s false. There was not an extermination of the Jews… it is a fundamental revision. It is not a little revision on some points.” (29-8003)
Faurisson had read Did Six Million Really Die? and believed that “The thesis of Richard Harwood is true. For me. It is exact.” He had also read the book Six Million Did Die, which he believed was “rubbish.” (29-8003)
Faurisson had summarized his opinion on the “Holocaust” in sixty words [in French] which had become a cause célèbre in France:
The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews are one and the same historical lie which opened the way to a gigantic political-financial fraud, whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal victims the German people – but not its leaders – and the entire Palestinian people.
Faurisson emphasized that although “not one of those sixty words are inspired by any political opinion,” he found that most of the time they were summarized as: “‘Faurisson says that the Jews lied to make money,’ which is absolutely not what I said.” (29-8005)
As a young person in France during the war, Faurisson had been “totally anti-German and with no distinction between Nazi or not Nazi. In our family, we were seven children, French father, Scottish mother. We were completely anti-German – violently, I should say. I was too young to do anything concrete, but this is what I believed.” (29-8006)
When the war ended on May 8, 1945, however, Faurisson’s hatred for Germany left him suddenly as he listened to the bells of the churches ringing in celebration: “… when I heard… the bells of the churches; it was finished, the war was finished, and suddenly I thought, it’s magnificent for me, but what about the German people? It might be terrible for those ones.” (29-8006)
Faurisson believed, in the years following the war, that what was said about the extermination of the Jews and the gas chambers was perhaps true, but he was, right from the beginning, opposed to the Nuremberg trial: “I thought that it was not fair at all. Personally, never I would accept, as a vanquished, to be judged by… my victor.” (29-8006)
His interest in the Holocaust was triggered in 1960 or 1961, when he read about a letter by Martin Broszat [published in Die Zeit] on 19 August 1960. In the letter, Broszat stated that there were no gassings in Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen or anywhere within the 1937 frontiers of Germany. This would have included Ravensbrück, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen and so on. For Faurisson, this was “a shock… because I believed in it, because I was sure that there were so many proof[s] and even confessions… about the existence of gassings” in those camps. At the Nuremberg trial, the Germans had been accused of having gas chambers in Dachau, in Buchenwald, in Oranienburg, etc. To Faurisson it was “a surprise” and he felt there was something to find. (29-8007, 8008)
At the beginning, he wrote to specialists of both sides of the question: Paul Rassinier, who had serious doubts about the gas chambers, on one side, and people like Leon Poliakov on the other: “… I waited for the answers, and I noticed that Rassinier was always answering quickly and exactly to my questions, and I saw that the other[s] were very late to answer and their answers were very vague.” (29-8008)
By 1974, Faurisson was absolutely sure that no gas chambers had ever existed. That year he published a very short article and in 1978 published a further article in a rightist and “nearly fascist magazine… That’s the only place that I could find to publish…something about that, and then in the journal Le Monde.” Although he was not a rightist or a fascist, the publication of his opinions led to trouble and controversy from the beginning. (29-8008, 8009)
When his article was published in Le Monde (29 December, 1978), Faurisson was teaching French literature of the 20th century and Text and Document Criticism at the University of Lyon. As part of the latter course, Faurisson invited his students to write theses on the subject of Anne Frank’s diary and he himself published material on the diary. (29-8010) After the publication of his article in 1978, there were many demonstrations against him at the university by people coming from the outside, never by his students: “I was punched many times, and it was difficult.” (29-8010)
He was also accused of falsifying history: “I had many, many lawsuits against me, many trials…” In the ten years from 1978 to 1988, however, Faurisson believed that the situation had “totally changed. It was very unpopular in… France…. Very unpopular… and dangerous. Now, the progress of revisionism in France is so important that, now, it’s absolutely not the same thing. I won’t say that it is popular, certainly not… but in the intellectual circles, I would say that the myth of the extermination of the Jews is a finishing myth, which means that, for me as a revisionist, I am at the same time very happy and very anxious. Very happy because I see that progress, and very anxious because I know perfectly well that the situation is more and more dangerous for me, and I know that very precisely.”[1] (29-8011)
In the most recent court decision in France, that of the Court of Appeal in Paris rendered on 16 December, 1987 it had been held that there was now a public debate among historians about the existence of the genocide of the Jews. (29-8012) The case had arisen when various Jewish organizations in France were successful in seizing and prohibiting the publication by Mr. Pierre Guillaume (publisher of Faurisson’s books), of the first issue of Annales d’Histoire Révisionniste [Annals of Revisionist History] which was to appear on 9 May, 1987, two days before the opening of Klaus Barbie’s trial in Lyon. On December 16, 1987, this summary order was overturned, with the appeal court giving the following reasons:
To take this conservatory step, which by its very nature implied that it involves effects which are limited in time, the judge for provisional judgments held that M. Guillaume, editor, had deliberately disseminated the first issue of the periodical Annales d’Histoire Révisionniste, which is consecrated to the denial of the existence of the genocide of the Jews, precisely at the time when the trial against Klaus Barbie was opened, in the course of which certain deeds related to this particularly painful period of contemporary history were to be judged: it was for this reason, considered by him as decisive, that the judge felt that the exposition and distribution of the work in places accessible to the public, carried out under particular circumstances which could not be “considered as the only expression of a will to see a historical debate establish itself under normal conditions” were resented “as a provocation to a discrimination based on the origin of a group of persons, susceptible to bring about at present disturbances and violent reactions.”
The circumstances which had thus come together and which had justified the prohibition promulgated on a provisional basis by the judge for provisional judgments no longer exist.
The very statement of the theses developed in Mr. Guillaume’s periodical and the controversy which is liable to come about because of it, are, in absence of all third party lawsuits for liability, subject to the free expressions of ideas and opinions and to a public debate among historians. Things being as they are, the court does not have to exercise a control over a discussion of this nature.
