Whether “Holocaust by gas” or “Holocaust by bullets”: no physical or forensic evidence!

In a decision handed down on April 26, 1983 senior French judges recognised the scientific character of my own research and findings on what the historian Olga Wormser-Migot, in 1968, called “the problem of the gas chambers”. They concluded that everyone should have the right to say, as I had done, that those alleged weapons of mass destruction had not existed and, furthermore, could not have existed. That decision of the first chamber, section A, of the Paris court of appeal, presided over by François Grégoire, may be read at robert-faurisson.com/histoire/communique26041983.

It was I who, on March 19, 1976, discovered the building plans, kept carefully hidden till then, of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria supposed to contain (homicidal) gas chambers. Those plans revealed that those crematoria never had gas chambers but did contain, as the case might be, either a depository for bodies at ground level (Leichenhalle), depositories semi-interred for protection from the summer heat (Leichenkeller), or other equally innocuous rooms. Quite early on I had noted that the historians and judges dealing with the “genocide of the Jews” and the “Nazi gas chambers” were content, as concerned those two subjects, with “testimonies” or “confessions” and coldly dispensed with any physical evidence. In particular, despite the fact that it was, apparently, a matter of crimes that were atrocious and methodical, countless and unprecedented, no one had sought forensic evidence of the existence and operation of a single one of those amazing chambers. With one exception, however, which occurred as early as 1945, in France, regarding the alleged gas chamber of the Struthof-Natzweiler camp near Strasbourg. And there, no luck for the accusation! On December 1, 1945 Professor René Fabre, dean of the pharmacy faculty in Paris, having led an investigation, closed his toxicological research with a doubly negative finding: there was no trace of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) either in the alleged gas chamber or in the bodies of the allegedly gassed Jews (partly preserved at the Hôpital civil of Strasbourg). Remarkably, his forensic report would, at an indeterminate date, disappear from the archives of the gendarmerie and the military courts (at Le Blanc in the Indre département) but, fortunately, in 1980, I personally discovered a report signed by the medical experts Simonin, Fourcade and Piedelièvre attesting to Professor Fabre’s doubly negative conclusion. No less remarkable is the fact that, despite my publication of these discoveries about the professor’s forensic report, the historians stubbornly ignored them. And this to the point, for example, where a Robert Steegmann did not even mention the name of René Fabre in the two works totalling 875 pages that he devoted to Struthof (in 2005 and 2009 respectively), and in which he presented as established fact the existence and operation of a homicidal gas chamber in that same camp.

I was the first and, for too many years, the only one to dispute the existence and operation of the magical Nazi gas chamber by producing evidence of a physical, chemical, architectural and topographical nature, evidence which, nonetheless, is used quite regularly in the technical police’s criminal research (with on-site investigation of a murder weapon) as well as in that of the scientific police (with laboratory analyses). I set about conducting numerous studies and consultations in several scientific fields at the central laboratory of the prefecture of police in Paris, with experts on gas in France and abroad, with manufacturers or users of Zyklon B for disinfection, with specialists of gas chambers for disinfection or disinfestation, of crematory ovens etc. Above all, I particularly turned my attention to the execution gas chambers used until the 1990s in American prisons (functioning with HCN, which happened to be the active ingredient of Zyklon B, the insecticide purportedly used to exterminate the Jews in the course of “the Holocaust”). I was surprised to find that in Germany, Austria and the United States, where engineers and chemists were hardly lacking, it seemed no questions had ever been asked about the simple feasibility of the gassing of millions of men, women and children with HCN, that is, with an explosive substance, so dangerous to handle that the Americans had, in order to mount their system for the execution of just one person, been obliged to design and perfect an extraordinarily complicated steel room with a door like that of a submarine and sophisticated machinery – especially for the removal by ventilation of the poison gas and its neutralisation after the execution, without which a corpse suffused with HCN could not be touched, much less carried away. For such an execution of a single inmate the whole prison was on a war footing, for an execution gassing was dreadfully more dangerous than a disinfection gassing. The argument of the American gas chamber proved so efficacious that, in a certain manner, my study of the real American gas chamber allowed the total discrediting of the imaginary German gas chamber. That said, one remains baffled at the gullibility in which, on this subject, so many people of the twentieth and early twenty-first century persist. In these “centuries of science” it has been possible to fool billions and convince them that, for years, the Germans used a weapon of mass destruction that has never been shown otherwise than in a vague or phantasmagorical form. Even today, tourists at Auschwitz I are shown around the inside of a place called “gas chamber” whereas, as historian Éric Conan finally admitted in 1995, “Everything in it is false” (The “Gas Chamber” of Auschwitz I).

But has not Father Patrick Desbois done as much with his ​​“Holocaust by bullets”? He claims to have discovered, in Ukraine, the sites of 850 mass graves containing a million and a half Jewish corpses. He shows the supposed locations of some of them but not one corpse, unless in a Jewish cemetery. He explains that a rabbi, whom he went to consult in London, has assured him that the victims of the Holocaust are saints and that, therefore, no one has the right to disturb their peace with excavations. And the trick works. It is enough to have the Holocaustic faith and believe, as visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington believe the inscription above the photograph, in the middle of the permanent exhibition, of an impressive pile of “shoes of the gassed” (sic), shoes which, speaking, tell them in unison, “We are the last witnesses”. At first the political, religious, academic authorities – the whole crowd of them – fêted Father Desbois. With his “Holocaust by bullets” (and his “Holocaust by smothering” under duvets or cushions) had he not found a substitute for the “Holocaust by gas” that was showing serious signs of exhaustion? Unfortunately for the holy healer, discredit has started to strike him as well, and his star is fading (Querelle autour du Père Desbois, Le Monde (des livres), June 19, 2009).

Science is but a long process of trial and error, then correction. It is, in its essence, revisionist. Instead of punishing him like a criminal, the justice system ought to protect the researcher keen on accuracy. That researcher is a benefactor of mankind, whether or not he wants to be.

April 9, 2014