Foreword to the 2nd edition of Écrits révisionnistes (1974-1998)

The first edition of the present work dates from March 1999. For it I was indebted to two persons who had kindly agreed to compile for publication the articles and studies which, in addition to a few revisionist books or other pieces, I had written from 1974 to 1998. This new edition reproduces the contents of the first but not without abundant corrections of detail; I owe it to Jean Plantin and, especially, to Yvonne Schleiter. The index of names has been entirely redone. In the absence of an index of subjects there is a “reading guide” prepared by Jean-Marie Boisdefeu. This second edition ought to have appeared in 2001 but we have constantly had to postpone it up to today. I had promised, in addition to the present four volumes, a book of illustrations; I regret all the more my inability to keep that promise as my general undertaking, essentially concrete, would have benefited from being illustrated by documents and photographs of which, moreover, I possess a great many.

On February 2 of this year I devoted an article to my “Sombre appraisal of historical revisionism”. Since that date the situation has worsened. The conference that was set to take place on April 24 and 25 in Sacramento, California, bringing together more than two hundred supporters of the revisionist cause, was cancelled and, in Toronto, one may fear the worst for Ernst Zündel, who for fifteen months has been held without charge in a high-security prison.

Revisionist researchers or active disseminators of revisionist works are today but a handful. One may mention, principally, Germar Rudolf in the United States (with the help of his friend Jürgen Graf in Russia,), Fredrick Töben in Australia, Carlo Mattogno in Italy, Jean Plantin in France, Vincent Reynouard in Belgium and, on the Internet, the “aaargh” site, on the one hand, and that of Radio-Islam on the other hand.

On the scientific level revisionism has won a total victory. It no longer has any opponents. The Hilbergs, the Vidal-Naquets, the Klarsfelds, the Berenbaums, the Deborah Lipstadts, a Robert Jan van Pelt who, in essence, is content to take up the feeble arguments of a Jean-Claude Pressac on his own account, have been reduced to naught. The revisionists no longer see anything opposing them but Spielberg films, Yad Vashem ceremonies, museums inspired by Disneyland, pilgrimages to Auschwitz, media drumming, brainwashing in the schools and universities and, finally, State propaganda relying on police and judicial repression. Our opponents have laid down their arms but practically no one knows it since the defeated, thanks to the power they possess in the media and their consummate talent in bluffing, blow their trumpets or shofars as if they had carried the day.

Their historians used to claim that Hitler had conducted a policy of extermination against the Jews, involving, particularly, the use of weapons of mass destruction called homicidal gas chambers or gas vans. They would also assure us that, on the Eastern front, the Einsatzgruppen had engaged in gigantic slaughters of Jews. In the end, if one was to believe them, nearly all the Jews of Europe had thus been exterminated.

So vast a crime would have presupposed an order, a project, a plan, overall guidelines, detailed instructions, funding, a monitoring of operations and expenditures, numerous assessments whether particular or general, research into and successful development of such weapons as mankind had not yet known, along with the involvement of a great many soldiers, scientists, engineers, builders and other employees. Such an undertaking, especially if it had been carried out in the utmost secrecy, would have required a set of draconian measures. All of this would have left much irrefutable evidence, both material and documentary. At first, the official historians had the nerve to state that such evidence did indeed exist, and “in abundance”. When challenged to supply “one proof, one single proof” of their own choice, they pulled back and, following Pressac’s example, thenceforth invoked only the existence of “criminal traces” or “beginnings of proof”. Retreating still further, they invented the claim that the great slaughter had occurred without any order or directive but spontaneously (like “spontaneous generation”, in a way). The most prestigious among them, Raul Hilberg, going back on his former affirmation that there had been two orders from the Führer to kill the Jews, proceeded to assert that in fact everything had happened without an order, without a plan, all thanks to “an incredible meeting of minds” (sic) within the vast German bureaucracy and to “a consensus-mind reading” (sic) among Nazi bureaucrats!