Defence attorney Christie placed a transparency on an overhead projector, which stated:
Faurisson explained that the chart meant as follows: “It means that we don’t find any order for an extermination of the Jews. We don’t find any plan, we don’t find any trace of a budget. There is no weapon, a specific weapon for a specific crime. If we have a systematic extermination, we need a system of extermination… So, it’s quite normal that the people who believe in the extermination, believe in the gas chambers because such an enterprise would have necessitated a specific weapon. Gas chamber and extermination are one [and] the same thing … and there is no expert report stating ‘this was a homicidal gas chamber’. You can visit in Auschwitz and in some other places… rooms [that] are supposed to be gas chamber[s] and even sometime in a genuine state, and when you ask – when you say, ‘But I don’t understand what is a gas chamber, I need a proof, bring me an expert report showing that it was a homicidal gas chamber’, and I say ‘homicidal’ because it means gas chamber to kill people, not for disinfection.” (29-8022)
There were bodies of people alleged to have been exterminated, said Faurisson, but there was no autopsy report stating ‘this is a body of a person killed by poison gas,’ notwithstanding that at the end of the war many, many autopsies were performed by the Americans, the British, the French and the Russians. (29-8023)
Only in one case had an autopsy report been done regarding gas chambers: “It was for the alleged gas chamber of Struthof-Natzweiler… in Alsace, part of France. Everybody can visit today a little room called ‘gas chamber’ and the French [inscription] says: ‘In original state.’ So, in December 1945… Professor René Fabre… toxicologist, Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy of Paris, was asked to do a report about (1) the gas chamber itself; (2) about the bodies … in the hospital of Strasbourg in the morgue and supposed to have been bodies of people killed in Struthof, and his answer was (1) about the description of the so-called gas chamber, no trace of [the] poison hydrocyanic acid and about the bod[ies], same conclusion. This report, very important, has disappeared.” (29-8023) Faurisson knew about the Fabre autopsy report “because in the files of… military justice in Paris we have… another report of three doctors… in this report, the three doctors say that Professor René Fabre said that.” (29-8024)
To Faurisson’s knowledge, there was no expert report in existence stating that a place was a homicidal gas chamber or that a body, subjected to an autopsy, was shown to have died by poison gas. (29-8024)
A second transparency was placed on the overhead projector for the jury to see which read
Holocaust
Revisionism Exterminationism
Concentration Camps Extermination Camps
Disinfection Gas Chambers Homicidal Gas Chambers
Ordinary Gas Vans Homicidal Gas Vans
Zyklon B to Protect Zyklon B to Kill
Territorial Final Solution Homicidal Final Solution
Crematories for Dead Bodies Crematories for Living Persons
Faurisson explained that in this chart, he was attempting to define the position of the revisionists and the exterminationists: “… the revisionist[s] say… there were concentration camps. There were no extermination camps… There were disinfection gas chambers. There were no homicidal gas chambers. There were ordinary gas vans. There were no homicidal gas vans. Zyklon B existed, of course. It is a disinfectant. It is to protect life by killing lice, for example. Zyklon B to kill, we have not the slightest proof of it and it is even a technical impossibility … You can very well kill somebody with Zyklon but you cannot use it in a gas chamber. I’ll explain why after.” (29-8025)
Faurisson testified that the term “final solution” for the Germans meant a territorial final solution of the Jewish problem: “… for any problem you are trying to find a solution. It’s the final solution… for the German, of the Jewish problem. If you say final solution of – I don’t know – the Palestinian problem, it doesn’t mean that you are trying to kill the Palestinians, or the final solution of the unemployment doesn’t mean that you are going to kill the unemployed. So, it was a territorial [solution]. They wanted a solution, a finding of a territory for those people because for 2,000 years, at least, there are no territory there, so a territory was to be found. And ‘final solution’ [had] absolutely not the meaning of homicidal.” (29-8025, 8026) To the Germans, said Faurisson, “final solution” meant that “they wanted to solve what they called the Jewish problem by emigration, if possible; by evacuation or deportation, if necessary.” (29-8035)
“Crematories,” he continued, “of course, the crematories existed. We never said the crematories did not exist. It was for dead bodies. They were really necessary in places where you had so many diseases, especially typhus and typhoid fever. There were no crematories for living… persons because this has been said – that people were put alive in crematories. It has even been said in the International Military Tribunal.” (29-8026)
Defence attorney Christie placed a third transparency on the overhead:
How Many Jews Died?
– Six Million is a Symbolic Figure
– In 1988, the Approximate Figure is Still Unknown
– Many Jews died and Many survived
– The Historians Must Freely Determine the Approximate Figure Through:
a) The International Tracing Service Files in Arolsen, West Germany;
b) Documents in Possession of the Polish Government (Auschwitz Museum…), the Soviet Union;
c) Names of Millions Who Received Reparation Payments including Survivors in Israel and in Every One of the 70 Countries Represented by the World Jewish Congress
Faurisson testified: “What we say is… that this figure of six million is a symbolic figure, meaning by that that there is nothing material to support this figure, but it’s a figure that we hear very often. It is repeated and repeated and we sometimes think that if it is so much repeated it’s certainly solid. No, it’s not solid and ‘symbolic’ figure is not even a wording of mine. It’s Martin Broszat… who used it in 1979. So, in 1988, the approximate figure is still unknown. What I can only say today is that many Jews died and many survived. I am not satisfied with this answer because what does it mean many Jews died and many Jews survived? We should have an answer to this question and I think that it is possible to find an answer, and I gave three examples. I say the historians must freely determine the approximate figure through, one, the International Tracing Service files in Arolsen, West Germany. I am convinced that the problem of the genocide of the… Jews has its solution in this place. They have fantastic files and we could, if we had the right to work in Arolsen, we could find the solution to this question. Documents in possession of the Polish government, the Auschwitz Museum, the Soviet Union – it is strange that we are supposed to have in Auschwitz and in Arolsen, two volumes of the register of the death[s] in Auschwitz and in Moscow, 36 or 37 volumes. This register [was] kept by the German[s] and we do not have the right, one, to look at them, two, even to know how many names there are in the two first volumes. We could, with the number of names of those two first volume, have an idea of what is in the other volumes, and the answer is ‘Oh, the Soviet do not want to show us that’. Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure that everybody would be very pleased if the Soviet Union suddenly decided to publish. They could publish and say, ‘Oh, that’s Nazi propaganda. The Nazi only put some part of those people who died but not all of them’. Okay. But show us this document, so important. There is no good reason to hide such a document. Three, names of millions who received reparation payments including survivors in Israel [and] in every one of the seventy countries represented by the World Jewish Congress. The World Jewish Congress is something like the Parliament of the [Diaspora]… and they have every possibility to check for everybody who is supposed to be Jew, where he comes from. We have the modern possibility with all those technical means that we have today to calculate anything, we should do this work and they have enough money to do it.” (29-8027 to 8029)
What had really happened to the Jews? Said Faurisson: “They suffered specific measures against them that you… may call persecutions. They suffered from the war; some of them… suffered of internment; some of them of deportation; some of them were deported in transit camps; some other in concentration camps; some other in labour camps; some were in ghettos… many of them suffered of diseases, different diseases; they suffered executions of hostages, reprisals, even massacres, because I have never seen a war without massacres… If the question was what happened to the Germans… during the war and after the war, my answer would be exactly the same except for ghettos, which is something specific to the Jews…” (29-8029)
Christie asked Faurisson whether he had any comment on the photographs from Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, examples of which were on page 26 of Did Six Million Really Die?, showing emaciated bodies. Faurisson replied: “I would say that none of those photographs that we know so well are the proof of an extermination. At least I think that everybody should ask himself the question, do I see there something which could be the proof of an extermination, considering the state of the bodies, same state, etc.” (29-8030)
Faurisson cautioned that although people were very moved by the photographs, one had to be very careful and prudent in looking at the captions. He gave as an example that of Dachau: “… Dachau was liberated on the 29th of April, 1945, so many Americans were there from the 1st of May to the 17th of May, 1945 [during which time] something like 1,500 inmates died, which is more than the total of the inmates who died in Dachau for the whole of 1943… They died from the state where we found Dachau with all those disease[s], with all those persons suffering from typhus, typhoid fever, etc., and many reports were done at that time about that. It was the general collapse in Germany…” (29-8030, 8031)
Faurisson had studied the transcript of the Nuremberg trial. Nowhere did he find any witness who had been cross-examined on the procedure of gassing. The lawyers did not ask questions about that: “And what I call myself ‘witness’,” said Faurisson, “is not somebody who comes and say[s] ‘I am a witness,’ it’s somebody who has been cross-examined about what he claims.” (29-8032)
