Foreword to the Second Leuchter Report
Fred A. Leuchter, aged 46, is an American engineer living near Boston, where he has become a specialist in the planning and building of execution systems for certain penitentiaries of his country. He has, in particular, carried out the modernisation of the gas chamber of the penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.
Ernst Zündel is a German of 50 who lives in Toronto where, after a brilliant career as a graphic artist and advertising man that he had to abandon due to the serious troubles and boycott that his revisionist opinions had earned him, he has devoted himself almost entirely to the struggle against the lie of the “Holocaust”. I have assisted him in that struggle, particularly on the occasion of the two trials to which he was subjected at the instigation of a Canadian Jewish organisation in 1985 and 1988. The first trial lasted seven weeks and ended with a conviction and a sentence to 15 months’ imprisonment for “publication of false news” (sic). That verdict was quashed on account of grave errors committed by District Court judge Hugh Locke. The second lasted four months and, this time, Zündel was sentenced to nine months by District Court Judge Ron Thomas. This second verdict may also be quashed on the same grounds.
In 1988 Zündel asked Leuchter to go to Poland in order to examine “the alleged execution gas chambers” in the three camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. The findings in the first Leuchter Report that resulted are formal: there never existed any such things in those three camps.
In 1989 he asked Leuchter to go to West Germany and Austria to examine the alleged “execution gas chamber” at Dachau, near Munich, along with those at Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle, near Linz. The findings in the second report, as will be seen below, are just as formal: there never existed any such things in those three places.
It has been said of revisionism that it is the great intellectual adventure of the end of the century. This adventure actually began on the morrow of the Second World War with the publication of the works of Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier and continued with the publication in 1976 of the American Arthur Robert Butz’s masterful book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, the publication in 1979 of the German Wilhelm Stäglich’s Der Auschwitz Mythos and the first international conference, in Los Angeles in the same year, of the Institute for Historical Review. In the 1980s, thanks, in particular, to the action of Ernst Zündel, revisionism has experienced such a development that, in all likelihood, future historians will speak of historical revisionism before and after Zündel. In a certain way, those two court cases – which are a dishonour for Canada – will have changed all. Zündel had promised in 1985 that his trial, even if he were to lose it, would turn into the trial of the Nuremberg Trial and that the slanderers of Germany would meet their Stalingrad there. He was not mistaken.
Before Ernst Zündel
Contrary to what the general public imagines, never have Germany’s accusers even given a thought to proving the existence of the gas chambers. They have held that existence to be proved.
According to “Nazi hunter” Serge Klarsfeld himself:
It is evident that in the years following 1945 the technical aspects of the gas chambers were a neglected subject because no-one imagined that someday their existence would have to be proved. (Le Monde Juif, January-March, 1987, p. 1)
During the trials of Nuremberg, of Jerusalem (Adolf Eichmann), of Frankfurt and a number of other resounding cases, amongst which that of Klaus Barbie in 1987, there was no more of an attempt to prove the horrible accusation that continues to weigh upon the great vanquished nation. These judicial masquerades have been like witchcraft trials where the accused themselves and their lawyers, apart from rare exceptions, are unable or unwilling to call into question the taboo of the century: that of the magical gas chamber, which defies all the laws of physics and chemistry. Even barrister Jacques Vergès, courageous but not heroic, steered clear from demanding the least proof of the existence of the gas chambers to which it was claimed that his client Barbie had sent the children of the French town of Izieu.
In these trials said to be for “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity”, nations that call themselves civilised have flouted the elementary rules of criminal procedure.
To illustrate this point, let us take the example of any given homicide committed in France. Let us suppose, in this case, the existence of a weapon, a body, and a killer (or presumed such). Apart from exceptions, the justice system will tend to demand four routine reports:
- a study in situ (on the spot) of everything the police have been able to find as regards the body and suspect objects;
- a forensic examination of the crime weapon;
- a post-mortem;
- minutes of the reconstruction of the crime carried out in the accused’s presence.