No one has been able to find a single enclosure that could have been an authentic homicidal gas chamber. Not a single homicidal gas van, either. For the world’s greatest crime, the accusation can produce no forensic examination of the weapon. Among the post-mortems not one attests to death by gassing. The alleged witnesses of “gassings” whom revisionists have been able to subject to a precise and public cross-examination in court have been unmasked. The execution gas chambers shown to tourists have been shown to be mere Potemkin-like fakes. The massacres attributed to the Einsatzgruppen have left not one common grave approaching the dimensions of the mass graves in Katyn forest (4,255 corpses counted) – a proved crime, that slaughter, and the culprits of which were our Soviet allies.

Conversely, facts that prove that the Third Reich never had a policy of physical extermination of the Jews are not wanting. Even on the Eastern Front, the killing of an innocent Jewish civilian was punishable by severe sanctions, including the death penalty. The German courts martial were capable of punishing those guilty of any sort of excess against Jews. Examples abound of measures taken, in the camps and elsewhere, to protect Jews against the excesses characteristic of all contexts of imprisonment, as well as against the ravages of disease. The Germans were haunted by a fear of disorder, of contagion and epidemics, of loss of manpower; even at Auschwitz there were training centres for Jewish youths in various manual trades. Millions of Jews, despite the great bloodshed that a Europe at war was experiencing and despite the apocalypse of a Germany pulverised by the systematic Allied bombing, survived the war. They call themselves “survivors”, owing their lives to “miracles”, and still today make up the membership of associations with a pronounced thirst for financial reparations. Even now, fifty-nine years after the war, their number is estimated at 687,900 (recent estimate by the demographer Jacob Ukeles of New York, according to an article by Amiram Barkat, U.S. Court to discuss issue of who is a Holocaust survivor, Haaretz, April 18, 2004). During the war, Jewish leaders made alarming statements about an on-going extermination of the Jews, but their conduct showed that they did not really believe their own words. The Allied chiefs saw that they were dealing at times with Jews seeking “to stoke us up”. And then, the “Brown Jews” of “the Jewish international of collaboration” were not absent from the scene. Zionists and National Socialists had, to a certain extent, the same worldview; whence, in 1941, the Stern Group’s offer to Germany of a military collaboration against the British. As late as April 21, 1945 a representative of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur, was received by Himmler to discuss the matter of Jews to be handed over to the Allies.

The Germans sought to expel the Jews from Europe, if possible with the rest of the world’s agreement. They had in mind a “territorial final solution of the Jewish question” (“eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage”, according to the internal memorandum of August 21, 1942 signed by one Martin Luther (sic), director at the German Foreign Office; on this point see my article of August 7, 2008, The secular religion of “the Holocaust”, a tainted product of consumer society).

On March 6 of this year, in France, on Thierry Ardisson’s television programme Tout le monde en parle, Admiral Philippe de Gaulle was heard saying of the Jews: “The Germans wanted, if not to exterminate them, at least to drive them out [of Europe].” This reflection has met with silence, but was hardly lacking in accuracy. Also kept hidden from the general public is the fact that during the war neither Churchill, Eden, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle nor Stalin cared to mention the “gas chambers” or “gas vans” in any statement or writing. Those among them who, years after the end of the conflict, wrote their war memoirs also kept quiet on the subject. Pope Pius XII, although even more hostile towards Hitler than towards Stalin, did likewise (cf. Robert Faurisson, Pope Pius XII’s Revisionism, Historical Review Press, Uckfield, England, 2006).

The “weapons of mass destruction” of Adolf Hitler – his alleged homicidal gas chambers and gas vans – existed no more than did the “weapons of mass destruction” of Saddam Hussein. The lie and the liars behind the stories of 1944 under the aegis of Franklin Roosevelt – with the War Refugee Board, set up by Henry Morgenthau Jr – were identical in kind to those materialising under George Bush Jr and his Office of Special Plans, set up in 2002 by Paul Wolfowitz (see my article The revisionist method applied to the history of the Third World War, May 11, 2003).

Unhappily, today, poisoned by “Holocaust” propaganda, the minds of too many people are not inclined to call their beliefs into question. The “Shoah” has become a religious superstition inspiring reverence or fear. Conscious of its own fragility and of the precarious position of the State of Israel, of which it is the sword and the shield, this religion has erected formidable defensive walls and severely punishes those who try to stand up against it. In the past, in order to be a truly active revisionist it took courage and sacrifices; in future, it will take the heroism of Antigone and a singular abnegation to remain a revisionist.

May 30, 2004