Faurisson compared the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to the position of two fighters at the conclusion of a boxing match: “At the end of the match, there is a victor and a vanquished on the floor and the victor says to the vanquished, ‘Don’t think that it is finished. It is not finished. Let me have enough time, to change my suit, to put [on] the gown of a judge and I am going to judge you. I have already prepared all the necessary things for that.'” (29-8034)
The International Military Tribunal, pointed out Faurisson, was not international but was made up of representatives of the Allied forces (British, French, American and Soviet); not military, except for the Soviet judge, who had also been the judge in the famous Moscow trial of 1936; and, in his view, was not a tribunal, having regard to Articles 19 and 21 of its charter. (29-8034)
Germans were not the first to use concentration camps, said Faurisson. They were a place “where you concentrate people, and that’s a typical euphemism, of course. It does not look bad to concentrate people, but when you concentrate people, you might have [a] real catastrophe.” (29-8035)
With respect to the alleged use of euphemisms by the Germans to hide the extermination, Faurisson testified that he did “not know one euphemism in the German document[s] that you can interpret as meaning extermination. For instance, Sonderbehandlung, special treatment. Of course, sometimes you could see that by the context. Sometimes it means execution, but sometimes it means exactly the contrary – favourable treatment and good food – so you have to see the context.” (29-8035, 8036)
Faurisson did not know whether the Wannsee Conference protocol was a genuine document or not. However, he continued, “… I say that if this document is genuine, it doesn’t mean at all extermination, if you read it carefully.” (29-8036)
Christie asked whether Faurisson read any sinister meaning into the words Arbeit Macht Frei [“Work Will Make You Free,” which appeared on the entrance gate to Auschwitz]. Faurisson replied: “You had that on some German camps, a kind of formula meaning work makes you free. It [is not] cynical. It meant this is a camp, you are going to work if you want one day to be free. That’s the original meaning, of course, of that. Good intention[s] always. The German had many like that… even in Auschwitz in the barracks, they had some inscriptions. You could think that they were kind of idealistic inscriptions… [an] even boy scout inscription, I would say.” (29-8037)
What about the words ‘night and fog’? Faurisson indicated that “Night and fog… is very special. In fact, at the beginning it was NN, two Latin word that you can find in any good German dictionary meaning Nomen Nescio and there was a decision called NN… not Nacht und Nebel, NN decision, it was the fact that a category of people who were suspected of terrorism, if they were not judged within one week, for instance, in France, they had to be sent to Germany as NN, meaning they will not receive… anything from France and they will… disappear for their family, which is a kind of sanction and you had a category which was called NN and then night and fog, but sometimes those people were liberated. Very, very rarely, but they were liberated and they could come back to France if they were judged not guilty… that was possible. But it was a very terrible category because they didn’t receive parcels in the camp… So they suffered more than the others.” With respect to this subject, Faurisson had studied the work of a priest called Martiniere. (29-8037, 8038)
With respect to the allegation of medical experiments conducted by the Germans, Faurisson testified that he had no knowledge of medicine himself, and therefore could not judge whether a medical experiment was scandalous or not. He noted that in one trial in Metz, France, of Germans who were in Struthof-Natzweiler concentration camp, the French doctors who had been at the beginning totally against the two German doctors who were accused of criminal medical experiments, “were day after day coming on the side of those German doctors… But I think that there are certainly possibility of criminal medical experiments, but it’s difficult for me to judge.” (29-8038, 8039)
Christie asked Faurisson if there was an operation called ‘Reinhard’. “There was an ‘Operation Reinhard’,” replied Faurisson, “which is most of the time spelled R-E-I-N-H-A-R-D. But this is a complicated problem. Since 1985, an exterminationist historian… Uwe Dietrich Adam… in a footnote of a communication he gave at the colloquia of the Sorbonne in 1982, said that maybe it shouldn’t be Reinhard spelled like that, but at the end “dt” and you would think that it’s nit-picking, no, it’s important because usually we are told Operation Reinhard is a criminal operation, it’s an operation to exterminate the people in the name of Reinhard Heydrich…. And Uwe Dietrich Adam said probably not. First of all, it would be strange to call an operation by the first name of a man, any man, as an ‘Operation Adolf’ or ‘Operation Joseph’ for Joseph Goebbels. No, it seems it is the name of the minister of finances and that it is essentially an operation of recuperation of goods of people expelled, of course, from Poland, for instance, but I think that we have no right to put like in this book called National Socialist Mass Murder by Poison Gas… a chapter called Operation Reinhard with a ‘d’, meaning… extermination. No.” (29-8039, 8040)
Faurisson testified that in his work he did not judge Nazis and Jews differently: “… I think that we should understand that a Nazi is not less than a man. He is a man. And that a Jew is not more than a man. He is a man, entitled to the same right[s]. When you have to examine cases, because in historical debate is more or less a case and we have to give the same right to one and the other. You cannot say ‘Oh, here’s a Nazi, so [he] is a liar’, or ‘Here is a Jew, so [he]… is a liar’. You have no right to say that.” (29-8040)
Christie turned to Did Six Million Really Die? and read from page 5, asking Faurisson to comment on the passage:
· Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany’s cultural life.
Faurisson stated that the conflict between the Jews and the Nazis was complicated: “It’s like a kind of war. If you ask me to say who is… responsible [for] a war, I am not able to tell you.” (29-8042)
Christie indicated that he wished to briefly go through the things which Faurisson had published relating to Did Six Million Really Die?. One of these was an article entitled “The Mechanics of Gassing,”[2] published in 1980: “In this article,” said Faurisson, “I said that when you have the words ‘gas chamber’, you must try to understand what it means… And sometimes to people who believe in the gas chamber, I say, ‘Please draw me what you call a gas chamber. Show me how you bring the gas and how you get into the place to take out the bodies, considering that… this place is [full], for example, of hydrocyanic acid’. Most of the people believe that the gas chamber is more or less like a room. You are in your bed and the next day you don’t wake up, you are dead. It’s as easy as that. That’s what many people think… in fact, when you want to kill somebody with the gas, and not to kill yourself, of course, it is necessarily very complicated. This place, for instance, could never be a gas chamber for many material reasons, very easy to understand. For example, this kind of door.” Faurisson motioned to the large double doors at the back of the courtroom. (29-8042, 8043)
Faurisson had first met Ernst Zündel in September of 1979 in Los Angeles, and had kept in touch with him concerning his views and findings by telephone and visits. At the conference in Los Angeles that year, Faurisson had asked someone to read his paper “The Mechanics of Gassing” because his English pronunciation wasn’t good; the person who did so was Ernst Zündel. (29-8043)
The paper dealt with the mechanics of gassing: “When you know the mechanics of gassing, when you know how complicated is the fact of handling any gas, you see that there are such difficulties in the places where this gas is supposed to have been used that it is impossible. And when I say impossible, as I am not a chemist, of course, my answer is the answer of a man who consulted a specialist of gas, of toxicology, etc., and not only in France. So, I would say, very briefly, a chemical impossibility.” (29-8045)
In the summer of 1980, Faurisson published the article “The Problem of the Gas Chambers” in the Journal of Historical Review. The use of the word “problem” in relation to gas chambers, was not Faurisson’s concept, but came from the work of a Jewish historian, Olga Wormser-Migot, who wrote a thesis in 1968 on the concentration camp system. In one chapter of the thesis, titled “The Problem of the Gas Chambers,” the author noted that although there were testimonies swearing to gas chambers for such camps as Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, it was impossible to believe there were gassings in those places; hence, there was a problem. Faurisson knew that Wormser-Migot had suffered “terrible trouble for having published that.” (29-8045, 8046)
In 1974, Faurisson wrote to Martin Broszat at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, asking him why he no longer had to believe in the testimonies of gassings in Dachau and Buchenwald, etc., but still had to believe in the testimonies of gassings in Auschwitz: “What is the difference?,” asked Faurisson, “And I gave him also a list, I said please tell me if there were gassings in such camps. He answered me by a very rude letter saying that I was under the influence of right extremism. So I wrote once more and I said ‘No question of that, please answer me’ and he said, ‘I have the letter, I cannot answer the trap questions about the complicated problem of the gas chambers.’ This was in 1974 and it means, one, that there was a problem of a gas chamber and that this problem was complicated, and so complicated that he could not even answer to very simple questions.” This was included in his 1980 article. (29-8046, 8047)
In 1981, Faurisson published an article about the diary of a German doctor who was in Auschwitz, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer. In the diary, Kremer had said that Auschwitz was an awful place, more awful than the inferno of Dante, and people had used this as proof that he was referring to gassings. “If you read it carefully,” said Faurisson, “you could see that it is nothing of that kind and if you follow the entire story of the life of Dr. Kremer, you can have confirmation of that. It had nothing to do with that. It was an inferno, a horrible place because of typhus and typhoid fever in summer 1942…” (29-8047)