Supposing that the accused has confessed, never will a judge decide that, since there is a confession, these formalities will not be respected. Besides, a confession in itself has no great legal value: it must be verified and confirmed.
However, in nearly half a century, these elementary demands have never been satisfied where it is a matter not of a commonplace crime perpetrated against a single person with an ordinary weapon (blade or firearm), but of a crime “without precedent”, supposedly perpetrated against millions of persons with an extraordinary weapon that no judge had ever yet seen in his life: the “gas chamber”, veritable chemical slaughterhouse of industrial prowess.
The first cases against the Germans accused of having been employed in camps equipped with gas chambers or gas vans began in late 1943 in the Soviet Union (trials at Kharkov and Krasnodar). They continue to this day, precisely in Israel with the Demjanjuk case. However, still today, after 46 years of such trials, there exists:
- no study in situ of everything that was found as regards bodies and suspect objects;
- no forensic examination concluding that such or such enclosure or van was used for homicidal gassings;
- no post-mortem concluding that a killing by poison gas occurred;
- no minutes of reconstruction (or simulation) of a homicidal gassing operation.
In the context of the so-called Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace) trial, there indeed were, respectively, a forensic study of the “gas chamber” and post-mortems on the bodies of the “gassed” kept at the civilian hospital in Strasbourg but, in each case, Professor René Fabre, a toxicologist, made a negative finding. In the case of Dachau, there was indeed a form of forensic study conducted by French army Captain Fribourg but, although it concluded that there was a need to continue with the examination of the enclosure provisionally christened “gas chamber”, that examination was not pursued.
During the investigation phase of the case brought against Rudolf Höss and others in charge at the Auschwitz camp, magistrate Jan Sehn entrusted the Krakow institute of judicial examination with the study of six zinc locking devices supposed to come from what he called the ventilation openings of the gas chamber of Krematorium-II at Birkenau. Added to this was the forensic study of 56 pounds of hair and of the metallic objects amidst that hair. The presence of hydrocyanic acid or compounds thereof had been noted (forensic reports by Dr Jan Z. Robel of December 15, 1945). Nothing but quite normal. The Germans often used hydrocyanic acid, in the form of Zyklon B, to disinfest structures, clothing, objects. In Poland, as in all of Europe at war, hair was collected from hairdressers’ salons for the manufacturing of textiles, after disinfestation. But the paradox is that, disposing of such a research institute, the Polish justice system has never, apparently, proceeded with elementary research in the enclosures described as homicidal “gas chambers”.
Some on-site visits by the courts did in fact take place during certain trials and notably that of Frankfurt (1963-65). The scandal is that certain places at the Auschwitz camp were examined then but not the supposed gas chambers which were, however, there, either in their original state (sic) or in ruins that were quite telling (see Wilhelm Stäglich, Auschwitz – A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1986).
A reconstitution, which is by definition a simulation, would have been easy to do at Birkenau and would have immediately made apparent the gassing accusations’ grotesque character. Hollywood-type films are sometimes shot at Birkenau, their makers purporting to retrace the arrival of convoys of Jews on the ramp at Birkenau, in the vicinity of the crematory buildings supposed to contain (a) a vestibule in which the victims would undress; (b) a homicidal gas chamber; (c) a room containing five crematory ovens with three mouths each. Each batch of victims amounted, we are told, to 2,000 persons and there were several batches per day for each crematorium. The reconstitution would immediately give rise to fantastic congestion given the size of the buildings concerned and the configuration of the surrounding grounds. The clogging up of the crematoria would be spectacular: assuming that it took, on average, an hour and a half to incinerate one body, a crematorium would still find itself, at the end of that time, with 2,000 – 15 = 1,985 bodies with no place to put them before their cremation! The “machinery of death” would come to a halt at the first gassing. It would take eight days and eight nights to cremate those 2,000 bodies; however, a crematory oven cannot operate continuously, day and night, in such a way.
