Letter to Bradley Smith and David Cole on the “gas chamber” in Auschwitz-I

Dear friends,

In Smith’s Report no. 12 (Nov.-Dec. 1992), you present as a sensational piece of news the fact that Franciszek Piper, Director of Research at the Auschwitz State Museum, admitted on camera to David Cole that the “gas chamber” of Auschwitz-I was “reconstructed”. You add that Robert Faurisson had been denied access to the Museum’s archives. Many errors!

I would be pleased if, in Smith’s Report and everywhere else, you could correct all this.

It was in 1975 that Robert Faurisson succeeded in having a man in charge at the Auschwitz State Museum, Jan Machalek, admit that this so-called “gas chamber” was not “genuine” (in German: echt) but “reconstructed” (in German: rekonstruiert). Consequently, Faurisson asked: “Reconstructed according to the original plan?” and Machalek replied “yes”. Therefore, coming back to Auschwitz in 1976, Faurisson asked Tadeusz Iwaszko, Director of the archives, whether Machalek had been right or not in saying that the so-called “gas chamber” was “reconstructed according to an original plan”. And Iwaszko replied “Yes”. So Faurisson asked to have access to this plan and, generally speaking, to plans and documents related to the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematories. Iwaszko, reluctantly, handed over to Faurisson, who had presented himself as someone teaching in the Sorbonne (which was true), some volumes, mostly in Polish, of the Rudolf Höss judicial inquiry and trial. Those volumes contained tiny photos. Very quickly Faurisson found some 30 interesting photos. Among them were photos of two different plans of the Auschwitz-I crematory today supposed to have contained a homicidal “gas chamber”. It was easy to see what that room had in fact been:

State 1 – From 1940 to 1943, a Leichenhalle (a cold room for bodies, with a washroom, etc.); 

State 2 – From June 1944 to January 1945, a Luftschützbunker für SS-Revier mit einem Operationsraum (an air-raid shelter for the SS-hospital with an operating room). 

The Leichenhalle was a dead-end room: there was no door on the S/E side.

The Luftschützbunker was a room with an opening on the S/E side: a typical anteroom with two doors and, inside, there were typical partition walls in zig-zag as in any air-raid shelter.

Therefore, if the Poles had “reconstructed” anything, it would have been either state 1 or state 2. In fact, they invented a state 3 (a mixture of state 1 and state 2) and they baptized it Gaskammer (gas chamber). They destroyed the partition walls and they kept the anteroom with the two doors. It was absolutely necessary for the lie’s sake to make tourists believe that the “victims” entered the “gas chamber” by this anteroom – recently, D. Cole has told me that the people who run the Auschwitz Museum have changed the story but this is of no importance here – instead of from the room with the ovens. There lies the fraud: the Poles have destroyed the partition walls of state 1 and kept the anteroom of state 2! It must be clear that the Auschwitz Museum’s ordinary guides are of course lying when they tell the tourists that the room is a genuine “gas chamber” or when, more prudently, they simply lead them to believe that. But those in charge at the Museum have also been lying, since 1975 and not 1992, in claiming that this room is a “reconstructed gas chamber”.

Be careful: when you say to your readers that F. Piper has admitted that the “gas chamber” is “reconstructed”, you in a way corroborate the story of the “gas chamber”! Your readers may think: “OK, the gas chamber is no longer in its original form but, anyway, here we had, at the time of the Germans, a real gas chamber.” I know that the title of your article contains the word “fraud”. It reads: “Director of Research at Auschwitz State Museum Admits on Camera that Auschwitz ‘Gas Chamber’ is a Fraud!” But this is misleading since F. Piper only said “reconstructed” (implying “honestly reconstructed”, which is the contrary of a “fraud”).

Secondly, you don’t bring forth any evidence of a “fraud”, which is a pity since I had shown the evidence of this fraud in 1979.

Let me remind you of what I have been repeating for thirteen years in my books, articles, audio and video cassettes, conferences and even in court. In 1979 I published the story in the Italian monthly Storia Illustrata (August 1979 issue) where one could for the first time find photos of the two plans of Krema I (p. 28) and of the plan of Krema II in Birkenau (p. 33). I showed all this at our first IHR convention in September 1979 in Los Angeles and then at a conference in New York. I recounted the details of the Machalek story when I testified in court at the first Zündel trial in 1985. I told there how I had managed to make Machalek confess what he actually confessed. And remember the models of Krema I and Krema II at Zündel’s house for the second Zündel trial in 1988! They were built according to the plans I had managed to find, order and buy at the Auschwitz Museum: quite an adventure, believe me.

Of course, at that time, I could not get Machalek or Iwaszko on camera but I did not need a camera since I had the best possible proof of the fraud (and not an “admission” – a quite false one – of a “reconstruction”). And since 1979 the Auschwitz Museum has never published a denial of what they know I have been saying all over the world. This is another kind of proof.

I hope you will understand my position. I feel disappointed to see that what I have discovered and so often made public is sometimes not perceived even by revisionists. As for very recent revisionists, they, of course, as we say in French, have a tendency to break down open doors. I perhaps made the same kind of mistake with A. Butz and D. Felderer. I wish you a Happy New Year.

January 9, 1993