In the winter 1981 issue of the Journal of Historical Review, Faurisson published “The Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?,” the translation of a long interview which he had given to the Italian historical magazine Storia Illustrata. The interview concerned not only gas chambers, but the problem of the Holocaust itself. (29-8048)
In 1982, Faurisson published an article concerning The Diary of Anne Frank. Faurisson had never examined the diary in its original form. In the article, he reproduced two examples of handwriting attributed to Frank, allegedly written four months apart. The first document was the facsimile of the epigraph of the diary translated from the Dutch in 1950; the second was the facsimile of a text written by Anne Frank on the back of one of her photographs. In Faurisson’s opinion, a comparison of the text and signatures indicated “adult” writing in the first document, while the second document, allegedly written four months later, was “childish.” (29-8049 to 8051)
Faurisson met twice with Frank’s father, Otto Frank, in Basel, Switzerland; five hours the first day and four hours the second day. Faurisson had immediately informed Frank that he didn’t believe in the authenticity of the diary and he asked Frank many questions during the interviews. Faurisson’s ultimate conclusion was that the diary was not Anne Frank’s, but was written after the war by Otto Frank himself. (29-8051) Faurisson explained his reasons: “He is the man who brought… this diary… He took the responsibility of bringing this diary, saying it was from his daughter and telling a genuine story. But when you examine carefully the story itself, not like a child reading the story of a child, but carefully, you discover so many impossibilities, physical impossibilit[ies]. I am going to give you only one. For instance, there were supposed to be in Amsterdam all this family in a place where the walls were so thin, that everybody could listen to them so they… ought to be very careful not to make any noise. Even when they cough, they had to take codeine and the story goes on and you discover that every day they were using the vacuum cleaner; every day the bell rang, there were noises, dispute[s] and so on. Many things like that. So when I asked all those questions to Mr. Frank, when I showed him all those impossibilit[ies], asking him [for] an explanation, first of all his wife, his second wife who was there, was saying, ‘Oh, but that’s impossible. That’s impossible what you are saying. Now, that’s not possible, but the police would have known, the neighbours would have known, the architect, etc.’, and he told her in German to shut up. And finally he told me, ‘Mr. Faurisson, I agree with you hundred percent. All those things are theoretically, scientifically impossible, but so it was.’ So I told him, ‘Mr. Frank, you get me into trouble because if you admit with me that the door theoretically and scientifically cannot be at the same time open and closed but that you have seen such a door, I am in trouble’. And I tried, I tried to get a specimen of the handwriting of Mr. Frank himself and it was absolutely impossible. Even when I would ask him only a name, he would go [to] his typewriter. But I know where I can find most probably the specimen of his handwriting. And I must say that I sent this kind of report to a German tribunal because a man called Römer… had trouble with the German justice about that. And what I know is that the tribunal decided to submit the manuscript of the Anne Frank diary to chemists in Germany and the conclusion was that there were additions with ball-point pen and as a [previous] report had said that everything in this manuscript was from the same hand, addition[s] and text itself, what was the meaning of those additions with… ball-point pen which existed only, they said, from… 1950, 1951.” Even Faurisson’s worst enemies in France admitted that concerning the Anne Frank diary, he was generally correct. (29-8052 to 8054)
In 1984, Faurisson wrote the article “A Challenge to David Irving” (Journal of Historical Review, vol. 5, 1984, page 289). Faurisson described Irving as “a very brilliant historian, certainly. He is the man who said I am ready to give 1,000 pounds… in Great Britain, or 1,000 dollars… when he is in U.S.A., to anybody who could show me an order from Hitler to say ‘exterminate the Jews’, and he is very well known for that and when, in 1977, he expressed those kind of views, it was a real scandal. Today, everybody among the historians say there were no orders from Hitler… but David Irving does not say that the gas chambers [did] not exist. He doesn’t say that the extermination did not exist.” (29-8054)
In one of his books, Irving wrote that in October or November, 1944, Himmler gave the order to stop the extermination of the Jews. Faurisson’s challenge to Irving was: ‘I am ready to give you 1,000 francs if you show me this order of Himmler’ which had never existed. Raul Hilberg also alleged that this order existed and was given on 25 November 1944, but the footnote citation given in support of this assertion was to a document which had nothing to do with a Himmler order. (29-8055)
In the spring of 1986, Faurisson published “Response to a Paper Historian” [Journal of Historical Review, vol. 7, 1986, page 21], which was a reply to Pierre Vidal-Naquet.[3] Vidal-Naquet had attacked Faurisson very strongly in 1980: “… he called me… a paper Eichmann: meaning I was a criminal and a scandalous criminal because a normal criminal kills people who are alive, but I am supposed to be [a] coward and I kill the people who are already dead.” In the paper, Faurisson attempted to answer all of Vidal-Naquet’s arguments. (29-8056) Faurisson explained the meaning of the title: “There are historians who are, I would say, totally immaterial. They don’t care for what is material. And I call them ‘paper’ historian[s]… the example that I give is this one. We are told that in Rome, you… had a democracy… because the people would be [in] the forum together to decide anything of the political life in Rome. You can believe in the democracy in Rome but if you go [to] Rome and if you see what is the forum, how tiny it is, you understand that this democracy could only have been a kind of aristocracy. So, you must go and see the places. If you say ‘gas chamber in Auschwitz’, go and see. If you say ‘gas vans’, please, bring me a photo of a ‘gas van’, something technical. He didn’t do that himself and I tried to answer to his questions.” (29-8056, 8057)
In the winter of 1986-87, Faurisson published the article, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss” (Journal of Historical Review, vol. 7, 1986, page 389). Faurisson testified that while it had already been known that Hoess was tortured, confirmation had been received with the recent publication in England of a book entitled Legions of Death. This book gave the names of the people who tortured Hoess: “When Hoess, after the war, was arrested by the British military police, he was tortured for something like forty-eight hours or three days with whip cord, he was beaten very strongly and suddenly he collapsed and said whatever the interrogator wanted him to say and it is an absurd statement. He invented even concentration camps in places which never existed in Poland… For example, he talked about an extermination camp in Wolzek… a place which never existed in Poland, and it’s not in confusion with Belzec. He says, ‘Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek’.” (29-8057)
In addition, Hoess’s alleged confession was written in English. Faurisson did not know whether Hoess spoke English or not, but stated: “… I think that for something so grave, I would never make a confession myself in English. I find that very strange. And there are two different ‘states’ of his confessions… I mean there are two document and they’re the same numeral notation in the Nuremberg trials because the British did first a kind of confession, then they corrected and corrected and corrected it, handwritten correction, and then they said this is the translation of what Hoess has confessed. It was not a translation. It was a clean copy of the first confession.” (29-8058)
Faurisson found the Hoess confessions to be “very interesting, because you… have always possibility of finding things which are true. It’s a mixture of truth and lies, of course. So you can have some interesting things about Auschwitz, and you have also some lies, some impossibilities of all sorts of dates, of place[s], etc.” (29-8059)
Faurisson cited an article from the newspaper Wrexham Leader, October 17, 1986, by a man called Mike Mason entitled “In a Cell with a Nazi War Criminal,” which indicated that they kept Hoess awake until he confessed. The article dealt with a British documentary called Secret Hunters which investigated the torture of Hoess. (29-8060)
Faurisson also wrote an article on the Müller document, which had been submitted to the court by witness Emil Lachout. Faurisson interviewed Lachout on the 7th and 8th of December, 1987 in Vienna, for a total of nine hours. (29-8061) His conclusions about the importance of the Müller document were summarized on page 121 of his article “The Müller Document” [Journal of Historical Review, vol. 8, 1988], which he read to the court:
If this document is genuine and if Emil Lachout is telling the truth, then one is entitled to raise a number of serious questions:
1) Does this document not constitute a verification of a revelation made by one Stephen Pinter in 1959? After the war, this American lawyer had worked for 17 months in Germany for the U.S. War Department. In 1959, he confirmed to a national Catholic weekly that, in the position in which he had found himself, he could state that there had never been any homicidal gas chambers in Germany and in Austria and that, as regards Auschwitz, the Americans had not been able to carry out any investigation there, because the Soviets did not allow it (Our Sunday Visitor, 14 June 1959, p. 15);
2) In 1960 Martin Broszat, a member of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, stated in a simple letter to the editor of Die Zeit (19 August 1960, p. 16) that there had not been any homicidal gassings either in Dachau or, more generally, in any of the camps in the Old Reich (Germany within her frontiers of 1937), which means to say that there had not been any gassings in such camps as Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen as well. He did not present any evidence to substantiate this statement. Would his proofs not have been those reports of the above-mentioned Allied Commissions of Inquiry?