To come to the matter of the witnesses: in all of these trials people have come presenting themselves as living witnesses of the “Holocaust” and the “gas chambers”. How did these people, for their own account, escape the gas chambers? Their answer is quite simple: they had all, uniformly, benefitted from a miracle. Each survivor was the result of a miracle; most often, as he or she had, successively, been through several “extermination camps”, that survivor represented, even all alone, a sum of miracles. The members of the “Sonderkommandos” beat all the records; usually, according to their story, the Germans gassed them too every three months, which means that, ultimately, two years spent at Auschwitz and Birkenau could amount for these persons to a total of seven or eight consecutive miracles. It is rare for lawyers or judges to dare to show their surprise at this proliferation of miracles. The champion of the gas chamber, Filip Müller (immortal author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers), got into some trouble on this subject with the court in Frankfurt, but found the way out: the story of the constant liquidation of the “Sonderkommando” members was, he was willing to acknowledge most generously, but a legend. It is dismaying that the general public, the historians and the judges let themselves be taken in to such an extent by the supposed witnesses to the “Holocaust”. Simone Veil, former French government minister and president of the European Parliament, generally presents herself as a living witness to and living proof of the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz but, if she is the living proof of anything it is indeed of the fact that the Germans did not exterminate the Jews at Auschwitz. During the war Simone Veil, her mother and one of her sisters were always together: at Drancy (a transit camp north of Paris), at Auschwitz, at Bobrek (a sub-camp of Auschwitz), and at Bergen-Belsen. It was in that last camp that they were to suffer from typhus; her mother died of it; she had, like her two daughters, survived Auschwitz; another of her daughters survived Ravensbrück.
Personally, I do not call “witness” a man presenting himself as such unless he has passed the test of cross-examination in court on the materiality of the alleged facts that he relates.
I ask the reader to consider carefully what I say here: in no trial has a supposed witness of “gassings” been cross-examined on the materiality of a gassing in which he claimed to have participated or witnessed. Even at the trial of the Germans Tesch and Weinbacher, sentenced to death and executed for having manufactured or sold Zyklon B, witness Charles Sigismond Bendel avoided that sort of cross-examination (see William Lindsey, Zyklon B, Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr Bruno Tesch, Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1983, p. 10-23). The lawyers had, as their principle and line of defence, avoidance of the taboo of the gas chambers, being content with saying that their clients had not gassed anyone.
After Zündel
With the arrival of Ernst Zündel, the veil of all these impostures was torn asunder.
This man had the daring not to let himself be intimidated. He showed that the emperor had no clothes on. He astounded the rascals. The prosecution’s experts and witnesses suffered a severe defeat. And Zündel, moving to the counter-offensive, gave a superb lesson to the historians and the judges: he showed them how things ought to have been done. They should have, in a sense, begun at the beginning which, as one knows, is at times difficult to do. Seeking first and foremost to establish the materiality of the facts, he sent, at his own expense, an expert on execution gas chambers and his team to Poland. This expert took samples of the floors, walls and ceilings of those alleged gas chambers and then had them analysed by an American laboratory.
I have related elsewhere how experts and witnesses for the prosecution were discomforted during the 1985 and 1988 Toronto trials (see The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988), Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-1989, p. 417-431), and shall not return to that point here. I should merely like to specify that this is not a matter of subjective judgment on my part. The proof that I am telling the truth lies in the fact that at the 1988 trial exterminationism’s number one expert, professor Raul Hilberg, refused to return and testify, so much did he still feel the bitter memory of his defeat in 1985: he confessed this in correspondence with prosecutor John Pearson, a letter that should have remained confidential but of which we got wind and then had to be revealed. As for Dr Rudolf Vrba and other witnesses of 1985, they did not return either for the 1988 trial; prosecutor Pearson, requested by judge Thomas to say whether any “survivors” would be coming, had to respond pitifully (I was there) that none would be coming this time. Out of pity for them I shall not bring up in detail here, as I have already done in the aforementioned article, the statements in 1988 of the expert Charles Biedermann, an honest man, apparently, and intelligent but ill prepared, and of professor Christopher Browning who, for his part, was to give a sorry image of what some American academics can be: astounding instances of ignorance, boundless naivety, taste for money and absence of scruples; here was a university professor who did not hesitate to have himself paid $150 per hour by the Canadian taxpayer to come to Toronto to heap condemnation on a man – Ernst Zündel – because of an opinion and contribute to having him thrown in prison: Zündel’s crime was to have published in Canada a 14-year-old study, freely distributed in the author’s country, Britain, and in Browning’s own land: the United States.
