Letter to the editor of North Shore News (Vancouver)

to the Editor
North Shore News,
North Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada

Sir,

Whatever Mr Richard Malher’s view on the matter (Dec. 19, 1993), the alleged “confession” of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, is no proof that there were homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. First, invoking a “confession” in order to prove the existence of such a gigantic crime is strange: what about the material evidence ? Does that material evidence confirm what the witness said or is supposed to have said? Second, we owe the text of that “confession” to his Polish communist jailers. Third, the contents of that “confession”, especially as far as the “gas chambers” are concerned, have been discredited: even Raul Hilberg and Jean-Claude Pressac clearly stated that we cannot really trust either the American version (the famous PS-3868 document partly read at the Nuremberg trial) nor the Polish version known in English as Commandant of Auschwitz.

In 1985, at the first Zündel trial, in Toronto, R. Hilberg had to admit under cross-examination that doc. PS-3868 “seems to have been a summary of things [Höss] said or may have said or may have thought he said by someone who shoved a summary in front of him and he signed it, which is unfortunate” (Transcript, p. 1230). About the Polish version, Pressac said that the “errors” made by Höss about the gassings are explained by the fact that: “Höss was present without seeing” (Auschwitz, Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, 1989, p. 128); he underlined “considerable implausibilities”, “clear anachronism”, “chronological errors”, an “imaginary visit”, “figures of deaths regularly multiplied by two or three”, etc. (Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz, 1993, p. 102-103). In 1983, the fact that the first “confession” had been obtained under torture was confirmed by “B. C., a British Jew and a sergeant in 92 Field Security Section”, who described the tortures (Rupert Butler, Legions of Death, Arrow Books, 1983, p. 234-238). Already in 1979, I had myself proved that the gassing procedure as allegedly described by Höss was a physical and chemical impossibility : all the gassers would have been killed by Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid).

Höss put the number of the victims from 1939 to November 1943 to 2,500,000 gassed and 500,000 other victims. Today, Pressac evaluates the total of the deaths from 1939 to 1945 at 750,000 rounded out to 800,000. My own figure of probably about 150,000 deaths is not “undoubtedly pulled out of the air” but is based on many technical considerations from revisionist literature and especially from Dr Arthur Butz’s studies.

I am still waiting for the “exterminationists” to respond to my challenge: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!”

January 15, 1994