Faurisson confirmed that the Pinter quotation on page 23 of Did Six Million Really Die? was a correct quote and that, in his opinion, the Müller document confirmed what Pinter had said. With respect to the Martin Broszat letter, Faurisson said: “Because I am very surprised that a man like Martin Broszat in 1960, to reveal such a news, sent only a letter to Die Zeit. He should have given a quantity of proof[s] of what [he] was saying, no gassings in those places… I think he had some ammunitions with him. I wonder if it was that.” (29-8065)
Previously, Faurisson testified, there had been many claims that gassings took place in those camps: “… you have even confessions of people of those camps, commandants of those camps, confessing that there were gas chambers…” when in fact there were none. For Faurisson, the significance of this was as follows: “It’s finished. We cannot use it anymore or very carefully, testimon[ies], so-called proof[s] and confessions… if I see the confessions of the commandant, of the doctor in Ravensbrück saying that there were gassings in Ravensbrück, when I see that, their description of the procedure of gassing, when I take that on my left side and on my right side I have a description of the process of gassing in Auschwitz, I don’t see any difference. … [F]rom 1945 to 1960, I had to believe that all that was true, and from 1960 they said no, no, no. What is on your left-hand side, don’t believe it anymore. But you must believe what is on your right-hand side. Still, I am ready, but give me a reason to believe.” (29-8066)
Faurisson testified that he had read the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? in detail and had formed an opinion on what was wrong and what was right about it. What was wrong about the pamphlet were details: “Details, some details are wrong. For instance, the story of the sister of Gerstein. [It] was not the sister, it was the sister-in-law. For instance, still about Gerstein, when Harwood said that Dr. Dibelius found him untrustworthy, it was exactly the contrary, it was trustworthy.” (29-8068)
Faurisson believed Harwood might have made the mistake by a “kind of pathology of the text. When you see how a text is reproduced, for instance, in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth century, when one copied the other, how is it that they did so many mistakes and why? You have to study what we call pathology of the text and to see how the people could commit such mistakes and it’s one of the way you do a mistake, it’s to take one word and reproduce the… word exactly on the other way. It seems extraordinary to read untrustworthy and to transform it into trustworthy. I am proceeding there the possibility of good faith. I mean that if Harwood had wanted to play us a trick, he would have used another sentence, another way. He wouldn’t have taken the word itself to put it into… quotation marks…” Faurisson noted, however, that what Gerstein had said in any event was “really mad and even Dr. Hilberg admitted it –” (29-8070)
Judge Ron Thomas intervened at this point in the testimony: “Well, I think this is speculation… And I don’t want to cut you off, but I think you would know, as a document examiner, that there’s a science to what you’ve studied and become an expert at and I don’t think you’re doing your doctorate any credit by speculating on this aspect. Especially with the word ‘denounce’ sitting in there. So we’ll just move on, please.” (29-8070, 8071)
Faurisson proceeded to page 30 of Did Six Million Really Die?:
· As has been noted earlier, the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896,892… In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich (January 19th, 1955), in a survey of all Second World War casualties based on figures of the International Red Cross, put the “Loss of victims of persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945” at 300,000, not all of whom were Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment.
Faurisson testified that the Die Tat article in fact gave the 300,000 figure for all people, not just Jews, who had died in concentration camps in Germany. (29-8073)
With respect to the sentence regarding Hilberg, Faurisson indicated that Harwood had obtained this from Paul Rassinier’s writings: “And what Paul Rassinier said is, ‘The statistics of Raul Hilberg are really foggy. If I take his own data, his own figures, I conclude that he should have this figure'” of 896,892 and not the figure of 5.1 million which Hilberg had in his book. The figure of 896,892 was actually the figure which Rassinier had arrived at after an analysis of Hilberg’s data. It was evident, said Faurisson, that Harwood had studied Rassinier carefully by his numerous references to his work, The Drama of the European Jews. (29-8073)
Faurisson produced and read to the court a copy of a letter dated 30 May 1975 which he had received from Richard Harwood, the author of Did Six Million Really Die?. Faurisson had written to Harwood after reading a French version of the pamphlet. (29-8077, 8078; Harwood letter filed as Exhibit 121 at 8081)
The letter read:
Dear M. Faurisson,
Thank you for your recent letter. I apologise for the delay in replying. I was pleased to hear that my letters had not gone astray, and that you received your copies of my booklet.
In answer to your questions –
1) It is true that I was unintentionally ambiguous in Did Six Million Really Die? about Raul Hilberg’s statistics. The figure of 896,892 is Prof. Rassinier’s figure after correcting Hilberg’s statistics. I did not make this very clear perhaps. Hilberg’s own figure is, of course, 5,100,000, but Prof. Rassinier shows that Hilberg’s own statistics cannot support it.
2) I am not a professor at London University, but hold a B.A. Honours Degree in History.
3) Unfortunately, I have very little time for reading at present, and have not yet read David Irving’s Hitler und seine Feldherren. I would welcome your opinions on it, however, and hope to read it shortly.
I was very interested to hear of your visit to Auschwitz and Majdanek and your opinions on the “gas chambers” there. I would be very grateful if you would write me a detailed description of what you saw there, with your comments and perhaps even one or two drawings. Would you do this for me?
With many thanks, and very best wishes to you, Yours sincerely,
Richard Harwood
Faurisson testified that Harwood made a mistake once in quoting from the Reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross, out of a total of nineteen quotes from the reports: “I can tell you,” he said, “as a professor I am surprised to see that he was able to quote a book nineteen times and only once incorrectly.” (29-8082)
Faurisson returned to Did Six Million Really Die? where the pamphlet stated at page 29:
· Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs européens, p. 31, 39).