In my view one of the main merits of the first Leuchter Report will prove to have been its making glaringly plain the simple fact… that no forensic studies of the crime weapon had yet been made. Since this report was revealed, in April 1988, not a single person has been found – not even among those who are enraged by it – to set against it another, previously established report (I am not talking here, of course, about the forensic studies ordered by the Polish investigating magistrate Jan Sehn, which sidestepped the subject). As for those who would criticise points of the Leuchter Report, I invite them to establish or cause to be established their own report and we shall compare them. There still remains a solution proposed by Fred Leuchter himself in his talk given in Los Angeles in February 1989 at the Institute for Historical Review’s Ninth International Conference: the establishment of an international committee of experts on the problem of the gas chambers. As early as 1982 French historian Henri Amouroux, whom I had made aware of my own research, confided to me that he wished to see that solution; he told me in so many words that what he strongly hoped for was an “international and especially not a national commission”, the specialists in France, in his opinion, being so lacking in open-mindedness on the question of the gas chambers.
The Polish authorities, unless they develop a sudden appetite for “glasnost”, will oppose with all their might an inquiry of that kind, just as they oppose any normal access to the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum and, in particular, to the death registers (Totenbücher) left by the Germans, which would allow us to get an idea of the real number of the dead at Auschwitz. “If we were to carry out digs on site and found no evidence of the existence of gas chambers, the Jews would accuse us, us Poles, of having done away with the traces”: such was the reply in 1987 of Tadeusz Iwaszko, director of the museum’s archives, to French journalist Michel Folco, and this in the presence of the pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac, friend of Serge Klarsfeld. (Note: On August 8, 1989 Ernst Zündel wrote to Mikhail Gorbachov informing him that he had learnt, from the court testimony of International Red Cross delegate Charles Biedermann, of the Soviet Union’s capture of the Auschwitz death registers. He requested access to the registers and suggested that their release would be seen as a gesture of goodwill. In perhaps a happy coincidence the Soviet Union released the registers a month and a half later.)
It is likely that the first Leuchter Report will long remain the first and last word on the question of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. It certainly has its defects since it is also the work of a pioneer in the matter, and no-one has ever yet seen a pioneer avoid all possibility of error, but it has the merit of opening a particularly fertile field of research.
The Second Leuchter Report
The Second Leuchter Report also constitutes a pioneering work but, this time, on the question of the gas chambers of Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim.
I had not accompanied Leuchter and his team to Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. It is I who had had the idea, in 1977, of recommending the study of the American gas chambers (using hydrogen cyanide) to show the absurdity of the alleged German gas chambers (using Zyklon B, an insecticide which is also essentially hydrogen cyanide). I hoped, without believing very much, that one day an American gas chamber specialist might go to Auschwitz and do the physical and chemical examination that ought to have been conducted in any normal legal or historical inquiry. In 1979, at the first international conference of the Institute for Historical Review, I expressed that idea to a few people and, in particular, to Ernst Zündel. In the years that followed I abandoned all hope. It must be said that, even among revisionists, I found no great interest in my idea, which perhaps appeared too bold or too fanciful. Ernst Zündel, for his part, abandoned neither that idea nor the hope of succeeding. In the foreword to the first Leuchter Report I told how, thanks to Zündel and to Canadian barrister Barbara Kulaszka, I was able to meet engineer Fred Leuchter in Boston and how the Polish expedition was organised.
For the expedition to West Germany and Austria, I was part of Leuchter’s team. In the report you are about to read he of course gives all the necessary information about the other members and the nature and result of his mission.
