Fax to the Auschwitz Museum authorities
FAX to: Jerzy WROBLEWSKI
Director, Auschwitz State Museum
and to: Krystyna OLEKSY
Assistant Director
+48 – 33 43 18 62
(1 page + 6 pages)
February 23, 1998
Dear Sir, Dear Madam,
Would you please be so kind as to find attached a text of mine dated January 26, 1998, entitled “The ‘Gas Chamber’ of Auschwitz-I”? I have included a German and an English translation along with the French original.
This alleged “gas chamber” is a fake (in French “une imposture” and, in German, “ein Schwindel” or “ein Betrug”).
Your are well aware of this fact.
In 1941-42, the period of the alleged gassings in the building, there existed neither “the victims’ entrance door” nor “the four openings in the roof for the pouring in of Zyklon-B pellets”. Consequently neither the victims nor the poison gas could have got into the premises in the manner in which we are deceitfully told that they did.
As I discovered in 1975-76, during my visits to the camp and my contacts with Messrs Jan MACHALEK and Tadeusz IWASZKO (archivist), the place had been, in 1941-42 and until August 1943, a cold room for the laying out of corpses awaiting cremation; then, as of September 1943, it had been transformed, at the price of several months’ effort, into an air-raid shelter with a surgical operating room and two adjoining sickrooms serving the nearby SS hospital.
Your present-day offices look out onto this false “gas chamber”.
My findings of 1975-76, published in 1978-80, thenceforth earned me some violent attacks, over a period of about fifteen years. Since then (since January of 1995, precisely) they have been confirmed by the French journalist and historian Éric CONAN (Auschwitz : la mémoire du mal, L’Express [Paris], January 19-25, 1995, particularly on page 68) and in a book published in 1996 by the Canadian-Jewish historian Robert Jan van PELT and the American historian Debórah DWORK, also of Jewish origin (Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, London 1996, particularly on pages 363-364, 367, and 369).
I repeat and again specify: this “gas chamber” is neither “in its original state” (the version given by the guides to your 500,000-odd visitors per year), nor “a reconstitution or a reconstruction [identical, or nearly so, to the original]” (the version of some State Museum staff members). It is in fact a fake created by the Communists in 1948.
It was precisely in 1995 that, after five years of delay and hesitation, you decided to make a drastic revision of the estimated death toll at Auschwitz: instead of the figure of 4,000,000 inscribed on 19 slabs in 19 languages, slabs which you had dismantled in 1990, you opted for that of 1,500,000. This latter figure remains extravagant but it does represent progress on the path of truth.
It remains for you to take another, similar step in the right direction, first by immediately closing the place called “the gas chamber” to all visitors, then by revealing the truth about it.
Yours sincerely,
R. Faurisson
COPY to UNESCO (Paris), with appropriate cover letter.
February 23, 1998