In his testimony, Dr. Browning indicated that he had never heard of Kubovy or the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. Faurisson testified that, to the jury, this must mean that it was an invention of Harwood. But it was not; Faurisson said: “Dr. Kubovy existed and his centre also and… I have found in my files a Jewish newspaper, the title is Yedioth Aharonoth… 26th of May, 1974, and in this newspaper, written in Hebrew, you have a photocopy of a letter that I sent from the Sorbonne on the 23rd of March, 1974. It is sent from Robert Faurisson, my title, to Dr. Kubovy, director of the… Centre of Jewish Documentation of Tel Aviv. And it arrived in this place and Dr. Kubovy was dead at that time. I didn’t know. But it arrived, it was not an invention.” (29-8083)
Faurisson had sent the letter to Kubovy and about twenty other places in the world and in it, had asked whether the gas chambers existed or not. The Jewish newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, had “said that it was quite a scandal to ask such a question, of course, in 1974.” The only thing Harwood might have gotten wrong was the wording of Kubovy’s centre. (29-8083, 8084) To Faurisson, this summarized what was wrong with Did Six Million Really Die?. (29-8085)
Christie next asked Faurisson to summarize the thesis of the pamphlet and to indicate what was right about it. Replied Faurisson: “The thesis of the book is that it’s not true that six million Jews died, and it is not true that there was an extermination plan, and it is not true that there were gas chambers. What I find right is first, the title. The title is good – Did Six Million Really Die?. That’s really the problem. I am trying to find because I see that this booklet is criticized, but what is good in it, what is positive? This man, Richard Harwood, brought plenty of information for the layman in 1974. He said in 1974 that there were no order[s] from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Three years after when David Irving said it, it was an uproar, so it was really new and true. We know it now in 1988.” (29-8086)
Faurisson believed that on the issue of the Wannsee Conference protocol, Harwood was prophetic: “He said… ‘Why we should not accept labour in the east to mean labour assignment in the east is not explained,’ and he explained that the Wannsee Conference takes place into a policy of sending the people to the east and nothing else and now, since at least 1984, I think that the historical community as Mr. Pearson said this morning, I mean among the exterminationists, they do not believe anymore that the Wannsee Conference decided an extermination, because if the Wannsee Conference had really decided an extermination, you would not have a dispute between the historians – on one side, the intentionalists, on the other side, the functionalists. There would be no dispute.” (29-8086, 8087)
In Faurisson’s opinion, the exterminationists now recognized that the Wannsee Conference was not an order for extermination. The turning point was the Stuttgart conference of historians in May of 1984 where intentionalist and functionalist historians discussed the issue and admitted that the Wannsee Conference was not a conference to send people to their extermination. Faurisson continued: “So, Richard Harwood said in… 1974, something which I consider has been confirmed – and something very important – ten years after in Stuttgart. I think that this is really positive. We must look at what the people are bringing also instead of always criticizing.” (29-8087)
Other points which Harwood raised which were positive were the Nuremberg trials, the confessions of Nazis, Auschwitz and the eyewitness accounts, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Hoess testimony, the chaos in Germany at the end of the war, the fake photos, Paul Rassinier, and the imposture of the gas chambers. (29-8088)
What Harwood wrote about the gas chambers was not a common belief in 1974, said Faurisson, and now the gas chambers were becoming an embarrassment: “… now in France,” he said, “we have people of Jewish origin saying… the gas chamber, we should perhaps get rid of it or we should not insist too much.” In an article published in the French magazine, Article 31, authors Marc Ascione and Ida Zajdel claimed that the gas chambers were “an invention of the SS in their confession[s] as a time bomb against the Jews.” (29-8088)
Faurisson testified that the pamphlet was so important in what it was bringing to the public that when it was published in France, the man who distributed it, Francois Duprat, was murdered: “We don’t know exactly who did that, but the interesting point is first, that it has been done by people very clever in those kind of bomb handling, and what was published in the journal Le Monde after was interesting. This murder was revindicated by a so-called ‘Memory of Auschwitz’ organization. It was justified by a man called Patrice Chairoff – saying that Francois Duprat, in distributing this kind of pamphlet, had taken a responsibility which kills.” (29-8089)
It was evident, said Faurisson, that people knew how important the pamphlet was at that time. It was discussed twice in lengthy articles in Le Monde. They were totally against the pamphlet and wanted a lawsuit launched against it. No legal action was ever taken, however, and the pamphlet could be read freely in France even today. (29-8089)
Nevertheless, Faurisson said, there were “always legal dangers” in saying that the gas chambers did not exist. The judgment of December 16, 1987 was under appeal by Jewish organizations: “… what a judgment builds,” said Faurisson, “another judgment can destroy… I don’t know what [will] happen. Perhaps it will be forbidden tomorrow in France, but for the present time, it’s not legally forbidden. It’s even legally permitted.” (29-8090)
Defence attorney Christie asked Faurisson to compare various findings of courts on the subject of the Holocaust since 1945 to the present. Faurisson began by quoting portions of Judge Thomas’s ruling taking judicial notice of the Holocaust:
It is my respectful view that the Court should take judicial notice of the Holocaust having regard to all of the circumstances. The mass murder and extermination of Jews of Europe by the Nazi regime during the Second World War is so notorious as not to be the subject of dispute among reasonable persons. Furthermore, it is my view that the Holocaust is capable of immediate accurate demonstration by resort to readily accessible sources of indisputable accuracies…. In my view, no reasonable person disputes that mass atrocities took place. The Holocaust is simply indisputable… I have not had my attention drawn to any case of any significance in the history of the world since the Second World War in which any reasonable person has ever suggested that the Holocaust did not take place.
Faurisson turned to Judge Thomas and indicated that it was both his and Christie’s fault that they had not brought to his attention the judgment of the Court of Paris of December 16, 1987, holding that there was a public debate among historians about the extermination. (29-8092, 8093)[4]
April 13, 1988
Faurisson testified that in 1945 and 1946, the International Military Tribunal did not use the word “Holocaust”; they used the word “genocide.” Said Faurisson: “And they said that it was the policy of a physical extermination or the actual physical extermination of six million Jews, especially with homicidal gas chambers.” The gas chambers, continued Faurisson were an “essential” part of the allegation, “because it was the specific weapon of a specific crime, and, of course, myself, it’s my opinion, I say the alleged specific weapon of an alleged specific crime. The weapon is the gas chamber, and the crime is ‘genocide’ or ‘Holocaust’, or ‘extermination’, or even ‘Shoah’… That’s the most recent term.” (30-8120)
If there was no systematic weapon, said Faurisson, it would be difficult to understand how this could be a systematic crime without precedent. Most historians, although not Browning apparently, said that the “Holocaust” was a new crime such as history had never known, and that the Germans had invented a new weapon for this systematic crime, the gas chamber. (30-8121)
In the beginning, the gas chambers were “supposed to be everywhere in Europe,” said Faurisson, “… a few years ago, it was in six points of Poland. Now, it seems that in Majdanek they are not very sure. In Auschwitz I, for some French historians it’s finished. This famous gas chamber that every tourist goes and visits in Auschwitz I. It seems that is finished… quite recently, Pierre Vidal-Naquet said, in a tortuous way, that he no longer believed in the gas chamber of Auschwitz I.” (30-8121, 8122)
Right after the war, Faurisson had believed there was an extermination of the Jews, although he was surprised by the great number of survivors. Later on, it was said that there had not really been an extermination, but an attempted extermination. Faurisson could not be precise about when this change in the Holocaust story occurred: “because it’s a very slow change through the years… sometimes, a historian like Mrs. Olga Wormser-Migot said something in the revisionist sense, and [a] few years after she recanted. There are so many people who recanted in all this story. So it is very difficult to [be] precise.” (30-8122, 8123)
Another change in the Holocaust story over the years was the simple fact that there was now a historical debate between the intentionalists and the functionalists. This debate began, said Faurisson, “… you could say 1984. It would be, I think, more reasonable to say already at the beginning of the 1980[s], because this kind of dispute, this kind of new idea, does not emerge suddenly like that, like in a theatre. It begins very slowly.” Among the intentionalists was Raul Hilberg, who said in his first edition that there were orders from Hitler. Among the functionalists was Martin Broszat. (30-8123, 8124)
Christie pointed out that Browning had testified that no legitimate historian could question the Holocaust. What did Faurisson say?
“I say that there is a legitimate debate, for myself, about any point of history, and we really need to know, first, if something really happened, instead of saying it happened and we’re now trying to see how it happened. We must establish first the fact. The first duty of a historian is to tell us what happened.” (30-8124)
Faurisson testified that another change in the Holocaust story concerned the numbers of people who allegedly died in Auschwitz. These numbers, claimed by various media, historians, or tribunals, ranged from 800,000 to 8 million. The figure of 8 million, for example, was given by Jacques Billiet, director of the Information Service of War Crimes in France, on page 7 of the book Concentration Camps, published in November of 1945. The same book also gave figures of 4 million and 7 million. The figure of 5 million was given by the historian Max Gallo in L’Express, June 16, 1975, page 70. The claim of “more than 4.5 million” was made by Dr. Charles Bendel on March 2, 1946 at the trial of the German, Dr. Bruno Tesch, in Hamburg. Dr. Tesch was responsible for the firm which manufactured Zyklon B. He was condemned to death and executed. A different figure was given by the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, in Nuremberg document PS-3868, in which Hoess declared under oath on April 5, 1946:
I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease making a total dead of about 3,000,000.