Dachau
From 1945 to 1960 the propaganda of the Allies and their courts had assured us that homicidal gas chambers had functioned at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim. Apparently, neither evidence, nor witnesses nor confessions were wanting.
There was particular insistance on the Dachau gas chamber and its victims. The American propaganda had been so booming that, if there is one country in the world today where the gassings at Dachau pass for a fact as surely as the pyramids of Egypt, it is indeed the United States.
At the big Nuremberg trial one decisive day was that of the showing of a film on the German concentration camps, where the height of horror was reached with a view of the Dachau gas chamber: the narrator explained the operation of the machinery that was supposed to gas “probably a hundred men at one time”. One can never say enough how much that film – of a length of 6,000 feet “chosen” from the 80,000 feet shot – struck people’s imagination, including that of most of the German accused. It is likely that, more than the whole of the trial, the two events that most contributed to exciting public opinion against the defeated were, first, the showing of that film and then the sort of public confession, before the tribunal, of the witness Rudolf Höss, “the commandant of Auschwitz”. Today it is known that this confession had been “dictated”: the substance of it had been made up by the sick imagination of a British Jew who was one of those who arrested and tortured Rudolf Höss.
But the story of the Dachau gassings was also fabricated out of nothing and it was necessary to wait until 1960 for the defenders of the “Holocaust” to agree. On August 19, 1960, in Die Zeit, Martin Broszat acknowledged that there had never been homicidal gassings at that camp. Two years earlier that historian, to his disgrace, had published the “confession” of Rudolf Höss presenting it as authentic and trustworthy: this time it was a question of essentially the same confessions as those obtained by the British but, as the latter had in the meantime turned Höss over to the Polish Communists, the Broszat version was nothing other than a concoction and an improvement, with some Polish dressing, on the British inventions! (In 1972 Martin Broszat was to become director of the institute for contemporary history in Munich, a semi-official propaganda institute of the West German state).
Today, every visitor to the gas chamber of Dachau may read, on a panel set on a stand, the following inscription in five languages:
GAS CHAMBER
disguised as a “shower room”
– never used as a gas chamber
Since that panel is easily movable, filmmakers short of sensational effect can withdraw it and film or photograph the room from all angles, persisting in saying that it is a gas chamber that was indeed used to gas detainees.
I do not know whether one must admire the Dachau officials’ cynicism or the naivety of the visitors. The words on the panel, in reality, have no meaning. In 1980, in my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (p. 197-222), I think I demonstrated this point. I recount there how I nonplussed Barbara Distel, a museum official, and the late Dr Guerisse, president of the international Dachau committee, headquartered in Brussels. When these people are asked how it was that the Germans did not find the time to finish that little gas chamber begun in 1942, the answer is that the inmates employed in its construction either sabotaged or boycotted the work. But how could those inmates, who never in their lives could have seen a weapon that existed nowhere in the world (a gas chamber for 100 people at a time), know, from the start of the job, that once that job was finished there would be, in that place, a homicidal gas chamber? Was this a miracle of interpersonal divination and thought transmission? Had the inmates, for three years, passed on the word about it among themselves? Had the Germans assigned them an ultra-secret mission without caring whether it was carried out properly? And then, how do Barbara Distel and Dr Guerisse know that the room was an unfinished gas chamber? Can they spell out for us what is missing in order for this gas chamber, from “unfinished”, to become “finished”? From where have they drawn their technical knowledge? Do they possess building plans for “gas chambers” in their archives? Have they already seen “finished” gas chambers? Where and when?
