Another hackneyed Auschwitz “revelation”!

The latest issue of the German mass-circulation daily Bild announces the recent discovery of new documents on Auschwitz, writing, in particular, that one of them seems to prove the existence of a homicidal gas chamber in that camp. In Berlin, Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the Federal Archives, thinks that in this “discovery” he has found the way to silence the revisionists.

In reality, there is strictly nothing new about this type of document, and the building plans of the “gas chamber” in question (Gaskammer, fully spelled out) are those of a simple “delousing facility” (Entlausungsanlage, fully spelled out as well).

Besides, a passage in the Bild article demonstrates the unease of our fraudsters. Here it is in German, followed by an English translation: “Dass in der 11,66 mal 11,20 Meter großen „Gaskammer“ nicht Kleidungsstücke mit dem bei der SS üblichen Blausäure-Mittel entlaust, sondern Menschen vergast werden sollten, muss als sehr wahrscheinlich angenommen werden.” “It must be considered very likely that in this 11.66 by 11.20-meter ‘gas chamber’ it was not garments that were deloused in the SS’s usual way with hydrogen cyanide, but that it was human beings who must have been gassed.”

The reader will have noted: “It must be considered very likely […] that it was human beings who must have been gassed.”

This passage was left out of the articles in the French or English-language press which have, so far, come to my attention and which claim to quote Bild.

I shall permit myself here to remind readers that I was the first in the world to publish the building plans for the Auschwitz crematoria supposed to have housed homicidal gas chambers; the spaces in question were actually either morgues, an air-raid shelter, or some other innocuous rooms. I discovered those drawings in 1976 in the camp archives and began publishing them with an article in the Spanish magazine Interviú (February 1979), a piece carrying a photo of me holding a sheet with crematorium plans altogether comparable to the ones now shown in Bild.

In the nearly thirty years since then I have never ceased going over the conclusions to be drawn from those plans and from a number of other elements, like the inspection of the purported crime scenes at Auschwitz, or, on the one hand, the scientific bibliography regarding delousing, disinfection or anti-infestation methods using Zyklon B and, on the other, the procedure for executing a condemned prisoner with hydrogen cyanide gas as followed in certain American penitentiaries. (Invented shortly after the first world war and still in use today under another name, “Cyanosil”, Zyklon B is a hydrogen cyanide-based substance).

From then onwards nearly all the revisionist researchers (Fred Leuchter, Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mattogno and many others) have made extensive use of those plans or of others still, which Bild discovers today, just as someone might discover the moon or the Loch Ness monster. Indeed the anti-revisionists have also, at their end, had to publish these plans and then attempt, though in vain, to challenge the obvious significance thereof. Such was precisely the case with the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac. I shall recall that he, after having deployed the formidable means put at his disposal by the Klarsfeld couple to uphold “the Holocaust” argument in general and that of the alleged homicidal Auschwitz gas chambers in particular, ended up writing that, all things considered, those arguments were fit only “for the rubbish bins of history” (Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Gallimard, Paris 2000, p. 652).

In the end, the Bild reporter has done nothing but recycle an old rumour.

It remains to be seen whether the Jewish authorities find fault with his clumsiness or, instead, congratulate him for being so willing to help with their propaganda.

November 9, 2008

 

Addition of November 10, 2008 about the first Jewish reactions to Bild‘s “discovery”

Below, the headline and beginning of an article in today’s Internet edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Auschwitz expert: Blueprints found in Berlin not of death camp

By Assaf Uni

A leading expert on Auschwitz on Sunday denigrated the importance of the finding of plans for the construction of the extermination camp, which was reported this weekend in the German tabloid Bild. He said the documents have been known to scholars for many years and that they were not plans to build the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but rather earlier plans for the building of a forced  labor camp. [Etc.]