Another figure was given by Georges Wellers in Le Monde Juif, October 7, 1983, page 158, where he claimed that 1,472,000 had died, ninety percent of which he claimed were Jews. The figure of 4 million was that officially accepted by the International Military Tribunal. It appeared in the official report of the Soviets which was accepted as authentic by virtue of Article 21 of the Tribunal’s charter. This had the value of judicial notice. This report, dated May 6, 1945, could be found in the IMT “Blue Series” vol. 39, pages 241 to 261. Dr. Raul Hilberg claimed 1 million Jews [and 250,000 non-Jews] perished in Auschwitz, while Reitlinger claimed in his book The Final Solution, 1953, re-edition in 1971, on page 500, that 800,000 to 900,000 persons perished in the Auschwitz gas chambers and its camps. Of those who believed in the extermination, said Faurisson, the figure of 800,000 was the lowest figure given for deaths at Auschwitz. (30-8125 to 8128)
“None of those figures,” said Faurisson, “even the figure of Reitlinger, are justified, like the total itself of 6 million. Recently, Mr. Leon Poliakov said in the newspaper Le Figaro, he said, ‘There is no shame to have to change your opinion. For instance, I said at the time 2.5 million died in Auschwitz. Now, I say 1.5 million’. But what would be interesting is, now, Mr. Poliakov, what is your total? Didn’t you change also your total… of 6 million?” (30-8129, 8130)
Christie returned to Did Six Million Really Die? and the segment of the pamphlet on page 21 dealing with the Anne Frank diary. Harwood alleged that the diary was not genuine:
· The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the “diary” and was demanding payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank.
Faurisson testified that Harwood had been confused, believing that Frank paid Levin to write the diary, when in fact he had hired Levin to write a play based on the diary. It was a “bad argument,” said Faurisson, “but on the essential, his opinion about the journal of Anne Frank, [he] is quite right.” (30-8130, 8131)
Faurisson had written the book Is The Diary of Anne Frank Genuine?. On the back cover was the photocopy of an article published on 9 October, 1980 in the New York Post dealing with the results of an official expert opinion on the authenticity of the diary. Faurisson read the article to the jury:
Anne Frank may not have inked that famous diary By Al Fredricks A REPORT by the German Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau (BKA) indicates that portions of The Diary of Anne Frank had been altered or added after 1951, casting doubt over the authenticity of the entire work, the West German news weekly Der Spiegel has disclosed.
The diary, a day-to-day account of the anguish of a young Jewish girl and her family hiding in in (sic) their Amsterdam home during the Nazi invasion, has touched the hearts of millions.
The manuscript was examined on orders of a West German court as part of a libel action brought by Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only family member to survive the concentration camps, against Ernst Roemer for spreading the allegation the book was a fraud.
This was the second suit against Roemer, a long-time critic of the book, by Frank. In the first case, the court decided in Frank’s favor when the testimony of historians and graphologists sufficed to authenticate the diary.
In April, however, only a short time before Otto Frank’s death on Aug. 19, the manuscript was turned over to technicians of the BKA for examination.
The manuscript, in the form of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, was examined with special equipment.
The results of tests performed at the BKA laboratories show that portions of the work, specifically of the fourth volume, were written with a ball point pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded, those sections must have been added subsequently.
The examination of the manuscript did not, however, unearth any conclusive evidence to lay to rest the speculations about the authenticity of the first three notebooks.
Faurisson produced the actual Official Expert Opinion dated 28 May 1980, upon which the newspaper article was based and which set out the results of the technical analysis of the original diary manuscript by the State Criminal Office. (30-8131 to 8142; filed as Exhibit 122 at 30-8142)
The expert opinion stated as follows [English translation]:
Wiesbaden 28th May 1980
STATE CRIMINAL OFFICE Tel. 55-2640
Case KT 41 – 2404/79 To District Court of Justice Hamburg Minor Penal Court 7 P.O. Box 30 01 21 2000 Hamburg 36
Ref. Penal case against Edgar Geiss and Ernst Römer viz. criminal and technical test of the “Diary of Anne Frank” Re: Decisions of the District Court of Justice in Hamburg, Minor Penal Court 7, dated 13th July 1979, 7th Jan 80 and 26th March 80 with ref numbers (49) 30/77 Ns – 141 Js 298/76 and 145 Cs 129/76
OFFICIAL EXPERT OPINION (based on Par. 256 of Civil[ian] Penal Code) According to the decision of the District Court of Justice in Hamburg dated 13th July 1979 (Vol. IV ref to (49) 30/77, page 478) it has to be found out whether the manuscripts ascribed to provene from Anne Frank, should possibly be denied as having been written within the years 1941-1944, by testing the paper and the handwriting utensils used.
The following items were submitted for examination: Diary I starting with the first date of 12th June 1942 in a checkered cover
Diary II dated from 22nd Dec 1943 until 17th Apr 1944 in a brown paper cover
Diary III starting with the 17th Apr 1944, ending with 1st Aug 1944 in a brown paper cover
A further item submitted for examination consisted of 324 loose manuscript pages starting with the date of 20th June 1942 until 29th March 1944, which are also ascribed to be written by Anne Frank. Another item was a note book of Anne Frank with narratives and remarks concerning events which happened in the “backyard-house”, allegedly written in the years 1942 to 1944. Each of these submitted items were originals.
The examinations were carried through in the town hall of Birsfelden/Switzerland. The police of the Basle County (Rural Dept.) distributed for this purpose 1 Stereo microscope and 1 ultra-violet lamp. Some samples of the diary papers, handwritings and samples of the loose manuscripts pages have been taken from the Swiss originals and tested at Wiesbaden document-testing-laboratories of the German State Criminal Office, to carry on the necessary chemical and physical examinations. The examinations in the laboratories have also been extended to a letter written by Anne Frank, addressed to her grandmother, dated 22nd March 1941, and to a postcard addressed to a “Mrs. Leni…” dated 7th July 1942 – all these items were necessary to compare the inks used.
TEST RESULTS:
All pages of the 3 diaries have a compact binding, showing a brown-yellowish tint. The fluorescent test did prove that in none of them a whitening ingredient has been traced; these so-called “whiteners” are commonly used in the production of modern papers since approximately 1950.
The strings of the bindings, too, do not exhibit any fluorescent properties.
The papers do not show any water-marks.
The diary manuscripts have been done by hand whereby blue-black ink – partly also red ink and pencil have been used; on some of the loose manuscripts corrections by pencil have been made.
A thorough-going examination and technical fluorescence testing of those 324 loose pages did show that, without exceptions, non-fluorescent papers of yellow, pink and blue colour have been used, with the only difference that paper of lighter weight have been used. Those loose papers do not show any water-marks.
The writing on the loose papers have also been done by hand with blue-black ink; post-entry corrections on those loose pages have been performed, too, with blue-black and red ink, sometimes also with pencil – and partly even with black, green and blue ball-point-pen paste.
Ball-point-pen paste of the quality shown on the tested pages did not be[come] available on the market but only since 1951.
The chemical test of the ink used on the pages of all diaries and loose manuscripts did show that, without exceptions, ferrigenous blue-black gallic acid ink with a high content of iron has been used – which was the common ink during WWII and the first years thereafter.
After 1949 gallic acid inks with a much lower content of iron but with a higher amount of dyestuffs available on the market, because the chemical industry was able to develop production on pre-war standards.
The same kind of ink has been used in making the handwriting of letters and postcards dating from 1941 until 1942, in making the notice-book containing the narrative dealing with the “backyard-house”, and in making the loose letter manuscripts, and the diaries. Also the same non-fluorescent quality of paper is the same in all those writings.
So we have to state that the same ink was used in performing the diaries I-III, the loose manuscripts and the other comparative scripts, which ink was obtainable on the market during WWII and the first years thereafter.
There is also no difference in the quality of papers, all were obtainable on the market during WWII.