During our visit to Dachau on April 9, 1989 Fred Leuchter, Mark Weber and I were filmed by Eugen Ernst, first in the gas chamber, then, once outside, on an open air esplanade. It was on that esplanade that we decided to record our comments on the visit. The tourists who themselves had just visited the “gas chamber” noticed us and sometimes stopped and lent an ear. Leuchter was able to make his report in peace, apart from one slight incident caused by a tourist who, in an aggressive tone, asked me if we were not doubting the reality of that gas chamber. I eluded his query and he went away. When it was my turn and that of Mark Weber to comment on camera, the tourists started gathering in too great a number. Some of them were already showing a little nervousness. We could have interrupted our report and continued it somewhere else in the camp. I decided to stay there and try to turn the situation to our advantage. After all, we had there before us the audience of our dreams: all these people had just “seen a gas chamber” and there was a risk that they would later be telling their friends and families: “The gas chambers’ existence can’t be disputed; I’ve seen one myself at Dachau.” I therefore engaged in a sort of improvised debate with the visitors. I had them note, in particular, that they had not visited a gas chamber at all but an enclosure that Mrs Distel, director of the Museum, had christened by that name. There that lady was taking the liberty of making a grave accusation in support of which she offered no proof (the few photos or papers exhibited in a room visited before the gas chamber demonstrated nothing at all). But who dared to ask her for proof? Apparently no-one. I cautioned those tourists against the temptation to go and tell their acquaintances that they had seen a gas chamber at Dachau. In reality, they had seen nothing of the kind. Continuing in stride I revealed to them that, for us revisionists, there had been no homicidal gas chambers, including at Auschwitz, nor any policy of extermination of the Jews. The whole thing took on the appearance of a sort of happening. Some visitors showed they were hostile, others favourable; all of them appeared either indignant or interested. One young German thought that, for making such remarks, I deserved prison. The most hostile ones found the usual way out: “Gas chambers or not, it amounts to the same”: an argument that a Frenchman can only find odd, considering that in France Jean-Marie Le Pen had been heavily convicted by the courts, at the request of Jewish organisations, for having said precisely that.
The magical gas chamber is the central pillar of the “Holocaust” religion. It is not the revisionists but the adherents to this religion who make a big to-to about the gas chambers; therefore it is the latter who must be asked for explanations for their attachment to the gas chamber. Besides, they are logical in their reasoning; without it, i.e. without the specific system of destruction, it becomes impossible to prove the existence of a systematic and specific destruction of the Jews. Without the gas chamber, there is no more genocide. And, without genocide, the history of the Jewish community resembles the history of any other human community that was prey to the horrors of the Second World War.
Eugen Ernst was able to film a good part of this happening that allowed me to give my first public talk in Germany about the taboo of the gas chambers and the genocide: just opposite the phoney Dachau gas chamber, one of the great shrines of the Sect.
Mauthausen
The minuscule gas chamber of Mauthausen has never had many faithful to defend it. It is indefensible. In nearly a half century I know of only only two significant figures who have truly tried to have us believe in its reality: the Austrian Hans Marsalek and the Frenchman Pierre-Serge Choumoff. In their various publications they prudently refrain from showing a veritable photograph taken inside the chamber. The reason for this is simple: the place has all the appearance of a simple shower room wherein not the least feature is to be seen that might lead one to think it was a homicidal gas chamber with all the apparatus which, in such case, would be indispensable. Marsalek and Choumoff show nothing at all or else – very rarely – reproduce an image of the outside of one of the two doors (two doors to a gas chamber, i.e. a deliberate doubling of the problems of air-tightness!), or otherwise they provide a vague glimpse of a small fragment of the interior.
In 1978, during my first visit, I had asked two officials of the museum, and particularly the director, a Spanish wartime detainee, why, amongst all the postcards of the camp on sale to tourists, there was not a single one showing the so-called gas chamber. The answer was: “That would be too cruel!” A surprising answer when one bears in mind that all the concentration camp museums, including that of Mauthausen, are often comparable to the “chambers of horrors” found at funfairs, and that “sex-shop anti-Nazism” is one of the most thriving trades of the “Shoah Business” denounced by a good number of Jews.
During the same visit I also sought to know why, either in the “gas chamber” itself or in the museum, there was to be found no document, no forensic report establishing that the place looking like a shower room was, it seems, a homicidal gas chamber. The camp’s director had the audacity to reply that the text of the report was well and truly on display in the gas chamber itself. That was false. He had to agree and told me about a report that was kept somewhere in Linz, giving no further specifics. One may well suppose that, if such a forensic report had existed, its text would be reproduced in all the works devoted to Mauthausen and cited in all the “Holocaust” bibliographies.
