Auschwitz I: Not “reconstruction” but falsification

LETTER (for publication)

to Mark WEBER and Greg RAVEN, Institute for Historical Review

I deplore the fact that, in its September-December 1999 issue, the Journal insists on saying that the Auschwitz main camp “gas chamber” visited by millions of tourists over the decades is “actually a postwar reconstruction” (photo caption, p. 13), or simply that this “alleged gas chamber […] is not in its original state” (p. 67). For more than twenty years I have kept repeating and demonstrating that it is strictly a “falsification”. The last time I had occasion to say this was… in that very issue, in an article entitled The “Gas Chamber” of Auschwitz I (p. 12-13). Therein I quoted two antirevisionist historians: Éric Conan and Robert Jan van Pelt. The former, in 1995, had used the exact equivalents of the words “false” and “falsifications”; he even wrote: “In the late 1970s, Robert Faurisson exploited these falsifications all the better as the Museum officials balked then at acknowledging them”. The latter, in 1996, used the words “falsified” and “falsifying”.

Remember that, in 1992, David Cole, who unfortunately was not very well acquainted with the subject, was ensnared by Franciscezk Piper who told him that today’s “gas chamber” was “very similar” to the original one. Piper was lying: it was not “very similar” but crudely falsified, as D. Cole could have proved to him immediately had he not been ignorant of the original and authentic construction drawings that I had discovered in 1976 and published in 1979.

February 28, 2000