But it is surely impossible, that those individual corrections, made by ball-point-pen paste on the loose paper pages had been written before the year 1951.
The report on the quality of paper used in the loose-pages manuscripts states, that this thin paper has been highly milled and did consist of relatively coarse cellulose pulp, not whitened.
As there is no water-mark on those paper sheets, it is impossible to determine the time when these papers have been manufactured, because no method exists to find out the age of paper by any scientific-criminal technique.
Anyway it is sure that those papers differ distinctly from those on the market nowadays. Papers of that minor quality is nowhere on sale today. It is also impossible to say clearly when the paper of better quality began to penetrate into the market. Generally speaking the reconversion from lower to better quality could have taken place in 1950 approximately. Its also impossible to fix the proper age of any ink inscription by chemical methods, even in adapting the “Mezger-Rall-Heess” method one can only have a chance to find out the age of any ink inscription with an accuracy of maximal 6 years – but in our case the time under consideration is much earlier.
Taking into account the quality of paper and the ferrigenous gallic acid ink it cannot be said that the 3 diaries and the manuscripts consisting of 324 loose paper pages have been performed on the stated dates, or have been written a few years later.
By order (–) signed Dr. Werner Chief Director Scientific Dept.
Faurisson testified that a handwriting report done in 1960 or 1961 had determined that the handwriting of the entire diary was done by the same person. This included the corrections written, as was later discovered, in ball-point pen ink. (30-8140)
Faurisson turned next to the subject of Raul Hilberg and the alleged Hitler orders. In 1961, Hilberg published the first edition of his book The Destruction of the European Jews, which contained the following passage on page 177:
How was the killing phase brought about? Basically, we are dealing with two of Hitler’s decisions. One order was given in the spring of 1941, during the planning of the invasion of the USSR; it provided that small units of the SS and Police be dispatched to Soviet territory, where they were to move from town to town to kill all Jewish inhabitants on the spot. This method may be called the “mobile killing operations.” Shortly after the mobile operations had begun in the occupied Soviet territories, Hitler handed down his second order. That decision doomed the rest of European Jewry. Unlike the Russian Jews, who were overtaken by mobile units, the Jewish population of central, western, and southeastern Europe was transported to killing centres. In short (outside Russia), the mobile operations were reversed. Instead of moving the killers to the victims, the victims were brought to the killers. This second method, the central killing operations, will be discussed in the subsequent two chapters, which deal with the deportations and the killing centre operations, respectively.
Faurisson pointed out that Hilberg spoke clearly of two “orders.” But in his subsequent publications, “There is no more order. In his second edition, he totally changed, which is the centre of his thesis… Raul Hilberg built a kind of monument, I could say that it is a monument, and this monument was about the extermination of the Jews. He calls that ‘the destruction of the European Jews.’ And to try to understand that and to explain that, he said: And there you have Hitler. If you don’t have Hitler, you cannot understand. Hitler dispatching orders, one order, two orders, and then you have, as a result, the destruction of the European Jewry. This is what Raul Hilberg explained up till, I should say, 1985.” (30-8146, 8147)
Faurisson stated that “in a certain way I admire his work, because it’s the work of somebody who worked very hard, but we have [books like that]… extraordinary books written in the past, and they are false… There is in… Dr. Hilberg, something of [the] immaterial – [he’s] absolutely not interested in what is material. He’s a little bit metaphysical. For instance, in this big book, you don’t have one photo. You have not the slightest idea of what could be a gas chamber. There is absolutely no description.” (30-8147, 8148)
As an example of the way Hilberg’s mental processes worked, Faurisson read from the first edition of his book, page 570, where Hilberg talked about the supply of Zyklon B:
The amounts required by Auschwitz were not large, but they were noticeable. Almost the whole Auschwitz supply was needed for the gassing of people; very little was used for fumigation. The camp administration itself did not buy the gas. The purchaser was Obersturmführer Gerstein, Chief Disinfection Officer in the Office of the Hygienic Chief of the Waffen-SS (Mrugowski). As a rule, all orders passed through the hands of TESTA, DEGESCH, and Dessau. From the Dessau Works, which produced the gas, shipments were sent directly to Auschwitz Extermination and Fumigation Division (Abteilung Entwesung und Entseuchung).
To any reader, said Faurisson, this passage would mean that Zyklon B was sent to a division in Auschwitz which took care of exterminating people as well as fumigation. But that was totally wrong. The word Entwesung meant “dis-insectization,” thus it referred to delousing or disinfestation or disinfection. Said Faurisson: “It has nothing to do with extermination of human beings, and it’s really… the thesis of Raul Hilberg. It’s really [a] very important part. Every naive reader would think Hitler gave those orders, and, for instance, you had in Berlin a man called Gerstein, and he would send the Zyklon to a special office to kill the people. This is what his book says, and he maintained that in his new edition.” (30-8150)
Faurisson testified that Hilberg had used Kurt Gerstein as a reference twenty-three times in the first edition of his book. Faurisson’s opinion of Gerstein was that his various statements were “Completely foolish, and it has been demonstrated not only in France but by… an international [researcher]… Carlo Mattogno.” In France, said Faurisson, a Mr. Henri Roques had been stripped of his doctorate in 1986 because of what he had written about Gerstein. This was the first time this had occurred in the history of France. (30-8150, 8151)
Faurisson did not think Hilberg’s work could be called impartial. He noted that Yehuda Bauer, the Jewish historian, had written in Midstream, April, 1987, page 50, as a compliment and not a criticism, that Hilberg’s whole work was filled with a burning hatred of Nazism and a deep, thorough identification with the victims.[5] Faurisson said: “I don’t criticize him for that, but I think that it is right. It is exact, accurate.” (30-8151, 8152)
In the 23 February 1983 edition of Newsday [Long Island, NY], in an article entitled “The Holocaust in Perspective,” author George DeWan had quoted comments made by Hilberg at a conference:
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds – a consensus, mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
[End Part 1/4]
_______________
Notes
[1] Robert Faurisson was viciously attacked and beaten by three young Jewish men on 16 September, 1989 while walking his dog in the early morning through a park in Vichy. Only the intervention of several men fishing on a nearby river saved his life. He remained in critical condition for several days with severe head injuries. A group called “The Sons of the Memory of the Jews” took responsibility for the attack. Serge Klarsfeld was quoted in the Globe & Mail (Sept. 18, 1989) as saying: “Someone who has provoked the Jewish community for years should expect this sort of thing.”
[2] This article is reproduced in full infra.
[3] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a professor at the School of Higher Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, was the author of the following declaration published in Le Monde (Feb. 21, 1979) which 34 historians endorsed by their signatures:
One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was possible technically, since it happened. That is the compulsory point of departure for any historical inquiry on this subject. It was our responsibility to recall this truth in simple terms: there is not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gas chambers.
[4] The above quotes read by Dr. Faurisson came from Judge Thomas’s ruling on judicial notice given in the absence of the jury. The ruling was repeated before the jury in almost identical terms later. Nevertheless, the reading of this ruling by Dr. Faurisson led to an attack by Judge Thomas on defence attorney Doug Christie. Thomas accused Christie of “orchestrating” the testimony for the purpose of challenging his ruling on judicial notice and to show “disrespect” for the court. Christie replied that the purpose of the testimony was to show that what Judge Thomas had ruled no man could reasonably dispute was very different from what the International Military Tribunal in 1945 held to be the truth. Thomas ruled, after hearing Dr. Faurisson’s proposed evidence in the absence of the jury, that Faurisson would not be allowed to comment on his judicial ruling or to give any “analyzation” (sic) of it. (30-8101 to 8119)]
[5] Yehuda Bauer. “Hilberg’s Silence: Replies to Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson”, Midstream (April, 1987) at p. 50, where Bauer wrote: “Hilberg’s whole work is filled with burning hatred of Nazism and a deep, thorough identification with the victims.”