During our inspection of April 10, 1989 there was an incident with the camp authorities. We had arrived early in the morning so as to allow Leuchter to carry out his sample takings without too much risk. No sooner had he finished this task, which caused a frightful noise, than successive groups of tourists began their visit of the “gas chamber”. They were above all schoolchildren who are systematically indoctrinated in shame and hatred for all that Germans and Austrians of previous generations are supposed to have done during the war (Austria is the country of choice of Simon Wiesenthal). The guides, i.e. museum officials or teachers, held forth on the gas chamber and its operation with stereotypical explanations that contradicted one another on numerous points. Without saying a word between us we began, Mark Weber and I, before Eugen Ernst’s camera, putting questions to one of those in charge, the one who seemed the most competent. At first rather sure of himself the poor man, pressed with questions, had to admit finally that the way in which that gas chamber had worked was not very well known. It became apparent that over the years the lie had taken extremely varied forms. Visitors had successively had three contradictory versions of the gassing procedure thrusted upon them:
– procedure 1: the gas came from the ceiling through shower heads (still existing): this version, the official told us, was abandoned when people had noted that, given the low ceiling, it would have sufficed for the victims to put their hands over those shower heads and so block them and prevent the arrival of the gas;
– procedure 2: the gas came from the ceiling (and left through it during evacuation) through a sort of chimney opening (still existing), situated in the western part; the official was unable to tell us why this version of the story was abandoned in its turn;
– procedure 3: the gas came through a thin perforated pipe situated in the east wall, about 80 centimetres above the floor, i.e., it came from the part of the room diametrically opposite to that of procedure 2; there was no longer any trace of that pipe, nor even of the opening through which it supposedly came from an adjacent room where the gas was prepared; the adjacent room was totally bare and contained nothing that could give the least idea of its function.
All this was already troubling but perhaps the most troubling thing was that the only explanation given on a metal plaque in the gas chamber was that of procedure 2. I mentioned this to the official, who explained that that was an “error”: the procedure described on the plaque was no longer the right one. I had him observe that procedure 3 (the one currently considered true) ran into a considerable physical unlikelihood. Set at a height of 80 centimetres, the perforated pipe, even if it had been partly embedded in the wall to resist the pressure of the bodies of the victims jammed in the gas chamber, would have been obstructed by one of those bodies: how would the gas have spread regularly so as to kill all the victims in the whole of the gas chamber? The official ended up replying that he was not a scientist and that his explanation was the one provided in the book written by… Hans Marsalek. A few minutes after leaving the room he sent in two policemen (?) who ordered us to cease all filming and photographing: everything could be photographed at Mauthausen, he informed us, except… the gas chamber and the crematory oven. However, no sign to this effect advised the tourists who, in any event, in their thousands took photos of those two places in the view and knowledge of the camp authorities.
At Mauthausen I had the feeling that the authorities lived in a kind of siege fever; they seemed haunted by the progress of revisionism in Austria and the action taken in that direction by men like Emil Lachout, Gerd Honsik and Walter Ochensberger (I should like, in passing, to pay homage here to the memory of another Austrian, Franz Scheidl who, in the 1960s, published at his own expense a whole series of studies under the general title Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands [History of the defaming of Germany], which has remained little known, even to many revisionists).
Hartheim Castle
Hartheim Castle stands out from afar in the midst of a plain. For a place supposed to have been used for committing the most secret of crimes, it is really impossible to conceal. This castle was, before and during the war, a sort of asylum and it remains such today. It contains a small innocuous-looking room regarding which one wonders how anybody can have decided to call it a homicidal “gas chamber”. Here is one of the most brazen inventions of the “Holocaust” religion. Today I can see only one use for it: to those who make fun of the religious superstitions of the past as if our era were more enlightened and intelligent than eras past, I would readily say:
Go visit the gas chamber of Hartheim Castle and, afterwards, come and tell me you don’t feel humiliated at having been taken for fools by those who dare to state that the thing is a former gas chamber.
I know of no publication that reproduces a photo of that minuscule “gas chamber”, qualified by Hans Marsalek, in the English version of the confession that he supposedly got from Franz Ziereis, comandant of Mauthausen, as:
a large gassing installation where, in Ziereis’s estimates, between 1 and 1.5 million persons were exterminated[!].
The Revisionist Intifada
The current disarray of the defenders of the “Holocaust” has some curious effects. Until the late 1970’s they believed that with Auschwitz, Birkenau and other camps in Poland they had solid proof of the existence of the gas chambers and therefore of the genocide of the Jews. Up until that time they could afford to say that there had been some exaggerations and that the camps located outside present-day Poland certainly or probably did not have gas chambers. From the beginning of the 1980’s, under the pressure of revisionist writings, the gas chambers in Poland and in particular those at Auschwitz and Birkenau seemed more and more doubtful. In a movement comparable to that of religious or political fundamentalism, the exterminationists called for a return to the original faith and doctrines. They “re-established” the gas chambers that had been abandoned. They set themselves anew to affirming that there had certainly been gas chambers at Mathausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Struthof-Natzweiler and perhaps even at Dachau. On this point I refer to the book by Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon and 21 other authors: NS-Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Fischer Verlag, 1983).
In the case of Mauthausen, people like Claude Lanzmann or Yehuda Bauer went so far as to retract the story. In 1982 the latter had clearly written: “No gassing took place at Mauthausen”. As for Lanzmann, he had been just as forthright: in 1986, during a violent discussion of the Roques affair on the French radio network Europe 1, he registered his disagreement with government minister Michel Noir, who had taken the liberty of mentioning the Mauthausen gas chamber. He had firmly corrected the minister on this point: never, he told him, had there been a gas chamber in that camp. All this did not stop Bauer and Lanzmann from stating later on that there had well and truly been a gas chamber at Mauthausen. (For Bauer’s retraction, see pages 33-34 of the absurd book published in Vienna in 1989 by the Dokumentations-archiv des österreichischen Widerstandes under the title Das Lachout-“Dokument”, Anatomie einer Falschung. As regards Lanzmann’s retraction, read his letter published in Le Monde Juif, July-September 1986, p. 97).
These retractions, these abrupt changes of course, these constantly changing explanations constitute an extra proof that the gas chamber and the genocide are but a myth: a myth incessantly mutates according to the dominant opinions and needs of the moment.
Today’s exterminationists have little more than two refuges left, two points where they hope to be able to anchor their faith: the “gas van” and “Treblinka”.
On the first point, I notify them here that the Frenchman Pierre Marais will soon publish a study entitled Les Camions à gaz en question. On the second point, I can tell them that they are going to lose “Treblinka” as they have lost “Auschwitz”.
In the times ahead the adherents to the “Holocaust” will keep their money, their power, their ability to produce films, hold ceremonies, build museums: films, ceremonies, museums more and more devoid of meaning. They will use ever more means of repression against the revisionists in the form of physical blows, press campaigns, court cases, special laws. Also, fifty years after the war, they will resort to ever more prosecutions of all those whom they call “war criminals”. The revisionists, for their part, will reply with historical studies or scientific and technical works. These books, these studies will be our stones, our Intifada.
As for the Jews themselves, they will have a choice: either to follow the example of the rare few among them who have had the courage and the merit to denounce the legend, or to endorse the histrionics of the Elie Wiesels and the Samuel Pisars and the witch hunts in the style of Simon Wiesenthal and the Americans’ “Office of Special Investigations”.
David Irving, having quite recently rallied to our positions, has just stated:
“The Jewish community have to examine their consciences. They have been propagating something that isn’t true.” (Jewish Chronicle, London, June 23, 1989)
It could hardly be put better.
August 1, 1989
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The Second Leuchter Report, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., Toronto 1989, p. 4-16.